Interesting choice of name, given that IBM recently announced Ubiquity XForms, a 100% AJAX implementation of XForms which lets web application authors to use markup to control DOJO and YUI and other libraries, and which runs in Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera.
the author looks like he is inexperienced, and unaware of the function "reduce",... (along with map...) Maybe you should send the author a note about map and reduce. As director of Research at Google, he's probably in a position to influence some of their programmers to make use of map and reduce.
It sure does seem like they made a lot of installer changes and didn't test them enough.
I upgraded from FC8 to FC9 from a.iso in the home directory, and found it didn't mount/home during the install, causing the installation to die because I had (perhaps unwisely) used the home partition to hold some/var/cache/yum via a relative symlink, a couple of years ago. I tried mounting home and continuing, but it skipped right past the install and claimed it was done, leaving me with a GRUB prompt on reboot. I wound up moving the iso to an external usb disk, reinstalling a couple more times and forcing the boot rewrite, and filing a bug on the condition.
However, nothing beats a group of peers to teach you....I recommend getting involved with your local HAM Radio club and hopefully find a handful of really good old-school analog electronics guys.
Original HP pocket calculators used bubble memory. Which model? MoHPC says there was a non-production prototype series called Roadrunner that was to use bubble memory but makes no mention of it in any production device.
Interesting; stir up a tempest, then calm it, and then claim you're now "standards compliant!"
Where's SVG, XForms, XBL?
Don't get blindsided by big stuff you can't see
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 3, Informative
XML has tremendous, huge, giant levels of adoption that dwarf its use as XHTML and in XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) stuff. WHATWG's HTML 5 and JSON will have no effect on these other uses. It's just that nobody in hangouts like this sees it.
The petroleum industry is a heavy user of XML. Example: Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language WITSML (http://www.knowsys.com/ and others).
The list goes on and on, literally, in major, world-wide industry after industry. XML has become like SQL -- it was new, it still has plenty of stuff going on and smart people are working on it, but a new generation of programmers has graduated from high school, and reacts against it. But it's pure folly to think it's going to go away in favor of JSON or tag soup markup.
So yes, suceess in Facebook applications can make a few grad students drop out of school to market their "stuff," and Google can throw spitballs at Microsoft with a free spreadsheet written in Javascript, but when you right down to it, do you really think the banking industry, the petroleum industry, and countless others are going to roll over tomorrow and start hacking JSON?
> Where's the keystroke or mouse-click to get to the implementation? EMACS and tags; Meta-. > For auto-completion? EMACS and dabrev; I bind it to Meta-Space.
> Where's the IDE that finds errors while I'm typing? EMACS and flymake; It works for Java, PHP, perl, python, etc.
Here are screenshots of it working with python, all candy-colored for your editing pleasure, with mouseovers or minibuffer reports of errors as you type:
A123 and Valence offer Lithium Nano Phosphate and Lithium Iron Phosphate cells that can source current at up to 60 times their total amp-hour rating and still deliver 100% of their energy rating, and have excellent safety compared to existing Li-Ion and LiPoly cells. A123 has $350M to spend, and deals with DeWalt/Black and Decker on sale now, and Chevy Volt on the table. It's going to be hard for Stanford to catch up.
Nevertheless, I'm quite excited about all these new Lithium battery technologies and have written a brief article about them for enthusiasts. I think there will be tremendous competitive pressure from these deals and developments, and 2008 will see a big change in batteries, relegating Lead Acid and Nickel Metal Hydride increasingly to niche application status.
When I lived in Cambridge, I sometimes visited friends in Boston who had 600VDC elevators using power from the city. Later elevators still used 600VDC but used a dynamotor; that whine you used to hear when you pressed an elevator button elsewhere was the dynamotor starting, to convert to 600VDC from the 120VAC line current. Eventually, elevator manufacturers stopped using it, but when you hear that whine in a medium-old elevator, you know what is is.
I've searched in the article for info about the battery technology and can't find it, but from the quick charge time, I am guessing that these might be Lithium Nanophosphate batteries from A123 systems. They charge and discharge quickly and don't have nearly the safety problems of Lithium ion or Lithium polymer batteries.
