Incidentally, this story (spying on UN delegates) seems to have had a very low profile in the US media, not sure why, in general I find the coverage pretty good, usual suspects excepted of course.
The weird pronouns we are listing exist because of English's inflected past.
Right, but this wasn't properly understood in the 17-18th centuries when the grammarians took charge - they thought that when you said "the mans watch" mans must be a contraction of man his, hence the apostrophe was used. As you mention, this was wrong - Old English had a genitive case that often ended in S and this is where the possessive S came from. The horrible collision with plural S is just an accident of history, somewhat boosted by French imports using S plurals.
Actually, to be pedantic, "its" is a very recent coinage - until the mid-1600s "his" was the neuter possessive pronoun, e.g. "the candle throws his light", hence the very few instances of "its" in the KJB and Shakespeare. This was the last pronoun to fall into line with the modern pattern.
If there were no problem today then no solution would be needed tomorrow - I trust we can agree that much.
But you appear to be arguing that Linux offers a cross-(hardware)-platform solution superior to Java today. From this we assume that you see Dotnet as no threat and Java of no use.
All three of these conclusions are questionable, to say the least.
Nonsense. More importantly, such a failure to realize that Linux is not and does not have an equivalent to Dotnet is the single largest threat to its future.
The complacent attitude that average users of Linux-equipped platforms are either going to configure and compile individual applications themselves, or will have access to a binary built just-so for their specific system is no longer tenable. We are past the era of overwhelmingly predominant x86 platforms, as you acknowledge yourself, and practices assuming such uniformity are no longer appropriate.
Such short-sightedness dooms Linux relative to Windows since it offers software organizations such an uncompetitive proposition - the cost of supporting Linux binaries across umpteen different hardware platforms is far greater than maintaining a single Dotnet build.
Sun, BEA and IBM offer a way out through their support of Java on Linux, yet few in a position of influence have bothered to capitalize on this, and indeed some prefer to spend their time complaining about arcane IP issues, as if we had the luxury of a dozen different VMs to choose from and five years in which to decide.
It's time the "Linux community" woke up and decided what the competitive solution should look like, and developed a realistic strategy to implement it.
1. The poster means that CORBA isn't restricted to port 80.
2. Asynchronous communication has been supported since CORBA 1.2 with "oneway" messages and the CORBA event service.
3. I have no idea what "same knowledge" refers to in this context, unless you mean interface definition, in which case there is no difference between CORBA and SOAP/WSDL.
Emacs has had a GUI based configurator for most settings since at least version 19.
More importantly, this is actually a good model to follow since the user only needs to learn one language. The logic of your approach requires at least two: the language for expressing values (e.g. XML) and the language for expressing logic (e.g. shell scripts).
This isn't to say that Emacs' implementation is particularly elegant, or that Emacs LISP is ultimate language, but the principle is sound.
Would you care to outline more formally your proposed distinction between "configuration" and "functionality", covering such aspects as the use of variables, conditionals and expressions?
XML syntax is not extensible, only XML "vocabularies" (element definitions) are.
This is one reason why simple expressions (as in XSLT or XACML) are either clumsily verbose or hacked in by embedding an additional expression syntax in tag values.
Now you mention it, I sense that this problem (EULA and restrictions in post W2KSP2) is becoming common enough to justify its own support structure - forum, lobby etc.
Er, wow. Well, it occurs to me that Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide phenomenon, so it's not American media that's flawed, but that corporate agendas exert a baleful influence worldwide.
For further reading:
Paul Krugman of The New York Times on US/Europe media differences
His Master's Voice - The Guardian on the uniform pro-war line taken in all 175 Murdoch papers worldwide
I'm constantly amazed at how much contempt Europeans have for Americans - it doesn't usually show until the subject of the US government comes up
Now I wonder why that is?:-)
Much as I am loath to encourage you, I don't think that the numerous US expats in Europe are in danger of persecution just yet (I believe there are about 200,000 in London alone). Fortunately most people are able to comprehend that individuals may not be personally responsible for a govt policy they don't like...
