I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?
Negative on both accounts, Ghost Rider. HTML -was- a markup language, then it got mangled into a layout language in the NS vs IE wars when the WWW exploded. Before this time it hadn't really progressed into the massive pile of dung we have now -- but when things really took off before a professional world could develop to fill the gap we were screwed from that point forth.
As we sit now, with HTML 4.0, things like <font> and <center> are deprecated, and frowned up. Sure, the browsers still support it, but the W3C is as least making a point about the issue. The adoption of CSS to get some nice fine-grained controll over layout is taking the burder off HTML and making it easier on developers to build flashy pages while keeping their markup somewhat pure to it's true form. It's still bastardized, and I've done it myself when it was conveinent; but with the growing number of different browsers out there it's -way- easier now to just send a new stylesheet with the same markup to diffent user agents. Much much nicer than the days where you had to write some God awful pile of crap to get NS4 and IE4 to do the same thing -- relying on unspoken order of importantce that the two different browsers placed on different tags and attributes.
Writing convoluted HTML to get the desired effect is very quickly becoming very inefficient when compared to CSS. Once NS4 dies the horrid death it should have years ago things will be much brighter. Further, CSS is a dream when it comes to actually managing your look and feel over time when used properly. As CSS is new it's still being bastardized by web-monkeys that don't understand that it's a -further- clarification of the data contained within the generic HTML markup. Your style shouldn't be "blueMediumTextOnDarkBack" -- it should be "txtCustomerName", or something similar. Describe the data -- not the style. When you change your look to now put customer names as green text on a black background your 'blueMediumTextOnDarkBack' name no longer holds true, and only confuses further maintainers, unless you want to search and replace all the blueMediumTextOnDarkBlack's with your new name, but if you do that you might accidentally hose up something else using that style that never should have been sharing one with the customer name data.
Abstraction -must- be applied to content delivery and display systems for the web to grow in the future. For programmers to ignore this, or to just plain not care, is every bit as reprehensible as not using proper seperation in the layering of components in your application itself.
XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.
You're at least on the right track with the stylesheets, but XML is certainly not something that search engines will be able to parse. You can make up your own tags for crying out loud! They won't know what to do with my custom XML tag: <customer-sucess-story>, but they'll know what to do once it's translated into <h2 style="customer-success">... they know that h2 is a header, therefore important, and the data in there is more important than what I have in my <span> most likely.
XML + XSLT -> HTML + CSS translations are a good thing, I agree there. But the search engines will still parse the HTML and CSS, and not the original XML -- the XML is just garbage to them, just like our HTML is garbage to them right now.
Now, to anybody who reads this and thinks, "Dude it's just HTML... shutup." -- go to w3c.org and print out the HTML 4.01 spec and read it. There's probably a lot in that 400 page document that you never knew about -- and there's a buttload of stuff in there I -still- don't know.
I think you're way off base for the uses of this, but I do agree that it might be a nice feature for some travelers -- especially on a 12 hour long flight. The idea of a portal-site or something onto that nature got my interest though.
Being able to arrange, or re-arrange your rental car as you get closer to your destination might be nice; or making arrangements via the web for a cab to pick you up once you're 95% sure of what your arrival time would be. You might want to make reservations at a restaunt near by, or just start figuring out what you're going to do to satisfy your gut once you hit the ground.
You might want to let your client know a head of time you'll be 2 hours late -- because they found some play-doh in a guy's sneaker which delayed the flight.
If you're renting a car you might save some time on your journey by checking traffic reports a few minutes before touchdown, although that one's a little far out there.
In a business situation $30 is worth about a half an hour to maybe an hour of somebody's time; or about 15 minutes to me (perosnally*) when I'm off in a world I'm not entirely familiar with. If I can shave 10 minutes off my rental-car pickup time, 10 minutes hunting for a good burger, and present a more professional image to a client (or boss, whatever have you) by sending out a nice update that I'll be 2 hours late thanks to Mr. Play-Doh that's well worth $30 bucks to me.
I wouldn't want something like this so I could keep working and sending updates back to the company mid-flight -- I'd want to use it to make my arrival go as smooth as possible.
*: Being in an unfamiliar place and not knowing where to go, where I am, or what's going on is insanely frustrating for me when I've got somewhere to get to.
> I don't think there's all that much information in structured markup. Certainly no where near as much as in the boring old plain text, so why focus on semantic analysis of the tags rather than the text?
Because HTML is supposed to mark-up the -content- of a webpage, and not be used as a layout engine. The data is contained within the tags, so you're right there, but the tags should describe what the data actually is.
Things within <table>'s are supposed to represent tabular data, but we all too often use them for getting things in the right spot of the page. The tags <b>, <i> and <u> should be banned entirely from HTML, as they describe the data visually, and not describe their content. You may want your address to be displayed in italics, but that's really a locale setting. You -should- put an address in an <address> tag so that the search engines can properly identify it as an address, and so that any user that visits your site gets the address displayed in the manner that they want addresses displayed. If your search phrase was contained within an <h2> block that likely means there's a whole section of data after it that talks about the subject. However, if your search string shows up in a <p> tag it's quite likely that it's simply a single sentence that happens to match your search criteria. That's why the <font> tag is deprecated IIRC, and should never ever be used. A <span> with a stylesheet setting lets everybody know that the data in there is really no more important than anything else, and you're just wishing to make it look differently.
It's far too late for this trend to be reversed I'm afraid, at least not for 3-4 browser generations and possibly a new HTML/CSS standard comes out. Until that time we'll probably just have to live with indexers flattening out a page and giving nearly every bit of information contained within the same level of importance.
'the internet' is faster then my connection to it, does it really matter?
