Posts by Geoff Edwards

PHP and Cutenews

PHP and Cutenews

Php and Cutenews: backwards compatible

I use Cutenews and have done so for several years. But owing to PHP headpeople backwards compatiblity is no longer supported. My largest website is freshfordsomerset.co.uk it has important material that will not be accessible, unless I pay my host monthly charges amounting to over £80 a year for extended support. The website is not a commercial project and I cannot afford to continue with it. Perhaps there is no real need to have extended support from the host? Since the website runs from Cute news which is a php powered site. The user does not have to write php to its site. In the past I have completed websites for a client and all they need is to access the Cutenews file. I do not even think that the PHP can be altered by the user. At present Cutenews development is stuck because a PHP8 Cutenews version does not exist yet. Yet without backwards compatability, users will be held up whilst Cutenews is updated, or possibly not. What I need to know is wether I can convince my host that extended support is not required.

PHP 7.0 arrives, so go forth and upgrade if you dare

Re: just my 2 cents...

I have been hit by the PHP 7 upgrade. It may or may not good for programers but I use CuteNews and my older sites will not work under PHP 7. I am paying my hosting company to allow me to continue to use PHP 5.4. I have tried upgrading the CuteNews installations and stoped after having to mess around, spending hours feeding existing news posts through CKEditor as after the upgrade all the posts (over 300) were showing the HTML code. My Search Box failed as well persisting to stop with a message that the text entry in the box was too short. I went through the source code and found where the file search.php tested the entry and found that the entry was there was correct - for some reason the logic was not working. CutePHP has not been able to guide me through a way to update my installations. The issue is that I doubt whether anyone but an expert could get my sites working under PHP 7. The PHP gurus should have realised that making PHP 7 not upgradable would put some users out of business. I think that I will need to ask CutePHP how much they would ask to ungrade the two remaining sites for me.

'Indestructible' rootkit enslaves 4.5m PCs in 3 months

Indestructible? And almost inifinite waste of time and money!

It's a great shame that all the money that is being spent to combat these deliberate attacks on people, that's everyone, East and West whatever their nationality, whatever their religion, whatever their political belief is being wasted. This attack and other attacks is in reality an utter waste of precious treasure that could be better spent on helping people to have a decent, rather than a squalid life. It's not just the money but the time we are all wasting on protecting our systems from these attacks or rather cleaning out their evil residue. It's not as if one can isolate one's computer from the outside world either. Has anyone calculated just how much money is being spent on protecting us? Back in the good old days it was just the Stoned Virus that one had to contend with!

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

The end of hard drives?

I still don't get this cloud thing. If its mainly a question of synching devices fair enough, storing my sensitive data no thanks. As for the end of hard drives? doesn't make any sense to me.

I am just getting around to doing some video edting and now have an HD camcorder. Judging buy (ahem) the price I paid for it there is a large market. and people will want to store their footage if not edit them. Without a large hard drive or two I can't see how I can make films and store the original material except by using SD cards, which I'll have to index by assigning a number to them as there is no room to write anything of any length. I would have thought that hard drives have a long healthy life ahead of them. SSD are faster but more expensive and for large storage needs the hard drive makes more sense.

Tape? I am just completing several weeks work copying VHS and SVHS footage to DV tape and will then be able to edit the material after capturing it to my PC. The VHS tape dates back to the early 1990s and amazingly has mainly been free of dropout and other defects.

Photos? these are smaller for storage compared to video but there are still worries about the possible loss of images from hard drives and other storage. Some photographers are even transferring digital material to film, which at least one can see! What I need is a means to store a lot of video material bearing in mind that one hour of raw footage needs 13GB of storage. I also have audio recordings - 83 GB recorded over 18 months or so. I would have thought that there is a growing need for Joe Public to have more hard drive storage than is present in their PC. My Dell 690 has space for five hard drives but then that is a workstation. Yet at present I am using a 490 with three hard drives: a 500GB and two one Terabyte drives. I do have several external hard drives but these are largely unused - they are not very large anyway.

For security a RAID 5 setup would be desirable? So I can hardly imagine a future reduction in hard drive sales, rather the reverse. What I would like is a cheap "box" that will allow access to a bank of Terabyte hard drives over a gigabyte network.

