Electric showers are the norm in this country, too. They run at 230V and around 30-50 amps depending on the kilowattage. Fortunately, we're fastidious about earthing {I don't think any other country has exclusively 3-pin plugs all with integral fuses, but am prepared to be corrected}.
And the soles of your feet are not the earth return path when you touch a live wire! The earth return is the whole surface of your body acting as one plate of a large {large as in cubic metres, not in farads} capacitor, the earth is the other; shoes, clothes &c. are the dielectric. If you touch an earth or neutral wire at the same time, the current has an easy return path so you will more likely get a localised shock and burn.
Electric shock is a heavily-misunderstood phenomenon, probably because people prefer to avoid it altogether rather than learn from experience, thus limiting experimental data.
This is veering off-topic, but as the parent poster I suppose I ought to reply, especially as you actually expanded nicely on the point I was making : that drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves, the harm is exacerbated by illegality, and almost every argument for retaining prohibition depends itself upon prohibition. So, I'll go through your list and explain point-by-point.
Unless you overdose.
Most accidental overdoses are caused by someone not knowing how strong the product is, and taking too much. I'm assuming legal drugs would be properly labelled as to dosage. Deliberate overdoses are a different matter. My guess is that ODing on heroin is a bigger cry for attention than ODing on aspirin. Anyway, it's easy enough to overdose on legally available substances.
Or are negligent becuase you're high or strung out (whilst driving, etc.)
Driving whilst unfit to do so - for whatever reason, be it drugs, alcohol or illness - is already an offence. I am not talking about legalising this.
Or have to steal to feed your habit.
A ten-pound wrap of heroin costs pennies to manufacture. Nine pounds and quite a lot of pence go into avoiding the law at one level or another. I'm assuming that prices would plummet with legalisation. It's certainly the prohibition that keeps prices high.
Or are blackmailed by someone who threatens to tell your boss about your coke addiction.
What is there to blackmail somebody with if what they are doing is not illegal? This is another classic example of harm caused by illegality.
Or get poisoned by a bad fix.
See first point, above. Chocolate is not illegal, absit omen, but selling poisoned chocolate is.
Or catch HIV or another nasty illness from sharing a dirty needle with another addict.
Hardly anybody shares needles anymore -- those that didn't get the message first time around are already dead. My feeling is that cheap, plentiful, legal drugs would be more likely to be taken by inhaling or swallowing than by injection -- these are less efficient modes of ingestion, but inherently less risky. Alternatively, someone might well manufacture a safer, pen-style self-administration device as is sometimes used for certain legal drugs.
Or are ripped off by your dealer.
If the drugs you were buying were legal, you could just give your local Trading Standards a tinkle. Illegality directly encourages this sort of behaviour.
Or are hurt because you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time when you needed to get a fix badly.
You could get hurt because you found yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time when you needed to get a leak badly. I don't think this is a particularly valid point. Legalisation won't get rid of carelessness. It may well make it easier to get a fix when you need one.
Or lose your life, family, friends and material possessions because of your addiction.
How many people dabble a little, then find themselves heavily addicted but feel unable to seek help for fear of landing someone else in trouble, so choose to persevere with a spiralling habit rather than let that happen? Addicts are human beings with complex feelings too - although they may be driven by primal urges over which they have little control sometimes - or has all the propaganda got so far through to you that you can't even see that? Without the threat of causing trouble for other people {and it is human nature to sacrifice yourself for the survival of the species} people would be more likely to do something about their out-of-control habits.
Yep, having a hard drug habit never hurt anyone.
Indeed. But, as you yourself have demonstrated so eloquently, prohibition has hurt many people, and still is.
I think singapore is similarly protecting their young by killing drug dealers on the spot
Drugs do not generally cause a great deal of harm in and of themselves. Making drugs illegal amplifies the harm done by drugs {drives up costs => users need to steal, worsens quality => accidental poisonings/ODs, puts users in vicinity of criminals => sundry harmful effects}. I have never heard an argument against legalising drugs that wasn't based on the fact {or an assumption depending upon the fact} that drugs were already illegal.
..... but not surprising coming from the country where it is allegedly illegal to go commando!
