It's hype because universities have been putting that type of information online long before OpenCourseWare...
And I already told you why I thought there was more to the MIT thing than that. If you don't buy my arguments, fine. But simply ignoring them and insisting on the last word is childish. Sorry.
I just downloaded Sharpreader, again. I'm impressed, not so much with the quality of the app (I still have a lot of issues with it) as with the fact that it's improved a lot since the last time I tried it. I don't remember most of what I disliked about it before, just that I deleted it with a sense of frustration and disgust -- something that's not gonna happen this time.
Linuxworld seems to be Slashdotted, so my knowledge of Tridgell is limited to the fact that he's reverse-engineered two well-known protocols: SMB, and the Tivo subscription thingee. What else has he down? Or should I ask what else has he reverse-engineered?
Either way, there isn't a linear relationship between processor speed and ability to crunch keys. Bottom line: Yes, a G4 is much, much, much faster than an equivalent P4. But there's no obvious quantification of "much, much, much".
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I've worked with engineers who are. One thing they hate is simplistic benchmarks. Mainly because you can always find one that "proves" your platform is better than the others.
So clock for clock, my machine was nearly 4 times faster.
Yes, and clock for clock, your machine is 4 times as pretty. They're equally irrellevent.
As this very experiment ought to tell you, CPU clock speed is only one factor in many determining how quickly the CPU will do some particular thing. It is impressive (but not suprising) that a 500 Mhz G4 does basic number crunching twice as fast as a 1.4GHz P4. But a 1.4GHz G4 wouldn't necessarily crunch 2.8 times as many keys as your system does. Probably not.
I've actually done this a couple times. I doubt if I had much influence on company policy -- but I actually got a real response (as opposed to the usual boilerplate) from somebody fairly high up in the organization.
I remember the first time I realized that I was talking to a person whose job consisted of following a flow chart -- and the solution to my problem was nowhere on that chart. Very, very frustrating. But yeah, hassling an employee just because they don't have the authority to help you is pretty pointless.
So, on the one hand Actiontec thinks parents need to spy on their kids. On the other hand, it doesn't occur to them that enabling TELNET on the wAN side of a router is unsafe. Bloody typical.
I'm as hype-sensitive as the next guy. You can't work in the computer industry as long as I have without hearing and seeing a lot of it. But there isn't that much hype here. You're dismissing the whole thing as hype simply because it doesn't meet your specific requirements.
I find it depressing how many techies, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, evaluate every product, project, or whatever, purely on how it works for them personally -- as if somebody were spending on that development money and effort solely to please them. Childish.
Hey dude, what universe do you live in? The one I live in is all about appearance. You take the VW Rabbit, you give it a new body that makes it look like a cartoon of the old VW Beetle, and you've changed a car nobody wants to a car they can't make fast enough -- without actually changing the car. Everything is appearance. You need it to sell, and you especially need it to get the money you need to develop a high-tech item.
You might respond that this results in a lot of products that are all appearance and no substance. So what else is new?
The 3D city is very pretty, and very impressive. It's also completely unnecessary. Republic is a board game, and all the 3D city does is add some 'color' to proceedings. A well-designed 2D board and cut-scenes would be more than sufficient.
Sufficient for making a playable game, perhaps, but not sufficient for a sellable one. Leave out the cool 3d graphics and nobody'd buy it. OK, maybe gamers are smarter than that, but the people who put up the development money definitely aren't.
It's a turn-based game that desperately wants to be an RTS. You can't pause the game to give orders, and time is always ticking (you have 4 minutes to do a turn - not much time to consider strategy and responses, really).
Unfortunately, this seems to be all the rage right now. I was never able to get really good at Age of Empires because I just can't think fast enough. I guess the idea is to keep the game from getting too cerebral.
Please, it's just a muddled rant. Slashdot hardly has a monopoly on those.
And if you sift out the actual opinions, you have to admit that Gokubi has a point, even if it is badly expressed. It should bother you that the U.S government is expending so much money and so many lives to promote individual freedom -- everywhere except the U.S. Somehow individual freedom in the U.S. promotes terrorism, but works against it everywhere else! Yeah, I know, Bush II isn't as bad as the Iranian theocrats. But if we continue to operate on a "trust him, he's the good guy" policy, that won't be true much longer.
