Have to agree with the parent. Cats are not tools to be thrown at a problem. They are intelligent creatures and require regular care and attention. Do not try to own a cat, dog, or other animal if you don't know how to take care of them. The submitter might know his stuff about I.T. but plainly knows nothing of either pests or pets.
Please submitter: have your company hire or consult someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to pest control. You worry about the computers. I don't know what on earth possessed you ask other I.T. nerds for advice either.
No, they don't, because unimmunized kids are a health risk for the entire community.
Explain how that works, then. I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but pretend I am. If I don't get my kids vaccinated and they come down with something nasty, how is that dangerous to your kids who did get the vaccine and are thus protected from it?
So, let's say we take the PSS principles seriously, and abstract away any non-platform-agnostic features you can think of. A few years down the road, you've got PSS all over the shop and you want to upgrade to a different platform nominally supporting your shell of choice. Even if you shake off PSS features you thought could create incompatibilities, you discover the new system buffers differently. Or added a parameter somewhere. Point is, if you went with something like Perl which is designed for cross-compatibility you would have been fine, but now you're all wet.
Shell scripting is best for system administration and automation. Basically, you wouldn't do anything in a shell script that you couldn't do with some combination of command-line savvy and text editing. Even though the scope of shell scripting is more limited than say, Perl, you still need a relatively full-fledged programming toolkit including variables, conditions, loops, functions, and so on in order to get anything useful done.
The pitfalls you describe above apply equally to Perl if you try to substitute it for Bash. Bash too is identical on every platform, it's the external commands and environment that differ. We know that keeping even "proper" high-level application code portable across various platforms is quite difficult, so Bash is certainly no exception.
We have different programming environments and languages for a reason. No one language fits all use cases. My guideline is generally this: If it's a sysadmin task, do it in Bash. If it's an application, talks to a database, or will be used by "normal" users, it's almost always better to use something else.
What's your argument here? That filesystem code in the kernel shouldn't be growing more sophisticated over time?
This rings of the armchair-pundit argument that the kernel is getting more and more "bloated" and a breath later crying out that there still aren't Linux hardware drivers for every computing device ever made.
Since the site is slashdotted and the summary is a little shy on details, can someone summarize how this thing works without cable? I know you can torrent some shows and watch some on sites like hulu, but that doesn't really "replace cable" (especially if you watch HD content). So how does this media center work with no cable input?
Easy, instead of connecting a coax cable to it, you connect an Ethernet cable instead.
Boxee is a fork of XBMC which (through corporate funding and proprietary add-ons) can view streaming content by connecting to services like Hulu, Netflix, and the plethora of other video services that are sure to be coming down the pike soon. The trick is that Boxee lets you watch TV content on your TV instead of in a little web browser window.
While I'm not sure about Boxee as a product, the concept of being able to simply pull down whatever content you want straight from the content provider (instead of waiting for it to air or messing about with a video recorder) is something that's long overdue.
You are missing the point that Amazon is selling the works as both text and audio when they have a contract to only sell text.
But they are not selling audio editions of the works, they are only selling textual versions. The fact that the Kindle device has a feature to produce audio based on the text doesn't change that Amazon is selling only the text.
And every time a Democrat does something against the general left-leaning political grain, the right-leaning slashdotters come out of the woodwork tripping over themselves to say, "Where's your tree-hugging liberal party now, bitches?"
I mean, I thought it was the Republicans who were destroying America and the Democrats were going to save us? You mean to tell me that they are all beholden to business interests? Say it it isn't so!
You must be new here. Democrats and Republicans are basically two versions of the exact same thing. Maybe one time there was a difference between the two parties, but there isn't any more. The only reason they exist is to fight each other.
And there's no technical or financial reason that what you propose couldn't be possible. The only roadblock is the cellular telcos throwing millions of dollars at congress-critters to protect their tightly-controlled market from competition.
Also AFAIK PHP has no convenient way of stripping Javascript from user input which also creates a risk.
Developers starting a new application would do well to begin with a PHP framework. No, frameworks don't solve every problem. Yes, some of them suck or are only suitable for certain kinds of sites or applications. But with all of the options out there, there's bound to be at least one that suits your needs and gets you started on the interesting parts of the code sooner. (I like CodeIgniter, for instance.)