Well, you're looking at this from the perspective as a "home user" where you're a leaf on the Internet. That's okay and all, but there's more than a few Slashdotter's here that actually have to think about this kind of stuff.
With a home connection you're a "leaf" -- you're on the outside and you only have one route to the internet -- your ISP. That is your "gateway" and there's nothing you can do about it.
The article's really talking about major ISPs, and how they peer with other networks. They have multiple routes to a single destination, and these routing tables can get pretty big when you're a big player on a big hub. I'm by no means an expert on the details of it, but I do appreciate the thought that goes into such decisions.
When you want to send a packet to NYC from wherever you are, your network only has once choice: Send it to the ISP and let them figure out what to do with it.
Your ISP may or may not have a choice what to do with it though. If they're a multi-homed place (meaning they have 2 or more connections) they have to decide what route to pass it off to. One of them might only require 1 hop to get to NYC, and the other might require 3. The simple answer is to just send it to the 1 hop route, but in the grand scheme of things it's better to send it to the 3-hop route sometimes because it's less congested.
That's just the tip of the iceberg really, but that might enlighten the issue a bit. It's certainly NOT a concern for a home user, so I can understand your post -- but to anybody that runs an ISP it's a fairly interesting topic.
1) MS has monopoly (practically) on web browsers. 2) Opera is a competitor. 3) MS is using it's webiste (a different product) to maintain it's monopoly
Apparently you didn't read the original thread very well. The -30 in the stylesheets was to work around a bug in Opera 6.0. There's no foul play here. Opera 7 fixed the bug, MS didn't add more voodoo to their website to account for that. Just that they even -tried- working around Opera 6's buggy CSS engine is a good sign. It's a nice gesture.
Please, people, stop moderating uninformed comments up to 5.
You can't trust Microsoft. Unless they had signed a solid, binding legal document...
You can't even trust them then. Unless you've only been hitting Slashdot for the past week you couldn't have possibly missed the whole Sun vs. MS deal with Java. Legally binding document or not -- they'll still try and f-over the competition.
Now they're trying to get a legally binding document to help them cover Java, web services, XML, RPC, and SOAP by wrapping it up in somthing called.NET.
If it were IBM, Apple, or Sun I'd give them the credibility to assume they're patenting it to keep it from being non-controlled, and just letting the patent ride out so nobody else can patent it and enforce it. Not with Microsoft though; for them it's all about the short-term money.
If they can't provide 3 meg/s to every person on the system at the same time with "always on" than maybe they need to re-think their business model.
Fess up, was it PCP or crack you had as dessert after your last meal? You can't possibly be serious.
I'm sold a 768kbps DSL line for $44USD a month. For an ISP to purchase a 1.5mbps connection it will cost them at -least- $600USD a month, and that's a good deal on a T1 line around here. They'll get a discount if they purchase a DS3 line and get a big hunk of bandwidth at once, but it wont' be anywhere near $44 a month and certainly not less.
So, you're seriously proposing that "always on" cable and DSL connections should cost upwards of $300+ a month if you're getting 768k? And the people with 3mbps cable modem should be paying $1200 a month? That sounds like a rock-solid business plan to me!
Please, put at least minimal thought into thing such as this before critizing the business practices of an industry that's been around for quite some time now.
No matter how easy you make it there is always some idiot who can manage to screw it up.
Ahhhh... yes. I have named this the Jorgensen Rule. He was a professor mine in college, whom I could have learned many a thing from had I actually paid attention in his class and used him as a mentor. Wonderful guy. Pure pity that I had him in a class I cared little about. At any rate, here in the story of his which prompted me to make a software development rule about him:
We were going over finite state machines, and what there uses were. He was an accomplished real-world developer and always had stories about how things applied to the real world.
He had worked on an ATM machine once, and the guys had this thing nailed down. Every possible event had a response, there was no way to crash this machine in theory. They developed the machine, then deployed it knowing that there was no way to throw it into an unrecoverable state. It was perfect, the ultimate programmer's dream.
One day, they're informed one of their ATM's crashed. "Impossible!" say the programmers. What could have possibly been done to crash their wonderful state machine? They had accounted for -EVERY- possible situation!
Well, one of their machines, in Germany I beleive had in fact crashed. It seems that they had never accounted for a drunk German sticking a Fish-wich McDonald's sandwich into the deposit slot. This did in fact bring the machine down, which resulted in the Jorgensen rule:
You can make it fool proof; but you can't make it damn fool proof!
I love educational topics... so I'm probably going to jump all over this thread.:)
I hope that the school is encouraging the kids to use this new knowlege as a jumpstart into college.
Ditto. I was horribly frusted when I got to college to find out that a large portion of the CS students knew nothing about computers at all. It completely blew my mind that you'd get into this field and not have some programming background, or knowledge of any alternative OS. Still, it happens. I like the idea of RH doing this just because it lets high school kids know earlier on that CS is not "knowing how to use MS Word."
And on a totally different subject:
In writing this comment I have had one thought though. When are High Schools going to start teaching kids how to read, write and do arithmetic? I know plenty of people WITH high school dipolmas who can't spell, can barely read and need a calculator for basic arithmetic.
Unfortunately the classroom is fitted toward the majority of students. Some get left in the dust. Some really are of less then average intelligence, but I'm finding out that many are not. All of this comes form my mother, who has recently gotten involved over the past few years with trying to teach learning disabled kids. From her small studies in my home town of only 10,000 people nearly all of the children she helps out are actually of average intelligence or slightly higher, but they just can't keep up in the classroom. It's really become a family interest as to how all this works as my father can't spell for crap, can't read too well, but does math like a duck in water off the top of his head at times. It seems he's dyslexic to a small point but he's managed to work around it. He's 45 now, and it never came up before in his life. He graduated from high school with a 1.8GPA, then went to community college for a year so he could run there and persue his interests in running track. As an academic he's basically a failure, but he started a business with my mother and has been greatly successful with it. My mother's not much different, she can read and write perfectly, but can't do math or any logical reasoning to tell you the truth. I blame the lack of logic on her being a woman though:). She too was labled "dumb" in school, and actually dropped out for various reasons and then went back to get a high school diploma in her early 20's.
