These are social constructs and social structures, you cannot disavow them just like that. Hell, they even serve a purpose - to enforce the fact that the person is professional in his/her tasks. Hey, you're spending half your day at the work-place and they are paying you - you'd better adhere to their sense of what is professional and what is not.
Most of the time you are awake is spent at work. Don't you see not beeing able to "be yourself" at work as a huge restriction on your life in that light?
Even worse if it even restricts who you are in the little spare-time you have (as restrictions on body modifications do).
You say it serves a purpose. But is this purpose (from a whole-society-viewpoint) really worth it? I think people, esp. americans, throw too much of their life away working to get new gadgets they don't have time to play with anyway, instaed of living.
Well, you pay income taxes on your income and then VAT on that income when you spend it
Yes, I should have written "double taxation between countries" ore something like that.
Foreign taxes paid are a credit on your US taxes, so if I lived and worked in Sweden, I'd have to pay Swedish taxes. But since Swedish taxes are higher than US taxes, I would just claim all my Swedish taxes as credits on my US taxes and owe zero US tax. Do you mean that at minimum the US tax level is allways paid, but some part (or all) of it may be to the local country as local tax? That's still quite different from the Swedish system, where you won't pay any Swedish tax at all on the income that you've paid local tax on. Regardless of the taxation level of the country you live in.
Whaat???! If you move abroad, without giving up your citizenchip, to live in an other country, you have to pay both local taxes and US taxes at the same time?? This sounds totally insane! Can that really be true? And right-wing people here use to say the US is the country of economic freedom!
In Sweden, our taxation laws are made especially so that you should never be taxed twice for the same income. You might have to pay swedish taxes when living abroad, but only if you don't pay local taxes on the same income and do have some sort of strong connection to sweden (like living here half of the year or something).
Btw, how does the US taxation office get to know about your income when living in another country anyway? It's not like your local employer will be forced by local law to send in your income details to them...
Or it is a clue that you should get another job, with a more sane management, ASAP.
Throughout this thread, I've been thinking; what's up with you americans, who let your society (government + private companies) restrict such a great part of your time so much?
My employer trusts me to do my work, and doesn't try to sneak into what I'm doing. Why should they do otherwize? Trusted employees are usually happier employees, and happier employees are usually better employees. On the other hand, I've only worked for SME:s...
If microsoft releases their own spec to everyone for free, no strings attached, I won't condemn them for making their own spec. As you say, their format must match their data-model, and OASIS, how good it may be, may or may not match their data model. But the keyword here is "no strings attached". I'm afraid they will add some licensing requirements that are incompatible with some software distribution schemes and/or licenses.
Sounds like he's just been listening to ESR and the like and never heard RMS. Had he, he'd noticed not everyone is just hacking for the good of the big companies but for themselves and everyone.
Open Source was a reaction on the, from an american view-point "too business unfriendly" Free Software, to get acceptance from and win supporters among businesses and thus make the free software more popular and ubiqous.
However in taking the descission to promote the licenses this way, one did not only distance oneseleves from the idealistic Free Software advocates, but also from the leftists, who, in the rest of the world aren't as few and unimportant as in the US. I think that one could argue that this descission was taken on a bit too US-centric arguments.
I can't see why cryptographers and security experts attempts, again and again, to higher the number of significant bits per character in passwords for humans, while human language naturally has a high redundancy. Why force people to remember random garbage like/56Ss4.,&XXy when they will just write it down? Why not allow humans to use human language?
If I remember correctly, human language has about two bits of information per character at average. So if you want a cryptographically strong 128bit password, just enforce a 64 character long human passphrase, with no limitations on used charcters or whatever. I bet people will come up with and remember such passphrases much more easily than e.g./56Ss4.,&XXy.
Many countries have some sort of honour/pride idea that makes them unable to admit faults publicly. The US of A suffers great from this, and the current anti-japanism in china at least partly stems from this. Germany is one of the few good examples in this case, they did so wrong they just couldn't but admit it, and thus, they have become accepted again and are now just one of the other members of the EU. Sweden (my country) did some...hm, interresting, things during WWII, but never really admitts to that, as it does neither with its collaboration with NATO during the cold war... I think this sort of pride is equally bad for individuals and countries. It's something humane, but which we need to get rid of as much as possible.
