Doom 3 Demo Prompts Filesharing Frenzy
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Just hours after a demo of Doom 3 for Windows made its debut onto the Web, copies began to spread throughout the game's vast network of enthusiast sites and peer-to-peer torrents. id Software has produced a playable demo of Doom 3's three level Mars City mission that is sure to push players' hardware to its limits.
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If you run a site that has tons of files for your users to download (or even just a few) that you want to keep safe from a direct link, this new article from the O'Reilly PHP DevCenter might be just what you're looking for.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Program isn't entirely benevolent: it also downloads files to infected PCs.
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A GTK/python frontend to the news leecher "hellanzb" providing most functionalities available from the "hellanzb daemon" and Drag and Drop file-enqueuing.Hellanzb can be obtained through your distro's package manager or at http://www.hellanzb.com   looks like hellagui only worked for me. There was a major bug : if no config file was present, hellagui would crash on start.  Now, if a developer, even of such a lowly glade hack as this one, says "this is working" and has even got screenshots to prove it, and the package doesn't work for you, it's very probable that there is some weird bug he (the developer, in this case me), missed.   It seriously doesn't hurt to just drop a small mail stating "sorry dude, but your application is just a pile of bugdung and it crashes". I'll even welcome "U 5vXX0r. it Cr4sh3d" messages ... If there is a shell output, even better. If not I'll survive and ask myself WHY it crashed and then fix it.  Anyway ... this version should work ... please DO tell me if it doesn't.
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When Tim Howes and a group of colleagues created the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol almost 15 years ago, he had no idea this quiet little front end to the more robust X.500 directory
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Well, maybe not yet. But what does the future hold for those who consider their source code an important proprietary asset? Halloween this year featured more scary stuff than just ghosts and ghouls.
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New drive crams enormous storage capacity into standard 3.5-inch format, but it's not ready for delivery just yet.
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Company's third open-source contribution is the first time it has shared code for actual application.
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underpar writes &quot;According to this ZDNet.com article, Microsoft &#39;has launched a pilot program in which some visitors to the main Windows download page are being asked to let the software maker check to see whether their copy of the operating system is
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Some attendees at the Storage Networking World conference say they're combining backup software and de-duplication technology with virtual systems in an effort to manage ever increasing data stores.
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Ziff Davis - New software programs enable storage silos to connect with one another.
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A battle over next-generation disc standards could create a rift in console game storage. Which side are you on? There are few who contest the fact that the acceptance of CD-ROM and then DVD-ROM standards
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New TagmaStore plays well with rivals' arrays to keep watch over 32 petabytes of data.
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Personal computers have rapidly turned into storage vaults for digital music, photos and videos. Now, computer-industry companies are rolling out new ways to let that content roam through the house.
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Clever 'perpendicular recording system' boosts storage capacity
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At Fry's this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives. Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!