Even if, as you say, the adults will mostly be too pig-headed to leave, which I agree with, the children would go, and the parents would most likely encourage it if they believe they could live a better life out there then down here, which for much of the world is probably true.
An interesting side-effect would be that the people who left, assuming equal opportunity for all, would overwhelmingly be from poor countries like India and Nigeria.
The Earth would be left as an underpopulated white-bread country club, while large shares of other ethnicities would head off into parts unknown.
The social and long-term political effects of this are hard to extrapolate, but I imagine it would make for some interesting (if controversial) fiction.
Would those who left find untold opportunity and one day return to scoff at a planet of go-nowhere, do-nothing, pasty-faced landlubbers?
Or would the White Aryan Resistance celebrate in the streets that their dream of a racially cleansed earth had finally come, while the spacers languished in aluminum tubes hurtling through space towards millenia of hardscrabble deprivation?
.. a vast majority of the total hits are from IE browsers.
Didn't you see that leaked memo where Bill Gates told the IE developers to have it generate two HTTP requests for every click? They doubled their market share overnight.
UC Davis uses Mozilla as its standard web browser, and they use Eudora as their standard mail client.
If you ask me, it is really stupid to require people who have Windows, and hence already have IE, to install Mozilla on their computers just so that they can get technical support from the help line. Ditto Eudora vs. Outlook Express. Why bother people and clutter up their computers?
It's called "long-term thinking". The more they can cadge people into using non-IE, non-OE clients, the less likely their users will infect themselves with stupid malware, and the less cleanup work the support department has to do.
I still really like Pine, but Mozilla is nice since it lets me see images.
Pine lets you see images. Turn on Xterm mouse reporting and assign an image-viewer helper app. Then just click on any image name and it'll pop up in a little window.
While I have my marginal gripes from time to time, Pine is basically the perfect mail reader from what I can tell. Certainly the fastest for cruising through lots of mail, dealing with attachments, etc.
Not sure whether this will make you feel any better, but I have a Netgear ME-102 access point and it's never had any heat problems.
I live in Washington DC where the summers get pretty summery. I keep it hanging in an unobscured east-facing window where it gets several hours of direct sunlight per day. It's between the window and the blinds so it also gets the heat reflected back by the blinds. I don't use the A/C in my apartment (prefer the fan), so it's usually about 80 in the shade indoors. The thing's gone through one full summer and what we've had of this one, without a hiccup.
I couldn't disagree more. In my research, I found that VoIP PBXs, even when putting in a new system from the ground-up, were not worth it. They all have voice quality problems (like echo), and the IP phones are much more expensive than wiring your building for Cat.3.
Voip phones are down to $75. That's a lot less than any proprietary mini-PBX phones that I'm aware of.
If you're having echo or other voice quality problems in this day and age, then you haven't configured things properly.
By using Voip phones you also save on admin hassle for moves - people just bring their phones with them to their new desk, and their extension follows... Even if they move to another building, or, if you choose to allow it, to their homes and hotels. Some of the proprietary non-voip systems do the former, but none of them do the latter.
I've never found a flash card reader that Windows 2000 had the drivers for by default
The dirt-cheap Accomdata 5-in-1 that I bought from ecost.com for $16 has worked straight away everywhere I've tried it (XP, 2K, Linux, Mac). I don't even remember whether it came with drivers.
Like how DOS was free. Windows 95 was free. Office 95 was free.
Make fun if you want. It happened with IE.
They gave it away for years. Now it costs $180 (bundled with Windows). No longer available for Solaris. No longer available (well, soon) for Mac. Yet now every moron ITT Technical Chubbage graduate with an MCSE to wipe his ass on writes web pages that only work on IE, so the admission price of the world wide web is gradually converging with the license price of XP.
Where are we going to draw the line between a "patriot" and a "terrorist"?
You're too late. The term "patriot" was thoroughly co-opted by terrorists a long time ago. The only people who label themselves that anymore are doomsday cults and abortion clinic bombers.
Obviously you don't write software for a living or you are still young. Its free if the time of the writer is free or not worth much. However think first software writers need to pay their mortgages, raise there kids and eat so unless that is free nothing can really be free.
In the universe of professional software developers, almost nobody makes their money writing mass-market software. The money is in services, custom vertical apps, and so on. And all those people do better when free software is available, so the community gains on the bottom line.
