JonoW

Finish college and work on your startup on the side for a year. Also, if you need to do a major research project or dissertation, choose something that will be of use for your startup.

press "Print Screen" and paste into new email? Works well in desktop clients like outlook, less so for web-clients like gmail...

I'm def not saying people shouldn't point it out, I just think people shouldn't base their entire opinion on the fact that he's an MS evangelist.

At least you're arguing the points of the article :) I haven't used either product so I don't have an opinion on whether he's talking BS or not...

It would be ad hominem if you called it a shit or untrue article just because you dislike SEO consultants. It may be a shit or untrue article, but then say why.

Of course it's valid to consider the source, but you need to back it up, show that it's influencing his opinion unfairly. You may be right, maybe he is just favouring MS products, but then show why his comparison is wrong, or why he is ignoring better alternatives, something at least.

Pretty crap what MS is doing. The $10/15 per handset seems so high, what exactly is this patent that they're referring to?

Ad hominem

Assuming you verify users over the phone securely, why not just reset their passwords for them with a one-time use, temporary password? Surely that's not much harder for the end-user to deal with, and then you needn't store their password...

Not quite sure how he managed to link Google+ and Office365? They're completely unrelated surely?

Please read this http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/windows-8-for-...

This story got me thinking; what stops hackers from using huge botnets to mine bitcoins? Surely more profitable than sending out spam?

> I have a feeling the chrome developers have a better idea about how to sandbox a browser than John Carmack does, as awesome as he is

In fairness, we have no idea of the extend of the authors expertise, I would bet John Carmack as an insanely intimate knowledge of drivers and their issues.

I'm a fan of WebGL and I really hope it does gain traction, but I think people are being really irresponsible for ignoring what MS is saying (perhaps a bit of anti-MS mentality?). There ARE avenues for attacks through WebGL (e.g. http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/06/16/webgl-graphics-m...), you'd be crazy to ignore them.

Also, if Silverlight is susceptible to the same vulnerabilities, then that makes MS hypocritical, not wrong! And comparisons with Java and Flash getting hardware shaders is beside the point - MS doesn't have control over which features those products choose to include or not, they only have control over IE and Silverlight.

I hope a reasonable scenario develops where IE does get WebGL, perhaps a whitelist of drivers that adhere to higher degrees of security for use with WebGL.

"see the latest fear mongering about webgl"

Can't be total BS, John Carmack agrees with them - http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/81732190949486592

No of course it doesn't neccessarily mean that. Like most things in life; it depends. If you feel that your day job is fulfilling your interest and happiness as a developer, I'd say you don't need to work on side-projects, you're probably learning plenty during the day.

But if your work gives you restricted oppurtunities to try new technology, or burdens you with outdated tech and boring work, working on a side-project can reignite your enthusiasm in programming, which can never be a bad thing for your career.

Also, theres nothing to say you need to spend huge amounts of time on a side-project, maybe a few hours a month just to try a few new things. Sure, you won't become an expert in those things, but you'll get a feeling of what it's about.

And choose something fun to inspire you, nothing is more mind-numbing that coming home to work on a side-project that actually bores the hell out of you.

I don't see Twitter as a competitor, for me they're too different and I don't see any problem using both of them parallel. Comparing Windows apps to web-apps; I think for the end-user they're conceptually very similar, just delivered differently. Is GMail that different from Outlook to the user? I think your average person will want something at least a little similar to Facebook; I don't think Twitter is that thing.

I normally compare the odds of unseating Facebook as the same as unseating Google for search. It might happen at some point, but it will be exceptionally difficult. I think FB is so much more ingrained than any other social network has been before, say MySpace or Orkut. I really hope we do see some competition in the future.

Microsoft showed off a new option for creating UIs and now everyone is running around saying the whole .NET eco-system is going down the can.

If you believe that you are a freaking idiot!

Agreed, currently there no real competitor to facebook, if people are closing their accounts its because they want to remove themselves from social networking all together (my one friend did this) rather than move to a different service.

Facebook is so ubiquitous now, it's like email. It will take one hell of a competitor to kill it.

I think this could be done safely (well just about as safe as sending forgotten password reset links):

1. Set a short expiry date on the link (1 day). 2. On first click within 1 day, log user user in and expire link. Ask user if they want to stay logged in (via a subtle overlay at the top of the page perhaps + set "remember me" cookie) 3. On subsequent clicks within 1 day. If user has "remember me" cookie, log them, otherwise redirect to login screen. 4. Clicks to link after 1 day. Redirect to login page.

This should be just about as safe as a forgotten password email; they both have an expiry period + 1 time use, meaning anyone intercepting the email before the expiry and before the user clicks on it can impersonate the user.

The only counter-point that I'll make against my own point is that a forgotten password email is sent on demand, i.e. a user requests it, so they are probably more likely to click it immediately (hence expire it immediately).

I wouldn't do this for an e-commerce or otherwise sensitive app, but for something a bit more casual I think it would ok.

How would it know if you're walking or driving?

Based on that logic no one should be building iPhone or iPad apps. You have to commit to something at some point. The odds of a company ditching a product they have invested hugely into is probably the same as the odds of an open technology or framework simply becoming unpopular.

As a .NET dev, I'm not worried, MS has invested really heavily into .NET, it's everywhere in their eco-system now. Even if the preferred way to build some desktop apps was HTML/JS, .NET is still going to be in use in many other places.

Even if they did ditch .NET (which I don't think they will), it would take years to do; plenty of time to move to something else ;)

Nope I haven't, I'm going on standard PC and Macbook (not pro) touch-pads that I've used. I'd like to try one of the new Apple trackpads out, but don't know anyone that has one.

Am I alone in my hatred of touch-pads? I'm 10x more productive on a desktop with a mouse compared to a touch-pad on a laptop.

My solution is little more lo-fi - I just have a bunch of rules in my hosts file to resolve urls of sites I waste too much time on (HN/twitter/engadget etc) to the wrong IP so I can actually concentrate.

Sure I can just edit the hosts file, but I find that extra step seems to deter me :)

I'm not sure your comparison with food safety is completely apt; This cookie law is the equalivant of being asked "Do you consent to the use of sodium benzoate in your food" before entering any restaurant. Most people will have no idea what to make of that, and will probably hate being asked every time.

It would be different if tracking was such a problem that it was outlawed all together (like dangerous food additives are), as that would be clear to everyone how to proceed.

So what do you use then? (Honest question)

I don't disagree with you about bloated middleware products, but you don't have to use them to use soap,xsd,xsl,xpath etc.

Some examples:

XSD (Schema) - lets you describe the format of your XML document. Useful if you need to tell other parties about your format. You can use XSDs to programmatically validate that a given XML document is "correct" as per your schema. IDEs can use XSDs file to do intellisense on XML files as you type. You can also include documentation within XSDs and have an external tool auto-generate documentation (e.g. in HTML) to describe your Schema in a more user-friendly way.

XSL - These are XML docs that define how to transform 1 XML format into another. Can use combine this with XSDs to ensure that the result of the transformation is valid.

SOAP + WS-* - WS-* is a set of standards on top of SOAP (which just defines a web-service interface). E.g. WS-Security can define that your web-service must encrypt the contents of the message, WS-Addressing makes SOAP less dependant on HTTP.