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I guess, the usual reason is limited resources.

Implementing feature X in its primitive incarnation costs N days. Implementing it intelligently costs 10*N. No one can do this for all the features in their software. The problem could be that we do not pick the right ones to implement properly.

Just yesterday, I watched this video http://businessofsoftware.org/video_09_gmoore.aspx , where Geoffrey Moore talks about innovation and how people should focus on and throw unreasonable amount of resources on their core features, but be very efficient when implementing all the rest.

Same with me. I joined not because I wanted, but because it was expected of me... Can you run a micro-business without having a facebook profile? How many invitations from your supporters can you ignore?

I was terrified when I visited some unknown web for the first time and there I saw my picture. Clicking on in revealed that they have a "special" relationship with facebook and facebook made the information about me available to them to make their services "better". (This is not the same as the facebook comments you see on many sites.) I opted out of this program, but how many will? How many do care about these things? Now I carefully log out every time I leave facebook and I should probably purge the long-duration cookies as well.

I am a long time advocate of silent computers, but it is pretty hard to actually build one. In the hard disk department, SSD is the obvious way to go. In the past, the Seagate drives were the most quiet. Maybe they still are - I stopped watching, because I am never going to buy another spinning hard drive. BTW the external USB drives are pretty silent these days. Fast SSD + large portable USB hard disk is a neat combo.

I would not miss Facebook if it were gone. It has wasted so much time of so many people... very much like the real drugs do...

But I doubt Anonymous can really shut it down for more than a few hours.

This may be a bit of an insulting question: Have you really switched your screen resolution to 1920x1080 after switching the displays? I know that it sounds odd, but I have seen people using non-native resolutions on LCDs before...

Interesting articles.

I became a .net skeptic shortly after it was released in 2002 after I had to work on a larger desktop app in .net. It promised simple nasty-error-free environment, but did not deliver. Don't get me wrong, it is good enough for server-side components or simple desktop apps (if you do not mind the need to have the proper version of the framework installed on users' machines (which I do)).

HTML5+JavaScript makes a lot of sense for client apps. I have actually been considering exploring that direction not a long time ago. XULRunner seems intriguing - it is maintained by Mozilla, open source, the binaries are relatively small (compared to .net framework). If anyone has actual experiences with XULRunner, I'd love to hear about it.

I could not resist the temptation and placed a couple of buttons on my web, but I am trying to keep the number reasonable.

10 is too much, 4 is the right number for me. People hate to have too many options.

I good rule is to add a social network button only after some visitors came from that network without having the button.

It seems like every tragedy is an excuse to tighten the noose of control in the modern western police state.

Politicians are happy when they can play it safe and responsible and gain another bit of power in the process.

I am ashamed of the European governments. The situation in Lybia and Somalia are another examples of how effectively can we "help".

I agree with the article. The attempts to undo all the good things that internet brought in the name of profit and control would make anyone angry, not just hackers.

Though, I do not think hacking web sites is the proper reaction. The "responsible hacker" should work on something positive and develop technologies that are resistant to misuse. I admire projects like freenet or bitcoin. While they have many drawbacks, others will be built upon their legacy and one day, we'll have the free internet back. The more the governments push against it, the sooner .

For some people, the word "crack" is more trustworthy or comprehensible than "freeware". 

But I agree with Renegade that it is most likely an automated content generator at work. It grabs names of real software and adds words like crack, serial, warez, torrent, etc. in an attempt to get a bit of search engine traffic and make some money on ads or another commodity that a spammer can harvest and sell (like emails or solved captchas).

I've run into that issue with some of my C# code, and speaking from experience, I can say the following:

that will only ever be an issue with very badly designed code. If you run into this issue, you're doing things wrong - massively wrong.

Our opinions differ in this point. I say quite the opposite. If you design your code in a good way and isolate things from each other, this limitation will bite you in the ass. Is it a bad design to use tabs, splitters or collapsible panels? http://www.rw-designer.co...t-animated-cursor-big.png Maybe I went a bit over the board with the complexity, but not in an unreasonable way.

I prefer isolated components, little black-boxes I can juggle around as I want. They need a bit more window nesting depth than the 64-bit edition gives...

I am slowly using more and more of the "cloud", but I am not happy about it. The main issue for me is the opacity of the cloud. I do not know what hardware and software and people are taking care of my data. When I do not understand something, I tend to fear it.

I am dreaming about a different cloud, one that is more transparent in its working and I can see what is going on inside.

My entry in the last NANY ( the Card Creator - http://www.donationcoder....m/index.php?topic=24837.0 ) can do part of what you have described. While all the built-in templates have some kind of fancy borders, it is possible to create simple templates to just arrange images in rows, columns or tables. The number and sizes of the individual images are controlled by the template - this may be a problem if you need flexibility. But it may also be an advantage if you want to publish on web and have consistent results.

