htmlspecialchars converts < to <, > to >, & to & and " to ", simply because those characters have special meanings in HTML and XML and therefore require to be properly escaped. (strictly speaking, converting " is only required in attributes where the value is between quotes itself, but that's the default behaviour of the function to be more general-purpose). As you can see, the character encoding of the string is irrelevant here -- assuming it is ASCII-compatible --, since the function only replaces some ASCII sequences by other ASCII sequences. Why the string has an additional argument to handle encoding is beyond me. (to prevent replacements of said characters within grapheme clusters perhaps? Or to handle non ASCII compatible encodings?)
Of course, handling character encoding is a real issue, but a different one. It's fairly trivial, however: you have to transfer your data in the character encoding that you declared your document was in.
Maybe you're actually talking of the issue that user agents will encode data not supported by the character set they're supposed to use as sequences? There are different approach on this issue, but the best way is arguably to ask the user agent to send its data in UTF-8. I don't remember any problem with IE6 for that (sure, it ignores the attribute made for that purpose in forms, but it will send the data in the character encoding of the page).
Just teach people how to code. When a function or subsystem expects a certain format as a precondition on its input, you actually have to make sure you enforce that precondition (in the case of PHP applications, you simply need to apply trivial conversions such as htmlspecialchars() or mysql_escape_char() depending on whether you want to use that input to generate HTML or XML or to include it into a MySQL request -- this is enough to get rid of XSS and SQL injections completely).
There would be no need for such tools if PHP developers actually were software engineers rather than kiddies surfing on the web hype that barely understand the tools they're manipulating.
Here's reality : studio artists make albums, sell albums, make money.
Artists really make money from performing, not by selling albums.
Yet in two thirds of Slashdot's distorted mind, they should stop doing that and look for "a real job instead".
You're misunderstanding. It's just claimed that people that people that do not want to spend their time moving about, advertising themselves, and performing should find another job. As a matter of fact, doing a living from that is difficult (it only works if you actually have talent), so if you're not that talented, you have to get another job instead of saying it's the fault of illegal downloads you can't live off of it.
The powers that be want to weaken/destroy copyright so that musicians/writers/programmers/designers/etc cannot make any income from selling the final product -- rather they expect these people to become salaried professionals, getting paid by the hour or work for free. Programmers are already in that group.
What powers that be want that? That certainly seems very interesting, but it's the opposite of what the governments are doing.
Also, I find that to be a good thing, personally. Getting paid for actually working makes more sense than earning money ad infinitum based on some work you've already done.
People aren't going to pay to go see a band they've never heard of either.
Unknown bands go to festivals to become more known, and people go to festivals to see the known bands and also take a look a other stuff while they're at it. It's the same for other kinds of artists, except conventions or the like replace festivals.
Why is Windows 7 even in the summary? People who buy high-end disk drives and care about Windows must be quite a minority. The point of hard disk drives with fast writing performance is for servers.
I suggest you look up the definition of open-source [1]. Real is not.
I also suggest you look up the definition of free software [2]. Indeed, free software is *less* restrictive than open-source, contrary to popular belief.
Please also refrain from spreading confusion between free software and copyleft.
By pointless crap, he meant eye-candy that is useless, with fricking animations everywhere that distract you from the actual content and that and only gets in the way of productivity and accessibility. I don't ever remember seeing a Flash website that had an usable interface.
Independence from Adobe for one. Right now, without Flash, Youtube does not work, period, end of story
It doesn't really work with Flash either. Fullscreen is slow, it's as if it was CPU scaling, the video goes out of sync from time to time, it crashes often, it uses my CPU to the maximum to do virtually nothing and causes my laptop to be so hot it runs the fan to the max.
At least, that's how Flash works on Linux. It seems it works as badly on Mac OS X, too.
The more important reason to ditch Flash is to make to the god damn thing work properly, such that you can really watch videos decently which would stop making youtube nothing more than a toy.
So on vacation, when downloading the photos of the day onto my old PowerBook, I started iWeb to select a few of them and write something about the picture and where it was taken, so I could host it for my parents to look at them.
For that, you should use a web application designed for publishing photo albums, not use a WYSIWYG editor.
