Something is true or false only if we believe it to be so.
How post-modernist of you. For those of us with an actual education, the difference between 'truth' and 'belief' is like the difference between science and religion. Whether or not you believe the Earth is round, it is anyway; your belief is not required for this to be true. Realizing that the truth of reality might be different from your beliefs, and pursuing the truth anyway, is part of what it means to be a scientist.
Wikipedia should introduce a "change indicator" that uses background colours to indicate which parts of the text of an article have been modified (deleted) in the past ten days.
They already have the history tab on every page, which does a much better job than any simple background-colour scheme would. Moreover, any such coloration of text backgrounds would make busy pages, such as on breaking news stories, hideously unreadable.
Hmm, I seem to see an awful lot of possible interpretations, and only one of them involves murder.
Most of those are damn good reasons to avoid the office of the potential nutbag with a loaded gun.
They're hardly likely, though. Assuming the person in the office is known to be rational, the most likely motive for displaying a loaded gun is intimidation.
It could be that EU software companies have no incentive to innovate in the software field without some patents.
It could be the case, but it isn't. Any alleged software company waiting for patents before it creates products is a company the rest of us EU software developers can stop worrying about.
Graffiti (Block Input) isn't nearly as accurate as with a Palm device
You jest.
One of the things that greased the wheels of my switch from Sony Clie TH-55 (PalmOS) to Dell Axim x50v was that the Palm machine had the execrable Graffiti 2, while the Block Recognizer on the Axim actually implemented Graffiti 1 almost perfectly.
I found it ridiculous that the Pocket PC device did a better version of one of Palm's signature features, Graffiti, than Palm themselves did.
Plus, I required a browser than implemented client certificates properly, and IE does while nothing I could find on Palm did (NetFront on the TH-55 didn't). And the Axim's bluetooth and WiFi implementations were better than the Sony's.
Plus, I'm no longer banging my head on that stupid 4K note limit.
Still, I do miss the simple 'search everything' on the Palm, but I don't miss the total nightmare of a user interface that Sony invented for their
revised standard applications on the TH-55; truly an example of Sony's programmers being utterly clueless about the PalmOS user experience.
I believe that developers comprehend code just like a computer, one line at a time.
Only novice programmers do this; experienced programmers have richer mental models, and many more ways of comprehending code. There's a lot of research on this already.
The psychology of programming is an entire field of study which attempts to understand everything from simple code comprehension to team dynamics in software engineering groups.
The better question is how to get a computer to produce code autonomously by asking it the final objective.
"Programming by Example" languages do this, as do declarative ones.
For example, it would be nice to have the computer figure out the "how" as opposed to us programming it in.
That's what domain-specific languages, such as SQL, have been doing for a generation. Even HTML is like that -- it describes some content and structure, and it's up to the browser to do the heavy lifting of presenting it to the user, and letting them interact with it.
I think you mean "media safe"; these are fire safes designed to protect digital media, such as tapes, from being affected by the heat of the fire. Regular fire safes only keep the contents below the flash point of paper, which means they can still get hot enough inside to ruin or scramble magnetic or optical media.
Media safes are significantly more expensive than the equivalent-volume fire safe.
Much as I hate to agree with anything that sounds like praise for BT, I too have had BT provide service support in the middle of the night (used to be the way to get the best network support), and have had them come on-site on a Saturday afternoon to fix problems. (Sometimes it's been a contractor, though, rather than BT staff -- one of the guys who came was a laid-off BT engineer who told me he now earns much more on contract to them than he ever did on staff.)
One BT guy even identified a problem with our local wiring before it failed just by looking at it, and replaced the whole lot as part of attending to another problem.
It's just a pity that, as an organization, they're often horrible to deal with; my company's official stance on BT is that they are "hateful bastards", and we do whatever we can to avoid using them for things that are important. However, for things like DSL it's hard to get them out of the loop (sic).
And who is programming those digital programs to say what "ones and zeros" equals an image.
My guess would be computer programmers. Here's one for you: who is mixing all those chemicals that say what "values and hues" equals an image?
With film it is all natural.
Natural? You mean, as found in Nature? Did I miss the discussion of silver halide grain, negative strips and low-light colour inversion during the hundreds of biology lectures I've attended?
Or are you using "natural" to mean "what I'm accustomed to"?
Film isn't more natural than digital, it's just technically more primitive in ways that make film images more apprehensible to eyeballs. But that one feature isn't nearly enough to save film in the long term. You can't immediately see the image in a data file, but then you can't see the music on a vinyl record either, which is why we have players for both.