But seriously. This sort of thing is serious, even although it is "only" happening in Thailand, because I can hear Blair, Bush et al having real live orgasms about the possibilities. You have to ask the question, "what next?" When they finally take the ashtrays off restaurant tables, the sugar bowl and the salt cellar will look furtuvely at one another and wonder how long they have left. Those in authority never stop with what they have. If they can successfully "solve" the "problem" of childhood addiction to computer games, then some new problem will take its place as "#1 menace to our youth" and will, in turn, be "solved" by an even more pointless and draconian law.
Since when has it become necessary to prevent adults from doing something that might be harmful for children just in case children might do it anyway? That is not the job of the government, it is the job of parents. The whole point of being an adult is that you alone are responsible for your actions and the consequences thereof. Since the dawn of time, the human race has practiced self-destructive behaviour..... it's part and parcel of what separates us from the animals.
Governments have been nibbling away at our rights for a long time now. Every so often, though, they seem to bite off a huge chunk, chew it with their mouths open, and spit it in your face.
If we don't take up against this sort of thing right now it might be too late. The day is coming when every single decision that might have a hint of a consequence about it will have already been made for you. The world is turning evil, what with ID cards, CCTV cameras, embedded RFID chips, anonymous tip-off hotlines and suchlike. And you know what? Under that kind of a system, I really can't think of a single advantage to not being in prison.
I have seen RFID chips in the course of my previous employment, so I think I have some right to comment. The ones we settled on were a small package about 20 * 8 * 3mm., and had a working range of c.100mm. depending on the antenna. They were basically a few bits of non-volatile memory, with commands for read and write; some bits were read-only and {presumed} unique to any one device.
It's well known that RF can travel a long way, but what gives RFID devices their short working range is inherent in the design of passive transponders.
The RFID chip is entirely powered by the interrogating field. It "transmits" back to the interrogator by switching on and off a FET with just a resistor for a load, effectively altering its impedance. This will cause more or less current to flow in the transmitter {if the first law of thermodynamics holds}. There is a resistor in series with the TX oscillator power supply. The more current going out of the transmitter, the higher the voltage drop across that resistor.
At large separations, less power can be got into the RFID device anyway, and the difference between the "ON" and "OFF" states becomes less and less noticeable. The only way to improve matters is to add a bigger antenna to the RFID chip. According to well-understood and published theories, such an antenna would have to be big enough to be obvious in order to work.
What we really need is a law that makes it an offence for a store not to remove or disable any inventory-control devices in lawfully-purchased merchandise before it leaves the store. Add to that a requirement that a disposable product should never be sold at a lower price than its reusable analogue unless a recycling programme exists {meant for batteries, diapers and plastic cutlery but would catch anti-theft tags as a bonus}, just for good measure.
I have an automatic single-shot email address generator {like this - it puts your IP address, date and time in the link} on one of my web sites, and I occasionally receive e-mail swearing blind I opted in, with an obviously autogenerated-that-day TO: address often matching the IP address in the HELO line of the mail headers.
So that's what people think of opt-in. Personally, I'd be entirely in favour of banning all advertising on the internet..... it'd be a good starting-point.....
Right..... I sort of guessed it probably wouldn't work too well, otherwise obviously someone'd've done it by now just for the sake of saving a bob or two.
Mind you, given how little ink there actually is in a printout, I would be very surprised if there was any chemical you could use that would be dangerous in the amounts you would be likely to ingest over the course of a slice of birthday cake. Methinks some experiments are in order.
A few days later in an underground car park: Hello, little boy. Would you like to try some of my delicious home-made cake?
Seriously, I doubt even the people who made the movie knew what you were supposed to do with them. Otherwise a Google search would have turned up something better.
If you think inkjet ink is too expensive, try refilling your old inkjet cartridges with red, yellow and blue food colouring. Then get some edible rice paper {or just roll out some sugar icing reeeeeeally thin} and you should be able to print photo birthday cakes!
Disclaimer: you alone are responsible for the consequences of your actions.
It isn't worth the effort. I have an Epson colour inkjet with a few blocked nozzles that defy all attempts with escputil to clean them, and a HP Laserjet 6L that I picked up for about £50. But most of the time, if I need to refer to something, I'll just display it on another console. I can usually remember enough to last the time it takes to flick between screens.