But let them post their own views here, there must be a bunch of expat/.ers around.
And I don't remember a lack of sympathy here for the Sept 11 attacks, though if that support has been squandered since I'd point the finger rather closer to home than President Chirac.
More to the point, there is absolutely no reason why my having a system that I can trust requires that the system be trusted by Microsoft. The two relationships are completely orthogonal, despite what MS would have you believe.
I was going to say something obvious about us being in the same situation regarding internet traffic routing...
But no, instead I'm reminded of the above remark, supposedly uttered by Her Majesty on being appraised of the content of Charles Haughey's phone calls by Mrs T.
And how reassuring to know that the Capenhurst locals could be bought off with double glazing. UPVC - the patriot's choice.
We use American billions now. Haven't seen a reference to billion being 10^12 since the 70s, though I've got a vague memory of the FT (newspaper) announcing a switch... anyone remember when?
There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.
I'm afraid I stopped reading here. The ice ages of the last few million years are all there have ever been. (I believe the breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana triggered them).
Slashdot Mirror
we are becoming known for invading the privacy of citizens of the world
And not just any old citizens.
Incidentally, this story (spying on UN delegates) seems to have had a very low profile in the US media, not sure why, in general I find the coverage pretty good, usual suspects excepted of course.
And as we probably all learned at school, the a distinguishing feature of Puritans is their faith in providence.
How long before Witchfinder General is added to Mr Ashcroft's job description?
The weird pronouns we are listing exist because of English's inflected past.
Right, but this wasn't properly understood in the 17-18th centuries when the grammarians took charge - they thought that when you said "the mans watch" mans must be a contraction of man his, hence the apostrophe was used. As you mention, this was wrong - Old English had a genitive case that often ended in S and this is where the possessive S came from. The horrible collision with plural S is just an accident of history, somewhat boosted by French imports using S plurals.
Actually, to be pedantic, "its" is a very recent coinage - until the mid-1600s "his" was the neuter possessive pronoun, e.g. "the candle throws his light", hence the very few instances of "its" in the KJB and Shakespeare. This was the last pronoun to fall into line with the modern pattern.
If there were no problem today then no solution would be needed tomorrow - I trust we can agree that much.
But you appear to be arguing that Linux offers a cross-(hardware)-platform solution superior to Java today. From this we assume that you see Dotnet as no threat and Java of no use.
All three of these conclusions are questionable, to say the least.
It demonstrates much of what Java promised
Nonsense. More importantly, such a failure to realize that Linux is not and does not have an equivalent to Dotnet is the single largest threat to its future.
The complacent attitude that average users of Linux-equipped platforms are either going to configure and compile individual applications themselves, or will have access to a binary built just-so for their specific system is no longer tenable. We are past the era of overwhelmingly predominant x86 platforms, as you acknowledge yourself, and practices assuming such uniformity are no longer appropriate.
Such short-sightedness dooms Linux relative to Windows since it offers software organizations such an uncompetitive proposition - the cost of supporting Linux binaries across umpteen different hardware platforms is far greater than maintaining a single Dotnet build.
Sun, BEA and IBM offer a way out through their support of Java on Linux, yet few in a position of influence have bothered to capitalize on this, and indeed some prefer to spend their time complaining about arcane IP issues, as if we had the luxury of a dozen different VMs to choose from and five years in which to decide.
It's time the "Linux community" woke up and decided what the competitive solution should look like, and developed a realistic strategy to implement it.
Just found a much better link
Looks like the women are already withdrawing their favours!
A methodology hasn't made really made it until somebody has published a Proper Book.
:-)
What, like The Art of the Meta-Object Protocol by the very same Gregor Kiczales et al, pub. MIT Press, 1991?
Like most things, AOP is only new if you don't know LISP.
