Does anybody have any lead on affordable rackmount kits to fit a standard AT-size motherboard? Most kits I have seen so far come out at twice the price of an ordinary ATor ATX desktop case, but perhaps someone has found better and could tell us where to buy from. Alternately, I also heard of really cheap all-in-one motherboards with a built-in 2.5" EIDE drive, decent graphics card and 10/100baseT NIC that are actually designed to be rackmounted but I have yet to run into such beasts. Can anyone tell us more?
Like many others here, I have this collection of various architectures, running either some BSD or some Linux, but all are currently sitting in the average mini-AT, with all cases stashed up ontop of each other into a nice babel tower, and then a secondary problem is some BIOSes refuse to boot if no keyboard or graphics card is found, which is not nice after a power failure. Given that (as others in this thread pointed out) I only really need one workstation with a good display and keyboard, other machines would preferably sit nicely in a rack case and be considered servers, yet be affordable enough to assemble and maintain. Nice idea, but how?
Calling it Progeny Debian makes perfect sense given that Ian Murdoch (yes, the Ian who started Debian) is behind Progeny. Also, it clearly identifies the distribution as being Debian-based, as opposed to being yet another Red Hat derivative.
--
cameras help prosecutors but DO NOT PREVENT CRIME
on
Surveillance Society
·
· Score: 1
All those street cameras do is help prosecutors put a face to a [ legally | humanely | morally ] reprehensible act, so that an otherwise powerless legal system can have some evidence to show at the trial. Street cameras do notprevent crime, they only provide a visual evidence of the event after the fact.
Sreet cameras will not prevent some starving narcomaniac from mugging you so It can get your wallet and buy more dope. All it will do is ensure the prosecutors can assert who mugged you after you endured the bruises and seering pain!
I've said it before and will say it again now, the only thing that prevents crime is more policemen walking the streets and being physically present wherever crime is happening to stop it first hand.
The idea is quite simple:
I do NOT trust my government!
So far, the only thing my passport has brought me is trouble: not being a European Union citizen has prevented me from getting dream jobs, having a passport issued by a country that does not represent the 7-million minority from my state constantly gives people the wrong impression about what my mother tongue might be, and the only thing my passport guarantees is who "owns" me as far as visa-issuing authorities are concerned.
Overall, I simply cannot trust a government that was not elected through a republican system that would guarantee a proportional sample of elected representative that is likely to include the interrests of people like me. Sorry to say, but the parliamentary system is as anti-democrtic as is gets, since it routinely gives absolute control over anything to a single winning party, instead of a coalition that represents the wider spectrum of views found in the population. If a country doesn't use a proportional republican electoral system, it simply is not democratic.
Finally, my government routinely legislates on matters it cannot understand and systematically does so only to accomodate the corporate demands, in total disregard of individual rights and against the voting population's will.
Because of all the above, I simply cannot grant any credance nor trust to my government's authority in any matter, especially not when it comes to Internet technology. Centralizing Internet authentication using PKI only looks good in the eye of an incompetent beholder and is as ridiculous as driving licenses and passports; I adamantly disapprove of their use and explicitely challenge any government's authority in those matters.
That the non-compete clause is a maximum of one month without compensation, or a maximum of one year on a compensation equal to your salary for the selected non-compete period.
Since BeOS is based upon UNIX principles, has a journalling filesystem with built-in database-like features and comes with a really cute and well-thought GUI, it is the most likely re-invention of computing that might happen if people had to start from scratch.
The true reason for Tatu Ylönen's claim is obvious: someone else released a version of his work that is better, free of any licensing restrictions and cost-free:
OpenSSH has sturdier code, is easier to port to a variety of obscure platforms and combines both protocol versions in a single client/server pair.
By contrast, the original SSH is a huge patchwork, produces all sorts of weird compiler errors or non-working binaries when porting
to obscure platforms, and requires separate packages for SSH1 and SSH2 versions. Also, SSH2's license is too restrictive for anything else than educuational and home use; it forces money-making users to buy commercial products by F-Secure or SSH Oy.
