But & is already used {in C and derivatives} for bitwise AND. 7 & 4 = 4; 10 & 1 = 0, and so on. && means logical AND.
Perl and PHP use the "dot" {full stop / decimal point} for joining strings, but that is used in JS as a sort of name delimiter. In Perl, "hello" + "world" = 0, "59" + 1 = 60, 123 + "456" = 579. And "hello" + 1 = "hellp". If you want to concatenate, you use the concatenation operator. "hello" . "world" = "helloworld".
My {rather incomplete, but the rest was boring and really didn't help make the point} code sample above tended to concatenate "1" to the end of the hours or minutes when you clicked the up button instead of incrementing. {Often, you want to treat a scalar as a number}. And I've also written this improbable bit of PHP in an application involving Ordnance Survey grid references:
You'll note though that I used variable interpolation rather than explicit string concatenation. You can't even do that in JS though, because they don't have a sensible indicator that whatever follows is a variable name.....
function hrs_up() { h = document.theform.hr.value; if (h < 23) { h += 1; }; document.theform.hr.value = h; }; function hrs_dn() { h = document.theform.hr.value; if (h > 0) { h -= 1; }; document.theform.hr.value = h; }; function mins_up() { m = document.theform.mn.value; if (m < 59) { m += 1; }; document.theform.mn.value = m; }; function hrs_dn() { m = document.theform.mn.value; if (m > 0) { m -= 1; }; document.theform.mn.value = m; };
This is because someone had the {IMHO crap} idea to use the addition operator for concatenating strings. That worked OK in BASIC {in those days, almost nobody had a full set of punctuation marks on their keyboard}; but unfortunately, JavaScript doesn't know the difference between strings and numbers like BASIC used to. So you end up having to subtract negative numbers when you meant to add.
Perl and PHP don't suffer from this of course, because they use two *different* operators for two *different* operations.
Personally I think its better to apply a binary patch than to have to recompile a kernel just to upgrade it from x.x.11 to x.x.12
Then you might want to check out this really cool game I wrote. I've compiled it for you already, so you won't have to muck about compiling it yourself or anything.....
I agree 100% with your proposal and might contact my own MEP about it. {I would also like to see banned in the E.U. the sale of goods manufactured under conditions which would not be tolerated in the E.U., e.g. poor workers' rights, health and safety, environmental practices &c. But that's another story.}
You could be onto something there. How often do you see Windows logos, but no penguins or daemons, on hardware which either is totally OS-agnostic {eg. HDDs, keyboards, ethernet switches/routers} or otherwise works well with non-Windows OSes {eg. PCL/Postscript printers, digital cameras, USB memory devices, 8139 network cards}?
Microsoft pays companies not to say their products work with non-MS OSes. Sheeple think only MS OSes are any good. MS get more money. The supposition fits the known facts..... question is, can we find another explanation which fits the facts -- and can we cast reasonable doubt on our earlier hypothesis?
Invoke your Common Law Property Rights. If you own an article such as a piece of computer hardware, then -- by sole virtue of the fact that you own it -- you are automatically privy to any secret embodied in that article. What is more, you would be permitted to use "reasonable force" in the pursuit of this inalienable right.
It already is law, but maybe it needs a special new law. The specifications of a piece of hardware are not proprietary secrets but form part of the owner's documentation and must be released gratis to owners of that hardware on request.
As to the idea that it may be possible to program, say, a radio transmitter to work on unlicenced frequencies, or a POTS modem to do things the phone company would frown on -- well, duh! What people do with the products they own is no concern of the manufacturer, who already waived all rights and disavowed all responsibilities associated with the device when they sold it. Are breweries responsible for drunk-drivers?
Great idea..... except in the end you're going to spend more money just on freezing the ice to run the thing. And guess what? If the fridge you use to freeze the ice vents into the room you're trying to cool, it'll never work. Frankly I'm amazed fridges don't have proper outside flues, but maybe in the winter you want the excess heat from your food.
A proper, two-unit air conditioner is the way to go if you want something cheap to run. A single-unit air conditioner is generally a poor substitute, because the air used to cool the evaporator {the bit that chucks out the waste heat} is usually drawn from the room. However, if you can find a way to modify it so as to make the evaporator draw its cooling air from outside {another length of Kopex and a fancy homebrew adaptor} then you can improve its efficiency somewhat.
I had a wild idea to replace my gas boiler with something like a beer cooler, and pump icy cold water around the radiators. However, I don't know how well this would work in practice: my own heating system runs the circulating water at about 80 degrees, just to heat the rooms to 20 degrees. So to get the same differential temperature, you'd need to cool the radiators to -40!
You're not wrong anywhere really. But HTTP was only ever designed to upload one file at a time. What you really want is somehow to embed an FTP client within a web browser {or, locally select a bunch of files and tar them up to upload in one via HTTP}. I had the tech for doing stuff like this a couple of years back. Never got it anywhere bigger than my own intranet, but maybe it's time it had an airing in public and see what other people make of it.
My solution was blindingly simple: have a local Apache server on the client end. Then you can have a server-side application call up something like http://localhost/cgi-bin/foo in an iFrame or pop-up window. This is a script running on the client machine. If you have setuid enabled, so the script can do anything its owner is permitted to do, then the script has access to your bit of the local filesystem. Crucially, it's also not tied to the HTTP connection between your machine and the web server. It could open up an FTP connection of its own, if it wanted to. Or SMTP, POP3, whatever.
