Sadly, just rebuilding the oldest parts of the railway wouldn't help with things like the 760km Konkan Railway down the west coast from Mumbai to Mangalore. The problem with the Konkan isn't that it's old, it's very new. Rather, the key issue is corruption.
If you don't check the contractors building the bridges, tunnels, cuttings, embankments, they WILL use 9 parts of sand to one of cement and bill as if they'd used 3:1. And they DID come up with a route running not inland as previously specified in the Indian Railways Engineering Code, but rather closer to the coast (through the swamps, the estuaries, the Western Ghats (mountains)), thus creating the need for hundreds of lucrative contracts for bridges, tunnels, cuttings and embankments, each of which yields a percentage in baksheesh, and each of which can then be built on the way-too-cheap once the full price for a proper job is in the bank.
The Konkan Railway thus loses USD3.5M per day and couldn't afford the planned new rolling stock, instead running aging rains at an average 50km/h instead of the promised 160km/h.
I was also surprised by the reference to "If the driver fails to do anything, then the brakes come on automatically within the next 30 seconds." as a novel contributor to safety.- I was under the impression that this device, a 'Dead Man's Handle' had been invented in the nineteenth century.
Which is not to say that I haven't had some great rides on the Konkan and met some very lovely people on the trains, because I have...
TomV By the time the line opened on new years day 1998, there were already tens of miles of subsidence needing urgent repair.
<resist could='false'> There are no Slashdot readers GETting from www.taipeitimes.com
Their TCP packets are even now committing suicide in a router in the Bering Straits.
Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 22 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality whatever this miserable Michael has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the Slashdotcommand is under siege.
The Editors, they always depend on a method what I call... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies. </resist> </post>
My german jewish grandparents didn't leave at the height of the atrocity - they wouldn't have been able to - they left for London in 1938 when my Dad was a year old. My polish jewish grandparents didn't leave Poland until shortly before the invasion.
I do have some concept of what Nazi Germany was about ( I just have to look at all the people who *have* cousins and aunts and uncles and who won't take their family's name to the grave with them to see the impact). And I'm also horribly aware that, historically, fascists, be they Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, Hitler, whoever, don't get into power because they look like lunatics, they get into power becasue at the time, they look, on first sight, like the *only* sane, reasonable people in a mad, unreasonable world.
Guantanamo seems reasonable, because of the 'extraordinary dangers' we face. Invading Iraq apparently seemed 'reasonable' in view of the 'extraordinary' (or as MI6 seem to be saying at the Hutton inquiry, overstated and emotionalised) dangers posed by Saddam. DMCA seemed 'reasonable' because of the 'extraordinary' threat posed to the content industries by technological advances.
They came for the Muslims and I did nothing because I was not a Muslim. They came for the Baathists and I did nothing becasue I was not a Baathist. They came for the cryptologists and I did nothing becasue I was not a cryptologist. Looks like I'm in pretty big trouble eventually...
yes, the patriot act sucks, but we're not putting jews in ovens or rolling panzer tanks into canada or holding mass book burnings
Arabs to Guantanamo, whose army is it in Iraq and Afghanistan just now, and do you fancy giving an academic presentation about deCSS on US soil? </advocate>
This could happen, but only if the people compiling the feed chose to do it like that, which, if they have any respect for their own bandwidth, they probably wouldn't.
Here's a cutdown version (I removed most of the ITEMs) of the Guardian main RSS feed (RSS 0.91):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN" "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.d td"> <rss version="0.91"> <channel>
<title>Guardian Unlimited</title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk</link>
<description>Intelligent news and comment throughout the day from The Guardian newspaper</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002</copyright>
<image>
<title>Guardian Unlimited</title>
<url>http://image.guardian.co.uk/news/site/global/ guardian_crumb.gif</url>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk</link>
<width>133</width>
<height>22</height>
<description>Intelligent news and comment throughout the day from The Guardian newspaper</description>
</image>
<item>
<title>Media exposure led to Kelly suicide </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Politics/kelly/sto ry/0,13747,1034240,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>David Kelly committed suicide at his dismay at being exposed to the media, director of Oxford centre for suicide research tells Hutton inquiry. </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Two held over Omagh bombing </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/S tory/0,2763,1034142,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>A man and woman were being questioned today by detectives investigating the Omagh bomb atrocity. </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Baghdad police station bombed </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763, 1033996,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>World: Two huge explosions heard in central Baghdad in what appeared to be a car bomb attack on a police station.</description>
</item> </channel></rss>
Now, if I follow the link to the first story, the David Kelly one, the full page comes to about 75kB, with images etc. But the entire RSS feed comes in at 6kB.