Also, as someone else pointed out, Tatu's own license specifically said others are welcome to create derived work, as long as it is clearly stated that it is such. OpenSSH clearly identifies itself as derived work, so it's perfectly Kosher.
IMHO, Tatu should realize that adding cryptology to common commandline telecom tools was a one-trick poney; it was bound to happen sooner or later and, by today's standards, is fairly obvious work. Commandline utilities contribute to the overall advancement of software development, but they are nothing precious; merely usefull.
Instead of clinging on to his 15 minutes of fame over a few commandline tools, may I recommend that he moves on to higher challenges of cryptography like IPv6 and network security, where true expertise is required and his name can be a truely powerfull statement? The same idea goes for his company, SSH Oy: you guys are network cryptology experts, so create some more, act as consultants and make money with big paying customers; causing needless turmoil among the developer community can only result in people dropping you dead and comming up with more non-compatible crypto in reaction. Be smarter than that!
PS: SSH Oy is a great company. Why else would I constantly be bugging them for a job?!
One thing I really like in X-windows is the standardized clipboard actions assigned to each of the 3 buttons. I really wished MacOS would adopt this paradigm and drop one-button mice for good. Of course, this means redesigning their brand-new optical mouse into a 3-button model too.
All of my systems communicate very well, thanks you. TCP/IP protcols are openly documented, do not require any vendor-specific garbage and just plain work.
While cable-net has started to appear in a few cities, which is helping bring the overall access costs down, I still know an awfull lot of people who cannot afford more than a couple of hours of surfing per day, because the only option in their town is dialup connection plus phone charges on top.
Honestly, even Canada is nowhere near Yankee standards, in terms of cost and variety of options. While most Canadian towns indeed don't charge for local calls, they also only offer (at best) 56K dialup access thru the phone company's indecently priced 100 hours/month package.
Basically, for anyone but Yankees, phone charges do apply and high-speed access is often simply unavailable, therefore completely nullify any master plans for portal-driven software.
Honnestly, what the hell do Microsoft and SUN think they are up to with their everything served through a web portal instead of installed localy approach? Are they trying to compete with the Entertainment industry in the pay-per-use scheme of things? Or are they simply dumb enough to think that people whose only option is still dialup with local phone charges will actually bother using applications served over the net, instead of software installed on their own hard-disk?
Honestly, I really cannot be bothered with either company's laughable attempts at controlling this planet's software. Freedom of choice and rock-solid software rules; this is a war neither company can win, even if they opensource their products. Both BSD and Linux have a proven track record that will kill any commercial attempt at world domination, including attempts at commercializing Linux such as Red Hat's self-declared domination of the Linux universe.
Here is a more realistic sample of smart shopping: my workstations run either MiNT, OpenBSD or Debian, on hardware ranging from 68k-based Atari TT030 to your average free second-hand PC hardware. The whole thing is fast, efficient and, in the case of MiNT, runs both vintage GEM software and X applications. It works without any Microsoftism, as it relies entirely on open standards and simply rocks, because the software itself is well-coded and efficient, not because of bloated 1GHz overclocked CPU architecture.
Given this, why should I even bother reading about what William Gates the 3rd or Scott McNealy have in mind for the future of consumer computing?
Bill, Scott, I already have everything I need. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
While the shroud of mystery surrounding any US governmental agency is enough to give any slashdoter a hard-on, people in the professional audio and recording industry will probably find this all very mundane and boring, at best calling this one example of "applying every RF shielding trick in the book".
One famous example of such overshielding is Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch's sound effect recording studio, which uses state-of-the-art (read: costly) shielding, such as a one-foot wide ground plane wire running under a wire mesh shieled floor.
In other words, well-paid private ventures like Lucasfilm can and do afford the same kind of costly technology that government agencies purchase. Nothing much to write home about, really.
However, it's nice to know that government has willingly transfered such a well-built facility to more pacific purposes, where the investment won't disappear under the bulldozer's scraping.
