Comment Effects, not affects. (Score 1) 194
IT jobs don't have feelings.
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Comment Pardus 2011 live-dvd (Score 1) 622
Give the Pardus 2011 live-dvd a spin. It should have video drivers, wifi, video codecs etc all work out of the box. At least I've had it work for every machine bar one so far without any config, and that one just needed a wifi driver blacklisted (yes, beyond a newbie, but I've tried Pardus, plus a whole lot more distros, on a bunch of machines - and Pardus had the highest success rate).
Good luck.
Comment Re:Still won't stop people (Score 1) 251
Hi Shaka,
That's kind of my point. They're pissed right now, but a high enough percentage don't have the sticking power to boycott Sony products for enough time to have a financial impact significant enough to change Sony's attitude towards customers. Three months after things are operational, bar a few straggling lawsuits, Sony will be acting as arrogant and entitled as ever.
Comment Still won't stop people (Score 5, Insightful) 251
It took years after the rootkit fiasco before I decided to extend some trust to Sony and spend money on their products.
Then came the removal of otheros, and I ceased spending any money with them. Then their bully tactics when the console got hacked, and I was glad I'd not spent any further money with them.
Now, I find even after not doing any business with them for such a period I'm still not free of their incompetence and poor management.
What will happen to Sony as a result of this? Nothing. All the muppets out there will continue to do business with this incompetent, morally bankrupt, behemoth.
Will I be dumb enough to become one of those muppets again? I hope not.
Comment Port Knocking (Score 1) 497
You could consider implementing port knocking.
It will be somewhat of an inconvenience for your clients, but it will
almost eliminate your ssh authentication failures.
Comment RSP's Earth (Score 1) 232
Depending on your needs you may find RSP's Earth to be a viable solution.
http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/earth/
It's cross-platform and has a web interface (though you could build a desktop one easily enough if you wanted to).
Cheers,
Alan.
Submission + - SPAM: The ethical decay of Turbosquid
skyphyr writes: "Turbosquid mailed its top sellers asking if they'd be interested in entering an exclusivity agreement. Competitors warned their vendors about the risks of going exclusive with Turbosquid. Potential loss of income in the short term, and reduced royalty rates in the long term. Rather than shelve the clumsy attempt at a stealthy cutoff of the competition's air supply Turbosquid instead effectively held their vendors' future income hostage. Royalty rates for vendors who do not go exclusive will be dropping from 55% to 40% on September 1st 2009.
How will this impact vendors, clients and Turbosquid?"
Link to Original Source
How will this impact vendors, clients and Turbosquid?"
Link to Original Source
Comment Re:What the point of a standards body (Score 1) 640
That's a good point, but it didn't bother the ISO when approving OOXML.
Though the W3C haven't scrapped the video tag and Microsoft has made no commitment there. Apple are a smaller player than Mozilla in the browser market. So either way we're looking at inconsistent behaviour.
On the other hand if people feel the standard provides benefits then they'll use the products which support it. So this puts the balance back towards providing a solid spec in the interests of end users. If there aren't benefits the standard will fail if there are benefits then the products which refuse to support it will fail.
Comment What the point of a standards body (Score 1) 640
That refuses to set a standard because people who should be implement it say they won't?
Simply choose the most appropriate technology, detail the requirements fully in your standard.
It's then a matter for the vendors to decide if they wish to make a standards compliant product
or not.
The point of a standards body is to put the interests of the general public first. Failure to do this
is failure to fulfil their purpose. Doing so because of what are effectively bullying tactics is even
worse as you've just decided to put corporate interests ahead of people's.
First ISO corrupts itself into virtual irrelevance now we're seeing W3C fail. Are there any
standards bodies left with the tenacity to get their job done?
Comment Android password dialogs (Score 1) 849
Android had a nice half-way option for this. When you type a password in the last character you typed
appears and the rest are bullets. It can be turned off so it's all bullets. This way you have feedback on
what you typed without completely losing security. Some of the dialogs also have a show password
option. So if you really want to you can let other steal your password more easily...