As someone who has travelled extensively through the "3rd world" and taken alot of photos I have some advice. I tend to take about 100-200 photos per week when travelling/backpacking. 10,000 in a year is alot (1 photo every 30 minutes of being awake) and I assume your friend is like as snap happy as me. (my photos are here)
The advise is simple. Don't use digital
Not many people posting to this thread seem to have ever traveled farther than their own backyards, so I'm piggybacking on your post as a fellow traveler.
However I do disagree with your advice. I've found digital to work great when traveling.
I've traveled more than most people, I think (4 continents, 15 countries in the past 6 months, similar rates for the previous 10 years, with occasional peaks and troughs). On the one hand it means I have a decent sense of what's out there in terms of technological facilities and so on. On the other hand it means I've developed near-institinctive behaviors that help me, but which may render my advice less than useful to a tyro backpacker.
I find several key advantages to digital:
If I'm only going to be in Timbuktu one day in my life, I damn well want to make sure I got the shots before I get on the boat down to Mopti. With digital I can do that. With film it's anybody's guess, especially with tricky shots like long exposures that you can never be quite certain of until you see them.
It's an amazing conversation piece. You can get so many colorful people to pose for you simply in exchange for giving them a glimpse of themselves on that tiny little LCD screen. This works with kids, adults, everyone, including lots of people who were initially unreceptive to the idea of being in a picture but saw how much fun everyone else was having (you know the type, the old man with the crazy hat that would just be the PERFECT photo but he gives you a dirty look when you get out your camera and ask).
On a long trip, it's really nice to be able to send photos back to your friends and family, so they know what you're up to (and don't forget you exist!)
With digital, I can reliably duplicate my "negatives" so that I have virtually no risk of losing my photos.
What do I bring? Not much. A robust CD wallet and a bunch of blanks. A small digital camera that uses a proprietary battery (charges faster). A spare battery. A 100-250V charger. An adapter that lets me add an electrical outlet to a light socket (very handy in developing countries where your hotel room often won't have an outlet). A handful of 128M CF cards at $35 apiece. Other than the CD wallet, it all takes up less space (and weight) than a single SLR with a fixed 35mm lens and no film. NO laptop (unless traveling for work). NO funky digital storage devices that mean I can lose everything in one fell swoop. NO CF cards that I can't be reasonably sure every little CD-burning shop will be able to read.
The batteries take about an hour to charge, so I charge one at night (if there's electricity in my room) or at a restaurant, cafe, or whatever. It's fast and painless and has never been a problem since I got the light bulb adapter and the spare battery and discovered that no restauranteur on earth minds having you use one of their outlets while you eat.
When I fill up the CF cards, I have them burned to a couple CDs (usually around $5 for the first and $2 for additional copies). I stick them in the wallet and when I get to somewhere that I trust the post office, I mail 1 copy of each one home.
When I get to somewhere with decent bandwidth (anywhere in Europe, most places in Asia and the Middle East, many places in Latin America, a few places in Africa) I rsync the CDs to my machine. I keep cygwin+ssh+rsync on a floppy and in a directory on my web server (in case the floppy drives don't work or are taped up). With rsync I can leave the copy job running, abort it whenever I have to (internet cafe
Good tip about the universal current adapter. Instead of a 110-to-DC and a 220-to-110 adapter chained together, it might make more sense to order a 220-to-DC adapter. This is not only more reliable and lighter, it also makes it less obvious that you're a Yankee.
That's one of the most retarded things I've ever read. You honestly think that people nursing anti-American agendas are slinking around checking the power input ratings on tourists' DC adapters?
And I presume you are unaware that 110V is used in Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Japan, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia?
The very clueless, like timid Americans who have never been outside North America (or who think a semester in France makes them tres internationale)
No scratch on the first two groups, good for them, they're well accomodated. The third group, however, is missing out. Missing out on better prices, more character, more locations, and an absence of dumb rules.
IYH is a cartel that succeeds primarily through misleading naive first-time travelers into thinking that they have a corner on the hostel market, when in fact they run a small minority of the beds. Staying at IYH is like paying your "first-time backpacker" tax.
And of course, a trip around the world will largely take in countries where staying in hostels - any hostels - is idiotic anyway because guest houses offer so much better value.