The benefit to using a framework for an application is that most of the mundane details of a basic website/app have been handled for you, leaving the developer to worry more about the "meat" of the code. Security is a great example. In CodeIgniter, for instance, there is a class that automatically sanitizes all input, whether it comes from a POST, GET, or whatever. Another class lets you validate a form field simply by specifying one or more rules to apply to the field. And these classes have already been tested in the field and examined by more than a small group of PHP developers.
These reasons alone should be compelling enough to start with a framework instead of writing everything from scratch.
I'm waiting to see if e-ink will ever improve to the point that it can be used in a fairly simple netbook-style product. Such a display certainly wouldn't be able to play movies, but I don't think email, web browsing, word processing, and similar applications would be out of the question.
Price is probably going to be the main barrier in e-ink for awhile, though.
Horacio Gutierrez, said in a statement that the Google license is "a great example of Microsoft's openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms
should Google be required to notify a content creator when their IP has been deleted/removed?
No, they shouldn't. And if you don't like it, quit being a pansy who wants everything for free and start hosting your own blog on an account that you paid for. Then the only person you can blame for "censorship" is yourself.
I'm so tired of this mantra. Elitists have been chanting this line for at least 5 years now. It's not insightful. It's not informative. It's just the same old shit that adds nothing to the discussion.
Sorry, I'm not following. Because it's repeated often automatically means it's not true?
Are we going to keep modding it up when there's still 1 user left who thinks "the blue E is the internet"?
Despite whatever kind of utopian highly-evolved intellectual society you think you live in, the vast majority of the "wired" public still have no freakin' clue how any of it works, even the bits on their own computer. They just click whatever they know they need to click in order to do their work (or games). And there's nothing wrong with that. That's exactly how it should be. The software is supposed to handle all the mundane details automatically.
Hell, even my grandpa uses Firefox. He may think it's the internet, but god damnit, he knows it's the better internet.
So all you've done is told your grandpa, "That little blue 'e' icon isn't the Internet. This curly fox icon is the Internet."
Congratulations, you just proved the OP's point even better than he did.
Will I pay $359 for a dedicated e-book reader? Not likely.
Would I pay $20 for an app on the iPhone or G-phone that would allow me access to the Amazon e-book store. Sure I would.
So, um, I'm no fan of the kindle either, but let's at least do a more realistic comparison:
- iPhone: $199 phone + $70 per month contract (minimum, before fees and taxes) + $20 ebook program = $289 for the first month, $70 every month after
- Kindle: $359 once
I suppose the iPhone route is fine if you already happen to have one, but it sure is more expensive in the long run. On top of that, the Kindle is designed for reading books all the way around. The iPhone will give you nothing but eye strain and muscle fatigue. (I know, I've tried reading a book on a friend's iPhone once.)
In the meantime, I'm still waiting for both cell phones and ebook readers to become affordable and not artificially lock you into one particular company's way of using the devices.
So now that these reports are "released", how many of you, slashdot readers that post in this thread, actually read at least 1 of them in its entirety? How many read 2? 5? Hands, anyone?
Um, this is Slashdot. To RTFA is practically a sin, imagine how verboten it would be to read research reports?
(Actually, I'm off to see if I can find anything interesting right now. I just wanted to read the comments first.)
Your staggering level of cynicism has been duly noted, but it doesn't change the fact that releasing these reports is beneficial for everyone even if every single person doesn't have an explicit interest in them. As a comparison, relatively few people actually ever utilize their 1st Amendment right to say unpopular things, but the fact that the right exists is invaluable.
And yes, I do wonder why studies sponsored by my tax dollars weren't publicly available to begin with.
It's only very recently that LCDs with acceptable refresh rates have become available (the ViewSonic VX2265wm, and the Samsung 2233rz), and AFAIK they are only available bundled with 3d glasses and not at all in most countries.
I guess I'm confused by your definition of an acceptable refresh rate. If I look at any LCD monitor manufactured within the last five years, I can't see any ghosting, tearing, or other artifacts even when there's high-speed movement on the screen. Not when I move windows, watch movies, or play games.
Sure, they only refresh at 60Hz (usually), but that's far higher than most humans can perceive anyway. The reason 60Hz sucks on CRTs is because the phosphor goes black before the beam swings around to hit it again, resulting in the whole screen being dark for half a cycle and then bright for half a cycle (i.e., flicker). LCDs will never have this problem no matter how low the "refresh rate" because their pixels don't change or darken until ordered to.
I only have one module running to run my gallery and locked down the module access to only myself can admin it. Nobody can upload anything unless they e-mail me the pics to me so I can post it.
