My online book/tutorial on LaTeX acquires some interesting ads from time to time but after a few days the pr0n0 ones just go away for a little while. Either there is a learning engine somewhere, or there is a cursory human glance.
The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
The moment I saw the description of the project I thought "Oh no, not again".
How many times has this chestnut come up?
Can nobody explain to these people that no-one wants to be able to search Google or
anything else by voice -- at least not on the scale that would make anyone any money by doing so...
TeX4HT certainly works, and not just for plain TeX,
and M$-Word has no problem in opening the HTML it
produces. LaTeX2HTML also does a reasonable job. You will always have to do some tidying-up no matter what conversion you use between any two formats, as there is almost always a mismatch in the facilities provided.
If you are doing a lot of writing, I recommend
looking at moving to XML. That way you can keep
using LaTeX as your preferred formatter (via an
XLST transformation XML-->LaTeX) but also have
other transformations to HTML, RTF, or whatever*.
Editors for XML are a pain for authors (part of my PhD work involves
finding out why), but no more so than learning to
write LaTeX code. Using an intermediate transformation is an extra step, but I find it gives me more flexibility.
*In theory, publishers should be able to give you their DTD or Schema for writing in XML, but in practice, they don't believe authors would be able to use it properly yet -- largely because of the poor facilities provided by XML editors.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
But they have: just do it. It's the bean-counters who are holding it back, insisting that the cost of processing the transaction be counted against the transaction, instead of as an overhead. How many businesses count the x" of Tally roll against each transaction?
If your company is processing 2000 payments per day of $0.01 each from 2000 different people, it's probably costing you more than it's worth.
Only if all your products are priced at $0.01. If you have a wide enough price span, you can subsume the per-transaction cost as an overhead. And if the site and the products are sufficiently attractive, today's $0.01 purchaser may become tomorrow's $500 purchaser.
> What I really want to see is a GPS-enabled camera that records not only time and date in the metadata, but also latitude and longitude
That's far too useful for the corporate marketing suits to think of...but it needs one other thing: a compass. Being able to work out from the GPS coords that I was on top of Mt Smoky is fine, but which way was I looking?
> So, yes, Fuddruckers should have sent the guy an email out of courtesy...
Unfortunately, courtesy is in short supply these days, especially from companies. And corporate webdesigners are not known for their technical etiquette.
What's more interesting is that Atom is more robust and better designed than RSS, but it's being touted as the future of syndication by companies who don't have any significant background or experience in markup (and that includes Microsoft, of course, who still have a lot to learn).
This shouldn't really be too surprising, however, since Atom came from some one who knows a lot about markup, and RSS came from a group of people who hadn't a clue.
People have been doing this for over a decade: one of the first things we looked at in the CELT project was auto number detection -- in Old Irish, Norman French, Latin, and a few other languages.
One of the later possibilities was implementing it in Javascript rather than embedding it in the stored SGML, which would exactly fit the "not embedded into the document stream" criterion you mention. It came up again recently when we started converting the docbase to XML.
We had rough consensus and running code, but we would never have considered patenting something that obvious, and anyway we decided we would embed it in the document markup after all.
Linux could learn a lot from DOS's simplicity (perhaps simple-minded stupidity would be a better term).
Writing for DOS was frustrating because the tools were primitive and the OS facilities almost non-existent. And it introduced some astonishingly silly conventions (backslash for path-separator, anyone?).
But writing for Linux is little better: a mind-numbing tangle of mutually-exclusive unresolvable cross-dependencies, unrealistic user expectations, and technical dead-ends (eg peripheral manufacturer restrictions on divulging interface details). To overcome these you have to write in ever higher-level languages, thus adding yet more layers of dependency, and filling up memory with vast swathes of libraries and drivers just in order to be able to set a bit here and there, or use one routine which does something a certain way.
Allowing anyone to do anything will eventually lead to no-one being able to do anything. Proprietary ring-fencing is being replaced by personality cults ("you don't want to use that smelly libfooutils, my libfoo2utils is way better").
DOS, and all the demons it spawned, was achieved by managerial direction: a single company pushing hard one way, even if it was the wrong way. Until Linux acquires something of the same unity of purpose, it cannot and will not offer a threat, no matter how technically superior or free it is, because it will remain a morass of competing city-states, a midden of warring fiefdoms. Linus may have been the godhead who showed us the One True Way, but we're still waiting for the Ghengis Khan to knock us into a team.