When someone makes a colour laser printer with decent hardware Postscript and 100MB Ethernet interface {no USB on my server's mobo} I'll buy one of them.
By the way, once the WEEE directive becomes law in all EU member states, Lexmark won't be allowed to sell their evil printers at all in Europe.
My last job involved a lot of testing work, since I was working for a company that made electronic control modules that went in larger items -- tractor transmision controls, gas boiler ignition / fan controls, and the like. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we made was just too well designed to pack up, and there were few spectacular failures. Maybe all the interesting stuff happened on the complete systems..... we did once send out a batch of tractor gear controllers with the wrong firmware in them. Shortly after that we had to send a technician with a laptop and a programming lead. Shortly after that we had to send another technician with a USB-to-RS232 converter.....
Of course, sometimes the test equipment would give way instead! For "live" testing gas boilers, we had this contraption with a pump, expansion vessel and heat exchanger, allowing the boiler to heat water which was simply chucked down the drain {not much else you can do with it unfortunately.....} and occasionally it would leak big-style, or someone would forget to put the hose in the drain. Never got a decent gas leak though..... although you could get some interesting smells! {I'm talking modern UK appliances with fan-assisted combustion here, so no CO by definition.}
We had surge test equipment for inducing high-voltage spikes onto the power lines of equipment..... mains stuff {230V low-current} was never as interesting as automotive stuff {13.5V high-current} when it packed up. The latter would sometimes go on fire. The surge kit was also known to have deleterious effects on oscilloscope input preamps, but how else do you make sure that there really are noise pulses on the leads? Oh, and it used some really brain-dead software that refused to accept any filename longer than 8.3 characters, despite running on Windows 95 OSR2.
One product whose testing I missed was a 12kW electric water heater, which involved passing some 50-odd amps of current {approaching automotive levels and now with the added delights of sensible voltages as well!} through {very fat!} PCB tracks close to a copper tube filled with fast-moving water. As you probably can imagine, one bad connection on that contraption could have led to interesting results.
I don't miss the lousy wages they paid, though..... nor the way they treated their workers.....
Sorry, but I don't buy that - it's purely and simply a cop-out. It seems like the only reason you ever look any further than the end of your own nose is when you're looking for somebody to blame.
When you buy closed-source software, you are paying for the supplier to promise that the software works. {Which is why I find it so unacceptable that such software should be allowed to be offered without warranty -- and I don't use it}.
When you use open-source software, you are not paying anyone for it. You, and only you, are responsible for it.
Browsing the web, e-mailing and doing your accounts on a spreadsheet, are non-critical applications. Nobody is going to get hurt if anything like that fails. But if you want to do anything important with your software, then you have a responsibility to whoever you could impact.
If you don't want to examine the source code yourself, or you don't know how and haven't the time to or aren't prepared to learn, then there are people who will do so for an appropriate fee.
And, of course, the Developer Community are always reviewing one another's code, deliberately or otherwise. There are no secrets in the Community. There are discussion fora, newsgroups and mailing lists devoted to the dissection of free software.
It takes money or it takes graft, but either way it takes. You may not think it's fair, but that's the way it is in the real world.
The author of free software grants you the explicit right to scrutinise the source code; therefore, in case of dispute {"Your software messed up my computer and I want payment!"} then there is a simple response: You could have known it was going to do that if you had read the source code.
Examining the source code comes under the heading of "due diligence". If an Open Source product breaks, then the negligence is on the part of the user, not the author.
If you read the instructions that come with proprietary software, they all tell you to back up your entire hard drive before you install the software. Even if Certain Operating Systems didn't intentionally make that impossible {so you can't follow the instructions to the letter, which might make those applications No Good anyway} I don't see that backing up an entire HDD is any less a ball-ache than reading several hundred pages of source code.
If you don't want to examine the source code yourself, you have to rely on other users' experience through the various forums that exist. Other people will have had experience, good and bad, with whatever software you're thinking of installing and, being the Open Source community, they will want to share it. Otherwise you're not really doing anything better than clicking an attachment in an email whose subject starts with "Re: {something you never sent}" and which originates from a total stranger.
