This article is either a troll, or the author greatly overstates her technical abilities.
She claims that RedHat 7.3 can't be installed on a "Windows machine", that it can't be dual-booted, etc. Which is really fucking funny to me, as I've had a dual-boot RedHat 7.3 system until very recently (when I upgraded it to a RedHat 8.0 dual-boot system).
I don't think that the writer read ANY of the documentation, nor did she use common sense: if you install an OS on the second hard drive, of COURSE the BIOS isn't going to find it, because the BIOS doesn't expect the OS to be on drive #2. The solution is to either change your BIOS settings so that it loads the OS from the hard disk #2 (though this would be a PITA), or use RedHat's solution as listed in the installation manual: create a/boot partition on the first hard disk, and put the / ,/home, and/usr partitions on the second drive (at least, that was what the old RH 6.0 installation manual said; since my partition setup has basically remained unchanged since RH 6.0, I've not read any of RH's install docs since then).
She claims that RedHat 8.0 can't access non-Linux drives, which I know to be 100% bullshit. For the CLI types, there's either "mount/dev/hd[your Windows drive & partition]" or if the partition isn't in/etc/fstab, then do "mount/dev/hd[windows drive & partition]/mnt/windows" (assuming that you've already at some point done "mkdir/mnt/windows"). I'm pretty sure that there's a GUI for this, but I've never needed to find it: since my Windows partitions have entries in/etc/fstab (don't remember if I put them there, or if some config program did it), they've got icons on the KDE desktop, and all I have to do is right click on the one I want and pick "mount" or "unmount". Not exactly rocket science.
She bitches about the "mixer" overriding the volume of the CD player. Guess what, honey, Windows95 does that too! I don't think it takes a genious to say, "Hmm, maybe I should check the volume level." when you can't hear the CD you're playing. The volume slider in KsCD is (rightly so) limited by the main volume, and the "?" button she mentions is actually, "?>" (which was enough for me to go, "Maybe this isn't the help button."), and the tooltip for it says "Shuffle Play". I'm getting some nagging suspicions about this author.
"After installation, I tried to add additional software by installing GIMP." I'll ignore the possible interpretation that she thought GIMP was some kind of software installer. But saying "GIMP doesn't install!" is unfair to the distro. And, knowing Gimp, the installation probably went fine. It lists some directories in your home directory that it needs to make, and some files that it needs to put in them, and has an "Ok" or a "Go" button at the bottom (don't remember which; I haven't had to install Gimp in a while); once you click this button it makes those directories and copies those files for you, and there is no ambiguity about this. I installed Gimp on the very first day I started using Linux, and I knew what it was doing.
She also claims that some software doesn't show up in the menu after installation, but that's understandable if she had actually thought about it, because there isn't a standard way for programs to do this (they'd have to know what desktop environment you're using, how you had your menus laid out (which every distro has differently), etc.). It'd be nice if GNOME and KDE had a standard, non-GUI way that other programs could use to insert themselves into the menu, and that this method was the same between both desktops so that programs wouldn't have to know or care which one the user was running. This tiny little complaint, aside from some hardware incompatibilities (which her great and wonderful Windows95 had in spades; there's a reason PnP used to be jokingly called "Plug 'n
You're probably just trolling, but here goes: In music it is used to indicate that a note is sharp, for example F#. Since C is not just a programming language but is also a musical note, so is C#. Get it?
Yes, there are only three "fun" things more important than giving your kids books:
1)Reading said books to them.
2)Having your kids read those books to YOU, with you helping them on the words they don't understand the meaning of or can't pronounce.
3)Don't just give them kiddie books. Obviously you aren't giving them philosophy books, but find something that they're interested in (and stay away from those damned books with the built-in speaker and pen where you run the pen over the word and the built-in microcontroller plays a HAL9000'esque voice saying that word; they don't learn to read that way, at least not very well, and the electronic voice will drive you batshit), and get them books about that subject that are on, or (better yet) just slightly above, their reading level.
