Darkfalz.com

I listen to a lot of podcasts and have been listening to John C. Dvorak preach up and down about the risk of "cloud computing". I'd say that, for the most part, I've been in agreement with him. Well, today I was logging into my email acount's web interface and got quite the scare. About 80% of my emails were messed up. The subjects, from address and body's were gone (date/time, status, etc were all still there). This really freaked me and got me thinking. Just how much of our "stuff" is floating out there in someone else's control? I'm one of those that tends to keep backups (not obsessive about it but I do it now and then) but when it comes to items out on the "cloud" how safe are we? I hadn't pulled my emails down to a local folder in months... just always assumed they'd be there. It's times like this that I get the proverbial "slap in the face" and start to wake up. More drive space....check (it's cheap)..... scheduled backups....check (in process of setting them up). Is this reactionary, sure, and will I continue in the long haul, probably not but I really do mean to. With about 1tb of data floating in my office (75% doesn't need to be backed up) I realized that less than 10% was actually on any reliable backup. What would I do if it suddenly vanished? Well, probably start with a breakdown, but after that I'd probably just be S.O.L. and have to work on recreating things as I needed.

Guess there's really no great insight here, just yet another warning..... PEOPLE... BACK UP YOUR DATA!

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Ok, don't ask me why but I signed up. I guess that means I'm part of "them" now. A friend of mine sent me a request and I joined, hesitantly. For me the real "TWITter" will always be http://www.ThisWeekInTech.com and not the social networking site, but I suppose I need to give in at some point. Anyways, I signed up and for those of you who really want to, I'm at http://twitter.com/Darkfalz01 so feel free to join in.

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I was taking my morning walk to work (yes, I really do walk to work) and listening to John C. Dvorak in his daily Tech5 podcast when he mentioned the above. He skipped over it rather quickly and mentioned it only because he thought it might be related to the Google Phone and them wanting to put simple games on it. Now normally I think he's fairly "on" with his insight but I think he's missing something here....something much bigger. For those of you gamers out there (yes, I'm one of those) you probably recognize the name Valve right away. They were the makers of Half-Life, one of, if not THE best game series ever. They get great sales and always have highly anticipated game releases. If it's true and Google is indeed buying them up then it's not for a simple Phone game but rather sometime more. Either they are looking to get yet another foothold into the PC Desktop markets or there is some other piece within Valve that's of interest.

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Yes, I use the Zune... quite proud of it actually. I looked at the different players out there and after evaluating them I was down to just 2. One was the iPod Touch, the other was the Zune 80gb. The evaluation stopped promptly when I did the $$ comparison. I got mine for $200 at the time (when they were still retailing for $250) from an online deal and have played with it now for a couple of months. It's been great. Being able to wirelessly send things to my coworkers (a number of which have the older 30gb model) has been a lot of fun. Now Microsoft has released version 3.0 of the software for the device and it's managed to get even better. Wireless downloads (and not just wireless sync) is a great feature and one that was overdue. Putting a clock (finally) on the screen was a good move too. The games feature was one I had actually added myself earlier (when I was playing with XNA) but the auto-loaded ones (Hexic and Texas hold'em)  look like good fun for those days on the plane/car/etc. I do have to say that there are a couple of things I would love to see added messaging (sending and not just receiving) for starters and then that would of course lead to a way to interface....that means touch screen or keyboard addon. Surfing, since its already got the wireless, would only make sense but again it would need the input device other than the existing one. I would be willing to bet that if Microsoft is going to continue with the Zune hardware that these will be on the next model, as I hope an 80gb solid state drive would be, but one can only hope.

That's just my $.02 on it at least.... bottom line, go try one and I think you'll find it a great piece of equipment.

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Ok, let me start off by saying I would not consider myself an elitist but at the same time I'm not overly complacent. I have my opinions and levels of acceptance. That said, what is going on today with developers? I spend a great deal of my time involved in the development community interacting with all levels of coders and have come to the realization of late that the skill levels of developers is severely decreasing.

I'm not sure if there are simply more entry level dev's out there or if they are simply suffering from the "do it for me" attitude but there is most definitely a difference over the last 5 years. Simplified tools (newer versions of Visual Studio, Express products, easier access to servers, etc) probably play a strong role in this slide. The fact that today people are exposed to computers (and in particular the Internet) at an earlier and earlier age is surely a factor as well. Mix these all together and I really can't be overly surprised that there are many many more dev's than ever before and I really think that it's a very good thing. The really issue I have isn't the quantitiy....it's the quality and lack of pure interest

When I started off in the coding community a person would be embarrassed to post a question in the forums with something like "please write this for me" or "please give me all the code" and yet today if you go out to the forums and newsgroups you see a great deal of these posts. I don't think it's laziness but rather it's apathy. People just don't really care to know how or why something works; they just want it to work. They don't want to learn (please people; pick up a book once and a while). This is the stuff that destroys progression. It's these subtle bits that make us understand what's happening. Without this understanding we can't grow. Without growth we are doomed to simply stagnate.

Now I know there are a number of dev's out there with near obsession in their craft...and these are not the ones I'm talking about. I have a great deal of respect for those individuals. The day was that these individuals were in vast numbers but it seems that it's not the case anymore. Perhaps I've just gotten "old", perhaps I've grown slightly bitter, perhaps.... but either way, it's just an opinion.

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Take a look over on the left hand side. I've added a list of books that I would definitely consider ones you need to read. If you enjoy a good book that makes you really think then you should enjoy these (I know I did). I'll keep adding to the list as I finish books, providing they are worth it of course.

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Well, the new site has been put together. It's based on the Graffiti CMS from Telligent and seems like a pretty decent product. I'm not 100% sure yet if it will fill all my needs but for what I need right now it's good. Anyways, I hope you like the visual aspects and the way it functions. Feel free to let me know what you think of it. As for the "content" of the site... well, that's another ballgame. I got a feeling it's going to be a DISTINCT work in progress. Come back again (and again and again) and let me know what you think of it as it grows.

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