There are RSS feeds which use the description to contain the entire text of the article, sometimes entity-escaped, sometimes as xhtml:body, sometimes in a CDATA section. But this isn't an efficient use of the medium. If you keep the Descriptions terse, just enough to tell me if I want to see the full text article, then I can choose to follow the link and consume the extra 75kB. As an RSS 0.91 feed, the Guardian feed has 15 items (the maximum from the Spec) - so that's a 6kB download containing pointers to, for the sake of argument, 1125kB of article content. Other than a bit of markup, I don't see that it's any *more* bandwidth-inefficient than an email containing links and abstracts.
Yup, Knewsticker reads RSS (and other formats)- here's an email from CmdrTaco, way back in April 2002, to the Knewsticker people expressing concern that a 30-second default reload rate (madness!) in Knewsticker was looking like slashdotting the slashdot RSS feed.
I don't see much of a difference between getting Chris's content over RSS and simply going to his website... same text either way
There IS no difference (well, getting the article list in RSS rather than fulltext with banner ads, IMG tags, flash and so on may be more bandwidth-friendly).
The difference comes when you use an aggregator to get Chris's content, Bob's content, Joe's content, Sarah's content, Don's content, Heather's content, CmdrTaco's content, Rusty's content and my content, all by making one 'refresh feeds' call (click, command, whatever) instead of 'simply' visiting all 9 websites. Especially if the aggregator tracks the <item>s that you've already read so you can see what's new at a glance.
Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.
But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.
All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.
But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.
The Apollo 18 mission gets almost as confusing as the 'whatever happened to Apollos 2-6'.
The Apollo 13 problems led to a rethink/cutback and the cancellation of the originally scheduled Apollos 18-20. Apollo 18 *would* have been to Copernicus, crewed by Richard Gordon, Vance Brand and Harrison Schmidt, if they had stuck to the existing schedule of 'backup crew on mission X becomes primary crew for Mission X+3'.
Then NASA recycled the 'Apollo 18' designation (not unreasonable, as this was an Apollo mission subsequent to Apollo 17) for their part of the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz linkup, using a Saturn 1B launcher, captained by Vance Brand.
To make things even more confusing, there were also three Apollo-Saturn1B missions in 1973 which were designated Skylab 2,3, 4 (Skylab 1 was the Lab launch itself), between Apollos 17 and 18.
In a sane world Apollo 18 would be Apollo 21, probably.
Correction: Discussing the Unicode, etc., support of various Unices is completely on topic; the suggestion is that the JCK governments may base their own alternative to Windows on Linux or BSD, in which case the Unicode support of Linux / BSD at present is an important indicator of how much work they will have to do, and thus of how much incompatibility with mainstream Linux / BSD may result, or of how much Linux / BSD might benefit from their work.
Something is wrong with this guys brain if he cant spend a penny of his money to fix his OS
If Moft aren't spending any money trying to fix their OS, then who's paying for all the patches that they issue, day-in, day-out, for Win95, 98, ME, 2k, XP, 2k3?
But when you have to deal with problems like the legacy TerminateThread API (see this article by Chris Brumme for a flavour of the problems it can cause), and still maintain the ability to call it or get utterly crucified for 'anticompetitively' locking out the third-party apps that took this abomination and ran with it when it first, foolishly, appeared, and when you're the number one target for malware authors for whatever reason, you can spend a king's ransom on patching every month and *still* there will be holes. In the end, whatever facade you present to the Internet, it's still an abstraction of the x86 instruction set, and since all abstractions are leaky, the decision on where to lock down has to be subjective, somewhere between the Universal Turing Machine and Utterly Useless. The only truly secure machine is not switched on.