The result is absolutely W3C-valid - no errors, no warnings.
And that is irrelevant. Being valid is necessary, but not sufficient to be good.
Sorry, what was the issue with incorrect HTML and WYSIWYG-editors again?
iWeb is known for being much better at generating valid HTML than other WYSIWYG editors. However, it still only has a 81% validity rate (others are usually below 4%). Why the hell all those editors don't always generate valid HTML in 100% of the cases, I don't know.
If you ignore ridiculous laws such as the DMCA, copyright law does not restrict how you may transfer or copy data within the rights you have. And fair use, or similar concepts (we're talking internationally here) always allow you to make copies for your private use.
Therefore, fair use allows you to transfer copyrighted music on the internet for certain scenarios.
Also, transferring copyrighted music on the internet is not fair use or fair dealing. It's illegal and copyright infringement in many countries
False. Using the internet to transfer copyrighted material from one of my computers to another is not more illegal than using streets to move my CDs from one place to another.
This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access.
By this they really mean they will ban you from their network not because you're breaking the law, but because you're not following their EULA, which would stipulate you may not transfer copyrighted material by other means than their service. (which is completely unrelated to what the law does and doesn't allow)
Transferring copyrighted music on the internet is fair use, not piracy. By educating people about online piracy, they really mean lying to them to make them believe their rights do not exist.
I keep hearing that, but I don't know why that would be so. MPEG-LA requires a fee for distribution of products. But Mozilla could pay the decoder cap fee (maxes out a $5M/year next year) and allow as many people to download a H.264-enabled Firefox as they want, no?
Except people wouldn't be allowed to redistribute it, which would be in direct contradiction of the Firefox license, or any free software license for that matter.
Browsers don't "read" any video files - they use CODECs to do so. Pretty much every OS comes with (or can easily have installed) an h.264 decoder at no cost to the user.
Sorry to disappoint you, but all browsers implementing the <video> element at the moment have purposedly chosen not to rely on any OS-level codec system.
Also, the best video players out there, namely VLC and MPlayer, do not rely on any OS-level codec system either.
Slashdot Mirror
htmlspecialchars converts < to <, > to >, & to & and " to ", simply because those characters have special meanings in HTML and XML and therefore require to be properly escaped. (strictly speaking, converting " is only required in attributes where the value is between quotes itself, but that's the default behaviour of the function to be more general-purpose).
As you can see, the character encoding of the string is irrelevant here -- assuming it is ASCII-compatible --, since the function only replaces some ASCII sequences by other ASCII sequences. Why the string has an additional argument to handle encoding is beyond me. (to prevent replacements of said characters within grapheme clusters perhaps? Or to handle non ASCII compatible encodings?)
Of course, handling character encoding is a real issue, but a different one. It's fairly trivial, however: you have to transfer your data in the character encoding that you declared your document was in.
Maybe you're actually talking of the issue that user agents will encode data not supported by the character set they're supposed to use as sequences? There are different approach on this issue, but the best way is arguably to ask the user agent to send its data in UTF-8. I don't remember any problem with IE6 for that (sure, it ignores the attribute made for that purpose in forms, but it will send the data in the character encoding of the page).
Huh? What kind of museums did you go to?
Most classical paintings are depictions of battles, for example.
And that makes you a puritan moron.
Just teach people how to code. When a function or subsystem expects a certain format as a precondition on its input, you actually have to make sure you enforce that precondition (in the case of PHP applications, you simply need to apply trivial conversions such as htmlspecialchars() or mysql_escape_char() depending on whether you want to use that input to generate HTML or XML or to include it into a MySQL request -- this is enough to get rid of XSS and SQL injections completely).
There would be no need for such tools if PHP developers actually were software engineers rather than kiddies surfing on the web hype that barely understand the tools they're manipulating.
Artists really make money from performing, not by selling albums.
You're misunderstanding. It's just claimed that people that people that do not want to spend their time moving about, advertising themselves, and performing should find another job. As a matter of fact, doing a living from that is difficult (it only works if you actually have talent), so if you're not that talented, you have to get another job instead of saying it's the fault of illegal downloads you can't live off of it.