As far as security goes, it's not as terrible as it sounds. If we're talking Big Bad Internet, the local machine is almost certain to be behind an ADSL router with NAT, so its apache server is invisible to the world at large. A.htaccess file will make sure. You have to be root to install the scripts properly. They are scripts, so you can audit the source code. If you're really paranoid, you can arrange for your CGI processes to run in a chroot. It should be fully cross-platform, as long as you can persuade a httpd implementation and a suitable programming language to compile on the target platform.
The downside is that people tend to install their web servers with wildly different configurations, and there is no canonical httpd.conf. You could, of course, package a quick and dirty web server. Something like hibachi would do the job; note you would be best using v1.0 {which is in the Public Domain} as the later versions have a rather restrictive licence.
And imagine if you were making moving parts to go into some complex mechanical system -- but you weren't allowed to actually measure any of the other parts they fit with with your own instruments, or even to have a real, live one to look at. All you had to work with was an incomplete data sheet, which also contained a few errors but nobody would tell you where.
Now do you understand why closed source drivers and a closed source OS are a recipe for disaster?
"Quite good"? All known USB digital cameras pretend to be hard disk drives. Linux support for digital cameras is therefore as good as Linux support for hard disk drives. I personally have experienced Windows boxes crashing when trying to install the software for digital cameras. Plugged the camera into a Linux box, modprobe usb-storage, mkdir/camera, mount -tvfat/dev/sda1/camera, worked. Edited/fstab. This was on a hardcore Debian box, no doubt fluffy distros like Mandrake or Yoper probably do all that for you already.
BTW, did you actually try compiling the Linux printer drivers under OS X?
This is called Using the Wrong Tool for the Job. If you want to send more than one file at a time, you really need an FTP client, not a web browser. HTTP was never designed for multiple file up/downloads in this way. Ever heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences?
Being a fully-paid-up Penguin Shagger myself, if I was writing a Web-based photo-sharing application I would just allow you to HTTP-upload a.tar.gz with several pics in it. But I wouldn't expect everyone to get it.....
90% of the home media devices out there are a pain in the ass to use (if it is even possible) if you use anything other than Windows.
They aren't really a whole lot better under Windows, if the ugly truth be told. Have you ever tried to get a cheap, "Windows-only" scanner working in Windows?
Of the ten percent that remain, you are better off getting a Mac than a using a Linux box, because at the very least you can haul the rig into an Apple Store and the folks at the Genius Bar will help you get it up and running.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
When I got the urge to record DVDs, I bought a Philips DVD+RW TV-recorder. Looks like a VCR, just uses discs instead of cassettes. Cost me a bit more, but it doesn't tie up my computer while I'm recording the big première off Sky Movies. It's the discs that are the main expense in the long run anyway. When that finally went the way of everything that plugs in, I replaced it with a Daewoo machine that was cheaper, had a slightly better user interface {though it was evidently very similar internally -- same processor, just more modern firmware with s/Philips/Daewoo/g} and came with a longer guarantee. {I can always copy DVD+RW discs of stuff I want to keep forever onto DVD+R using K3B. [Yes, this does work, and transparently to the point of being boring. But make sure you press STOP twice and move the menu highlight to the first programme before you eject the DVD, otherwise the copy will start in the middle!] Or, since K3B shows you exactly what commends it did, I can type the commands in an Xterm and just pretend I used K3B.}
Just because a computer can be used for something doesn't mean it should.
I've had to explain to my mother how to drag and drop a file to copy it in Windows 30 times over the past 5 years and she keeps forgetting.
That's because dragging and dropping a file to copy it is ultimately a counter-intuitive action.
It looks pretty, and I'm not going to dispute it takes a fair bit of computing power and some programming prowess to make the computer copy a file when you drag an icon -- but it really isn't what you'd expect to happen. Dragging and dropping suggests moving, not copying. Maybe if you had to click the middle or right button while dragging with the left to deposit a copy. Or if you had to drag it to some representation of a copying machine, which would then create a copy icon in its "output tray" that you could put somewhere else. But now you've added complication to the process
Typing cp old_filename new_filename isn't half so counter-intuitive, once you can get your head round three notions: (1) the computer will do what you ask it, but you must phrase it precisely; (2) every file has a name; (3) cp is short for "copy".
I think we need to do more studies with the bash prompt. I'm not saying give up on GUIs altogether -- they work in some applications. But there is definitely such a thing as stretching a metaphor, and using a GUI for file management is an example. {OTOH, the old Amiga file managers [SID, Directory Opus &c.] -- with two windows and buttons below -- were quite reasonable}.
No. All the electricity you feed into an air conditioner gets turned into heat as well. It's just that most of that heat -- and all the heat extracted from the room -- gets blasted outside.
An air conditioner appears to chuck out more watts of heat from the discharge pipe {if you can measure it; it's actually quite difficult} than you are feeding it in electricity. The difference is how much heat the air conditioner is extracting from the room. Small air conditioners aren't terribly efficient: I have a unit that draws about 1kW and only does about 2kW of cooling {so puts out 3kW of heat from flue}.