Dunno about New Zealand, but in this country, it is effectively illegal to refuse to supply someone with goods and/or services if they are a member of a minority group {black, asian, jewish, gay &c. Mathematically, males constitute a minority group, but do not count for the purposes of law.}
In a disreputable suburb {the sort of place where they send pro-lifers and they come back believing abortion should be freaking compulsory} of the city where I live, some underage white youths went into a shop owned by an Asian gentleman and demanded that he sell them some cigarettes. He quite rightly refused to serve them, and they left in a bad mood.
When the youths later returned to the store with petrol, matches and baseball bats, it was eventually treated by the police as being a racially-motivated attack.
The kids were in the wrong, I do not doubt, but the motive was not racial. They almost certainly would have done the exactly same to a white shopkeeper. The motive was simply that the shopkeeper refused to supply them with fags.
The point I'm making is if you are a member of a minority group, you often can claim unfair discrimination. There's even a name for this: "Playing the Race Card".
I always thought that the whole point of PHP was to be a NON-Object Oriented language.
I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I prefer telling the computer how to process the data, rather than telling the data how to let the computer process it!
Look at JavaScript for a freakin' awful example. In any sensible language, if you want to find the length of a string, you call a function and pass the string as a parameter. In JavaScript, you have to read something like foo.length, which most probably is making a function call "behind the scenes" but it's this abstraction layer that causes bloat. Either it has to measure the length of the string every time you access the property, which takes time, or it has to measure it every time it changes and store it, whether you want it or not, which takes space. And it all adds up - it's called the Ton of Feathers Effect. Why should I have to buy a faster processor, more RAM or a bigger disk simply because some programmer can't be arsed to shave a few clock cycles or a few bytes off here and there?
If I want to measure the length of a string, I'll call a function to find it out; and if I want to use the value ever again, I'll store it in a variable. If I just want to act conditionally on the length and not care about the actual value once I've chosen a branch to follow, maybe I'll even put the function evaluation right there in the conditional.
Microprocessors don't, as far as I know, have strong typing or object-orientation. This probably is for a very good reason. They are completely artificial concepts.
What I'd REALLY like is a "forget" statement, so I can say free up the space that was being used by one variable and park another variable {any one that will fit, I'm not fussy - say just the next variable I declare} in there. Oh, and maybe a "pretend" statement {just for debugging purposes - I can't see it being any use in real life} for making temporary assignments that will be undone immediately after the variable is read.
e.g.
$foo = 10;
.....
pretend $foo = 5; next time, and only that one time, we look at $foo we will see the value 5 if ($foo == 5) { test passes, but $foo goes back to 10 immediately once read .....
}
Sod it. I'm off back to my little shack to practice "Identifying Edible Objects In A Forest for Beginners" and "A First Course in Not Getting Eaten".
When you plug a digital camera into a Linux box, it will say something about detecting a USB device and it will be a new disk drive, which you can mount by hand {cop-out method} or configure auto-mounting {harder, but the proper way}. Same with a slot-reader.
That's one thing the USB people did get right, I think -- making cameras act like disks. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation actually create an index.htm file on the fly so you can view your shots in your web browser. Maybe even a special file that, when you try to read it,
Older digital cameras that plug into the serial port are less straightforward, as you generally have to use a command-line utility to download pictures from the camera to your HDD. But whatever you have to do - even if Dick and Harry have to cobble their own driver together on the spot - you only have to learn it once.
Slashdot Mirror
Electric showers are the norm in this country, too. They run at 230V and around 30-50 amps depending on the kilowattage. Fortunately, we're fastidious about earthing {I don't think any other country has exclusively 3-pin plugs all with integral fuses, but am prepared to be corrected}.
And the soles of your feet are not the earth return path when you touch a live wire! The earth return is the whole surface of your body acting as one plate of a large {large as in cubic metres, not in farads} capacitor, the earth is the other; shoes, clothes &c. are the dielectric. If you touch an earth or neutral wire at the same time, the current has an easy return path so you will more likely get a localised shock and burn.
Electric shock is a heavily-misunderstood phenomenon, probably because people prefer to avoid it altogether rather than learn from experience, thus limiting experimental data.
..... but not surprising coming from the country where it is allegedly illegal to go commando!
..... it's part and parcel of what separates us from the animals.