Now your CF 256mb has a rebate on it- they are 80$ a piece.
Why? Are we pretending it's 2002? Or are you talking Canadian dollars? Or was it the kind of rebate that makes the price go up (from the normal $60) rather than down? Because those are optional, you know.
HOWEVER... as a political move for getting through the university, its not going to garner you any points with a closed minded professor.. and, depending on how much of a jerk the are, may get you black listed from other educators of a similar mind set.
Come now. Blacklisted? Are you being a touch dramatic? Do you think that the faculty hang around in the teachers' lounge re-patching the elbows on their cordurouy jackets and pasting black stars on a secret rogues' gallery of free-thinking right-wing students?
Because they don't. They talk about departmental politics and remodeling their houses.
There is no possible way you can hurt your academic career by being an ideological gadfly (unless you're advocating violent white separatism or something). Like I said before, faculty love controversial students; they create debate, which makes it seem like their teaching is reaching people. An effective foil in the classroom is all the more helpful in this regard.
That is super silly IMO. Other scripting languages have done just fine without "hidden types". I do not like hidden types. I do not like them in the rain, not in a train, and not in my brain, Dear Sam-I-Aim.
Types aren't hidden in PHP
As anyone can plainly see
They are not hidden from your code,
They're right there from the time you load.
With gettype() they're revealed to you,
With *val() you can set them too.
There's so much flexibility
I can hardly contain my glee.
Setting, seeing, casting types,
PHP answers all your gripes.
Like the other PHP PDF library mentioned here, it doesn't support CMYK color (only RGB). So you can't use it for printing, only for on-screen use or perhaps for amateur-hour newsletters.
What's up with that? How hard is it to support a proper color model?
Re:All PDF generators suck
on
PHP Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
Have you tried looking into tex/latex?
Anything but the simplest layout is impossible in Latex. It's fabulous for writing your dissertation in 1987, but for modern stuff it breaks down quickly.
Try doing a typical magazine-style layout with two stories (a main story and a sidebar) each breaking from page 1 to page 2.
I can guarantee you that for every command in PHP, there is an equivalent command (or module) in Perl.
Well, it'll be a module, not a built-in; Perl's built-ins are often powerful in the broad thermonuclear sense, but are never web-specific. Two key differences remain, though.
One: The Perl modules will have 15 dependencies each, 3 of which are no longer available at CPAN and which have to be hunted down from a Taiwanese mirror using archive.org.
Two: The various Perl modules you need will use different and incompatible pet data structures as preferred by their various developers, so you'll spend extra time writing glue code - vs PHP where you just use the function and go.
PHP's typing system is kind of annoying IMO. It acts as if it has a hidden "type" attribute for each variable. I prefer languages that don't have this hidden attribute, and more or less store everything as a string. It does require explicit comparison operators that distinquish between numbers and strings, but this is a good thing IMO because it makes it clear what you are intending to compare. Plus, string comparisons are often more complicated than simple equality. Often you want to compare ignoring leading/trailing white space, case, etc. Thus, you need a heavy-duty string compare function anyhow (I write my own when using PHP). Some languages ignore this issue out of some attempt to achieve "proper" operator polymorphism. But it fails with strings and you end up writing your own or doing workarounds anyhow.
You can use === to include type when you compare two expressions.
There are functions that make case-independent comparisons, leading/trailing-space-indepdendent comparisons, and type checks into a few extra characters.
If you know how it works, it's extremely powerful. If you don't, it generally does the right thing anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting side-effect would be that the people who left, assuming equal opportunity for all, would overwhelmingly be from poor countries like India and Nigeria.
The Earth would be left as an underpopulated white-bread country club, while large shares of other ethnicities would head off into parts unknown.
The social and long-term political effects of this are hard to extrapolate, but I imagine it would make for some interesting (if controversial) fiction.
Would those who left find untold opportunity and one day return to scoff at a planet of go-nowhere, do-nothing, pasty-faced landlubbers?
Or would the White Aryan Resistance celebrate in the streets that their dream of a racially cleansed earth had finally come, while the spacers languished in aluminum tubes hurtling through space towards millenia of hardscrabble deprivation?
Rule #783 of the internet: If you're going to be pedantic and picky, you have to do it right.
