pwaring

I've never had a problem, and I suspect it's more likely to be shared hosting which ends up getting blacklisted due to people installing insecure scripts.

If you use a half-decent provider who quickly investigates any unusual traffic on their network then I can't see it being a problem.

"ALWAYS make backups!"

To be fair, that applies to any hosting, cheap or expensive, virtual or dedicated. I've only once had to restore data due to the fault of the host, but I've lost track of the number of times that I've had to get things back because of a user error. :)

I've run all my personal services (email, web sites, screen sessions etc.) off two Bytemark[1] virtual machines with 500MB of RAM each and the only problems I've experienced have been one or two 'high up' problems such as two core routers going down at the same time - i.e. nothing to do with contention. If you need more RAM, you just pay the extra monthly/annual fee for the next plan up and reboot the machine.

I pay £15/month per VM, which is probably $15-30/month each depending on where the exchange rate is.

[1] http://www.bytemark.co.uk/

"Neither should consultants who recommend and deploy a service [be penalised]"

In this case I'd suggest they're being penalised for not reading the limitations before recommending a product to their client, and not double-checking that the service met the client's requirements.

Indeed, and if you use -Wall -Wextra -ansi -pedantic you get:

pointer-test.c:7:3: warning: format ‘%p’ expects type ‘void * ’, but argument 2 has type ‘int * ’

Same goes for using -std=c99 instead of -ansi, although casting to (void *) does get rid of the warning.

The Iceweasel name in Debian is not because Debian give away Firefox for free (as in no cost), it's because Mozilla only allow you to call the software Firefox if you use an official build (or get permission for non-official builds), and I believe the artwork also has a proprietary licence, making it non-free by Debian's definition.

Or you can turn your product into a web application which you host, and ignore the GPL entirely if it's not the Affero version. The same might apply if you have a small client binary which you distribute the code to, but keep the server code (based on a GPL project) secret.

LibreOffice is not GPL, it is LGPL (and also MPL for new contributions, which I believe is not GPL compatible). So depending on how OpenOffice.org used parts of LibreOffice, they might be able to include them. Admittedly it starts to get complicated when you have three licences involved.

I'm not sure what the benefit would be to LibreOffice if they merged under the ASF. It's already a large project with lots of contributors (and an excellent 'how to get involved' section which more OSS projects should emulate), infrastructure, mailing lists etc., so what would be the benefit of being an Apache project?

In my opinion, the best solution would be to leave OpenOffice.org to bitrot and ask developers to contribute to LibreOffice, given that it is the preferred suite of nearly every distribution already.

Handily, gcc has -Werror, which turns all warnings into errors. So -Wall -Wextra -Werror should catch most things.

Ah, I'm using a newer version of gcc, which seems to catch the warning regardless of the optimisation level (including none at all). The text of the man page also seems to be different.

If you're being sensible and using -Wall with gcc, it will pick up the %zu thing anyway:

sizeof-test.c: In function ‘main’: sizeof-test.c:5:3: warning: format ‘%d’ expects type ‘int’, but argument 2 has type ‘long unsigned int’

Compilers have warnings so that you don't have to remember archaic bits of C. :)

That only applies to warnings in conjunction with optimisations though, just turning optimisations on (as shown in the example slide) won't necessarily pick up uninitialised variables. For example, if I compile the example given in the slides with -O, -O1, -O2 or -O3 with gcc, I don't get an error/warning, but I do if I use -Wall.

Also, you can use -Wuninitialized without optimisations and it picks up the problem, at least in my version of gcc (4.5.2).

I'm a bit surprised by the suggestion that optimisation somehow makes the compiler work harder (e.g. catching uninitialised variables), isn't that what -W flags are for? I'm not sure that optimiser flags will catch anything with gcc that -Wall and -Wextra would miss.

I agree on the "I would never write code like this" point. I have never read the C standard and don't know off the top of my head what happens when you fail to initialise a static vs auto variable, but I don't really care because I would never write code which relies on whatever the implicit behaviour is. If I found code which did that on a project I'm involved with, I'd search for what is supposed to happen and then fix the code to make it explicit.

If I was interviewing, I'd much rather hire someone who said "I'd never write code like that" to someone who reels off what might happen in every possible scenario, unless I was hiring for a compiler writer.

I agree, I run XP and Vista under Virtualbox for testing websites, plus Debian for when I want to guarantee a clean development environment. I've never had any problems, other than with some Windows games which can't detect the CD drive because they assume it will be at D:\

Potentially easier link to read, in terms of the threading:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1200194

Even if you do, you're still liable for any charges which hit the account after it's been closed, at least according to every closed account letter I've received (in the UK, not sure what the process is in other countries). Plus you can't close an account until the balance is clear.

That's standard practice for all cards, it's not just AMEX (I believe the authority is based on the account rather than the card). In the UK, there's no easy way to cancel a recurring payment on a card other than contacting the entity taking the payments. If they refuse, you can complain to the card provider and they will eventually sort it out, but payments will still go through in the meantime.

Moral of the story: Don't let anyone have a recurring payment authorisation on your card.

Git supports hooks, so you could write a script to push a branch out to a server whenever a commit is made. That would be more sensible than running 'git pull' in a cron job.

You don't even have to be in the eurozone, I know UK companies which have euro accounts with international banks such as HSBC, which sit alongside their sterling accounts. The same goes for dollars, and probably other major currencies as well.

It's a bit dubious to say "Europe is the largest economy in the world", because it's not really a single economy, more a collection of economies of varying sizes, with different currencies, laws and banking systems.

You also have to be careful of what you mean by 'Europe', because there's the European Union, the European Economic Area, Europe the continent, Europe as used in the UK (which often means 'all those other foreign countries but not us' :) etc.

It's also different in those other countries in the world (yes, there are technology companies outside the US).

"This rectangle represents the calculation of sales x price, and the biggest rectangle represents the biggest profit."

Err, no. The biggest rectangle represents the biggest revenue. Profit != revenue, unless you have zero costs.

Why not just fill in the link after review but before publication? Presumably that happens with other information which identifies authors, such as their names and email addresses.

Although 'blind' reviewing is something of a misnomer in small research fields where the reviewer can probably guess at least one of the authors.

I presume they mean nginx will be the default web server, rather than removing Apache altogether? You can't just replace Apache with nginx, they're two different pieces of software - admittedly with some overlap.

They are generally not open to the public, and when they are you are rarely allowed to access electronic journals because of the licence agreement which the university has signed with the publisher.

Depends which country you are in - UK libraries don't usually have access to academic journals.

Is that a big problem? Replies are public, so signing up as another user is not leaking any private data.

Isn't a major selling point of GitHub the fact that you don't have to develop and maintain your own infrastructure, because they've already set everything up for you?