Dave

I'm surprised that nobody's bothered to mention C# here. It's a mix between C, Java and Visual Basic, but, in my opinion, it's extremely good and very powerful. You can have a look at the Visual Express edition if you want to give it a go. Also, the Mono project has free compilers/interpreters for Linux and Windows.

The Gimp isn't that bad, once you get used to it. However, it's not a real substitute for Photoshop in my eyes - I'm just too used to it being really easy for me

As far as I'm aware, the later version of the P4 doesn't automatically shut the computer down, but downclock itself to a very slow speed to avoid burning the processor out. There's a cool video on Tom's Hardware somewhere about that.

It certainly helps you understand exactly how the computer works, that's for sure. Usefully, you can also embed it with C code to create extremely fast routines.

I don't know about that. There was an article a little while ago about riding bikes in urban areas actually being bad for your health due to all of the exhaust fumes.

What about this one? It's a bit crap, I know, but I did it in about 5 minutes

I'll design one and post it when I'm finished.

Moved here since it seems more appropriate than GD.

I'd agree. I installed a copy of Firefox (normal, not this one) for use on the computers at university, since they only run 0.8.3 there. The only stuff left was in my home directory (the .firefox folder), and that was only to store the profile information. From what I've heard, PFF stores the profile information on the flash drive so there shouldn't be anything left on the machine.

To digress somewhat, there was a similar television programme broadcast on Channel 4 about 3 weeks ago on the same subject. I have to say that they got far too hung up on one particular aspect (namely the atomic bomb, as usual), and I would have liked for them to concentrate a lot more on the history of the equation, and not its applications. Not sure whether this is going to be more of the same, but I'll post my opinions after I've given them a listen.

I have to agree with Pangloss about outsourcing. One of my relatives is an employee at Ericsson in Ireland. He's been telling me about the work that they'd been doing in India, outsourcing contracts for programming and such things. It's been a great success for them, all things considered, but there are certain problems that need to be overcome: for one, the language barrier is quite substantial. People still have to be hired over here for things like documentation instead of relying on less-than-adequate translations. In fact, the cultural barrier is a far greater obstacle, but talking about this too much would be digressing.

My own slant on this is that it would only be a matter of time before the descending situation in Iraq and, indeed, domestic things such as petrol prices pushed the American populace over the edge. Interestingly, the article reports that opinions on Iraq haven't changed much - it seems to be Bush and moreover the entire Republican party that's getting to the public at the moment. Having said that, this is an ideal opportunity for the Democrats. This is a heck of an opportunity for them to come back strongly and prove that they could have managed this entire situation better than the current administration. More importantly, any democratic system needs a strong opposition party, and anyone can see that they've been more than a little limp-wristed over the past few years. I suppose the real question for the Republicans is how they're going to improve the situation. This is an area where I don't have any real expertise, and not knowing much about American current affairs doesn't really help.

Moved.

OH NO, NOT $3 A GALLON!!!!!!!!!!!!! Tip of the day: get a car that has room for more than 1 digit on the MPG readout.

Right. Before I start on my contemptuous rant, I'd like to apologise beforehand. I'm sorry take this out on you, but there's been just too many posts along the lines of: "Look at me, I'm so ereet because I'm a leethaxxxxxor!!!" recently. To quote Aeternus on IRC, there have been far too many posts on uberleet haxors recently (and quite considerable interest in them, I may add), but when real computer science questions come up they get very litte interest. This thread is a shining example of that, and I'd like to raise a few points about your "guide". In fact, I will raise just one issue with you, although I could indeed pick many more. I read up until this little gem of a quote: before I had to stop and retrieve my lower diaphragm from the floor through extortionate laughter and general mirth. Firstly, I'd like to point out the fact that MS-DOS is possibly the most inept, useless and downright moronic operating system that has ever had the misfortune to grace the hard drives of many a computer. I cannot possibly emphasise just how bad this epitome of uselessness is. I've heard many comparisons of MS-DOS to other shell environments, such as bash or just plain old sh. I'm sorry to say that there's just no point in drawing these, because amongst other things - they are actually useful, whereas MS-DOS is not. Secondly, there seems to be a common misconception amongst pretty much everyone on these forums. Namely, when you run cmd.exe on Windows 2000 or later, what you get is not MS-DOS in any way, shape or form. As has been covered a number of times now, the little window with the amazing shell of immensely lame proportions is simply an emulation layer, created by Microsoft to help the less fortunate followers of MS-DOS adapt to XP. Whilst it carries some functionality (and I emphasise the word some), it's certainly not the same as 98 or 95, when MS-DOS was booted, and then Windows on top of this. I'd just like to say that, for the most part, hacking is misinterpreted - that document is a perfect example of such a thing. It's not glamorous, as people often make it out to be. People generally spend hours and hours sitting down, reading through source code, determining vulnerabilities, possible buffer overflow attacks and the like. It's painstaking work, and for the most part, those who consider themselves "hackers" are nothing more than script kiddies who have far too much time on their hands. The entire issue here is not with the proper hackers who literally spend their time hacking code, but with those who think that because they use Linux they are 31337 and know everything to know about computers in general. Such a claim is silly, at best. Generally, those who talk about how great they are at hacking and how much they can teach everyone else know little or nothing at all about how the process really works. Frankly, I'm tired of it and that is the primary reason for this rant. I'd appreciate it if, in future, people actually thought before posting "LOOK I CAN USE NET SEND OMG LOLORZ" continuously in their many guises. Whilst I don't claim to be an elite hacker of doom - much the opposite, in fact - I do actually know about some of the processes that go on behind it, and when people talk about how great they are at DDoS attacking and pinging people to death with a 1 million terabit ADSL connection, it really gets on my nerves. Just think before you post.

They're carriage returns and line feeds - it's basically a delimiter for the HTTP headers. Each header is followed by a \r\n and that tells the server that what you've just typed in is a header. Sorry if that sounds confusing, but I can't think of a decent way of putting it

Currently ranked at #7, according to my googlification.

Well, if you used normal light then the receiver would pick up all sorts of junk from your surrounding area (we're being bombarded by light all the time, after all). That's about the only advantage I can think of at the moment.

We're trying to tell you, but unfortunately it's quite complex. If you get it wrong, you could delete the wrong version, and that can lead to all sorts of problems.

Hmm. Maybe I'm too used to UK prices Cheapest one on eBuyer is £17.

I should probably point out that Pangloss's method won't remove the files on the hard drive that were installed. You'll have to remove those by hand, and carefully too. If I remember correctly, installing two versions on the same hard drive creates two different main windows folders on the C drive. If, if, if...

Yes, they do. What list are you looking at?

As far as I know there's no easy way to remove them. The only sure way I do know is a complete reformat, and I'm not sure you want to do that.

ScITE isn't an IDE as such, but it does have some advantages over things like TextPad. For one, it's free. Another, it's easy to modify to get just how you want it. I don't know about Java, but it does have a list of function names/parameters/descriptions for the in-build PHP4 functions (a la Visual Studio). It also has an output pane that links into a compiler, but I'm not sure exactly how that works. It's a fairly simple, extremely customisable editor. Probably not what you're looking for to be honest, but I thought I should suggest it, just in case

I'm loving ScITE at the moment. You can get it to do java compiles etc, although it doesn't really count as a "proper" IDE. Try it out and see what you think.