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Comment Windows 3.11 "Windows for Workgroups" (Score 1) 387

by rixon (#49756531) Attached to: 25 Years Today - Windows 3.0

For me, Windows 3.11 "Windows for Workgroups" was the standout. Were you still there for that release?

After that, Windows 95 and Windows XP were the good ones in my book. (Although Windows 98 added a lot, it still felt like an incremental improvement over Windows 95).

For the M$ haters, I'm typing this on a Mac.
Government

South Korea Announces Daily MMO Blackouts For Youths 148

Posted by Soulskill from the probably-just-making-more-time-for-starcraft dept.
eldavojohn writes "GamePolitics reports that South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism has announced two new policies that will force underage gamers to pick a six-hour block of time (midnight-6 AM,1-7 AM, or 2-8 AM) where they will not be able to play 19 online role-playing games. While it targets most popular MMORPGs, some popular games like Lineage were left off the list."
Cellphones

BlackBerry Bold Tops Radiation Ranking 189

Posted by timothy from the woo-top-of-the-list-awesome dept.
geek4 writes with this excerpt from eWeek Europe: "Data from the Environmental Working Group places the BlackBerry Bold 9700 as the mobile device with the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation among popular smartphones. Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold 9700 scores the highest among popular smartphones for exposing users to the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation, according to the latest 2010 Environmental Working Group ranking. Following the Bold 9700 are the Motorola Droid, the LG Chocolate and Google's HTC Nexus One. The rankings still put the phones well within federal guidelines and rules."
Idle

Hand Written Clock 86

Posted by samzenpus from the up-to-the-minute dept.
a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."
Games

Pirates as a Marketplace 214

Posted by Soulskill from the marrrrrrrket-share dept.
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, made some revealing comments in an interview with Kotaku about how the company's attitudes are shifting with regard to software piracy. Quoting: "Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA. But around that cloud Riccitiello identified a silver lining: 'There's a sizable pirate market and a sizable second sale market and we want to try to generate revenue in that marketplace,' he said, pointing to DLC as a way to do it. The EA boss would prefer people bought their games, of course. 'I don't think anybody should pirate anything,' he said. 'I believe in the artistry of the people who build [the games industry.] I profoundly believe that. And when you steal from us, you steal from them. Having said that, there's a lot of people who do.' So encourage those pirates to pay for something, he figures. Riccitiello explained that EA's download services aren't perfect at distinguishing between used copies of games and pirated copies. As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer."
The Internet

Air Force To Rewrite the Rules of the Internet 547

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
meridiangod writes "The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the 'laws of cyberspace.'" I'm sure that'll work out really well for them.
United States

Journal Journal: In San Francisco until the 7th of July

Journal by alien_blueprint

I'm actually here in the US all the way from Australia with nothing in particular to do until the 7th of July. So if anyone's in the area and wants to meet up to talk about Fnorb, Python, or whatever, that would be cool. I have rental car, so my range is pretty huge.

Just email me, or reply here, and we'll work something out.

Comment Re:Correct, but there is more (Score 2, Insightful) 494

by alien_blueprint (#11260167) Attached to: Is Your Development Project a Sinking Ship?
Scary! I'd say we must work at the same place, but this pretty describes large software development efforts everywhere.

Particularly the "framework" bit - this sort of thing is a particular pet hate of mine. Why do people do this kind of thing continually when it almost never works? Why not just solve the direct problem instead? I have seen it over and over again. People seem to miss the obvious point that solving the class of problem is always going to be an order of magnitude (at least) more difficult that solving an instance of the problem - and you need an appropriately large budget to do it. The final nail in the coffin for the "let's build a framework while we're at it" lunacy is that the "framework" often ends up providing a solution to something that didn't even need doing in the first place - it's just something someone thought might be useful early on. I can't count the number of times we've ripped the bloated, buggy, badly designed, unusable "framework" out of a system and it's then become reliable, simpler, smaller, more efficient, and more extensible and flexible (those two points are often the reasoning for the "framework" in the first place, so it's ironic how that works out).

Sigh. "Frameworks" - it's my anti-pattern of the year. Or maybe decade, or even career. That's not to say it can't be done, it can of course, but only with lots of time, money, careful thought, planning and exactly the right people - certainly not as an off-hand skunkworks inside some other project with no clear purpose or direct problem to solve.
Programming

Journal Journal: Python decorators - an overview

Journal by alien_blueprint

I said I'd stay away from code today, but I found myself with nothing to do tonight after kicking people out and so started mucking around with the new Python "decorator" syntax. Trouble is, the documentation on this new feature is very terse and there are certainly no examples, and so it took me a little bit of fiddle work and experimenting to figure out exactly how to write my own decorators.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Can someone please put the ACS out of our misery?

Journal by alien_blueprint

After a series of increasingly bizarre press releases from this organisation comes this headline: ACS pushes own IT 'licence'

"THE Australian Computer Society (ACS) has called on government to support its bid to become the accreditation agency for the IT profession, making membership mandatory for computer staffers ranging from Microsoft Certified Engineers to high-level project managers."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Gmail invites! 2

Journal by alien_blueprint

Google have given me so many Gmail invitations recently that I've just about run out of interested people that I know personally to give them to.

So, if you want one just reply here with [first name, last name, email address], or email me, and I'll give you one. I currently have 5 left.

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