But OpenOffice can't embed them:( Not properly, that is. Try to embed a vector graphics image in an OO doc. Try EPS, SVG or WMF/EMF, whichever you like, and you will fail anyway. Not totally, just enought not to make it usable (if you do it in one way, it will embed a pixmap rendition of the graphics, in another way it will embed the EPS comments as text).
How come the CLI is so integration-friendly in linux, you can pipe anything through anything, but the GUI isn't (you can't copy-paste between anything and anything, and you can't have Mozilla render a part of your OO-doc and gnumeric another)?
I'm a programmer. I hack python-code all day long and usually only use emacs, python, bash and tla. However, as soon as I try to do some graphics work (layout, producing some docs, whatever), I feel that this non-integration in Linux sucks. And I'm not a PHP or AD or anything like that!
Nah, you are both wrong. Two 160bit hashes are prolly somewhere in between as strong as a 320bit hash and a 160bit hash, depending on exactly how the hash-values distribute over the input space. If the hash where perfect, the distance between any two hash-values with one bit of difference would be the same. However, in reality, that would hardly be the case except for some hashes with a given data-to-hashsize-ratio. But taking two random hashfunctions would probably combine into one where many bits are redundant (not the same bits for all hash-values of course). Hm, hope that goes for enought of an explanation. Otherwize, go read up on coding theory at mathworld.wolfram.com or wikipedia. A search for "Hamming distance" might also be a good start:)
It's interresting that this patterns seems to repeat all over europe - green party is against software patents, with a good set of arguments, liberal party is against too, but with less arguments, and the rest are for.
How comne the greens turned up the only knowledgable, in a question totally unrelated to environment?
The Internet is a bounch of protocols - all owned by everyone and governed by different bodies (mainly the RF Editor), and a set of cables. The protocols, or rather, their ancestors, where invented by US military.
However, the cables are mainly owned by a multitude of private, and for the largest part, non-us, companies.
I don't say that a UN governed Internet would be a good thing, but you are terribly wrong if you think the Internet is a US-owned thingy - the US could go blackout today, and there would still be an immense network left.
No part of that immense network is a gift given to us by the US, it is something we others build ourselves, you only supplied us with the protocol specs. And nowdays, most of the specs in use, are written by people all over the planet (of course including the US), as is the software implementing them.
>As for the police forces: They don't have to protect you. Period. They're job is to catch the guy after he robs/rapes/kills you. Don't beleive me? Ask the Supreme Court Of the United States.
Interresting. In Sweden where I live, the police is obliged to try to stop crime if they are noticed about it. They are _not_ obliged to find out after a crime has been comitted who was responsible, and often don't as they have quite some cases and must prioritize.
Btw, I find the pro-gun argument that the citizens must be able to overthrow the government if it stops being democratic a bit strange as its never practically true (any more, perheaps I should add) that the populace have greater weapon resources than the army...
Yes. The DNS-system is not flat system with suffixes, its a tree system. You don't have just foo.com, you have myhost.mydepartement.mycompany.com. The point here is that the directory of names is spread over different server - one server for each domainname part, one for the root, one for com, net, us, se etc, one for mycompnay.com and one for mydepartement.mycompany.com. Each server holds only the data for that part of the tree. To flattern it all would require One Big Server serving _all_ requests, run by One Big Company... You don't want that.
Ombudsman comes from Swedish and rougthly translates into "someone who does business on someone elses behalf and order" or "Someone who is a representative or deputy of somebody else".
Yes, except yum is much inferior to urpmi, both theoretically (urpmi has better algorithms and datastructures) and practically (yum has a shitload of bugs, such as big problems working with an install-root different from/). urpmi and apt-get are on par with each other in my experience (mature, good performance scaling), and I can't see why redhat shose yum, as both apt-get for rpm and urpmi are available to them and are both superior...
A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!
