On the other hand, the wildlife that's beginning to swarm in the Dead Zone is as dangerous to a biker as any cell-distracted SUVer. As Elena herself acknowledges. Wonder if she knows about deer warning devices?
When Elena first posted her pictures, my first thought was "That's a great place to film a post-apocalypse movie." But I can't imagine who would agree to star in it!
I'm not sure a motorcycle ride is worth even a 1 in 10K chance of getting cancer. But then, I'm not a biker.
But to continue the relative risk theme: visiting a meltdown dead zone is not they only way to expose yourself to radiation. There's living in a house made of brick. (Not very much, I admit, but some.) There's living in a poorly ventilated house that's over a Uranium deposit. And of course, there's sunbathing or visiting a tanning salon, which Elena's pastime look positively healthy!
So if you have a simpler theory, let's hear. Sure scientific theories should be as simple as possible. But not simpler!
The dude who invented this principle phrased it this way (translated from the Latin): "Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary." But what entities are "necessary"? To Ockham, God was a necessary entity, yet you hear Ockham's Razor used to deny the existence of God.
Bottom line: OR is a highly subjective tool that should be applied with great care. And even then, it can mislead you -- the simplest plausible theory can still be wrong, due to evidence you haven't seen. OR is a strategy for coming up with good theories, not a law of nature!
hink of it like Gnutella. Anyone can become a hub, and if two people connect to it, you are part of the same network. Now imagine gnutella over something like, CB radio. It's all proximity based.
So all we need is to find a million people to walkaround with one of these in their backpacks, and we can stop shelling out money to those darn ISPs!
I would have given him a consumer-oriented distro, like Lycoris. But then you'd have to learn about Lycoris yourself, and that would take away from your quality Gentoo time!
I think your perceptions are quite correct. What we have here is yet another technology that somebody can't bear to see die off. Nothing wrong with that (I myself have just wasted rather a lot of time playing with gopher software), but it's silly to pretend that anybody but a few enthusiasts are ever going to use Gopher. Even if the efficiency issue is real, no sane content provider is going to give up 90% of their audience just for a small improvement in transmission overhead.
(I suppose you tell your potential audience to access your site via a Gopher gateway. But is it worth the hassle?)
I also have some issues with the gopher protocol as such. You can't just write a page and stick it on your server. You have to follow a lot of strange little rules for integrating it into the menu structure. These complications have a lot to do with gopher's lack of acceptance,
They're also a big reason web browser support is so poor. The only browser that fully supports the protocol is Lynx. Mozilla/Netscape has a half-assed implementation they inherited from Mosaic, which they never seem to have updated. IE used to have the same code, but has since stripped it out. Opera claims to support gopher if you configure it to use a proxy server-- a concept I don't quite understand and lack any inclination to test.
Should browser vendors support Gopher (better)? Perhaps. Put let's do some prioritizing here. There are a lot of things we need to get browser vendors to do. Better support for W3C specs has to be a major focus Support for legacy protocols that a few enthusiasts won't give up on just isn't worth anybody's energy.
Next time, think of what you're writing as a means of communicating your thoughts, rather than a form of rhetorical onanism.
This is the second time I've said "onanism" on Slashdot in as many days. People are gonna start looking at me funny, at least those who know what the word means. But in this case, it's the only word that applies.
Is this the full version? I remember playing an incomplete port on PDP-11s before the commercial games appeared. It was initially unauthorized (though the author did get permission after the fact) and based on a pre-final version of the MDL game. I also seem to recall that the author took some small shortcuts with the parser and the game logic.
Putting in paragraph breaks means stoping to think about the structure of your document. Which also implies stopping to think about what you're actually trying to say. That interferes with the sense of self-righteous fury that is essential to a certain kind of rant.
I can't comment on the virtues of WordML, having let my evaluation copy of Word 2003 expire. But when you refer to "everything useful stripped out" it sounds like they've removed the formatting info, retaining only the basic structure of the document. That's the way content-presentation separation is supposed to work. Of course, creating the stylesheets to put the presentation back is non-trivial!
Your OO/PHP solutions seems to work pretty well. But it seems to be very specific to your needs and goals. Here's some of your site parameters as I see them:
Your overall design is simple, content-oriented, easy to navigate. A pretty good job overall, but your site is quite small, and I don't think your design would work if it got much bigger.
You also seem less concerned with esthetics than most webmasters.
