My partner is a radiologist, and he often reads images from home when he's on call (e.g. an ER doc will call him and ask for him to review a set of images right away). The images are stored on a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) installation, and the client image reader software is basically just an ActiveX plugin that runs in IE (which, interestingly, broke when I upgraded IE to IE7 - the plugin had an explicit check for the IE version). Thus, all the client machines for this PACS (which is a very popular brand of PACS) are standard Windows machines. The machines in the hospitals are locked down for the most part, but all the radiologists have the capability to read images from their home computers.
While of course Jobs gets (and deserves) tons of credit, what would Apple be like without its design wizard Jonathan Ive? Ive is responsible for the design of all of Apple's "iconic" products since the late 90's: the iMacs, the iPods and the iPhone. While Jobs may be the rock star CEO, Ive is the reason Apple designs sleek and chic products while Microsoft designs a brown boxy turd called the Zune.
Yet Another Example of How a Slashdotter Doesn't Get It, huh? Slashdotters tend to tick down the feature list (wireless - check, bluetooth - check, WHAT NO 3G?) without giving any value to feature integration and ease of use. For example, lots of other phones have web browsers, but they generally suck and force you to visit WAP-only sites. On the iPhone, the integrated Safari browser that uses two-finger zooming means that, for the first time, it really IS viable to do heavy duty web browsing (and "internet communicating") from a phone.
There are tons of thing on this phone that ARE innovative and next generation, and it makes you wonder why Apple is so much better at product design than everyone else, even for something like a phone that they've never built before. I guess you can't clone Jonathan Ives.
Agreed. I think that open sourcing Java will make Java on Linux very similar to Java on OS X. In OS X, an end user can hardly recognize that Java apps aren't native because Java ships with the OS and the default swing look-and-feel is Aqua. With Java free to be a core Linux component, a similar end user experience is possible on Linux.
Relax NG - constraining based on attribute values
on
Tim Bray Says RELAX
·
· Score: 1
As someone who has used XML schemas pretty extensively, I was pretty amazed at how I was able to skim through the tutorial in about 10 minutes and understand Relax NG, versus reading an entire XML Schema book and still needing to refer to it whenever I write schemas.
One thing I really like about Relax NG is that it's possible (with very easy syntax) to constrain the XML structure based on an attribute value, something you can't do in schema or a DTD. For example, suppose you want to have an XML element:
true ' With Relax NG it's possible to constrain the text in the arg element (e.g. "true" or "false") based on the value of the type attribute. For example, if type="int", you could limit the text in arg to an integer value. This is something you can't do in schemas or dtds.
Umm, did you actually follow your own advice, because your statement is not true. When I search "microsoft" in MSN live search, I got over 80 MILLION results (compared to 40 million on Google), but still got only 648 when I searched for "google" (vs ~53 million on Google). To me, that does show a significant bias.
I'm continually intrigued by how often reports on traffic accidents and fatalities are invalid because they focus on fatalities per capita instead of fatalities per miles driven. The report you link to implies that the US is unsuccessful at reducing fatalies due to traffic policies, but I bet a much more likely reason is that Americans DRIVE a whole lot more than residents in other countries.
There was an article on MSN today rating fatality rates by different occupations. One of the safest "occupations" was "homemaker". Well, duh, by definition, homemakers don't commute, which is where most drivers spend the majority their time.
I actually think the interesting question is to why you assume that this is not the case for proprietary software. They may not admit to it, but there are plenty of companies out there who would be totally screwed (or at least individual projects would be screwed) if their lead developer was hit by a bus.
Agreed. In Austin, the demand for competent software developers, dev managers and project managers is very high right now, and I here similar stories from friends in other cities.
The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
As usual, slashdotters grossly underestimate the importance of good UI. Looking through the demo on Apple's website, I think this is the first time I've ever seen a versioning FS that could be used by any of my non-techie friends (they got the 'time machine' metaphor right, and the UI is just plain cool). While the slashdot community may not care that much because they would do everything on the command line, for the 98% of the population that's never seen a bash shell, this is brand new functionality.
How the hell did the parent get modded informative?