> News flash: A significant fraction of people in America, a not-insignificant place in the developed world, still us dial-up internet connections.
You obviously must have just misspelled it, but shouldn't it read undeveloped world? I mean, not having ethernet in your home and fiber between the houses is'n a good sign of developement... But ok, using DSL isn't that bad either. But modems? That so... 90ies!
Eh, you don't have to make an action illegal just for that. In.se, suicide isn't illegal,l but there still is a law they are allowed to rescue you and lock you up until you aren't suicidal any more - but in a hospital. You can never be put in a prison, and you won't have a conviction on your record.
In addition, planning a crime is illegal in sweden, but as suicide isn't a crime, planning for your own suicide isn't a crime naither...
Personally, I think suicide should be on the list of Human Rights.
It is doable without root from what I know, but to allow writes for changes, you'l have to remove the config-file that instructs gconf not to write anything to your home-dir, restart gnome, make the changes, readd the file and restart gnome again...
That is the easy part - just set up GConf not to write (to) any config-files in your home-dir. GConf can read and merge several config trees, and optionally write to one of them. Usually, it reads/etc/gnomesomething and ~/.gconf, and writes to the latter one. However, it locks and writes to it all the time, even when it doesn't really need to. But you can easily make GConf unchangable or have it store all changes in/temp or the like. All this is configured in its main XML-config-file in/etc, just read the docs:)
The only bad side of GConf is that it is not network transparent. It sort of replaces X Resources, but dows not solve two of the problems that X Resources do - to get all applications running on a desktop, regardless of where they run physically (on what machine, over which ssh-connection) to look the same, and to allow a GUI-WYSIWYG-realtime-editor for looknfeel-configuration (Like X resedit).
It would be übercool if someone hacked an GConf-over-X-window-properties protocol and back-end and an integrated options-editor-system for gnome...
I installed Linux for a non-techie friend some months ago. Seems like to most important things to get working was:
gaim (ICQ and MSN)
mozilla with flash and java support
DVD-player (mplayer with some libdvddecryptstupidcss)
oo
some file-sharing-thingy
The only real problem was the file-sharing-thingy: I couldn't find a _working_ DC-client, and he ended up switching to bittorrent, which havn't worked that well neither (btgui has some interresting bugs...).
Oh, one more thing, he missed all the small games he used to install on windows... But he _could_ see how this was linked to the machine crashing all the time and being cut off from the broadband for spreading worms and the like...
Nope. Not in sweden. We had a king that worked much a like a president (voted into power) since the ciking age all up to king Gustav Vasa, who took the power by more or less a coup. He did ask the people to vote him into power, was turned down once and went on heading for norway, in skis, but the people changed their mind and wen after him, and after that a big skiing contest is held each year, ending in Mora, Dalarna. Later, he created the order of succession and changed the country from a pseudo-demochracy to a monarchy, also, he was the one to remove the powers (and the gold) from the church and to make the lutheran protestantic church the swedish national church.
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Because you need to _parse_ it in any way at all. Simply holerith/runlength-encoding the data would be much better.
Take XPath as an example. How do you extract the fragment pointed to by the expression
foo/bar/fie[@naja='hehe']
? You read the document, counting opening and closing tags, until you read in a foo-tag at topp-level then you continue, counting as before, until you, before a foo-ending tag at topp level, reaches a bar-tag at second level, and then until you reach a fie-tag with the attribute naja set to 'hehe' at third level. Then you read on counting opening and closing tags until you reach its ending tag and return the string between the opening and ending tags, including those tags, as result.
Thus, if the foo-tag is at the end of the document, yoy have read the entire document just to extract those tiny bytes at the end of it.
If you coded each tag something like
4711 characters
this task would directly be greatly minimized, as you could "jump" over big chunks of the file at once. Changing the coding of that 4711 to binary would also minimize the hassle, as reading the number would be a simple 4 byte read operation (one machine instruction).
Even better would be to have tags not contain any information, but just pointers (indexes into the file) to the information, so that changing the file destructively to add some extra info would be possible without re-writing the whole (possibly big) file.