#2) Maybe. Things don't always go well during childbirth. Who are you going to trust in a medical emergency, a midwife or a doctor? I would most likely have died (along with my mother) had I not been born at a hospital (I was tangled up in the umbilical cord, and my heart stopped twice).
** Don't give your kid a pacifier. They'll get too attached to it, and might not be able to sleep without it.
** Don't replace the pacifier with something else to get the to go to sleep (feeding, a favorite video, or whatever). Again, they'll grow dependant on it. It's important that they develop good sleeping habits.
Sorry, I agreed with you until you said that your kid now calls adults "Sir" or "Ma'am".
I really fucking hate it when parents do that.
It is one thing to teach your kid respect, but that doesn't require you to be authoritarian.
You should try explaining to your son why something is bad or shouldn't be done. Still punish him when he goes ahead and does it anyway;), but instead of "Don't hit your brother BECAUSE I SAID SO! GO TO YOUR ROOM!" try "Listen, mister, I don't ever want to see you hit your little brother again. No, I don't care if he hit you first. You don't like getting hit, do you? No? Well, I'm pretty sure that HE doesn't like to be hit either. The next time you two get in a fight, think about how much it hurts when he hits you, and just stop the whole thing right there by not hitting him back. That way, HE'LL get in trouble, but YOU won't. Now, go to your room, and if you do it again you're grounded."
#1: obviously nobody should over-discipline their kid. But if you don't discipline them when they do something wrong, they think that they can get away with whatever they want, and they become the boss, instead of you. Enough discipline to get the point of "Don't do that" across without overdoing it will also help the child learn self responsibility, impulse control, etc. It's also important to explain things and try and help your child understand why they shouldn't do whatever it was that they did wrong, to jumpstart their reasoning powers.
#2: if you get divorced, do it really really early on (early enough in the kid's life that he or she won't be able to remember it), or do it when they're old enough to understand (preferrably mid- to late-teens). I speak from experience on this (my parents got divorced when I was a year old, and wasn't old enough to even remember the damn thing; OTOH, I've got cousins whose parents divorced when they were around 12, and they had, umm... "issues" with their mother and women in general for a while, because they were at that age they were old enough to realize what was happening, but not old enough to understand why or be immune to their parents using them to get back at each other).
And no, marriage isn't easily dissolved by divorce. Alimony, community property, child support, can all make your life suck just as much after divorce as it did when you were married, but in a completely different way.
Everybody should wait at least a year (or three) before popping out their first brat, to give enough time for any problems to sprout. If you have a kid right away, and get divorced after the kid is born, it's going to hurt your child a lot more than it will you or your wife.
#3: exactly. The world is crowded enough, and doesn't need another kid who's messed up (or a selfish brat) because of his or her unfit parents. Most women get the desire to pop out at least one kid, but the question you've got to ask yourself is, "Can I do a good job, or will I just fuck the kid's mind and life up?"
Why do major sites still use MySQL? The answer is simple: momentum.
It's hyped as "The Open Source SQL Database Of Choice", when in reality it seems to me that only reason anybody uses it is because a)it seems like everyone else is, or b)it's the only thing available, or c)they aren't aware that there are other free SQL databases that have more features.
And yes,/. uses MySQL. They'd probably get more out of their servers if they used a different SQL database. Remember, though, that quote comes from MySQL's website, so of course they're going to play up any use of it. A better meterstick would be to find out what those sites thought of MySQL (how much it gets used, how it performs under the load, if they've tried any other DBs and what they thought of them under similar circumstances, etc.).
Head on over to this site, which will let you try various SQL statements on various SQL databases (MySQL being one of them). Try tutorial #2 on one of the systems running MySQL. Oh wait, you can't, MySQL doesn't support nested SELECTs (the site will warn you of this if you try it). Even Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server support this basic feature (so does PostgreSQL).