Here's a video of the nail test A123 vs a standard LiIon cell, like the ones used in laptops.
The A123 cells have other advantages, such as a lower fully-charged voltage, that are helpful to systems that have specific voltage requirements, such as those designed for 12v-14.4v automotive-type systems. The fully charged voltage of LiPo and LiIon are too high (~16v).
In 1988, Philip Greenspun and I did a study of audiophile cables, as part of a Psychoacoustics laboratory course at MIT. Our paper was published in The Absolute Sound and the MIT Computer Music Journal (first page). The MIT version published several paragraphs and pages out of order, so you have to put the puzzle back together.
At the time, CD players were just out, and many audiophiles derided them, so we used 33RPM LP recordings, purchased new and played on a high-end turntable, and used expensive electrostatic speakers and a typical audiophile listening room, not an anechoic chamber, as audiophiles again had in the past not accepted such tests.
Rather than testing speaker cables, we decided to test the tonearm-to-preamp connection, where the signal as the weakest, reasoning that any effects would show up more profoundly there.
We tested a 1-meter long cable from Straight Wire (provided to us free, but costing about $100) and 24-feet of zip cord from Radio Shack (which we purchased).
To avoid any interference from switches or relays, I went into a closet with the equipment and the door closed, and Philip waited with the test subjects in the listening room. (This formally made our test single-blind, though it answered previous concerns from previous tests about signal depredation from switches. Still, we made sure that there was no way for subjects to find out during the test.)
Each run consisted of either AAAA or ABAB, with A or B being a one-minute passage played with cable A or cable B. AAAA or ABAB was etermined by coin toss. Before each minute passage, I unplugged the cables and plugged the cable back in, so there was no way for the subjects to tell which cable was used. We asked for each 4-minute run if the subjects thought it was A or B, and we asked after each 1-minute, if they preferred it.
We ran several groups of 5 subjects each, and did 6 runs with each. Our tests included audiophiles, musicians, and other random test subjects. We found no statistically significant ability for subjects either in preference or in ability to distinguish 1 meter long audiophile cable from 24 feet of Radio Shack zip cord.
If we discarded the first run for each group of subjects as a training run, we found an 80% confidence for ability to distinguish, which was still not significant. However, we did find a 95% confidence on preference, for the Radio Shack 24' zip cord!
> It may cause pain now, but increase your chance for cancer, much like sunburn. Sunburn causes cancer because the frequency of UV light is extremely high, approximately 10^17Hz. The energy available in a photon is directly related to frequency by Planck's constant, so the higher the frequency the more energy one photon has. Right around the frequency of UV light, electromagnetic radiation becomes ionizing radiation, which means that there is enough energy to knock electrons off important things (like your DNA), and cause mutations, which lead to cancer, as Dr. Tyrell explained to us in Bladerunner.
The Voyager uses three computers whose CPUs are RCA 1802. The 1802 was (and still is) made in a rad-hardened ceramic DIP.
You can build your own 1802 computer, thanks to a retro kit, which updates the 1976 Popular Electronics $99 COSMAC Elf project. We built one of these, and chose not to get the full kit, but instead spend months chasing down parts. I'd got for the full kit if I did it again.
>So, politicians ended up congratulating each other on how much money they raked in for the public coffers... and companies suddenly found themselves so strapped for cash that they no longer had the money to invest
We had two of these fiascoes. One was Nextwave, which overbid and promptly filed for bankruptcy back in 1996, trying up spectrum for ten years, at which point they started selling their licenses to incumbents such as Verizon. Here's a summary from 2005:
NextWave declared bankruptcy after defaulting on $4.7 billion due on spectrum wireless licenses awarded to the company by the FCC in 1996. The FCC revoked NextWave's spectrum rights, arguing that the company had paid only a fraction of what it promised, and re-auctioned the rights to companies including Verizon and VoiceStream. NextWave sued, however, contending that U.S. bankruptcy laws protected the company from the FCC license revocation. The dispute reached the Supreme Court in January 2003, with the court ruling that the FCC had improperly seized more than 200 wireless licenses from NextWave. The FCC was forced to refund the $16 billion in proceeds from the sale of NextWave's licenses.
