> I don't think I've heard the immagration from India bit yet
You call yourself Romani and don't know the history of your people? I'm sorry, but that's pretty pathetic, especially since you're calling others names for their ignorance.
And you've just proven that metadata is useful for media-type files. Unfortunately this isn't the case for all types of files. Take for example DLLs. One of the systems on my machine has over 400 DLLs spread across about ten folders, all supporting one executable or another, with cryptic names such as VSDRW.DLL. Categorizing these files using metadata would be pretty much futile, because individually they're uninteresting to the user, only the application cares.
Let's face it, both location-based and metadata-based referencing have their place, with each having strengths and weaknesses for different usage models. I have worked for years with a document management system that functions as a bit bucket and depends heavily on meaningful metadata. For simple and convenient use cases such as yours it can be demonstrated to be indeed extremely useful and convenient. The problem is that in real world use many types of files quickly degenerate into endless revisions of the same document. Take fifteen revisions of your resume, where you tweaked it a little bit here and there each time. The metadata of all these revisions would most likely read remarkably identical and non-specific, unless you either put a lot of effort into updating the metadata of each revision in a meaningful way, or have a very powerful and intelligent autoextraction system. The point is, even metadata is no panachea--it's only as good and useful and you make it, and the more useful it is, the more effort it takes to keep it that way.
What you have done is state the bleeding obvious, and that is not at issue at all here. The question that this thread is REALLY grappling with is: just because a company offers us a carrot, should we accept it and rely on it as a vital component of OUR business? Microsoft has every right to operate their business within the law, and part of that right is also to be able to offer the world new and wonderful file formats. What you have to ask yourself though is whether it is prudent for YOUR business to rely on THEIR promise. If you take their carrot without even asking yourself that question, you're a fool. If you tackle the question, and after much deliberation decide that the carrot is worth accepting, kudos to you; just hope that the deal won't be changed on you later on. But don't chastise those who examine the deal and find it wanting.
Or better yet, why don't they work on making it POSSIBLE for people to actually BUY existing music they WANT? Case in point, iTunes lets you browse foreign music offerings and even listen to the samples, but alas you can't buy the albums. Here is the money, burning a hole in my pocket, yet they're apparently not interested enough in it to bother enabling me to give it to them. I guess they're more interested in suing me for trying to obtain it through other means than in actually just plain selling it to me.
In one of the Flash animations it is being passed from the left hand to the right one while flipping it around, seeming to suggest that you can use it upside down as well.
Right, MS have a long and illustrious track record of self-deprecation--as long as it relates to the PAST and not something that is a current potential money maker. BG has no problem saying "didn't I look silly in that hat", but he will never in a million years say "gosh, that WMP10 GUI sure is one ugly bugger!"
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't admire them too much since they only won because they pooled their resources efficiently and had good programming practices? Sheesh, those cheating bastards!
Actually, you could theoretically get a good image if the person simply had a TV on in the room, tuned to a known channel--the bigger the TV, the better. You could synchronize your sensor to the channel and use it to normalize your light readings. This could even be done asynchronously at a later time.
I find the SVG approach more interesting because it's an open solution (well, except for the various viewer implementations at the moment). I don't necessarily see how the Batik viewer comes into this though, because their sample font demos work just fine in the Adobe viewer also.
This technology is interesting way beyond just the web. It could be used by organizations that require a consistent platform-independent representation of critical documents. Currently PDF is often the choice for that sort of thing, and probably will be for a while because it is mature in both display and printing. But having SVG become a viable option together with better viewers, or even browser-integrated SVG capabilities, can only be a good thing in the long run.
In my experience the weak point of most cables, and the one that mostly leads to perceived sound difference between cheap and expensive cables is the solder joint between the cable conductors and the connector. Cheap cables often have really crappy soldering and no proper stress relief, so as the cables plugged and unplugged repeatedly, the already crappy solder joints are stressed even more. I've opened connectors on cheap cables and found just one or two remaining strands of the conductors still attached to the joint. The thing is, even a single fiber will still work fine at reasonable volumes, but if you drive up that 200W receiver, you might be liable to cook that wire.
Don't rob him of his fantasies. If he defines the cables needed as a percentage of the system cost, then let him be. For systems over $200 you definitely need the Mosters. Actually, on occasion it has been observed that they are needed even for systems at $179.99, and there is anecdotal evidence of one case where they were needed at the $149.99 price point, though that is up for debate.
