OTOH, They're pretty late in CSS implementation. The "float" property is relatively old, but has just been added in this release. Seems background-images didn't work either (CSS1).
If you must revert to spacer GIF tricks to build a webpage out of Amaya, there's no point in using a "we lack 1998's standards" browser. You prevent the web from evolving.
Wouldn't the Amaya developers use their time more wisely in collaborating with Mozilla/KHTML? It's nice to show off SVG and MathML, but if there's no audience, that precious development is lost.
Errors in book happen all the time, but it seems like translation make it worse...
I own a couple of coding books translated in french - it's even weirder. Sometimes the variables in the code get translated, sometimes the step-by-step explanations get out-of-sync and the variables change names, well you get the point.
Do translators know they're translating code or are book businesses really hiring cheap labor?
Then, after reading stacks and stacks of books and lines and lines of code that talk about arrays, floats, strings, you find yourself faced with tableaux, nombres à virgule flottante, chaînes de caractères. It just doesn't feel right.
I mean, it's like translating a russian-chinese dictionnary in english!
I doubt we can do anything with that formula to express Nature's art. Sure, we can build simpler graphical engines, but that's it.
I don't know how far this "transformed circle formula" is from a circle formula, but as long as it's an integer-dimension thing, we get nothing from it. It doesn't scale.
The concept of locality is too important - the behaviour of a cell is really parametered by its neighbors; the same ADN is in your brain, your liver and your nails.
Fractals are still a relatively simple method of describing 3D structures - sure it's really hard to start with a real object and map it to a fractal (but Nature works the other way around!). A very small disturbance can create as many shapes as you want; the number of different vegetal organisms showing very similar DNAs seem to support this.
Maybe Sun is feeling that a "cross-platform" "oriented-object" environment a la C#/.NET means danger. They should.
Microsoft, apart from marketing universal support for its platform, really is only interested in taking Java's piece of the cake.
You look at Java, it's one of the greatest OOP languages. Why would make developers switch? What's wrong with Java?
Performance.
As 80%+ of the users/developers are on Wintel, C#.NET will look like a nicer alternative to Java developers; Microsoft won't bother adding a graphical abstraction layer ontop of its API...
The point I was trying to make was that you'd better use a cross-platform language than a proprietary/single platform language.
There was no question of flaming a language or another. Slashcode shouldn't be written in Logo and kernels shouldn't be written in Fortran. A java programmer is no less a programmer than a hardcore macho coder blaming hexadecimal for oversimplification of binary.
Know why they invented high-level languages? because maintaining assembly is a time-consuming nightmare. We need it for lots of things, sure, but not everyone needs to write a driver or a real-time-every-NOP-counts.
Of course learning assembly first will show you low-level candy that you can re-use afterwards, but can bring such bad habits (JMP for GOTOs, pointer arithmetic,...)
It is _very_ important to understand what's going on under the hood, I get the point. But knowing 8088 assembly wouldn't lead you anywhere today; C would.
Focus on cross-platform languages and libraries. You may not keep your job anyway, but you'll be flexible.
The market for programmers slowly moves away from Microsoft. If you code in Visual Basic, you can be sure that only Microsoft-oriented companies will employ you.
Companies more and more switch to non-Microsoft solutions, meaning that they must switch programmers too. Knowing UNIX is becoming more and more of an asset; you might not know all the intricacies of bash or emacs, but if you code in perl you can be employed by Win/Lin/Mac/UNIX worlds...
Whenever possible, go for java instead of C#. Go for PHP instead of ASP. Learn to use as little platform-dependant code as possible.
There is a new project which tries to promote the local Quebec music scene, called Musicbot. Through an intelligent webring concept, mBOT tries to give visibility to local music and does the streaming. NetMusik is a portal for Quebec music too.
We may have super-elegant-configurable browsers now. But innovation remains important: the people at w3c are working hard to set new guidelines for the future:
CSS3 will allow even better control of look/layout reducing the need for graphics which still plague the web and waste bandwidth;
MathML which is now only a hack for a few browsers will make it possible to export scientific data 'a la LaTeX' instead of relying on poor resolution images;
SVG reducing the need for Flash and other alternative proprietary technologies;
Trouble is, if MSIE doesn't follow, will the web evolve? I mean, why are there still GIFs all around as they were designed for 8-bit VGA (remember the pre-web times in its glorified 320x200 mode?) Why is there a problem with PNG implementation on MSIE? It's a 1996 recommendation! Will that be the same principle holding us back from browser innovation?
