8 is very cute. Just got there a bit ago. I hope you keep adding stuff, I love revisiting this thing over time and seeing how it evolves. It's become a pretty darn good game.

- Oshyan

Sweeet! I loved these games and frankly never fully got into the sequels for some reason. It will be great to relive these.

- Oshyan

Wave and Buzz have very different goals and both still seem legitimate as separate systems when considering the existence of the other. So if you were developing for the purpose of Wave - i.e. group collaboration - then Buzz does not invalidate that at all IMO.

- Oshyan

The OSX point is definitely a good one against the assertion of the original article. But there may be other reasons for that... The example of physical security companies doing bank robberies falls a lot more into my point about the tire slashing example though. It's a helluvalot harder and more risky to stage robberies to inflate the value of your security service (although I believe even this sort of thing *has* been done in the past!), than it is to anonymously pay cheap virus writers to iterate off of existing virus toolkits in a foreign country outside of our legal jurisdiction and unlikely to ever "whistle blow" to anyone relevant and within ear shot. It just involves a whole lot more headache than the digital equivalent. I bet I could go jump on a rent-a-coder type site right now and find someone willing to do this for a couple hundred bucks within 24 hours. Hehe.

- Oshyan

OK, the headline is somewhat sensationalized. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I know it sounds crazy, and believe me I don't buy into this, at least not until I see real evidence. But I found some of the points in this blog post to be interesting, if not entirely "compelling" as he claims:
http://dmytry.blogsp...es-main-driving.html

I know the subject has been discussed before; I've even seen it mentioned here on DC in past AV discussions I think. It wouldn't be the first time unethical corporate behavior was responsible for billions of unnecessary spending by consumers. And with the ready availability of obviously less scrupulous off-shore development resources, easily contracted relatively anonymously, it seems all too easy for this to be happening. As opposed to the situation with other businesses like the car tire slashing example given in the post above, where the barrier to accomplishing the stated goal of increasing demand for the product/service would be much higher. Here it's relatively low. Pay some off-shore contractor $10/hr to write virus variants with existing kits = millions of viruses for pennies a piece.

It sounds crazy, but really what's the barrier to this? Legality and morality. If you don't think you'll get caught, legality doesn't matter, and that really seems to be the case with a lot of bad corporate behavior, from "cooking the books" to toxic waste disposal, and much more, some a lot more (physically) harmful than viruses. And morality? Well, since when have corporations had morality? Hmm...

- Oshyan

From what I could gather, they made some mistakes early on in the organizational structure by moving to an LLC with a single person running it, and that person is now holding their power over everyone (though apparently with the "best of intentions"). The history I read (from one of the original devs) indicated that the person they chose was great back then *but* had no managerial or other related experience, and it sounds like they just picked her because she was able and willing to apply herself to the managerial tasks, while everyone else just wanted to code. That's my take anyway.

I suspect then that as things went down the road, the lack of real experience and the focus from everyone else on other areas aside management (who wants to be a manager?) meant that this person was able to dig deeper and deeper holes through poor decisions, with little or no oversight or argument, until it was too late. Now they're having to negotiate with this person just to get control of the SMF org back.

From the sound of it the original devs actually intended SMF to be, if not open source, at least something close to it, run by a non-profit, controlled by no one but the community, or at least by a group. So the actual outcome as we have it now is really a far cry from what was originally intended, and this goes a long way to explaining the weird nature of the SMF "free but don't touch our source code" approach which in other cases usually results in at least faster product development (since that generally means dev is being done by a more dedicated, perhaps commercial team, being supported by other products or something).

Anyway, I've been waiting a long time for SMF 2.0, I think it has a lot of meaningful, useful upgrades. But I now understand why it has been so long delayed, and it's very sad. Basically it sounds like one person's arrogance and control issues slowly spiraled good intentions and hard work from others into a stand-still. Granted this is probably a one-sided view, but there hasn't really been a very compelling alternative view posted by anybody, so either they have other reason to be silent (legal?), or there is no better version.

Long story short I hope this works out to SMF being more open and the original devs getting back control, with long-term leadership by a group and working under a non-profit system. If not, I may have to migrate a coupla sites within the next year or so...

- Oshyan

I'm buzzed! And it's underwhelming. Of course, keep in mind this is from a guy who hates Facebook, Twitter, MyFace, SpaceCase, and the rest. I've never updated my Facebook status, hardly even update my IM status when I'm "away" (it doesn't seem to make much difference anyway, people know when I'm idle automatically). So I'm probably not the target market for this. I could see it being interesting leveraging the existing data of Gmail and other Google services, but at the same time I wonder whether people actually like the separation between Gmail/email in general and something like Facebook. I think I do...

- Oshyan

Housetier, what you're talking about starts to sound like a pretty cool general mod for SMF sites, and maybe even combined with a 3rd party site that you can optionally connect to, a sort of directory of communities organized by topic and keywords, with each having associated membership thread highlighting, etc. Let's say you're a user of the "SMF Stumbler" and you have found a new interest in knitting. You could do a web search for "knitting forum" or "knitting community", but maybe it would be better to look for keyword (or category/subject?) "knitting" in your SMF Stumbler account, and *bam* you have top-rated threads/communities on your subject of interest. Hmm!

- Oshyan

Another thought: try fooling the email client into thinking something is a quote. Some use pretty simplistic ways of determining this, e.g. > character prefix. Of course this will only work on certain clients, those that are configured with that quote detection method *and* have quote collapsing options, heh.

- Oshyan

Shoutcast as the source, streaming to dual player instances (Winamp or whatever player), each tied to a different sound card. Since it's streaming from the local system, it should have either no delay, or *equal* delay between each player (provided you set the streaming playback buffers for each player to be the same!). Note that you should be able to setup Shoutcast to play not just MP3s from e.g. another Winamp instance, but also the loopback or line in or whatever else, thus it should be able to stream any audio on your system...

- Oshyan

Ooo! I'm glad you did this because I had no idea what that thing really did until seeing this. Now I want it.

- Oshyan

Yes, that's a shame. There is always the Lastpass Bookmarklet, but I realize it's not an adequate solution. Stupid, stupid Opera devs! Their lack of extensions seems to be considered a "feature" (and not in the "bug we don't intend to fix" sense, but in the "we're proud of our lack of extensions" sense). Yeesh.

- Oshyan