What powers that be want that? That certainly seems very interesting, but it's the opposite of what the governments are doing.
Also, I find that to be a good thing, personally. Getting paid for actually working makes more sense than earning money ad infinitum based on some work you've already done.
People aren't going to pay to go see a band they've never heard of either.
Unknown bands go to festivals to become more known, and people go to festivals to see the known bands and also take a look a other stuff while they're at it.
It's the same for other kinds of artists, except conventions or the like replace festivals.
NILFS2 I suppose.
Supposedly beats the crap out of LogFS, YAFFS and JFFS2 when using SSDs.
Why is Windows 7 even in the summary?
People who buy high-end disk drives and care about Windows must be quite a minority. The point of hard disk drives with fast writing performance is for servers.
I suggest you look up the definition of open-source [1]. Real is not.
I also suggest you look up the definition of free software [2]. Indeed, free software is *less* restrictive than open-source, contrary to popular belief.
Please also refrain from spreading confusion between free software and copyleft.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_definition
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_definition
You do realize Javascript and Actionscript (that Flex uses) are the *same* language?
And if Javascript is the most arcane programming language you've ever used, you really know nothing of programming languages, I'm afraid.
RealPlayer is proprietary, and the Real formats too.
By pointless crap, he meant eye-candy that is useless, with fricking animations everywhere that distract you from the actual content and that and only gets in the way of productivity and accessibility. I don't ever remember seeing a Flash website that had an usable interface.
It doesn't really work with Flash either.
Fullscreen is slow, it's as if it was CPU scaling, the video goes out of sync from time to time, it crashes often, it uses my CPU to the maximum to do virtually nothing and causes my laptop to be so hot it runs the fan to the max.
At least, that's how Flash works on Linux. It seems it works as badly on Mac OS X, too.
The more important reason to ditch Flash is to make to the god damn thing work properly, such that you can really watch videos decently which would stop making youtube nothing more than a toy.
For that, you should use a web application designed for publishing photo albums, not use a WYSIWYG editor.
And that is irrelevant.
Being valid is necessary, but not sufficient to be good.
iWeb is known for being much better at generating valid HTML than other WYSIWYG editors.
However, it still only has a 81% validity rate (others are usually below 4%). Why the hell all those editors don't always generate valid HTML in 100% of the cases, I don't know.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the solar system, aliens prepare a missile to launch at earth to see whether there is any carbon-based life there.
If you ignore ridiculous laws such as the DMCA, copyright law does not restrict how you may transfer or copy data within the rights you have. And fair use, or similar concepts (we're talking internationally here) always allow you to make copies for your private use.
Therefore, fair use allows you to transfer copyrighted music on the internet for certain scenarios.
Distribution is illegal without acquiring the necessary rights, but sharing is always granted.
Just like you may put on a CD in your place and have your friends listen to it, you may send music digitally to your friends.
False.
Using the internet to transfer copyrighted material from one of my computers to another is not more illegal than using streets to move my CDs from one place to another.
Transfer is not distribution.
By this they really mean they will ban you from their network not because you're breaking the law, but because you're not following their EULA, which would stipulate you may not transfer copyrighted material by other means than their service. (which is completely unrelated to what the law does and doesn't allow)
Transferring copyrighted music on the internet is fair use, not piracy.
By educating people about online piracy, they really mean lying to them to make them believe their rights do not exist.
Still, they're not using the system of the OS, they're using their own, which happens to be that on the OS on one of their supported platforms.
Which certainly doesn't count as the OS-level codec system on Microsoft Windows, another platform supported by Safari 4.
In which way the browser cannot reliably guarantee being able to play h264, which makes it a bad choice for a standard.
Think also of platforms without those big Operating Systems...
Except people wouldn't be allowed to redistribute it, which would be in direct contradiction of the Firefox license, or any free software license for that matter.
Sorry to disappoint you, but all browsers implementing the <video> element at the moment have purposedly chosen not to rely on any OS-level codec system.
Also, the best video players out there, namely VLC and MPlayer, do not rely on any OS-level codec system either.
Why, you ask? Because those are not good enough.