Pointless ad-hominem snideness doesn't make for a more reliable Internet or more secure Windows. It took a lot to educate our ancestors that human lives depended on hygiene, and there's still filthy bastards out there breeding all kinds of nasties for the want of soap - just as there will always be filthy bastards out there with no concept of computer hygiene. Cleanliness is next to Uptime, anyone?
But Windows without an ISP contract is entirely invulnerable to Internet attacks. There are NO RPC vulnerabilities for a standalone PC, there are NO email-based vulnerabilities for a standalone PC, there are no IIS vulnerabilities for a standalone PC. Although there were always the 'malware on a floppy' vulnerabilities of course.
So it *could* be argued that it's the ISP that's "the company that sells a dangerous product to its consumers while knowing that most of them do not have the skills to protect themselves". And I don't recall the ISP's (who have an actual commercial incentive to keep their services clean, to protect their bandwidth, to protect their customers) promoting the internet as a "severely broken product, Needs Anti-virus to survive". Which it is, when exposed to the general public. That, as you say, would be great for publicity, so they didn't. And look where that got them. If the likes of Demon and Freeserve had done a mass-purchase deal with, say, Sophos or McAfee all those years ago and installed AV on all their customers as part of their initial setup, and had paid to keep all their customers subscribed and up-to-date, would it really have cost them less than the all-too-regular cleanups, spamfiltering, bandwidth loss and so forth they have to deal with today? Ain't hindsight fabulous.
It's not free trade. It's a system that has been sold as free trade, but is in fact highly restrictive and depends fundamentally on Restraint of Trade in the Labour Market.
I'm HugeCo of Arizona, I'd like to *buy* some labour to make TV sets. I can buy that labour in Chicago for several thousand dollars a year, or I can buy it in Otherland for several hundred. 'Free Trade' says so, and there's a WTO to enforce the rules. There's a free market on the demand side for labour.
I'm Kim in Otherland. I'd like to *sell* some labour, making TV sets. I can sell that labour in Otherland for several hundred dollars a year.
Oh, hang on, apparently I *can't* sell it in Chicago for several thousand. I'm not allowed to move to Chicago, let alone work there, live adequately, and remit a king's ransom in Otherlandish terms back to my family. But if HugeCo of Arizona wants, it can *buy* my labour, at way below the price it would command in a truly free market, here in Otherland. And if the US Government were to put a tariff on those TV sets I make to try and protect US workers, they would have the WTO dropping sanctions on them from a great height. Very nice for HugeCo, keeps me underpaid, and keeps US workers vulnerable. Everybody human loses, everybody corporate wins. There's a totally distorted restrictive market on the supply side for labour.
To totally mangle a Gandhi quote: "so, what do you think of Free Trade? I think it would be a very good idea"
Everyone in prison is there to be PUNISHED for their CRIME to SOCIETY, usually by DUE PROCESS, and convicted by their PEERS.
I agree. Especially the bit about Due Process.
The law as it stands says that Due Process includes depriving the convicted offender of his or her liberty. That is the socially-agreed punishment. It is therefore reasonable to curtail the individual's human rights in respect of their liberty in accordance with the sentence passed.
I have never heard of an American court passing a sentence of Rape, for any offence, ever. This would suggest that the use of Rape as punishment does NOT constitute Due Process.
If you feel strongly that criminals should, for certain or for all offences, be liable to a sentence of, say, 5 years Rape without parole, fine. Contact your representatives in the legislature, start a pressure group, make your case to the public via the media of your choice, and good luck to you in getting the Rape As Penal Experience Act (they've all got to be acronyms these days, right?) passed by Congress.
Once you've done that it's fair enough that those whom the court sentences to 5 years Rape should, in accordance with the law, be Raped every day for five years.
I don't have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to find the practice of Rape in prisons offensive. I can reach that position just as easily as an authoritarian wondering what the hell kind of lax undisciplined chaotic regime holds in the jails. And as an authoritarian, i'd like to see it stamped out utterly and those responsible (prisoners doing the deed, officers neglecting their duty to prevent it) punished harshly. In accordance with Due Process of course. If prison is an anarchy-shop, what the hell is the point?