The word is "subjunctive," not "subjuctive." You spelled it incorrectly twice, so no claims based on the Typo Exemption will be entertained.
Didn't you see that leaked memo where Bill Gates told the IE developers to have it generate two HTTP requests for every click? They doubled their market share overnight.
It's called "long-term thinking". The more they can cadge people into using non-IE, non-OE clients, the less likely their users will infect themselves with stupid malware, and the less cleanup work the support department has to do.
Pine lets you see images. Turn on Xterm mouse reporting and assign an image-viewer helper app. Then just click on any image name and it'll pop up in a little window.
While I have my marginal gripes from time to time, Pine is basically the perfect mail reader from what I can tell. Certainly the fastest for cruising through lots of mail, dealing with attachments, etc.
That's pretty impressive. Better turn it off once in a while or you'll cool the earth to absolute zero.
Not sure whether this will make you feel any better, but I have a Netgear ME-102 access point and it's never had any heat problems.
I live in Washington DC where the summers get pretty summery. I keep it hanging in an unobscured east-facing window where it gets several hours of direct sunlight per day. It's between the window and the blinds so it also gets the heat reflected back by the blinds. I don't use the A/C in my apartment (prefer the fan), so it's usually about 80 in the shade indoors. The thing's gone through one full summer and what we've had of this one, without a hiccup.
Voip phones are down to $75. That's a lot less than any proprietary mini-PBX phones that I'm aware of.
If you're having echo or other voice quality problems in this day and age, then you haven't configured things properly.
By using Voip phones you also save on admin hassle for moves - people just bring their phones with them to their new desk, and their extension follows... Even if they move to another building, or, if you choose to allow it, to their homes and hotels. Some of the proprietary non-voip systems do the former, but none of them do the latter.
The dirt-cheap Accomdata 5-in-1 that I bought from ecost.com for $16 has worked straight away everywhere I've tried it (XP, 2K, Linux, Mac). I don't even remember whether it came with drivers.
Make fun if you want. It happened with IE.
They gave it away for years. Now it costs $180 (bundled with Windows). No longer available for Solaris. No longer available (well, soon) for Mac. Yet now every moron ITT Technical Chubbage graduate with an MCSE to wipe his ass on writes web pages that only work on IE, so the admission price of the world wide web is gradually converging with the license price of XP.
Better yet, just let your destructor handle the update.
You're too late. The term "patriot" was thoroughly co-opted by terrorists a long time ago. The only people who label themselves that anymore are doomsday cults and abortion clinic bombers.
In the universe of professional software developers, almost nobody makes their money writing mass-market software. The money is in services, custom vertical apps, and so on. And all those people do better when free software is available, so the community gains on the bottom line.
Not many people posting to this thread seem to have ever traveled farther than their own backyards, so I'm piggybacking on your post as a fellow traveler.
However I do disagree with your advice. I've found digital to work great when traveling.
I've traveled more than most people, I think (4 continents, 15 countries in the past 6 months, similar rates for the previous 10 years, with occasional peaks and troughs). On the one hand it means I have a decent sense of what's out there in terms of technological facilities and so on. On the other hand it means I've developed near-institinctive behaviors that help me, but which may render my advice less than useful to a tyro backpacker.
I find several key advantages to digital:
If I'm only going to be in Timbuktu one day in my life, I damn well want to make sure I got the shots before I get on the boat down to Mopti. With digital I can do that. With film it's anybody's guess, especially with tricky shots like long exposures that you can never be quite certain of until you see them.
It's an amazing conversation piece. You can get so many colorful people to pose for you simply in exchange for giving them a glimpse of themselves on that tiny little LCD screen. This works with kids, adults, everyone, including lots of people who were initially unreceptive to the idea of being in a picture but saw how much fun everyone else was having (you know the type, the old man with the crazy hat that would just be the PERFECT photo but he gives you a dirty look when you get out your camera and ask).
On a long trip, it's really nice to be able to send photos back to your friends and family, so they know what you're up to (and don't forget you exist!)
With digital, I can reliably duplicate my "negatives" so that I have virtually no risk of losing my photos.