A similar sad story happened in the 1980's, when UPS succesfully lobbied the FCC to take away VHF spectrum from ham radio, but by the time they got it, they decided they didn't want it. You can read a summary which I won't quote here. They auctioned it off, then had to go investigate the licensees to see if they were using it. Then they auctioned it off again in June 2007, and realized (according to the preceeding link, if I read it correctly), about $200,000.
In a couple of years, when they decide to do it again, I hope Charles Simoyni (who got his ham license when he went on board ISS), will buy it all and give it back to the hams.
So, you put the data in your XML data section (just like the Ajax stuff does), then you put your data type declarations in (string, boolean, date, email address, enumeration, etc), and then you use the tags inside your XHTML to refer to the data. It's exactly a three-layer model.
Or "Browser makers ignore standard; make own"
on
W3C Considering An HTML 5
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
W3C was formed to create a "consortium" not only of browser makers, but also tool vendors and other major HTML users. The W3C explicitly differed from IETF in having members pay dues (and hefty ones for big companies), and in having more structure, though still less than real standards bodies such as ISO.
One of the goals was to make sure that all the players had a voice, not just the browser vendors.
Well, everybody got together and decided to design something that had clear semantics, well-defined behavior, and was modular. CSS came out of this, and XHTML came out of this. Netscape didn't like CSS, so Microsoft did. Then Netscape capitulated on CSS, then it folded.
Then nothing happened. For a long, long time. (You may recall this period.)
Opera was founded by Hakon Lie Waum, and it found a great niche market in embedded browsers, but getting there required it to be "IE5 bug compatible," at a tremendous engineering effort.
Then a bunch of other companies came along and started making browsers and tools and middleware and all sorts of stuff that implemented the plethora of W3C modules, and started to target enterprise customers and mobile phone vendors with products implementing XHTML Basic (which replaced WAP/WML in short order), SVG (which made Flash be stillborn in the phone market), XForms (which appeals mostly now to vendors who can control the middleware, but gives them the AJAX advantage without browser dependence). It became clear to the now old-guard browser vendors that if they didn't do something to enshrine "IE5 bug compatibility" in HTML, it was going to be subsumed by new, easier to implement standards, probably starting from the cell phone and enterprise markets, but pushing out into full consumer/open web markets from there.
So, they created a crisis by starting their own parallel standards group and threatening W3C. The keep this threat up, and use the same kind of populist appeal and divisiveness we see in US politics to stir up hatred and polarization, all the while keeping the parallel work on the forefront.
All I can say at this point is that you should be prepared for JavaScript to become the language of expression on the web, with markup languages being reduced to a graphics library for scribbling on screens.
>On Earth, radio waves occur naturally during lightning strikes, which cause electrons in the atmosphere to oscillate and release the waves. These radio waves bounce back and forth between the Earth's surface and its ionosphere, the high-up region of the atmosphere filled with electrically-charged particles.
I do this myself on earth a lot. It's lot of fun to experiment.
Some of this was with off-on keying of an RF carrier, and some with digital-signal processing software running on Linux (both extremely weak signal modes originally designed for bouncing signals off the Moon, and more conversational modes.)
From what I remember of Logo, few people in the class "got" it. Everyone in CS harps on and on about how great logo is, but most of my classmates in grade-school just laughed when the "turtle" did stupid things, and asked the teacher for help (ie, to fix it for them.)
Yes, one of the big failings of Logo is that although it had the potential to help make kids smarter, it couldn't do anything about the teachers.
Disclaimer: I wrote Logo for the C64, Apple II, and Mac.
> I tried to stand by your window to read my book using your light. The window let me. Does this mean I automatically get the right to use your light? Is this a trick question? If you're standing in the street, yes.
This sounds a lot like a phased-lock loop It doesn't sound like a PLL to me; a PLL has VCO in it, and this is a VCO, but the VCO is just the oscillator part. I.e., where's the phase comparator?