You apparently author all your own content, and do all your web design. And of course, you write your own scripts. In short collaboration, workflow, and communication are not big issues for you.
None of these things are bad, if they're consistent with your needs as a webmaster. But your needs seem to be pretty atypical. Most serious sites are much bigger than yours, and involve collaborations between multiple authors, designers, and script writers. And there's more of a premium on appearance. If you had to meet any of these constrains, your current workflow simply would not work.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you work for a business that has standardized on OO. Your boss says, "I want you to design a new company web site from scratch. That includes content management and workflow. You only have one constraint: all authoring must be done with OO, because that's what our people know how to use. For authoring content, you can support OO HTML or OO Text Documents, your choice."
Now the choice of editors might seem a simple no brainer: it's a web site, you have to use the HTML editor to create content. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the OO HTML editor doesn't create maintainable files. It's possible to write scripts (like you did) to strip out the extraneous stuff, but OO HTML is so messy and non-standard that's it's tricky and unreliable.
Now OO Text Documents are also pretty baroque -- but they're all well-formed XML, validated against some well-documented XML schema. In theory, it should be possible to transform OO native XML into HTML, using XSL scripts. The OO designers even had that in mind, since they made it easy to plug in XSL scripts as export filters.
That's the theory. It's probably more complicated than that, because you'd have to understand every XML schema used in an OO doc. I just created a simple OO text document, and it's got seventeen different namespaces. Maybe you should tell your boss that OO is more trouble than it's worth as a web authoring tool!
It's not like we need those ecosystems, given the fact that we've been practicing agriculture for 6000 years...
So your logic is, "we've been destroying ecosystems for 6000 years, therefore we can continue to do so indefinitely." Not logical. The global environment is big and complex, but it's not infinitely so. If we continue to simplify, and at an exponentially increasing pace, it'll eventually be too simple to support our noble selves.
How much margin do we have left? I dunno. There are many arguments, but probably the only way to know for sure is to keep pushing until the planet ceases to be habitable. Which will certainly settle the argument, but which isn't very practical!
You remind me of an old ethnic joke. In these politically correct times, I can't be specific about the ethnic affiliation of our Straight Man -- insert whoever you stereotype as terminall stupid.
Anyway, the SM goes and jumps off the Empire State building just to see what its like. As he's passing the tenth floor, he thinks, "I heard this was dangerous, but so far it's just plain fu..."
To be fair, Microsoft has finally gotten the message that they can't change their application formats every other year. Recent versions of Word 2003 (and other Office 2003 products) have no trouble talking to their 2000 predecessors. Plus they're moving to XML as a native format (as OO already has), which will open the door to more third-party filters.
Still, there are many reasons not to passively accept Word format as a "de facto standard". It's a goddamn mess for one thing.
I mostly have a strong positive impression of OO, the recent versions anyway. It has what people need, and it's reasonably easy to use. If it weren't for people needing interoperability with their existing Word and Excel files, Office would be dying, instead of dominating the market. Yes, this is ironic, considering how bad Microsoft is at supporting interoperability -- but it's true all the same.
But the one part of OO I dislike is the one you love: the HTML editor. Yes, it does a lot of the basic stuff very well, including WYSIWYG editing. But it treats HTML files as a kind of Word Processor file -- and that's a major design flaw. Like most WPs, the HTML editor relies on template files to standardize style -- which means that it's pretty hard to impose a new style on a bunch of existing files.
The sane, maintainable, standards-compliant way to author web pages is to put your styles in a single CSS style sheet, which all your web pages link to. For that to work, you have to be careful about separation of content and presentation, meaning you have to avoid tags like <font> and attributes like "align". The OO editor simply doesn't know how to do these things.
Link managment could use some work as well.
I suppose the OO editor is fine if you just want to create a bunch of web pages and that won't undergo a lot of revision or redesign. But for serious web design, look elsewhere.
Your definition of "old growth" is faulty. It's not forest that has been deliberately planted, it's forest that has had a very long time time to mature. It's valuable both economically (wood that old is high quality) and ecologically (lots of genetic diversity in them old woods).
Ever been in the Santa Cruz area, south of San Francisco? All the redwood forests look very pretty. They give the impression of hosting tons of wildlife, and being very ancient. Both impressions are completely false. The Santa Cruz forests were actually completely cut down in order to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 quake. (Redwood is the best structural wood there is, being extremely resistant to termite damage.) But after nearly a century natural, there are as many trees as there ever were. So the damage is undone right?