Americans have had way more than their slice of cake over the decades, so it's about time we got a look in over here:-) Anyway, what about all those American companies who won't sell outside the contiguous 48 states because it's just too much trouble?
What worries me more is that HP still don't know their ass from their elbow. Instead of kludging up a distro to work with their non-standard hardware, they'd be far better off just adhering to the prevailing h/w standards, and making sure the specs are available for OS writers to use.
That way it wouldn't cost them anything, and all distros would end up working with HP kit, and they'd sell far more machines. Unfortunately this is far too simple for the suits in Marketing, who are still thinking in the 1950s. Gotta make it proprietary! Gotta trap the customer! Gotta have a hardware USP! Boy, wrap two more inches of chrome round that fender!
I don't think it need always be a prior art search. Daily listings in the web site, grouped by some kind of topic hierarchy, and viewable via RSS, would mean each application would simply be exposed to people who know their way around each field ("Hey, I've seen that before..."). OK, so you're still asking experts to give up some of their time to making the submission, but if it's to protect their own patch this seems reasonable.
I doubt it. It's much more likely the invention of some lamebrain marketing droid. Or worse, the product of a "focus group" or some similarly fatuous corroborree.
How long before it becomes conventional to add an "i" and make it Mandrivia to rhyme with Trivia?
The problem is that right now, one grass-pellet's volume (or indeed, weight) of petroleum fuel will run my car for several hundred meters, and until we get a good heat-to-movement conversion system for grass pellets, I don't see how I'm going to make serious use of this.
I agree that biomass is worth investigating, but there have been dozens of projects in the area over the years, and nothing usable so far.
Like almost all governmentally-oriented people who make ill-informed comments about the Internet, this guy Zhao has his head so far up his ass he might just as well climb up in after it and disappear.
XML has its place. But it is next to HTML, and not next to RPC or databases!
Yessssss! Finally someone who understands XML. (Well, nearly.)
It's for storing text for publishing. Remember publishing? Books? Articles? Reports? Text documents? Sure, you can stuff it with spreadsheet data and send it over the wire. Sure, you can generate it from a database with element names 25 yards long and containing 1 byte of data. You can also try to open a sardine can with a banana.
But if you edit XML with Notepad, you a) haven't understood XML and b) deserve everything you get. It's by no means brain-dead, and it had nothing to do with scripting developers (a fine red-herring, that). It certainly has been pushed into areas where it didn't belong. It's a tribute to XML that it has actually performed well in those areas in circumstances where the document type has been carefully designed, but they are rare.
Slashdot Mirror
The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
The moment I saw the description of the project I thought "Oh no, not again". How many times has this chestnut come up? Can nobody explain to these people that no-one wants to be able to search Google or anything else by voice -- at least not on the scale that would make anyone any money by doing so...
Goatse guy?
If you are doing a lot of writing, I recommend looking at moving to XML. That way you can keep using LaTeX as your preferred formatter (via an XLST transformation XML-->LaTeX) but also have other transformations to HTML, RTF, or whatever*. Editors for XML are a pain for authors (part of my PhD work involves finding out why), but no more so than learning to write LaTeX code. Using an intermediate transformation is an extra step, but I find it gives me more flexibility.
*In theory, publishers should be able to give you their DTD or Schema for writing in XML, but in practice, they don't believe authors would be able to use it properly yet -- largely because of the poor facilities provided by XML editors.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree [Spike Milligan]
But they have: just do it. It's the bean-counters who are holding it back, insisting that the cost of processing the transaction be counted against the transaction, instead of as an overhead. How many businesses count the x" of Tally roll against each transaction?
If your company is processing 2000 payments per day of $0.01 each from 2000 different people, it's probably costing you more than it's worth.
Only if all your products are priced at $0.01. If you have a wide enough price span, you can subsume the per-transaction cost as an overhead. And if the site and the products are sufficiently attractive, today's $0.01 purchaser may become tomorrow's $500 purchaser.
America has simply forgotten how to do business.