I don't even have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to feel that if my tax money is being used to support the prisoners, I'd like to see that money used in a way that reduces the chances that I'll have to support them in prison again (and again, and again), and which increases their chances of returning to society, contributing to society, and getting into a position to pay some taxes of their own to cover some of my expenses.
Three that I know of. VisiCorp's VisiOn, Digital Research GEM and QuarterDeck DesqView all predated Windows 1.
GEM came on our Amstrad PC512, and was fine if you could find the apps for it. Which I couldn't. The same was apparently true of VisiOn, and both of these died young. But both were real graphical OSs (DR's GEM, of course, was a 'derivative work' of CP/M, and the PC also came with Concurrent CP/M 86, which which was pretty fab, and frankly a whole lot more useful than GEM).
DesqView was too costly for me to have played with it, but it got great reviews and seemed very desirable from afar. It wasn't an OS as such, but a GUI wrapper on top of DOS, which seemed like a fiendishly clever wheeze, and meant it could run serious apps like WordStar and VisiCalc. So fiendishly clever that one Mr W H Gates decided to do something similar, though it took version 3 of his product to deal the coup-de-grace...
The MULTICS resource quotas were expressed in Dollars, reflecting the design goal of creating a Computing Utility.
Resource Limits Multics supported spending limits per user and per project. When a user or project exceeded its limits, users could not log in, and logged-in users whose limit expired were logged out by the answering service. Prices in "dollars" were set for interactive (per shift) and absentee (per queue) virtual CPU usage and memory usage, terminal connect time, terminal I/O, I/O daemon usage by queue, and attached device usage time by device type. A project administrator could set limits on individual users' spending in the PDT, per shift or overall. (from the glossary at multicians.org)
That's about 39 years of prior art, sadly for your retirement plan;-)
Another way of phrasing 'they grow much faster than trees' is 'they're a much quicker and more efficient way of locking up atmospheric CO2 than trees'. The atmospheric possibilites if we converted a large proportion of the paper industry from trees to hemp could be wondrous.
The Cotton industry could switch to hemp farming very quickly, I'm sure. The trouble is, canvas is do damnably hard-wearing. A pair of Denim 501's is good for, what, maybe two years? Levi's would be seriously stuffed if a pair of 501's was good for a decade.
Many [...] people I've talked to have suggested that this was the actual reason marijuana [...] was made illegal.
It's certainly the reason why setting aside a proportion of your arable land for hemp used to be compulsory in England. It's no coincidence that 'canvas' and 'cannabis' sound kind of alike, not that you'll find much real canvas nowadays.
Canvas was what you used to make sails.
Hemp was what you used to make rope.
The Royal Navy was what you used to make empires.
Back in the days when Queen Victoria was in her pomp as the biggest opium baron in history of course;-)
"He then made the Sea of cast metal; it was round in shape, the diameter from rim to rim being ten cubits; it stood five cubits high, and it took a line thirty cubits long to go round it. All round the Sea on the outside under its rim, completely surrounding the thirty cubits of its circumference, were two rows of gourds, cast in one piece with the Sea itself." (New English Bible translation, Cambridge University Press, 1970)
Part of the description of King Solomon's construction of his Temple. A rabbi called Nehemiah did try to rationalise it in the 2nd century AD by claiming that the 10cubits diameter referred to the outside of the vessel, while the thiry cubit circumference was that of the inside.
To me it just sounds like standard engineering back-of-a-fag-packet calculations. The 1998 'press release' from Huntsille Alabama was definitely a hoax though.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Wade's point is not very interesting
Basic courtesy, please, it's Professor Wade. And bear in mind that in a UK University, 'professor' does not mean 'tenured lecturer'.
Sadly, just rebuilding the oldest parts of the railway wouldn't help with things like the 760km Konkan Railway down the west coast from Mumbai to Mangalore. The problem with the Konkan isn't that it's old, it's very new. Rather, the key issue is corruption.