It sounds more like a quadrature oscillator with 4 outputs. Oscillators have an inherent need for a 180 degree phase shift, and a quadrature oscillator gives you two outputs 90 degrees out of phase. This one gives you 4 outputs 90 degrees out of phase, which seems a bit of a trick.
It may be some variant on the Bubba Oscillator, which uses 4 stages to reach the 180 degree inversion, but of course the output of each of those is 45 degrees.
>All things being equal and HTML starting out fresh, I guess you could make a case for a "strict only"-policy. We're not starting out fresh though.
(BTW, I don't like the subject line of this thread (I didn't create it) so I changed it to ***.)
This is another issue I don't understand. If you visit a web page, and it requires the Flash plugin, or if it requires JavaScript, or if it works only in Internet Explorer, or if it requires Java, then either you get the stuff and it works, or you don't get it and it doesn't work. There's plenty of ways to find out if a client supports something and serve up one version or another. The same is true for other markup-based technologies such as SVG; either you get the SVG content or you don't. But there aren't people running around saying the entire web is broken because there are pages with SVG in them.
It's not that hard a task to add SVG to Firefox once you know how to implement SVG; in fact, it's been done. It's not that hard a task to add recognition of XHTML2 markup if someone wanted to do it. And XForms is in version 0.7, heading towards a 1.0 release in Firefox as well. None of these things break the web. If you want to use them, use them. If you don't, don't. But why must you run around telling other people not to implement them? What is it that you fear? I think it's the lack of mystery.
Modularizing HTML so that it's possible to intermix SVG, XForms, and other markup and get predictable results takes a lot of the mystery out of writing web browsers. And mystery is important if your business is writing web browsers, (i.e. for the mobile phone market) because if you could read the specs and write software and sell it, then there'd be less money to be made for the established players.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting choice of name, given that IBM recently announced Ubiquity XForms, a 100% AJAX implementation of XForms which lets web application authors to use markup to control DOJO and YUI and other libraries, and which runs in Firefox, IE, Safari, and Opera.
ITS had versioning in the filesystem way before VMS.
the author looks like he is inexperienced, and unaware of the function "reduce",
It sure does seem like they made a lot of installer changes and didn't test them enough.
.iso in the home directory, and found it didn't mount /home during the install, causing the installation to die because I had (perhaps unwisely) used the home partition to hold some /var/cache/yum via a relative symlink, a couple of years ago. I tried mounting home and continuing, but it skipped right past the install and claimed it was done, leaving me with a GRUB prompt on reboot. I wound up moving the iso to an external usb disk, reinstalling a couple more times and forcing the boot rewrite, and filing a bug on the condition.
I upgraded from FC8 to FC9 from a
Does anybody else hear the siren call of Ubuntu?
You can search for a local club here: http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/club/clubsearch.phtml Definitely agree. Also, try some kits. These below (not an exhaustive list) have excellent instructions:
http://www.qrpme.com/ (try the Sudden Storm receiver)
http://www.qrpkits.com/ (more advanced)
http://www.elecraft.com/ (even more advanced)
http://radio.tentec.com/kits/Receiver/ (a good range of receiver kits)
Ramsey kits are ubiquitous, but often require expertise to debug.
Some of the MAKE Magazine store kits are good, but some of them are not for beginners.
Interesting; stir up a tempest, then calm it, and then claim you're now "standards compliant!"
Where's SVG, XForms, XBL?
XML has tremendous, huge, giant levels of adoption that dwarf its use as XHTML and in XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX) stuff.
WHATWG's HTML 5 and JSON will have no effect on these other uses. It's just that nobody in hangouts like this sees it.
For example, the entire international banking industry runs on XML Schemas. Here's one such standard: IFX. Look at a few links: http://www.csc.com/industries/banking/news/11490.shtml , http://www.ifxforum.org/home , http://www.ifxforum.org/home
But there are other XML standards in use in banking.
The petroleum industry is a heavy user of XML. Example: Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language WITSML (http://www.knowsys.com/ and others).