Since the end of June 2002, when I saw that goal on the big screens either side of the stage at Glastonbury, I have known the Brazilians had it right. {The fact that in my locker at work was a slip of paper with the word "Brazil" on it, which had cost me a pound -- twelve minutes' wages in that hell-hole -- and was now one blow of a whistle away from being worth sixteen times that, was perhaps also in some measure responsible for the way I felt.} Brazil winning the works sweepstake -- sorry, the World Cup -- made everything worth it.
The fact is that it is very possible to survive without Microsoft. We'd already been doing it for tens of thousands of years before they came along. {For that matter, IR1 wasn't held up for lack of patent protections.}
Once upon a time, the way to make money was to have an idea that nobody had had before. Now it seems that all the ideas worth having have already been had; and the new way to make money is to find something that people currently do all the time without having to pay for it, and find a way to make them pay you for it.
That little fad will soon be over, but not without a lot of name-calling, hair-pulling, below-the-belt punching and general dirty fighting. Those who have chosen to stay clear of the whole mess will undoubtedly be seen in the long run to have made the right choice.
I'll second that. Due to mis-copying a serial number I was unable to install Win98SE when I built myself an Athlon XP2000+ box. This was at the time when this was the fastest processor on the planet. Desperate to feel the raw power of this beast before a newer processor came out and spoiled it all, I slapped Mandrake Linux on as a single-boot just to get the damn thing up and running.
I haven't touched Windows since.
Go on! You don't need Windows. If it can't be done using Open Source alone, then do it by hand just like everyone did before computers. Just imagine that if you made your system dual-booting, the whole Open Source community would be standing around you in a big circle, making chicken noises.....
I really don't think Linux isn't "average user friendly". Of course I'm biased, being a fully paid-up penguin-shagger. But if you could get a machine pre-installed -- so the user never has to see the "scary" install process -- with something like Ubuntu and all the usual packages {OpenOffice.org, Firefox browser, Flash plugin [there soon will be a Free Flash alternative which may be worth investigating], Evolution mail client / personal organiser, Gaim internet messenger, maybe even FUSE to satisfy the retro-gaming instinct, GCC and some necessary libraries for compiling.tar.gz files} then you're suddenly on a par with an out-of-the-box Windows installation -- or even almost a Mac.
Average users don't install Windows. I have done this and it was no easier than installing Linux -- in fact, some Windows versions will refuse to install on a machine that has ever had Linux on it, because the Windows fdisk is totally christian. {Solution: use Linux fdisk [on bootable CD] to change all existing partitions to some FAT variant first, then wipe 'em out.}
Installing software packages can look complicated, but with Ubuntu or Debian it's as simple as opening an Xterm and typing sudo apt-get install foo. Hell, even with Gentoo -- yes, the one that's so manual, it makes Deb and Slack look automatic, but once it's installed it just runs sweet as anything -- you can just substitute emerge for apt-get.
I like PHP because it's basically a bastardised dialect of Perl, and I like Perl.
I like Perl because it uses different operators for string concatenation and addition. That doesn't sound like much of a reason, but a lot of the programming I'm doing seems to call for either adding numbers or concatenating strings.
Now, in some languages, strings and numbers are completely different types. Then it's sort-of OK to recycle an operator to mean something completely different, because the computer knows what you mean. But there are several dynamically-typed languages which use + to concatenate strings. Then the magic guesser gets its knickers in a twist with not being able to work out whether something is really a number or just a string that looks like a number. This causes problems when you try to add numbers and find yourself concatenating strings. I wasted the best part of a day on a stupid bit of JavaScript for a DHTML application with increment/decrement buttons.
In Perl {and in PHP}, 3 + 4 gives 7. "3" + 4 gives 7. 3 + "4" gives 7. And "3" + "4" gives 7. If you actually want to concatenate the 4 onto the end of the 3, you have to use the concatenation operator . instead of the addition operator +. 3 . 4 gives "34". "3" . 4 gives "34". 3 . "4" gives 34. And "3" . "4" gives "34". That is simple.
Perl is a bit of a 'mare for n00bs because everything is a shorthand representation. There is the wonderful $_ which avoids cluttering up your script with temporary variables. You don't need brackets round function arguments {like the British BASIC dialects of the '80s}. Everything is optimised for the hardcore hacker, not the beginner. It only looks pretty when you realise that simplicity is beauty.
PHP has a more consistent interface than Perl. So you can't just drop in a regular expression, you have to call a function with the regular expression inside a string. It also does more stuff automagically for you, like keeping hashes ordered {Perl doesn't bother, expecting you to keep a separate array if you really care} and dereferencing everything {Perl expects you to manually create and dereference references when you make multidimensional arrays}. So it's probably a bit slower running, but it's quicker to get an app up and running.
Re:What's not to get?
on
A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 2, Informative
REGISTER_GLOBALS is not insecure. The default order of fetching -- cookies overwrite sessions, POSTs overwrite cookies, query strings overwrite POSTs -- is potentially insecure. Somebody could use a URL something like http://myisp.co.uk/~myspace/foo.php?auth=1 and, if you just relied on the value of $auth without regard to where $auth was coming from, you might get hurt.
It did say in the manual that this would happen and how to get at the different data sources if you cared. {And you can do sneaky stuff of your own, like if ($_GET["auth"]) { include "crash_browser.inc.php"; exit(); }; if you really want}.