Now, both my parents went to the same high school. The same one I went to, and the same one my middle brother went to, and the same one my youngest brother is currently attending. Both parents were labled "dumb" for lack of a better word while they were there. I've actually had some of my parents -same- teachers when I went to the same high school. It really makes for an interesting case study if you ask me.
I'm not the smartest peanut in the turd, but I was a decent student. I nailed a 30 on my ACT, as did the middle child, and the youngest got a 27 or so. As I gather this puts us into the IQ range of 130-145 or something collectively. Not trying to toot my own horn, but for the offspring of "dumb" people it's rather odd that we turned out this way.
Point is, my "dumb" dad can work numbers in his head faster than I can whittle them into a calculator half the time. My "dumb" mother whips through book after book like I do water and corrects my English if I ever put a piece of writing in front of her. Personally, the education system just couldn't work with them, so they got pushed to the side. I'm not bitter about it, as they turned out okay, but you have to wonder how many other people actually get hurt by this.
Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?
Giddy up - I'm all for it. Maybe we can get a tax exempt charity status for NASA donations. Maybe one already exists, I dunno. If it was on my 1040 though I'd like that -- more people would see it at least. It'd put it on the forefront of my mind come Tax time.
Personally, I have two uses for the federal government. My military and my space exploration. Beyond that, they're pushing into things that I think my state should handle. I'll spare y'all that ramble though.
I like the idea of space exploration. I sure wasn't around in 1969 when man landed on the moon, but I still get a little lump in my throat when I see things about that era. It makes me proud, not only to be an American but just to be a human being. Hell, I'm filled with awe when I read little tidbits about the early Russian space program, and I was raised in the '80's when the Russians were "bad bad peopole."
I think it's about time we set a real goal for space exploration again, although I'm certainly no expert on this subject. It just seems like it's time to me. We need somebody to step up like JFK did and say "We're going to point X by date Y, and there's no stopping us."
What will we do when we get to Mars, or a station on the moon? I don't know. We'll get something out of the deal though as a society as a whole though I think. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, right?
As it sits, over 50% of my money goes away in taxes right now -- I'd much rather it go to things that I really had an interest in is all.
We cling to it because we're geeks, nerds, or "software engineers" if you want to be politically correct about it. It's what we do -- and we consider it easy, and are frustrated when source isn't open. We see an obvious bug and it frustrates us, because we beleive we can fix it ourselves but must rely on another company to fix it.
That's our niche though. You think hard-core mechanics like "closed" cars that require equipment to get simple diagnostics out of? No. They'll bitch and swear all over when they see ass-backwards engineering from auto companies. They're no different than us software geeks really. I have a family friend that's an auto mechanic that swears by GM -- because he feels they're easier to work on in the long run. It's no different to me than me saying "run Linux" to family friends; at least from my perspective.
I disagree with him, in reality, because I drive a Volkswaggen. It "just works" for me. Sure, they all admit that it's got a good engine, but say to me, "Good luck when it breaks -- hard as hell to find the problem."
Same with my world.. "Sure, NT's got a good kernel, but good luck when it breaks. Have fun trying to find the problem."
My car doesn't break that often though, and if it ever does I know I'll have to pay to get it fixed, but it happens rarely in my life.
Same with him -- sure, his computer works almost all of the time, but somebody can fix it when it does break, and for much less than my car would cost really.
For me, I see computers act up (Windows ones) a lot, and hate to have to fix them because it seems like there's a much better alternative out there for people.
To him, he sees non-GM cars break down and has to wrangle with them just to figure out what's wrong and fix them. It happens to him all the time, just like I see Windows break all the time. But, I rarely see a Ford or a VW break down in my life, and he rarely sees Windows break down in his life. We have different perspectives.
So, to sum it up. That's why we software geeks hold onto our open source world -- we can control it, love it, and follow it. It's the same reason this guy owns GM car after GM car and replaces just about every single part on them himself if they break. He can fix his brand of car, and I can fix my "brand" of software.
I'm sure there's more applications to this analogy, it's just the most apparant to me at the moment.
Re:I'll have to see the bandwidth tests first.
on
A Sound Server For X
·
· Score: 1
If you want to do a test try running the XMMS gui across the network via X11. The last time I did it, XMMS was using 11 megabits per second. It would really suck to try that over a modem or a 64K frame-relay link.
I'd really like to know just -what- you were running with XMMS that made it do 11mbps -- a graphical visulizer perhaps? I run XMMS across my 10mbps network all the time. I gave up on putting my XMMS skins on the server though, so I went with the "bandwidth hog" approach instead. I NFS mount my music from the server, play it locally on my laptop which pushes the sound BACK to the same server via EsoundD. It's not perfect, but it does work -- total usage is typically 2.5MBps for that route. Just doing XMMS from the server displayed on my laptop was -way- less than that too. I've got MRTG stats to show it too, but that's a few weeks old and the little bumps it made aren't really recognizable.
If you hit 11mbps you were trying to run a visualization tool over the network. Although, most of the vis. tools I see need local X to grab portions of the video card -- maybe some of the lesser intense tools don't though.
Just my thoughts -- me thinks that 11mbps total was coming from something besides X though. I've just never seen it.