I doubt visual programming will ever significantly replace textual representation, at least in our lifetimes. As an adjunct--just another tool in the box--it can be very useful, but not more than that. Some aspects of programming lend themselves more naturally to textual representation, others to visual representation, and forcing each into the other paradigm only makes things awkward. Take the GUI and command line: some aspects of file manipulation are more quickly and naturally done using the mouse, others are infinitely more efficient on the command line. Given a window containing a list of files, it is quicker to point to a file and either launch it or display its properties using a mouse, yet it is much quicker to display a list of files using wildcards. Then again, selecting a set of random files (without easily selectable common patterns in their names) from a displayed list is quicker with the mouse than on the command line. See a pattern here? Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither is likely to displace the other entirely.
Similarly, even given high level visual manipulation of program structure, there comes a point (quite frequently, actually) where the details must be fiddled with, and you're back to dragging around IFs and WHILEs with the mouse. That's where a popup code editor is much more efficient, and you're back to a complementary relationship.
Why hasn't there been more focus on VP?!
on
True Visual Programming
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Because, while on the surface it looks like a really neat thing, in the real world productivity and usability quickly take a nose dive. Visual tools are good for smaller graphs where you can keep most of the view onscreen at once (e.g. filters or rules like in email apps, or workflow graphs), but once the graph grows beyond a certain size it quickly becomes unmanagable. Besides, what's quicker, typing "for (int i = 0; i max; i++)" or dragging an "if" element from a toolbar and dropping it on an empty area of the form, activating and filling out its fields, and connecting it to the rest of the program flow?
You must be thinking of Delta, because those were my exact experiences flying them to Europe the last two times. I was actually actively insulted and yelled at. Can't say I ever experienced that sort of thing on Lufthansa, and the planes were nicer than the MD-11 cattle cars. I'm not sure how many people will share your opinion of Lufthansa. I'd put them up there with SAS and Qantas.
The real improvement is the support for DD 5.1 Surround Sound. When that subwoofer kicks you off your seat with a mega burp, you'll really know that those files are gone.
Re:Good LORD it's got some useless stuff!
on
KDE 3.4 Released
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
When the news headline reads "Two weeks till President Bush is reelected", they fail to be a news channel. Out with the pom-poms and kick those legs!
> I was approached by petitioners from PETA who were upset about
> the treatment of the horses in the latest Conan movie
Never mind the horses--what about the audience who had to endure this movie?
> Okay, let's just suppose that viruses were a technological development of an ancient civilization
That's quite a rant, based just on a supposition.
> I don't think I've heard the immagration from India bit yet
You call yourself Romani and don't know the history of your people? I'm sorry, but that's pretty pathetic, especially since you're calling others names for their ignorance.
And you've just proven that metadata is useful for media-type files. Unfortunately this isn't the case for all types of files. Take for example DLLs. One of the systems on my machine has over 400 DLLs spread across about ten folders, all supporting one executable or another, with cryptic names such as VSDRW.DLL. Categorizing these files using metadata would be pretty much futile, because individually they're uninteresting to the user, only the application cares.
Let's face it, both location-based and metadata-based referencing have their place, with each having strengths and weaknesses for different usage models. I have worked for years with a document management system that functions as a bit bucket and depends heavily on meaningful metadata. For simple and convenient use cases such as yours it can be demonstrated to be indeed extremely useful and convenient. The problem is that in real world use many types of files quickly degenerate into endless revisions of the same document. Take fifteen revisions of your resume, where you tweaked it a little bit here and there each time. The metadata of all these revisions would most likely read remarkably identical and non-specific, unless you either put a lot of effort into updating the metadata of each revision in a meaningful way, or have a very powerful and intelligent autoextraction system. The point is, even metadata is no panachea--it's only as good and useful and you make it, and the more useful it is, the more effort it takes to keep it that way.
I would have thought the real problem would be finding a spot to touch down amongst all the flags up there.
What you have done is state the bleeding obvious, and that is not at issue at all here. The question that this thread is REALLY grappling with is: just because a company offers us a carrot, should we accept it and rely on it as a vital component of OUR business? Microsoft has every right to operate their business within the law, and part of that right is also to be able to offer the world new and wonderful file formats. What you have to ask yourself though is whether it is prudent for YOUR business to rely on THEIR promise. If you take their carrot without even asking yourself that question, you're a fool. If you tackle the question, and after much deliberation decide that the carrot is worth accepting, kudos to you; just hope that the deal won't be changed on you later on. But don't chastise those who examine the deal and find it wanting.
> clearance sales are wonderful things, especially when they involve devices with LCD screens.
That's what I thought right away--a $12 color LCD for embedded projects. That's cheaper than anything I've seen so far.
Or better yet, why don't they work on making it POSSIBLE for people to actually BUY existing music they WANT? Case in point, iTunes lets you browse foreign music offerings and even listen to the samples, but alas you can't buy the albums. Here is the money, burning a hole in my pocket, yet they're apparently not interested enough in it to bother enabling me to give it to them. I guess they're more interested in suing me for trying to obtain it through other means than in actually just plain selling it to me.
