Generally, when people talk about "excessive consumerism," they're not talking aobut living normally, or even about having nice things. They're talking about people doing stupid things like getting into enormous debt to "keep up with the Joneses." My sister, for example, has a well-paying IT job. She could easily have money put away and not be in debt, except that she thinks she's got to have a Dodge Durango to fit in in the area she's living. (At least she's buying instead of leasing this time. Ack.)
Everybody has the ability to not do that, and nearly everybody (those above the average salary, especially) has the ability to put some cash away for a rainy day.
"Living in caves and wearing a loincloth." Sheesh.
Actually, I love to hear about the new precision weapons we have. I thank God that I live in a day and age in which it is actually possible to minimize the extent of civilian casualties to the extent that we do.
His point is that it easier for him to throw together a bunch of regular expressions to do his thing than it is to use some off the shelf validating parser with a generic DOM/SAX based API. Good for him that is job is so simple that a bunch of regular expressions do the trick for him.
Okay...I think you missed the class that teaches how to avoid ad hominem. Still, you have a good point otherwise. Let's move his arguments to a common real-world example.
Let's say you're a clearinghouse for some specialized electronic transactions. You have clients who send you many small files. You package them and send them to their various destinations. Your customers on the other end return you a few extremely large files to be parsed, split, and have the data returned somehow to your original clients.
If you receive these files in XML, you have two options:
- DOM-like parsers. These will 1) be initially slow, and 2) take ungodly amounts of memory. If the files are large enough, this may rule out DOM altogether.
- SAX-like parsers. You either write take the callbacks yourself or write a zillion wrapper classes to do the parsing. Either way, it's a pain in the butt and your future maintainers will have to suffer with debugging code that executes non-sequentially.
So where's the common stream-based solution that exists for nearly every other file format? Something like that would be ideal, don't you think?
The original author's problem with XML is that there aren't any.
The author specifically had a problem with SAX because of the callback structure. Generally, to use it well, you have to write a wrapper around a SAX parser.
Tell me: should parsing a file be as difficult as doing asynchronous I/O?
The author also had a problem with DOM, because any program using it becomes a big, fat memory hog if it has to parse very large XML files.
That's the problem. There is no easy stream-based solution for parsing XML like there is for almost any other format.
Because splashing £26 billion dollars on a "super-duper" defence system is easier than sitting down and talking to all the other countries in the world to sort out the real problems.
Any clue where "real problems" come from?
First, let's define the "real problems." How about slavery, hunger, poverty, and ignorance? (We'll not include silly things like "right to an abortion" or "gun laws" in that list. For 1/4 of the people in the world, those are the least of their worries.)
Where do these things come from? Most modernly, where those run rampant are in dictatorships. Right: the kind of governments whose leaders you can't just sit down and have a chat with, because they'd feel more comfortable doing that with a few barrels pointed at your head.
This feel-good intellectual idealism drives me nuts sometimes.
I think you missed my point. Here it is, spelled out:
I am not my great, great, great, great grandfather.
Here's how it's relevant. Quoth the poster, a few posts back:
Yeah, the US is a great role model for the world in how to deal with your history and native peoples.
In your reply to that, you didn't seem to be talking about referencing and recalling history, you seemed to be equating today's U.S. with that of more than a lifetime ago. Mirrors, and all that. Agreeing that the U.S. today isn't fit to judge how a goverment treats its people because of its actions over 125 years ago.
My primary beef is with people who think it's right to fill our heads with guilt and grief from things that our ancestors did. Are you in that camp?
In fact, I'd always considered it a sign of great personal strength, this desire to peacefully resolve conflicts even if it included the risk of grave personal harm.
When "personal harm" extends to millions of people, the logic changes just a bit. We're not on the playground anymore.
Oh no! If the end result isn't exactly and perfectly equal, that means (ipso facto) that the opportunities are unequal! This is a BAD THING! It's obvious that something discriminatory is going on.
Didn't they teach you anything in elementary school?
Is it also possible to base a judgment on the stupidness of a state entirely on the name of its newspapers? Say, "Kalamazoo Gazette?" And do you think it's possible for the people who work at those fine newspapers - like the aforementioned - to actually take themselves seriously?
The basic problem is that there is no unique pronoun to reference objects of undetermined or unknown gender. Any book setting forth rules of grammar will tell you to use the word "he" in those cases. Nearly every work ever written uses this convention, which is why it sounds "weird."