@vlastimil I disagree that this is a actual issue affecting many end users.

maybe not many, but it affects some users/applications
http://stackoverflow.com/...in-32-bit-in-net-winforms

I never ran into this issue, and I do not believe it is any problem. If anything, window handles (which are the things you are referring to, I believe) have only gone up in the supported amounts, and the last time a scarcity of that resource was an issue was back in the W9x days. If you refer to the Z-order that defines what is drawn on top of what, I do not believe there is any sane limitation on that either.

I dare say, if you run into issues with the amounts of resources Windows makes available for a specific purpose, you are abusing that as a developer and without a doubt can find a more suitable solution. For example, there are tons of windowless controls that are considered lightweight because they do not use any Windows resources, and instead co-opt the help of their parent control that do have a handle.

This is not about the number of window handles. It is about recursive window message processing - parent window receives WM_SIZE, sends WM_SIZE to its children, etc. (it is more complex in reality, there are more messages being sent)
Even native Windows controls use this kind of aggregation. List box has a Header control as its child, Combo box has an Edit box as a child. A toolbar can host a combo box (with an edit box inside) and be hosted in a Rebar. These are 4 levels of depth and we are still talking just about a toolbar. That toolbar is hosted within the application frame. Now add a tab or a splitter control and the depth grows. The depth limit on 64-bit windows is pretty shallow, like ~12. If you use .net winforms and make a tab/splitter hierarchy, you can experience this yourself.

Window-less controls can help, but it is a pain to use them. They are not the easy-to-use blackbox that a window is. But this is not the main issue here. The fact that the 64-bit system is worse than the 32-bit one in this aspect. And there may be more catches like this one.

The memory: first, determine if you need it. Do you want to work with really hi-res video or a large database? By all means get a lot of memory, 64-bit Windows AND a 64-bit edition of the software. Do you just browse the internet, use office and play games? You'll be better off with 4GB and 32-bit for the next few years.

Also...there are artificial limits on how much memory a 64-bit Windows allows you to use http://en.wikipedia.org/w..._7#Physical_memory_limits

I think the right time to switch will be when 64-bit Windows becomes the more compatible flavor. When developers actually focus on the 64-bit editions of their software and when hardware manufacturers do the same with 64-bit drivers. We are not there yet and installing 64-bit OS will cause compatibility issues than sticking with 32-bit. I would still recommend 32-bit to my mother, because most people do not care about fancy 64-bit address space - they care about their favority applications.

Let me mention one incompatibility that affects my software on 64-bit Windows. Here is some context...
Windows (I mean the mostly rectangular regions on screen) form a hierarchy: imagine an application with a tabbed top-level window (like Firefox). The actual tabs may be implemented as standalone child windows. These tabs may have other child windows like edit boxes, bookmark panels, etc. A complex application may have a complex hierarchy of windows.
Unfortunately, there is an unofficial limitation on the depth of this window hierarchy. While the application may create child windows as it sees fit, the messages sent between these windows stop working at certain level. This is due to internal stack overflow in the message routing component in Windows kernel.

Here is the catch: the amount of memory available for the stack is the same in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, but the stack entries are twice as long on 64-bit Windows. Hence the usable window hierarchy depth is halved. And if you think that you can avoid the problem by using 32-bit edition of the affected application on 64-bit Windows, that is not the case. The problem is in the 64-bit kernel. The worst thing is that Microsoft refuses to consider this a bug and fix it (unless they changed their mind since the last time I checked).

So...if you do not want unexpected problems, switch to 64-bit Windows when you HAVE A REASON to, not when there seem not to be a reason not to.

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are pushing HTML5. An open and (relatively) powerful standard is in their interest.

Opera is trying, but its small market share makes it irrelevant (sorry to say that) - it is a good software, but they do not have a killer feature that would lead more people to them. Good compatibility is not enough, especially when sites are optimized for other browsers.

Internet Explorer has been successfully (intentionally) slowing down the adoption of new web technologies in the last decade. Powerful web apps are Microsoft's nightmare. Once ordinary users only need a capable internet browser, Windows loses a lot of ground. (Why install Windows on your mom's computer when she only needs it for reading email, video-conferencing, watching news, TV shows and movies, listening to music and playing games like solitaire? And all that can be done in a free HTML5 browser running on a free Linux.)

Microsoft continues to sabotage the progress with IE9 by claiming HTML5 compatibility and calling it a modern browser. They only implemented a tiny bit of HTML5 and are discrediting the HTML5 buzzword. That behavior is completely understandable, it has brought them a lot of money. They were the leader in IE4 times, but left that position to others. Maybe they make a comeback - they had 10 years to address the situation and I kind of do not want to believe that their whole strategy was to delay the adoption of web technologies. We'll see...

[bought]

... he bought a CD of pirated software ...

This really sounds absurd to me. He is OK to pay for software, but not to the authors.

