I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.

When the draft spec for a technology that moves so fast and has so much widespread adoption is still deemed several years off I don't know how anyone can take their recommendations seriously. We're already at a level of fairly good interoperability amongst the core browser engines for the base features we need. If developers and designers took any notice of this then we'd probably all be still building sites with tables.

If you are a small software shop then I can see reasons for allowing your small technical staff to have access to production. It's all well and good saying that only the admin of that server should have access and there's a full rollout procedure in place to be followed only on certain days, certain times; but even when I've seen that sort of structure in place there are times when it's useful for the developers to have access to production. Nothing is perfect and we'd all love to have multitude's of staging servers, replicating the typical load and uses of production but for a hell of a lot of (non critical I'd add) systems that just doesn't happen.

There simply is no one rule fits all. Sometimes I wish we had extremely rigorous rules & regulations in place - I'd probably get to go home a hell of a lot earlier. I'm not suggesting you start chucking exceptions all over your checkout code on live but I think you should asses your own situation (and staff for that matter).

I can remember trying to install programs to D:\ rather than C:\ - That caused no end of problems due to developers hard coding in and just assuming that windows and themselves would be installed on the conventional C: That anyone would ever use any other drive letter didn't seem to occur to them. If I remember correctly this happened to me with a version of matlab (or something in that family).

It might be essential but it saddens me a bit how much of a let down the LHC has been. Fermliab however has been a real story of inspiration. I hope we see results from Geneva in the future but so far it's not exactly been inspiring stuff and this decision to shut down everything sounds a bit OTT.

As much as I would love to see this fail, it's still early days in this projects inception, and I don't think they were expecting it to massively take off anyway. The paywall proper has only been in effect a few weeks, maybe better marketing and a better price point (I think £1 a day is too much for digitally delivered content, especially if the actual print edition is the same price!).

An interesting piece by David Mitchell at the Guardian as to why he would like to see this succeed is worth a read.

It was microsofts attempt to woo the facebook generation. The fact you have never heard of it probably means the targeted marketing was done competently.

Seems once your money is in the system its there for good

The amount of money held in a payclick account must be between $20 to $1000 and withdrawals to a bank account are not allowed. Payclick also supports recurring transactions

Of course you can just keep spending it online but I'm sure there'll come a point where little Jimmy wants some cold cash in his hands.

However, the Thai clinic didn’t inject the stem cells into the patient’s blood stream, instead they injected them directly into her kidneys. That means the stem cells did nothing to stop the immune system’s attack on the organs–and they instead produced never-before-seen side effects.

Apparently had the treatment been in her blood stream it would probably have been ok, the shot straight to the kidneys was a totally new thing. In other words someone didn't know what they where doing and screwed up.

As many have suggested look at outputting your data in a format that allows it to be used in another application. I typically allow for CSV or PDF output. There are libraries out there to do that within your app. The path of least resistance is your friend. I have seen developers spend an age trying to replicate the functionality of excel for a web view when a CSV export would've been much more useful, cleaner and far easier to code.

When in doubt have something else handle it!

Well, if you've good karma you can switch ad's off and I'd say a lot of the technical audience slashdot attracts is probably adblocking too whilst their at it, but regardless of that...

I don't mind provocative posts, but completely misguided posts are another thing. Slashdots appeal is that its meant to be news for nerds, if more stuff like this makes it through the quality and returning visits from the very people slashdot attracts and therefore can provide that extra value as a platform for its advertisers will go down with time. As a niche news site it would be in slashdots interest surely to continue to attract the sort of people that the targetted ad's are aimed at not dumb itself down to yet another "regular" tech site.

Re-reading that, I admit thats probably already happened for a lot of people but I still think of slashdot as a higher-than-normal tech site. Just about.

I was expecting something really crazy and complex but what I saw was well documented and made sense. Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot?? I wont repeat the many well made statements that "API's arent for users" above. I'm just surprised this has made it to the front page as a developers link. I sure hope I don't work with the sub. at any point if he thinks this is an example of people being "too smart for their own good". /saddened

Rendering all but the most basic pages these days requires a lot of CPU. Think about it, complex web apps like Gmail have thousands of elements on page. You have events bound to them with javascript, changing styles with css, background sprites coming in - its not cheap for the CPU to chug through all that to output the end result. This isn't about 3d rotating ad's that use OpenCV to poll your webcam, its about pushing the web even further towards a replacement for the desktop.
br> One of the complaints people still have over webapps vs the desktop equivilant is performance. It still feels sluggish whenever the page becomes very complex. I for one am happy about this, the leap in what you can do when you start accelerating with the GPU is enormous. That IE flying images demo really gives you an idea of it. I'm surprised its taken this long but this sort of direction is whats needed for HTML5 + canvas to really compete with the desktop.

Seriously? How people ever think this sort of plan makes fiscal sense and isn't at all dodgy I will never understand.