I'm not saying that the backend can't be database-driven, just that you should make as much of what the user is seeing be static HTML as possible, like having that database backend generate the static HTML for you whenever new content is added (or existing content is changed).
it's a lot cheaper and more efficient to add an extra server and run a (typically database-driven) CMS than it is to get a lacky to update the site manually
There is no manual updating going on. You have to run a script to upload new content (say, for a blog), and it is that script which generates the static HTML pages from the dynamic content. You don't have to, say, have a cron job that runs a script every hour to regenerate your static HTML, or pay some junior sysadmin to run the script every once in a while, or anything like that. The script that allows your creative people to post their new content is also the script that generates the static HTML pages, and since that script only gets run when new content is posted, the static HTML only gets regenerated when new content is posted.
Basically, let's say you post some news to a site using news script Z. You run the script, it asks you for your password and all that, it asks you for the news you want to post, gives this news a little formatting (based on a template that you supplied when you first installed the script), and then sticks it at the top of some file ("news.txt" for the purposes of our discussion).
Now, understand that news.txt is not a complete HTML page. Rather, it just contains the HTML tags and text for your news. No <body> tags or anything like that. On your main page (index.html), you'd insert the following line into the HTML wherever you wanted the news to appear:
<!--#include virtual="news.txt" -->
and then rename index.html to index.shtml
And that's it. From now on, whenever you post news, your news script just sticks the new posts at the top of news.txt. Visitors to your site get a static HTML page (the server strips out the SSI tag and replaces it with the contents of news.txt, so the visitors don't even see the SSI tag).
Almost any monkey can be trained to update a site with a sufficiently simple CMS system, not everyone can be taught/trusted to manage SSI files.
Umm... the script generating the static HTML pages *is* the content management system. The CMS generates the static HTML pages *for you*, so there's no monkey required.
I hope you're not confusing SSI (Server-Side Includes, which are HTML tags that you insert in your page to have the server include the contents of a different page) with SSL (Secure Socket Layer). There are no SSI files to manage. A sample index.shtml (notice:.shtml, not.html) for Joe's Blog might be:
Even if you go crazy with server-side includes, the CPU load won't be nearly that of running even a small PHP script on every pageview.
Re:I don't know the answer, but don't use "and"!
on
Eleventy What?
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· Score: 1
Correct. However, I will point out that nobody says, "three-hundred and one" and means "300.1". The actual math jargon is "three-hundred and one tenth" (which, according to the rule I'll describe below, is correct, but not for the reason that most math teachers think), but this is thankfully falling out of favor in preference to the less ambiguous, and easier to say, "whatever point whatever" style ("three-hundred point one" in this case).
The word "and" means "in addition to", so "Jim and myself..." means "Jim, in addition to myself..."; "five-hundred and one" would mean "five-hundred in addition to one", or "500 + 1", which is the equivalent of "501".
You can see this in just about every formal writing that is more than about 100 years old. Take the Gettysburg Address, for example: "Four score and seven years ago...". This means 80 in addition to 7 (80 + 7), or 87.
The problem with most American math teachers is that they're pedants with no knowledge outside of mathematics. They teach "sixty-two and seventy-nine hundredths" as correct English (and it is, FWIW), yet teach "nine-hundred and fifty-three" as being incorrect (which it isn't) because that's the rules of their jargon. This would be like CompSci professors teaching their students that a kilometer is 1024 meters.
Re:In all non-decimal systems..
on
Eleventy What?
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· Score: 1
Tell your assembly teacher that while most operations on binary numbers are performed from right-to-left, you speak it left-to-right, because that is proper English.
If he still insists on being an (incorrect) pedant, ask him why he doesn't speak the decimal number 456 as "six-fifty-four-hundred", and tell him that while operations on decimal numbers are performed right-to-left, just like with binary numbers, the number itself is read left-to-right (again, just like with binary numbers).
Although I'm sure he didn't mean it this way, the "and" denotes addition. It used to be a common way of expressing numbers, but is now taught as being "incorrect." For an example, the Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago" = 80 + 7 = 87, or "Indeed, I am not yet one and twenty." = "Yeah, I'm not one plus twenty yet" = "Yeah, I'm not twenty-one yet."