Comment Read the contracts? (Score 1) 77
I'd be curious to know what exactly the contracts they had with them stipulate. My guess is it's something along the longs of we own your information once you pass it to us. Ooopppss - guess you really should read those things before signing.
Anyone actually seen it?
Comment This was prophecised years ago (Score 1) 182
They even made a movie about it http://ur1.ca/3oog
Comment Someone head back to 1955 (Score 1) 184
and tell Doc Brown they don't need to wait for the clock tower.
Submission + - JRoller altering poster comments without consent (jroller.com)
skyphyr writes: "A couple of weeks ago I read a review on jroller.com which I felt was inaccurate and glossed over important pieces of information which a developer considering the purchase of a book would want to know. So I added a comment on the site citing these issues to help make the review more useful to others who may be considering purchasing the book. I dropped by today and saw they've changed my comment attempting to make it another gushing complimentary coverage of the book. This is not an accurate reflection of my opinion of the book so I'm counting on Slashdot to set the record straight.
You can find the review and comments here http://www.jroller.com/bookreview/entry/professional_android_application_development
Seeing I'm here my original comments were almost exactly as follows.
--------------------------------
I feel your compliments for this book are a bit excessive here. While it is useful their coding is a little sloppy with inconsistent naming conventions used, creating variables for return values from functions used only once which not only makes the code less readable, but also adds extra memory allocation overhead on a device where this is damaging to performance and battery life. It also includes at least one piece of incorrect information (regarding SQLite databases).
Having said that the book is certainly good enough to get you up and running providing a more application centric overview of android development than the android sdk documentation (which is more API centric) does.
So perfectly written, no, but worth reading if you're a competent coder and just wish to get familiar with the details of android development.
--------------------------
To add some additional information about the book for those interested. It contains significant portions which detail APIs that have been removed since the API was finalized for version 1, and in all likelihood will either never return, or been in a significantly modified form in order to ensure sufficient abstraction for the underlying implementation to provide a good base for application development without pushing internal android classes into the SDK.
So to reiterate the book certainly has some value, but I'd be most interested in having a good look at Ed Burnette's Hello, Android and Mark Murphy's Busy Coder's Guide(s) to Android Development. I would recommend that interested developers look at all three before deciding which to purchase."
You can find the review and comments here http://www.jroller.com/bookreview/entry/professional_android_application_development
Seeing I'm here my original comments were almost exactly as follows.
--------------------------------
I feel your compliments for this book are a bit excessive here. While it is useful their coding is a little sloppy with inconsistent naming conventions used, creating variables for return values from functions used only once which not only makes the code less readable, but also adds extra memory allocation overhead on a device where this is damaging to performance and battery life. It also includes at least one piece of incorrect information (regarding SQLite databases).
Having said that the book is certainly good enough to get you up and running providing a more application centric overview of android development than the android sdk documentation (which is more API centric) does.
So perfectly written, no, but worth reading if you're a competent coder and just wish to get familiar with the details of android development.
--------------------------
To add some additional information about the book for those interested. It contains significant portions which detail APIs that have been removed since the API was finalized for version 1, and in all likelihood will either never return, or been in a significantly modified form in order to ensure sufficient abstraction for the underlying implementation to provide a good base for application development without pushing internal android classes into the SDK.
So to reiterate the book certainly has some value, but I'd be most interested in having a good look at Ed Burnette's Hello, Android and Mark Murphy's Busy Coder's Guide(s) to Android Development. I would recommend that interested developers look at all three before deciding which to purchase."
Comment A hack off? (Score 1) 674
Organize to have you and these vendors each bring along a system and a hacker. Their hacker tries to compromise your Free Software system, your hacker tries to compromise their windows system.
That should settle it rather efficiently. Just to put a little doubt into anything the "I"SVs may say make sure your client reads this first http://www.linux.com/feature/131059