Better still is the experience of writing the same program a thousand times.
Oi! I wish more programmers thought that way. I nabbed a little tidbit from Ars Digita once (right from Philip Greenspan ) I beleive. The tidbit was something along the lines of you haven't really got a handle on how to solve a programming problem until you've already done it 10 times. I just blinked in amazement, thinking that was alot (was on my 1st real job)... but now I really see how that holds true.
What's more important than knowing HOW to do it after the first 10 times though is knowing that if you've only done it 2-3 times you probalby haven't got the problem domain really down yet. Rather, alwasys assume there's a better way to do it until you've actually exhausted all other possibilities.
Last year's was worse... simply because of execution. Remember that fiasco? They toss ads around for weeks, then during the supwerbowl they say you can go to mlife.com to find out what it is. I don't know about you, but they basically "slashdotted" their own servers with that one.
Three inches of snow was already on the ground with more falling.
You're not from the north, eh? Where I'm from 3 inches of snow on the -road- is considered plowed. On the expressway that's pretty much unacceptable, but in really heavy snowing I've acdtually seen it happen. The "express"way drops to round 45mph and white-knuckle the wheel when going from lane to lane to get around people.
Re:My predictions for the superbowl:
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
I dunno there Gyord, Sierra Mist really made the precense known with the "monkey launch" commercial. They started off thinking the astro-monkey was headed into space, but just as he gets up over the rock-wall, BOOM!, there's Polar Bears and icey water!
Specifically, why don't we have any sports/games with more than two teams? Does anyone else, for that matter? What is it that prevents us from being able to invent interesting games that perceive conflict in more than an 'Us vs. Them' fashion?
Actually, there is something like this still practiced in the United States, and just about every other country in the world. It's a fairly old sport, and not very popular theese days, but it's still featured in the Summer Olympics held every four years. They call it "Athletics" but us Americans tend to refer to it as Track and Field. Referees are basically not needed anymore, as machines can handle the only real tough calls. Who started too early and who finished when.
With your multi-billion dollar football, baseball and basketball in this country and "Us vs. Them" mentality is easy to develop. With such sports there's really no clear winner. You have to do a bracket and hope that the two best teams really end up against eachother in the end to determine who really was the best. There's alot of room for "what-ifs" and such with these types of things, so it's easy to assume your team is the best even if they don't come out on top. Unless you're a Lions fan. There's no room to argue that they're really worth much of anything these days.:)
Because running performance is measurable, the day the big race really comes along (with 8 or so people in the final heat), there are favored winners, and even people without runners in the top 3 or so can get into the race, because they know the best runner will be the one that wins.
Maybe that's why it's not a major professional sport though. It's hard to root for a guy or a team when you know darned good and well that he's got no chance at it given past performances. Severe underdog upsets just don't really happen. On the other hand, I heard the Lions actually won a game or two this year, which is enough reason for us Michigander's to tune in now and again.
don't buy CD's from the big labels, don't record your album at the big labels.
Everytime I hear this I think of Esham. he's a rapper, of who's music I don't really care for most of the time, but may of my friends do. From what I gather he's actually pretty profitable and has never been signed by a major record label. If he has then he was profitable before that -- selling CD's "cheap" at 10 bucks a copy and promoting himself.
Is he successful? I'd say so -- I'm a honky-tonky country guy that likes rock and more of the mellow stuff but I know him by name and can pick his songs out because so many people around me listen to him. I've actually spotted his songs in a movie before, but I can't recollect which movie or which song really.
If he his of a major record label, somebody let me know. I don't like his music really, but I do know his name and recognise his work. That says something I think about bucking the major record labels.
BTW, he's from the Detroit area and I'm in Grand Rapids Michigan if that helps out any. It's local, in a sense, but if he can pull in 4 bucks per CD instead of.25 cents it seems worthwhile to only suck up 1/50th the market potential at.25 cents a CD.
...and the cost of support per user is higher than that of private-sector firms of comparable size.
Could you expand on that? First, I'm wondering where you get these numbers (I beleive it -- I'd just like to see it too), and second I do you know why that's the case?
Some negligent sysadmin should've been canned over that.
Whoop! It's not the sysadmin's job to make sure you do backups properly -- unless you've got a desktop system constantly conected to the network, and I think the poster clearly stated that the issue at hand was a laptop.
This is where source control and versioning control comes into play, and yes, it does apply to your graphis people. Every CVS shop I've been employed at, and involved in develpment with, I kept myself on "watch" to see who checked in code. I didn't really care about productivity really, as I knew people were doing their job, I just wanted to see who was making marginal gains and actively checking in good code. I'd track down people and ask them to check even non-working but compilable code at times, when they hadn't made an update in a few days.
The last shop I was at, which I wasn't a manger in at all, I'd see people with things in Visual Source Safe (there's an oxymoron for you) checked out for 2 weeks without a single update to their major components. That's just not good. I sure as heck don't trust code on my machine to stay put for any given time. I develop on my local box and generally checkin with every minor milestone I complete. Not only does this guarantee safety on my part, but it gives the company a good log of what I have been working on in case somebody else needs to take my place.
This -does- go for graphics designers too -- source control and versioning control should be a part of your daily routine. Get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?
... they know that h2 is a header, therefore important, and the data in there is more important than what I have in my <span> most likely.
Negative on both accounts, Ghost Rider. HTML -was- a markup language, then it got mangled into a layout language in the NS vs IE wars when the WWW exploded. Before this time it hadn't really progressed into the massive pile of dung we have now -- but when things really took off before a professional world could develop to fill the gap we were screwed from that point forth.