But seriously. This sort of thing is serious, even although it is "only" happening in Thailand, because I can hear Blair, Bush et al having real live orgasms about the possibilities. You have to ask the question, "what next?" When they finally take the ashtrays off restaurant tables, the sugar bowl and the salt cellar will look furtuvely at one another and wonder how long they have left. Those in authority never stop with what they have. If they can successfully "solve" the "problem" of childhood addiction to computer games, then some new problem will take its place as "#1 menace to our youth" and will, in turn, be "solved" by an even more pointless and draconian law.
Since when has it become necessary to prevent adults from doing something that might be harmful for children just in case children might do it anyway? That is not the job of the government, it is the job of parents. The whole point of being an adult is that you alone are responsible for your actions and the consequences thereof. Since the dawn of time, the human race has practiced self-destructive behaviour
Governments have been nibbling away at our rights for a long time now. Every so often, though, they seem to bite off a huge chunk, chew it with their mouths open, and spit it in your face.
If we don't take up against this sort of thing right now it might be too late. The day is coming when every single decision that might have a hint of a consequence about it will have already been made for you. The world is turning evil, what with ID cards, CCTV cameras, embedded RFID chips, anonymous tip-off hotlines and suchlike. And you know what? Under that kind of a system, I really can't think of a single advantage to not being in prison.
The things aren't transmitters ..... they are just receivers that can draw more or less power from the transmitter. Spoofing would be dead easy.
I have seen RFID chips in the course of my previous employment, so I think I have some right to comment. The ones we settled on were a small package about 20 * 8 * 3mm., and had a working range of c.100mm. depending on the antenna. They were basically a few bits of non-volatile memory, with commands for read and write; some bits were read-only and {presumed} unique to any one device.
It's well known that RF can travel a long way, but what gives RFID devices their short working range is inherent in the design of passive transponders.
The RFID chip is entirely powered by the interrogating field. It "transmits" back to the interrogator by switching on and off a FET with just a resistor for a load, effectively altering its impedance. This will cause more or less current to flow in the transmitter {if the first law of thermodynamics holds}. There is a resistor in series with the TX oscillator power supply. The more current going out of the transmitter, the higher the voltage drop across that resistor.
At large separations, less power can be got into the RFID device anyway, and the difference between the "ON" and "OFF" states becomes less and less noticeable. The only way to improve matters is to add a bigger antenna to the RFID chip. According to well-understood and published theories, such an antenna would have to be big enough to be obvious in order to work.
What we really need is a law that makes it an offence for a store not to remove or disable any inventory-control devices in lawfully-purchased merchandise before it leaves the store. Add to that a requirement that a disposable product should never be sold at a lower price than its reusable analogue unless a recycling programme exists {meant for batteries, diapers and plastic cutlery but would catch anti-theft tags as a bonus}, just for good measure.
Excuse me?!
..... it'd be a good starting-point .....
I have an automatic single-shot email address generator {like this - it puts your IP address, date and time in the link} on one of my web sites, and I occasionally receive e-mail swearing blind I opted in, with an obviously autogenerated-that-day TO: address often matching the IP address in the HELO line of the mail headers.
So that's what people think of opt-in. Personally, I'd be entirely in favour of banning all advertising on the internet
Right ..... I sort of guessed it probably wouldn't work too well, otherwise obviously someone'd've done it by now just for the sake of saving a bob or two.
Mind you, given how little ink there actually is in a printout, I would be very surprised if there was any chemical you could use that would be dangerous in the amounts you would be likely to ingest over the course of a slice of birthday cake. Methinks some experiments are in order.
A few days later in an underground car park:
Hello, little boy. Would you like to try some of my delicious home-made cake?
And was the result a scrum-diddly-umptious edible printout, or a knackered printer?
One up, one down, one to polish?
Seriously, I doubt even the people who made the movie knew what you were supposed to do with them. Otherwise a Google search would have turned up something better.
If you think inkjet ink is too expensive, try refilling your old inkjet cartridges with red, yellow and blue food colouring. Then get some edible rice paper {or just roll out some sugar icing reeeeeeally thin} and you should be able to print photo birthday cakes!
Disclaimer: you alone are responsible for the consequences of your actions.
