Instead of relying on common, generic data-format such as XML
XML was not designed as a "generic data-format"; it was designed as a "better SGML", that is, a document format. In fact, it is not a good data format, as can be seen by the contortions involved in adding a type system (essential to a general purpose data format). Which still doesn't work, by the way.
Besides which, designing your own data format, while requiring some care, is not exactly a Herculean labor. If they would just add product and union types, I could see using this.
My employer has an entire department dedicated to helping employees with "life" problems. Any hint where you work? I've never heard of this, but it sounds like terrific policy.
typical US$300,000 house with $50,000 down (most don't have that), you pay about US$19,000 in mortgage (6.5% fixed). US$16,200 of that is interest.
Of the interest, you get ~$5000 back as a tax deduction (in the US). Your house appreciates (conservatively) by inflation, ~3% or $9000, in a non-speculative housing market. (However now the market in most regions is highly speculative, so that's subject to fluctuation, drastically increasing both the upside and downside.) And the remaining $3800 reduces your growing principle, so it's effectively at investment returning a safe 6.5%. On the other hand, you pay the opportunity cost of investing the $50000 down payment, perhaps $4000, with fluctuations depending on how you invest. Property taxes will be a few thousand, depending on where you live, deductible (though they might just bring you up to the standard deduction). And don't forget the other costs of ownership, such as maintenance and condo fees. Finally, You lose another chunk to closing costs on both transactions and commission when you sell. Put that all together and compare to renting. Keep in mind that the numbers will change over the period of home ownership due to compounding and inflation.
This analysis isn't simple, but it's the only way to estimate how you'll make out financially with a house. Arguments like "2 of 10 years' earnings go to interest" and "how is that ownership?" are purely emotional.
The question of which seafood is most ecologically sound is complicated. Probably your best bet is to follow the specific recommendations of Seafood Watch, a terrific education service from several leading aquariums and conservation organizations. You'll see that their recommendations are highly dependent on particulars: there's no simple rule for which fish is better. Fortunately, they provide a printable card you can carry in your wallet.
Bayesian and other filters do not rely on "spammy" words alone -- they also rely on "unspammy" words, and spammers have no idea what those words are because each person receives different email.
I'm skeptical of this commonly-heard argument. First, as others have pointed out, most people want to receive chatty, conversational emails, which don't vary greatly from person to person. As you responded, at least names and email addresses of common correspondants will help good mail stand out; still, a spam composed of "chatty" words looks a lot like a friendly mail from a new correspondant to today's filters. Second, most people in fact get quite a variety of good mail. Even if most of my mail is geeky, those relatively few messages from friends (who have various interests and writing styles) are exceedingly important.
These points were driven home to me recently. I use bogofilter, a typical statistical ("Baysian") filter, with an "unsure" folder between my inbox and spam box (which practically speaking I never check, as it gets ~1000 messages/day). First, many "empty spams" now get into my unsure folder, as they happen to overlap with the words in my good mails, and have few bad words to make them stand out. Second, and more importantly, a new friend sent me a mail that went way towards the spammy end of my unsure folder, because it used a vocabulary different from that of my other friends. I very nearly deleted it, which would have been a minor tragedy.
I am still using bogofilter, but my confidence in it is considerably shaken. I think much more sophisticated machine learning will be needed to survive the next wave of spam.
Strong agree. I think Tim Bray may be overrated, but Radia Perlman is on my list of "listen to anything they say" people since I heard her at Usenix this year. An incisive and original thinker. (And funny, as in her anecdote of having someone try to explain the difference between a bridge and a switch.) But this interview gets nothing out of her.
no matter how obvious it is that the customer is right, you must insist that he is wrong
To inject some levity into your miserable experience.... My friend invented a game called CSR. It's real simple: One person pretends to be calling customer support with some problem, and the other pretends to be the customer service representative (CSR). The caller's goal is to get some satisfaction, and the CSR's goal is to deny it and get the caller off the line. For both parties, the game is to remain adamant but remotely credible in the face of all explanation and logical argument, which may involve playing dumb, emphasizing one side an issue while ignoring the other, snowing the other with regulations or jargon, etc. It's fun because you have to behave the opposite of how you deal with rational human beings otherwise.