If you don't check the contractors building the bridges, tunnels, cuttings, embankments, they WILL use 9 parts of sand to one of cement and bill as if they'd used 3:1. And they DID come up with a route running not inland as previously specified in the Indian Railways Engineering Code, but rather closer to the coast (through the swamps, the estuaries, the Western Ghats (mountains)), thus creating the need for hundreds of lucrative contracts for bridges, tunnels, cuttings and embankments, each of which yields a percentage in baksheesh, and each of which can then be built on the way-too-cheap once the full price for a proper job is in the bank.
The Konkan Railway thus loses USD3.5M per day and couldn't afford the planned new rolling stock, instead running aging rains at an average 50km/h instead of the promised 160km/h.
I was also surprised by the reference to "If the driver fails to do anything, then the brakes come on automatically within the next 30 seconds." as a novel contributor to safety.- I was under the impression that this device, a 'Dead Man's Handle' had been invented in the nineteenth century.
Which is not to say that I haven't had some great rides on the Konkan and met some very lovely people on the trains, because I have...
TomV
By the time the line opened on new years day 1998, there were already tens of miles of subsidence needing urgent repair.
<resist could='false'>
There are no Slashdot readers GETting from www.taipeitimes.com
Their TCP packets are even now committing suicide in a router in the Bering Straits.
Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 22 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality whatever this miserable Michael has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the Slashdot command is under siege.
The Editors, they always depend on a method what I call
</resist>
</post>
Taiwan is just as free/democratic as the US
:-)
Wow - do you have 'chads' too?
TomV
My german jewish grandparents didn't leave at the height of the atrocity - they wouldn't have been able to - they left for London in 1938 when my Dad was a year old. My polish jewish grandparents didn't leave Poland until shortly before the invasion.
I do have some concept of what Nazi Germany was about ( I just have to look at all the people who *have* cousins and aunts and uncles and who won't take their family's name to the grave with them to see the impact). And I'm also horribly aware that, historically, fascists, be they Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, Hitler, whoever, don't get into power because they look like lunatics, they get into power becasue at the time, they look, on first sight, like the *only* sane, reasonable people in a mad, unreasonable world.
Guantanamo seems reasonable, because of the 'extraordinary dangers' we face. Invading Iraq apparently seemed 'reasonable' in view of the 'extraordinary' (or as MI6 seem to be saying at the Hutton inquiry, overstated and emotionalised) dangers posed by Saddam. DMCA seemed 'reasonable' because of the 'extraordinary' threat posed to the content industries by technological advances.
They came for the Muslims and I did nothing because I was not a Muslim.
They came for the Baathists and I did nothing becasue I was not a Baathist.
They came for the cryptologists and I did nothing becasue I was not a cryptologist.
Looks like I'm in pretty big trouble eventually...
TomV
yes, the patriot act sucks, but we're not putting jews in ovens or rolling panzer tanks into canada or holding mass book burnings
Arabs to Guantanamo, whose army is it in Iraq and Afghanistan just now, and do you fancy giving an academic presentation about deCSS on US soil?
</advocate>
TomV
This could happen, but only if the people compiling the feed chose to do it like that, which, if they have any respect for their own bandwidth, they probably wouldn't.
Here's a cutdown version (I removed most of the ITEMs) of the Guardian main RSS feed (RSS 0.91):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN" "http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.d td">
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>Guardian Unlimited</title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk</link>
<description>Intelligent news and comment throughout the day from The Guardian newspaper</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002</copyright>
<image>
<title>Guardian Unlimited</title>
<url>http://image.guardian.co.uk/news/site/global/ guardian_crumb.gif</url>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk</link>
<width>133</width>
<height>22</height>
<description>Intelligent news and comment throughout the day from The Guardian newspaper</description>
</image>
<item>
<title>Media exposure led to Kelly suicide </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Politics/kelly/sto ry/0,13747,1034240,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>David Kelly committed suicide at his dismay at being exposed to the media, director of Oxford centre for suicide research tells Hutton inquiry. </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Two held over Omagh bombing </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Northern_Ireland/S tory/0,2763,1034142,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>A man and woman were being questioned today by detectives investigating the Omagh bomb atrocity. </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Baghdad police station bombed </title>
<link>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763, 1033996,00.html?=rss</link>
<description>World: Two huge explosions heard in central Baghdad in what appeared to be a car bomb attack on a police station.</description>
</item>
</channel></rss>
Now, if I follow the link to the first story, the David Kelly one, the full page comes to about 75kB, with images etc. But the entire RSS feed comes in at 6kB.