All of this is old knowledge however. Go read up on SUN RPC, Corba, or, heaven forbid, ASN.1...
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time you are awake is spent at work. Don't you see not beeing able to "be yourself" at work as a huge restriction on your life in that light?
Even worse if it even restricts who you are in the little spare-time you have (as restrictions on body modifications do).
You say it serves a purpose. But is this purpose (from a whole-society-viewpoint) really worth it? I think people, esp. americans, throw too much of their life away working to get new gadgets they don't have time to play with anyway, instaed of living.
Well, you pay income taxes on your income and then VAT on that income when you spend it
Yes, I should have written "double taxation between countries" ore something like that.
Foreign taxes paid are a credit on your US taxes, so if I lived and worked in Sweden, I'd have to pay Swedish taxes. But since Swedish taxes are higher than US taxes, I would just claim all my Swedish taxes as credits on my US taxes and owe zero US tax.
Do you mean that at minimum the US tax level is allways paid, but some part (or all) of it may be to the local country as local tax? That's still quite different from the Swedish system, where you won't pay any Swedish tax at all on the income that you've paid local tax on. Regardless of the taxation level of the country you live in.
Whaat???! If you move abroad, without giving up your citizenchip, to live in an other country, you have to pay both local taxes and US taxes at the same time?? This sounds totally insane! Can that really be true? And right-wing people here use to say the US is the country of economic freedom!
In Sweden, our taxation laws are made especially so that you should never be taxed twice for the same income. You might have to pay swedish taxes when living abroad, but only if you don't pay local taxes on the same income and do have some sort of strong connection to sweden (like living here half of the year or something).
Btw, how does the US taxation office get to know about your income when living in another country anyway? It's not like your local employer will be forced by local law to send in your income details to them...
Or it is a clue that you should get another job, with a more sane management, ASAP.
Throughout this thread, I've been thinking; what's up with you americans, who let your society (government + private companies) restrict such a great part of your time so much?
My employer trusts me to do my work, and doesn't try to sneak into what I'm doing. Why should they do otherwize? Trusted employees are usually happier employees, and happier employees are usually better employees. On the other hand, I've only worked for SME:s...
If microsoft releases their own spec to everyone for free, no strings attached, I won't condemn them for making their own spec. As you say, their format must match their data-model, and OASIS, how good it may be, may or may not match their data model. But the keyword here is "no strings attached". I'm afraid they will add some licensing requirements that are incompatible with some software distribution schemes and/or licenses.
Sounds like he's just been listening to ESR and the like and never heard RMS. Had he, he'd noticed not everyone is just hacking for the good of the big companies but for themselves and everyone.
Open Source was a reaction on the, from an american view-point "too business unfriendly" Free Software, to get acceptance from and win supporters among businesses and thus make the free software more popular and ubiqous.
However in taking the descission to promote the licenses this way, one did not only distance oneseleves from the idealistic Free Software advocates, but also from the leftists, who, in the rest of the world aren't as few and unimportant as in the US. I think that one could argue that this descission was taken on a bit too US-centric arguments.
I can't see why cryptographers and security experts attempts, again and again, to higher the number of significant bits per character in passwords for humans, while human language naturally has a high redundancy. Why force people to remember random garbage like /56Ss4.,&XXy when they will just write it down? Why not allow humans to use human language?
/56Ss4.,&XXy.
If I remember correctly, human language has about two bits of information per character at average. So if you want a cryptographically strong 128bit password, just enforce a 64 character long human passphrase, with no limitations on used charcters or whatever. I bet people will come up with and remember such passphrases much more easily than e.g.
Many countries have some sort of honour/pride idea that makes them unable to admit faults publicly. The US of A suffers great from this, and the current anti-japanism in china at least partly stems from this. Germany is one of the few good examples in this case, they did so wrong they just couldn't but admit it, and thus, they have become accepted again and are now just one of the other members of the EU. Sweden (my country) did some...hm, interresting, things during WWII, but never really admitts to that, as it does neither with its collaboration with NATO during the cold war... I think this sort of pride is equally bad for individuals and countries. It's something humane, but which we need to get rid of as much as possible.