The list goes on and on, literally, in major, world-wide industry after industry. XML has become like SQL -- it was new, it still has plenty of stuff going on and smart people are working on it, but a new generation of programmers has graduated from high school, and reacts against it. But it's pure folly to think it's going to go away in favor of JSON or tag soup markup.
So yes, suceess in Facebook applications can make a few grad students drop out of school to market their "stuff," and Google can throw spitballs at Microsoft with a free spreadsheet written in Javascript, but when you right down to it, do you really think the banking industry, the petroleum industry, and countless others are going to roll over tomorrow and start hacking JSON?
> Where's the keystroke or mouse-click to get to the implementation?
EMACS and tags; Meta-.
> For auto-completion?
EMACS and dabrev; I bind it to Meta-Space.
> Where's the IDE that finds errors while I'm typing?
EMACS and flymake; It works for Java, PHP, perl, python, etc.
Here are screenshots of it working with python, all candy-colored for your editing pleasure, with mouseovers or minibuffer reports of errors as you type:
http://blog.printf.net/articles/2007/10/15/productivity-a-year-on
A123 and Valence offer Lithium Nano Phosphate and Lithium Iron Phosphate cells that can source current at up to 60 times their total amp-hour rating and still deliver 100% of their energy rating, and have excellent safety compared to existing Li-Ion and LiPoly cells. A123 has $350M to spend, and deals with DeWalt/Black and Decker on sale now, and Chevy Volt on the table. It's going to be hard for Stanford to catch up.
Nevertheless, I'm quite excited about all these new Lithium battery technologies and have written a brief article about them for enthusiasts. I think there will be tremendous competitive pressure from these deals and developments, and 2008 will see a big change in batteries, relegating Lead Acid and Nickel Metal Hydride increasingly to niche application status.
Let's say you take a editorial by David Brooks and paste it in without attribution.
When I lived in Cambridge, I sometimes visited friends in Boston who had 600VDC elevators using power from the city.
Later elevators still used 600VDC but used a dynamotor; that whine you used to hear when you pressed an elevator button elsewhere was the dynamotor starting, to convert to 600VDC from the 120VAC line current. Eventually, elevator manufacturers stopped using it, but when you hear that whine in a medium-old elevator, you know what is is.
I've searched in the article for info about the battery technology and can't find it, but from the quick charge time, I am guessing that these might be Lithium Nanophosphate batteries from A123 systems.
They charge and discharge quickly and don't have nearly the safety problems of Lithium ion or Lithium polymer batteries.
Here's a video of the nail test A123 vs a standard LiIon cell, like the ones used in laptops.
The A123 cells have other advantages, such as a lower fully-charged voltage, that are helpful to systems that have specific voltage requirements, such as those designed for 12v-14.4v automotive-type systems. The fully charged voltage of LiPo and LiIon are too high (~16v).
In 1988, Philip Greenspun and I did a study of audiophile cables, as part of a Psychoacoustics laboratory course at MIT. Our paper was published in The Absolute Sound and the MIT Computer Music Journal (first page). The MIT version published several paragraphs and pages out of order, so you have to put the puzzle back together.
At the time, CD players were just out, and many audiophiles derided them, so we used 33RPM LP recordings, purchased new and played on a high-end turntable, and used expensive electrostatic speakers and a typical audiophile listening room, not an anechoic chamber, as audiophiles again had in the past not accepted such tests.
Rather than testing speaker cables, we decided to test the tonearm-to-preamp connection, where the signal as the weakest, reasoning that any effects would show up more profoundly there.
We tested a 1-meter long cable from Straight Wire (provided to us free, but costing about $100) and 24-feet of zip cord from Radio Shack (which we purchased).
To avoid any interference from switches or relays, I went into a closet with the equipment and the door closed, and Philip waited with the test subjects in the listening room. (This formally made our test single-blind, though it answered previous concerns from previous tests about signal depredation from switches. Still, we made sure that there was no way for subjects to find out during the test.)
