Why is it You’re Studying CS, Again?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Some people tend to be rather stupid about the choices they make in life. For the most part, that’s OK – it’s human nature after all, and it can (most of the time) be rectified with a bit of hard work and a lot of concentration. But at other times, these mistakes run so deep that it’s almost impossible/unfeasible to set them straight afterwards, making you wonder just why they happened in the first place.

Take, for instance, the average class of computer science students. Go to the nearest university on a day where 2nd or 3rd year computer science students have a hands-on lab session for programming in the language of your choice. Watch as half of them struggle with the basic logic that’s already up on the board/overhead-projector. Notice how half of them (or more) have trouble writing a simple if statement or a for loop (no matter what language) that properly tests-for/does something.

It’s not their fault. In a world that has been turned upside-down in less than a decade and revolutionized in its entirety by the digital PC, you can’t blame students for turning to the number most popular field of work/study when it comes to deciding what they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives. The facts certainly support their decision: you no longer have to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, a Lawyer, or a Doctor to be making 120k+ a year (and if you’re a lawyer or doctor you have to handle licensing fees, insurance, and many other money-sapping necessities) – you just have to be a programmer with 5+ years of experience.

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What on Earth is Wrong with Akismet!?!?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Akismet sucks. No really – if it can’t tell that 400 duplicate comments made to the same blog but different pages by the same IP address linking to the same domain in a matter of 4 minutes are to be considered spam, no thanks – we’ll find something better.

Seriously though! This has happened 3 times in 24 hours. 100 or so comments each time. Each “wave” comes from the same IP, links to the same site, contains the same exact (non) words, and is just as ridiculously obvious as being spam…. They don’t even get flagged as “moderated,” they go straight to the inbox (so to speak..)!

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Image Lists or Resources?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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One of the nicest things about Visual Studio and the .NET language is choice. You have plenty of choices, plenty of options, and plenty of different ways to confuse and confound yourself. Take, for instance, icons/images as “labels” for buttons: what’s the best way to do that?

At face value, there are two options, either of which should theoretically work just fine, and get what you need: Image Lists and Resources (resx files). Technically, there’s even a third option: compiling local resources directly into your application. Anyway if this all sounds like Greek to you, no worries, here’s the low-down on these two (three) different ways of adding an image to your file.

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CompleteRSS 1.0 Released

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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CompleteRSS 1.0 was released yesterday, it’s been upped to a full-release, no longer alpha. Nothing major has changed as far as functionality or purpose is concerned, but it’s a highly recommended upgrade because it addresses a couple of high-profile (really annoying) bugs that can occur if you have a post with the word “feed” in the permalink.

Moreover, there have been several fixes to enhance compatibility with non-standard permalink structures, older versions of PHP, and feeds via proxies. It’s a fully-stable release, and now it’s more important than ever, since WordPress 2.1 has gone public.

WordPress 2.1 never displays content past the <!–more–> marker in an RSS/Atom feed, unlike WordPress 2.0.x & co. If you’re a dedicated blogger and you love your readers, do them a favor and serve full-content RSS feeds: they’ll appreciate it, and you’ll get more feed subscribers :)

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Bloggers: Boycott Pay-Per-Action!!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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If you’re a blogger or a small-site webmaster, get ready to boycott Google’s new Pay-Per-Action program. Why? Because you’ll never get as much money as you do right now with AdSense & Co.

Google calls Pay-Per-Action the “complement to AdWords,” but in reality, Pay-Per-Action is an AdWords/AdSense replacement. Look at it from Google’s point of view: Google claims it loses over a billion dollar’s in revenue from click-fraud with AdSense. If Google thinks it’s losing that much money due to click-fraud, and Google sincerely believes that with Pay-Per-Action that loss will no longer exist, they’d be stupid not to switch over.. Unless of course, bloggers refuse to use their new PPA service.

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The Real Reason Twitter Will Fail

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Twitter is all the hype right now, you don’t need us to tell you that. For some odd reason, something as simple and basic as a one-liner blog site has captured the minds of the online world. For two minutes, put aside whatever feelings you may have on the matter. Good or bad, just set them aside for a couple of minutes and look at it from a different point of view.

Let’s take the best-case scenario here. Twitter continues to increase in popularity, and can handle any and all problems that come up with their system. Let’s assume Twitter keeps on booming. What happens next?

As with all other social networks, the goal of Twitter is connections. NeoSmart Technologies connects ideas, Twitter connects people. Now there are a billion people on Twitter: they check out each other’s profiles, and get to one-another. What then? They head off to each person’s blog, Facebook, or even MySpace to get in touch: leave one another messages, check out their friends, share ideas, photos, and videos.

At the end of the day, people are going to be leaving Twitter to go to their friends’ blogs and sites, and hooking up with them there. The point is, Twitter isn’t filling the void. It fills up a small portion of it, but not enough to satisfy. If at the end of the day, people are going to leave it for other sites, they’ll stop going back.

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NST Server Upgraded to SP2

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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We’ve successfully upgraded our server to Windows Server 2003 SP2 today, without any trouble at all. During the upgrade, there was about an hour-and-a-half of on and off downtime due to the upgrade procedure, but that’s all been taken care of now thankfully.

Windows 2003 SP2 was only just released yesterday, so it hasn’t really been put through the motions. But you know us: it’s hypocrisy to preach bleeding-edge and remain using decrepit software! If you notice any odd behavior regarding our server or how pages are being displayed (or aren’t!) that wasn’t there before, please comment away to bring the matter(s) to our attention.

Halo 2 Release Date: May 8, 2007!!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft has just announced two birds with one press bulletin: Halo 2 will be coming to Windows Vista on a PC near you on May 8, 2007 — at the same time as Games for Windows LIVE goes public!

As the official press release states, Halo 2 for Windows Vista will have superior graphics compared to the Xbox version, and it’ll come with a Map Editor too (that we’ve known for a while now). It’s good to finally have a concrete date set for one of the most anticipated games in PC history.

Halo 2 was the most popular game for the Xbox, taking up where the original Halo for Xbox left off. Halo 2 and Microsoft/Epic’s Gears of War currently top the popular list for Xbox 360. Gears of War is another game PC gamers are looking forward to playing on the PC.

Following the May 8th release of Halo 2 for PC, another FPS game for Windows Vista will be released come June: Shadowrun. Shadowrun will PCs and Xbox 360s at the same time, making it the first true multi-platform experience on Games for Windows LIVE.

Windows XP x64 Service Pack 2 Released!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Microsoft has just released Windows XP x64 Edition SP2, currently available for all architectures (x86, x64, & Itanium) in English and German.

Before installing Windows XP x64 Service Pack 2, you must first ensure that you uninstall Internet Explorer 7 before installing the update, or else Internet Explorer will fail to work, since SP2 will reinstall IE6 for you.

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Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Released!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Microsoft has just released Windows Server 2003 SP2, currently available for all architectures (x86, x64, & Itanium) in English and German.

Before installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, you must first ensure that you uninstall Internet Explorer 7 before installing the update, or else Internet Explorer will fail to work, since SP2 will reinstall IE6 for you.

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