Hercco

Not too keen on your job, are you? Simplest workaround on this issue... Don't send freaking MS office format files over email. If the recipient is meant to modify the document go with RTF format, if not PDF is the way to go. Of course Microsoft won't recommend this as its basically admitting the obvious faults in their product. Personally I never send DOC files even to my friends unless they specifically ask for it. And most of them seems to prefer PDF anyways.

Let's hope it's not that bad. I actually believe that security won't be a major issue with 3.0. I've gotten the impression that the development has been made more security in mind and they've learnt from the countless issues with 2.0. And regarding the full version, the development team has set no dates. The complete phpBB 3.0 will be relased when they think it's ready. So it could take a while....

Well it's been a while... It feels like they've been developing PHPBB3 forever. I actually thought that the whole project was dumped. It's nice to see that the open source forums software is still kicking. Is there a complete feature list available somewhere?

I'm currently running Ubuntu and I've been very happy with it. And for people who want to brand Ubuntu as n00b Linux, I'd like to say that there are many of us IT pros who just like the simplicity. Previously I've used Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian and I don't really have bad things to say about any of them.

Yet another proof that Stargate SG-1 has some truth to it. Or not.

Très bien! It's no real wonder that kind of big institutions switch to open source. The savings must be huge in terms of software purchases. Then there's of course the installation and education costs but eventually old machines need to get replaced anyways. About the browsers... I don't think it matters much for the members of the French parliament which browser they get to use as both do their job well. Remember these are people in important positions and I suspect they don't have time to fight over which browser is best like bunch of nerds. One thing that speaks for Linux systems in large organizations is the networking and network drive sharing. In all fairness Windows still sucks when you need to have the ability to share network resources like disk space and printers. In Unix world all that has been working like charm for years. I'm sad that our university and not even our department of information technology (where I study) hasn't gone open source. Instead in all quietness they signed a contract with Microsoft last spring which will most likely mean more Windows work stations. Our university's email system was changed from old perfectly fine working Unix system to MS Exchange based one and for the whole year there has been loads of problems with it. I personally wasn't able to access my email for two weeks. The ridiculous thing is that the system probably costed a lot... Yeah but if you're talking about open source operating system for office computers there are not that many sensible options apart from Linux.

PHP has a function called is_int() to test if parameter is integer. Why not just use that?

Bakr_2k5, NULL is a bit different in databases and programming languages like PHP. NULL in PHP, like in C means a pointer to "nothing" while NULL is databases basically is for indicating "no value set". It's also improtant to bear in mind that NULL is databases does not equal to emptry string. So when you test if ($mysql_result == NULL ) you are essentially testing if the handle to the query result is NULL. And if the query is performed and the result is returned to that variable it is never NULL regardless of the query result. Database can return a NULL for a value of a field.

If you're going to use system calls it's kind of pointless to use PHP then. I mean why bother with PHP when a simple shell script would do the job. Problems tend to rise when you're not on your own server as system calls from PHP usually are blocked (and for a good reason).Loading an image from an URL is actually not that difficult. If you have fopen wrapper enabled you can just pass the URL as parameter to imagecreatefromjpeg() (you can replace jpeg with gif or png too) function . Then just do whatever you want to the image, resize it, save it, push it to database, etc. If the wrapper is not enabled you then need to open a filehandle (just fopen(http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) ) and read the binary to a variable using fread() and then proceed with imagecreatefrom*().EDIT: Please post if you need more detailed examples.

It matches 'Ducks' infitite number of times and the results are sorted by relevance. Someone else has to help here with the order direction, is it decreasing relevance or increasing? Anyways basically this means that if you have a full text field with the word 'Ducks' appearing twice, it is of higher relevance than fields with only one occurance.

Exactly. I don't know about the policy regarding software patents in US, but I'd guess the description of how the program is done has to be pretty accurate, as it is with physical inventions. Being not-physical is where I think the line is crossed. You can patent software which is "nothing" so why not patent music or poetry?

That's exactly what can happen when you have such as thing as "software patent". You North-American guys probably don't know but here in EU, it's not possible to apply for a patent for software. European parliament concluded that software patents would lessen innovation. And I wholeheartedly agree. Patents just don't work for software. Sure the companies need to have their products protected but that's what the copyrights are for.