At present I use SyncToy 2 to sync folders over my network, I am not tempted to use "cloud" storage, the closest I have got to the cloud is to open a Dropbox account, at present unused. But then I don't use many portable devices. My grandchildren might be more interested in not having to syhnch their iPods on a PC but then, they have the PCs and what school is mad enough to restrict their students to a Mac envirionment?

I have never had a PC fail on me, ie it had to be scrapped due to mechanical failure. And my first PC was an Amstrad 386, which was reluctantly taken to recycling, simply as it didn't have a CD drive and at that time an external CD drive would have set me back £140.

Mac users urged to ditch Safari

Not a PC?

"Whether it runs Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD, DOS, OS/2, RISC OS, or any other flavour, or has no hard drive it's still a PC."

I think the the term Personal Computer although it should refer to Apple Macs as well is not used that way. Because the PC is an open design that may be manufactured by any company it is distinct from the Apple Mac that is not an open design. When people talk about the desktop or laptop computer they are referring to machines that probably are running MS Wndows.

Historically we are using a term that used to be "IBM PC" and this became shortened to PC - the key is the common hardware platform. The Apple Mac is not a PC becomes it doesn't have a common hardware platform as do all other personal computers.

UK.Gov green lights nuclear power

Building Nuclear Power Stations is Hardly Part of the Answer

Its like burning your antique furniture to stay warm. All the fuel we use is in short supply, most of these fuels have valuable ingredients, so should not be wasted. when they have been used up they are gone, and gone for good. In less than a hundred years we will be subject to being virtually destitute due to the rising cost of living.

And its not just the fuel that is limited in its supply, all the other minerals are as well. The cost in real terms -energy -to get them and move them to where they are needed is counter productive. Even the arabs are short of sand! And we used to be the World's largest producer of salt, not any more.

Solution: stop wasting energy (and money), build machines to make use of renewable sources of energy, phrase out the internal combustion engine, make do with the roads we've got, restrict air transport to essential services, grow food locally, only make durable and useful products, ensure that work is a sensible really valuable activity, use extra clothing to keep warm, walk or cycle, . . .

The Electric Car Conspiracy ... that never was

electric car vs petroil

Not viable, expensive? Some sort of electric tricycle could be built. There is a diesel motorbike that can do 1,000 km on a tankful. We could possibly use little electric cars for local use. But in the UK, why should consumers opt for buying more than one vehicle when they will have to pay double road tax and their second vehicle will be subject to insurance with ( I may be wrong) initially no entitlement to a no claims bonus. No conspiracy, just no proper incentive for folks to buy two vehicles. And we do (most of us) require a vehicle that can take us and our family on holiday etc.

Met's de Menezes photo 'manipulated', says prosecution

Menezies and the Police

No ones mentioned that Mr Menezies was reported as working illegally here as an electrician. If so, he might have been concerned that he might be being watched by the Home Office (or whichever state dept that deals with aliens) and thus would have been likely to behave suspiciously to trained police. If he was, on that fateful day, somewhat aware that he was being watched and possibly being followed, he would have probably added, by his body movements, to the perception by the police that this man was a danger and could indeed be the wanted man Osman.

As for the facts of the unfortunate shooting of Mr Menezies, it doesn't make any sense, except as an attempt to stop a bomb going off; unless the police concerned panicked. I don't know how much space is required under clothing to conceal a deadly bomb so the absence of a backback doesn't negate the possibility that Menezies could have been a bomber.

Thinking by Mad Mike certainly is a very reasonable piece of thinking. It seems that many people have a very shallow perception of the nature of the individuals who work in the police force.

Photofit? Well why not vary the size of an image to match another, no problem there. Alter the proportion? No, except that the photos of both men may not be recent. They also, may not have been full frontal images and may have been altered to allow for this? The proportions of a person's face may change if they have lost or put on weight for example. Camera lens? can distort features, ideally to ensure that a person's nose isn't made to appear larger than normal a portrait type lens should be used; is there a variable here that also justifies image manipulation? Alternatively, a deliberate fit could they really be that stupid? Another factor is that it is rare, even, that both sides of a person's own face are identical!

Appearance? Some Welshmen look Middle Eastern in appearance! I don't see that much difference between nationalities: hair/eye colour, nose shape, skin colour? I read somewhere that if we take 12 people one of them will look somewhat similar to ourselves. As we get older and grayer and we get some sun we can become even more similar. I was looking at a Japanese chap on television and thought to myself he looks a bit like me.