Four-thousand-seven-hundred and twenty-nine means 4700 + 29, which is the equivalent of 4729.
The "you only use 'and' in place of the decimal" rule is only partly correct (although universally taught as being 100% correct by people with no knowledge of history or the English language), in that putting "and" in place of the decimal follows the rule that "and" actually means addition: four and seven-tenths = 4 + 0.7 = 4.7
Why? Because the poster whose sig to which I was replying ended his sentence with a preposition. Ordinarily I don't care much about such things, but the fact that he used incorrect grammar while trying to be a Grammar Nazi required me to correct him.
My sig, on the other hand, did not end with a preposition, and was a valid sentence.
This reminds me of a joke: A woman from Arkansas gets on an airplane. Next to her sits a woman from England.
The woman from Arkansas leans over and asks the English woman, "Where y'all from?" to which the other woman replies, in perfect Queen's English, "I'm from a place where people don't end their sentences with a preposition."
Flustered, the Arkansas woman says, "Fine. Where y'all from, bitch?"
Umm, hello, you've heard of server-side includes, yes?
Just make your navigation thingy a seperate HTML file (but without the <head>, <body>, and <html> tags; basically, just the bare HTML for your navigation thing) and then include it on your main page via SSI. Very very simple.
Or, you could have a Perl/PHP backend that generates static HTML pages for you whenever new content is uploaded or existing content is changed, giving you the best of both worlds: dynamic content, but without the CPU overhead of having to run a Perl/PHP script for every pageview. This even gives less CPU overhead than small scripts that will pull a page from cache (and regenerate it if a certain amount of time has passed), since the scripts only run when the content is uploaded/changed, instead of for each and every page view.
The problem with this is that not many people can afford the expensive programs you mention.
What's more, there aren't any "Build Your Own Database-Driven Website With PHP and PostgreSQL" books, so you get idiots who can't even bother to write proper HTML suddenly thinking that they can do an enterprise-level site using nothing but PHP and MySQL. MySQL is such a half-assed database that it's embarrassing, yet unless you run your own server, that's pretty much what you're limited to because that's the only DB most hosting companies offer.
I love the way that once MySQL finally got support for transactions people were like, "Whoah! Transactions! Neato!" when every other SQL database already had them, even free ones like PostgreSQL.
Your server's CPU load for that site would be a lot less if you just used SSI for the headers, footers, and whatever else you needed. That's what I do for my site, and I'd be willing to bet that, given an equal number of hits and bandwidth usage, my CPU load would be less than yours.
For many sites that get/.'ed, it isn't that they run out of bandwidth, but that their CPU load burns up the processor because the webmaster thought it'd be fun to dynamically serve up their image gallery, even though static HTML with SSI (and a Perl or PHP script to regenerate the static HTML pages when new images are uploaded) would have been enough.
They're cheap (dunno 'bout $1/gig, but you're paying for more than just the bandwidth), the service is pretty good (though, I must admit, I've never had to deal with their customer service department, so I have no idea how good that is; on the other hand, the fact that I've never needed to deal with their customer service department says a lot), and the only difference between the cheapest and the most expensive account types are how many gigs per month you get, how much disk space, etc. (all accounts get the same services: Perl, PHP, MySQL, subdomains, SSH access, FTP access, etc.).
I've been using them for almost a year and haven't had any problems, although my site is fairly small and pretty low-traffic.
If you want to have your own server, try SA Net Hosting. Never used 'em, but they seem decent enough, and you'd be supporting Something Awful, which is a damn funny site (although, lately their articles haven't been so good).
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This article is either a troll, or the author greatly overstates her technical abilities.
/boot partition on the first hard disk, and put the / , /home, and /usr partitions on the second drive (at least, that was what the old RH 6.0 installation manual said; since my partition setup has basically remained unchanged since RH 6.0, I've not read any of RH's install docs since then).
