Better still, add some markup in ASCII (eg XML,
but any machine-parsable system would do) when
you want to indicate things unmarked ASCII can't.
OK now, but the pointy-bracket method wasn't really available until 1985 when SGML came along.
But the Domesday Project people were told when they started that the file format should be marked ASCII (TeX was suggested, and would certainly still be trivially usable today).
The whole thing is a con. Last few years they've been saying "don't miss it, it'll be spectacular" and the whole shebang went off like wet fart. Clear night and I saw one shooting star, was all. I'm sure as hell not wasting another night's sleep on this scam.
> How does the Slashdot crowd find their banking support?
Abysmal. Browser access to personal checking is OK, but business accounts have to be MSIE only, and then only with the bank's client plugin. My consultancy is all Unix: we don't even have a Windows machine.
Re:Easy prediction: It'll Never Happen.
on
The Coming Air Age
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It didn't happen because helicopters have all the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. When the power goes in a plane, you can glide for miles and with luck land in a field or on a beach. When the power goes in a helicopter you just drop, vertically.
Predictions like this were made during and after WW1 as well, for the private use of planes. For a time in the 20s and early 30s, it seemed as if it might be true: small biplanes like the Moth were cheap and easy to fly, and could be stored in the garage and assembled for a trip.
But I don't know why it never took off...maybe the intervention of WW2, cheaper cars, better roads...
While you're at it, photocopy or print all your doc
and mail it to yourself as sealed registered mail, and when
it arrives, keep it unopened and lodge it with your lawyer or a bank vault.
That way if anyone disputes the date you finalised
stuff before submitting, you have the unopened, date-franked package. It's not 100% watertight but
it's a good start.
Political parties? Well, the US has a precedent:-)
Either they have a lot of reds-under-the-beds paranoiacs, or they're using it in criminal investigations (do they have that many crooks?), or it's become a social necessity for the govmnt.
[gnat]
>I'm sick of whiny Americans who are so upset
>about the DMCA that they claim to be oppressed.
>...
>You're so naive from living in a free country
Well said. And next time you vote, remember just who it was you voted for last time. Voting for the same tired old big-party hacks that got you into this mess is not the way to fix the problem.
Baird's system used a spiral of holes in a rotating disk to perform the "scan" (when viewed through a static viewport the line of holes appears to move across the field). Farnsworth used electronics. Both "invented" a form of television, and both were scanning systems, but it was unquestionably Baird who made the first TV transmission, two years before Farnsworth, just as it was unquestionably Farnsworth who had the superior system. The two later cooperated on the development of CRT-based TV, but it is simply incorrect to imply that Farnsworth made the first TV transmission.
I am starting a beer database...as discussed at the Extreme Markup conference in Montreal a couple of weeks ago. I committed a while back to starting a Beer "published subject" (using Topic Maps) as a use-case, and quite a lot of people have expressed an interest.
An announcement (here and elsewhere) will be up soon. Meantime mail me if you want to contribute. You will need to grok XTM if you want to get involved in the detail, but simpler submissions will be taken via a Web form.
Perhaps now Americans will understand why Europeans get so pissed off at not being able to buy all the (relatively:-) cool stuff that American companies refuse to sell to Europeans. That's been going on for decades. The reasons are totally different, but the barriers still exist: I don't mean restrictions on "munitions" but the incapability of US companies to grasp that countries outside the USA really do exist.
If you want to branch out, learn markup (XML, XSL, etc) thoroughly. You'll need to make a few mental gear changes, as it's not what programmers expect, but with the big swing towards using it as the de facto common carrier for machine-to-machine interchange, there are still a lot of systems need programming to accept it.
Plus the time wasted trying to find something one dickhead manufacturer puts in/usr/sbin and the other dickhead manufacturer puts in/etc/X11/lib (or whatever). And the ones who think they're smarter than the X Consortium and put stuff in ~/.xresources that ought to be in Xresources (or whatever:-) Or whose system management scripts rely on proprietary extensions to awk or grep;-)
In my book on SGML and XML Tools I used a well-known
mathematical expression in the examples of markup
(given here in TeX notation: you have to speak it)
b_4i\sqrt{u}(ru\over 16)qt\pi
The publisher never noticed, and the two reviewers
who did, mailed me to say they were sufficiently
amused to keep quiet about it; and I've had mail
from a handful of readers:-)
I used it in the XML FAQ until several anal-retentives from corporate mid-America
complained, then I weakened and took it out.
Maybe now that Moz supports MathML I can put it back...