Governments: please, never waste taxpayers money again by destroying anything; destroying evidences of compromising material is one thing, scrapping an entire facility is another. Whenever possible, please do auction the facility or, better yet, hand it over to researchers at no cost, to let that horrendous expenditure enjoy some civilian purpose, instead of dumbly scraping it once the MJ12 has deemed the location obsolete.
--
What one's degree really means to an employer
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 2
I think that the former Atari developper Dave Small is the one that summed this the best, in one of his columns:
Whatever degree you bring with you at a job interview means you have some working knowledge of what the job is about. It basically implies that your schooling provides enough of a solid base to warrant investing the two to three years average it takes to properly develop raw abilties into exploitable working skills, no more but no less.
I am quoting this off memory, so the words might not be exact, but the essence remains: a degree only means you have some faintest idea of what lies ahead and a certain minimal skill level worth investigating, that's all.
At both of my two most recent jobs, I ended up leaving in a situation where some people were completely dependant on my work and praising it (thus feeling utterly depressed about my leaving the company for somewhere else), while others who were at key Management positions basically seized the opportunity for personal vengeance.
Guess which one of these two groups gets to provide (bad) references to future potential employers? Yep, the one that made sure that my departure would be a bridge-burning session...
About the "start moving personal belongings home and making copies of usefull creations you have made there" part, bear in mind that some companies expressely own anything and everything you create while working for them, thus making copies for yourself might be illegal or, in some countries, can even be considered on par with theft.
Better check with a copyright lawyer upfront, before signing any future contract, to ensure that you are allowed to recycle your own code elsewhere, or at least that you own the concepts behind them, without ending up with a costly lawsuit or in jail.
All the "mundanes" would gang up against the elite and smash them to bits.
The recent example in Prague, where manifestants from around the globe were illegally arrested by the police and brutalized, is an example of what happens when "mundanes" try to even as much as speak against the system.
Be realistic, there won't be any planetary-wide "French Revolution" against a system that already equipped the police with military hardware for crowd control. People would just not be willing to accept the fact that casualties happen in any war, including a war against your own politicians and their police state; nowadays, they prefer to stay home and approve any law, until the said law affects them personally, at which point it's already too late to do anything about something you pushed your congressman to pass into legislation.
It probably wasn't HER insurance coverage, but an employee health plan. Lose your job, lose the coverage.
Point taken, although be aware that the article - as pointed out by others in this thread - provides too little information on the specifics of what happened to this woman, thus your point is pure speculation, at this stage.
It may seem cruel, but this might be one of the best ways to screen for jobs. It will allow our businesses to have the best and healthiest employees. This will lead to increased production and satisfaction by the customer.
Once everyone has been tested, categorized and found to be carrying some genetic hickup of some sort, then rejected for any employment, do you expect anyone to have any money left to buy anything, if they don't have any source of income left? DUH!
First, a woman looses both her insurance and her job, because of some DNA testing result. Then, some researcher says DNA-based insurance discrimination is illegal in the first place, thanks to "a legal patchwork in several states". If it is illegal, then why did she loose her insurance coverage?
The part about laws against employer DNA-testing being constantly shelved by the Justice is somewhat scary, though. Or, is the situation already like X-Files, where the Elite already conceded to handing over their DNA to aliens in exchange for protection, while also constituting a broad DNA database of the population, thus this whole mess is a non-issue for them? *grin*
Maybe I didn't notice Bill Gates at the beginning of his career. But I remember DOS selling well while there was, for example the Amiga about.
If you are of the Amiga generation, then you are obviously way too young to know what kind of a hero Bill used to be to a whole generation of Whiz Kids who hacked home-made vocal synthesizers boards onto their 8-bit and coded in Basic or Assembler.
Hint: those of you who remember the TV series of the same name, raise your hands. Bonus points for whoever remembers (this means, no search engine allowed; either you are old enough to remember the series, or you are not) the main actors and the name of the friendly computer the main character had, and who was Farley.
In a market place, it doesn't work. You do not, in fact, have a "solid piece of wood in your hands" -- if you don't give people what they want and what they believe to be most useful, they will go elsewhere. It is not up to you to "teach" them anything if, as I suspect, they do not want to be taught.
