Via Slashdot, Washtech.com: From the Shareware Industry, Lessons on Keeping Downloaders Honest, by Rob Pegoraro. Great article. Here's another article I have to read: Bitwise Operator: The Plain Truth About Piracy, also via Slashdot.

The gist of it is that a shareware company was able to reduce piracy by encoding the date of registration in the registration key, and making the software no longer accept it if the key was older than 30 days. Pretty smart.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1668

23:52 (utc-5)
edited: 2002-03-18 00:07 (utc-5)

 

If I wanted to become the first website listed on Google for the term... say "fundamentalist wacko", how would I go about doing that?

Permalink | Comments? | id 1667

22:11 (utc-5)

 

Do you think most people take life too seriously, or not seriously enough?

Permalink | Comments? | id 1666

21:06 (utc-5)

 

Slashdot: Knuth: All Questions Answered. "The AMS published a lecture by Donald Knuth called All Questions Answered (pdf), where Knuth simply responded to questions from the audience. Topics ranged from errors in software ('I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"') to how he gets distracted by fonts on restaurant menus, to software patents. There were some really good questions (and responses)." I'm really looking forward to reading this.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1665

14:16 (utc-5)

 

Via Slashdot, IBM's Think Research: Made to Order "IBM makes sense of unstructured data". I haven't read the article yet, but I wonder if I will find anything interesting in it... If data's (sorry, if data are) unstructured, there's not much you can do with it, is there? From what I skimmed so far this looks like not much more than an advertisement for IBM products.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1664

04:29 (utc-5)

 

Slashdot: Vesta Releases First GPL Version. Another new software configuration management system. Best thing about this Slashdot post is that it consolidates a lot of info about different systems in one place for me to make a list of later.

Permalink | Comments? | id 1663

04:23 (utc-5)

 

If anyone has any problems posting a comment while trying to subscribe to a post please let me know. I just had what I thought was a problem, but I wasn't able to reproduce it. In the near future, whenever you leave a comment, if you subscribe to the post, check to make sure the comment is actually posted before you leave Thanks.

Permalink | 7 Comments | id 1662

00:35 (utc-5)

 

Ok, I will do a CSS based design for my site over spring break After talking to caillon on #Mozillazine (thank you), I realize it's possible to do what I want to do... also, I've never read the CSS2 standard, so I'm doing that now. When CSS1 came out I read it, but CSS2 is so enormous that I never got around to reading it. (Check out /programmming/#specifications for links to the specs) (I hate how Internet Explorer is too stupid to go to anchors correctly)

You really have to read the specs for these things to fully understand them. I've never bought a book on HTML, the specs have always been enough. Once you read the specs you know everything there is, so you don't need a book. (That's one of the reasons I'm annoyed that the C and C++ specs aren't freely available.)

Do you know that element.classname {} is short for element[class~=classname]? Or what the |= operator does? Or that .classname is short for *.classname? Or that they fixed the !important declarations in CSS2 so that the user gets final say?

Permalink | 1 Comment | id 1661

00:04 (utc-5)
edited: 00:07 (utc-5)