It's also sort of funny that the free proxy has a few censorship rules of its own. "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for." So telling people what they can access is only bad when Evil Mullahs do it.
Well, yeah, instructors have been putting class content on the web for a long time. Less hassle than waiting your turn at the photocopier. When I need to look up some half-forgotten big of computer science, I go to Google, and almost always end up with some material from some state U somewhere, sort of an online handout. Very useful, even if it wasn't meant for me.
But that's not what's exciting about the MIT initiative. They're not the first university to put class content online -- but they're the first to do so in a standard format on a single server, with the announced goal of making all class materials available to the public at large. Of course this material is still incomplete -- the initiative's only been underway for a couple of years.
And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get. Doesn't mean it isn't very cool.
I have Googled this for a while now and, as you can guess, I can't find much other than data storage solutions.
When you go Googling, remember that there's more than one way to skin a cat. (To quote one of my favorite TV bad guys, I happen to know that's factually true.) If your keywords keep pointing to things you're not interested in, use different keywords. Usually it suffices to use synonyms or words that describe a similar concept. If you get stuck, refer to thesaurus.com.
As you observed, most of the top Google hits for "storage" refer to data storage. So try "containers". "Parts" also seems to generate a lot of noise, so try "components".
It also helps to throw in related concepts that narrow the search. Since static electricity is an issue, "static" makes a good keyword.
You know, the Z80 is still in production, and your experience helps explain why. It's a useful, accessible CPU. I mean, why are you doing this? Fun, self-edification? If so, the Z80 suits your purpose as well as it every did.
I'm absolutely shocked by the number of developers posting on this story, all of whom seem to have a pretty clear idea what tech writers are for. Boggles the mind. I guess the people who think tech writers are glorified key-entry operators just ignored the discussion!
This has nothing to do with deep linking. Deep linking is when somebody provides a link that bypasses a main web page that everybody's supposed to go through. AOL doesn't even try to make people do that. They're just providing people with a web presence, and are perfectly happy to have people go directly to a person's web page.
If you read the story with a little more care, you'll understand that this is about "bandwidth theft", which is kind of a confusing term. In plain language, AOL doesn't want its users making their site a free image repository. They've just gone about it in a clumsy way that locks out web surfers that they do want.
You're right about the usability testing. I'm a big believer in UT, but you can't make pacifying your testers the only objective.
Come to think of it, you've just gone and answered a question that's bothered me for a very long time: How is it that Microsoft puts so much effort into usability testing, and still manages to produce products that are so damned difficult to use? The answer is the way they use the UT results: when the users complain that it's hard to figure out what to do this task or that, it never occurs to them that this means their application is badly designed. Instead, they pile on new features -- "wizards" and "agents" that narrowly address the testers complaints, but actually make the overall usability of the application slightly worse.
It reminds me of another kind of testing, those damned Hollywood focus groups. They show them a semi-creative movie, and the clueless idiots that seem to make up all focus groups say they think the hero's not nice enough or the ending's not happy enough. So they make the corresponding changes -- and now all movies are pretty much the same. With notable exceptions like American Beauty -- I'm still trying to figure out how that one got made.
Sorry for the topic drift. Or maybe I'm not offtopic. Software suffers when there's no creative hand that's protected from trivial process-driven changes. The same goes for movies.
You're right on all points. However, it might be easier to enforce use of stylesheets if the high-level Word functions were a little more style aware. For example, if you click the bulleted paragraph button, you don't get a paragraph with a bulleted style (even though normal.dot is full of them). You get a normal paragraph with non-style indenting and bulleting.
Fortunately, Word is pretty configurable. If I were told to set up Word for use as a structured tech pubs authoring tool I'd (a) strongly recommend against it and (b) having been told to shut up and do it, I'd sit down and rip out every feature of Word that allows you to do formatting without style sheets. It wouldn't be easy, but it's doable.
One advantage of FrameMaker is that style sheets are little easier to get at. But reconfiguring FrameMaker is very, very hard. So you're basically stuck with the default tool bar, which is full of style-bypassing buttons.