Often, you don't really care where your data is coming from anyway. I personally would have had POSTs overwrite query strings, cookies overwrite POSTs and sessions overwrite cookies. That would have dealt with it even more simply -- though it probably would have made debugging a 'mare.
The only people I know who buy original Microsoft software are our Accounts department, who still need it for some legacy application they have to run for compatibility with Group head Office. The rest of the business runs on Linux -- Mandrake or Mandriva as it is now for desktops, and Debian for servers {we used to use Slackware, but apt-get is just so nice. It's also possible we'll be trying Gentoo at some point in the future}. Everybody I know who has a Windows box at home is running a pirated copy of Windows.
Microsoft can afford to stand piracy. Apple probably cannot. Piracy is what killed off the independent software companies, but not for the reason most people think.
If you're selling a £50 program and Microsoft are selling a £500 program which does roughly the same, what do you think people are going to do: buy the £50 one and save £450, rip off the £50 one and save £50, or rip off the £500 one and save £500? It's a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. To a dog, stolen food tastes nicer. To a human being, paying full price is cheating. It's the same instinct that kept cave-man alive.
Simply by having enough cash reserves to tolerate piracy to such an extent, Microsoft have all but eliminated the competition. Only the Open Source Community, which has close to zero piracy {just the likes of CherryOS and certain router manufacturers}, is in a better position.
There are two sure and certain ways to stop a runaway printer dead in its tracks. Method One is to forcibly deprive it of paper. Method Two is to forcibly deprive it of electricity.
NB, either way will create headaches for someone else to deal with. I really wonder that printers -- especially fast ones -- don't have a proper Emergency Stop device which, when operated, aborts the current job, ejects the half-finished page and starts swallowing all data {just flashing a light to indicate characters being received} until reset.
When it comes to package management systems, I have seen just two that I really like. They are Debian's apt and Gentoo's portage. The latter wins by a whisker because it uses source tarballs; but Debian has source packages too, if you need them.
I tried using RPMs when I was using Mandrake. All I ended up doing was saying "Sod that!" and learning how to compile from a source tarball. Of course, it's probably not completely insignificant that both Debian and Gentoo are famous for the sheer number of packages they provide, whereas Mandrake -- Mandriva nowadays -- was more about making it easy {at least, easy to do what they ever envisaged you doing}. I can't really knock the Mandrake guys: the simple fact is, I outgrew their distribution.
Source.tar.gz with autoconf and automake really is the "proper" way, whatever anyone else says. Adding new package formats to combat the proliferation of package formats is a bit like fighting for peace, or shagging for virginity.
Getting back to topic here, I really don't think that Apple are threatening Linux users. On the contrary, I think that Apple are going to have a very hard time moving into the 80x86 market.
Microsoft sell software to businesses in the first world. {Private individuals in the first world, and everyone in the third world, use mainly pirated software.}
Apple sell hardware and software. Apple software does not get pirated much, but there is a good reason for this: it is useless without Apple hardware. If Apple OS XI will run on "standard" 80x86 hardware, of the sort currently used to run GNU/Linux, Windows and FreeBSD, then Apple will have to accept that piracy will be inevitable. And probably rampant.
The Free Software and Open Source communities do not in general have to worry about piracy. The only way FOSS can be "pirated" is if a commercial developer releases a closed-source derivative of an Open Source program. Even then, the original must obviously remain Open Source.
Add to this that it will soon be genuinely worth the effort of reverse-engineering hardware drivers; and there is bound to be at least one country in the world where this is not only not illegal but a protected right. It really might not be long before some new player muscles in with an Apple OS look-alike, probably based on FreeBSD {like Apple OS was} and including reverse-engineered drivers for all the spiffiest hardware.
I really don't see how Apple can succeed by moving into the 80x86 market. It strikes me as being a bit like deciding to build a pay toilet in a forest.
The chemical formulations of film and developer are published {and even if they weren't, would still be susceptible to mass spectrometry if not simpler analysis techniques}. If the companies making them go out of business, then the only thing preventing anybody from starting up making exact clones would be availability of equipment.
What we really need is for it to be enshrined in law, in bold type if necessary, that a person is automatically privy to any secret embodied in any article they physically own, by sole virtue of the fact that they own the article embodying the secret. Well..... it already is, I suppose; that's just simple common-law property rights. But you try getting a court to uphold your rights, especially in these times where juries consist of celebrity-obsessed morons utterly ignorant of the true meaning of freedom as long as the big corporations look as though they are giving something away and lawyers will tell you black is white for the appropriate fee.
The problem is that back in the days when the US constitution was being written, nobody could ever have foreseen a time that it would be physically possible to make something that the owner couldn't scrutinise in the minutest detail. Like there is no mention of a right to privacy; because in those days before telephone taps, concealed cameras, tape recorders and suchlike, you could always just go off into the woods somewhere, poke the undergrowth with a stick to make sure nobody was listening, and have a private conversation.
One of the reasons why this country did not adopt a written constitution was the fear that something important would be omitted, and not discovered until it was too late; or that some social or technological change would give rise to an issue which did not exist at the time of writing. At the time the US constitution was written, the UK was in the middle of IR1..... then WW1, WW2 and IR2 followed on in pretty quick succession. {Some might also say that if people know what their rights are, it makes it that much harder to take them away.}
Please actually respond to at least one of my points, in which I do actually believe sincerely enough to put my name to. It would be nicer if you could log in as well. Otherwise, I fear it will look rather as though it is you who is doing the trolling around here.