Thank you.
This is precisely what Slashdotters need to learn, en masse. Technology for technology's sake doesn't work in the mass market; it has to respond to an explicit need.
But the issue here is not finding or developing a replacement to.doc for the masses, it is about choosing an appropriate existing standard to require standards drafts to be submitted in.
Wrong.
The initial post must be viewed into a wider context.
The issue is to permanently yank Word out of the marketplace for good, by coming up with something everyone will actually want to use, something that available and ported to a variety of platforms: Unices, Mac, Windows... as well as older legacy systems still in use out there.
Your points about the obligation to quote all values, self-closing BR tags, disapearing B and I tags... have all been carefully considered by W3C when they decided to formalize these things.
Advantages of formalism in markup languages:
No need to guess where a value ends, just parse and look for the quotation marks within a tag.
No need to check for UPPER and lower case versions of the same tags and attributes; everything is in lowercase.
Removal of presentation control allows the same source document to be used for a variety of output devices.
If you are authoring for any medium or major -sized content provider, chances are that making the content outputable in several of the following formats is a must:
HTML
WML
Postscript (includes PDF)
MAN page
Newsgroup post
By using XML as the source format (or, in this case, XHTML Basic), all of these can be covered easily using the appropriate Style Sheet or in a few cases, with sophisticated XSLT schemas.
HTML: no transformation needed, already in XHTML; CSS can optionally be used to add visual nicies and presentation control.
WML: no transformation needed, unless transport buttons are required. In any case, no presentation control available, so XHTML can pretty much be used as is.
Postscript: probably needs an XSLT schema to ensure a predictable, printable layout. Otherwise, the source XHTML document already provides the structure, which can easily be parsed to provide an automated Table of Content page, as a bonus.
MAN page: the structure is already provided by XHTML, but must be filtered by troff or similar tools to convert the tagging into appropriate markup for MAN pages; a simple substitution game, easily handled by a script.
Newsgroup post: the document structure is already provided by XHTML, but tagging must be stripped and converted to carriage returns, tabs or spaces, to render a plain text message.
For the record, I also hated the disappearance of favorite tags and the requirement of using lowercase for everything, because I still prefer to hand-type my HTML (with the help of auto-expanders that provide tags out of a few keystrokes).
Ever since I adopted HTML Tidy, the conversion to XHTML has been rather painless. Sure, reading lowercase-only tagging took a few weeks to get used to, but nowadays I hardly notice the difference; the tags have become easy to spot, once again.
In closing, I would like to thank W3C people for their efforts, in both web standardization and providing freeware tools to implement these standards. Tidy is something I can no longer live without!;-)
However, (and this also goes for a lot of other standards out there, such as NTP), you people really need to learn how to distill all those technicalities into more accessible documents: XHTML Basic was the very first human-readable recommendation you produced! Heck, for once, I could find a list of supported tags in one single section, instead of having to decipher an impossibly long DTD!
Old School: notice how, back then, Microsoft was the hero and Bill Gates represented the ultimate success story of school drop-outs? We had Microsoft Basic, Microsoft Word (which was a really nice, simple text editor with an innovative format called RTF, back then), MS-DOS floppy formatting, etc. Just when you least expected it, our old-time hero turned into a big greedy jerk. Oh the times, they are a-changing!
Memorable hardware: TRS-80 Model 100 (the first "laptop" that got massively adopted by writers on the move and schientific projects in far-fetched places such as the Himalaya alike), the early 8-bit machines that got most of us started: ZX81, TRS-80 Color Computer (a.k.a. CoCo), Vic20/C64, Atari 800.
Marketing freaks: Fans of typography will have noticed the futuristic sans-serif variants used in contrast to the boxy-looking computers of the time, hardware designers no doubt noticed the predominance of grey and/or metalic colours, while writers certainly enjoyed the over-abundance of openly published specs and page-wide texts explaining the merits of each product.
Of interrest to Atari fans: early Atari Computer ads said "We can make beautiful music together" ages before the 520 ST stormed the music business with its built-in MIDI ports.