First, the vaccine IS for birds, not for humans. Second, while the poster is somewhat correct about needing to cross species boundaries to be lethal, it doesn't need to go all the way from birds to humans. While it's usually not serious for wild birds, some strains can be absolutely lethal for domesticated birds (see the CDC website on avian flu) - some chicken farms have been totally wiped out in Asia. Same thing is true for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). SIV is harmless to African Green Monkeys but lethal to Rhesus Macaques (see Wikipedia article on SIV).
Like many slashdot replies, the parent is only thinking from a consumer website point-of-view. A huge market for this technology is corporate web applications where the company can dictate browser support (and "you must have javascript enabled" is a pretty minimal requirement from the corporate application perspective). Company XYZ doesn't care if it's sales quoting app doesn't work in lynx.
Time to gang up on them, and about every other company that does it, especially directly.
Umm, yes, why is that such an outlandish idea? A lot of the comments in this story basically just state "well, sure, these sweatshops suck, but that's the way capitalism works, nothing you can do to change it." Bullshit. That's no different from saying 150 years ago "Sure, it may suck that slaves had to pick this cotton for my clothes, but that's just the way our system works, and look they even get room and board for free."
The point of publically going against a large company like Apple is to shame them into improving working conditions, and more importantly to get consumers (that's you) to think about where that $20 DVD player comes from.
I think they don't know what innovative means, either. Basically, the device looks like a copy of the iPod nano. Sure, they mention that the software has some improvements like transparency, but being a good copy of a market leader is pretty much the opposite of innovation.
If you're just writing a letter by yourself, a web-based word app doesn't help much, but for collaborative docs it makes a very big difference. In my company we used to do all of our requirements and design docs in Word and put these up on Microsoft Sharepoint. It sucked pretty bad. These types of documents have LOTS of stakeholders (developers, project management, marketing, etc.) and lots of people editing them. When we used Word, the process usually had someone "owning" the doc, and when the docs were sent out for review, people would send back comments in email, then the owner would incorporate them in the doc.
Things got much more efficient when we switched over to a MediaWiki installation for our docs. It took a while to get used to the mindset that ANYONE can edit a doc (we just keep track of baselines and can always roll back if needed), but now feedback is incorporated into the docs much quicker. Note that Word with sharepoint says they have these collaborative features, but we were much more successful with the Wiki - everyone has a web browser but now everyone has the latest version of Word.
No, not really. In the past couple of years, wage increases have lagged what could be expected by the large gains in productivity. Inflation only occurs if wages outpace productivity gains. Instead, those productivity gains have been fueling record corporate profits.
I don't think the pooping patent is such a bad idea. Right now, the public at large has no idea that this patent nonsense will have substantial negative effects on them. One of the best ways to get things noticed by the public is a parody so outrageous that it can highlight how there are other actual patents that are just as ridiculous.
For example, suppose an organization like the FSF flooded the patent office with tons of ridiculous patents (pooping, blowing your nose, sex), got enough media attention, and then said "hey, these are stupid patents, but if you think these are dumb check out 'Method for swinging on a swing' or 'Exercising a cat with a laser pointer'". In the book Freakonomics the authors point out how one of the best tools that worked against the KKK was to make fun of it by having Superman radio episodes talk about Superman slaying Grand Dragons in white sheets. Seems like a similar approach might work well here.
Agreed. And I want to know what's up with the Michael Moorean title, "Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools." Couldn't it just as easily be "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?"
Au contraire. A good study from MIT about how hurricane wind speeds are 50% stronger in the past 3 decades, partially due to global warming (although I realize there is a 50% chance this study is false):
Bull. You know all those slashdot posts and buzz we hear about AJAX - that wouldn't be there (at least not now) without things like GMail and Google Suggest. The technology behind AJAX was around for years - it was only when Google created a truly innovative UI using it that people started to take notice.
Slashdot Mirror
My partner is a radiologist, and he often reads images from home when he's on call (e.g. an ER doc will call him and ask for him to review a set of images right away). The images are stored on a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) installation, and the client image reader software is basically just an ActiveX plugin that runs in IE (which, interestingly, broke when I upgraded IE to IE7 - the plugin had an explicit check for the IE version). Thus, all the client machines for this PACS (which is a very popular brand of PACS) are standard Windows machines. The machines in the hospitals are locked down for the most part, but all the radiologists have the capability to read images from their home computers.
