Wouldn't it make more sense to operate the Maglev over a distance which would allow it to save a significant amount of time? i.e. Actually inter city?
In theory, yes. Germany has discussed implementing the "Transrapid" technology somewhere in Germany for decades now. A 20 mile track is way better than nothing, especially if you want to sell it to other countries.
The reason why long distances are no great idea: Germany's topology and population density. Whatever two larger cities you take, there probably are mountains or other things in between which would make the building of the line extremely expensive. Germany's ICEs suffer from the same problem.
France has a high-speed conventional train, the Thalys running between Belgium and Paris and some parts in the Netherlands and bordering West Germany. That area is flat and great for a straight line between two points.
One can live happily without knowing about linked lists.
Sure, but if a developer can't be bothered to learn about a very simple concept from "Data structures 101", will he be able to deal with situations that require non-trivial solutions? Doing the research, comparing approaches, implementing and testing one? I'm not optimistic. I'm not talking about over-engineering things, which would be the other extreme.
Naked "pointers" for data structures are kind of an archaic concept that are happily being phased out in higher-level languages and databases.
Huh? Every reference to a dynamically-created object (so, everything apart from primitive types like int or char) in Java is a pointer. It's called NullPointerException for a reason.
As for linked lists, they have the advantage of being able to quickly insert or remove single elements without having to copy all elements behind them by one position, as would be necessary in an array list (implementation contains a array of pointers to elements).
I don't get it. Storing data by column instead of row is a change at the physical level and has nothing to do with the data model. In other words, storage by column can be implemented with the relational data model, there is no contradiction.
If a column-based DBS is something entirely new, what data model does it use?
Western Europe's population density varies a great deal. Obviously, there is some average value, but there are rural areas, where you can't get a fast Internet connection. I only know the situation here in Germany. It's the same thing - it would cost telcos too much to get DSL there, so they don't do it.
Full screen and not having a border are two things in Java. The latter can be done by a call to setUndecorated(true).
Obviously, your fix would work for that as well: disallow unsigned applets that particular method. But it'll take a lot of time until all those JREs are replaced.
Of course she's not going to feel better, but I guess smileys have become part of the culture, which is already very superficial. There's a lot of smiling and compliments and smalltalk going on, and that's probably a good thing, to a degree. A certain "buffering zone" between what someone wants and thinks and what they'll tell the world keeps everything more civilized. It won't make a difference when losing 100Ks of dollars, but in the long run, I prefer some "syntactic sugar" in my communication. Of course, if there's too much lying and fake niceness going on, that'll do more harm. In a nutshell: don't mind the occasional smiley face.
B. it doesn't make sense to reassemble an email because eventually the whole email will be submitted.
I disagree. It's interesting to observe how passages in a text--any text, really--are changed. It gives good insight into what a person thinks on a particular subject.
I can archive my e-mail discussions, save them to an mbox file and load them into most other mail applications. That's not possible with all that web-based stuff. With some IM programs exporting works, too, but it's hard or impossible to import those discussions elsewhere. Text messages as part of a cellphone - can you archive those? I never tried.
Anyway, I still have my first mail conversations from the mid 90s. Can't say the same thing for other forms of digital conversation.
I know the project is just starting, but here it goes.
They should republish the raw data the same way Wikipedia and even IMDb does. I for one am not going to contribute to any data collection project that I can't later use myself.
Their schema doesn't differentiate between editions. If I understand it right, that means that for the 3000 existing editions of "Tom Sawyer" released over the years, by different publishers in different countries and languages, the book's description has to be replicated for each one. That can't be good. I don't have a quick solution to this myself. Sometimes (esp. with tech books), a new edition changes content significantly compared to the previous one, sometimes they're exactly the same.
Collecting the cover images is a great service. However, doesn't this infringe on the publisher's copyright? Is this still fair use? What about countries like Germany without fair use laws--will German books still be OK because the data is collected in the USA (I guess)?