Ironically enough, the W3C uses a table to layout the W3C A to Z bar to the left, the news content in the middle, and the other links of the right side. And I quote..
What the average Joe needs is something that saves the structure as XML markup, the formatting as CSS, and bundles both as a single file that starts with the XML text, follows with a delimiter, then the CSS rules, another delimiter, then XSLT schemas, another delimiter, any embeded images MIME-encoded and separated with additional delimiters.
To make this whole technical twist completely transparent to the end-user, the word processor itself is GUI-based and duplicates all Word functions in ever aspect: location of menus, layout of the toolbar, etc. and the end-user doesn't even know that his document's content is broken down in sevral parts before being tarballed into a single file; everything remains transparent and so much like using Word that the end-user becomes a Linux-happy camper.
Slashdot Mirror
On a somewhat related issue:
Does anybody have any lead on affordable rackmount kits to fit a standard AT-size motherboard? Most kits I have seen so far come out at twice the price of an ordinary ATor ATX desktop case, but perhaps someone has found better and could tell us where to buy from. Alternately, I also heard of really cheap all-in-one motherboards with a built-in 2.5" EIDE drive, decent graphics card and 10/100baseT NIC that are actually designed to be rackmounted but I have yet to run into such beasts. Can anyone tell us more?
Like many others here, I have this collection of various architectures, running either some BSD or some Linux, but all are currently sitting in the average mini-AT, with all cases stashed up ontop of each other into a nice babel tower, and then a secondary problem is some BIOSes refuse to boot if no keyboard or graphics card is found, which is not nice after a power failure. Given that (as others in this thread pointed out) I only really need one workstation with a good display and keyboard, other machines would preferably sit nicely in a rack case and be considered servers, yet be affordable enough to assemble and maintain. Nice idea, but how?
Calling it Progeny Debian makes perfect sense given that Ian Murdoch (yes, the Ian who started Debian) is behind Progeny. Also, it clearly identifies the distribution as being Debian-based, as opposed to being yet another Red Hat derivative.
--
All those street cameras do is help prosecutors put a face to a [ legally | humanely | morally ] reprehensible act, so that an otherwise powerless legal system can have some evidence to show at the trial. Street cameras do not prevent crime, they only provide a visual evidence of the event after the fact.
Sreet cameras will not prevent some starving narcomaniac from mugging you so It can get your wallet and buy more dope. All it will do is ensure the prosecutors can assert who mugged you after you endured the bruises and seering pain!
I've said it before and will say it again now, the only thing that prevents crime is more policemen walking the streets and being physically present wherever crime is happening to stop it first hand.
--
The idea is quite simple: I do NOT trust my government!
So far, the only thing my passport has brought me is trouble: not being a European Union citizen has prevented me from getting dream jobs, having a passport issued by a country that does not represent the 7-million minority from my state constantly gives people the wrong impression about what my mother tongue might be, and the only thing my passport guarantees is who "owns" me as far as visa-issuing authorities are concerned.
Overall, I simply cannot trust a government that was not elected through a republican system that would guarantee a proportional sample of elected representative that is likely to include the interrests of people like me. Sorry to say, but the parliamentary system is as anti-democrtic as is gets, since it routinely gives absolute control over anything to a single winning party, instead of a coalition that represents the wider spectrum of views found in the population. If a country doesn't use a proportional republican electoral system, it simply is not democratic.
Finally, my government routinely legislates on matters it cannot understand and systematically does so only to accomodate the corporate demands, in total disregard of individual rights and against the voting population's will.
Because of all the above, I simply cannot grant any credance nor trust to my government's authority in any matter, especially not when it comes to Internet technology. Centralizing Internet authentication using PKI only looks good in the eye of an incompetent beholder and is as ridiculous as driving licenses and passports; I adamantly disapprove of their use and explicitely challenge any government's authority in those matters.
--
That the non-compete clause is a maximum of one month without compensation, or a maximum of one year on a compensation equal to your salary for the selected non-compete period.