/dev/hd[your Windows drive & partition]" or if the partition isn't in /etc/fstab, then do "mount /dev/hd[windows drive & partition] /mnt/windows" (assuming that you've already at some point done "mkdir /mnt/windows"). I'm pretty sure that there's a GUI for this, but I've never needed to find it: since my Windows partitions have entries in /etc/fstab (don't remember if I put them there, or if some config program did it), they've got icons on the KDE desktop, and all I have to do is right click on the one I want and pick "mount" or "unmount". Not exactly rocket science.
She claims that RedHat 7.3 can't be installed on a "Windows machine", that it can't be dual-booted, etc. Which is really fucking funny to me, as I've had a dual-boot RedHat 7.3 system until very recently (when I upgraded it to a RedHat 8.0 dual-boot system).
I don't think that the writer read ANY of the documentation, nor did she use common sense: if you install an OS on the second hard drive, of COURSE the BIOS isn't going to find it, because the BIOS doesn't expect the OS to be on drive #2. The solution is to either change your BIOS settings so that it loads the OS from the hard disk #2 (though this would be a PITA), or use RedHat's solution as listed in the installation manual: create a
She claims that RedHat 8.0 can't access non-Linux drives, which I know to be 100% bullshit. For the CLI types, there's either "mount
She bitches about the "mixer" overriding the volume of the CD player. Guess what, honey, Windows95 does that too! I don't think it takes a genious to say, "Hmm, maybe I should check the volume level." when you can't hear the CD you're playing. The volume slider in KsCD is (rightly so) limited by the main volume, and the "?" button she mentions is actually, "?>" (which was enough for me to go, "Maybe this isn't the help button."), and the tooltip for it says "Shuffle Play". I'm getting some nagging suspicions about this author.
"After installation, I tried to add additional software by installing GIMP."
I'll ignore the possible interpretation that she thought GIMP was some kind of software installer. But saying "GIMP doesn't install!" is unfair to the distro. And, knowing Gimp, the installation probably went fine. It lists some directories in your home directory that it needs to make, and some files that it needs to put in them, and has an "Ok" or a "Go" button at the bottom (don't remember which; I haven't had to install Gimp in a while); once you click this button it makes those directories and copies those files for you , and there is no ambiguity about this. I installed Gimp on the very first day I started using Linux, and I knew what it was doing.
She also claims that some software doesn't show up in the menu after installation, but that's understandable if she had actually thought about it, because there isn't a standard way for programs to do this (they'd have to know what desktop environment you're using, how you had your menus laid out (which every distro has differently), etc.). It'd be nice if GNOME and KDE had a standard, non-GUI way that other programs could use to insert themselves into the menu, and that this method was the same between both desktops so that programs wouldn't have to know or care which one the user was running. This tiny little complaint, aside from some hardware incompatibilities (which her great and wonderful Windows95 had in spades; there's a reason PnP used to be jokingly called "Plug 'n
You're probably just trolling, but here goes: In music it is used to indicate that a note is sharp, for example F#. Since C is not just a programming language but is also a musical note, so is C#. Get it?
Yes, there are only three "fun" things more important than giving your kids books:
1)Reading said books to them.
2)Having your kids read those books to YOU, with you helping them on the words they don't understand the meaning of or can't pronounce.
3)Don't just give them kiddie books. Obviously you aren't giving them philosophy books, but find something that they're interested in (and stay away from those damned books with the built-in speaker and pen where you run the pen over the word and the built-in microcontroller plays a HAL9000'esque voice saying that word; they don't learn to read that way, at least not very well, and the electronic voice will drive you batshit), and get them books about that subject that are on, or (better yet) just slightly above, their reading level.
#2) Maybe. Things don't always go well during childbirth. Who are you going to trust in a medical emergency, a midwife or a doctor? I would most likely have died (along with my mother) had I not been born at a hospital (I was tangled up in the umbilical cord, and my heart stopped twice).