While of course Jobs gets (and deserves) tons of credit, what would Apple be like without its design wizard Jonathan Ive? Ive is responsible for the design of all of Apple's "iconic" products since the late 90's: the iMacs, the iPods and the iPhone. While Jobs may be the rock star CEO, Ive is the reason Apple designs sleek and chic products while Microsoft designs a brown boxy turd called the Zune.
Yet Another Example of How a Slashdotter Doesn't Get It, huh? Slashdotters tend to tick down the feature list (wireless - check, bluetooth - check, WHAT NO 3G?) without giving any value to feature integration and ease of use. For example, lots of other phones have web browsers, but they generally suck and force you to visit WAP-only sites. On the iPhone, the integrated Safari browser that uses two-finger zooming means that, for the first time, it really IS viable to do heavy duty web browsing (and "internet communicating") from a phone.
There are tons of thing on this phone that ARE innovative and next generation, and it makes you wonder why Apple is so much better at product design than everyone else, even for something like a phone that they've never built before. I guess you can't clone Jonathan Ives.
Agreed. I think that open sourcing Java will make Java on Linux very similar to Java on OS X. In OS X, an end user can hardly recognize that Java apps aren't native because Java ships with the OS and the default swing look-and-feel is Aqua. With Java free to be a core Linux component, a similar end user experience is possible on Linux.
As someone who has used XML schemas pretty extensively, I was pretty amazed at how I was able to skim through the tutorial in about 10 minutes and understand Relax NG, versus reading an entire XML Schema book and still needing to refer to it whenever I write schemas.
One thing I really like about Relax NG is that it's possible (with very easy syntax) to constrain the XML structure based on an attribute value, something you can't do in schema or a DTD. For example, suppose you want to have an XML element:
true
'
With Relax NG it's possible to constrain the text in the arg element (e.g. "true" or "false") based on the value of the type attribute. For example, if type="int", you could limit the text in arg to an integer value. This is something you can't do in schemas or dtds.
Umm, did you actually follow your own advice, because your statement is not true. When I search "microsoft" in MSN live search, I got over 80 MILLION results (compared to 40 million on Google), but still got only 648 when I searched for "google" (vs ~53 million on Google). To me, that does show a significant bias.
I originally thought your comment was trolly, but it actually turns out to be true, especially if you compare all possible cases:
Google searching "microsoft": 39,500,000 results
Google searching "google": 52,800,000 results
MSN searching "microsoft": 80,139,835 results
MSN searching "google": 648 results
I can understand leaning a little more one way or the other, but 648 versus 52 million? Give me a friggin break.
I'm continually intrigued by how often reports on traffic accidents and fatalities are invalid because they focus on fatalities per capita instead of fatalities per miles driven. The report you link to implies that the US is unsuccessful at reducing fatalies due to traffic policies, but I bet a much more likely reason is that Americans DRIVE a whole lot more than residents in other countries.
There was an article on MSN today rating fatality rates by different occupations. One of the safest "occupations" was "homemaker". Well, duh, by definition, homemakers don't commute, which is where most drivers spend the majority their time.
The Revolutionary war was, in part, to protect ou privacy from English soldiers entering our homes and taking what they wanted.
Duh, the Revolutionary War was fought by a bunch of terrorists. You don't support the terrorists, do you!
I actually think the interesting question is to why you assume that this is not the case for proprietary software. They may not admit to it, but there are plenty of companies out there who would be totally screwed (or at least individual projects would be screwed) if their lead developer was hit by a bus.
People here are on slashdot are no different from people everywhere else.
Well, if none of them are getting laid either, why are there so many of them?
Agreed. In Austin, the demand for competent software developers, dev managers and project managers is very high right now, and I here similar stories from friends in other cities.
In communist Kerala... Linux installs you
and it takes 2 days to complete the installation, at the end of which you cannot see or hear because there are no compatible drivers.
The versioning FS is nice, but it's really just a pretty UI on something that VMS had a couple of decades ago.
As usual, slashdotters grossly underestimate the importance of good UI. Looking through the demo on Apple's website, I think this is the first time I've ever seen a versioning FS that could be used by any of my non-techie friends (they got the 'time machine' metaphor right, and the UI is just plain cool). While the slashdot community may not care that much because they would do everything on the command line, for the 98% of the population that's never seen a bash shell, this is brand new functionality.