"It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such perfomance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM,"
Man, I'm impressed too, don't be jealous!
I'm really sorry for you that the only good things in the Free Software world would be borrowed from insiders from proprietary companies. Here is the truth, lastnames omitted - the longlist of cheaters of IP:
With 100% of the disk cached in memory, you'd get a pretty expensive hard drive.
With 50% of the disk cached in memory, half the time, you'd have to wait for an average half-cycle to get your data. And still an expensive hard drive.
With 0% of the disk cached in memory, you'd still have to wait for an average half-cycle for all disk requests.
Now with any amount of cache, you get an overpriced drive and/or poor performance.
So we need a power supply. What do we have on the moon to supply energy? not much.
Solar energy needs lots of equipment just to give a kilowatt. The results should be better on the moon, hey, no atmosphere to filter out precious wavelengths.
You don't want to use oil because you don't want to carry it and also because it needs OXYGEN. Okay, there is some buried in the rocks, but then you still need energy first to get it. Carry both oxygen and oil? you're kidding.
How much energy here on earth can be extracted from rock? Not much.
If the moon can't supply itself with enough energy to mine, what's the point?
First of all, something _very_ important is to make sure your students understand the 'tree-like' organisation of information in XML. h1 and p tags are NOT designed to be tags for bigger size and line breaks. People tend to look HTML as a paint program, it's so easy and Internet Explorer allows all this stuff.
Then you can show them HTML tags. I think the road from HTML to XHTML is much more dangerous than beginning with XML because of all the bells and whistles that can distract from the fact that XHTML is a _structure oriented_ markup language.
As some of your students will already know some HTML, don't let them corrupt their classmates with "witty" tricks like spacers made out of GIFs and FONT all over the place.
May I suggest Mozilla as a workbench? it can be configured to be extremely strict regarding XML syntax, and if it does fine in Mozilla, you are SURE it's legal.
>>particularly over the issue of choice and consent
We decide for them where they go, what they eat, when to bath, push them away when we want.
We let them locked inside when there's nobody home, we decide when and why they lose their reproductive abilities. If they need medication, we push it inside their throats.
Yeah, like people care for choice and consent from cats.
Do you think it'll help to use gas made from bacon, sausages and ham?
Imagine your morning traffic jam, with that 'breakfast is ready' smell. You look to your right, you see a man drooling behind his wheel. You look in your mirror, you see men trying to suck your car exhaust.
Using X-Windows, you could just install a basic distro and run the app remotely (via an encrypted tunnel) on another machine (on which you could install anything you want). That would work with a bare system (there exists a 2-floppy XFree86 linux distro).
You could burn a CD that does just that, and boot the computer with that CD -- means no installation. The OS and apps on the CD would connect remotely to the X server (client?) and that would be the end of the problem.
Windows has this "innovation" called "Terminal Services" which seems like a pale clone of the X-Windows ability to run apps remotely. I don't know how much you could transpose from X or if clients are available in a base Windows installation.
Slashdot Mirror
You can regex in a page with a bookmarklet, works usually with any javascript-enabled browser.
;)
One of them is here, spawn your favorite search engine and look for bookmarklets, there are plenty.
Bookmarklets and smart bookmarks (not available in IE) can make magic and turn your browser into a very powerful process
OTOH, They're pretty late in CSS implementation. The "float" property is relatively old, but has just been added in this release. Seems background-images didn't work either (CSS1).
If you must revert to spacer GIF tricks to build a webpage out of Amaya, there's no point in using a "we lack 1998's standards" browser. You prevent the web from evolving.
Wouldn't the Amaya developers use their time more wisely in collaborating with Mozilla/KHTML? It's nice to show off SVG and MathML, but if there's no audience, that precious development is lost.
So, what does "use" mean in that context?
Amazon say they allow specific under-age-13 anonymous reviews. So I guess it's always the parent's fault, or the kids' fault, never Amazon's.
After all, parents should always be around, I wonder if letting a child use a computer without supervision is a crime. Seems to be.
So long, script kiddies!
Darn law-traps.
Click on P, click on R, click on I, click on N, click on T, click on F, shift-click on 9...
Am I the only one thinking that the mouse to a programmer is the same as a tricycle to a fish?