** Don't give your kid a pacifier. They'll get too attached to it, and might not be able to sleep without it.
** Don't replace the pacifier with something else to get the to go to sleep (feeding, a favorite video, or whatever). Again, they'll grow dependant on it. It's important that they develop good sleeping habits.
Sorry, I agreed with you until you said that your kid now calls adults "Sir" or "Ma'am".
;), but instead of "Don't hit your brother BECAUSE I SAID SO! GO TO YOUR ROOM!" try "Listen, mister, I don't ever want to see you hit your little brother again. No, I don't care if he hit you first. You don't like getting hit, do you? No? Well, I'm pretty sure that HE doesn't like to be hit either. The next time you two get in a fight, think about how much it hurts when he hits you, and just stop the whole thing right there by not hitting him back. That way, HE'LL get in trouble, but YOU won't. Now, go to your room, and if you do it again you're grounded."
I really fucking hate it when parents do that.
It is one thing to teach your kid respect, but that doesn't require you to be authoritarian.
You should try explaining to your son why something is bad or shouldn't be done. Still punish him when he goes ahead and does it anyway
#1: obviously nobody should over-discipline their kid. But if you don't discipline them when they do something wrong, they think that they can get away with whatever they want, and they become the boss, instead of you. Enough discipline to get the point of "Don't do that" across without overdoing it will also help the child learn self responsibility, impulse control, etc. It's also important to explain things and try and help your child understand why they shouldn't do whatever it was that they did wrong, to jumpstart their reasoning powers.
#2: if you get divorced, do it really really early on (early enough in the kid's life that he or she won't be able to remember it), or do it when they're old enough to understand (preferrably mid- to late-teens). I speak from experience on this (my parents got divorced when I was a year old, and wasn't old enough to even remember the damn thing; OTOH, I've got cousins whose parents divorced when they were around 12, and they had, umm... "issues" with their mother and women in general for a while, because they were at that age they were old enough to realize what was happening, but not old enough to understand why or be immune to their parents using them to get back at each other).
And no, marriage isn't easily dissolved by divorce. Alimony, community property, child support, can all make your life suck just as much after divorce as it did when you were married, but in a completely different way.
Everybody should wait at least a year (or three) before popping out their first brat, to give enough time for any problems to sprout. If you have a kid right away, and get divorced after the kid is born, it's going to hurt your child a lot more than it will you or your wife.
#3: exactly. The world is crowded enough, and doesn't need another kid who's messed up (or a selfish brat) because of his or her unfit parents. Most women get the desire to pop out at least one kid, but the question you've got to ask yourself is, "Can I do a good job, or will I just fuck the kid's mind and life up?"
I thought everybody on /.'s favorite amateur rocketman was John Carmack. Maybe I'm wrong.
Why do major sites still use MySQL? The answer is simple: momentum.
/. uses MySQL. They'd probably get more out of their servers if they used a different SQL database. Remember, though, that quote comes from MySQL's website, so of course they're going to play up any use of it. A better meterstick would be to find out what those sites thought of MySQL (how much it gets used, how it performs under the load, if they've tried any other DBs and what they thought of them under similar circumstances, etc.).
It's hyped as "The Open Source SQL Database Of Choice", when in reality it seems to me that only reason anybody uses it is because a)it seems like everyone else is, or b)it's the only thing available, or c)they aren't aware that there are other free SQL databases that have more features.
And yes,
Head on over to this site, which will let you try various SQL statements on various SQL databases (MySQL being one of them). Try tutorial #2 on one of the systems running MySQL. Oh wait, you can't, MySQL doesn't support nested SELECTs (the site will warn you of this if you try it). Even Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server support this basic feature (so does PostgreSQL).
I'm not saying that the backend can't be database-driven, just that you should make as much of what the user is seeing be static HTML as possible, like having that database backend generate the static HTML for you whenever new content is added (or existing content is changed).
