People often don't update their software for years at a time. Hey, it costs. Which is why NAV is designed to update itself automatically. You just have to configure it correctly.
I'm no fan of Symantec. It's perfectly true that they're badly run. Hey, they used to be a lot more than a "security software" company, but all their other business (natural language databases, compilers, IDEs, desktop software, backup software) just died on them. But to blame them for the ineptitude of the CNN's IT department is idiotic.
Jeez, references to cars brings out the idiots even more so than references to guns.
When I said "passive restraint" I meant "passive seatbelts". Technically, I guess airbags are passive restraints too, but that's not what I meant, and I think it was clear what I meant. Don't make my choice of terminology into a conspiracy theory.
Airbags are not now nor have they ever been considered a substitute for seatbelts. Indeed, cars with airbags are more dangerous if you don't buckle up.
You're really reaching for it with your weird discussion of speed limits and your clueless assumption that I was referring to the old 55 MPH experiment. I was referring to the fact that when I drive 65 (OK, sometimes 70), I'm routinely passed by folks going 20 MPH faster. A big reason I avoid the left lane these days.
I do have to point out that higher speed limits have had a certain elevating effect, not just on accident rates, but on the price of gas.
My choice of examples is "interesting"? Does that mean I have some evil hidden agenda? If so, I guess I must be smarter than you: you managed to attack me 5 different ways without really understanding anything I was saying — much less attempting to deal with my point about NSFs vs. RRFs, which was the whole point of my post, and which you completely ignored.
Dude, I said that.toCapitalized was like the existing.toUpperCase. If you'd go and read the docs for the API, you could answer your own questions, instead of wasting both our time.
You're reading "capitalize itself" out of context. "Know how" refers to the logic that's built into the object — nonstatic methods. For example, a Java string knows how to convert itself to upper case:
AC is just saying that there should also be a nonstatic method.toCapitalized() that would just force the first character ("Hello"). Nothing to do with immutability.
Did you actually look at that list? It's only 44 stores, 2/3 of which are in California and Texas; half of the remainder are west of the Mississippi. Sounds pretty Small and Western to me.
Sigh. "Nannie state fascist" is not a bad term, but the fact that you apply it so carelessly indicates a certain knee-jerkiness on your part. Please repeat after me: "Rush Limbaugh thinks with his mouth."
To me, a "Nannie State fascist" is somebody wants the government to outlaw every little danger. Ralph Nader is a prime case. Of course, the term is sort of subjective. You and I would probably agree that the crusade to require passive restraints in cars (basically, seatbelts that buckle you in involuntarily) is Nannie State Fascism. But we probably disagree as to the speed limit (I think people who think they can drive safely at 90 MPH are fooling themselves, but that's not a popular opinion).
This, on the other hand is better described as "Righteous Religious Fascism." The motivation is not to protect you from yourself, but to protect you from Satan.
I recently switched to Cingular because their phones are a lot more open than the competition. So there's nothing stopping third parties from writing applications that (for example) sync your phone with your Palm PDA and/or Desktop.
Did I say "nothing"? I meant "nothing technical or legal". There's only a couple of applications out there that do this sort of thing, and they're both crap, obviously written by some inept hacker in his spare time. I guess the market for this sort of thing isn't big enough to attract a serious player. As you say, most people just want to talk to other people.
The other reason I went with Cingular was their use of GSM. I always figured GSM/GPRS was the true geek's cell phone protocol, because it is more international, more hackable, and supports connectionless data transfer (meaning you can buy your connection by the packet, instead of by the minute). And it is all that, But there don't seem to be enough Cingular/GSM hackers to make it worthwhile. And now I'm stuck with a phone I can't use around speakers!
You have a good point. It's much too easy to get bogged down in detail. I guess where I'm coming from is the desire to wander and explore. That's always my favorite part of any "adventure" game. If you can magically transport yourself anywhere, it takes away all the fun.
Gee, thanks for clearing that up. BTW, do you know who's buried in Grant's Tomb? That's always confused me.
Games have rules, and the choice of rules is what makes the game interesting or boring. By leaving an important economic factor out of an economic game, Second Life has made itself rather less interesting.
Each simulator runs everything for 16 acres of virtual land -- buildings, physics, and of course, scripts.
I've never done 2nd life. What happens if you stand at the border and throw a rock into the next region?
