I was curious just how far off that is. Turns out, it's quite a bit.

I'm quite partial to original series that you find on USA: Burn Notice, White Collar, Psych, Covert Affairs, etc. It not the best writing and production, but I'd rather watch any of those over pointless sitcoms any day (I also prefer the longer format). Several of these shows have been using CGI or cheesy digital effects in places that really surprised me. In Covert Affairs all the external aerial shots of the CIA headquarters are rather cheesy 3D, and don't add much to the show and ultimately take me out of the story and annoy me each time they are shown.

Also in one of the seasons of White Collar for 4 or 5 episodes every time Peter meets his wife, they are obviously in a studio with a green screen and the New York background is being inserted digitally. I later found out this was because the actress playing his wife was pregnant and couldn't travel to New York where they shoot on location most of the time. I still don't understand why they had to be outdoor settings in every scene though, and the overall effect was so bad that I wanted to puke and ended up fast-forwarding through those scenes rather than be distracted by how bad the effects are.

I suspect that overall the technology has gotten alot cheaper and more than ever the 'fix it in post' attitude is taking over when studios and networks are trying to tighten up on costs, and increase profit margins. This is in turn leading to cheaper and cheaper digital effects that end up really distracting from the end product rather than making it better.

This is the most sane way to handle this, if its truly an admin only control interface. It's also a great way to allow access to appliances from outside of the private network as well.

I think it's getting kinda ridiculous how authors and many books about Drupal 7were pressured into publishing early. There have been books published about software that didn't even exist at time of publication, such as Panels for Drupal 7 (they used the version from 6). Several others are publishing when there are APIs being changed to fix critical issues, and tons of new API additions still occurring. I am not even sure if Drupal 7 is in string freeze yet, and I know that visual considerations to the new themes are still on the table as well, causing all screenshots and reference to onscreen options to be at risk of being outdated. I wouldn't buy or recommend any Drupal 7 book that comes out before the release.

I was in talks over a year ago with an acquisitions editor at a another major publisher that had only done 2 Drupal books at the time, and they wanted to get started on Drupal 7 books early since they say that Drupal books were really picking up (or that their competitors were putting lots of energy into Drupal books). The problem was, that the folks of course know nothing of the open source software ecosystem and require deadlines and schedules which are simply impossible to predict with volunteer software development. My editor wanted to have my chapters by March of 2010, so they could hit the shelves and announce at DrupalCon San Francisco in April. They were convinced that a release of D7 would happen in Fall of '09. I told them, that the release would never happen in 09 and probably not in Q1 of '10 and that getting a comprehensive API reference (I was estimating around 800-900 pages) by that time would be a stretch. They ended up passing on the offer, since they felt the timeline was wrong, and that Joomla and Wordpress downloads were better.

I am also sick of all these books that cover Drupal 7 or other similar software are a very cursory level. I'd much rather wait for Pro Drupal Development 3rd edition to come out, when it's a book whose authors have spent thousands of hours maintaing community contributions, and they have hundreds of patches to Drupal itself.

The whole point of a firewall is blocking connections. I don't know about anyone else, but I make a point to not run services that I don't want people to connect to on my machine. How hard is that?

An outgoing firewall though is immensely valuable. I love seeing everything that every little shareware app or office suite tries to phone home with. When doing local web development, I've even been surprised to find a number of open source CMS/frameworks phoning home with more info than I care to share.

It looks like that option was included with the intention the browsers implementing the feature would have a method to disable it's usage. I'm guessing if it gets crazy then major players will ship with it disabled, or maybe include some sort of same domain policy for pings (ping domain has to match referrer or href). I'm not too scared, and this would work much better than JS versions of the same thing.

'nuff said.

I do work mainly with LAMP stack apps, and one major step that we've taken is to work more CI magic into our workflow. I *love* Hudson, and have it setup to do everything from typical testing duties, to jobs for pulling sanitized production databases back for testing. The cool thing is that I can give some developers access to certain Hudson jobs, and let them trigger the production dumps whenever they want.

I've even taking to setting up jobs that will spin up a VM, that gets setup with puppet, and then load the app with latest production dump, with parameters for the name of the environment. Now developers can even build their own testing/staging environments with a click, and everyone gets hassled alot less, and production sits alot safer.

While I think the studios are so greedy that we need to make up a new word for greed, as it doesn't really cut it anymore, I do have to point out from the Harry Potter article...

I don't see where they got the $938 million number from, it appears to be from a later press release, or some such, as the numbers from the Total Defined Gross on the balance sheet only seem to indicate $612.6 million cumulative revenue. It's entirely possible that an additional $325.8 million in gross revenue could have put the film into the black, as long the additional expenses didn't exceed around $309.8 million.

The article seems somewhat disingenuous at best.

It can be mere minutes. I've filed a bug with an open source project, like say MacPorts, and then realized maybe I should have tried searching Google for a different part of the error message and lo and behold there was my report as the number one result for my search. It was less than 5 minutes old at that point. I've seen similar reports from folks on freenode.

I've seen this in the Denver area back in about 2004. (Westminster actually). Around 112th and Federal, there is an area that is really open to the North and West, and got all the lights that faced north completely covered in snow. When I first approached it, I thought that the power was out, so slowed to a stop, saw a few other cars stopped, and waited for them to proceed (assuming everyone was treating it like a 4-way stop, since power must be out). I stopped and the other cards didn't go, so I double checked all directions and started to proceed through the intersection when a car from the right comes flying over a hill at quite alot faster than I thought they should be going, and skidded enough to just miss me and go behind me. I had a hard time clearing the intersection because I was going up hill against ice and snow, and the other driver was going quite fast as they never stopped, and were going downhill as well.

I don't know what else I could have done in that situation.

It seemed that later that day I saw workers using a dump truck to drive around, standing in the back with and using compressed air, or forced air to blow them off.

I do know of a popular CMS that has some Twitter integration code, where for a proof of a really-bad-concept, a developer modified the module before a live audience to evaluate anything between php tags in a tweet within the global scope.

That's probably much more dangerous ;)

Get a couple of these. Works great, is simple, can be quickly reconfigured, works with almost any desk that you can screw into the bottom of, and did I saw it works great?

Add some velcro ties to it if you have too much stuff otherwise all the individual hooks give you plenty of places to hang loops of cables.

There are plenty of ways to store data inexpensively in a RDBMS. There are plenty of GPL and low cost RDBMS available.

The real issue is that the more and more we move into complex data structures and we push the limits of what an ORM can do with those simple, inexpensive RDBMS, the more problems we run into trying to map our objects into rows in tables.

Here is one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen to the problem, but it only work over relatively simplistic data where managing indexes by hand is ok, and it's okay for the indexes to be incomplete at any given moment. Ironically, that gives them more availability than trying to force MySQL to do indexes. But it really depends on the data and needs.

Agreed, Kyocera made what was at the time, a major advancement, a flip phone, that was a full palm pilot, and could run whatever palm apps you could find to put on it.

I still miss my 7135, 4 years later, and have never seen another phone that rivals its features and reliability. I'm thinking of trying an iPhone soon, but even that isn't the same somehow, given the state of paid/signed apps.

Also when my third Motorola v710 gave up and I got sick of replacing them, I dug out my first phone, a Kyocera 2135, then over 4 years old, plugged it in, and told Verizon what my EIN was, and it worked GREAT. After 4 years.

Although I will agree that newer Kyocera phones aren't as good as the old ones, I wouldn't knock them too much.