That's far too useful for the corporate marketing suits to think of...but it needs one other thing: a compass. Being able to work out from the GPS coords that I was on top of Mt Smoky is fine, but which way was I looking?
Unfortunately, courtesy is in short supply these days, especially from companies. And corporate webdesigners are not known for their technical etiquette.
The best cure for seasickness is to go and sit under a tree. [Spike Milligan]
Never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by incompetence.
This shouldn't really be too surprising, however, since Atom came from some one who knows a lot about markup, and RSS came from a group of people who hadn't a clue.
Propagate, even?
Slow light is just a mercury delay-line made of light...
One of the later possibilities was implementing it in Javascript rather than embedding it in the stored SGML, which would exactly fit the "not embedded into the document stream" criterion you mention. It came up again recently when we started converting the docbase to XML.
We had rough consensus and running code, but we would never have considered patenting something that obvious, and anyway we decided we would embed it in the document markup after all.
Fewer fines, even.
Cloning a font?
Tape, tape, tape, tape...
Writing for DOS was frustrating because the tools were primitive and the OS facilities almost non-existent. And it introduced some astonishingly silly conventions (backslash for path-separator, anyone?).
But writing for Linux is little better: a mind-numbing tangle of mutually-exclusive unresolvable cross-dependencies, unrealistic user expectations, and technical dead-ends (eg peripheral manufacturer restrictions on divulging interface details). To overcome these you have to write in ever higher-level languages, thus adding yet more layers of dependency, and filling up memory with vast swathes of libraries and drivers just in order to be able to set a bit here and there, or use one routine which does something a certain way.
Allowing anyone to do anything will eventually lead to no-one being able to do anything. Proprietary ring-fencing is being replaced by personality cults ("you don't want to use that smelly libfooutils, my libfoo2utils is way better").
DOS, and all the demons it spawned, was achieved by managerial direction: a single company pushing hard one way, even if it was the wrong way. Until Linux acquires something of the same unity of purpose, it cannot and will not offer a threat, no matter how technically superior or free it is, because it will remain a morass of competing city-states, a midden of warring fiefdoms. Linus may have been the godhead who showed us the One True Way, but we're still waiting for the Ghengis Khan to knock us into a team.
What worries me more is that HP still don't know their ass from their elbow. Instead of kludging up a distro to work with their non-standard hardware, they'd be far better off just adhering to the prevailing h/w standards, and making sure the specs are available for OS writers to use.
That way it wouldn't cost them anything, and all distros would end up working with HP kit, and they'd sell far more machines. Unfortunately this is far too simple for the suits in Marketing, who are still thinking in the 1950s. Gotta make it proprietary! Gotta trap the customer! Gotta have a hardware USP! Boy, wrap two more inches of chrome round that fender!
Maybe finally the killer app for Topic Maps :-)
I doubt it. It's much more likely the invention of some lamebrain marketing droid. Or worse, the product of a "focus group" or some similarly fatuous corroborree.
How long before it becomes conventional to add an "i" and make it Mandrivia to rhyme with Trivia?
I agree that biomass is worth investigating, but there have been dozens of projects in the area over the years, and nothing usable so far.
Damn, still nothing for XSLT.
Much more to the point, does it handle Unicode properly?
Like almost all governmentally-oriented people who make ill-informed comments about the Internet, this guy Zhao has his head so far up his ass he might just as well climb up in after it and disappear.
There's no asshole like a lard-ass corporate lawyer with time on his hands.
I also think they've made the same mistake. But most people won't care.
Sadly, yes. Marketing people are so thick they can't see the opportunities staring them in the face.
And the sheep just carry on grazing.
Yessssss! Finally someone who understands XML. (Well, nearly.)
It's for storing text for publishing. Remember publishing? Books? Articles? Reports? Text documents? Sure, you can stuff it with spreadsheet data and send it over the wire. Sure, you can generate it from a database with element names 25 yards long and containing 1 byte of data. You can also try to open a sardine can with a banana.
But if you edit XML with Notepad, you a) haven't understood XML and b) deserve everything you get. It's by no means brain-dead, and it had nothing to do with scripting developers (a fine red-herring, that). It certainly has been pushed into areas where it didn't belong. It's a tribute to XML that it has actually performed well in those areas in circumstances where the document type has been carefully designed, but they are rare.