What do you mean by "middleware was just a buzzword"? That nobody really understood it? The article claims the opposite, that many qualified experts, who knew exactly what they were doing, worked on CORBA. I believe him. The point of the article is that even with capable people involved, standards groups tend to produce crap. Are you saying that middleware not a buzzword now? It seems to be more so than ever. What makes you believe that people understand middleware better now? And what do "Apache+PHP+MySql or IIS+ASP+SqlServer" have to do with any of this? None of the mainstream web services tools are based on them. (Not saying that's good or bad.)
Re:What a ridiculous trend... CORBA to WebServices
on
The Rise and Fall of Corba
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Go, build a Webservice with NetBeans and a client with VS.net 2005 and you will have to implement two or three lines of code
There may be some truth to this (I've never used those tools), but that's not saying much. You've just built a self-contained "hello world" client and service, accepting all the defaults. Now, take a complicated, pre-existing service, using some non-default binding and non-trivial schemas, and integrate a client for it into a large existing application. I tried this recently using apache axis2, and it was a world of pain. Now, it may be that axis2 sucks and there are better tools, but I've read many of the web service standards, and it's clear that there are complexity and interoperability issues (why do these standards have to offer implementors so many options??) that you can't easily paper over. Ultimately, I agree with the author (and hope!) that web services will fail for technical reasons.
The article focuses on market conditions and forces as reasons behind CORBA's downfall. Having worked on CORBA, I can say there are some technical reasons too.
I don't think you read to the second page, where he says:
No matter how much industry hype might be pushing it, if a technology has serious technical shortcomings, it will eventually be abandoned. This is where we can find the main reasons for CORBA's failure.
This is the point of the article: You have to get the design basically right for a standard to fly, but getting the design basically right (not even all the way right) in a standards process is darn hard. Frankly, we need standards for standards groups, since they keep making the same mistakes and ignoring the very wise and practical advice of people like Michi Henning.
And while the reporter is throwing numbers around, he might have asked what the cumulative value of craigslist is to its users. Does that value exceed $500M per year? If so, then turning down paid ads is a net economic benefit. One might even wish that there were a standard way to measure this value, so that craigslist and other companies could point to it to explain their behavior.
I meant to reply sooner, but between the denotation and origin of the word,
and the trauma associated with misspelling it in front of a full theater,
your name brings on quite a spell. I may have to blackball you from my
slashdot view. I may even have to stop eating oatmeal and using the Glasgow
Haskell Compiler. (Fortunately I don't play golf.) I just pray I never
hear a cry of "gardyloo" in the wild.
Now excuse me as I finish my petition for redress with the 25th Annual
Putnam County Spelling Bee.
PS. I'm glad I'm not alone about the itchy skirts.
I wish I'd known of you sooner. Not for your delightful wit or scientifical cleverosity, but for your name. You see, I was in a spelling bee, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and some cruel spirit selected this word for me. I had a vaguely correct sense of the origin and came up with "gardeloo"--which some sources tell me is even an acceptible variant. Are you a Scot? What do you think? I asked an English fellow and he was unfamiliar with the word, explaining that despite his people's efforts, Scotland has acquired modern plumbing.
Happily, there is a remedy to avoid the end that befell Unix, and that remedy is open standards - specifically, the Linux Standards Base (LSB).
Let's see, Linux has been around 15 years, and there has been a competitive commercial marketplace for, what, at least 10 of those. The LSB has been relevant for how many of these? Oh wait, it's still not relevant! Whatever has saved Linux from "the end that befell Unix" so far, it ain't the LSB.