It isn't worth the effort. I have an Epson colour inkjet with a few blocked nozzles that defy all attempts with escputil to clean them, and a HP Laserjet 6L that I picked up for about £50. But most of the time, if I need to refer to something, I'll just display it on another console. I can usually remember enough to last the time it takes to flick between screens.
When someone makes a colour laser printer with decent hardware Postscript and 100MB Ethernet interface {no USB on my server's mobo} I'll buy one of them.
By the way, once the WEEE directive becomes law in all EU member states, Lexmark won't be allowed to sell their evil printers at all in Europe.
My last job involved a lot of testing work, since I was working for a company that made electronic control modules that went in larger items -- tractor transmision controls, gas boiler ignition / fan controls, and the like. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we made was just too well designed to pack up, and there were few spectacular failures. Maybe all the interesting stuff happened on the complete systems ..... we did once send out a batch of tractor gear controllers with the wrong firmware in them. Shortly after that we had to send a technician with a laptop and a programming lead. Shortly after that we had to send another technician with a USB-to-RS232 converter .....
.....} and occasionally it would leak big-style, or someone would forget to put the hose in the drain. Never got a decent gas leak though ..... although you could get some interesting smells! {I'm talking modern UK appliances with fan-assisted combustion here, so no CO by definition.}
..... mains stuff {230V low-current} was never as interesting as automotive stuff {13.5V high-current} when it packed up. The latter would sometimes go on fire. The surge kit was also known to have deleterious effects on oscilloscope input preamps, but how else do you make sure that there really are noise pulses on the leads? Oh, and it used some really brain-dead software that refused to accept any filename longer than 8.3 characters, despite running on Windows 95 OSR2.
..... nor the way they treated their workers .....
Of course, sometimes the test equipment would give way instead! For "live" testing gas boilers, we had this contraption with a pump, expansion vessel and heat exchanger, allowing the boiler to heat water which was simply chucked down the drain {not much else you can do with it unfortunately
We had surge test equipment for inducing high-voltage spikes onto the power lines of equipment
One product whose testing I missed was a 12kW electric water heater, which involved passing some 50-odd amps of current {approaching automotive levels and now with the added delights of sensible voltages as well!} through {very fat!} PCB tracks close to a copper tube filled with fast-moving water. As you probably can imagine, one bad connection on that contraption could have led to interesting results.
I don't miss the lousy wages they paid, though
Q. How many Disabled People's Rights Activist does it take to change a light bulb?
A. It's not the light bulb that needs changing - it's the rest of society's attitude that needs changing!
The Aurora Borealis discriminates against the blind. Maybe we should sue Mother Nature. Either that, or learn to freaking deal with it.
Customer: My Mercedes Benz blew up in my driveway, severly injuring my dog.
Judge AJS318: Tough titty. Deal with it. Ting! Next please.
Sorry, but I don't buy that - it's purely and simply a cop-out. It seems like the only reason you ever look any further than the end of your own nose is when you're looking for somebody to blame.
When you buy closed-source software, you are paying for the supplier to promise that the software works. {Which is why I find it so unacceptable that such software should be allowed to be offered without warranty -- and I don't use it}.
When you use open-source software, you are not paying anyone for it. You, and only you, are responsible for it.
Browsing the web, e-mailing and doing your accounts on a spreadsheet, are non-critical applications. Nobody is going to get hurt if anything like that fails. But if you want to do anything important with your software, then you have a responsibility to whoever you could impact.
If you don't want to examine the source code yourself, or you don't know how and haven't the time to or aren't prepared to learn, then there are people who will do so for an appropriate fee.
And, of course, the Developer Community are always reviewing one another's code, deliberately or otherwise. There are no secrets in the Community. There are discussion fora, newsgroups and mailing lists devoted to the dissection of free software.
It takes money or it takes graft, but either way it takes. You may not think it's fair, but that's the way it is in the real world.
..... or like expecting each and every customer to back up their entire hard drive before installing a piece of software?
The author of free software grants you the explicit right to scrutinise the source code; therefore, in case of dispute {"Your software messed up my computer and I want payment!"} then there is a simple response: You could have known it was going to do that if you had read the source code.
Examining the source code comes under the heading of "due diligence". If an Open Source product breaks, then the negligence is on the part of the user, not the author.