Add a feature to upload book descriptions as XML. Suggest a DTD. I have a list of my book collection stored as an XML file, so have others (maybe not natively, but book collection management software usually has an export function). It should be possible to automate the process of adding book information already stored in some digital format.
There should be some category system to pick from. Some may put Tom sawyer into "Novel, USA antebellum", others into "Novel, USA 19th century".
Somehow connect this to Wikipedia. The more prominent books have article pages. Maybe data could be retrieved from it as well. There are currently Tom Sawyer articles in 16 or so languages.
The edit page should group items better: stuff everyone understands (year published, title) first, then those things only specialists know.
The edit page's descriptors shouldn't be images but text which links to an explanation page for the same reason. BISAC? LCCN? UCC13? I know, I can find out what those are with a search engine, but I shouldn't have to.
Prepare for i18n. I guess LCCN is a library of congress code number? Those types of libraries exist in other countries, too. Each book can have a gazillion codes. Make this another tuple in the database: (book_id, code_id, code_value) instead of (book_id, lcc_id, isbn10, isbn13, 10 other codes in the same record).
Also i18n: store language codes with all textual columns. A description is most likely going to be Hungarian for a book published in Hungary in Hungarian.
This complicates the schema a lot. Having very few tables is tempting, but it usually doesn't work well with the real world.
I don't think that trend is as strong in other parts of the world as it is in the US. Print media are for the most part losing readers and ad clients, but enterprises are rather conservative when it comes to ads online. Talking about Germany, I think we're at least five years behind. Online ad budgets are negligible compared to what is being done in the US. Unfortunately I don't have the latest number, I'm sure we're catching up.
Besides, I'd like to stress the importance of printed media. We still have a couple of good magazines and I'd hate to lose them because supposedly one print magazine can be replaced with a dozen mediocre websites. (PC Professionell, certainly one of the better ones, was recently discontinued while crap like Computerbild is doing fine.) It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world.
Only slightly related, but what happened to Riya, the software used to identify faces once a face has at least once been tagged with a name? I think there was an outcry about the potential implications, and then I never heard about it again. Their web site looks like the last time I checked one or two years ago. I'd like to have something like that for my private photo collection locally.
I know Riya is mentioned in the article, but it doesn't seem to answer my question.
Are classical movies getting released and does HD make a difference in that area? Any HD release search function that lets you search for the movie's production year? With most modern movies, I just don't seem to care enough to buy a DVD, let alone one of the more expensive HD versions.
Sorry, pressed Submit too soon. As for the other issue:
I also find it interesting that in this cases privacy is an issue, whereas otherwise (EU data retention, to name an example) privacy only protects "teh ebil terorrists"
With the Stasi files it was about publishing them for the world to see, while any of the data retention laws will keep information restricted to authorities (after a court order - or not, I'm not sure). That's quite a difference, in my book.
I find it interesting in that case that Kohl at that time was involved in a big fund raising scandal. As of today, he refused to name the donators of the money
The Stasi files weren't updated after the GDR collapsed in 1989, while the "scandal money" donated to the CDU was given to it in the 1990s. Unless there are some additional links, I don't see the connection.
IDE with code completion / on-line help is better
on
MySQL Cards and Charts
·
· Score: 1
Charts are all fine, but isn't the ideal solution an IDE which shows type information to the developer entering the code, like Eclipse does with Java, Visual Studio with C# and C++, and so on?
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: They're really shooting a sequel: Untitled X-Files Sequel.
Wouldn't it make more sense to operate the Maglev over a distance which would allow it to save a significant amount of time? i.e. Actually inter city?
In theory, yes. Germany has discussed implementing the "Transrapid" technology somewhere in Germany for decades now. A 20 mile track is way better than nothing, especially if you want to sell it to other countries.
The reason why long distances are no great idea: Germany's topology and population density. Whatever two larger cities you take, there probably are mountains or other things in between which would make the building of the line extremely expensive. Germany's ICEs suffer from the same problem.