But OpenOffice can't embed them :( Not properly, that is. Try to embed a vector graphics image in an OO doc. Try EPS, SVG or WMF/EMF, whichever you like, and you will fail anyway. Not totally, just enought not to make it usable (if you do it in one way, it will embed a pixmap rendition of the graphics, in another way it will embed the EPS comments as text).
How come the CLI is so integration-friendly in linux, you can pipe anything through anything, but the GUI isn't (you can't copy-paste between anything and anything, and you can't have Mozilla render a part of your OO-doc and gnumeric another)?
I'm a programmer. I hack python-code all day long and usually only use emacs, python, bash and tla. However, as soon as I try to do some graphics work (layout, producing some docs, whatever), I feel that this non-integration in Linux sucks. And I'm not a PHP or AD or anything like that!
Nah, you are both wrong. Two 160bit hashes are prolly somewhere in between as strong as a 320bit hash and a 160bit hash, depending on exactly how the hash-values distribute over the input space. If the hash where perfect, the distance between any two hash-values with one bit of difference would be the same. However, in reality, that would hardly be the case except for some hashes with a given data-to-hashsize-ratio. But taking two random hashfunctions would probably combine into one where many bits are redundant (not the same bits for all hash-values of course). Hm, hope that goes for enought of an explanation. Otherwize, go read up on coding theory at mathworld.wolfram.com or wikipedia. A search for "Hamming distance" might also be a good start :)
Where are my fucking modpoints when I need them? This is the first time I say this, but mod parent +10 funny as hell :)
It's interresting that this patterns seems to repeat all over europe - green party is against software patents, with a good set of arguments, liberal party is against too, but with less arguments, and the rest are for.
How comne the greens turned up the only knowledgable, in a question totally unrelated to environment?
The Internet is a bounch of protocols - all owned by everyone and governed by different bodies (mainly the RF Editor), and a set of cables. The protocols, or rather, their ancestors, where invented by US military.
However, the cables are mainly owned by a multitude of private, and for the largest part, non-us, companies.
I don't say that a UN governed Internet would be a good thing, but you are terribly wrong if you think the Internet is a US-owned thingy - the US could go blackout today, and there would still be an immense network left.
No part of that immense network is a gift given to us by the US, it is something we others build ourselves, you only supplied us with the protocol specs. And nowdays, most of the specs in use, are written by people all over the planet (of course including the US), as is the software implementing them.
>As for the police forces: They don't have to protect you. Period. They're job is to catch the guy after he robs/rapes/kills you. Don't beleive me? Ask the Supreme Court Of the United States.
Interresting. In Sweden where I live, the police is obliged to try to stop crime if they are noticed about it. They are _not_ obliged to find out after a crime has been comitted who was responsible, and often don't as they have quite some cases and must prioritize.
Btw, I find the pro-gun argument that the citizens must be able to overthrow the government if it stops being democratic a bit strange as its never practically true (any more, perheaps I should add) that the populace have greater weapon resources than the army...
Yes. The DNS-system is not flat system with suffixes, its a tree system. You don't have just foo.com, you have myhost.mydepartement.mycompany.com. The point here is that the directory of names is spread over different server - one server for each domainname part, one for the root, one for com, net, us, se etc, one for mycompnay.com and one for mydepartement.mycompany.com. Each server holds only the data for that part of the tree. To flattern it all would require One Big Server serving _all_ requests, run by One Big Company... You don't want that.
Ombudsman comes from Swedish and rougthly translates into "someone who does business on someone elses behalf and order" or "Someone who is a representative or deputy of somebody else".
Yes, except yum is much inferior to urpmi, both theoretically (urpmi has better algorithms and datastructures) and practically (yum has a shitload of bugs, such as big problems working with an install-root different from /). urpmi and apt-get are on par with each other in my experience (mature, good performance scaling), and I can't see why redhat shose yum, as both apt-get for rpm and urpmi are available to them and are both superior...
A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!
> News flash: A significant fraction of people in America, a not-insignificant place in the developed world, still us dial-up internet connections.