Each run consisted of either AAAA or ABAB, with A or B being a one-minute passage played with cable A or cable B. AAAA or ABAB was etermined by coin toss. Before each minute passage, I unplugged the cables and plugged the cable back in, so there was no way for the subjects to tell which cable was used. We asked for each 4-minute run if the subjects thought it was A or B, and we asked after each 1-minute, if they preferred it.
We ran several groups of 5 subjects each, and did 6 runs with each. Our tests included audiophiles, musicians, and other random test subjects. We found no statistically significant ability for subjects either in preference or in ability to distinguish 1 meter long audiophile cable from 24 feet of Radio Shack zip cord.
If we discarded the first run for each group of subjects as a training run, we found an 80% confidence for ability to distinguish, which was still not significant. However, we did find a 95% confidence on preference, for the Radio Shack 24' zip cord!
> It may cause pain now, but increase your chance for cancer, much like sunburn.
Sunburn causes cancer because the frequency of UV light is extremely high, approximately 10^17Hz. The energy available in a photon is directly related to frequency by Planck's constant, so the higher the frequency the more energy one photon has. Right around the frequency of UV light, electromagnetic radiation becomes ionizing radiation, which means that there is enough energy to knock electrons off important things (like your DNA), and cause mutations, which lead to cancer, as Dr. Tyrell explained to us in Bladerunner.
The Voyager uses three computers whose CPUs are RCA 1802. The 1802 was (and still is) made in a rad-hardened ceramic DIP.
You can build your own 1802 computer, thanks to a retro kit, which updates the 1976 Popular Electronics $99 COSMAC Elf project. We built one of these, and chose not to get the full kit, but instead spend months chasing down parts. I'd got for the full kit if I did it again.
We had two of these fiascoes. One was Nextwave, which overbid and promptly filed for bankruptcy back in 1996, trying up spectrum for ten years, at which point they started selling their licenses to incumbents such as Verizon. Here's a summary from 2005:
A similar sad story happened in the 1980's, when UPS succesfully lobbied the FCC to take away VHF spectrum from ham radio, but by the time they got it, they decided they didn't want it. You can read a summary which I won't quote here. They auctioned it off, then had to go investigate the licensees to see if they were using it. Then they auctioned it off again in June 2007, and realized (according to the preceeding link, if I read it correctly), about $200,000.
In a couple of years, when they decide to do it again, I hope Charles Simoyni (who got his ham license when he went on board ISS), will buy it all and give it back to the hams.
which the browser would automatically know about as a date field and have its own built-in popup calendar for browsing dates
XForms, the W3C's forms module for XHTML, has this.
You just mark the data as type date and it does it for you.
The control is still input.
See XForms 1.0 and XForms 1.1 which is nearly done. There's support for this feature in the native implementation for Firefox, which is presently at about version 0.8.
So, you put the data in your XML data section (just like the Ajax stuff does), then you put your data type declarations in (string, boolean, date, email address, enumeration, etc), and then you use the tags inside your XHTML to refer to the data. It's exactly a three-layer model.
W3C was formed to create a "consortium" not only of browser makers, but also tool vendors and other major HTML users. The W3C explicitly differed from IETF in having members pay dues (and hefty ones for big companies), and in having more structure, though still less than real standards bodies such as ISO.
One of the goals was to make sure that all the players had a voice, not just the browser vendors.
Well, everybody got together and decided to design something that had clear semantics, well-defined behavior, and was modular. CSS came out of this, and XHTML came out of this. Netscape didn't like CSS, so Microsoft did. Then Netscape capitulated on CSS, then it folded.
Then nothing happened. For a long, long time. (You may recall this period.)
Opera was founded by Hakon Lie Waum, and it found a great niche market in embedded browsers, but getting there required it to be "IE5 bug compatible," at a tremendous engineering effort.
Then a bunch of other companies came along and started making browsers and tools and middleware and all sorts of stuff that implemented the plethora of W3C modules, and started to target enterprise customers and mobile phone vendors with products implementing XHTML Basic (which replaced WAP/WML in short order), SVG (which made Flash be stillborn in the phone market), XForms (which appeals mostly now to vendors who can control the middleware, but gives them the AJAX advantage without browser dependence). It became clear to the now old-guard browser vendors that if they didn't do something to enshrine "IE5 bug compatibility" in HTML, it was going to be subsumed by new, easier to implement standards, probably starting from the cell phone and enterprise markets, but pushing out into full consumer/open web markets from there.
