neylitalo

You missed the point. They're not "too good." They're too powerful. They have the ability to make all of our lives miserable. When people get dependent enough on a particular organization, entity, whatever, it's time to start worrying. Someone's behind the scenes (or right out in front) pulling all of the strings, and they can do whatever they want. It's not just browsers, it's all software. I have one non-free piece of software on my computer, and that's the firmware for my wireless network card. Every other piece of software on it is completely free and open source. And half of the time, it's not access to the source that I'm worried about, it's the freedom to use it however I want and distribute it to whoever I want, however I want. Yes, it's nice to be able to hack something, add your own features or change a bit of functionality, and maybe re-distribute it, but that's usually not very high on my list of priorities. And I seriously hope that you're not comparing applications to websites. They're not even remotely close to the same thing. Yes, some websites are very nearly applications, but it's still not the same.

Google is simply too powerful. While I certainly appreciate the powerful and lightning-fast searches, they are moving into too many markets to be healthy. I've said this for a long time, and hold to it: If Google and Walmart ever join forces, consumers are going to be hurting. They have effective monopolies on their industries, and what people don't realize is that once everybody else is out of the picture, they're going to start hurting consumers by way of price hikes, unfair TOS agreements, and infringements of rights. With their email service, document applications, and image manager, they could collect enough information to make even the most security- and privacy-ignorant users worry.

That's correct. There are very few web sites that are free and open source, and Google is certainly no exception. (I'm not even sure that this is a valid argument, but I'll go with it.) When there are no free alternatives, however, then you simply have no choice. And while I do use Google, I don't like doing it, albeit not for the reason that I can't see their source code.

And I noticed that there was a grand total of six senators supporting this bill back when it was started - six senators out of 100 is nothing to get too worried about.

You may be correct, although I seem to remember uninstalling it with that window, but somehow I have the impression that it either didn't stick, or it just removed the iexplore executable or something. I'm fairly (not 100%) sure that it's still embedded in Windows Explorer.

Those are much more reliable, thanks.

Hah! Ron, you just keep on talking... we all know who the brains of this outfit is. (I'll give you a clue: It's me. )

You can't. It's built in.

A word of advice to everybody who reads that, and any articles like it: Take it as a grain of salt. I'm going to introduce you to a term that fits quite well here: FUD. FUD is a common term that stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". It is applied to anything that is written with the attempt to scare people into thinking a certain thing or taking a particular action, and is generally deemed to be one of the most despicable forms of communication. Notice that the links provided by the poster have little or no reliability, and should not be taken seriously without doing your own research. Make sure to pick reliable, reputable sources - such as the House of Representatives or U.S. Senate websites. All hearing and testimony transcripts, bills and resolutions, and nearly all other US Congress activities are available to the public. (I'm of the opinion that every single thing they do should be available to the public, but I don't have a whole lot of say in the matter.) Here is a Library of Congress search engine that indexes every House and Senate bill and resolution for easy and powerful searching. The U.S. Senate page dedicated to Bills & Resolutions.

Um... running cat on this particular command will just return the output, why can't you leave the cat out?

I think the general question here is "would you rather be wasting time, or being productive?"

You're correct, it doesn't cost anything to use it, but that's not what I mean. I mean that you aren't free to analyze and modify the source code and then re-distribute the modified version. I'm using the word "free" in the sense of freedom of speech, not free beer.

FUD, methinks.

I've not heard of it, but there are days like "National Talk Like A Pirate Day", so you can never tell.

That's because pid 23193 is the ID of the grep you ran on the output. Notice how it says "grep V3Uploader.php.37"? That's the grep you ran, not the application itself. If you do "ps ax | grep V3Uploader.php", and don't get any lines back other than the one for grep, then it's not running. And wget does automatically stop execution after a successful or failed fetch, so I suspect you might want to start looking elsewhere for the cause of your server's illness.

For example, the traditional "Hello, world!" program, written in bash. (With a few added features, just for fun) #!/bin/bash if [[ -n $1 ]] ; then times=$1 else times=3 fi i=0 while [ "$i" -lt "$times" ] ; do echo "Hello, world!\n" i=$((${i} + 1)) done return 0 In bash, 0 is the value returned when a script has executed successfully. Edit: Holy infinite loop, Batman!

One thing: Processes != files. Killing the processes will not remove the files. To remove the files you want, try running this: # rm V3Uploader.php.*

The surest way to not even be considered for a moderator position.