You obviously must have just misspelled it, but shouldn't it read undeveloped world? I mean, not having ethernet in your home and fiber between the houses is'n a good sign of developement... But ok, using DSL isn't that bad either. But modems? That so... 90ies!
Eh, you don't have to make an action illegal just for that. In .se, suicide isn't illegal,l but there still is a law they are allowed to rescue you and lock you up until you aren't suicidal any more - but in a hospital. You can never be put in a prison, and you won't have a conviction on your record.
In addition, planning a crime is illegal in sweden, but as suicide isn't a crime, planning for your own suicide isn't a crime naither...
Personally, I think suicide should be on the list of Human Rights.
It is doable without root from what I know, but to allow writes for changes, you'l have to remove the config-file that instructs gconf not to write anything to your home-dir, restart gnome, make the changes, readd the file and restart gnome again...
That is the easy part - just set up GConf not to write (to) any config-files in your home-dir. GConf can read and merge several config trees, and optionally write to one of them. Usually, it reads /etc/gnomesomething and ~/.gconf, and writes to the latter one. However, it locks and writes to it all the time, even when it doesn't really need to. But you can easily make GConf unchangable or have it store all changes in /temp or the like. All this is configured in its main XML-config-file in /etc, just read the docs :)
The only bad side of GConf is that it is not network transparent. It sort of replaces X Resources, but dows not solve two of the problems that X Resources do - to get all applications running on a desktop, regardless of where they run physically (on what machine, over which ssh-connection) to look the same, and to allow a GUI-WYSIWYG-realtime-editor for looknfeel-configuration (Like X resedit).
It would be übercool if someone hacked an GConf-over-X-window-properties protocol and back-end and an integrated options-editor-system for gnome...
I installed Linux for a non-techie friend some months ago. Seems like to most important things to get working was:
gaim (ICQ and MSN)
mozilla with flash and java support
DVD-player (mplayer with some libdvddecryptstupidcss)
oo
some file-sharing-thingy
The only real problem was the file-sharing-thingy: I couldn't find a _working_ DC-client, and he ended up switching to bittorrent, which havn't worked that well neither (btgui has some interresting bugs...).
Oh, one more thing, he missed all the small games he used to install on windows... But he _could_ see how this was linked to the machine crashing all the time and being cut off from the broadband for spreading worms and the like...
Nope. Not in sweden. We had a king that worked much a like a president (voted into power) since the ciking age all up to king Gustav Vasa, who took the power by more or less a coup. He did ask the people to vote him into power, was turned down once and went on heading for norway, in skis, but the people changed their mind and wen after him, and after that a big skiing contest is held each year, ending in Mora, Dalarna. Later, he created the order of succession and changed the country from a pseudo-demochracy to a monarchy, also, he was the one to remove the powers (and the gold) from the church and to make the lutheran protestantic church the swedish national church.
Because you need to _parse_ it in any way at all. Simply holerith/runlength-encoding the data would be much better.
Take XPath as an example. How do you extract the fragment pointed to by the expression
foo/bar/fie[@naja='hehe']
? You read the document, counting opening and closing tags, until you read in a foo-tag at topp-level then you continue, counting as before, until you, before a foo-ending tag at topp level, reaches a bar-tag at second level, and then until you reach a fie-tag with the attribute naja set to 'hehe' at third level. Then you read on counting opening and closing tags until you reach its ending tag and return the string between the opening and ending tags, including those tags, as result.
Thus, if the foo-tag is at the end of the document, yoy have read the entire document just to extract those tiny bytes at the end of it.
If you coded each tag something like
4711 characters
this task would directly be greatly minimized, as you could "jump" over big chunks of the file at once. Changing the coding of that 4711 to binary would also minimize the hassle, as reading the number would be a simple 4 byte read operation (one machine instruction).
Even better would be to have tags not contain any information, but just pointers (indexes into the file) to the information, so that changing the file destructively to add some extra info would be possible without re-writing the whole (possibly big) file.
All of this is old knowledge however. Go read up on SUN RPC, Corba, or, heaven forbid, ASN.1...