Wrong. When they cut down the forest, they eliminated a habitat, and a lot of biodiversity simply went away. It'll come back too, eventually -- but not in another 100 years, and probably not in a thousand.
There's more to forest management than just keeping the tree count up.
IM bots are nothing new. Nor are online Infocom games. So you put the two of them together, and it's something special?
What would impress me is if somebody got the original version online where we could play it. No I don't mean the Infocom games. I mean the original MIT game that only ever ran on a PDP-10.
I guess Comcast does OK as an ISP. At least from the technical side -- some of theirbusiness practices leave something to be desired.
But when you say "Quality" in connection with TV, you usually quality of content. As in this case. Alas, those who are hoping that Comcast will raise the quality of the programming on TechTV are too optimistic. Comcast, like other media monopolies, doesn't like to spend a lot of money on programming. So more reality shows. But it's about robots, so it's a tech reality show, so that's OK!
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, the wildlife that's beginning to swarm in the Dead Zone is as dangerous to a biker as any cell-distracted SUVer. As Elena herself acknowledges. Wonder if she knows about deer warning devices?
..when your mom, girlfriend, or whatever complains that your room needs dusting!
Symbolism, like many other things, is lost on Slashdotters!
When Elena first posted her pictures, my first thought was "That's a great place to film a post-apocalypse movie." But I can't imagine who would agree to star in it!
But to continue the relative risk theme: visiting a meltdown dead zone is not they only way to expose yourself to radiation. There's living in a house made of brick. (Not very much, I admit, but some.) There's living in a poorly ventilated house that's over a Uranium deposit. And of course, there's sunbathing or visiting a tanning salon, which Elena's pastime look positively healthy!
No, he that was the one in the movie! The cartoon will feature the live action version of Jar Jar! Be afraid....
Where can I find Open Source children available for adoption?
The dude who invented this principle phrased it this way (translated from the Latin): "Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary." But what entities are "necessary"? To Ockham, God was a necessary entity, yet you hear Ockham's Razor used to deny the existence of God.
Bottom line: OR is a highly subjective tool that should be applied with great care. And even then, it can mislead you -- the simplest plausible theory can still be wrong, due to evidence you haven't seen. OR is a strategy for coming up with good theories, not a law of nature!
I would have given him a consumer-oriented distro, like Lycoris. But then you'd have to learn about Lycoris yourself, and that would take away from your quality Gentoo time!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of dying BSD trolls all surfing Gopher!
(I suppose you tell your potential audience to access your site via a Gopher gateway. But is it worth the hassle?)
I also have some issues with the gopher protocol as such. You can't just write a page and stick it on your server. You have to follow a lot of strange little rules for integrating it into the menu structure. These complications have a lot to do with gopher's lack of acceptance,
They're also a big reason web browser support is so poor. The only browser that fully supports the protocol is Lynx. Mozilla/Netscape has a half-assed implementation they inherited from Mosaic, which they never seem to have updated. IE used to have the same code, but has since stripped it out. Opera claims to support gopher if you configure it to use a proxy server-- a concept I don't quite understand and lack any inclination to test.
Should browser vendors support Gopher (better)? Perhaps. Put let's do some prioritizing here. There are a lot of things we need to get browser vendors to do. Better support for W3C specs has to be a major focus Support for legacy protocols that a few enthusiasts won't give up on just isn't worth anybody's energy.
This is the second time I've said "onanism" on Slashdot in as many days. People are gonna start looking at me funny, at least those who know what the word means. But in this case, it's the only word that applies.
Is this the full version? I remember playing an incomplete port on PDP-11s before the commercial games appeared. It was initially unauthorized (though the author did get permission after the fact) and based on a pre-final version of the MDL game. I also seem to recall that the author took some small shortcuts with the parser and the game logic.
Putting in paragraph breaks means stoping to think about the structure of your document. Which also implies stopping to think about what you're actually trying to say. That interferes with the sense of self-righteous fury that is essential to a certain kind of rant.
Are you an alter ego of Phil Welch, or do you just share his tendencytendency to babel?
You work at IBM? Please check out my resume.
Jeez. I must be getting old. I lack the capacity to even parse that, never mind reply to it.
Your OO/PHP solutions seems to work pretty well. But it seems to be very specific to your needs and goals. Here's some of your site parameters as I see them:
- Your overall design is simple, content-oriented, easy to navigate. A pretty good job overall, but your site is quite small, and I don't think your design would work if it got much bigger.