As we sit now, with HTML 4.0, things like <font> and <center> are deprecated, and frowned up. Sure, the browsers still support it, but the W3C is as least making a point about the issue. The adoption of CSS to get some nice fine-grained controll over layout is taking the burder off HTML and making it easier on developers to build flashy pages while keeping their markup somewhat pure to it's true form. It's still bastardized, and I've done it myself when it was conveinent; but with the growing number of different browsers out there it's -way- easier now to just send a new stylesheet with the same markup to diffent user agents. Much much nicer than the days where you had to write some God awful pile of crap to get NS4 and IE4 to do the same thing -- relying on unspoken order of importantce that the two different browsers placed on different tags and attributes.
Writing convoluted HTML to get the desired effect is very quickly becoming very inefficient when compared to CSS. Once NS4 dies the horrid death it should have years ago things will be much brighter. Further, CSS is a dream when it comes to actually managing your look and feel over time when used properly. As CSS is new it's still being bastardized by web-monkeys that don't understand that it's a -further- clarification of the data contained within the generic HTML markup. Your style shouldn't be "blueMediumTextOnDarkBack" -- it should be "txtCustomerName", or something similar. Describe the data -- not the style. When you change your look to now put customer names as green text on a black background your 'blueMediumTextOnDarkBack' name no longer holds true, and only confuses further maintainers, unless you want to search and replace all the blueMediumTextOnDarkBlack's with your new name, but if you do that you might accidentally hose up something else using that style that never should have been sharing one with the customer name data.
Abstraction -must- be applied to content delivery and display systems for the web to grow in the future. For programmers to ignore this, or to just plain not care, is every bit as reprehensible as not using proper seperation in the layering of components in your application itself.
XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.
You're at least on the right track with the stylesheets, but XML is certainly not something that search engines will be able to parse. You can make up your own tags for crying out loud! They won't know what to do with my custom XML tag: <customer-sucess-story>, but they'll know what to do once it's translated into <h2 style="customer-success">
XML + XSLT -> HTML + CSS translations are a good thing, I agree there. But the search engines will still parse the HTML and CSS, and not the original XML -- the XML is just garbage to them, just like our HTML is garbage to them right now.
Now, to anybody who reads this and thinks, "Dude it's just HTML... shutup." -- go to w3c.org and print out the HTML 4.01 spec and read it. There's probably a lot in that 400 page document that you never knew about -- and there's a buttload of stuff in there I -still- don't know.
I think you're way off base for the uses of this, but I do agree that it might be a nice feature for some travelers -- especially on a 12 hour long flight. The idea of a portal-site or something onto that nature got my interest though.
Being able to arrange, or re-arrange your rental car as you get closer to your destination might be nice; or making arrangements via the web for a cab to pick you up once you're 95% sure of what your arrival time would be. You might want to make reservations at a restaunt near by, or just start figuring out what you're going to do to satisfy your gut once you hit the ground.
You might want to let your client know a head of time you'll be 2 hours late -- because they found some play-doh in a guy's sneaker which delayed the flight.
If you're renting a car you might save some time on your journey by checking traffic reports a few minutes before touchdown, although that one's a little far out there.
In a business situation $30 is worth about a half an hour to maybe an hour of somebody's time; or about 15 minutes to me (perosnally*) when I'm off in a world I'm not entirely familiar with. If I can shave 10 minutes off my rental-car pickup time, 10 minutes hunting for a good burger, and present a more professional image to a client (or boss, whatever have you) by sending out a nice update that I'll be 2 hours late thanks to Mr. Play-Doh that's well worth $30 bucks to me.
I wouldn't want something like this so I could keep working and sending updates back to the company mid-flight -- I'd want to use it to make my arrival go as smooth as possible.
*: Being in an unfamiliar place and not knowing where to go, where I am, or what's going on is insanely frustrating for me when I've got somewhere to get to.
> I don't think there's all that much information in structured markup. Certainly no where near as much as in the boring old plain text, so why focus on semantic analysis of the tags rather than the text?
Because HTML is supposed to mark-up the -content- of a webpage, and not be used as a layout engine. The data is contained within the tags, so you're right there, but the tags should describe what the data actually is.
Things within <table>'s are supposed to represent tabular data, but we all too often use them for getting things in the right spot of the page. The tags <b>, <i> and <u> should be banned entirely from HTML, as they describe the data visually, and not describe their content. You may want your address to be displayed in italics, but that's really a locale setting. You -should- put an address in an <address> tag so that the search engines can properly identify it as an address, and so that any user that visits your site gets the address displayed in the manner that they want addresses displayed. If your search phrase was contained within an <h2> block that likely means there's a whole section of data after it that talks about the subject. However, if your search string shows up in a <p> tag it's quite likely that it's simply a single sentence that happens to match your search criteria. That's why the <font> tag is deprecated IIRC, and should never ever be used. A <span> with a stylesheet setting lets everybody know that the data in there is really no more important than anything else, and you're just wishing to make it look differently.
It's far too late for this trend to be reversed I'm afraid, at least not for 3-4 browser generations and possibly a new HTML/CSS standard comes out. Until that time we'll probably just have to live with indexers flattening out a page and giving nearly every bit of information contained within the same level of importance.
ability to relize you can't controll the enviroment you live in like you do the enviroment on your computer.
Clearly you work on a total *nix environment. There's no fscking way a Win32 guy would actually feel like they control their computer!
'the internet' is faster then my connection to it, does it really matter?
Well, you're looking at this from the perspective as a "home user" where you're a leaf on the Internet. That's okay and all, but there's more than a few Slashdotter's here that actually have to think about this kind of stuff.
With a home connection you're a "leaf" -- you're on the outside and you only have one route to the internet -- your ISP. That is your "gateway" and there's nothing you can do about it.