If you read the instructions that come with proprietary software, they all tell you to back up your entire hard drive before you install the software. Even if Certain Operating Systems didn't intentionally make that impossible {so you can't follow the instructions to the letter, which might make those applications No Good anyway} I don't see that backing up an entire HDD is any less a ball-ache than reading several hundred pages of source code.
If you don't want to examine the source code yourself, you have to rely on other users' experience through the various forums that exist. Other people will have had experience, good and bad, with whatever software you're thinking of installing and, being the Open Source community, they will want to share it. Otherwise you're not really doing anything better than clicking an attachment in an email whose subject starts with "Re: {something you never sent}" and which originates from a total stranger.
That wasn't an instruction, just a passing mention.
Dunno about New Zealand, but in this country, it is effectively illegal to refuse to supply someone with goods and/or services if they are a member of a minority group {black, asian, jewish, gay &c. Mathematically, males constitute a minority group, but do not count for the purposes of law.}
In a disreputable suburb {the sort of place where they send pro-lifers and they come back believing abortion should be freaking compulsory} of the city where I live, some underage white youths went into a shop owned by an Asian gentleman and demanded that he sell them some cigarettes. He quite rightly refused to serve them, and they left in a bad mood. When the youths later returned to the store with petrol, matches and baseball bats, it was eventually treated by the police as being a racially-motivated attack.
The kids were in the wrong, I do not doubt, but the motive was not racial. They almost certainly would have done the exactly same to a white shopkeeper. The motive was simply that the shopkeeper refused to supply them with fags.
The point I'm making is if you are a member of a minority group, you often can claim unfair discrimination. There's even a name for this: "Playing the Race Card".
FUD = Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
RTFA = Read The Flaming(*) Article.
* There was a bit of a crackle on the line as the person said this word, but I can't think of anything else that would fit.
I always thought that the whole point of PHP was to be a NON-Object Oriented language.
.....
.....
I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I prefer telling the computer how to process the data, rather than telling the data how to let the computer process it!
Look at JavaScript for a freakin' awful example. In any sensible language, if you want to find the length of a string, you call a function and pass the string as a parameter. In JavaScript, you have to read something like foo.length, which most probably is making a function call "behind the scenes" but it's this abstraction layer that causes bloat. Either it has to measure the length of the string every time you access the property, which takes time, or it has to measure it every time it changes and store it, whether you want it or not, which takes space. And it all adds up - it's called the Ton of Feathers Effect. Why should I have to buy a faster processor, more RAM or a bigger disk simply because some programmer can't be arsed to shave a few clock cycles or a few bytes off here and there?
If I want to measure the length of a string, I'll call a function to find it out; and if I want to use the value ever again, I'll store it in a variable. If I just want to act conditionally on the length and not care about the actual value once I've chosen a branch to follow, maybe I'll even put the function evaluation right there in the conditional.
Microprocessors don't, as far as I know, have strong typing or object-orientation. This probably is for a very good reason. They are completely artificial concepts.
What I'd REALLY like is a "forget" statement, so I can say free up the space that was being used by one variable and park another variable {any one that will fit, I'm not fussy - say just the next variable I declare} in there. Oh, and maybe a "pretend" statement {just for debugging purposes - I can't see it being any use in real life} for making temporary assignments that will be undone immediately after the variable is read.
e.g.
$foo = 10;
pretend $foo = 5; next time, and only that one time, we look at $foo we will see the value 5
if ($foo == 5) { test passes, but $foo goes back to 10 immediately once read
}
Sod it. I'm off back to my little shack to practice "Identifying Edible Objects In A Forest for Beginners" and "A First Course in Not Getting Eaten".
When you plug a digital camera into a Linux box, it will say something about detecting a USB device and it will be a new disk drive, which you can mount by hand {cop-out method} or configure auto-mounting {harder, but the proper way}. Same with a slot-reader.
That's one thing the USB people did get right, I think -- making cameras act like disks. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation actually create an index.htm file on the fly so you can view your shots in your web browser. Maybe even a special file that, when you try to read it,
Older digital cameras that plug into the serial port are less straightforward, as you generally have to use a command-line utility to download pictures from the camera to your HDD. But whatever you have to do - even if Dick and Harry have to cobble their own driver together on the spot - you only have to learn it once.
Dying and waiting seventy years is considered in this case to constitute permission.