There are RSS feeds which use the description to contain the entire text of the article, sometimes entity-escaped, sometimes as xhtml:body, sometimes in a CDATA section. But this isn't an efficient use of the medium. If you keep the Descriptions terse, just enough to tell me if I want to see the full text article, then I can choose to follow the link and consume the extra 75kB. As an RSS 0.91 feed, the Guardian feed has 15 items (the maximum from the Spec) - so that's a 6kB download containing pointers to, for the sake of argument, 1125kB of article content. Other than a bit of markup, I don't see that it's any *more* bandwidth-inefficient than an email containing links and abstracts.
TomV
Yup, Knewsticker reads RSS (and other formats)- here's an email from CmdrTaco, way back in April 2002, to the Knewsticker people expressing concern that a 30-second default reload rate (madness!) in Knewsticker was looking like slashdotting the slashdot RSS feed.
TomV
I don't see much of a difference between getting Chris's content over RSS and simply going to his website... same text either way
There IS no difference (well, getting the article list in RSS rather than fulltext with banner ads, IMG tags, flash and so on may be more bandwidth-friendly).
The difference comes when you use an aggregator to get Chris's content, Bob's content, Joe's content, Sarah's content, Don's content, Heather's content, CmdrTaco's content, Rusty's content and my content, all by making one 'refresh feeds' call (click, command, whatever) instead of 'simply' visiting all 9 websites. Especially if the aggregator tracks the <item>s that you've already read so you can see what's new at a glance.
TomV
Reading this thread (which of course I found via my aggregator (RSS Bandit) from the Slashdot Feed, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what RSS actually IS. The beauty of RSS, IMHO, is that is is Really Simple. The Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS 2 shows that there's a tiny core of mandatory information and reasonable extensibility through the use of XML namespaces. I use RSS to locate new articles from here, from The Register, BBC News, The Guardian, ITN news (yes, I'm a news junkie), kuro5hin, InfoWorld, Wired, for product update news from various SourceForge projects I use, for tracking a bunch of techie blogs I read without having to visit every one of them regularly, for recently-posted-article lists from thirty or so sites that I couldn't possibly keep track of by visiting them individually. I figure that if you've had a look at the examples I've given, and optionally the spec, you ALREADY have enough to successfully expose and consume RSS.
But the thing is, RSS is Really Simple. Simple to consume, simple to produce. So, since I already have my reader in place, I've also got a bunch of private feeds - an RSS file that shows me login/logout events from my server logs, an RSS feed that shows me the last 25 orders valued over 250 placed by our customers, an RSS feed that lists the 25 most recent software releases we've done, outstanding Service Requests and Change requests.
All of this could be achieved in other ways - what makes it a winner for me is that, for anything that's a series of events, it's pretty much trivial to expose those events as RSS <item>s, and then I can monitor all those items, from their diverse sources, in one place.
But then, I'm already somewhat smitten with RSS, obviously.
TomV
It's, Shat. ner's Syndrome.
This, post. Suffers terribly
Shows, all, the symptoms.
TomV
The Apollo 18 mission gets almost as confusing as the 'whatever happened to Apollos 2-6'.
The Apollo 13 problems led to a rethink/cutback and the cancellation of the originally scheduled Apollos 18-20. Apollo 18 *would* have been to Copernicus, crewed by Richard Gordon, Vance Brand and Harrison Schmidt, if they had stuck to the existing schedule of 'backup crew on mission X becomes primary crew for Mission X+3'.
Then NASA recycled the 'Apollo 18' designation (not unreasonable, as this was an Apollo mission subsequent to Apollo 17) for their part of the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz linkup, using a Saturn 1B launcher, captained by Vance Brand.
To make things even more confusing, there were also three Apollo-Saturn1B missions in 1973 which were designated Skylab 2,3, 4 (Skylab 1 was the Lab launch itself), between Apollos 17 and 18.
In a sane world Apollo 18 would be Apollo 21, probably.