Another advantage of FrameMaker is that it's now bundled with "structured FrameMaker", which used to be a separate product called FrameMaker+SGML. Now, once you've defined an XML application in FrameMaker (not easy, alas -- the tools for defining structure are really awful) it doesn't matter how much raw formatting idiots put into the file -- it just goes away when you write out the XML. Of course, you then lose document structure when those idiots used italics instead of an emphasis style.
Which is exactly what people already do to create structured documentation in Word and "unstructured" Framemaker. It works as long as you keep a close eye on how people are using styles. The minute they get careless, the whole thing breaks down.
The OO people are experimenting with support for XML export by associating styles with XML tags. The latest version has a beta implementation of "simplified DocBook". But again, this is pretty much what people already do with Word and Framemaker. The difference is that OO is less of a mess than Word, and the OO people will certainly do a better job of defining a mapping mechanism than the one that comes with "structured" Framemaker. That last thing is very badly designed!
When you're creating a structured document, you really want an authoring tool that writes directly to whatever XML application you're using. The problem with that is that you have to define this application before you can write a single word -- which makes this approach impractical for an ordinary productivity suite like Open Office.
The one tool I really like for this is XMetal. You can feed it a DTD and a set of stylesheets, and it's instantly ready to do WYSIWYG editing of XML. Unfortunately, XMetal now belongs to Corel, which seems determined to destroy it in the name of.NET support.
The leading XML/SGML editor is the Arbortext product (I foget what they changed the name to after the last rebranding). Unfortunately this one is expensive. Also, defining an XML or SGML application is non-trival.
I got all excited when I heard about Lyx, an open-source "Document Processor" that support structured documents. Unfortunately its native format is not structured. Once again, you have to define some kind of mapping between stylistic elements and your document structure.
Or use a stylesheet on the document and adopt it for, say, mobile devices
That only works if you're transforming XML that imposes some kind of structure on the document. OO XML doesn't. Here's some pretty typical OO XML:
<text:p text:style-name="Standard" >All <text:span text:style-name="T1" >work</text:span> and no <text:span text:style-name="T2" >play</text:span> makes <text:span text:style-name="T3" >Jack</text:span> a dull <text:span text:style-name="T4" >boy</text:span>. </text:p>
As you can see, they only use a couple of tags (P and SPAN) for most content. Formatting is kept elsewhere (in CSS sheets), which does make the file easier to process. But it doesn't impose any kind of structure, since nothing identifies the particular pieces except the style-name attribute -- and most of these are chosen arbitrarily. So there isn't enough information to transform the content into other markups. You can always just strip out the formatting information -- but you can do that with any word processor format!
Your rhetoric is so 60s. Nowadays, the only acceptable way to defend an idea is to claim that people who disagree with it are "kneejerk" or some other hot-button term.
Re:Flaming Nurf Darts Are A No-No
on
Cubicle Etiquette?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Which kind of points out the uselessness of this kind of list making. Show common sense and consideration. And don't think it's beneath your dignity to apologize. Everything else comes from that.
It's funny how everybody insists that ASCII is a universal character set, when very few people actually use it any more. What most people use is Microsoft Latin1, with ISO Latin1 a distant second. Yeah, both these character sets are supersets of ASCII, but when you a Pound Sterling symbol can be entered with the right keystroke, you've broken any pretence at backward compatibility.
Not that it really matters, except that the A is ASCII is "American", so Western Europeans will accuse you of being U.S.-centric.
Despite the name, the "ANSI Character set" was never any kind of standard. Microsoft claims they call Microsoft Latin1 "ANSI" because it's based on an ANSI draft that eventually became ISO Latin1. But I think it has to do with the "ANSI" software that used to be in MS-DOS. This emulated an "ANSI Terminal" (better known as a DEC VT-100) and allowed the ANSI graphics BBS people used to be so fond of. Not the same character set as Latin1, of course, but it's not suprising that the tech writers would confuse the two.
Further confusion: when I was documenting Delphi, explaining the exact meaning of the AnsiString character type took some skill. Its characters were never any kind of "ANSI" character set. In fact, it's not even a single-byte character set. It is, in fact, UTF-8, which is also a superset of ASCII, but which uses multi-byte characters to represent the more exotic stuff.