Pretty secure to me.
Not necessarily. What you did was secure it through configuration. When I talk about exploits, I mean bugs or bad coding in the extensions that attackers use to gain access to the whole account. Mambo and Joomla themselves are moderately secure themselves (as long as you keep them up to date) due to the "many eyeballs" effect. The third-party extensions, however, tend to be far less widespread and are therefore a favorite target of scripts kiddies. The code is popular enough to be easily located by Google or crawling, but not popular enough to have been seen by enough PHP experts.
I think your company should post some examples on how to secure their website from attacks. Have them ask for help if they need it.
Most of our customers are the types who want flashy websites for their businesses and barely have the minimum required technical skill to configure a site and post content to it, let alone figure out how all the stuff underneath works. Understanding good security practices is just way out of their reach. For all intents and purposes, our support team act as surrogate webmasters for these customers.
Slashdot Mirror
See that Borg ship out there? You have 5 minutes if you don't want to be a member of its crew.
Have to agree with the parent. Cats are not tools to be thrown at a problem. They are intelligent creatures and require regular care and attention. Do not try to own a cat, dog, or other animal if you don't know how to take care of them. The submitter might know his stuff about I.T. but plainly knows nothing of either pests or pets.
Please submitter: have your company hire or consult someone who knows what they are doing when it comes to pest control. You worry about the computers. I don't know what on earth possessed you ask other I.T. nerds for advice either.
Explain how that works, then. I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but pretend I am. If I don't get my kids vaccinated and they come down with something nasty, how is that dangerous to your kids who did get the vaccine and are thus protected from it?
I agree with your overall message, but...
Shell scripting is best for system administration and automation. Basically, you wouldn't do anything in a shell script that you couldn't do with some combination of command-line savvy and text editing. Even though the scope of shell scripting is more limited than say, Perl, you still need a relatively full-fledged programming toolkit including variables, conditions, loops, functions, and so on in order to get anything useful done.
The pitfalls you describe above apply equally to Perl if you try to substitute it for Bash. Bash too is identical on every platform, it's the external commands and environment that differ. We know that keeping even "proper" high-level application code portable across various platforms is quite difficult, so Bash is certainly no exception.
We have different programming environments and languages for a reason. No one language fits all use cases. My guideline is generally this: If it's a sysadmin task, do it in Bash. If it's an application, talks to a database, or will be used by "normal" users, it's almost always better to use something else.
Uh oh. Someone should have warned this guy.
What's your argument here? That filesystem code in the kernel shouldn't be growing more sophisticated over time?
This rings of the armchair-pundit argument that the kernel is getting more and more "bloated" and a breath later crying out that there still aren't Linux hardware drivers for every computing device ever made.
Easy, instead of connecting a coax cable to it, you connect an Ethernet cable instead.
Boxee is a fork of XBMC which (through corporate funding and proprietary add-ons) can view streaming content by connecting to services like Hulu, Netflix, and the plethora of other video services that are sure to be coming down the pike soon. The trick is that Boxee lets you watch TV content on your TV instead of in a little web browser window.
While I'm not sure about Boxee as a product, the concept of being able to simply pull down whatever content you want straight from the content provider (instead of waiting for it to air or messing about with a video recorder) is something that's long overdue.
Hulu, Netflix, ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and others probably.
They're not screen-scraping, I believe they have arrangements with these companies to provide their content via an API.
But they are not selling audio editions of the works, they are only selling textual versions. The fact that the Kindle device has a feature to produce audio based on the text doesn't change that Amazon is selling only the text.
And every time a Democrat does something against the general left-leaning political grain, the right-leaning slashdotters come out of the woodwork tripping over themselves to say, "Where's your tree-hugging liberal party now, bitches?"
Good god, a little maturity wouldn't kill you.
They don't need to vote, they just simply buy their politicians instead.
You must be new here. Democrats and Republicans are basically two versions of the exact same thing. Maybe one time there was a difference between the two parties, but there isn't any more. The only reason they exist is to fight each other.
And there's no technical or financial reason that what you propose couldn't be possible. The only roadblock is the cellular telcos throwing millions of dollars at congress-critters to protect their tightly-controlled market from competition.
Developers starting a new application would do well to begin with a PHP framework. No, frameworks don't solve every problem. Yes, some of them suck or are only suitable for certain kinds of sites or applications. But with all of the options out there, there's bound to be at least one that suits your needs and gets you started on the interesting parts of the code sooner. (I like CodeIgniter, for instance.)
