doesn't include paid for channels by the likes of sky or virgin. But to be fair, 99% of those channels are dire anyway

I currently work on the many ecommerce websites for a v. large company. My job was advertised to PHP developers and the company cross-trained me because we use Perl for pretty much all our backend code. There's pretty much no PHP. So after a year of working on the framework and in the environment - I think I can say I'm confident in my Perl abilities but am very aware that I'm losing my skills as a PHP programmer.

So while I'm thankful of the learning opportunity - I realise there's a lot more PHP jobs out there than there are Perl jobs. I'd rather be really good at PHP that really good at Perl. I'm aware that the longer time I spend at my current company, the less transferable my programming skills will be. Which isn't necessarily an issue - I could always go down the management route.

Just for the record; I'm one of those who maintain there's nothing particularly wrong with PHP as a language, the issue is how people use it.

Which I believe is actually illegal in the UK right now - I think the hose pipe ban is already in effect this year

Then I guess that includes small indie games that have in-game currency or use Facebook credits (which are bought for real world money) should also be shut down. Or casinos that use chips rather than letting you bet at the tables with real money?

Point is, companies have had their own currencies for years. While some people might disagree with those practises - company-specific currency isn't intrinsically bad

Parent has hit the nail right on the head. I used to work on Facebook games for an indie games company and now I'm in charge of 'doing Facebook' for another company and so cross domain Iframe cookie problems are something I come across a lot. Maintaining user sessions inside iframes isn't straightforward.

Relatively recently, Facebook updated their apps platform so that app iframes to 3rd party sites are POSTed to via JavaScript to avoid safari's limitation on accepting 3rd party cookies. Previously the work around was to have some js in your page that would post to itself - both methods trick safari into thinking the user actively navigated to the Iframe and so should accept cookies.

Facebook have yet to implement a trick to make ie accept 3rd party cookies and so the widely used work around is use either a genuine or dud p3p header.

Yes, these hacks and workarounds are nasty and yes they're bad for standards - but if browser vendors insist on such privacy controls they need to make it much more user friendly for users to whitelist sites. Most of users we get through Facebook don't know what cookies are - they just want our apps to work. Blocking cookies without even prompting the user is not the way forward.

I'd rather have adverts that are targeted to my personal interests and 'likes' than be bombarded with irrelevant crap that I'm not at all interested in. Do I want to have farmville adverts showing up on my FB page? No - I'm not a teenage girl. Do I want to be notified when ebuyer or have a sale on? Yes. What's more relevant to me; A band I like is playing a concert in my area, or, A rapper who makes my ears bleed is doing a gig in a different country?

Say what you want about Facebook - but I like how their adverts quite often for something I'm genuinely interested in. IMO, that's what ALL advertising should be like. No matter how many times I see the Always adverts on TV - I'm never going to buy sanitary pads.

This isn't advertising, it's reporting the news.

Should /. not report on new Windows releases? Should it not report on major Linux distro releases? A tech news site not reporting on new tech releases would be a pretty crap site.

But AIM wasn't that popular over here in the UK, and I suspect the same situation in most other countries.

Facebook/Myspace/etc are used much more widely than AIM ever was.

Every result in [search engine of your choice] will be "You need enable cookies to use this website, yay or nay" because search engines won't be able to index the website's content without themselves accepting cookies.

A much better way to implement this unnecessary cookie law would be to put the responsibility on browser vendors instead of website owners. Something along the lines of "This website wants to set cookies which may be necessary for it to work correctly, do you want to allow this? yay/nay". Someone/"they" could even make a standard that allows websites to explain to browsers the reasoning behind each cookie set. Of course, this has the problem that too many people don't update their browsers - but those people bring it on themselves and should therefore not be "protected" by this law.

The accomplishment is nonetheless pretty damn impressive. I wonder how long it took to stitch all those photos together.

From the summary; "months" (:

Wikipedia lists more than a couple linux viruses.

I don't know where you got the notion of me being on the "*nix is just as vulnerable as Windows" bandwagon, at no point did I say anything along those lines. Anybody who assumes that *nix platforms have no native viruses aside from rootkits is utterly naive. Yes, *nix viruses aren't as widespread as their Windows counterparts, but they do exist, they can cause significant damage and *nix platforms are not inherently immune.

It would be relatively simple to write a script that would send itself to everybody in a user's address book and then execute "rm -fr /" with root permissions without even having to exploit some hole in the kernel or whatever. Never underestimate the end user's stupidity. A lot of Ubuntu (for example) newbies don't really understand why many operations prompt them for a password and a malicious script could abuse this by posing as something harmless but ask for root permissions. Many desktop Linux newbies are the same people that turn of Windows' UAC prompts because they're annoying.

An OS can be as secure as you want on paper, but no OS is 100% secure if it's got any human interaction.

This is exactly why antivirus software for Linux already exists, they probably catch a couple of Linux viruses too, but the majority of their definitions are Windows viruses.

I've set up ClamAV on my Linux mail server to catch most dodgy stuff before it reaches my Windows PC. I also recently installed it onto my Linux Netbook to scan a friend's external hard drive for a Windows virus. I haven't been following the latest security news, so didn't particularly want to risk plugging it into my friend's or my Windows machine to scan it.

So I agree, there definitely is a use for Linux-based anti virus software...even if my own uses are mainly concerned with protecting Windows machines.

A machine using another machine to make coffee? Should we really be teaching robots to be slave drivers?

If you hear the same rumour from 2 different people/sources, it's true. This also holds true for rumours that you yourself started - if you hear it back from 2 different people, it must be true.