TomV
Correction: Discussing the Unicode, etc., support of various Unices is completely on topic; the suggestion is that the JCK governments may base their own alternative to Windows on Linux or BSD, in which case the Unicode support of Linux / BSD at present is an important indicator of how much work they will have to do, and thus of how much incompatibility with mainstream Linux / BSD may result, or of how much Linux / BSD might benefit from their work.
Something is wrong with this guys brain if he cant spend a penny of his money to fix his OS
If Moft aren't spending any money trying to fix their OS, then who's paying for all the patches that they issue, day-in, day-out, for Win95, 98, ME, 2k, XP, 2k3?
But when you have to deal with problems like the legacy TerminateThread API (see this article by Chris Brumme for a flavour of the problems it can cause), and still maintain the ability to call it or get utterly crucified for 'anticompetitively' locking out the third-party apps that took this abomination and ran with it when it first, foolishly, appeared, and when you're the number one target for malware authors for whatever reason, you can spend a king's ransom on patching every month and *still* there will be holes. In the end, whatever facade you present to the Internet, it's still an abstraction of the x86 instruction set, and since all abstractions are leaky, the decision on where to lock down has to be subjective, somewhere between the Universal Turing Machine and Utterly Useless. The only truly secure machine is not switched on.
Pointless ad-hominem snideness doesn't make for a more reliable Internet or more secure Windows. It took a lot to educate our ancestors that human lives depended on hygiene, and there's still filthy bastards out there breeding all kinds of nasties for the want of soap - just as there will always be filthy bastards out there with no concept of computer hygiene. Cleanliness is next to Uptime, anyone?
TomV
But Windows without an ISP contract is entirely invulnerable to Internet attacks. There are NO RPC vulnerabilities for a standalone PC, there are NO email-based vulnerabilities for a standalone PC, there are no IIS vulnerabilities for a standalone PC. Although there were always the 'malware on a floppy' vulnerabilities of course.
So it *could* be argued that it's the ISP that's "the company that sells a dangerous product to its consumers while knowing that most of them do not have the skills to protect themselves". And I don't recall the ISP's (who have an actual commercial incentive to keep their services clean, to protect their bandwidth, to protect their customers) promoting the internet as a "severely broken product, Needs Anti-virus to survive". Which it is, when exposed to the general public. That, as you say, would be great for publicity, so they didn't. And look where that got them. If the likes of Demon and Freeserve had done a mass-purchase deal with, say, Sophos or McAfee all those years ago and installed AV on all their customers as part of their initial setup, and had paid to keep all their customers subscribed and up-to-date, would it really have cost them less than the all-too-regular cleanups, spamfiltering, bandwidth loss and so forth they have to deal with today? Ain't hindsight fabulous.
TomV
:-) I hope that "medicoracy" was aiming at 'modicum', cos 'mediocrity' is a little bit lower than where I'm aiming :-)
TomV
It's not free trade. It's a system that has been sold as free trade, but is in fact highly restrictive and depends fundamentally on Restraint of Trade in the Labour Market.
I'm HugeCo of Arizona, I'd like to *buy* some labour to make TV sets. I can buy that labour in Chicago for several thousand dollars a year, or I can buy it in Otherland for several hundred. 'Free Trade' says so, and there's a WTO to enforce the rules. There's a free market on the demand side for labour.
I'm Kim in Otherland. I'd like to *sell* some labour, making TV sets. I can sell that labour in Otherland for several hundred dollars a year.
Oh, hang on, apparently I *can't* sell it in Chicago for several thousand. I'm not allowed to move to Chicago, let alone work there, live adequately, and remit a king's ransom in Otherlandish terms back to my family. But if HugeCo of Arizona wants, it can *buy* my labour, at way below the price it would command in a truly free market, here in Otherland. And if the US Government were to put a tariff on those TV sets I make to try and protect US workers, they would have the WTO dropping sanctions on them from a great height. Very nice for HugeCo, keeps me underpaid, and keeps US workers vulnerable. Everybody human loses, everybody corporate wins. There's a totally distorted restrictive market on the supply side for labour.
To totally mangle a Gandhi quote: "so, what do you think of Free Trade? I think it would be a very good idea"
TomV
Everyone in prison is there to be PUNISHED for their CRIME to SOCIETY, usually by DUE PROCESS, and convicted by their PEERS.