It's training: when we see the word "she," every one of us is used to that pronoun referencing a person with a known gender. Similarly, depending on context, we're used to "he" referencing a person of known or unknown gender. So rather than suggesting a mild anti-sexist stance (which the author is no doubt doing, since he's male), it's doing the following two no-nos:
1) Bringing images of a known-gendered person to mind when the person's gender is in fact not known 2) Causing almost all of us - who are used to the "he" convention - to get distracted trying to rembember that the "she" could also be a "he"
The moral arguments can proceed forever, but those two facts remain. One thing to remember is that they are not necessarily logical when considered in a vacuum, or in the context of gender equality. Consider it in the context of training (from a very, very early age - from when the average human starts understanding words), and it makes sense.
Maybe one of these days we'll introduce a word like "hesh" and it'll all go out the window - after a generation or two.
I consider Bresenham's algorithm to be brilliant and immortal - but those others make me want to puke.
Why? They are not blatantly obvious. Sure, if you know them and have mentally parsed and stepped through them in the past they are, but what if you haven't? Why curse your future maintainers with little "tricks" that do nothing but slow them down, and have very little (if any) positive benefit?
The only nice thing I can say about them is that they're good logic puzzles for first- or second-year CS students.
I'd rather my programs read more easily than that, thank you very much. Bresenham, Dijkstra, et al, get my respect; but the users of those monstrosities ought to be shot.
IMO, of course. Not you, of course. If you've used them. Or not. Whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Quoth you, basically:
I can't believe you're telling me I live in a shack (caves and loincloths, etc.) in order to survive in my profession.
I believe that's called a "Straw Man" argument.
Generally, when people talk about "excessive consumerism," they're not talking aobut living normally, or even about having nice things. They're talking about people doing stupid things like getting into enormous debt to "keep up with the Joneses." My sister, for example, has a well-paying IT job. She could easily have money put away and not be in debt, except that she thinks she's got to have a Dodge Durango to fit in in the area she's living. (At least she's buying instead of leasing this time. Ack.)
Everybody has the ability to not do that, and nearly everybody (those above the average salary, especially) has the ability to put some cash away for a rainy day.
"Living in caves and wearing a loincloth." Sheesh.
Actually, I love to hear about the new precision weapons we have. I thank God that I live in a day and age in which it is actually possible to minimize the extent of civilian casualties to the extent that we do.
...and haven't heard that much of the "evidence" cited by Colin Powell in his "brilliant" speach to the UN was forged, and crudely at that.
Link? Or is this just word-of-mouth?
What about data binding [rpbourret.com] tools? Generate some classes from your DTD/schema, call bind(xmlFile) and you've got objects to work with.
They're still DOM underneath, with all the disadvantages.
His point is that it easier for him to throw together a bunch of regular expressions to do his thing than it is to use some off the shelf validating parser with a generic DOM/SAX based API. Good for him that is job is so simple that a bunch of regular expressions do the trick for him.
Okay...I think you missed the class that teaches how to avoid ad hominem. Still, you have a good point otherwise. Let's move his arguments to a common real-world example.
Let's say you're a clearinghouse for some specialized electronic transactions. You have clients who send you many small files. You package them and send them to their various destinations. Your customers on the other end return you a few extremely large files to be parsed, split, and have the data returned somehow to your original clients.
If you receive these files in XML, you have two options:
- DOM-like parsers. These will 1) be initially slow, and 2) take ungodly amounts of memory. If the files are large enough, this may rule out DOM altogether.
- SAX-like parsers. You either write take the callbacks yourself or write a zillion wrapper classes to do the parsing. Either way, it's a pain in the butt and your future maintainers will have to suffer with debugging code that executes non-sequentially.
So where's the common stream-based solution that exists for nearly every other file format? Something like that would be ideal, don't you think?
The original author's problem with XML is that there aren't any.
The author specifically had a problem with SAX because of the callback structure. Generally, to use it well, you have to write a wrapper around a SAX parser.
Tell me: should parsing a file be as difficult as doing asynchronous I/O?
The author also had a problem with DOM, because any program using it becomes a big, fat memory hog if it has to parse very large XML files.
That's the problem. There is no easy stream-based solution for parsing XML like there is for almost any other format.
Can someone please explain to me how the parent post can be regarded as a troll?
Thanks in advance.
So how many LOC's/hour is that?! ;)
I'm more used to LOCs/microfortnight.
I dunno. I think Mary-Kate and Ashley might give that a run for its money.
Because splashing £26 billion dollars on a "super-duper" defence system is easier than sitting down and talking to all the other countries in the world to sort out the real problems.
Any clue where "real problems" come from?
First, let's define the "real problems." How about slavery, hunger, poverty, and ignorance? (We'll not include silly things like "right to an abortion" or "gun laws" in that list. For 1/4 of the people in the world, those are the least of their worries.)