Are you saying there is a way to trust software without having the Source Code independently audited? What other way? Do you not believe that I have the right to view the Source Code of every piece of software that runs on my computer? Why not? Do you believe that anyone genuinely needs to use non-Free software? What software? Why?
Slashdot Mirror
Perl and PHP use the "dot" {full stop / decimal point} for joining strings, but that is used in JS as a sort of name delimiter. In Perl, "hello" + "world" = 0, "59" + 1 = 60, 123 + "456" = 579. And "hello" + 1 = "hellp". If you want to concatenate, you use the concatenation operator. "hello" . "world" = "helloworld".
My {rather incomplete, but the rest was boring and really didn't help make the point} code sample above tended to concatenate "1" to the end of the hours or minutes when you clicked the up button instead of incrementing. {Often, you want to treat a scalar as a number}. And I've also written this improbable bit of PHP in an application involving Ordnance Survey grid references: You'll note though that I used variable interpolation rather than explicit string concatenation. You can't even do that in JS though, because they don't have a sensible indicator that whatever follows is a variable name
This doesn't do what you'd expect it to do:
function hrs_up() {
h = document.theform.hr.value;
if (h < 23) {
h += 1;
};
document.theform.hr.value = h;
};
function hrs_dn() {
h = document.theform.hr.value;
if (h > 0) {
h -= 1;
};
document.theform.hr.value = h;
};
function mins_up() {
m = document.theform.mn.value;
if (m < 59) {
m += 1;
};
document.theform.mn.value = m;
};
function hrs_dn() {
m = document.theform.mn.value;
if (m > 0) {
m -= 1;
};
document.theform.mn.value = m;
};
This is because someone had the {IMHO crap} idea to use the addition operator for concatenating strings. That worked OK in BASIC {in those days, almost nobody had a full set of punctuation marks on their keyboard}; but unfortunately, JavaScript doesn't know the difference between strings and numbers like BASIC used to. So you end up having to subtract negative numbers when you meant to add.
Perl and PHP don't suffer from this of course, because they use two *different* operators for two *different* operations.
I agree 100% with your proposal and might contact my own MEP about it. {I would also like to see banned in the E.U. the sale of goods manufactured under conditions which would not be tolerated in the E.U., e.g. poor workers' rights, health and safety, environmental practices &c. But that's another story.}
You could be onto something there. How often do you see Windows logos, but no penguins or daemons, on hardware which either is totally OS-agnostic {eg. HDDs, keyboards, ethernet switches/routers} or otherwise works well with non-Windows OSes {eg. PCL/Postscript printers, digital cameras, USB memory devices, 8139 network cards}?
..... question is, can we find another explanation which fits the facts -- and can we cast reasonable doubt on our earlier hypothesis?
Microsoft pays companies not to say their products work with non-MS OSes. Sheeple think only MS OSes are any good. MS get more money. The supposition fits the known facts
Invoke your Common Law Property Rights. If you own an article such as a piece of computer hardware, then -- by sole virtue of the fact that you own it -- you are automatically privy to any secret embodied in that article. What is more, you would be permitted to use "reasonable force" in the pursuit of this inalienable right.
It already is law, but maybe it needs a special new law. The specifications of a piece of hardware are not proprietary secrets but form part of the owner's documentation and must be released gratis to owners of that hardware on request.
As to the idea that it may be possible to program, say, a radio transmitter to work on unlicenced frequencies, or a POTS modem to do things the phone company would frown on -- well, duh! What people do with the products they own is no concern of the manufacturer, who already waived all rights and disavowed all responsibilities associated with the device when they sold it. Are breweries responsible for drunk-drivers?
Great idea ..... except in the end you're going to spend more money just on freezing the ice to run the thing. And guess what? If the fridge you use to freeze the ice vents into the room you're trying to cool, it'll never work. Frankly I'm amazed fridges don't have proper outside flues, but maybe in the winter you want the excess heat from your food.
A proper, two-unit air conditioner is the way to go if you want something cheap to run. A single-unit air conditioner is generally a poor substitute, because the air used to cool the evaporator {the bit that chucks out the waste heat} is usually drawn from the room. However, if you can find a way to modify it so as to make the evaporator draw its cooling air from outside {another length of Kopex and a fancy homebrew adaptor} then you can improve its efficiency somewhat.
I had a wild idea to replace my gas boiler with something like a beer cooler, and pump icy cold water around the radiators. However, I don't know how well this would work in practice: my own heating system runs the circulating water at about 80 degrees, just to heat the rooms to 20 degrees. So to get the same differential temperature, you'd need to cool the radiators to -40!
You're not wrong anywhere really. But HTTP was only ever designed to upload one file at a time. What you really want is somehow to embed an FTP client within a web browser {or, locally select a bunch of files and tar them up to upload in one via HTTP}. I had the tech for doing stuff like this a couple of years back. Never got it anywhere bigger than my own intranet, but maybe it's time it had an airing in public and see what other people make of it.