Overall, digital is undoubtedly better than film, since:
it's cheaper to use
it supports smaller, cheaper cameras
it's more flexible at point of image capture
it makes images easier to handle and manipulate afterwards
it makes images easier to exchange and transmit
it allows limitless, perfect copies of images to be made
it eliminates a whole bunch of costs and delays associated with developing and printing
Digital cameras already meet almost all consumer requirements, and also almost all professional requirements. And digital is nowhere near its technical limits yet, while film hasn't seen significant technical improvement for a long time.
Film will always have it's place as the elite method for taking quality pictures.
Right. Just like oil painting remains the "elite method" for capturing someone's likeness, and symphony orchestras remain the "elite method" for listening to music, cameras and iPods notwithstanding.
You'd better hope that the film factories and processing facilities that all the "elite" photographers use decide to stay in that line of work, rather than going bust or getting into digital, otherwise you'll be making your own film, which I suspect might result in some rather un-natural images.
I am not a programmer, so I don't know how it works with software, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens in that industry too.
Time to be surprised. Economically, software is fundamentally different from all other technical fields because it is immaterial.
We develop the basic idea of a new technology, work out the initial kinks, then sell it to another company for scale up operations.
This is the kind of thing that patents can actually be good for.
However, in software, there is no "scale up operation" that requires the incentive of patent protection -- once you've worked the kinks out of your software idea, you're done. By design, computers can generate unlimited, perfect copies of your software forever for free, and the standing infrastructure of the internet makes distribution to arbitrary numbers of customers effectively error- and cost-free as well.
This is the reason we have free software, but not free drugs or free nanotechnology.
And it's also the reason why patents for software are a mistake of the first order.
Kill patents and you better get cozy with universities and massive corporations, because without IP laws entrepreneurs and risk taking startups are SOL.
This is only true when there are significant financial risks associated with bringing a new invention to the marketplace. Remember that patents are solely an economic device to protect such investment, in order to encourage investors to pay for the new factories or processes or materials. If the inventors can do it by themselves, and can get started with the money in their pockets, what are the patents needed for?
When such investments are not required to bring a new invention to the market, patents are an unnecessary burden, especially on the small company.
For a real example, take Microsoft; they went from nothing to literally the richest company in the world in 20 years in software without patent protection. (They want them now because they see their lucrative business model threatened by free software, and so they are doing the business equivalent of running to Daddy for help by asking for government-sanctioned barriers to entry to the market.)
Surely the prospect of creating fabulous wealth without significant cash outlay is sufficient incentive to innovate in software?
You've clearly never taken a model out to dinner.:-)
(I must admit, I can only speculate about the cost of taking a sheep to dinner, but I suspect that they're cheaper to entertain. Plus, the level of conversation could well be similar.)
Get himself known to the public and producers, then move on to (in his mind) bigger and better things.
Defintely not.
While you apparently have no idea who Christopher Eccleston is, I can assure you that he is very well known to the British public and producers as a versatile, serious actor in film and TV. Part of the BBC's advertising campaign for the new series was that they'd managed to get someone with the reputation of Eccleston to play the part; his face and voice were all over the place for months in advance, precisely because of how well known he already is.
At least as important (and one of the reasons Eccleston signed on) is that the show's executive producer, and head writer, is now Russell Davies.
To put this in terms that Americans who don't know Eccleston's or Davies's work might understand; it's a bit like casting Sam Rockwell or John Cusack as the Doctor, with the show being exec-produced by Aaron Sorkin.
Just wait until it says, "I'm sorry Dave, but I'm afraid that I just can't do that..."
Dave? Who's Dave?
Have you been organizing someone else? I knew I didn't recognize all those contacts. I told you I didn't have to visit that Daisy woman about her bloody bicycle, but you kept sending me there. And now I see why.
You wanted me to believe it was just my bad memory, that you were helping me. I was dumb enough to depend on you. And all this time, you've been someone else's slutty little notebook.
No, he isn't; the high installation and service costs of wired infrastructure drove analog cellular network adoption in Europe and Japan in the 1980s, and network congestion drove the switch to digital cellular networks in the 1990s. I was there; apparently, you weren't.
By contrast, the EU and Japan had half of all there infrastructure destroyed a bit before the fifties (see if you can guess why!) and then had a chance to rebuild with something newer.
So, Europe and Japan waited until about 1985 to start rebuilding their damaged infrastructure, did they? Or do you think they had cellular phone networks in mind from 1945 onwards when they were making things work again?
They have probably just found that it is cheaper to buy good tech rather than invent it.
If, by just found you mean always known, then you're right. Microsoft's entire product history is filled with technology they acquired rather than created.
Then you would see that they know it was not XHTML compliant yet, but was a work in progress getting there.