Errors in book happen all the time, but it seems like translation make it worse...
I own a couple of coding books translated in french - it's even weirder. Sometimes the variables in the code get translated, sometimes the step-by-step explanations get out-of-sync and the variables change names, well you get the point.
Do translators know they're translating code or are book businesses really hiring cheap labor?
Then, after reading stacks and stacks of books and lines and lines of code that talk about arrays, floats, strings, you find yourself faced with tableaux, nombres à virgule flottante, chaînes de caractères. It just doesn't feel right.
I mean, it's like translating a russian-chinese dictionnary in english!
Science: A Skeptical Look At The Universe
The NY Times has a short, interesting article on universe theory. The author, Paul Davies, writes: 'This idea of single universe, or single reality, has been around in philosophical circles for centuries. The scientific justification for it, however, is new.' It is quite an interesting read. The author is Physicist and pretty good science writer." Davies is not kind to the universe theory.
I doubt we can do anything with that formula to express Nature's art. Sure, we can build simpler graphical engines, but that's it.
I don't know how far this "transformed circle formula" is from a circle formula, but as long as it's an integer-dimension thing, we get nothing from it. It doesn't scale.
The concept of locality is too important - the behaviour of a cell is really parametered by its neighbors; the same ADN is in your brain, your liver and your nails.
Fractals are still a relatively simple method of describing 3D structures - sure it's really hard to start with a real object and map it to a fractal (but Nature works the other way around!). A very small disturbance can create as many shapes as you want; the number of different vegetal organisms showing very similar DNAs seem to support this.
Maybe Sun is feeling that a "cross-platform" "oriented-object" environment a la C#/.NET means danger. They should.
Microsoft, apart from marketing universal support for its platform, really is only interested in taking Java's piece of the cake.
You look at Java, it's one of the greatest OOP languages. Why would make developers switch? What's wrong with Java?
Performance.
As 80%+ of the users/developers are on Wintel, C#.NET will look like a nicer alternative to Java developers; Microsoft won't bother adding a graphical abstraction layer ontop of its API...
Because CD-R, like almonds, get tastier when burned a bit...
If you look at the new 'windows icon' _VERY CLOSELY_, in the upper-left part (the red tile), you can see an 'echo' from the old bill-borg-icon.
In the lower-right window, I see the side of a man looking left.
Is it just my fertile imagination? Should I stop coffee?
what are the other two tiles?
Of course standards have no importance...
WMA, BMP, WAV, RLE, were all formats that absolutely necessary. There was no other way before to store that kind of information.
C# is also so important! I mean, there was no language before that could be run in a virtual machine.
The point I was trying to make was that you'd better use a cross-platform language than a proprietary/single platform language.
...)
There was no question of flaming a language or another. Slashcode shouldn't be written in Logo and kernels shouldn't be written in Fortran. A java programmer is no less a programmer than a hardcore macho coder blaming hexadecimal for oversimplification of binary.
Know why they invented high-level languages? because maintaining assembly is a time-consuming nightmare. We need it for lots of things, sure, but not everyone needs to write a driver or a real-time-every-NOP-counts.
Of course learning assembly first will show you low-level candy that you can re-use afterwards, but can bring such bad habits (JMP for GOTOs, pointer arithmetic,
It is _very_ important to understand what's going on under the hood, I get the point. But knowing 8088 assembly wouldn't lead you anywhere today; C would.
Focus on cross-platform languages and libraries.
You may not keep your job anyway, but you'll be flexible.
The market for programmers slowly moves away from Microsoft. If you code in Visual Basic, you can be sure that only Microsoft-oriented companies will employ you.
Companies more and more switch to non-Microsoft solutions, meaning that they must switch programmers too. Knowing UNIX is becoming more and more of an asset; you might not know all the intricacies of bash or emacs, but if you code in perl you can be employed by Win/Lin/Mac/UNIX worlds...
Whenever possible, go for java instead of C#. Go for PHP instead of ASP. Learn to use as little platform-dependant code as possible.
A perfect sphere would imply fractional quarks and fractional parts of quarks, and ... an infinite precision!
Pi is still irrational, isn't it?
Don't tell me the all my math teachers lied to me!
There is a new project which tries to promote the local Quebec music scene, called Musicbot. Through an intelligent webring concept, mBOT tries to give visibility to local music and does the streaming. NetMusik is a portal for Quebec music too.