Nope. Go to Ireland instead. Culture is closer to home, country is physically closer to home, no language barriers, big pool of highly trained, highly productive programmers who *like* working for American corporations, they're slightly more expensive than Indians, but a *lot* of US software companies do work in Ireland (including Red Hat as well as that one from Redmond, WA).
But before Google there was DogPile, and one of their sections (fairly high up) was RealNames...and it returned the stupidest collection of garbage in response to almost anything you typed that it was a total waste of time (and one of the reasons I eventually gave up on DogPile; the other one being About.com).
I'm sorry, but it's right. The little coloured clamshell thingies (IMacs?) they were targeting
at schools and colleges a few years ago were $500
in the USA but over £1000 here ($500=/=£300 then).
Yes, we have a sales tax, and I don't know what the
underlying trade price was, but the end user was
being ripped off big-time.
I'm not in their target market, so it doesn't affect me directly; more of an annoyance to see it happen than anything else, but what baffles me is
that this kit would be more expensive at all in a country with a far lower disposable income than the USA. Given that the stuff is built just up the road, you'd expect it to be cheaper, not more expensive...
The computer salesman was presenting his bid to a large engineering
company back in the days when such corporations still considered
building their own computers rather than buying them.
`It's like Noah and the Ark,' he explained, `he could have gone to a
professional ark-builder, or he could have done the job himself.'
Silence.
Finally it's broken by a rookie engineer at the back taking the bait.
`But Noah did build the ark himself!'
`Damn right!' roared the salesman, `and if you've got 40 years
experience and God on your side, you can build your own computer.'
The company decided to buy...from the competition.
(anonymous, probably apochryphal, but reputed to have been Ferranti
selling to Glacier Metal). <plug class="shameless">Quoted in my book on SGML and XML Tools.</plug>
The idea is that non-commercial use allows them to
market a lo-spec machine at reduced cost to institutions that can't afford the prices business will pay, in the hope that educating students on your kit will encourage them to stay with you when they leave and get a job.
So far all it means is Apple charge 2-3 times US prices outside the States, making it grossly unaffordable even if you can get your hands on one.
I can see the Apple factory from my office window (Cork), but my office in college is all Linux: we never
see anyone from Apple from one year's end to the next, so marketing edu-only products is something of a sick joke here.
Yeah, but where's the smell of warm machine oil and
paper dust from the cardpunch and the rattle of overworked DASD as some asshole thrashes the database...
I hope it will be...but there are a couple of serious gray areas that need fixing:
printing still sucks little black toads (Times only, fixed [tiny] size, under Linux);
the email editor still has problems maintaining line-ends stable.
I've been using Moz for a couple of years and I love it, but I can't understand why these two areas are still outstanding. Does no-one print from Mozilla?
Interesting to note that this is part of what HTML was originally intended to do: provide one possible standard way of identifying information (like <title> was supposed to hold the title of the document), with SGML being used to let people develop more specialist applications.
It got perverted along the way, but hey, it's only taken us a decade to get back on track. So when will/. be available as a Web Service? C'mon guys, drop the mod_perl stuff, just give us the XML...
Slashdot Mirror
OK now, but the pointy-bracket method wasn't really available until 1985 when SGML came along. But the Domesday Project people were told when they started that the file format should be marked ASCII (TeX was suggested, and would certainly still be trivially usable today).
But they of course knew better...
The whole thing is a con. Last few years they've been saying "don't miss it, it'll be spectacular" and the whole shebang went off like wet fart. Clear night and I saw one shooting star, was all. I'm sure as hell not wasting another night's sleep on this scam.
Abysmal. Browser access to personal checking is OK, but business accounts have to be MSIE only, and then only with the bank's client plugin. My consultancy is all Unix: we don't even have a Windows machine.
Predictions like this were made during and after WW1 as well, for the private use of planes. For a time in the 20s and early 30s, it seemed as if it might be true: small biplanes like the Moth were cheap and easy to fly, and could be stored in the garage and assembled for a trip.
But I don't know why it never took off...maybe the intervention of WW2, cheaper cars, better roads...
That way if anyone disputes the date you finalised stuff before submitting, you have the unopened, date-franked package. It's not 100% watertight but it's a good start.
Either they have a lot of reds-under-the-beds paranoiacs, or they're using it in criminal investigations (do they have that many crooks?), or it's become a social necessity for the govmnt.
[gnat]
>I'm sick of whiny Americans who are so upset
>about the DMCA that they claim to be oppressed.
>...
>You're so naive from living in a free country
Well said. And next time you vote, remember just who it was you voted for last time. Voting for the same tired old big-party hacks that got you into this mess is not the way to fix the problem.