.htaccess file will make sure. You have to be root to install the scripts properly. They are scripts, so you can audit the source code. If you're really paranoid, you can arrange for your CGI processes to run in a chroot. It should be fully cross-platform, as long as you can persuade a httpd implementation and a suitable programming language to compile on the target platform.
My solution was blindingly simple: have a local Apache server on the client end. Then you can have a server-side application call up something like http://localhost/cgi-bin/foo in an iFrame or pop-up window. This is a script running on the client machine. If you have setuid enabled, so the script can do anything its owner is permitted to do, then the script has access to your bit of the local filesystem. Crucially, it's also not tied to the HTTP connection between your machine and the web server. It could open up an FTP connection of its own, if it wanted to. Or SMTP, POP3, whatever.
As far as security goes, it's not as terrible as it sounds. If we're talking Big Bad Internet, the local machine is almost certain to be behind an ADSL router with NAT, so its apache server is invisible to the world at large. A
The downside is that people tend to install their web servers with wildly different configurations, and there is no canonical httpd.conf. You could, of course, package a quick and dirty web server. Something like hibachi would do the job; note you would be best using v1.0 {which is in the Public Domain} as the later versions have a rather restrictive licence.
And imagine if you were making moving parts to go into some complex mechanical system -- but you weren't allowed to actually measure any of the other parts they fit with with your own instruments, or even to have a real, live one to look at. All you had to work with was an incomplete data sheet, which also contained a few errors but nobody would tell you where.
Now do you understand why closed source drivers and a closed source OS are a recipe for disaster?
"Quite good"? All known USB digital cameras pretend to be hard disk drives. Linux support for digital cameras is therefore as good as Linux support for hard disk drives. I personally have experienced Windows boxes crashing when trying to install the software for digital cameras. Plugged the camera into a Linux box, modprobe usb-storage, mkdir /camera, mount -tvfat /dev/sda1 /camera, worked. Edited /fstab. This was on a hardcore Debian box, no doubt fluffy distros like Mandrake or Yoper probably do all that for you already.
BTW, did you actually try compiling the Linux printer drivers under OS X?
This is called Using the Wrong Tool for the Job. If you want to send more than one file at a time, you really need an FTP client, not a web browser. HTTP was never designed for multiple file up/downloads in this way. Ever heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences?
.tar.gz with several pics in it. But I wouldn't expect everyone to get it .....
Being a fully-paid-up Penguin Shagger myself, if I was writing a Web-based photo-sharing application I would just allow you to HTTP-upload a
When I got the urge to record DVDs, I bought a Philips DVD+RW TV-recorder. Looks like a VCR, just uses discs instead of cassettes. Cost me a bit more, but it doesn't tie up my computer while I'm recording the big première off Sky Movies. It's the discs that are the main expense in the long run anyway. When that finally went the way of everything that plugs in, I replaced it with a Daewoo machine that was cheaper, had a slightly better user interface {though it was evidently very similar internally -- same processor, just more modern firmware with s/Philips/Daewoo/g} and came with a longer guarantee. {I can always copy DVD+RW discs of stuff I want to keep forever onto DVD+R using K3B. [Yes, this does work, and transparently to the point of being boring. But make sure you press STOP twice and move the menu highlight to the first programme before you eject the DVD, otherwise the copy will start in the middle!] Or, since K3B shows you exactly what commends it did, I can type the commands in an Xterm and just pretend I used K3B.}
Just because a computer can be used for something doesn't mean it should.
It looks pretty, and I'm not going to dispute it takes a fair bit of computing power and some programming prowess to make the computer copy a file when you drag an icon -- but it really isn't what you'd expect to happen. Dragging and dropping suggests moving, not copying. Maybe if you had to click the middle or right button while dragging with the left to deposit a copy. Or if you had to drag it to some representation of a copying machine, which would then create a copy icon in its "output tray" that you could put somewhere else. But now you've added complication to the process
Typing cp old_filename new_filename isn't half so counter-intuitive, once you can get your head round three notions: (1) the computer will do what you ask it, but you must phrase it precisely; (2) every file has a name; (3) cp is short for "copy".
I think we need to do more studies with the bash prompt. I'm not saying give up on GUIs altogether -- they work in some applications. But there is definitely such a thing as stretching a metaphor, and using a GUI for file management is an example. {OTOH, the old Amiga file managers [SID, Directory Opus &c.] -- with two windows and buttons below -- were quite reasonable}.
No. All the electricity you feed into an air conditioner gets turned into heat as well. It's just that most of that heat -- and all the heat extracted from the room -- gets blasted outside.
An air conditioner appears to chuck out more watts of heat from the discharge pipe {if you can measure it; it's actually quite difficult} than you are feeding it in electricity. The difference is how much heat the air conditioner is extracting from the room. Small air conditioners aren't terribly efficient: I have a unit that draws about 1kW and only does about 2kW of cooling {so puts out 3kW of heat from flue}.
No it isn't. All the electricity you feed into anything electric ends up getting turned into heat anyway.
Since the end of June 2002, when I saw that goal on the big screens either side of the stage at Glastonbury, I have known the Brazilians had it right. {The fact that in my locker at work was a slip of paper with the word "Brazil" on it, which had cost me a pound -- twelve minutes' wages in that hell-hole -- and was now one blow of a whistle away from being worth sixteen times that, was perhaps also in some measure responsible for the way I felt.} Brazil winning the works sweepstake -- sorry, the World Cup -- made everything worth it.
