Lease or buy isn't important. What's important is that batteries become standardized. Recharge at home by all means, but when your car is running out of juice on a trip, you pull into a juice station, slide out the battery, slide in a recharged one, and slide your discharged one into a rack for recharging. You pay for your "refill" like you pay for a tank of gas, and drive out.
OK, so maybe we need small, medium, and large batteries, plus a couple of bigger sizes for trucks, buses, RVs, and those 4x4s needed for all that rugged terrain around the suburban malls:-) but the last thing we need is some dipshit marketing droid inventing new and proprietary batteries that you have to get from the manufacturer. Suppose you bought a Toyota but you had to go to a Toyota garage to get your gas...
The defects of the URN/URI/URL mechanism were well known at the time this was discussed in the working groups and SIGs while XML was gestating.
The correct solution would have been to fix the outstanding problems with FPIs and use a combination of local catalog and DNS-style resolution, but this was turned down. Perhaps it's time to wake it up.
In the 1990s I did try to devise a resolution server for FPIs, in the hope that someone like the (then) GCA (now IdeAlliance) -- who were the ISO 9070 Registration Authority and theoretically still are -- would pick up the idea.
I still have the large collection of SGML DTDs used at the time, now largely redundant, but replacing it with current XML is not the problem. This is something that should probably be discussed at the Markup conference in Montreal this summer.
Nothing like a shortage of research funding to spur a little novelty-hunting.
Or possibly the low educational level of the scientists means they need simpler texts.
Hardly surprising when you elect your judges instead of having them appointed by a commission. As Bennett points out, any dickhead can become a judge at a local level, and clearly many do. An appointments commission doesn't solve all the problems, but it can provide far greater accountability and transparency.
Far worse is the problem of stupidity. I find it hard to believe that even local judges believe spam is not a problem, and that the anti-spam laws are "bad". What planet have these people been raised on, and what have they been smoking (and where can I get some)? Or were they simply bought for the day by the spammer?
There is no point in moving to HTML5 when browsers still make a mess of supporting CSS. All the goodwill proposals in the world won't stop Microsoft trying to force adoption of its broken HTML and CSS implementation simply by weight of usage.
I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript.
HTML itself can't "do" anything: it's just a markup language. You're confusing the language with how a browser interprets it.
You fuck with the middle classes at your peril. A large, prosperous middle-class is the best guarantee of social stability -- unfortunately in the past it has accompanied appalling treatment of classes below, and neglect of the classes above.
If you can somehow engineer middle-class contentment along with opportunity and encouragement for those less fortunate, and keep the rich or aristocratic in their place at the same time as letting them use their wealth, you'll have solved it. But somehow I don't see either a surveillance UK or a fundamentalist USA as the places for this Brave New World to arise.
Why is the head of IT also the CFO? Saving a few grand on hardware doesn't seem worth it if you're going to cripple graduating students' chances of a job. The money would be better spent teaching students how to deal with the assorted stupidities of IT that we all have to face eventually.
I'm tired and I haven't written a Makefile that I had to deduce by hand and eye in many aeons. Has anyone written a Makefile suitable for Deb or Edgy they could share?
It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."
That's not the only business model, either. If the text is accessible online, then publishers could allow deep linking into a book. That way you could point someone at a quote, or a section, or a page, even just a phrase, without the need for them to download the entire thing. Exposing someone to a book this way is an excellent opportunity to sell it to them. Assuming the books are in SGML or XML, implementing this method is almost trivial.
Any institution which forces users to buy one specific platform just in order to read mail has its head so far up its ass that it might just as well climb up in after it and disappear.
Even in my own institution, which is slavishly Microsoft-dominated, both student email and faculty/staff email are accessible from any platform. Not necessarily optimally -- OWA is probably the suckiest email interface ever devised -- but no-one is placed in the position of not being able to read college email just because they happen to use a Mac, or a Sun, or a Linux box.
It's an education/training problem: most Windows users are only very dimly aware that anything else exists: they may have heard of Apple Macs but probably not of Linux. They've certainly never seen or used anything except Windows, and are thus completely baffled and uncomprehending at the concept of someone who is not a Windows user.
When that species of ignorance exists at decision-making level, you will get people making unwise decisions because they are simply unaware that any problem exists. If they are already that badly brainwashed, then recommendations for alternative action from lower down the food chain will have no effect, because they lack the cognitive hooks on which further information can hang.
Exactly. Håkon is almost completely correct, but for the wrong reasons. If we exclude the few people who really understand pointy-bracket markup, the traditional author just wants to be able to type stuff and edit it. They don't give a tinker's spit about file structure or formats and never will, so if Microsoft or OpenOffice want to push their undistinguished XML formats as "the" save-formats, so be it. There are currently no XML editors suitable for use by people who do not grok pointy bracket markup. Only when we have an editor capable of detecting the author's intentions and silently adding the appropriate markup will any use of meaningful XML become possible at that level (claimer: yes, this is my PhD topic:-)
A business plan is only any good if you have a saleable product, unless you're just aiming to milk some VCs. I've seen (and done DD on) startups with good business plans, people who understood cash flow and customers and marketing -- but the product was crap, or already obsolete, or simply a non-starter (didn't stop some of them getting the cash, of course, but it sure as hell stopped the business dead in its tracks when the funding ran out).
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so maybe we need small, medium, and large batteries, plus a couple of bigger sizes for trucks, buses, RVs, and those 4x4s needed for all that rugged terrain around the suburban malls :-) but the last thing we need is some dipshit marketing droid inventing new and proprietary batteries that you have to get from the manufacturer. Suppose you bought a Toyota but you had to go to a Toyota garage to get your gas...