There is no manual updating going on. You have to run a script to upload new content (say, for a blog), and it is that script which generates the static HTML pages from the dynamic content. You don't have to, say, have a cron job that runs a script every hour to regenerate your static HTML, or pay some junior sysadmin to run the script every once in a while, or anything like that. The script that allows your creative people to post their new content is also the script that generates the static HTML pages, and since that script only gets run when new content is posted, the static HTML only gets regenerated when new content is posted.
Basically, let's say you post some news to a site using news script Z. You run the script, it asks you for your password and all that, it asks you for the news you want to post, gives this news a little formatting (based on a template that you supplied when you first installed the script), and then sticks it at the top of some file ("news.txt" for the purposes of our discussion).
Now, understand that news.txt is not a complete HTML page. Rather, it just contains the HTML tags and text for your news. No <body> tags or anything like that. On your main page (index.html), you'd insert the following line into the HTML wherever you wanted the news to appear:and then rename index.html to index.shtml
And that's it. From now on, whenever you post news, your news script just sticks the new posts at the top of news.txt. Visitors to your site get a static HTML page (the server strips out the SSI tag and replaces it with the contents of news.txt, so the visitors don't even see the SSI tag).
Almost any monkey can be trained to update a site with a sufficiently simple CMS system, not everyone can be taught/trusted to manage SSI files.
Umm... the script generating the static HTML pages *is* the content management system . The CMS generates the static HTML pages *for you*, so there's no monkey required.
I hope you're not confusing SSI (Server-Side Includes, which are HTML tags that you insert in your page to have the server include the contents of a different page) with SSL (Secure Socket Layer). There are no SSI files to manage. A sample index.shtml (notice:
Correct. However, I will point out that nobody says, "three-hundred and one" and means "300.1". The actual math jargon is "three-hundred and one tenth" (which, according to the rule I'll describe below, is correct, but not for the reason that most math teachers think), but this is thankfully falling out of favor in preference to the less ambiguous, and easier to say, "whatever point whatever" style ("three-hundred point one" in this case).
The word "and" means "in addition to", so "Jim and myself..." means "Jim, in addition to myself..."; "five-hundred and one" would mean "five-hundred in addition to one", or "500 + 1", which is the equivalent of "501".
You can see this in just about every formal writing that is more than about 100 years old. Take the Gettysburg Address, for example: "Four score and seven years ago...". This means 80 in addition to 7 (80 + 7), or 87.
The problem with most American math teachers is that they're pedants with no knowledge outside of mathematics. They teach "sixty-two and seventy-nine hundredths" as correct English (and it is, FWIW), yet teach "nine-hundred and fifty-three" as being incorrect (which it isn't) because that's the rules of their jargon. This would be like CompSci professors teaching their students that a kilometer is 1024 meters.
Tell your assembly teacher that while most operations on binary numbers are performed from right-to-left, you speak it left-to-right, because that is proper English.
If he still insists on being an (incorrect) pedant, ask him why he doesn't speak the decimal number 456 as "six-fifty-four-hundred", and tell him that while operations on decimal numbers are performed right-to-left, just like with binary numbers, the number itself is read left-to-right (again, just like with binary numbers).
Except that it is correct.
Although I'm sure he didn't mean it this way, the "and" denotes addition. It used to be a common way of expressing numbers, but is now taught as being "incorrect." For an example, the Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago" = 80 + 7 = 87, or "Indeed, I am not yet one and twenty." = "Yeah, I'm not one plus twenty yet" = "Yeah, I'm not twenty-one yet."
Four-thousand-seven-hundred and twenty-nine means 4700 + 29, which is the equivalent of 4729.
The "you only use 'and' in place of the decimal" rule is only partly correct (although universally taught as being 100% correct by people with no knowledge of history or the English language), in that putting "and" in place of the decimal follows the rule that "and" actually means addition: four and seven-tenths = 4 + 0.7 = 4.7
No.
Why? Because the poster whose sig to which I was replying ended his sentence with a preposition. Ordinarily I don't care much about such things, but the fact that he used incorrect grammar while trying to be a Grammar Nazi required me to correct him.