The article's really talking about major ISPs, and how they peer with other networks. They have multiple routes to a single destination, and these routing tables can get pretty big when you're a big player on a big hub. I'm by no means an expert on the details of it, but I do appreciate the thought that goes into such decisions.
When you want to send a packet to NYC from wherever you are, your network only has once choice: Send it to the ISP and let them figure out what to do with it.
Your ISP may or may not have a choice what to do with it though. If they're a multi-homed place (meaning they have 2 or more connections) they have to decide what route to pass it off to. One of them might only require 1 hop to get to NYC, and the other might require 3. The simple answer is to just send it to the 1 hop route, but in the grand scheme of things it's better to send it to the 3-hop route sometimes because it's less congested.
That's just the tip of the iceberg really, but that might enlighten the issue a bit. It's certainly NOT a concern for a home user, so I can understand your post -- but to anybody that runs an ISP it's a fairly interesting topic.
1) MS has monopoly (practically) on web browsers.
2) Opera is a competitor.
3) MS is using it's webiste (a different product) to maintain it's monopoly
Apparently you didn't read the original thread very well. The -30 in the stylesheets was to work around a bug in Opera 6.0. There's no foul play here. Opera 7 fixed the bug, MS didn't add more voodoo to their website to account for that. Just that they even -tried- working around Opera 6's buggy CSS engine is a good sign. It's a nice gesture.
Please, people, stop moderating uninformed comments up to 5.
You can't trust Microsoft. Unless they had signed a solid, binding legal document...
.NET.
You can't even trust them then. Unless you've only been hitting Slashdot for the past week you couldn't have possibly missed the whole Sun vs. MS deal with Java. Legally binding document or not -- they'll still try and f-over the competition.
Now they're trying to get a legally binding document to help them cover Java, web services, XML, RPC, and SOAP by wrapping it up in somthing called
If it were IBM, Apple, or Sun I'd give them the credibility to assume they're patenting it to keep it from being non-controlled, and just letting the patent ride out so nobody else can patent it and enforce it. Not with Microsoft though; for them it's all about the short-term money.
If they can't provide 3 meg/s to every person on the system at the same time with "always on" than maybe they need to re-think their business model.
Fess up, was it PCP or crack you had as dessert after your last meal? You can't possibly be serious.
I'm sold a 768kbps DSL line for $44USD a month. For an ISP to purchase a 1.5mbps connection it will cost them at -least- $600USD a month, and that's a good deal on a T1 line around here. They'll get a discount if they purchase a DS3 line and get a big hunk of bandwidth at once, but it wont' be anywhere near $44 a month and certainly not less.
So, you're seriously proposing that "always on" cable and DSL connections should cost upwards of $300+ a month if you're getting 768k? And the people with 3mbps cable modem should be paying $1200 a month? That sounds like a rock-solid business plan to me!
Please, put at least minimal thought into thing such as this before critizing the business practices of an industry that's been around for quite some time now.
No matter how easy you make it there is always some idiot who can manage to screw it up.
Ahhhh... yes. I have named this the Jorgensen Rule. He was a professor mine in college, whom I could have learned many a thing from had I actually paid attention in his class and used him as a mentor. Wonderful guy. Pure pity that I had him in a class I cared little about. At any rate, here in the story of his which prompted me to make a software development rule about him:
We were going over finite state machines, and what there uses were. He was an accomplished real-world developer and always had stories about how things applied to the real world.
He had worked on an ATM machine once, and the guys had this thing nailed down. Every possible event had a response, there was no way to crash this machine in theory. They developed the machine, then deployed it knowing that there was no way to throw it into an unrecoverable state. It was perfect, the ultimate programmer's dream.
One day, they're informed one of their ATM's crashed. "Impossible!" say the programmers. What could have possibly been done to crash their wonderful state machine? They had accounted for -EVERY- possible situation!
Well, one of their machines, in Germany I beleive had in fact crashed. It seems that they had never accounted for a drunk German sticking a Fish-wich McDonald's sandwich into the deposit slot. This did in fact bring the machine down, which resulted in the Jorgensen rule:
You can make it fool proof; but you can't make it damn fool proof!
I love educational topics... so I'm probably going to jump all over this thread. :)
:). She too was labled "dumb" in school, and actually dropped out for various reasons and then went back to get a high school diploma in her early 20's.
I hope that the school is encouraging the kids to use this new knowlege as a jumpstart into college.
Ditto. I was horribly frusted when I got to college to find out that a large portion of the CS students knew nothing about computers at all. It completely blew my mind that you'd get into this field and not have some programming background, or knowledge of any alternative OS. Still, it happens. I like the idea of RH doing this just because it lets high school kids know earlier on that CS is not "knowing how to use MS Word."
And on a totally different subject:
In writing this comment I have had one thought though. When are High Schools going to start teaching kids how to read, write and do arithmetic? I know plenty of people WITH high school dipolmas who can't spell, can barely read and need a calculator for basic arithmetic.
Unfortunately the classroom is fitted toward the majority of students. Some get left in the dust. Some really are of less then average intelligence, but I'm finding out that many are not. All of this comes form my mother, who has recently gotten involved over the past few years with trying to teach learning disabled kids. From her small studies in my home town of only 10,000 people nearly all of the children she helps out are actually of average intelligence or slightly higher, but they just can't keep up in the classroom. It's really become a family interest as to how all this works as my father can't spell for crap, can't read too well, but does math like a duck in water off the top of his head at times. It seems he's dyslexic to a small point but he's managed to work around it. He's 45 now, and it never came up before in his life. He graduated from high school with a 1.8GPA, then went to community college for a year so he could run there and persue his interests in running track. As an academic he's basically a failure, but he started a business with my mother and has been greatly successful with it. My mother's not much different, she can read and write perfectly, but can't do math or any logical reasoning to tell you the truth. I blame the lack of logic on her being a woman though
Now, both my parents went to the same high school. The same one I went to, and the same one my middle brother went to, and the same one my youngest brother is currently attending. Both parents were labled "dumb" for lack of a better word while they were there. I've actually had some of my parents -same- teachers when I went to the same high school. It really makes for an interesting case study if you ask me.