OK, I guess there's probably some handoff mechanism. But I have to say that I find the "physics" of 2nd life disappointing. In the real world, there's an enormous cost in time and energy in moving stuff from place to place. That's an important part of our economy. In 2nd life, they've gone to a lot of trouble to create a serious economic system — but you can still wave your hands and move around arbitrarily — even fly.
I think HTML is a good format for its purpose. The problem is that people have come to expect more from it than it can deliver. It is now expected to deliver types of data and display it in ways that were not conceived of when HTML was first established.
You're talking about HTML 1.0. Nowadays, "HTML" means HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0, or something very close to those specifications, usually used in conjunction with CSS. For these, people have had 10 years to polish the spec and make it more flexible. The result is, as I said, barely adequate for doing web pages, and useless for anything else.
I find basic HTML is a good format for making e-books, but it is not suitable for high-level word processing.
You're making the standard mistake: you're judging formats entirely on how expressive they are. And if documents never got re-written, you'd be right. But documents do get rewritten, unless the subject matter never changes. (And even then, the document gets reviewed and revised, unless the author is a total hack.) If you write documents that are going to be revised even once (and as a technical writer, I write documents that are going to be revised dozens of times), you want a document format that's maintainable. That means a useful semantic structure. The semantic structure of HTML is very basic. The semantic structure of RTF is essentially nonexistent.
I normally use RTF for my word processing because I find it a good format for text-only documents. It also has the advantage that just about every word processor can read the files, and it also tends to produce smaller files compared to other formats.
You have got to be kidding. Yes, every word processor reads RTF — but they all do different things with it. Try copying a complicated table or a multi-level list between word processors using RTF.
There's nothing wrong with using a convenient application (a word processor, a spread sheet, even a text editor) to write a one-off document with no future. But don't pretend that any of these create "universal" documents. That's wishful thinking.
Returning to the issue of HTML, one of the biggest advantages of it is one shares with WordPerfect: you are able to easily view the format codes within the document. This is also an advantage of the OpenDocument format and RTF: with minimal effort you can view the actual files that make up the document.
And if you want to spend all your time hacking the fine details of document, that's fine. But if you've got a lot of documentation to get written, you don't have time for that. Besides, not every writer is a (like you and me) a format weenie. And they should not have to be.
The thing with The Non-Designer's Design Book is that she didn't have the web in mind when she wrote it back in 1994. It's more for people doing stuff like desktop publishing. True, a lot of what it says is applicable to web design. But if your focus is web design, her more recent Non-Designer's Web Book is probably a better place to start. A very good book if you can overlook some irritating but non-essential technical errors.
I actually did publish a book that I authored in HTML. More precisely, we used HTML run through a really ugly preprocessor that one of the original authors of the book created while she was teaching herself Perl.
Fortunately, our publisher found an SGML/XML wizard who did a very good job of converting the HTML to XML, which then got converted PDF using an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor. I was very impressed with his work, without which the conversion would have been a total nightmare. It was still very tedious, though, because HTML is not a true structured format, and you cannot completely automate its conversion.
It would, of course, have been much more efficient to have authored the document in XML in the first place. I remember this actually being proposed back in 1998 for an earlier version of the book. (I was not a co-author back then, but I was working for the department that owned the content.) The manager who responsible for this had zero interest: HTML got the job done, she didn't have the resources to do a big XML conversion. Never mind the huge inefficiency of authoring that book, and a lot of other content related to the Java SE platform, in plain HTML. Only now, after this manager has left the company and it has become painfully obvious that they can no longer afford to hack such a huge mountain of HTML code, is the company getting round to making the conversion.
HTML is just not a good format. It's barely adequate for creating web pages, and totally useless for anything else.
Do people who run these high demand systems really upgrade the cpu every time AMD or Intel manages a tiny delta of performance increase?
Probably not. But they don't take the "wait six months until the price comes down" attitude either. They can't afford to.
And the people who take these chips and turn them into actual systems do upgrade every time AMD or Intel does that tiny delta. No, that's wrong: they upgrade before. Because they have OEM agreements that give them access to the chip maker's secret development schedule. So long before you hear about a new chip, system manufacturers are busy designing the systems that will use them.
If all you want is a cheap powerful processor to put into your gaming PC, then yeah, you don't care who dethrones who. But if you work in the industry (and right now I'm writing documentation for an Operton-based HPC system) then the Intel-AMD struggle is very interesting indeed. Every time AMD scores an upset over Intel, the whole marketplace changes.