What do I bring? Not much. A robust CD wallet and a bunch of blanks. A small digital camera that uses a proprietary battery (charges faster). A spare battery. A 100-250V charger. An adapter that lets me add an electrical outlet to a light socket (very handy in developing countries where your hotel room often won't have an outlet). A handful of 128M CF cards at $35 apiece. Other than the CD wallet, it all takes up less space (and weight) than a single SLR with a fixed 35mm lens and no film. NO laptop (unless traveling for work). NO funky digital storage devices that mean I can lose everything in one fell swoop. NO CF cards that I can't be reasonably sure every little CD-burning shop will be able to read.
The batteries take about an hour to charge, so I charge one at night (if there's electricity in my room) or at a restaurant, cafe, or whatever. It's fast and painless and has never been a problem since I got the light bulb adapter and the spare battery and discovered that no restauranteur on earth minds having you use one of their outlets while you eat.
When I fill up the CF cards, I have them burned to a couple CDs (usually around $5 for the first and $2 for additional copies). I stick them in the wallet and when I get to somewhere that I trust the post office, I mail 1 copy of each one home.
When I get to somewhere with decent bandwidth (anywhere in Europe, most places in Asia and the Middle East, many places in Latin America, a few places in Africa) I rsync the CDs to my machine. I keep cygwin+ssh+rsync on a floppy and in a directory on my web server (in case the floppy drives don't work or are taped up). With rsync I can leave the copy job running, abort it whenever I have to (internet cafe
That's one of the most retarded things I've ever read. You honestly think that people nursing anti-American agendas are slinking around checking the power input ratings on tourists' DC adapters?
And I presume you are unaware that 110V is used in Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Japan, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia?
Amen. IYH is for three groups:
No scratch on the first two groups, good for them, they're well accomodated. The third group, however, is missing out. Missing out on better prices, more character, more locations, and an absence of dumb rules.
IYH is a cartel that succeeds primarily through misleading naive first-time travelers into thinking that they have a corner on the hostel market, when in fact they run a small minority of the beds. Staying at IYH is like paying your "first-time backpacker" tax.
And of course, a trip around the world will largely take in countries where staying in hostels - any hostels - is idiotic anyway because guest houses offer so much better value.
Why? Are we pretending it's 2002? Or are you talking Canadian dollars? Or was it the kind of rebate that makes the price go up (from the normal $60) rather than down? Because those are optional, you know.
Come now. Blacklisted? Are you being a touch dramatic? Do you think that the faculty hang around in the teachers' lounge re-patching the elbows on their cordurouy jackets and pasting black stars on a secret rogues' gallery of free-thinking right-wing students?
Because they don't. They talk about departmental politics and remodeling their houses.
There is no possible way you can hurt your academic career by being an ideological gadfly (unless you're advocating violent white separatism or something). Like I said before, faculty love controversial students; they create debate, which makes it seem like their teaching is reaching people. An effective foil in the classroom is all the more helpful in this regard.
Must limit their options... I have a hard time finding shops that will accept PDFs.
Types aren't hidden in PHP
As anyone can plainly see
They are not hidden from your code,
They're right there from the time you load.
With gettype() they're revealed to you,
With *val() you can set them too.
There's so much flexibility
I can hardly contain my glee.
Setting, seeing, casting types,
PHP answers all your gripes.
Like the other PHP PDF library mentioned here, it doesn't support CMYK color (only RGB). So you can't use it for printing, only for on-screen use or perhaps for amateur-hour newsletters.
What's up with that? How hard is it to support a proper color model?
Anything but the simplest layout is impossible in Latex. It's fabulous for writing your dissertation in 1987, but for modern stuff it breaks down quickly.
Try doing a typical magazine-style layout with two stories (a main story and a sidebar) each breaking from page 1 to page 2.
Well, it'll be a module, not a built-in; Perl's built-ins are often powerful in the broad thermonuclear sense, but are never web-specific. Two key differences remain, though.
One: The Perl modules will have 15 dependencies each, 3 of which are no longer available at CPAN and which have to be hunted down from a Taiwanese mirror using archive.org.
Two: The various Perl modules you need will use different and incompatible pet data structures as preferred by their various developers, so you'll spend extra time writing glue code - vs PHP where you just use the function and go.
You can use === to include type when you compare two expressions.
There are functions that make case-independent comparisons, leading/trailing-space-indepdendent comparisons, and type checks into a few extra characters.
If you know how it works, it's extremely powerful. If you don't, it generally does the right thing anyway.
Printer sharing might be useful for you.