So I made two C components for PHP, almost 20 years ago now, and they are still part of standard PHP. Pushing C-stuff into PHP was comically trivial already 20 years ago, and more recent versions of PHP made it even easier. Some people do argue that PHP is a glue language that was built to absorb C libraries (I have heard Rasmus himself argue that, and it made a lot of sense at that time).

I recently reinstalled Oneric/ia64 on a few machines because of the recently included gcc-arm packages which always were a pain to self-compile.

I added a http-proxy (squid) on my local fileserver/NAS and used the netinstall through that proxy: No duplicate downloads, up to date packages for everything and I could start installing without waiting for the .ISO to finish downloading.

I highly recommend that method, and it should work for most distributions out there, possibly even for WindowsUpdate ;-)

It may well be that CompSci grads have higher expectations and refuse to take the first thing offered to them. When you hear about the salaries talked about on /., HN and Reddit, who the hell wants to take a job for £15k working for Asda as a maintenance programmer?

Another aspect is: how many CompSci grads will initially attempt to start their own consultancy or work freelance as opposed to Creative Arts grads? And what percentage of them will be successful? It's impossible to draw too much from these statistics, because they assume that all graduates are equally suited to traditional employment, and that traditional employment is what they seek. With CompSci, where you can make a living as a freelancer without needing too many contacts or a huge reputation, it ain't necessarily so...

Is everybody silly?

Usenet as a discussion forum is dead. Go elsewhere.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a discussion forum, run your own server. The bandwidth required is next to nothing - any small dedicated server carries the power and bandwidth to run a Usenet server that can easily make it to the top1000 in the server statistics for what remains of Usenet.
If you absolutely must have Usenet as a file sharing medium, well, commercial offers for that exist.

I teach an entry-level computing class in a large European university. So long as it doesn't comprise the entire assessment, students sitting together and working the lab out is a good thing, I think. It's how most of the real world works, after all. You need to have some individual assessment, but working in small study groups to crack a problem is probably the best way to learn. Having the peer-pressure to do the work, and to contribute to the group, can really encourage a student to surpass the effort that they may have been happy with individually.

Hm - it could be that he wasn't getting the support he needed. But, in my experience the people who cheat are not the type who would directly come and ask for support. Cheaters tend to be people who don't know the answers because they never really tried, and therefore don't have a huge emotional investment in the course. The cheating generally occurs as a last-minute attempt to hand in something 'reasonable' without having had to do the work.

I've found that the students that come and ask for help directly are a little too proud to scheme off someone else's work - and that since they are willing to work at the course and come for help when necessary, they rarely need to cheat.

Now that you have put these poll options up, I fully expect to see them appear on this site after a delay of 4-6 weeks. Thanks very much!

I'm not instigating an 'insane left vs. right debate' ;-)

I agree that your solution would be relatively cheap, but it would be wrong. There seems to be an attitude that those associated with the ??AAs deserve to be supported by the public. Why them, and not people who deliver measurable benefit to society - teachers, garbagemen, nurses and so forth?

I think I'd rather that artisits and musicians provide for themselves, just like everyone else. I don't owe them special rights to work created 50 years ago, nor do I owe them any special retirement fund that is denied to software developers, private tutors, or any other work-for-hire private market participant.

Corporate musicians and artists are better treated by our society than almost any class of persons throughout history. Yet we can probably all agree that these people contribute less to creativity and originality than most independent artists, where an 'artist' is defined purely as someone who creates something.

There's really nothing special about these people - music existed before the 1930s, and it will exist even if we allow the RIAA to go to the wall. Their advantage is hype, marketing and spin. They've no celestial right to that.

I can't help but think that this is a troll, and the mods have been taken for suckers.

If we look at the major creative works of the last 100 years, there's Disney animated film, the creation of Rock & Roll, the majority of Science Fiction, almost all Televisual and Film works and a bunch more things that have built on 'plundering the past of its riches'. Disney ripped off the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (Grimm and Andersen 'plundered' folklore), Rock & Roll was based on blues rhythms, most SciFi is folklore, rewritten with shiny robots and there's nothing on TV or in Film that doesn't rip-off Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde.

Yes, that's pretty facile, but you have to remember to what I am responding ;-) These things are all worth watching, and learning from. Simply because they are not entirely original does not mean that they are worthless...

Still, congratulations, DNS-and-BIND - I think that when you are unable to see any worth in contemporary culture, you qualify for a stick, a cap, a bus-pass and possibly a kid-infested lawn!

MySQL has already been forked. The project is called Drizzle.

Do you know that in Scotland, we deep-fry pizza? It's called pizza crunch, and it's disgusting! :-)