[quote author=timmy2 link=topic=105646.msg659971#msg659971 date=1186000877] no  ;) [/quote] Contrary to popular belief, one-word responses aren't actually that helpful. Please take this into consideration the next time you feel the urge to hit four buttons and press "Post". Thanks.

I'd use Opera if it weren't for two things: 1. It doesn't support modifying the HTML DOM, at least not on the level that the FCK Editor (a core part of the CMS we use/develop at work) does. 2. It's non-free. And I suppose I could bend on the second one, if the first one wasn't an issue.

Python is... interesting. In most languages, whitespace is trivial, nothing to be worried about. Sure, proper indentation is nice, but it's not required. NOT the case in python. Indentation is a crucial part of python syntax, and how it knows where a particular loop, method, class, etc., starts and ends. For example: #!/usr/bin/python class Person: def __init__(self): self.firstname = "" self.lastname = "" def set_firstname(self, value): self.firstname = value def set_lastname(self, value): self.lastname = value def main(): person = Person() person.set_firstname("John") person.set_lastname("Doe") That's very rudimentary, but you get the idea. Once you un-indent, you leave the current construct. Another quirk is that methods in a class always take a reference to the owning object as the first argument, but the reference is not passed in the actual method call. One thing that I really like about python (but takes some getting used to) is the ease with which you can read code. It's written very naturally, with relatively few non-alphanumeric symbols. For example, to write a basic condition: some_bool = True if some_bool: print "The variable some_bool is not false." if not some_bool: print "The variable some_bool is false." Note the complete absence of parentheses around the condition, and you simply write "if not" instead of "if !some_bool". Regarding efficiency: I haven't run any tests, but for all practical purposes, python and perl are very comparable when you use them for scripting. When you bind python to GTK or Qt, however, it starts to slow down - but that's to be expected, with an interpreted language. One little thing that I imagine helps in the efficiency arena is that when you first run a python script, it compiles it to a binary, and as long as you don't change the script, it transparently uses the byte-compiled binary every time after that. (Every time you run the script, it compares the file's mtime to a value stored in the binary, and updates it if it's required.) Regarding functionality: Just as there are hundreds of modules written for extended functionality in perl, there are hundreds of packages that provide bindings for python. PyGTK allows you to create GTK apps with python, dbus-python allows you to send and monitor dbus signals, and so on and so forth. I'm sure there are more written for perl, but I have yet to encounter a situation in python that I haven't been able to find a pre-written solution. And regarding objects in python: I think its OO support is excellent, although, as with perl, I haven't really tried anything too tricky.

would you consider PHP a "scripting language" because i would, however i still use classes as much as i can inside PHP. Oh, absolutely. But as effigy so wisely put it, it's a matter of design. PHP was designed specifically to allow people to easily create dynamic content on their websites, and to be run on a server, where perl was designed (and is primarily used) for client-side scripting. You don't generally use PHP on the client-side, nor do you generally implement perl in a server-client situation. Sure, it's not uncommon for either situation to occur, but they're not the majority. Oh, it gets plenty uncomfortable in PHP as well. I've had to clone objects quite a few times, when I need multiple identical or almost-identical objects.

Do a google search for "search engine optimization" - there are hundreds of resources available on the subject. And in the future, please don't use the colored text just because you can - it's hard on the eyes.

Oh, definitely - I won't argue with a single bit of that. But when you use a non-Windows operating system, (as I do ) you don't really have the choice to use DirectX, unless you use the DX implementation provided by Wine, which is pretty sketchy. And it goes the other way as well - if you're using an application that only supports DirectX, you have no choice but to use DirectX. Now I'm curious, though, how did we get into a discussion of which rendering system is preferable?

You're right, there are some parts of PHP that have advantages over perl, and the same functionality in PHP and perl would probably be much easier to write in PHP. (And I've never actually heard of python being used for web sites, but it's definitely possible.) For example, PHP has database connection support built into it, but with perl, you need to use an external module. And I suppose I ought to say what I should have said a long time ago - I'm referring to their proficiency from a scripting point of view, not necessarily web sites. When I write any script, I use these languages, in this order: bash, python, perl. I never use PHP, and I use bash and python before perl for the simple reason that I'm more familiar with them. PHP is very clunky and inefficient for regular scripts. I imagine this could have saved a lot of discussion if I'd said it in the first place, but I suppose someone may have learned from it, so it's not all bad.