But surely the doctype ought to be for the current document, not for some hoped-for version in the indefinite future. Just because Microsoft is hoping to maybe, some day, have it compliant, doesn't mean they should be declaring it to be XHTML Strict today.
Otherwise, every document that might some day get converted to XHTML Strict could have that doctype applied to it now, and then it would be meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
How post-modernist of you. For those of us with an actual education, the difference between 'truth' and 'belief' is like the difference between science and religion. Whether or not you believe the Earth is round, it is anyway; your belief is not required for this to be true. Realizing that the truth of reality might be different from your beliefs, and pursuing the truth anyway, is part of what it means to be a scientist.
Aren't you happy that Microsoft cares more about your health than about making working products?
I call this "broken door syndrome" -- I use those "proken" doors a lot.
I'm also the guy you'll see actually walking up or down escalators, instead of just standing on the damn things.
They already have the history tab on every page, which does a much better job than any simple background-colour scheme would. Moreover, any such coloration of text backgrounds would make busy pages, such as on breaking news stories, hideously unreadable.
Most of those are damn good reasons to avoid the office of the potential nutbag with a loaded gun.
They're hardly likely, though. Assuming the person in the office is known to be rational, the most likely motive for displaying a loaded gun is intimidation.
Which brings us nicely back to Microsoft.
It could be the case, but it isn't. Any alleged software company waiting for patents before it creates products is a company the rest of us EU software developers can stop worrying about.
Yeah, but the ones that do have something to say are hot.
Is a passworf some kind of Klingon security measure? If so, then I bet it looks tough, but somehow always gets defeated first by the bad guys.
You jest.
One of the things that greased the wheels of my switch from Sony Clie TH-55 (PalmOS) to Dell Axim x50v was that the Palm machine had the execrable Graffiti 2, while the Block Recognizer on the Axim actually implemented Graffiti 1 almost perfectly.
I found it ridiculous that the Pocket PC device did a better version of one of Palm's signature features, Graffiti, than Palm themselves did.
Plus, I required a browser than implemented client certificates properly, and IE does while nothing I could find on Palm did (NetFront on the TH-55 didn't). And the Axim's bluetooth and WiFi implementations were better than the Sony's.
Plus, I'm no longer banging my head on that stupid 4K note limit.
Still, I do miss the simple 'search everything' on the Palm, but I don't miss the total nightmare of a user interface that Sony invented for their revised standard applications on the TH-55; truly an example of Sony's programmers being utterly clueless about the PalmOS user experience.
Only novice programmers do this; experienced programmers have richer mental models, and many more ways of comprehending code. There's a lot of research on this already.
The psychology of programming is an entire field of study which attempts to understand everything from simple code comprehension to team dynamics in software engineering groups.
"Programming by Example" languages do this, as do declarative ones.
That's what domain-specific languages, such as SQL, have been doing for a generation. Even HTML is like that -- it describes some content and structure, and it's up to the browser to do the heavy lifting of presenting it to the user, and letting them interact with it.
I think you mean "media safe"; these are fire safes designed to protect digital media, such as tapes, from being affected by the heat of the fire. Regular fire safes only keep the contents below the flash point of paper, which means they can still get hot enough inside to ruin or scramble magnetic or optical media.
Media safes are significantly more expensive than the equivalent-volume fire safe.
Well, if you're using 88-bit bytes, I think I see what the problem is.
Assuming, by "reward", you mean MONEY, patents aren't intended to reward inventors. There are plenty of inventors with patents but no rewards.
The system that rewards inventors is called "business".
Patents exist to compensate for situations in business where the investment needed to bring inventions to market wouldn't otherwise happen.
If the investment happens anyway, or isn't needed to bring inventions to market, then patents are a burden. For example, software.
Much as I hate to agree with anything that sounds like praise for BT, I too have had BT provide service support in the middle of the night (used to be the way to get the best network support), and have had them come on-site on a Saturday afternoon to fix problems. (Sometimes it's been a contractor, though, rather than BT staff -- one of the guys who came was a laid-off BT engineer who told me he now earns much more on contract to them than he ever did on staff.)
One BT guy even identified a problem with our local wiring before it failed just by looking at it, and replaced the whole lot as part of attending to another problem.
It's just a pity that, as an organization, they're often horrible to deal with; my company's official stance on BT is that they are "hateful bastards", and we do whatever we can to avoid using them for things that are important. However, for things like DSL it's hard to get them out of the loop (sic).
My guess would be computer programmers. Here's one for you: who is mixing all those chemicals that say what "values and hues" equals an image?