I'm not the smartest peanut in the turd, but I was a decent student. I nailed a 30 on my ACT, as did the middle child, and the youngest got a 27 or so. As I gather this puts us into the IQ range of 130-145 or something collectively. Not trying to toot my own horn, but for the offspring of "dumb" people it's rather odd that we turned out this way.
Point is, my "dumb" dad can work numbers in his head faster than I can whittle them into a calculator half the time. My "dumb" mother whips through book after book like I do water and corrects my English if I ever put a piece of writing in front of her. Personally, the education system just couldn't work with them, so they got pushed to the side. I'm not bitter about it, as they turned out okay, but you have to wonder how many other people actually get hurt by this.
Like I said.. a little off topic.
Like I said... a totally different subject.
Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?
Giddy up - I'm all for it. Maybe we can get a tax exempt charity status for NASA donations. Maybe one already exists, I dunno. If it was on my 1040 though I'd like that -- more people would see it at least. It'd put it on the forefront of my mind come Tax time.
Personally, I have two uses for the federal government. My military and my space exploration. Beyond that, they're pushing into things that I think my state should handle. I'll spare y'all that ramble though.
I like the idea of space exploration. I sure wasn't around in 1969 when man landed on the moon, but I still get a little lump in my throat when I see things about that era. It makes me proud, not only to be an American but just to be a human being. Hell, I'm filled with awe when I read little tidbits about the early Russian space program, and I was raised in the '80's when the Russians were "bad bad peopole."
I think it's about time we set a real goal for space exploration again, although I'm certainly no expert on this subject. It just seems like it's time to me. We need somebody to step up like JFK did and say "We're going to point X by date Y, and there's no stopping us."
What will we do when we get to Mars, or a station on the moon? I don't know. We'll get something out of the deal though as a society as a whole though I think. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, right?
As it sits, over 50% of my money goes away in taxes right now -- I'd much rather it go to things that I really had an interest in is all.
Co-worker: "I've got a buddy down in Arkansas that does computer network support down there..."
Me: "Really, both of 'em?"
Co-worker: "Both of what?"
Me: "Both computers -- he's got the two of them in Arkansas networked up? Good deal."
*RIMSHOT*
We cling to it because we're geeks, nerds, or "software engineers" if you want to be politically correct about it. It's what we do -- and we consider it easy, and are frustrated when source isn't open. We see an obvious bug and it frustrates us, because we beleive we can fix it ourselves but must rely on another company to fix it.
That's our niche though. You think hard-core mechanics like "closed" cars that require equipment to get simple diagnostics out of? No. They'll bitch and swear all over when they see ass-backwards engineering from auto companies. They're no different than us software geeks really. I have a family friend that's an auto mechanic that swears by GM -- because he feels they're easier to work on in the long run. It's no different to me than me saying "run Linux" to family friends; at least from my perspective.
I disagree with him, in reality, because I drive a Volkswaggen. It "just works" for me. Sure, they all admit that it's got a good engine, but say to me, "Good luck when it breaks -- hard as hell to find the problem."
Same with my world.. "Sure, NT's got a good kernel, but good luck when it breaks. Have fun trying to find the problem."
My car doesn't break that often though, and if it ever does I know I'll have to pay to get it fixed, but it happens rarely in my life.
Same with him -- sure, his computer works almost all of the time, but somebody can fix it when it does break, and for much less than my car would cost really.
For me, I see computers act up (Windows ones) a lot, and hate to have to fix them because it seems like there's a much better alternative out there for people.
To him, he sees non-GM cars break down and has to wrangle with them just to figure out what's wrong and fix them. It happens to him all the time, just like I see Windows break all the time. But, I rarely see a Ford or a VW break down in my life, and he rarely sees Windows break down in his life. We have different perspectives.
So, to sum it up. That's why we software geeks hold onto our open source world -- we can control it, love it, and follow it. It's the same reason this guy owns GM car after GM car and replaces just about every single part on them himself if they break. He can fix his brand of car, and I can fix my "brand" of software.
I'm sure there's more applications to this analogy, it's just the most apparant to me at the moment.
If you want to do a test try running the XMMS gui across the network via X11. The last time I did it, XMMS was using 11 megabits per second. It would really suck to try that over a modem or a 64K frame-relay link.
I'd really like to know just -what- you were running with XMMS that made it do 11mbps -- a graphical visulizer perhaps? I run XMMS across my 10mbps network all the time. I gave up on putting my XMMS skins on the server though, so I went with the "bandwidth hog" approach instead. I NFS mount my music from the server, play it locally on my laptop which pushes the sound BACK to the same server via EsoundD. It's not perfect, but it does work -- total usage is typically 2.5MBps for that route. Just doing XMMS from the server displayed on my laptop was -way- less than that too. I've got MRTG stats to show it too, but that's a few weeks old and the little bumps it made aren't really recognizable.
If you hit 11mbps you were trying to run a visualization tool over the network. Although, most of the vis. tools I see need local X to grab portions of the video card -- maybe some of the lesser intense tools don't though.
Just my thoughts -- me thinks that 11mbps total was coming from something besides X though. I've just never seen it.