Yet further confusion: Slashdot seems to use ISO Latin1, but sends an HTTP header claiming to use UTF-8! Doesn't matter most of the time...
Slashdot Mirror
I just downloaded Sharpreader, again. I'm impressed, not so much with the quality of the app (I still have a lot of issues with it) as with the fact that it's improved a lot since the last time I tried it. I don't remember most of what I disliked about it before, just that I deleted it with a sense of frustration and disgust -- something that's not gonna happen this time.
Linuxworld seems to be Slashdotted, so my knowledge of Tridgell is limited to the fact that he's reverse-engineered two well-known protocols: SMB, and the Tivo subscription thingee. What else has he down? Or should I ask what else has he reverse-engineered?
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I've worked with engineers who are. One thing they hate is simplistic benchmarks. Mainly because you can always find one that "proves" your platform is better than the others.
As this very experiment ought to tell you, CPU clock speed is only one factor in many determining how quickly the CPU will do some particular thing. It is impressive (but not suprising) that a 500 Mhz G4 does basic number crunching twice as fast as a 1.4GHz P4. But a 1.4GHz G4 wouldn't necessarily crunch 2.8 times as many keys as your system does. Probably not.
I remember the first time I realized that I was talking to a person whose job consisted of following a flow chart -- and the solution to my problem was nowhere on that chart. Very, very frustrating. But yeah, hassling an employee just because they don't have the authority to help you is pretty pointless.
So, on the one hand Actiontec thinks parents need to spy on their kids. On the other hand, it doesn't occur to them that enabling TELNET on the wAN side of a router is unsafe. Bloody typical.
I find it depressing how many techies, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, evaluate every product, project, or whatever, purely on how it works for them personally -- as if somebody were spending on that development money and effort solely to please them. Childish.
You might respond that this results in a lot of products that are all appearance and no substance. So what else is new?
And if you sift out the actual opinions, you have to admit that Gokubi has a point, even if it is badly expressed. It should bother you that the U.S government is expending so much money and so many lives to promote individual freedom -- everywhere except the U.S. Somehow individual freedom in the U.S. promotes terrorism, but works against it everywhere else! Yeah, I know, Bush II isn't as bad as the Iranian theocrats. But if we continue to operate on a "trust him, he's the good guy" policy, that won't be true much longer.
It's also sort of funny that the free proxy has a few censorship rules of its own. "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for." So telling people what they can access is only bad when Evil Mullahs do it.
But that's not what's exciting about the MIT initiative. They're not the first university to put class content online -- but they're the first to do so in a standard format on a single server, with the announced goal of making all class materials available to the public at large. Of course this material is still incomplete -- the initiative's only been underway for a couple of years.
And of course it will never allow the same level of access that tuition-paying students get. Doesn't mean it isn't very cool.
As you observed, most of the top Google hits for "storage" refer to data storage. So try "containers". "Parts" also seems to generate a lot of noise, so try "components".
It also helps to throw in related concepts that narrow the search. Since static electricity is an issue, "static" makes a good keyword.
You can download it for free here.
You know, the Z80 is still in production, and your experience helps explain why. It's a useful, accessible CPU. I mean, why are you doing this? Fun, self-edification? If so, the Z80 suits your purpose as well as it every did.
I'm absolutely shocked by the number of developers posting on this story, all of whom seem to have a pretty clear idea what tech writers are for. Boggles the mind. I guess the people who think tech writers are glorified key-entry operators just ignored the discussion!
If you read the story with a little more care, you'll understand that this is about "bandwidth theft", which is kind of a confusing term. In plain language, AOL doesn't want its users making their site a free image repository. They've just gone about it in a clumsy way that locks out web surfers that they do want.
Come to think of it, you've just gone and answered a question that's bothered me for a very long time: How is it that Microsoft puts so much effort into usability testing, and still manages to produce products that are so damned difficult to use? The answer is the way they use the UT results: when the users complain that it's hard to figure out what to do this task or that, it never occurs to them that this means their application is badly designed. Instead, they pile on new features -- "wizards" and "agents" that narrowly address the testers complaints, but actually make the overall usability of the application slightly worse.