And while you may be content to buy cheap technology 6 months after its introduced, not everybody who buys hardware has that luxury. If you're spending 6 or 7 figures for a rack full of high-performance computer, then every little twitch in performance or pricing makes a big difference to your bottom line.
None of which is all that impressive. XEmacs is just a GUI-aware port of Emacs (I wouldn't call it "user friendly".) XKeyCaps is useful (or was, when he was still maintaining it), but not a major achievement. I don't believe JWZ contributed that much to the creation of Mosaic or Netscape; certainly his comments in the resource files that I mentioned suggest he'd be more of a hindrance then a help in a major software project, whatever his technical talents.
Why is that ironic? "Web 2.0" is about hyping "interactive" web applications — most of which are badly designed.
Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.
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People often don't update their software for years at a time. Hey, it costs. Which is why NAV is designed to update itself automatically. You just have to configure it correctly.
I'm no fan of Symantec. It's perfectly true that they're badly run. Hey, they used to be a lot more than a "security software" company, but all their other business (natural language databases, compilers, IDEs, desktop software, backup software) just died on them. But to blame them for the ineptitude of the CNN's IT department is idiotic.
Dude, I said that .toCapitalized was like the existing .toUpperCase. If you'd go and read the docs for the API, you could answer your own questions, instead of wasting both our time.
Did you actually look at that list? It's only 44 stores, 2/3 of which are in California and Texas; half of the remainder are west of the Mississippi. Sounds pretty Small and Western to me.
Dude, learn to read. I never said that seatbelts shouldn't be mandatory.
You're really overstating the problem! By your own logic, only 60% of us are doomed!
So, basically, you're saying that there are no rules at all in 2nd Life. Sounds pretty boring.
Sigh. "Nannie state fascist" is not a bad term, but the fact that you apply it so carelessly indicates a certain knee-jerkiness on your part. Please repeat after me: "Rush Limbaugh thinks with his mouth."
To me, a "Nannie State fascist" is somebody wants the government to outlaw every little danger. Ralph Nader is a prime case. Of course, the term is sort of subjective. You and I would probably agree that the crusade to require passive restraints in cars (basically, seatbelts that buckle you in involuntarily) is Nannie State Fascism. But we probably disagree as to the speed limit (I think people who think they can drive safely at 90 MPH are fooling themselves, but that's not a popular opinion).
This, on the other hand is better described as "Righteous Religious Fascism." The motivation is not to protect you from yourself, but to protect you from Satan.
I recently switched to Cingular because their phones are a lot more open than the competition. So there's nothing stopping third parties from writing applications that (for example) sync your phone with your Palm PDA and/or Desktop.
Did I say "nothing"? I meant "nothing technical or legal". There's only a couple of applications out there that do this sort of thing, and they're both crap, obviously written by some inept hacker in his spare time. I guess the market for this sort of thing isn't big enough to attract a serious player. As you say, most people just want to talk to other people.
The other reason I went with Cingular was their use of GSM. I always figured GSM/GPRS was the true geek's cell phone protocol, because it is more international, more hackable, and supports connectionless data transfer (meaning you can buy your connection by the packet, instead of by the minute). And it is all that, But there don't seem to be enough Cingular/GSM hackers to make it worthwhile. And now I'm stuck with a phone I can't use around speakers!
That one is so funny, it was even in the article.
Jeez, dude, now you're the one who seems to have forgotten It's Just A Game.
You have a good point. It's much too easy to get bogged down in detail. I guess where I'm coming from is the desire to wander and explore. That's always my favorite part of any "adventure" game. If you can magically transport yourself anywhere, it takes away all the fun.
Gee, thanks for clearing that up. BTW, do you know who's buried in Grant's Tomb? That's always confused me.
Games have rules, and the choice of rules is what makes the game interesting or boring. By leaving an important economic factor out of an economic game, Second Life has made itself rather less interesting.
I'll say it again, then give up: having a cost to moving things in space and time has economic impact. Second life places a big emphasis on economics.
I've never done 2nd life. What happens if you stand at the border and throw a rock into the next region?
OK, I guess there's probably some handoff mechanism. But I have to say that I find the "physics" of 2nd life disappointing. In the real world, there's an enormous cost in time and energy in moving stuff from place to place. That's an important part of our economy. In 2nd life, they've gone to a lot of trouble to create a serious economic system — but you can still wave your hands and move around arbitrarily — even fly.
You're talking about HTML 1.0. Nowadays, "HTML" means HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0, or something very close to those specifications, usually used in conjunction with CSS. For these, people have had 10 years to polish the spec and make it more flexible. The result is, as I said, barely adequate for doing web pages, and useless for anything else.