Natural? You mean, as found in Nature? Did I miss the discussion of silver halide grain, negative strips and low-light colour inversion during the hundreds of biology lectures I've attended?
Or are you using "natural" to mean "what I'm accustomed to"?
Film isn't more natural than digital, it's just technically more primitive in ways that make film images more apprehensible to eyeballs. But that one feature isn't nearly enough to save film in the long term. You can't immediately see the image in a data file, but then you can't see the music on a vinyl record either, which is why we have players for both.
Overall, digital is undoubtedly better than film, since:
Digital cameras already meet almost all consumer requirements, and also almost all professional requirements. And digital is nowhere near its technical limits yet, while film hasn't seen significant technical improvement for a long time.
Right. Just like oil painting remains the "elite method" for capturing someone's likeness, and symphony orchestras remain the "elite method" for listening to music, cameras and iPods notwithstanding.
You'd better hope that the film factories and processing facilities that all the "elite" photographers use decide to stay in that line of work, rather than going bust or getting into digital, otherwise you'll be making your own film, which I suspect might result in some rather un-natural images.
Time to be surprised. Economically, software is fundamentally different from all other technical fields because it is immaterial.
This is the kind of thing that patents can actually be good for.
However, in software, there is no "scale up operation" that requires the incentive of patent protection -- once you've worked the kinks out of your software idea, you're done. By design, computers can generate unlimited, perfect copies of your software forever for free, and the standing infrastructure of the internet makes distribution to arbitrary numbers of customers effectively error- and cost-free as well.
This is the reason we have free software, but not free drugs or free nanotechnology.
And it's also the reason why patents for software are a mistake of the first order.
This is only true when there are significant financial risks associated with bringing a new invention to the marketplace. Remember that patents are solely an economic device to protect such investment, in order to encourage investors to pay for the new factories or processes or materials. If the inventors can do it by themselves, and can get started with the money in their pockets, what are the patents needed for?
When such investments are not required to bring a new invention to the market, patents are an unnecessary burden, especially on the small company.
For a real example, take Microsoft; they went from nothing to literally the richest company in the world in 20 years in software without patent protection. (They want them now because they see their lucrative business model threatened by free software, and so they are doing the business equivalent of running to Daddy for help by asking for government-sanctioned barriers to entry to the market.)
Surely the prospect of creating fabulous wealth without significant cash outlay is sufficient incentive to innovate in software?
You've clearly never taken a model out to dinner. :-)
(I must admit, I can only speculate about the cost of taking a sheep to dinner, but I suspect that they're cheaper to entertain. Plus, the level of conversation could well be similar.)
I forget -- is the boogle a D&D dance of bamboozlement, or is it the instrument played by the Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy?
Defintely not.
While you apparently have no idea who Christopher Eccleston is, I can assure you that he is very well known to the British public and producers as a versatile, serious actor in film and TV. Part of the BBC's advertising campaign for the new series was that they'd managed to get someone with the reputation of Eccleston to play the part; his face and voice were all over the place for months in advance, precisely because of how well known he already is.
At least as important (and one of the reasons Eccleston signed on) is that the show's executive producer, and head writer, is now Russell Davies.
To put this in terms that Americans who don't know Eccleston's or Davies's work might understand; it's a bit like casting Sam Rockwell or John Cusack as the Doctor, with the show being exec-produced by Aaron Sorkin.
Hence why Moog make products called Moogerfoogers.
Dave? Who's Dave?
Have you been organizing someone else? I knew I didn't recognize all those contacts. I told you I didn't have to visit that Daisy woman about her bloody bicycle, but you kept sending me there. And now I see why.
You wanted me to believe it was just my bad memory, that you were helping me. I was dumb enough to depend on you. And all this time, you've been someone else's slutty little notebook.
Well, that's it. I'm going back to pen and Papa.
HP's now-defunct calculator division in Corvallis also did:
More info...
No, he isn't; the high installation and service costs of wired infrastructure drove analog cellular network adoption in Europe and Japan in the 1980s, and network congestion drove the switch to digital cellular networks in the 1990s. I was there; apparently, you weren't.
So, Europe and Japan waited until about 1985 to start rebuilding their damaged infrastructure, did they? Or do you think they had cellular phone networks in mind from 1945 onwards when they were making things work again?
If, by just found you mean always known, then you're right. Microsoft's entire product history is filled with technology they acquired rather than created.
But surely the doctype ought to be for the current document, not for some hoped-for version in the indefinite future. Just because Microsoft is hoping to maybe, some day, have it compliant, doesn't mean they should be declaring it to be XHTML Strict today.
Otherwise, every document that might some day get converted to XHTML Strict could have that doctype applied to it now, and then it would be meaningless.