How the hell did the parent get modded informative?
First, the vaccine IS for birds, not for humans.
Second, while the poster is somewhat correct about needing to cross species boundaries to be lethal, it doesn't need to go all the way from birds to humans. While it's usually not serious for wild birds, some strains can be absolutely lethal for domesticated birds (see the CDC website on avian flu) - some chicken farms have been totally wiped out in Asia. Same thing is true for SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). SIV is harmless to African Green Monkeys but lethal to Rhesus Macaques (see Wikipedia article on SIV).
I think I'm too perfectionnist
Good thing it wasn't a written interview.
Like many slashdot replies, the parent is only thinking from a consumer website point-of-view. A huge market for this technology is corporate web applications where the company can dictate browser support (and "you must have javascript enabled" is a pretty minimal requirement from the corporate application perspective). Company XYZ doesn't care if it's sales quoting app doesn't work in lynx.
Time to gang up on them, and about every other company that does it, especially directly.
Umm, yes, why is that such an outlandish idea? A lot of the comments in this story basically just state "well, sure, these sweatshops suck, but that's the way capitalism works, nothing you can do to change it." Bullshit. That's no different from saying 150 years ago "Sure, it may suck that slaves had to pick this cotton for my clothes, but that's just the way our system works, and look they even get room and board for free."
The point of publically going against a large company like Apple is to shame them into improving working conditions, and more importantly to get consumers (that's you) to think about where that $20 DVD player comes from.
the new Samsung device is just as innovative
I think they don't know what innovative means, either. Basically, the device looks like a copy of the iPod nano. Sure, they mention that the software has some improvements like transparency, but being a good copy of a market leader is pretty much the opposite of innovation.
If you're just writing a letter by yourself, a web-based word app doesn't help much, but for collaborative docs it makes a very big difference. In my company we used to do all of our requirements and design docs in Word and put these up on Microsoft Sharepoint. It sucked pretty bad. These types of documents have LOTS of stakeholders (developers, project management, marketing, etc.) and lots of people editing them. When we used Word, the process usually had someone "owning" the doc, and when the docs were sent out for review, people would send back comments in email, then the owner would incorporate them in the doc.
Things got much more efficient when we switched over to a MediaWiki installation for our docs. It took a while to get used to the mindset that ANYONE can edit a doc (we just keep track of baselines and can always roll back if needed), but now feedback is incorporated into the docs much quicker. Note that Word with sharepoint says they have these collaborative features, but we were much more successful with the Wiki - everyone has a web browser but now everyone has the latest version of Word.
No, not really. In the past couple of years, wage increases have lagged what could be expected by the large gains in productivity. Inflation only occurs if wages outpace productivity gains. Instead, those productivity gains have been fueling record corporate profits.
I don't think the pooping patent is such a bad idea. Right now, the public at large has no idea that this patent nonsense will have substantial negative effects on them. One of the best ways to get things noticed by the public is a parody so outrageous that it can highlight how there are other actual patents that are just as ridiculous.
For example, suppose an organization like the FSF flooded the patent office with tons of ridiculous patents (pooping, blowing your nose, sex), got enough media attention, and then said "hey, these are stupid patents, but if you think these are dumb check out 'Method for swinging on a swing' or 'Exercising a cat with a laser pointer'". In the book Freakonomics the authors point out how one of the best tools that worked against the KKK was to make fun of it by having Superman radio episodes talk about Superman slaying Grand Dragons in white sheets. Seems like a similar approach might work well here.
Agreed. And I want to know what's up with the Michael Moorean title, "Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools." Couldn't it just as easily be "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?"
Au contraire. A good study from MIT about how hurricane wind speeds are 50% stronger in the past 3 decades, partially due to global warming (although I realize there is a 50% chance this study is false):
l
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/hurricanes.htm
Bull. You know all those slashdot posts and buzz we hear about AJAX - that wouldn't be there (at least not now) without things like GMail and Google Suggest. The technology behind AJAX was around for years - it was only when Google created a truly innovative UI using it that people started to take notice.