Where do these things come from? Most modernly, where those run rampant are in dictatorships. Right: the kind of governments whose leaders you can't just sit down and have a chat with, because they'd feel more comfortable doing that with a few barrels pointed at your head.
This feel-good intellectual idealism drives me nuts sometimes.
I think you missed my point. Here it is, spelled out:
I am not my great, great, great, great grandfather.
Here's how it's relevant. Quoth the poster, a few posts back:
Yeah, the US is a great role model for the world in how to deal with your history and native peoples.
In your reply to that, you didn't seem to be talking about referencing and recalling history, you seemed to be equating today's U.S. with that of more than a lifetime ago. Mirrors, and all that. Agreeing that the U.S. today isn't fit to judge how a goverment treats its people because of its actions over 125 years ago.
My primary beef is with people who think it's right to fill our heads with guilt and grief from things that our ancestors did. Are you in that camp?
If that's not what you meant, I apologize.
Game, set and match.
Score one for the guy with the mirror who's not afraid to look in it.
And score zero for the guy who thinks that looking six generations back or more is the same as looking in a mirror.
I swear, I can't understand you guilty self-haters. Do we still blame Germany for Hilter? That one is more recent, even.
In fact, I'd always considered it a sign of great personal strength, this desire to peacefully resolve conflicts even if it included the risk of grave personal harm.
When "personal harm" extends to millions of people, the logic changes just a bit. We're not on the playground anymore.
I know, brutha. I was joking. :)
Oh no! If the end result isn't exactly and perfectly equal, that means (ipso facto) that the opportunities are unequal! This is a BAD THING! It's obvious that something discriminatory is going on.
Didn't they teach you anything in elementary school?
Just once, can't we turn right?
Dunno what they're complaining about. All they have to do is go the other way.
Best Voice / Digitally Enhanced Acting Performance. That would also let actors from animated films get a chance.
Maybe if enough of us scream for it we can get him nominated next year. He certainly deserves it.
No kidding. I missed Bombadil as much as you did.
/me ducks
Regarding privacy: a booger specialist can always find a clost, empty room, or some kind of Convenient Obstruction. It's practically instinct.
Dear Dave,
Is it also possible to base a judgment on the stupidness of a state entirely on the name of its newspapers? Say, "Kalamazoo Gazette?" And do you think it's possible for the people who work at those fine newspapers - like the aforementioned - to actually take themselves seriously?
Thanks,
A Concerned Citizen
P.S. Two strikes against MI, at any rate.
Does it antialias the text? The text in those shots are antialiased, and it looks too smartly-placed to be jpeg artifacts.
You've hit the nail on the head, though a bit circumspectly. It's not about profits, it's about control.
The grammar fascist agrees.
The basic problem is that there is no unique pronoun to reference objects of undetermined or unknown gender. Any book setting forth rules of grammar will tell you to use the word "he" in those cases. Nearly every work ever written uses this convention, which is why it sounds "weird."
It's training: when we see the word "she," every one of us is used to that pronoun referencing a person with a known gender. Similarly, depending on context, we're used to "he" referencing a person of known or unknown gender. So rather than suggesting a mild anti-sexist stance (which the author is no doubt doing, since he's male), it's doing the following two no-nos:
1) Bringing images of a known-gendered person to mind when the person's gender is in fact not known
2) Causing almost all of us - who are used to the "he" convention - to get distracted trying to rembember that the "she" could also be a "he"
The moral arguments can proceed forever, but those two facts remain. One thing to remember is that they are not necessarily logical when considered in a vacuum, or in the context of gender equality. Consider it in the context of training (from a very, very early age - from when the average human starts understanding words), and it makes sense.
Maybe one of these days we'll introduce a word like "hesh" and it'll all go out the window - after a generation or two.
ACK!
I consider Bresenham's algorithm to be brilliant and immortal - but those others make me want to puke.
Why? They are not blatantly obvious. Sure, if you know them and have mentally parsed and stepped through them in the past they are, but what if you haven't? Why curse your future maintainers with little "tricks" that do nothing but slow them down, and have very little (if any) positive benefit?
The only nice thing I can say about them is that they're good logic puzzles for first- or second-year CS students.
I'd rather my programs read more easily than that, thank you very much. Bresenham, Dijkstra, et al, get my respect; but the users of those monstrosities ought to be shot.
IMO, of course. Not you, of course. If you've used them. Or not. Whatever.
Me, I'd prefer no wars but it seems to be the losing opinion these days.
More like the unavailable option. It doesn't work by schoolyard logic: it only takes one bad government to have a war.