It reminds me of another kind of testing, those damned Hollywood focus groups. They show them a semi-creative movie, and the clueless idiots that seem to make up all focus groups say they think the hero's not nice enough or the ending's not happy enough. So they make the corresponding changes -- and now all movies are pretty much the same. With notable exceptions like American Beauty -- I'm still trying to figure out how that one got made.
Sorry for the topic drift. Or maybe I'm not offtopic. Software suffers when there's no creative hand that's protected from trivial process-driven changes. The same goes for movies.
Fortunately, Word is pretty configurable. If I were told to set up Word for use as a structured tech pubs authoring tool I'd (a) strongly recommend against it and (b) having been told to shut up and do it, I'd sit down and rip out every feature of Word that allows you to do formatting without style sheets. It wouldn't be easy, but it's doable.
One advantage of FrameMaker is that style sheets are little easier to get at. But reconfiguring FrameMaker is very, very hard. So you're basically stuck with the default tool bar, which is full of style-bypassing buttons.
Another advantage of FrameMaker is that it's now bundled with "structured FrameMaker", which used to be a separate product called FrameMaker+SGML. Now, once you've defined an XML application in FrameMaker (not easy, alas -- the tools for defining structure are really awful) it doesn't matter how much raw formatting idiots put into the file -- it just goes away when you write out the XML. Of course, you then lose document structure when those idiots used italics instead of an emphasis style.
The OO people are experimenting with support for XML export by associating styles with XML tags. The latest version has a beta implementation of "simplified DocBook". But again, this is pretty much what people already do with Word and Framemaker. The difference is that OO is less of a mess than Word, and the OO people will certainly do a better job of defining a mapping mechanism than the one that comes with "structured" Framemaker. That last thing is very badly designed!
When you're creating a structured document, you really want an authoring tool that writes directly to whatever XML application you're using. The problem with that is that you have to define this application before you can write a single word -- which makes this approach impractical for an ordinary productivity suite like Open Office.
The one tool I really like for this is XMetal. You can feed it a DTD and a set of stylesheets, and it's instantly ready to do WYSIWYG editing of XML. Unfortunately, XMetal now belongs to Corel, which seems determined to destroy it in the name of .NET support.
The leading XML/SGML editor is the Arbortext product (I foget what they changed the name to after the last rebranding). Unfortunately this one is expensive. Also, defining an XML or SGML application is non-trival.
I got all excited when I heard about Lyx, an open-source "Document Processor" that support structured documents. Unfortunately its native format is not structured. Once again, you have to define some kind of mapping between stylistic elements and your document structure.
Interesting thread here.
Unfair! Loud music and fire are both legitimate forms of self-expression!
Your rhetoric is so 60s. Nowadays, the only acceptable way to defend an idea is to claim that people who disagree with it are "kneejerk" or some other hot-button term.
Which kind of points out the uselessness of this kind of list making. Show common sense and consideration. And don't think it's beneath your dignity to apologize. Everything else comes from that.
Not that it really matters, except that the A is ASCII is "American", so Western Europeans will accuse you of being U.S.-centric.
Despite the name, the "ANSI Character set" was never any kind of standard. Microsoft claims they call Microsoft Latin1 "ANSI" because it's based on an ANSI draft that eventually became ISO Latin1. But I think it has to do with the "ANSI" software that used to be in MS-DOS. This emulated an "ANSI Terminal" (better known as a DEC VT-100) and allowed the ANSI graphics BBS people used to be so fond of. Not the same character set as Latin1, of course, but it's not suprising that the tech writers would confuse the two.
Further confusion: when I was documenting Delphi, explaining the exact meaning of the AnsiString character type took some skill. Its characters were never any kind of "ANSI" character set. In fact, it's not even a single-byte character set. It is, in fact, UTF-8, which is also a superset of ASCII, but which uses multi-byte characters to represent the more exotic stuff.
Yet further confusion: Slashdot seems to use ISO Latin1, but sends an HTTP header claiming to use UTF-8! Doesn't matter most of the time...