- You also seem less concerned with esthetics than most webmasters.
- You apparently author all your own content, and do all your web design. And of course, you write your own scripts. In short collaboration, workflow, and communication are not big issues for you.
None of these things are bad, if they're consistent with your needs as a webmaster. But your needs seem to be pretty atypical. Most serious sites are much bigger than yours, and involve collaborations between multiple authors, designers, and script writers. And there's more of a premium on appearance. If you had to meet any of these constrains, your current workflow simply would not work.Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you work for a business that has standardized on OO. Your boss says, "I want you to design a new company web site from scratch. That includes content management and workflow. You only have one constraint: all authoring must be done with OO, because that's what our people know how to use. For authoring content, you can support OO HTML or OO Text Documents, your choice."
Now the choice of editors might seem a simple no brainer: it's a web site, you have to use the HTML editor to create content. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the OO HTML editor doesn't create maintainable files. It's possible to write scripts (like you did) to strip out the extraneous stuff, but OO HTML is so messy and non-standard that's it's tricky and unreliable.
Now OO Text Documents are also pretty baroque -- but they're all well-formed XML, validated against some well-documented XML schema. In theory, it should be possible to transform OO native XML into HTML, using XSL scripts. The OO designers even had that in mind, since they made it easy to plug in XSL scripts as export filters.
That's the theory. It's probably more complicated than that, because you'd have to understand every XML schema used in an OO doc. I just created a simple OO text document, and it's got seventeen different namespaces. Maybe you should tell your boss that OO is more trouble than it's worth as a web authoring tool!
How much margin do we have left? I dunno. There are many arguments, but probably the only way to know for sure is to keep pushing until the planet ceases to be habitable. Which will certainly settle the argument, but which isn't very practical!
You remind me of an old ethnic joke. In these politically correct times, I can't be specific about the ethnic affiliation of our Straight Man -- insert whoever you stereotype as terminall stupid.
Anyway, the SM goes and jumps off the Empire State building just to see what its like. As he's passing the tenth floor, he thinks, "I heard this was dangerous, but so far it's just plain fu..."
Still, there are many reasons not to passively accept Word format as a "de facto standard". It's a goddamn mess for one thing.
I mostly have a strong positive impression of OO, the recent versions anyway. It has what people need, and it's reasonably easy to use. If it weren't for people needing interoperability with their existing Word and Excel files, Office would be dying, instead of dominating the market. Yes, this is ironic, considering how bad Microsoft is at supporting interoperability -- but it's true all the same.
But the one part of OO I dislike is the one you love: the HTML editor. Yes, it does a lot of the basic stuff very well, including WYSIWYG editing. But it treats HTML files as a kind of Word Processor file -- and that's a major design flaw. Like most WPs, the HTML editor relies on template files to standardize style -- which means that it's pretty hard to impose a new style on a bunch of existing files.
The sane, maintainable, standards-compliant way to author web pages is to put your styles in a single CSS style sheet, which all your web pages link to. For that to work, you have to be careful about separation of content and presentation, meaning you have to avoid tags like <font> and attributes like "align". The OO editor simply doesn't know how to do these things.
Link managment could use some work as well.
I suppose the OO editor is fine if you just want to create a bunch of web pages and that won't undergo a lot of revision or redesign. But for serious web design, look elsewhere.
Online! NOW!
Ever been in the Santa Cruz area, south of San Francisco? All the redwood forests look very pretty. They give the impression of hosting tons of wildlife, and being very ancient. Both impressions are completely false. The Santa Cruz forests were actually completely cut down in order to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 quake. (Redwood is the best structural wood there is, being extremely resistant to termite damage.) But after nearly a century natural, there are as many trees as there ever were. So the damage is undone right?
Wrong. When they cut down the forest, they eliminated a habitat, and a lot of biodiversity simply went away. It'll come back too, eventually -- but not in another 100 years, and probably not in a thousand.
There's more to forest management than just keeping the tree count up.
What would impress me is if somebody got the original version online where we could play it. No I don't mean the Infocom games. I mean the original MIT game that only ever ran on a PDP-10.
But when you say "Quality" in connection with TV, you usually quality of content. As in this case. Alas, those who are hoping that Comcast will raise the quality of the programming on TechTV are too optimistic. Comcast, like other media monopolies, doesn't like to spend a lot of money on programming. So more reality shows. But it's about robots, so it's a tech reality show, so that's OK!