I agree. Especially the bit about Due Process.
The law as it stands says that Due Process includes depriving the convicted offender of his or her liberty. That is the socially-agreed punishment. It is therefore reasonable to curtail the individual's human rights in respect of their liberty in accordance with the sentence passed.
I have never heard of an American court passing a sentence of Rape, for any offence, ever. This would suggest that the use of Rape as punishment does NOT constitute Due Process.
If you feel strongly that criminals should, for certain or for all offences, be liable to a sentence of, say, 5 years Rape without parole, fine. Contact your representatives in the legislature, start a pressure group, make your case to the public via the media of your choice, and good luck to you in getting the Rape As Penal Experience Act (they've all got to be acronyms these days, right?) passed by Congress.
Once you've done that it's fair enough that those whom the court sentences to 5 years Rape should, in accordance with the law, be Raped every day for five years.
I don't have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to find the practice of Rape in prisons offensive. I can reach that position just as easily as an authoritarian wondering what the hell kind of lax undisciplined chaotic regime holds in the jails. And as an authoritarian, i'd like to see it stamped out utterly and those responsible (prisoners doing the deed, officers neglecting their duty to prevent it) punished harshly. In accordance with Due Process of course. If prison is an anarchy-shop, what the hell is the point?
I don't even have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to feel that if my tax money is being used to support the prisoners, I'd like to see that money used in a way that reduces the chances that I'll have to support them in prison again (and again, and again), and which increases their chances of returning to society, contributing to society, and getting into a position to pay some taxes of their own to cover some of my expenses.
TomV
If it's a .net implementation of Model-View-Controller you're after, MS calls it 'The User Interface Process Application Block'.
TomV
Three that I know of. VisiCorp's VisiOn, Digital Research GEM and QuarterDeck DesqView all predated Windows 1.
GEM came on our Amstrad PC512, and was fine if you could find the apps for it. Which I couldn't. The same was apparently true of VisiOn, and both of these died young. But both were real graphical OSs (DR's GEM, of course, was a 'derivative work' of CP/M, and the PC also came with Concurrent CP/M 86, which which was pretty fab, and frankly a whole lot more useful than GEM).
DesqView was too costly for me to have played with it, but it got great reviews and seemed very desirable from afar. It wasn't an OS as such, but a GUI wrapper on top of DOS, which seemed like a fiendishly clever wheeze, and meant it could run serious apps like WordStar and VisiCalc. So fiendishly clever that one Mr W H Gates decided to do something similar, though it took version 3 of his product to deal the coup-de-grace...
TomV
That's about 39 years of prior art, sadly for your retirement plan
TomV
I'll gladly send all my spam and virii/worms to florida
About 90% of it comes from a dozen or so spamhouses in Boca Raton anyway, so why not...
TomV
Another way of phrasing 'they grow much faster than trees' is 'they're a much quicker and more efficient way of locking up atmospheric CO2 than trees'. The atmospheric possibilites if we converted a large proportion of the paper industry from trees to hemp could be wondrous.
The Cotton industry could switch to hemp farming very quickly, I'm sure. The trouble is, canvas is do damnably hard-wearing. A pair of Denim 501's is good for, what, maybe two years? Levi's would be seriously stuffed if a pair of 501's was good for a decade.
TomV
It's certainly the reason why setting aside a proportion of your arable land for hemp used to be compulsory in England. It's no coincidence that 'canvas' and 'cannabis' sound kind of alike, not that you'll find much real canvas nowadays.
- Canvas was what you used to make sails.
- Hemp was what you used to make rope.
- The Royal Navy was what you used to make empires.
Back in the days when Queen Victoria was in her pomp as the biggest opium baron in history of courseTomV
Part of the description of King Solomon's construction of his Temple. A rabbi called Nehemiah did try to rationalise it in the 2nd century AD by claiming that the 10cubits diameter referred to the outside of the vessel, while the thiry cubit circumference was that of the inside.
To me it just sounds like standard engineering back-of-a-fag-packet calculations. The 1998 'press release' from Huntsille Alabama was definitely a hoax though.
TomV