The fact is that it is very possible to survive without Microsoft. We'd already been doing it for tens of thousands of years before they came along. {For that matter, IR1 wasn't held up for lack of patent protections.}
Once upon a time, the way to make money was to have an idea that nobody had had before. Now it seems that all the ideas worth having have already been had; and the new way to make money is to find something that people currently do all the time without having to pay for it, and find a way to make them pay you for it.
That little fad will soon be over, but not without a lot of name-calling, hair-pulling, below-the-belt punching and general dirty fighting. Those who have chosen to stay clear of the whole mess will undoubtedly be seen in the long run to have made the right choice.
I'll second that. Due to mis-copying a serial number I was unable to install Win98SE when I built myself an Athlon XP2000+ box. This was at the time when this was the fastest processor on the planet. Desperate to feel the raw power of this beast before a newer processor came out and spoiled it all, I slapped Mandrake Linux on as a single-boot just to get the damn thing up and running.
.....
I haven't touched Windows since.
Go on! You don't need Windows. If it can't be done using Open Source alone, then do it by hand just like everyone did before computers. Just imagine that if you made your system dual-booting, the whole Open Source community would be standing around you in a big circle, making chicken noises
I really don't think Linux isn't "average user friendly". Of course I'm biased, being a fully paid-up penguin-shagger. But if you could get a machine pre-installed -- so the user never has to see the "scary" install process -- with something like Ubuntu and all the usual packages {OpenOffice.org, Firefox browser, Flash plugin [there soon will be a Free Flash alternative which may be worth investigating], Evolution mail client / personal organiser, Gaim internet messenger, maybe even FUSE to satisfy the retro-gaming instinct, GCC and some necessary libraries for compiling .tar.gz files} then you're suddenly on a par with an out-of-the-box Windows installation -- or even almost a Mac.
Average users don't install Windows. I have done this and it was no easier than installing Linux -- in fact, some Windows versions will refuse to install on a machine that has ever had Linux on it, because the Windows fdisk is totally christian. {Solution: use Linux fdisk [on bootable CD] to change all existing partitions to some FAT variant first, then wipe 'em out.}
Installing software packages can look complicated, but with Ubuntu or Debian it's as simple as opening an Xterm and typing sudo apt-get install foo. Hell, even with Gentoo -- yes, the one that's so manual, it makes Deb and Slack look automatic, but once it's installed it just runs sweet as anything -- you can just substitute emerge for apt-get.
I like PHP because it's basically a bastardised dialect of Perl, and I like Perl.
I like Perl because it uses different operators for string concatenation and addition. That doesn't sound like much of a reason, but a lot of the programming I'm doing seems to call for either adding numbers or concatenating strings.
Now, in some languages, strings and numbers are completely different types. Then it's sort-of OK to recycle an operator to mean something completely different, because the computer knows what you mean. But there are several dynamically-typed languages which use + to concatenate strings. Then the magic guesser gets its knickers in a twist with not being able to work out whether something is really a number or just a string that looks like a number. This causes problems when you try to add numbers and find yourself concatenating strings. I wasted the best part of a day on a stupid bit of JavaScript for a DHTML application with increment/decrement buttons.
In Perl {and in PHP}, 3 + 4 gives 7. "3" + 4 gives 7. 3 + "4" gives 7. And "3" + "4" gives 7. If you actually want to concatenate the 4 onto the end of the 3, you have to use the concatenation operator . instead of the addition operator +. 3 . 4 gives "34". "3" . 4 gives "34". 3 . "4" gives 34. And "3" . "4" gives "34". That is simple.
Perl is a bit of a 'mare for n00bs because everything is a shorthand representation. There is the wonderful $_ which avoids cluttering up your script with temporary variables. You don't need brackets round function arguments {like the British BASIC dialects of the '80s}. Everything is optimised for the hardcore hacker, not the beginner. It only looks pretty when you realise that simplicity is beauty.
PHP has a more consistent interface than Perl. So you can't just drop in a regular expression, you have to call a function with the regular expression inside a string. It also does more stuff automagically for you, like keeping hashes ordered {Perl doesn't bother, expecting you to keep a separate array if you really care} and dereferencing everything {Perl expects you to manually create and dereference references when you make multidimensional arrays}. So it's probably a bit slower running, but it's quicker to get an app up and running.
REGISTER_GLOBALS is not insecure. The default order of fetching -- cookies overwrite sessions, POSTs overwrite cookies, query strings overwrite POSTs -- is potentially insecure. Somebody could use a URL something like http://myisp.co.uk/~myspace/foo.php?auth=1 and, if you just relied on the value of $auth without regard to where $auth was coming from, you might get hurt.
It did say in the manual that this would happen and how to get at the different data sources if you cared. {And you can do sneaky stuff of your own, like if ($_GET["auth"]) { include "crash_browser.inc.php"; exit(); }; if you really want}.
Often, you don't really care where your data is coming from anyway. I personally would have had POSTs overwrite query strings, cookies overwrite POSTs and sessions overwrite cookies. That would have dealt with it even more simply -- though it probably would have made debugging a 'mare.