1. The poster means that CORBA isn't restricted to port 80.
2. Asynchronous communication has been supported since CORBA 1.2 with "oneway" messages and the CORBA event service.
3. I have no idea what "same knowledge" refers to in this context, unless you mean interface definition, in which case there is no difference between CORBA and SOAP/WSDL.
Emacs has had a GUI based configurator for most settings since at least version 19.
More importantly, this is actually a good model to follow since the user only needs to learn one language. The logic of your approach requires at least two: the language for expressing values (e.g. XML) and the language for expressing logic (e.g. shell scripts).
This isn't to say that Emacs' implementation is particularly elegant, or that Emacs LISP is ultimate language, but the principle is sound.
But the people using Ant would probably not :-)
Would you care to outline more formally your proposed distinction between "configuration" and "functionality", covering such aspects as the use of variables, conditionals and expressions?
Thought not.
Every anti-XML rant pretty much boils down to the same thing
Then you've not been reading the posts.
One problem already discussed here is the difficulty of accommodating simple expressions, hence the problems exhibited by XSLT and XACML.
Another problem is the "level 0" nature of the language - it has no variables (and no one has yet proposed using XPath).
Any practical configuration language will require these characteristics, so it is indeed questionable whether XML is practical.
XML syntax is not extensible, only XML "vocabularies" (element definitions) are.
This is one reason why simple expressions (as in XSLT or XACML) are either clumsily verbose or hacked in by embedding an additional expression syntax in tag values.
Now you mention it, I sense that this problem (EULA and restrictions in post W2KSP2) is becoming common enough to justify its own support structure - forum, lobby etc.
Anyone know of one?
Er, wow. Well, it occurs to me that Rupert Murdoch is a worldwide phenomenon, so it's not American media that's flawed, but that corporate agendas exert a baleful influence worldwide.
For further reading:
Paul Krugman of The New York Times on US/Europe media differences
His Master's Voice - The Guardian on the uniform pro-war line taken in all 175 Murdoch papers worldwide
I'm constantly amazed at how much contempt Europeans have for Americans - it doesn't usually show until the subject of the US government comes up
:-)
/.ers around.
Now I wonder why that is?
Much as I am loath to encourage you, I don't think that the numerous US expats in Europe are in danger of persecution just yet (I believe there are about 200,000 in London alone). Fortunately most people are able to comprehend that individuals may not be personally responsible for a govt policy they don't like...
But let them post their own views here, there must be a bunch of expat
And I don't remember a lack of sympathy here for the Sept 11 attacks, though if that support has been squandered since I'd point the finger rather closer to home than President Chirac.
Indeed.
More to the point, there is absolutely no reason why my having a system that I can trust requires that the system be trusted by Microsoft. The two relationships are completely orthogonal, despite what MS would have you believe.
Or you can read a review piece by her biographer in Nature.
In case you didn't know, there's a good version of your sig in the opening stanzas of The Selfish Gene, quoted here.
Yes, the Nature coverage is excellent - and free, unlike the usual content.
(I was struck how one of the DNA repair mechanism was like that bizarre DLL restoration mechanism in WinXP... not so daft after all?)
Are they issuing a supplement or book? I couldn't make this from the site.
I was going to say something obvious about us being in the same situation regarding internet traffic routing...
But no, instead I'm reminded of the above remark, supposedly uttered by Her Majesty on being appraised of the content of Charles Haughey's phone calls by Mrs T.
And how reassuring to know that the Capenhurst locals could be bought off with double glazing. UPVC - the patriot's choice.
Java will die, bla bla bla.
Does he follow IBM's financials too then?
...on impact with MS patents, one presumes, tho any tips on where to aim would be peachy.
We use American billions now. Haven't seen a reference to billion being 10^12 since the 70s, though I've got a vague memory of the FT (newspaper) announcing a switch... anyone remember when?
There were 8 ice ages in the last 2 million years and that is within the last 20 pages.
I'm afraid I stopped reading here. The ice ages of the last few million years are all there have ever been. (I believe the breakup of the southern supercontinent Gondwana triggered them).