You're making the standard mistake: you're judging formats entirely on how expressive they are. And if documents never got re-written, you'd be right. But documents do get rewritten, unless the subject matter never changes. (And even then, the document gets reviewed and revised, unless the author is a total hack.) If you write documents that are going to be revised even once (and as a technical writer, I write documents that are going to be revised dozens of times), you want a document format that's maintainable. That means a useful semantic structure. The semantic structure of HTML is very basic. The semantic structure of RTF is essentially nonexistent.
You have got to be kidding. Yes, every word processor reads RTF — but they all do different things with it. Try copying a complicated table or a multi-level list between word processors using RTF.
There's nothing wrong with using a convenient application (a word processor, a spread sheet, even a text editor) to write a one-off document with no future. But don't pretend that any of these create "universal" documents. That's wishful thinking.
And if you want to spend all your time hacking the fine details of document, that's fine. But if you've got a lot of documentation to get written, you don't have time for that. Besides, not every writer is a (like you and me) a format weenie. And they should not have to be.The thing with The Non-Designer's Design Book is that she didn't have the web in mind when she wrote it back in 1994. It's more for people doing stuff like desktop publishing. True, a lot of what it says is applicable to web design. But if your focus is web design, her more recent Non-Designer's Web Book is probably a better place to start. A very good book if you can overlook some irritating but non-essential technical errors.
I actually did publish a book that I authored in HTML. More precisely, we used HTML run through a really ugly preprocessor that one of the original authors of the book created while she was teaching herself Perl.
Fortunately, our publisher found an SGML/XML wizard who did a very good job of converting the HTML to XML, which then got converted PDF using an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor. I was very impressed with his work, without which the conversion would have been a total nightmare. It was still very tedious, though, because HTML is not a true structured format, and you cannot completely automate its conversion.
It would, of course, have been much more efficient to have authored the document in XML in the first place. I remember this actually being proposed back in 1998 for an earlier version of the book. (I was not a co-author back then, but I was working for the department that owned the content.) The manager who responsible for this had zero interest: HTML got the job done, she didn't have the resources to do a big XML conversion. Never mind the huge inefficiency of authoring that book, and a lot of other content related to the Java SE platform, in plain HTML. Only now, after this manager has left the company and it has become painfully obvious that they can no longer afford to hack such a huge mountain of HTML code, is the company getting round to making the conversion.
HTML is just not a good format. It's barely adequate for creating web pages, and totally useless for anything else.
Probably not. But they don't take the "wait six months until the price comes down" attitude either. They can't afford to.
And the people who take these chips and turn them into actual systems do upgrade every time AMD or Intel does that tiny delta. No, that's wrong: they upgrade before. Because they have OEM agreements that give them access to the chip maker's secret development schedule. So long before you hear about a new chip, system manufacturers are busy designing the systems that will use them.
If all you want is a cheap powerful processor to put into your gaming PC, then yeah, you don't care who dethrones who. But if you work in the industry (and right now I'm writing documentation for an Operton-based HPC system) then the Intel-AMD struggle is very interesting indeed. Every time AMD scores an upset over Intel, the whole marketplace changes.
And while you may be content to buy cheap technology 6 months after its introduced, not everybody who buys hardware has that luxury. If you're spending 6 or 7 figures for a rack full of high-performance computer, then every little twitch in performance or pricing makes a big difference to your bottom line.
None of which is all that impressive. XEmacs is just a GUI-aware port of Emacs (I wouldn't call it "user friendly".) XKeyCaps is useful (or was, when he was still maintaining it), but not a major achievement. I don't believe JWZ contributed that much to the creation of Mosaic or Netscape; certainly his comments in the resource files that I mentioned suggest he'd be more of a hindrance then a help in a major software project, whatever his technical talents.
"Bribe" is the wrong word. When you give somebody a million bucks to keep them from doing something nasty to you, the correct term is "extortion".
Why is that ironic? "Web 2.0" is about hyping "interactive" web applications — most of which are badly designed.
Can someone explain to me why Jamie Z is a hero? I only know him from reading his comments in the Netscape keyboard resource file when I was trying to get the browser to behave under Linux. These left me with a permanent dislike for the dude: instead of explaining the format of the file, he put in lengthy sarcastic (and misinformed) rants about the "mistakes" made by various Unix vendors in designing their keyboards.