They've been doing this for at least a year at Dublin and Shannon (where you do US Immigration before you leave Ireland).
"Oops, my foot caught in the power cord, I'm sooooooo sorry...just one of those accidents..."
hangs when you try to install under [crossover] wine
Oh look, three pink pigs just flew past my window.
Silly! It's obviously the remains of a Martian; the equivalent for a silicon-based life-form of our fossils.
> Prepaid phone
Do they have them in the States yet?
The defects of the URN/URI/URL mechanism were well known at the time this was discussed in the working groups and SIGs while XML was gestating.
The correct solution would have been to fix the outstanding problems with FPIs and use a combination of local catalog and DNS-style resolution, but this was turned down. Perhaps it's time to wake it up.
In the 1990s I did try to devise a resolution server for FPIs, in the hope that someone like the (then) GCA (now IdeAlliance) -- who were the ISO 9070 Registration Authority and theoretically still are -- would pick up the idea.
I still have the large collection of SGML DTDs used at the time, now largely redundant, but replacing it with current XML is not the problem. This is something that should probably be discussed at the Markup conference in Montreal this summer.
we all want html mail and purty graphics
Spam Assassin and Procmail are your friends. Anything smelling of HTML gets filed in /dev/null here unless I know the sender.
And how nice of the spammers to write illiterate Russlish or Englihili: it makes Bayesian filtering sooooo much easier.
Yep. And the documentation at CERN is done using TeX :-)
Nothing like a shortage of research funding to spur a little novelty-hunting. Or possibly the low educational level of the scientists means they need simpler texts.
Real IT professionals don't use Outlook.
But some of them Just Don't Get It [tm]. "We're Americans, we don't use fancy foreign letters, so we just want ASCII." Sigh.
--
The best cure for seasickness is to go sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
Far worse is the problem of stupidity. I find it hard to believe that even local judges believe spam is not a problem, and that the anti-spam laws are "bad". What planet have these people been raised on, and what have they been smoking (and where can I get some)? Or were they simply bought for the day by the spammer?
There is no point in moving to HTML5 when browsers still make a mess of supporting CSS. All the goodwill proposals in the world won't stop Microsoft trying to force adoption of its broken HTML and CSS implementation simply by weight of usage.
I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript.
HTML itself can't "do" anything: it's just a markup language. You're confusing the language with how a browser interprets it.
You fuck with the middle classes at your peril. A large, prosperous middle-class is the best guarantee of social stability -- unfortunately in the past it has accompanied appalling treatment of classes below, and neglect of the classes above.
If you can somehow engineer middle-class contentment along with opportunity and encouragement for those less fortunate, and keep the rich or aristocratic in their place at the same time as letting them use their wealth, you'll have solved it. But somehow I don't see either a surveillance UK or a fundamentalist USA as the places for this Brave New World to arise.
Why is the head of IT also the CFO? Saving a few grand on hardware doesn't seem worth it if you're going to cripple graduating students' chances of a job. The money would be better spent teaching students how to deal with the assorted stupidities of IT that we all have to face eventually.
With the politicians safely in the pockets of Hollywood and the TV companies, it's probably not as relevant how much the tax take is.
I'm tired and I haven't written a Makefile that I had to deduce by hand and eye in many aeons. Has anyone written a Makefile suitable for Deb or Edgy they could share?
That's not the only business model, either. If the text is accessible online, then publishers could allow deep linking into a book. That way you could point someone at a quote, or a section, or a page, even just a phrase, without the need for them to download the entire thing. Exposing someone to a book this way is an excellent opportunity to sell it to them. Assuming the books are in SGML or XML, implementing this method is almost trivial.
Even in my own institution, which is slavishly Microsoft-dominated, both student email and faculty/staff email are accessible from any platform. Not necessarily optimally -- OWA is probably the suckiest email interface ever devised -- but no-one is placed in the position of not being able to read college email just because they happen to use a Mac, or a Sun, or a Linux box.
It's an education/training problem: most Windows users are only very dimly aware that anything else exists: they may have heard of Apple Macs but probably not of Linux. They've certainly never seen or used anything except Windows, and are thus completely baffled and uncomprehending at the concept of someone who is not a Windows user.
When that species of ignorance exists at decision-making level, you will get people making unwise decisions because they are simply unaware that any problem exists. If they are already that badly brainwashed, then recommendations for alternative action from lower down the food chain will have no effect, because they lack the cognitive hooks on which further information can hang.
Yep. If true, it's a disgraceful example of the NIH and NSF brown-nosing the religious fruit-loops.
eppur si muove
Exactly. Håkon is almost completely correct, but for the wrong reasons. If we exclude the few people who really understand pointy-bracket markup, the traditional author just wants to be able to type stuff and edit it. They don't give a tinker's spit about file structure or formats and never will, so if Microsoft or OpenOffice want to push their undistinguished XML formats as "the" save-formats, so be it. There are currently no XML editors suitable for use by people who do not grok pointy bracket markup. Only when we have an editor capable of detecting the author's intentions and silently adding the appropriate markup will any use of meaningful XML become possible at that level (claimer: yes, this is my PhD topic :-)
A business plan is only any good if you have a saleable product, unless you're just aiming to milk some VCs. I've seen (and done DD on) startups with good business plans, people who understood cash flow and customers and marketing -- but the product was crap, or already obsolete, or simply a non-starter (didn't stop some of them getting the cash, of course, but it sure as hell stopped the business dead in its tracks when the funding ran out).