There is a growing shortage of surgeons in Europe and remote chirurgy won't allievate this.
:)
Sure as hell not going to be an English teacher
Perhaps my all time favorite common misspelling is "retarted" when used as an insult.
My favorite: niger
No, I don't like the word nigger, but I find it entirely hilarious when somebody can't spell it and actually thinks they've got it right.
Better still is the experience of writing the same program a thousand times.
Oi! I wish more programmers thought that way. I nabbed a little tidbit from Ars Digita once (right from Philip Greenspan ) I beleive. The tidbit was something along the lines of you haven't really got a handle on how to solve a programming problem until you've already done it 10 times. I just blinked in amazement, thinking that was alot (was on my 1st real job)... but now I really see how that holds true.
What's more important than knowing HOW to do it after the first 10 times though is knowing that if you've only done it 2-3 times you probalby haven't got the problem domain really down yet. Rather, alwasys assume there's a better way to do it until you've actually exhausted all other possibilities.
Sittin' back, cleaning my new assault rifle, havin' a couple of beers and keeping and eye on the game.
Now, what's more American than that? I got a gun, my beer, and a football game.
Last year's was worse... simply because of execution. Remember that fiasco? They toss ads around for weeks, then during the supwerbowl they say you can go to mlife.com to find out what it is. I don't know about you, but they basically "slashdotted" their own servers with that one.
Three inches of snow was already on the ground with more falling.
You're not from the north, eh? Where I'm from 3 inches of snow on the -road- is considered plowed. On the expressway that's pretty much unacceptable, but in really heavy snowing I've acdtually seen it happen. The "express"way drops to round 45mph and white-knuckle the wheel when going from lane to lane to get around people.
I dunno there Gyord, Sierra Mist really made the precense known with the "monkey launch" commercial. They started off thinking the astro-monkey was headed into space, but just as he gets up over the rock-wall, BOOM!, there's Polar Bears and icey water!
You just don't see a play like that these days.
Specifically, why don't we have any sports/games with more than two teams? Does anyone else, for that matter? What is it that prevents us from being able to invent interesting games that perceive conflict in more than an 'Us vs. Them' fashion?
:)
Actually, there is something like this still practiced in the United States, and just about every other country in the world. It's a fairly old sport, and not very popular theese days, but it's still featured in the Summer Olympics held every four years. They call it "Athletics" but us Americans tend to refer to it as Track and Field. Referees are basically not needed anymore, as machines can handle the only real tough calls. Who started too early and who finished when.
With your multi-billion dollar football, baseball and basketball in this country and "Us vs. Them" mentality is easy to develop. With such sports there's really no clear winner. You have to do a bracket and hope that the two best teams really end up against eachother in the end to determine who really was the best. There's alot of room for "what-ifs" and such with these types of things, so it's easy to assume your team is the best even if they don't come out on top. Unless you're a Lions fan. There's no room to argue that they're really worth much of anything these days.
Because running performance is measurable, the day the big race really comes along (with 8 or so people in the final heat), there are favored winners, and even people without runners in the top 3 or so can get into the race, because they know the best runner will be the one that wins.
Maybe that's why it's not a major professional sport though. It's hard to root for a guy or a team when you know darned good and well that he's got no chance at it given past performances. Severe underdog upsets just don't really happen. On the other hand, I heard the Lions actually won a game or two this year, which is enough reason for us Michigander's to tune in now and again.
don't buy CD's from the big labels, don't record your album at the big labels.
.25 cents it seems worthwhile to only suck up 1/50th the market potential at .25 cents a CD.
Everytime I hear this I think of Esham. he's a rapper, of who's music I don't really care for most of the time, but may of my friends do. From what I gather he's actually pretty profitable and has never been signed by a major record label. If he has then he was profitable before that -- selling CD's "cheap" at 10 bucks a copy and promoting himself.
Is he successful? I'd say so -- I'm a honky-tonky country guy that likes rock and more of the mellow stuff but I know him by name and can pick his songs out because so many people around me listen to him. I've actually spotted his songs in a movie before, but I can't recollect which movie or which song really.
If he his of a major record label, somebody let me know. I don't like his music really, but I do know his name and recognise his work. That says something I think about bucking the major record labels.
BTW, he's from the Detroit area and I'm in Grand Rapids Michigan if that helps out any. It's local, in a sense, but if he can pull in 4 bucks per CD instead of
...and the cost of support per user is higher than that of private-sector firms of comparable size.
Could you expand on that? First, I'm wondering where you get these numbers (I beleive it -- I'd just like to see it too), and second I do you know why that's the case?
Thank you.
Some negligent sysadmin should've been canned over that.
Whoop! It's not the sysadmin's job to make sure you do backups properly -- unless you've got a desktop system constantly conected to the network, and I think the poster clearly stated that the issue at hand was a laptop.
This is where source control and versioning control comes into play, and yes, it does apply to your graphis people. Every CVS shop I've been employed at, and involved in develpment with, I kept myself on "watch" to see who checked in code. I didn't really care about productivity really, as I knew people were doing their job, I just wanted to see who was making marginal gains and actively checking in good code. I'd track down people and ask them to check even non-working but compilable code at times, when they hadn't made an update in a few days.
The last shop I was at, which I wasn't a manger in at all, I'd see people with things in Visual Source Safe (there's an oxymoron for you) checked out for 2 weeks without a single update to their major components. That's just not good. I sure as heck don't trust code on my machine to stay put for any given time. I develop on my local box and generally checkin with every minor milestone I complete. Not only does this guarantee safety on my part, but it gives the company a good log of what I have been working on in case somebody else needs to take my place.
This -does- go for graphics designers too -- source control and versioning control should be a part of your daily routine. Get used to it.