--
Since BeOS is based upon UNIX principles, has a journalling filesystem with built-in database-like features and comes with a really cute and well-thought GUI, it is the most likely re-invention of computing that might happen if people had to start from scratch.
--
The true reason for Tatu Ylönen's claim is obvious: someone else released a version of his work that is better, free of any licensing restrictions and cost-free:
Also, as someone else pointed out, Tatu's own license specifically said others are welcome to create derived work, as long as it is clearly stated that it is such. OpenSSH clearly identifies itself as derived work, so it's perfectly Kosher.
IMHO, Tatu should realize that adding cryptology to common commandline telecom tools was a one-trick poney; it was bound to happen sooner or later and, by today's standards, is fairly obvious work. Commandline utilities contribute to the overall advancement of software development, but they are nothing precious; merely usefull.
Instead of clinging on to his 15 minutes of fame over a few commandline tools, may I recommend that he moves on to higher challenges of cryptography like IPv6 and network security, where true expertise is required and his name can be a truely powerfull statement? The same idea goes for his company, SSH Oy: you guys are network cryptology experts, so create some more, act as consultants and make money with big paying customers; causing needless turmoil among the developer community can only result in people dropping you dead and comming up with more non-compatible crypto in reaction. Be smarter than that!
PS: SSH Oy is a great company. Why else would I constantly be bugging them for a job?!
--
One thing I really like in X-windows is the standardized clipboard actions assigned to each of the 3 buttons. I really wished MacOS would adopt this paradigm and drop one-button mice for good. Of course, this means redesigning their brand-new optical mouse into a 3-button model too.
--
Actually, I do work in IT, as it happens.
All of my systems communicate very well, thanks you. TCP/IP protcols are openly documented, do not require any vendor-specific garbage and just plain work.
--
The same is true pretty much all over Europe.
While cable-net has started to appear in a few cities, which is helping bring the overall access costs down, I still know an awfull lot of people who cannot afford more than a couple of hours of surfing per day, because the only option in their town is dialup connection plus phone charges on top.
Honestly, even Canada is nowhere near Yankee standards, in terms of cost and variety of options. While most Canadian towns indeed don't charge for local calls, they also only offer (at best) 56K dialup access thru the phone company's indecently priced 100 hours/month package.
Basically, for anyone but Yankees, phone charges do apply and high-speed access is often simply unavailable, therefore completely nullify any master plans for portal-driven software.
--
Honnestly, what the hell do Microsoft and SUN think they are up to with their everything served through a web portal instead of installed localy approach? Are they trying to compete with the Entertainment industry in the pay-per-use scheme of things? Or are they simply dumb enough to think that people whose only option is still dialup with local phone charges will actually bother using applications served over the net, instead of software installed on their own hard-disk?
Honestly, I really cannot be bothered with either company's laughable attempts at controlling this planet's software. Freedom of choice and rock-solid software rules; this is a war neither company can win, even if they opensource their products. Both BSD and Linux have a proven track record that will kill any commercial attempt at world domination, including attempts at commercializing Linux such as Red Hat's self-declared domination of the Linux universe.
Here is a more realistic sample of smart shopping: my workstations run either MiNT, OpenBSD or Debian, on hardware ranging from 68k-based Atari TT030 to your average free second-hand PC hardware. The whole thing is fast, efficient and, in the case of MiNT, runs both vintage GEM software and X applications. It works without any Microsoftism, as it relies entirely on open standards and simply rocks, because the software itself is well-coded and efficient, not because of bloated 1GHz overclocked CPU architecture.
Given this, why should I even bother reading about what William Gates the 3rd or Scott McNealy have in mind for the future of consumer computing?
Bill, Scott, I already have everything I need. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
--
While the shroud of mystery surrounding any US governmental agency is enough to give any slashdoter a hard-on, people in the professional audio and recording industry will probably find this all very mundane and boring, at best calling this one example of "applying every RF shielding trick in the book".
One famous example of such overshielding is Lucasfilm's Skywalker Ranch's sound effect recording studio, which uses state-of-the-art (read: costly) shielding, such as a one-foot wide ground plane wire running under a wire mesh shieled floor.