I think this is ours (software authors') fault. We cannot sell the software properly. The deal does not seem fair to a lot of people. And so they pirate the software. I don't hate them...but helping them? No.

Domain squatters suck.

Anyway, as people advised above, try to ask the current owner politely to give/sell you the domain. I would not bother with threats of legal action. The squatter will just ignore it - they won't bother responding, because the process is complicated and the worst that can happen to them is they lose the domain. But it takes time and they will happily make money on "your" visitors until then.

The domain does not appear to have a lot of traffic or links and therefore, for the squatter, it does not have a significant value. Offer them a price that would cover the time needed to transfer the domain. The $100 mentioned above is a decent price for this task - make it clear, you are unable to pay more. If you offer a low price that does not cover their time, the squatters will just ignore you. I doubt you can count on the goodness of their heart - cybersquatting is a shady business.

According to yahoo, only feministcardiff.wordpress.com is linking to your original site. If that blog is under your control, you should change the link to the mirror (removing the links further decreases the value of the domain to the squatter).

I do not consider questions better than awkwardly twisted words. It shall not be the user's task to prove that they are human.

Spam only works because it is automated and stock CMS solutions are low hanging fruits, especially the free ones like Wordpress or Drupal. By adding a bit of a non-standard code, the problem is solved. A spammer will not bother writing custom script for just one website. And if they do, the webmaster can react by changing a little detail. The spammer has to spam 100s of webs, while the web owner only has 1 (or a few) to care about. Web masters, who care, win easily.

(Of course, if a web site owner has dozens of sites, then I understand they would want to use captchas. In that case, I have my doubts about the quality of the sites. It takes a lot of time to maintain and add valuable content to just a single web site.)

So if we agree that captchas are bad at all, and that there ARE situations where you need one, my finding is still one of the better ones.

And as we talk about Javascript. What if you have customers with JS disabled? Doesn't that mean you hate them when you make your pages unusable without JS? E.g. in my browser JS is disabled and scripts are blocked all the time unless i allow a page to execute scripts. How annoying if i have to enable scripts all the time.

I guess, the way your use of captchas is perfectly fine. If you do not actually want people to use that form, captcha is a good way .

It is true that some of the functionality of my pages will not be available to people with JS disabled. This affects 1-2% of visitors - captchas in wrong place affect 100%. I am happy with that state, especially when the interaction with the web is way smoother for the 98-99% with JS on.

I should apologize for this post in advance. I know, you think you have found a very good thing, but I do not believe there is or ever will be a "good" captcha. They are a major annoyance for end users. Putting them on your web site is like saying "I hate you" to your visitors. Spam is your problem, you should solve it. It is not your visitor's problem. They don't care.

I have 0 captchas on my site and the level of spam I am getting is negligible. It is because my forms are protected by other means. I use invisible codes that expire after some time, I do not have the form source code in the html, but use javascript to display it. I submit the forms via ajax. This improves the user experience and prevents spam.

Google for "without captchas" and you'll get a lot of resources. It takes more time to build a site without captchas, but it is worth it.

[I am looking for more ideas from you]

Hi all,

few days ago I read and enjoyed Renegade's post ( http://www.donationcoder....m/index.php?topic=26359.0 ) and his cheap art purchasing guide on his blog.

Though, I think things needs to be taken a bit further. The web is moving forward and online art archives should be more than just archives. Here is my attempt at providing for free one of the icon that Renegade showed as an example in his post. I have re-created it and made it more flexible: http://www.rw-designer.com/make-icon/classic-web20

Now I am looking for more ideas from you. What pictures would you use on your own web site?

Thanks,
Vlasta

Not that I know the answer for that question (as much as I would like to know) (maybe fiddling with http headers would help with the re-download), but it also sometimes happens to me and I usually have the download on multiple urls and have an additional .zip with the installer and I tell the people to download using one of the other urls or with different browser.

Why not? It is a kind of site that can benefit from a ads, if there are not too many.

Requiring to commit for a year seems a bit unusual. Did they offer you a fixed amount of cash for the year? Also, it is worth the effort to find out whether they are in for the visitors it can bring them or if they are just looking for the links to get better search engine rankings. I would stay away from them if it is later case.

Re Reviews -
I can see why the reviews section (full- as opposed to mini-) died a death - too much work.

I agree with this. In order to make a really valuable and insightful review, one would need to work with every application for literally years to really know it. I work with various programs, but I would not feel competent to write a review of for example ftp clients or text editors. It is like, I have my favorite one and ignore the others. Even if I installed the others I would be angry, because they work differently than the old one. And then there are new versions and the review article getting outdated...

Here is an idea for the review section: Who knows most about the reviewed software? Who has the biggest motivation for the review to exist? The authors. Instead of a volunteer with limited motivation and information writing the review, what if a mechanism existed that would allow the software authors to do their part? An independent review manager would only need to set the rules and grantee all the facts are straight. Much less work.