The only people I know who buy original Microsoft software are our Accounts department, who still need it for some legacy application they have to run for compatibility with Group head Office. The rest of the business runs on Linux -- Mandrake or Mandriva as it is now for desktops, and Debian for servers {we used to use Slackware, but apt-get is just so nice. It's also possible we'll be trying Gentoo at some point in the future}. Everybody I know who has a Windows box at home is running a pirated copy of Windows.
Microsoft can afford to stand piracy. Apple probably cannot. Piracy is what killed off the independent software companies, but not for the reason most people think.
If you're selling a £50 program and Microsoft are selling a £500 program which does roughly the same, what do you think people are going to do: buy the £50 one and save £450, rip off the £50 one and save £50, or rip off the £500 one and save £500? It's a manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. To a dog, stolen food tastes nicer. To a human being, paying full price is cheating. It's the same instinct that kept cave-man alive.
Simply by having enough cash reserves to tolerate piracy to such an extent, Microsoft have all but eliminated the competition. Only the Open Source Community, which has close to zero piracy {just the likes of CherryOS and certain router manufacturers}, is in a better position.
There are two sure and certain ways to stop a runaway printer dead in its tracks. Method One is to forcibly deprive it of paper. Method Two is to forcibly deprive it of electricity.
NB, either way will create headaches for someone else to deal with. I really wonder that printers -- especially fast ones -- don't have a proper Emergency Stop device which, when operated, aborts the current job, ejects the half-finished page and starts swallowing all data {just flashing a light to indicate characters being received} until reset.
I tried using RPMs when I was using Mandrake. All I ended up doing was saying "Sod that!" and learning how to compile from a source tarball. Of course, it's probably not completely insignificant that both Debian and Gentoo are famous for the sheer number of packages they provide, whereas Mandrake -- Mandriva nowadays -- was more about making it easy {at least, easy to do what they ever envisaged you doing}. I can't really knock the Mandrake guys: the simple fact is, I outgrew their distribution.
Source.tar.gz with autoconf and automake really is the "proper" way, whatever anyone else says. Adding new package formats to combat the proliferation of package formats is a bit like fighting for peace, or shagging for virginity.
Getting back to topic here, I really don't think that Apple are threatening Linux users. On the contrary, I think that Apple are going to have a very hard time moving into the 80x86 market.
- Microsoft sell software to businesses in the first world. {Private individuals in the first world, and everyone in the third world, use mainly pirated software.}
- Apple sell hardware and software. Apple software does not get pirated much, but there is a good reason for this: it is useless without Apple hardware. If Apple OS XI will run on "standard" 80x86 hardware, of the sort currently used to run GNU/Linux, Windows and FreeBSD, then Apple will have to accept that piracy will be inevitable. And probably rampant.
- The Free Software and Open Source communities do not in general have to worry about piracy. The only way FOSS can be "pirated" is if a commercial developer releases a closed-source derivative of an Open Source program. Even then, the original must obviously remain Open Source.
Add to this that it will soon be genuinely worth the effort of reverse-engineering hardware drivers; and there is bound to be at least one country in the world where this is not only not illegal but a protected right. It really might not be long before some new player muscles in with an Apple OS look-alike, probably based on FreeBSD {like Apple OS was} and including reverse-engineered drivers for all the spiffiest hardware.I really don't see how Apple can succeed by moving into the 80x86 market. It strikes me as being a bit like deciding to build a pay toilet in a forest.
The chemical formulations of film and developer are published {and even if they weren't, would still be susceptible to mass spectrometry if not simpler analysis techniques}. If the companies making them go out of business, then the only thing preventing anybody from starting up making exact clones would be availability of equipment.
..... it already is, I suppose; that's just simple common-law property rights. But you try getting a court to uphold your rights, especially in these times where juries consist of celebrity-obsessed morons utterly ignorant of the true meaning of freedom as long as the big corporations look as though they are giving something away and lawyers will tell you black is white for the appropriate fee.
..... then WW1, WW2 and IR2 followed on in pretty quick succession. {Some might also say that if people know what their rights are, it makes it that much harder to take them away.}
What we really need is for it to be enshrined in law, in bold type if necessary, that a person is automatically privy to any secret embodied in any article they physically own, by sole virtue of the fact that they own the article embodying the secret. Well
The problem is that back in the days when the US constitution was being written, nobody could ever have foreseen a time that it would be physically possible to make something that the owner couldn't scrutinise in the minutest detail. Like there is no mention of a right to privacy; because in those days before telephone taps, concealed cameras, tape recorders and suchlike, you could always just go off into the woods somewhere, poke the undergrowth with a stick to make sure nobody was listening, and have a private conversation.
One of the reasons why this country did not adopt a written constitution was the fear that something important would be omitted, and not discovered until it was too late; or that some social or technological change would give rise to an issue which did not exist at the time of writing. At the time the US constitution was written, the UK was in the middle of IR1
Please actually respond to at least one of my points, in which I do actually believe sincerely enough to put my name to. It would be nicer if you could log in as well. Otherwise, I fear it will look rather as though it is you who is doing the trolling around here.
Are you saying there is a way to trust software without having the Source Code independently audited? What other way? Do you not believe that I have the right to view the Source Code of every piece of software that runs on my computer? Why not? Do you believe that anyone genuinely needs to use non-Free software? What software? Why?