So, they created a crisis by starting their own parallel standards group and threatening W3C. The keep this threat up, and use the same kind of populist appeal and divisiveness we see in US politics to stir up hatred and polarization, all the while keeping the parallel work on the forefront.
All I can say at this point is that you should be prepared for JavaScript to become the language of expression on the web, with markup languages being reduced to a graphics library for scribbling on screens.
>On Earth, radio waves occur naturally during lightning strikes, which cause electrons in the atmosphere to oscillate and release the waves. These radio waves bounce back and forth between the Earth's surface and its ionosphere, the high-up region of the atmosphere filled with electrically-charged particles.
I do this myself on earth a lot. It's lot of fun to experiment.
In the past month, I was able to bounce a radio wave of approximately 20 meters to 40 meters in length from California to Hawaii, Mexico, Australia, the Bering Sea, Pacific Islands, Vladivostok, Khabarosk (Russia 20km from Chinese border, where they had the chemical spill a couple of years ago), and South Africa.
Some of this was with off-on keying of an RF carrier, and some with digital-signal processing software running on Linux (both extremely weak signal modes originally designed for bouncing signals off the Moon, and more conversational modes.)
If the Indiana legislature can redefine pi why can't congress redefine baseband vs broadband?
From what I remember of Logo, few people in the class "got" it. Everyone in CS harps on and on about how great logo is, but most of my classmates in grade-school just laughed when the "turtle" did stupid things, and asked the teacher for help (ie, to fix it for them.)
Yes, one of the big failings of Logo is that although it had the potential to help make kids smarter, it couldn't do anything about the teachers.
Disclaimer: I wrote Logo for the C64, Apple II, and Mac.
> I tried to stand by your window to read my book using your light. The window let me. Does this mean I automatically get the right to use your light?
Is this a trick question? If you're standing in the street, yes.
This sounds a lot like a phased-lock loop
It doesn't sound like a PLL to me; a PLL has VCO in it, and this is a VCO, but the VCO is just the oscillator part.
I.e., where's the phase comparator?
It sounds more like a quadrature oscillator with 4 outputs. Oscillators have an inherent need for a 180 degree phase shift, and a quadrature oscillator gives you two outputs 90 degrees out of phase. This one gives you 4 outputs 90 degrees out of phase, which seems a bit of a trick.
It may be some variant on the Bubba Oscillator, which uses 4 stages to reach the 180 degree inversion, but of course the output of each of those is 45 degrees.
>All things being equal and HTML starting out fresh, I guess you could make a case for a "strict only"-policy. We're not starting out fresh though.
(BTW, I don't like the subject line of this thread (I didn't create it) so I changed it to ***.)
This is another issue I don't understand. If you visit a web page, and it requires the Flash plugin, or if it requires JavaScript, or if it works only in Internet Explorer, or if it requires Java, then either you get the stuff and it works, or you don't get it and it doesn't work. There's plenty of ways to find out if a client supports something and serve up one version or another. The same is true for other markup-based technologies such as SVG; either you get the SVG content or you don't. But there aren't people running around saying the entire web is broken because there are pages with SVG in them.
It's not that hard a task to add SVG to Firefox once you know how to implement SVG; in fact, it's been done. It's not that hard a task to add recognition of XHTML2 markup if someone wanted to do it. And XForms is in version 0.7, heading towards a 1.0 release in Firefox as well. None of these things break the web. If you want to use them, use them. If you don't, don't. But why must you run around telling other people not to implement them? What is it that you fear? I think it's the lack of mystery.
Modularizing HTML so that it's possible to intermix SVG, XForms, and other markup and get predictable results takes a lot of the mystery out of writing web browsers. And mystery is important if your business is writing web browsers, (i.e. for the mobile phone market) because if you could read the specs and write software and sell it, then there'd be less money to be made for the established players.