The benefit to using a framework for an application is that most of the mundane details of a basic website/app have been handled for you, leaving the developer to worry more about the "meat" of the code. Security is a great example. In CodeIgniter, for instance, there is a class that automatically sanitizes all input, whether it comes from a POST, GET, or whatever. Another class lets you validate a form field simply by specifying one or more rules to apply to the field. And these classes have already been tested in the field and examined by more than a small group of PHP developers.
These reasons alone should be compelling enough to start with a framework instead of writing everything from scratch.
I'm waiting to see if e-ink will ever improve to the point that it can be used in a fairly simple netbook-style product. Such a display certainly wouldn't be able to play movies, but I don't think email, web browsing, word processing, and similar applications would be out of the question.
Price is probably going to be the main barrier in e-ink for awhile, though.
Cool, can you point us to all the other examples?
No, they shouldn't. And if you don't like it, quit being a pansy who wants everything for free and start hosting your own blog on an account that you paid for. Then the only person you can blame for "censorship" is yourself.
I tsee what you did tsere.
Sorry, I'm not following. Because it's repeated often automatically means it's not true?
Despite whatever kind of utopian highly-evolved intellectual society you think you live in, the vast majority of the "wired" public still have no freakin' clue how any of it works, even the bits on their own computer. They just click whatever they know they need to click in order to do their work (or games). And there's nothing wrong with that. That's exactly how it should be. The software is supposed to handle all the mundane details automatically.
So all you've done is told your grandpa, "That little blue 'e' icon isn't the Internet. This curly fox icon is the Internet."
Congratulations, you just proved the OP's point even better than he did.
So, um, I'm no fan of the kindle either, but let's at least do a more realistic comparison:
- iPhone: $199 phone + $70 per month contract (minimum, before fees and taxes) + $20 ebook program = $289 for the first month, $70 every month after
- Kindle: $359 once
I suppose the iPhone route is fine if you already happen to have one, but it sure is more expensive in the long run. On top of that, the Kindle is designed for reading books all the way around. The iPhone will give you nothing but eye strain and muscle fatigue. (I know, I've tried reading a book on a friend's iPhone once.)
In the meantime, I'm still waiting for both cell phones and ebook readers to become affordable and not artificially lock you into one particular company's way of using the devices.
Firefox is better than any version of IE so far and has been available for over 4 years, so why haven't people flocked to it in that time frame?
Um, this is Slashdot. To RTFA is practically a sin, imagine how verboten it would be to read research reports?
(Actually, I'm off to see if I can find anything interesting right now. I just wanted to read the comments first.)
Your staggering level of cynicism has been duly noted, but it doesn't change the fact that releasing these reports is beneficial for everyone even if every single person doesn't have an explicit interest in them. As a comparison, relatively few people actually ever utilize their 1st Amendment right to say unpopular things, but the fact that the right exists is invaluable.
And yes, I do wonder why studies sponsored by my tax dollars weren't publicly available to begin with.
I guess I'm confused by your definition of an acceptable refresh rate. If I look at any LCD monitor manufactured within the last five years, I can't see any ghosting, tearing, or other artifacts even when there's high-speed movement on the screen. Not when I move windows, watch movies, or play games.
Sure, they only refresh at 60Hz (usually), but that's far higher than most humans can perceive anyway. The reason 60Hz sucks on CRTs is because the phosphor goes black before the beam swings around to hit it again, resulting in the whole screen being dark for half a cycle and then bright for half a cycle (i.e., flicker). LCDs will never have this problem no matter how low the "refresh rate" because their pixels don't change or darken until ordered to.
Not necessarily. What you did was secure it through configuration. When I talk about exploits, I mean bugs or bad coding in the extensions that attackers use to gain access to the whole account. Mambo and Joomla themselves are moderately secure themselves (as long as you keep them up to date) due to the "many eyeballs" effect. The third-party extensions, however, tend to be far less widespread and are therefore a favorite target of scripts kiddies. The code is popular enough to be easily located by Google or crawling, but not popular enough to have been seen by enough PHP experts.
Most of our customers are the types who want flashy websites for their businesses and barely have the minimum required technical skill to configure a site and post content to it, let alone figure out how all the stuff underneath works. Understanding good security practices is just way out of their reach. For all intents and purposes, our support team act as surrogate webmasters for these customers.