Way back when they started, what was Google's killer insight? That there was information out there on the Web (the link structure) that could be used to improve search results. What's the premise of Google co-op? That people will feed information to Google that can be used to improve search results. See the big difference? In the first case, the information is public, and generated as a side-effect of making the Web more useful generally (by creating helpful links); in the second, the information is owned by Google, and only Google can make use of it directly.
It doesn't have to be this way: Google could have told people how to publish this information themselves, on their web pages. It certainly has the ability to scrounge data from myriad sites. This way, more uses could be made of the information: browsers could display it, other search engines could build it into their results, and anyone could build a novel application (you could imagine this being what makes the semantic web take off). I would argue that not only is Google being selfish with their design, but ultimately making the wrong choice for themselves, because the more useful information is, the more of it people will generate.
There are a number of interesting issues with this bug and how it's being
reported.
Never mind that the bad code is valid C, it's insane that it didn't
generate a warning. I hope GCC has the option, and security sensitive code
should be built with as many warning enabled as possible.
Code that's conditional on "whether I'm root" is a hole waiting to open.
Must better to have a separate wrapper that is setuid and accepts a
constricted set of options, then calls the real program (which is not
setuid).
Given that X is a network service, most commonly run on single-user
machines, a local root vulnerability (while egregious) is hardly a
"worst-case scenario".
This appears to be an effective use of government funds.
Any effort such as yours should begin with clear thinking, which is aided by purging yourself of such vague, overloaded, and literally nonsensical terms as "configuration management". In case you think this is a troll, note that the posters so far have given your message a range of completely unrelated senses. Describe precisely what you're trying to accomplish if you want useful answers.
As someone who worked at a successful start-up when that movie came out, I have to say that company didn't do a single thing right. (Except for having a good idea, but ideas are cheap.) I had no sympathy for any of them.
it is Harvard. I bet they talk to the RIAA on a regular basis.
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, former home of Lawrence Lessig and current home of Jonathan Zittrain, Charles Nesson, et al, is at Harvard. Does that change your perception?
Slashdot Mirror
Besides which, designing your own data format, while requiring some care, is not exactly a Herculean labor. If they would just add product and union types, I could see using this.
Of the interest, you get ~$5000 back as a tax deduction (in the US). Your house appreciates (conservatively) by inflation, ~3% or $9000, in a non-speculative housing market. (However now the market in most regions is highly speculative, so that's subject to fluctuation, drastically increasing both the upside and downside.) And the remaining $3800 reduces your growing principle, so it's effectively at investment returning a safe 6.5%. On the other hand, you pay the opportunity cost of investing the $50000 down payment, perhaps $4000, with fluctuations depending on how you invest. Property taxes will be a few thousand, depending on where you live, deductible (though they might just bring you up to the standard deduction). And don't forget the other costs of ownership, such as maintenance and condo fees. Finally, You lose another chunk to closing costs on both transactions and commission when you sell. Put that all together and compare to renting. Keep in mind that the numbers will change over the period of home ownership due to compounding and inflation.
This analysis isn't simple, but it's the only way to estimate how you'll make out financially with a house. Arguments like "2 of 10 years' earnings go to interest" and "how is that ownership?" are purely emotional.
vague semantics, confusing specifications, unwarranted complexity, standards proliferation, poor tools, and wildly inappropriate application. Not to mention rampant disregard for existing work in nearly every arena it entered. So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.
The question of which seafood is most ecologically sound is complicated. Probably your best bet is to follow the specific recommendations of Seafood Watch, a terrific education service from several leading aquariums and conservation organizations. You'll see that their recommendations are highly dependent on particulars: there's no simple rule for which fish is better. Fortunately, they provide a printable card you can carry in your wallet.
(not to mention a laudable use of unicode), check out Tim Kreider. It's rather moving, actually: "Pluto has rented a tuxedo."
Just clean up the damn dog shit!