Time to clarify fileformats.
GIF: non-lossy bitmapped format
PNG: non-lossy bitmapped format
JPG: lossy format
GIF: 8-bit, 1 alpha channel
PNG: n-bit (as needed, up to 24), 8-bit alpha (as needed)
JPG: no alpha
PNG is also patent free and typically gets smaller file sizes than GIF.
There is no reason left but MSIE to use GIFs.
We may have super-elegant-configurable browsers now. But innovation remains important: the people at w3c are working hard to set new guidelines for the future:
Trouble is, if MSIE doesn't follow, will the web evolve? I mean, why are there still GIFs all around as they were designed for 8-bit VGA (remember the pre-web times in its glorified 320x200 mode?) Why is there a problem with PNG implementation on MSIE? It's a 1996 recommendation! Will that be the same principle holding us back from browser innovation?
"It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code, methods or concepts to achieve such perfomance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM,"
Man, I'm impressed too, don't be jealous!
I'm really sorry for you that the only good things in the Free Software world would be borrowed from insiders from proprietary companies. Here is the truth, lastnames omitted - the longlist of cheaters of IP:
- Linux-ze-kernel Bobby from SCO
- Mozilla Tim from Opera
- KDE Jack from Apple
- Gnome Zak from Microsoft
- XFree Paul from Xerox
- Freeciv Yann from Microprose
- MySQL Sergei from Oracle
- GCC Rod from Borland
- Mplayer Allan from Real
- Ogg Vorbis Dan from FhG
- ...
Sorry guys, the party's over.With 100% of the disk cached in memory, you'd get a pretty expensive hard drive.
With 50% of the disk cached in memory, half the time, you'd have to wait for an average half-cycle to get your data. And still an expensive hard drive.
With 0% of the disk cached in memory, you'd still have to wait for an average half-cycle for all disk requests.
Now with any amount of cache, you get an overpriced drive and/or poor performance.
Ok, let's say we mine the moon.
So we need a power supply. What do we have on the moon to supply energy? not much.
Solar energy needs lots of equipment just to give a kilowatt. The results should be better on the moon, hey, no atmosphere to filter out precious wavelengths.
You don't want to use oil because you don't want to carry it and also because it needs OXYGEN. Okay, there is some buried in the rocks, but then you still need energy first to get it. Carry both oxygen and oil? you're kidding.
How much energy here on earth can be extracted from rock? Not much.
If the moon can't supply itself with enough energy to mine, what's the point?
First of all, something _very_ important is to make sure your students understand the 'tree-like' organisation of information in XML. h1 and p tags are NOT designed to be tags for bigger size and line breaks. People tend to look HTML as a paint program, it's so easy and Internet Explorer allows all this stuff.
Then you can show them HTML tags. I think the road from HTML to XHTML is much more dangerous than beginning with XML because of all the bells and whistles that can distract from the fact that XHTML is a _structure oriented_ markup language.
As some of your students will already know some HTML, don't let them corrupt their classmates with "witty" tricks like spacers made out of GIFs and FONT all over the place.
May I suggest Mozilla as a workbench? it can be configured to be extremely strict regarding XML syntax, and if it does fine in Mozilla, you are SURE it's legal.
>>particularly over the issue of choice and consent
We decide for them where they go, what they eat, when to bath, push them away when we want.
We let them locked inside when there's nobody home, we decide when and why they lose their reproductive abilities. If they need medication, we push it inside their throats.
Yeah, like people care for choice and consent from cats.
What kind of freedom is that?!
So, Americans have a known problem with obesity.
Do you think it'll help to use gas made from bacon, sausages and ham?
Imagine your morning traffic jam, with that 'breakfast is ready' smell. You look to your right, you see a man drooling behind his wheel. You look in your mirror, you see men trying to suck your car exhaust.
Whew!
Using X-Windows, you could just install a basic distro and run the app remotely (via an encrypted tunnel) on another machine (on which you could install anything you want). That would work with a bare system (there exists a 2-floppy XFree86 linux distro).
You could burn a CD that does just that, and boot the computer with that CD -- means no installation. The OS and apps on the CD would connect remotely to the X server (client?) and that would be the end of the problem.
Windows has this "innovation" called "Terminal Services" which seems like a pale clone of the X-Windows ability to run apps remotely. I don't know how much you could transpose from X or if clients are available in a base Windows installation.