France has a high-speed conventional train, the Thalys running between Belgium and Paris and some parts in the Netherlands and bordering West Germany. That area is flat and great for a straight line between two points.
This could really put a big dent into both the "credibility" of the RIAA and MPAA as well as turn public opinion.
Only if major news outlets pick this up and spend a lot of time explaining the details. I doubt that's going to happen.
Some BitTorrent caching at the ISP level is already taking place: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/29886.html ("Third"...)
One can live happily without knowing about linked lists.
Sure, but if a developer can't be bothered to learn about a very simple concept from "Data structures 101", will he be able to deal with situations that require non-trivial solutions? Doing the research, comparing approaches, implementing and testing one? I'm not optimistic. I'm not talking about over-engineering things, which would be the other extreme.
I know the difference (grew up with Pascal myself), but I wasn't aware that "naked" is the term for it.
Naked "pointers" for data structures are kind of an archaic concept that are happily being phased out in higher-level languages and databases.
Huh? Every reference to a dynamically-created object (so, everything apart from primitive types like int or char) in Java is a pointer. It's called NullPointerException for a reason.
As for linked lists, they have the advantage of being able to quickly insert or remove single elements without having to copy all elements behind them by one position, as would be necessary in an array list (implementation contains a array of pointers to elements).
I don't get it. Storing data by column instead of row is a change at the physical level and has nothing to do with the data model. In other words, storage by column can be implemented with the relational data model, there is no contradiction.
If a column-based DBS is something entirely new, what data model does it use?
Western Europe's population density varies a great deal. Obviously, there is some average value, but there are rural areas, where you can't get a fast Internet connection. I only know the situation here in Germany. It's the same thing - it would cost telcos too much to get DSL there, so they don't do it.
Full screen and not having a border are two things in Java. The latter can be done by a call to setUndecorated(true).
Obviously, your fix would work for that as well: disallow unsigned applets that particular method. But it'll take a lot of time until all those JREs are replaced.
However, the idea was quite good. It's sad that there wasn't a smarter screenplay.
Now I have that stupid stonecutters song in my head again, thanks a lot.
...
We doo, we doo,
Of course she's not going to feel better, but I guess smileys have become part of the culture, which is already very superficial. There's a lot of smiling and compliments and smalltalk going on, and that's probably a good thing, to a degree. A certain "buffering zone" between what someone wants and thinks and what they'll tell the world keeps everything more civilized. It won't make a difference when losing 100Ks of dollars, but in the long run, I prefer some "syntactic sugar" in my communication. Of course, if there's too much lying and fake niceness going on, that'll do more harm. In a nutshell: don't mind the occasional smiley face.
B. it doesn't make sense to reassemble an email because eventually the whole email will be submitted.
I disagree. It's interesting to observe how passages in a text--any text, really--are changed. It gives good insight into what a person thinks on a particular subject.
I can archive my e-mail discussions, save them to an mbox file and load them into most other mail applications. That's not possible with all that web-based stuff. With some IM programs exporting works, too, but it's hard or impossible to import those discussions elsewhere. Text messages as part of a cellphone - can you archive those? I never tried.
Anyway, I still have my first mail conversations from the mid 90s. Can't say the same thing for other forms of digital conversation.
I know the project is just starting, but here it goes.
They should republish the raw data the same way Wikipedia and even IMDb does. I for one am not going to contribute to any data collection project that I can't later use myself.
Their schema doesn't differentiate between editions. If I understand it right, that means that for the 3000 existing editions of "Tom Sawyer" released over the years, by different publishers in different countries and languages, the book's description has to be replicated for each one. That can't be good. I don't have a quick solution to this myself. Sometimes (esp. with tech books), a new edition changes content significantly compared to the previous one, sometimes they're exactly the same.
Collecting the cover images is a great service. However, doesn't this infringe on the publisher's copyright? Is this still fair use? What about countries like Germany without fair use laws--will German books still be OK because the data is collected in the USA (I guess)?