I'm skeptical of this commonly-heard argument. First, as others have pointed out, most people want to receive chatty, conversational emails, which don't vary greatly from person to person. As you responded, at least names and email addresses of common correspondants will help good mail stand out; still, a spam composed of "chatty" words looks a lot like a friendly mail from a new correspondant to today's filters. Second, most people in fact get quite a variety of good mail. Even if most of my mail is geeky, those relatively few messages from friends (who have various interests and writing styles) are exceedingly important.
These points were driven home to me recently. I use bogofilter, a typical statistical ("Baysian") filter, with an "unsure" folder between my inbox and spam box (which practically speaking I never check, as it gets ~1000 messages/day). First, many "empty spams" now get into my unsure folder, as they happen to overlap with the words in my good mails, and have few bad words to make them stand out. Second, and more importantly, a new friend sent me a mail that went way towards the spammy end of my unsure folder, because it used a vocabulary different from that of my other friends. I very nearly deleted it, which would have been a minor tragedy.
I am still using bogofilter, but my confidence in it is considerably shaken. I think much more sophisticated machine learning will be needed to survive the next wave of spam.
Strong agree. I think Tim Bray may be overrated, but Radia Perlman is on my list of "listen to anything they say" people since I heard her at Usenix this year. An incisive and original thinker. (And funny, as in her anecdote of having someone try to explain the difference between a bridge and a switch.) But this interview gets nothing out of her.
What do you mean by "middleware was just a buzzword"? That nobody really understood it? The article claims the opposite, that many qualified experts, who knew exactly what they were doing, worked on CORBA. I believe him. The point of the article is that even with capable people involved, standards groups tend to produce crap. Are you saying that middleware not a buzzword now? It seems to be more so than ever. What makes you believe that people understand middleware better now? And what do "Apache+PHP+MySql or IIS+ASP+SqlServer" have to do with any of this? None of the mainstream web services tools are based on them. (Not saying that's good or bad.)
And while the reporter is throwing numbers around, he might have asked what the cumulative value of craigslist is to its users. Does that value exceed $500M per year? If so, then turning down paid ads is a net economic benefit. One might even wish that there were a standard way to measure this value, so that craigslist and other companies could point to it to explain their behavior.
Now excuse me as I finish my petition for redress with the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.
PS. I'm glad I'm not alone about the itchy skirts.
I wish I'd known of you sooner. Not for your delightful wit or scientifical cleverosity, but for your name. You see, I was in a spelling bee, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and some cruel spirit selected this word for me. I had a vaguely correct sense of the origin and came up with "gardeloo"--which some sources tell me is even an acceptible variant. Are you a Scot? What do you think? I asked an English fellow and he was unfamiliar with the word, explaining that despite his people's efforts, Scotland has acquired modern plumbing.
Way back when they started, what was Google's killer insight? That there was information out there on the Web (the link structure) that could be used to improve search results. What's the premise of Google co-op? That people will feed information to Google that can be used to improve search results. See the big difference? In the first case, the information is public, and generated as a side-effect of making the Web more useful generally (by creating helpful links); in the second, the information is owned by Google, and only Google can make use of it directly.
It doesn't have to be this way: Google could have told people how to publish this information themselves, on their web pages. It certainly has the ability to scrounge data from myriad sites. This way, more uses could be made of the information: browsers could display it, other search engines could build it into their results, and anyone could build a novel application (you could imagine this being what makes the semantic web take off). I would argue that not only is Google being selfish with their design, but ultimately making the wrong choice for themselves, because the more useful information is, the more of it people will generate.
The same criticism holds for Google Base.
That's a non-null constant function pointer.
Any effort such as yours should begin with clear thinking, which is aided by purging yourself of such vague, overloaded, and literally nonsensical terms as "configuration management". In case you think this is a troll, note that the posters so far have given your message a range of completely unrelated senses. Describe precisely what you're trying to accomplish if you want useful answers.
As someone who worked at a successful start-up when that movie came out, I have to say that company didn't do a single thing right. (Except for having a good idea, but ideas are cheap.) I had no sympathy for any of them.
ultra- midget-fetish