In other words, well-paid private ventures like Lucasfilm can and do afford the same kind of costly technology that government agencies purchase. Nothing much to write home about, really.
However, it's nice to know that government has willingly transfered such a well-built facility to more pacific purposes, where the investment won't disappear under the bulldozer's scraping.
Governments: please, never waste taxpayers money again by destroying anything; destroying evidences of compromising material is one thing, scrapping an entire facility is another. Whenever possible, please do auction the facility or, better yet, hand it over to researchers at no cost, to let that horrendous expenditure enjoy some civilian purpose, instead of dumbly scraping it once the MJ12 has deemed the location obsolete.
--
I think that the former Atari developper Dave Small is the one that summed this the best, in one of his columns:
I am quoting this off memory, so the words might not be exact, but the essence remains: a degree only means you have some faintest idea of what lies ahead and a certain minimal skill level worth investigating, that's all.
--
At both of my two most recent jobs, I ended up leaving in a situation where some people were completely dependant on my work and praising it (thus feeling utterly depressed about my leaving the company for somewhere else), while others who were at key Management positions basically seized the opportunity for personal vengeance.
Guess which one of these two groups gets to provide (bad) references to future potential employers? Yep, the one that made sure that my departure would be a bridge-burning session...
About the "start moving personal belongings home and making copies of usefull creations you have made there" part, bear in mind that some companies expressely own anything and everything you create while working for them, thus making copies for yourself might be illegal or, in some countries, can even be considered on par with theft.
Better check with a copyright lawyer upfront, before signing any future contract, to ensure that you are allowed to recycle your own code elsewhere, or at least that you own the concepts behind them, without ending up with a costly lawsuit or in jail.
--
The recent example in Prague, where manifestants from around the globe were illegally arrested by the police and brutalized, is an example of what happens when "mundanes" try to even as much as speak against the system.
Be realistic, there won't be any planetary-wide "French Revolution" against a system that already equipped the police with military hardware for crowd control. People would just not be willing to accept the fact that casualties happen in any war, including a war against your own politicians and their police state; nowadays, they prefer to stay home and approve any law, until the said law affects them personally, at which point it's already too late to do anything about something you pushed your congressman to pass into legislation.
--
Point taken, although be aware that the article - as pointed out by others in this thread - provides too little information on the specifics of what happened to this woman, thus your point is pure speculation, at this stage.
--
Once everyone has been tested, categorized and found to be carrying some genetic hickup of some sort, then rejected for any employment, do you expect anyone to have any money left to buy anything, if they don't have any source of income left? DUH!
--
First, a woman looses both her insurance and her job, because of some DNA testing result. Then, some researcher says DNA-based insurance discrimination is illegal in the first place, thanks to "a legal patchwork in several states". If it is illegal, then why did she loose her insurance coverage?
The part about laws against employer DNA-testing being constantly shelved by the Justice is somewhat scary, though. Or, is the situation already like X-Files, where the Elite already conceded to handing over their DNA to aliens in exchange for protection, while also constituting a broad DNA database of the population, thus this whole mess is a non-issue for them? *grin*
--
If you are of the Amiga generation, then you are obviously way too young to know what kind of a hero Bill used to be to a whole generation of Whiz Kids who hacked home-made vocal synthesizers boards onto their 8-bit and coded in Basic or Assembler.
Hint: those of you who remember the TV series of the same name, raise your hands. Bonus points for whoever remembers (this means, no search engine allowed; either you are old enough to remember the series, or you are not) the main actors and the name of the friendly computer the main character had, and who was Farley.
--
Thank you.
This is precisely what Slashdotters need to learn, en masse. Technology for technology's sake doesn't work in the mass market; it has to respond to an explicit need.
--
Wrong.
The initial post must be viewed into a wider context.
The issue is to permanently yank Word out of the marketplace for good, by coming up with something everyone will actually want to use, something that available and ported to a variety of platforms: Unices, Mac, Windows... as well as older legacy systems still in use out there.
--
Your points about the obligation to quote all values, self-closing BR tags, disapearing B and I tags ... have all been carefully considered by W3C when they decided to formalize these things.