Thing would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
Baird's system used a spiral of holes in a rotating disk to perform the "scan" (when viewed through a static viewport the line of holes appears to move across the field). Farnsworth used electronics. Both "invented" a form of television, and both were scanning systems, but it was unquestionably Baird who made the first TV transmission, two years before Farnsworth, just as it was unquestionably Farnsworth who had the superior system. The two later cooperated on the development of CRT-based TV, but it is simply incorrect to imply that Farnsworth made the first TV transmission.
Both Mozilla and Galeon use Gecko...probably others as well.
An announcement (here and elsewhere) will be up soon. Meantime mail me if you want to contribute. You will need to grok XTM if you want to get involved in the detail, but simpler submissions will be taken via a Web form.
Perhaps now Americans will understand why Europeans :-) cool stuff that American companies
get so pissed off at not being able to buy all the
(relatively
refuse to sell to Europeans. That's been going on
for decades. The reasons are totally different, but
the barriers still exist: I don't mean restrictions
on "munitions" but the incapability of
US companies to grasp that countries outside the
USA really do exist.
If you want to branch out, learn markup (XML, XSL, etc) thoroughly. You'll need to make a few mental gear changes, as it's not what programmers expect, but with the big swing towards using it as the de facto common carrier for machine-to-machine interchange, there are still a lot of systems need programming to accept it.
Plus the time wasted trying to find something one dickhead manufacturer puts in /usr/sbin and the other dickhead manufacturer puts in /etc/X11/lib (or whatever). And the ones who think they're smarter than the X Consortium and put stuff in ~/.xresources that ought to be in Xresources (or whatever :-) Or whose system management scripts rely on proprietary extensions to awk or grep ;-)
b_4i\sqrt{u}(ru\over 16)qt\pi
The publisher never noticed, and the two reviewers who did, mailed me to say they were sufficiently amused to keep quiet about it; and I've had mail from a handful of readers :-)
I used it in the XML FAQ until several anal-retentives from corporate mid-America complained, then I weakened and took it out. Maybe now that Moz supports MathML I can put it back...
> Learn to speak Hindu.
:-)
Nope. Go to Ireland instead. Culture is closer to home, country is physically closer to home, no language barriers, big pool of highly trained, highly productive programmers who *like* working for American corporations, they're slightly more expensive than Indians, but a *lot* of US software companies do work in Ireland (including Red Hat as well as that one from Redmond, WA).
Biased? Nah, I live there
But before Google there was DogPile, and one of their sections (fairly high up) was RealNames...and it returned the stupidest collection of garbage in response to almost anything you typed that it was a total waste of time (and one of the reasons I eventually gave up on DogPile; the other one being About.com).
I'm not in their target market, so it doesn't affect me directly; more of an annoyance to see it happen than anything else, but what baffles me is that this kit would be more expensive at all in a country with a far lower disposable income than the USA. Given that the stuff is built just up the road, you'd expect it to be cheaper, not more expensive...
`It's like Noah and the Ark,' he explained, `he could have gone to a professional ark-builder, or he could have done the job himself.'
Silence.
Finally it's broken by a rookie engineer at the back taking the bait.
`But Noah did build the ark himself!'
`Damn right!' roared the salesman, `and if you've got 40 years experience and God on your side, you can build your own computer.'
The company decided to buy...from the competition.
(anonymous, probably apochryphal, but reputed to have been Ferranti selling to Glacier Metal). <plug class="shameless">Quoted in my book on SGML and XML Tools.</plug>
So far all it means is Apple charge 2-3 times US prices outside the States, making it grossly unaffordable even if you can get your hands on one.
I can see the Apple factory from my office window (Cork), but my office in college is all Linux: we never see anyone from Apple from one year's end to the next, so marketing edu-only products is something of a sick joke here.
Should be using dog anyway!
///Peter "bury me face down, '9' edge first"
> or is it a completely new approach???
Neither nor. It's been known for over 30 years in many fields. See, for example, Bartholomew D, Stochastic Models for Social Processes (Wiley).
///Peter
I hope it will be...but there are a couple of serious gray areas that need fixing:
I've been using Moz for a couple of years and I love it, but I can't understand why these two areas are still outstanding. Does no-one print from Mozilla?
It got perverted along the way, but hey, it's only taken us a decade to get back on track. So when will /. be available as a Web Service? C'mon guys, drop the mod_perl stuff, just give us the XML...
///Peter
> friends who write emails like that?
No, but I have 15,000 users who might.