I was always wondering what a PSU would look like if Monster made it. Now I know!
In one of the Flash animations it is being passed from the left hand to the right one while flipping it around, seeming to suggest that you can use it upside down as well.
Right, MS have a long and illustrious track record of self-deprecation--as long as it relates to the PAST and not something that is a current potential money maker. BG has no problem saying "didn't I look silly in that hat", but he will never in a million years say "gosh, that WMP10 GUI sure is one ugly bugger!"
> The 700+ years of agressive militaristic culture could also have something to do with it as well
As opposed to the peace and love spread by the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world.
> Soccer players refer to rugby as a game for men with funny shaped balls.
More like "a game for men who like to stick their heads into other men's balls."
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't admire them too much since they only won because they pooled their resources efficiently and had good programming practices? Sheesh, those cheating bastards!
Actually, you could theoretically get a good image if the person simply had a TV on in the room, tuned to a known channel--the bigger the TV, the better. You could synchronize your sensor to the channel and use it to normalize your light readings. This could even be done asynchronously at a later time.
Not unlike the way that most countries with the word "democratic" in the name tended to be on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
I find the SVG approach more interesting because it's an open solution (well, except for the various viewer implementations at the moment). I don't necessarily see how the Batik viewer comes into this though, because their sample font demos work just fine in the Adobe viewer also.
This technology is interesting way beyond just the web. It could be used by organizations that require a consistent platform-independent representation of critical documents. Currently PDF is often the choice for that sort of thing, and probably will be for a while because it is mature in both display and printing. But having SVG become a viable option together with better viewers, or even browser-integrated SVG capabilities, can only be a good thing in the long run.
In my experience the weak point of most cables, and the one that mostly leads to perceived sound difference between cheap and expensive cables is the solder joint between the cable conductors and the connector. Cheap cables often have really crappy soldering and no proper stress relief, so as the cables plugged and unplugged repeatedly, the already crappy solder joints are stressed even more. I've opened connectors on cheap cables and found just one or two remaining strands of the conductors still attached to the joint. The thing is, even a single fiber will still work fine at reasonable volumes, but if you drive up that 200W receiver, you might be liable to cook that wire.
Don't rob him of his fantasies. If he defines the cables needed as a percentage of the system cost, then let him be. For systems over $200 you definitely need the Mosters. Actually, on occasion it has been observed that they are needed even for systems at $179.99, and there is anecdotal evidence of one case where they were needed at the $149.99 price point, though that is up for debate.
I doubt visual programming will ever significantly replace textual representation, at least in our lifetimes. As an adjunct--just another tool in the box--it can be very useful, but not more than that. Some aspects of programming lend themselves more naturally to textual representation, others to visual representation, and forcing each into the other paradigm only makes things awkward. Take the GUI and command line: some aspects of file manipulation are more quickly and naturally done using the mouse, others are infinitely more efficient on the command line. Given a window containing a list of files, it is quicker to point to a file and either launch it or display its properties using a mouse, yet it is much quicker to display a list of files using wildcards. Then again, selecting a set of random files (without easily selectable common patterns in their names) from a displayed list is quicker with the mouse than on the command line. See a pattern here? Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither is likely to displace the other entirely.
Similarly, even given high level visual manipulation of program structure, there comes a point (quite frequently, actually) where the details must be fiddled with, and you're back to dragging around IFs and WHILEs with the mouse. That's where a popup code editor is much more efficient, and you're back to a complementary relationship.
Because, while on the surface it looks like a really neat thing, in the real world productivity and usability quickly take a nose dive. Visual tools are good for smaller graphs where you can keep most of the view onscreen at once (e.g. filters or rules like in email apps, or workflow graphs), but once the graph grows beyond a certain size it quickly becomes unmanagable. Besides, what's quicker, typing "for (int i = 0; i max; i++)" or dragging an "if" element from a toolbar and dropping it on an empty area of the form, activating and filling out its fields, and connecting it to the rest of the program flow?
You must be thinking of Delta, because those were my exact experiences flying them to Europe the last two times. I was actually actively insulted and yelled at. Can't say I ever experienced that sort of thing on Lufthansa, and the planes were nicer than the MD-11 cattle cars. I'm not sure how many people will share your opinion of Lufthansa. I'd put them up there with SAS and Qantas.
The real improvement is the support for DD 5.1 Surround Sound. When that subwoofer kicks you off your seat with a mega burp, you'll really know that those files are gone.
OP: well, there's your answer. This guy needs it.