Advantages of formalism in markup languages:
No need to guess where a value ends, just parse and look for the quotation marks within a tag.
No need to check for UPPER and lower case versions of the same tags and attributes; everything is in lowercase.
Removal of presentation control allows the same source document to be used for a variety of output devices.
If you are authoring for any medium or major -sized content provider, chances are that making the content outputable in several of the following formats is a must:
By using XML as the source format (or, in this case, XHTML Basic), all of these can be covered easily using the appropriate Style Sheet or in a few cases, with sophisticated XSLT schemas.
HTML: no transformation needed, already in XHTML; CSS can optionally be used to add visual nicies and presentation control.
WML: no transformation needed, unless transport buttons are required. In any case, no presentation control available, so XHTML can pretty much be used as is.
Postscript: probably needs an XSLT schema to ensure a predictable, printable layout. Otherwise, the source XHTML document already provides the structure, which can easily be parsed to provide an automated Table of Content page, as a bonus.
MAN page: the structure is already provided by XHTML, but must be filtered by troff or similar tools to convert the tagging into appropriate markup for MAN pages; a simple substitution game, easily handled by a script.
Newsgroup post: the document structure is already provided by XHTML, but tagging must be stripped and converted to carriage returns, tabs or spaces, to render a plain text message.
For the record, I also hated the disappearance of favorite tags and the requirement of using lowercase for everything, because I still prefer to hand-type my HTML (with the help of auto-expanders that provide tags out of a few keystrokes).
Ever since I adopted HTML Tidy, the conversion to XHTML has been rather painless. Sure, reading lowercase-only tagging took a few weeks to get used to, but nowadays I hardly notice the difference; the tags have become easy to spot, once again.
In closing, I would like to thank W3C people for their efforts, in both web standardization and providing freeware tools to implement these standards. Tidy is something I can no longer live without! ;-)
However, (and this also goes for a lot of other standards out there, such as NTP), you people really need to learn how to distill all those technicalities into more accessible documents: XHTML Basic was the very first human-readable recommendation you produced! Heck, for once, I could find a list of supported tags in one single section, instead of having to decipher an impossibly long DTD!
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That was a real trip down memory lane.
Old School: notice how, back then, Microsoft was the hero and Bill Gates represented the ultimate success story of school drop-outs? We had Microsoft Basic, Microsoft Word (which was a really nice, simple text editor with an innovative format called RTF, back then), MS-DOS floppy formatting, etc. Just when you least expected it, our old-time hero turned into a big greedy jerk. Oh the times, they are a-changing!
Memorable hardware: TRS-80 Model 100 (the first "laptop" that got massively adopted by writers on the move and schientific projects in far-fetched places such as the Himalaya alike), the early 8-bit machines that got most of us started: ZX81, TRS-80 Color Computer (a.k.a. CoCo), Vic20/C64, Atari 800.
Marketing freaks: Fans of typography will have noticed the futuristic sans-serif variants used in contrast to the boxy-looking computers of the time, hardware designers no doubt noticed the predominance of grey and/or metalic colours, while writers certainly enjoyed the over-abundance of openly published specs and page-wide texts explaining the merits of each product.
Of interrest to Atari fans: early Atari Computer ads said "We can make beautiful music together" ages before the 520 ST stormed the music business with its built-in MIDI ports.
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Ah, but it is a table of content, isn't it? ;-)
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What the average Joe needs is something that saves the structure as XML markup, the formatting as CSS, and bundles both as a single file that starts with the XML text, follows with a delimiter, then the CSS rules, another delimiter, then XSLT schemas, another delimiter, any embeded images MIME-encoded and separated with additional delimiters.
To make this whole technical twist completely transparent to the end-user, the word processor itself is GUI-based and duplicates all Word functions in ever aspect: location of menus, layout of the toolbar, etc. and the end-user doesn't even know that his document's content is broken down in sevral parts before being tarballed into a single file; everything remains transparent and so much like using Word that the end-user becomes a Linux-happy camper.
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