My sig, on the other hand, did not end with a preposition, and was a valid sentence.
This reminds me of a joke:
A woman from Arkansas gets on an airplane. Next to her sits a woman from England.
The woman from Arkansas leans over and asks the English woman, "Where y'all from?" to which the other woman replies, in perfect Queen's English, "I'm from a place where people don't end their sentences with a preposition."
Flustered, the Arkansas woman says, "Fine. Where y'all from, bitch?"
Umm, hello, you've heard of server-side includes, yes?
Just make your navigation thingy a seperate HTML file (but without the <head>, <body>, and <html> tags; basically, just the bare HTML for your navigation thing) and then include it on your main page via SSI. Very very simple.
Or, you could have a Perl/PHP backend that generates static HTML pages for you whenever new content is uploaded or existing content is changed, giving you the best of both worlds: dynamic content, but without the CPU overhead of having to run a Perl/PHP script for every pageview. This even gives less CPU overhead than small scripts that will pull a page from cache (and regenerate it if a certain amount of time has passed), since the scripts only run when the content is uploaded/changed, instead of for each and every page view.
MySQL is not robust. I mean, for crying out loud, it only got transactions fairly recently IIRC.
Umm, you've heard of PostgreSQL, right?
It's free, and is a much more complete SQL database than MySQL.
The problem with this is that not many people can afford the expensive programs you mention.
What's more, there aren't any "Build Your Own Database-Driven Website With PHP and PostgreSQL" books, so you get idiots who can't even bother to write proper HTML suddenly thinking that they can do an enterprise-level site using nothing but PHP and MySQL. MySQL is such a half-assed database that it's embarrassing, yet unless you run your own server, that's pretty much what you're limited to because that's the only DB most hosting companies offer.
I love the way that once MySQL finally got support for transactions people were like, "Whoah! Transactions! Neato!" when every other SQL database already had them, even free ones like PostgreSQL.
Your server's CPU load for that site would be a lot less if you just used SSI for the headers, footers, and whatever else you needed. That's what I do for my site, and I'd be willing to bet that, given an equal number of hits and bandwidth usage, my CPU load would be less than yours.
/.'ed, it isn't that they run out of bandwidth, but that their CPU load burns up the processor because the webmaster thought it'd be fun to dynamically serve up their image gallery, even though static HTML with SSI (and a Perl or PHP script to regenerate the static HTML pages when new images are uploaded) would have been enough.
For many sites that get
OC12Host
They're cheap (dunno 'bout $1/gig, but you're paying for more than just the bandwidth), the service is pretty good (though, I must admit, I've never had to deal with their customer service department, so I have no idea how good that is; on the other hand, the fact that I've never needed to deal with their customer service department says a lot), and the only difference between the cheapest and the most expensive account types are how many gigs per month you get, how much disk space, etc. (all accounts get the same services: Perl, PHP, MySQL, subdomains, SSH access, FTP access, etc.).
I've been using them for almost a year and haven't had any problems, although my site is fairly small and pretty low-traffic.
If you want to have your own server, try SA Net Hosting. Never used 'em, but they seem decent enough, and you'd be supporting Something Awful, which is a damn funny site (although, lately their articles haven't been so good).
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
Wouldn't that be:
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, to whom are you going to speak it?
The list is of the top 100 April Fools hoaxes, not just hoaxes in general.
And, what's more, the hoaxes should be funny. People believing in Sasquatch and crop circles is just sad.
Except that is a list of the Top 100 April Fools Hoaxes. The Orson Welles War of the Worlds "hoax" occurred on Halloween.
The source code to Duke Nukem 3D was released on Tuesday.
At this rate, the fans will have taken that code and made their own version of Duke Nukem Forever before the real version comes out.
It's just like the Slashdot editors to post something that was meant for release on April 1 on March 31, thereby ruining the joke.
Sort of like when they jump the gun and do a "FreeBSD version X is out" post prior to the official announcement by the FreeBSD team.