I was first very suprised about their announcement. Why would Microsoft want to do something like that...Well after giving it some thought I see there's two alternatives:1. Microsoft now sees open source as a real threat and they want to secure bases. If Linux based operating systems at some point take significant piece out of MS's market, they can at least in someway benefit from it. That it see like MS office or games for Linuxes... 2. They smell another way to do money. They give little to Novell and expect to get lots. They want to spread their dominance to Linux realm too. My friend made a quite funny comment about this partnership... He wondered when Novell will integrate IE to a "Linux" kernel and SuSE will start leaking like Windows. I understand why SuSE people feel betrayed and disappointed. But it's not the end of the world if you lose SuSE to Microsoft, there's plenty of other distros and MS can't take over them all.

Thanks guys! I installed Songbird and I really like it. The GUI is fantastic and so is the library.

Actually pyros often find starting fires sexually pleasing or are otherwise obsessed with it. Pyromania is a mental disease, blackhacking technically isn't. I guess some crackers are seriously obsessed with breaking in to systems thus being mentally ill, but I'd believe most are not. Many of them probably think it's just über-cool. They need to show-off, to get something to brag about to the other like-minded. They get the feeling of power and being in control out of it, something that they might not be able to get in real life. These are the guys whose favourite characters in action films are the "hacker-nerds" not the leaders or the ones who beat the **** out of everyone.

I went for the bother to copy and paste and run it it browser. And it looked quite neat actually! I've been considering dhtml menus for me new site design and a loader like this would be quite neat. By the way, I tested in Opera 9.02 too and worked like a charm. And if it works in Firefox it'll work with all modern Gecko based browsers like Netscape and Mozilla. So I guess your script just doesn't work in IE. And we don't really care, right?

I recently changed my primary computer's OS from Win2k to Ubuntu Linux. I'm a big music fan and I do all my music and video (including DVDs) playing with my computer. So in a way my computer acts also as a "media centre".I have a lot of music in digital format and lot of CDs. For CD playing Rhythmbox is just fine but for mp3s and such I've yet to find my favourite. By the way on the Windows side I used Winamp5, which GUI and media library were just awesome. Good media library is a must for me. For video I think I'm going to stick with Mplayer.So far I've tried these:XMMS is a bit old and lacks a good media library, although I love the winampish UI. Banshee has decent UI but the media library isn't quite what I want and it also crashed occasionally. Quod Libet has a really nice library (I might say even better than Winamp) and the UI is tolerable. So this is the player I've used so far. Only complaint is that it seems to be taking awful lot of processor time for a media player which I don't really like. Could this be because it's implemented in Python? Are there any others worth testing or am I going to have to stick with Quod Libet?

Update on the situation here... I installed Ubuntu and I'm loving it. Everything's working smoothly. What caused a bit problems was my WLAN card (Asus WL-138g) which doesn't have Linux drivers available. Luckily I was able to get it working with NDISWrapper and Windows drivers.

Ummm... Can someone explain me why we would want Flash-based GUI for database management? Like what's the point, what it does better than html-based one, like PhpMyAdmin. Except look better perhaps, but at least in my list looks is in quite low priority for database GUIs...

LOL. Yes, I think "web science" is neccessary. Web is such a huge phenomena and has so much impact on our lives and livestyles that it needs to be studied not just from technological OR humanist point of view, but also with something in-between too. That sounds like something I might have chose to study had it been available when I started my university studies.

Shocking...

Thanks for the replies. At the moment I'm thinking Ubuntu. The posts here and after a talk with couple of Linux gurus at the uni kind of got me convinced. I'll try Ubuntu and if I don't like it, I'm going to go with either SUSE or Fedora. After getting some basic info and people's opinions on all of these, it feels like I can't choose badly. Well at least it's going to be huge improvement from the old Redmondian...

I'm going to install Linux to my primary computer. It'll take about week until I get my new hard drive and have the time to start installing. So that's how much time I have to choose a distro! People have been debating which distro is best is about as long as there has been linux distros, but I want you to recommend a distro for me. Everyone has opinion which distro is best, but why I should choose it? First of all I'll tell a little background. I study IT at university and will be graduating next year. I'll start to work as a software engineer from the beginning of next year. So practically I'm a professional on communications and software design. I have experience on Linux, I've used it at the uni and have installed different distros to my own and friends computer in the past. What I use my computer for? Graphics design, web design, multimedia (I listen to lot of music and watch films), downloading and of course web. I have wireless internet connection and use bluetooth (to connect my cell phone). So, why "your" distro would be best choice for me?

I got my 'Fox 2.0. Everything so far has been really great. I especially love the spell checker! I have a lot of extensions and I was happy to find out that only one isn't compatible with 2.0. The rest worked either instantly or with quick automatic update.

I understand it's less than 20%. That's just the number I got in my head, don't have anything to back it up.