Add a feature to upload book descriptions as XML. Suggest a DTD. I have a list of my book collection stored as an XML file, so have others (maybe not natively, but book collection management software usually has an export function). It should be possible to automate the process of adding book information already stored in some digital format.
There should be some category system to pick from. Some may put Tom sawyer into "Novel, USA antebellum", others into "Novel, USA 19th century".
Somehow connect this to Wikipedia. The more prominent books have article pages. Maybe data could be retrieved from it as well. There are currently Tom Sawyer articles in 16 or so languages.
The edit page should group items better: stuff everyone understands (year published, title) first, then those things only specialists know.
The edit page's descriptors shouldn't be images but text which links to an explanation page for the same reason. BISAC? LCCN? UCC13? I know, I can find out what those are with a search engine, but I shouldn't have to.
Prepare for i18n. I guess LCCN is a library of congress code number? Those types of libraries exist in other countries, too. Each book can have a gazillion codes. Make this another tuple in the database: (book_id, code_id, code_value) instead of (book_id, lcc_id, isbn10, isbn13, 10 other codes in the same record).
Also i18n: store language codes with all textual columns. A description is most likely going to be Hungarian for a book published in Hungary in Hungarian.
This complicates the schema a lot. Having very few tables is tempting, but it usually doesn't work well with the real world.
I don't think that trend is as strong in other parts of the world as it is in the US. Print media are for the most part losing readers and ad clients, but enterprises are rather conservative when it comes to ads online. Talking about Germany, I think we're at least five years behind. Online ad budgets are negligible compared to what is being done in the US. Unfortunately I don't have the latest number, I'm sure we're catching up.
Besides, I'd like to stress the importance of printed media. We still have a couple of good magazines and I'd hate to lose them because supposedly one print magazine can be replaced with a dozen mediocre websites. (PC Professionell, certainly one of the better ones, was recently discontinued while crap like Computerbild is doing fine.) It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world.
You have to do an explicit cast:
byte a = (byte)0xff;
That's a bit annoying, but hardly a giant pain in the ass.
Remind me again how MS has actively blocked other companies from writing software that competes with their own?
In this case, apparently by making it impossible to replace the desktop search part of the OS in a way that doesn't slow down the whole thing.
What exactly caused that problem (laziness, Vista deadlines, differing priorities, malice) doesn't really matter.
Oh...so Google's just being a whiny little bitch here?
No, they just want their software to run properly on Vista.
Only slightly related, but what happened to Riya, the software used to identify faces once a face has at least once been tagged with a name? I think there was an outcry about the potential implications, and then I never heard about it again. Their web site looks like the last time I checked one or two years ago. I'd like to have something like that for my private photo collection locally.
I know Riya is mentioned in the article, but it doesn't seem to answer my question.
Exactly. The man's name is Thomas Matussek, here's a text of his: http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/storyid.aspx?Sto ryId=33151 40,00.html, 359568,00.html (in German)
More stories on the topic:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,1781
http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/0,1518
Are classical movies getting released and does HD make a difference in that area? Any HD release search function that lets you search for the movie's production year? With most modern movies, I just don't seem to care enough to buy a DVD, let alone one of the more expensive HD versions.
Sorry, pressed Submit too soon. As for the other issue:
I also find it interesting that in this cases privacy is an issue, whereas otherwise (EU data retention, to name an example) privacy only protects "teh ebil terorrists"
With the Stasi files it was about publishing them for the world to see, while any of the data retention laws will keep information restricted to authorities (after a court order - or not, I'm not sure). That's quite a difference, in my book.
I find it interesting in that case that Kohl at that time was involved in a big fund raising scandal. As of today, he refused to name the donators of the money
The Stasi files weren't updated after the GDR collapsed in 1989, while the "scandal money" donated to the CDU was given to it in the 1990s. Unless there are some additional links, I don't see the connection.
Charts are all fine, but isn't the ideal solution an IDE which shows type information to the developer entering the code, like Eclipse does with Java, Visual Studio with C# and C++, and so on?