Netscape doesn't have MathML. Mozilla does. In fact, this is the essential difference between Netscape 6 and Mozilla at this stage.
But I agree with the fact that I hope MathML will replace this obsolete and obfuscated TeX format in future mathematical publications.
As for the "soon to be followed", I hope you're saying that tongue-in-cheek. Goldbach's conjecture may be just around the corner (but nobody's interested in it, anyway), but the Riemann hypothesis is as far as ever. Nobody ever made any kind of progress towards proving it (Deligne's proof of the Riemann hypothesis on varieties in characteristic p doesn't count, because it's a local result that's completely trivial in the classical case).
You're assuming that election is a single round process, but nothing says it has to be. You can have a first round between every candidate, and then a second round allowing only the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round. This is how the president is elected in most countries where he is elected directly by popular vote. Thus, small parties can exist without spoiling the election, because on the second round they must instruct their legions to vote for one of the two popular candidates.
Permit me to applaud. Wonderfully insightful post (moderators, hint, hint).
George Lucas is clearly capable of the better and the worse. One movie I liked better than the whole Star Wars series was Willow (he wrote the plot). Also, I've heard much praise of his earlier THX 11, but I haven't seen it; has anyone? If he hadn't been driven away by his success, he would have done much better than he has.
Wait 'till they start using Unicode characters which you don't even understand or know how to type.
Like "ACME" (if your browser supports Unicode and you have the right fonts you should see a smiling face after "ACME"), or "Esterica" or "Fbar" whatever. (Not to mention that artist whose name used to be "Prince" and who changed it to some unspeakable hieroglyph.)
Then, with I-DNS they can even have domain names with their weird and untypable characters. Yuck.
(I guess since this is an AC posting I don't have much chance of a reply, but I'll try anyway.)
This was observed by Dante and recorded in The Divine Comedy
Really? Could you give a reference? (Reply by mail preferedly.) I'm supposed to have read The Divine Comedy, and I don't recall this.
One thing in the same lines which I did find striking in The Divine Comedy, however, is the fact that, when Dante and Virgil come out of Hell by the "hidden path", Dante describes the constellation of "Crux Australis" which I don't understand how he could have known about at the time.
Isaac Newton practically drove himself blind by staring at the sun for hours regularly, watching for sunspots.
To make it vividly clear how dangerous it is to stare at the sun, consider this. Total luminous flux from a given source drops down quadratically with distance; but so does the apparent angle. So the luminous intensity (luminous flux per unit solid angle) does not decrease with distance. In other words, neglecting absorbtion by the atmosphere, and so long as you are not near-sighted, a cell in your retina receives as much intensity from the sun when you stare at it from Earth as it would do if you were three meters from the sun.
(Of course, some would argue the same should hold for the stars. The reason it doens't is that the stars' apparent angle is smaller than one retinal cell. However, if the Universe were infinite in space and time, with stars uniformly distributed among it, the entire sky would be as luminous as the surface of the sun. This is the well known Ober's paradox.)
The only languages that can comfortably be
written with the repertoire of US-ASCII
happen to be Latin, Swahili, Hawaiian and American English without
most typographic frills. It is rumoured that there are more languages
in the world.
You mean 0 through 0x7f not 0xff. ASCII is 7-bit only. Actually, it's even 0x20 through 0x7e.
Secondly, I think you're being terribly unfair toward CJK unification. I see it more like unifying the Latin letter "V" that serves both as "U" and "V" with the "V" in later Latin scripts. Or Unifying the Gothic script with the Roman script.
Remember, after all, that simplified radicals are not identified with the corresponding traditional radical. It seems to me to be the sane way of proceeding.
If you need metadata, use XML. The following DTD should suit your needs exactly:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii" ?> <!DOCTYPE t [ <!ELEMENT t (#PCDATA | t)*> <ATTLIST t xml:lang NMTOKEN #IMPLIED> ]>
So you can just use the <t> tag with the xml:lang attribute to define the language.
Mozilla is already faaaar more useful than Konqueror. Much slower, of course, but much better in every other respect. I really don't see why it should be overtaken by it.
What new k3wl stuff? I don't see any of it. Every feature request in the bugzilla database is being marked as "future" now, and even bugs are often marked "future" or "nsbeta3-".
(For those who don't know the Mozilla jargon, "nsbeta3-" means "not now" and "future" means "really not now".:-)
Look, even if the time expectancy for all of mankind being destroyed by an asteroid is even as low as 4000 years (and expect it to be pretty much higher than that), it only reduces your life expectancy by about one year. Not negligible, but not terribly high either.
Re:IANAL, but here is what will probably happen...
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
That's the reason for splitting the data, as is done by my Random Pads proposal or, better even, the Publius system.
See here for an implementation of a secret-sharing mechanism.
Who mentioned closed doors? IETF working groups are as open as you can get. Internet working drafts and RFCs are public documents. They get ample public scrutiny. Much more than Yet Another open source project on sourceforge in which the protocol and the implementation are hopelessly tangled.
What I am saying is that the implementation is far less important than the definition of the protocol. It should serve as a Proof of Concept, but it should not lead the way. The two should be kept separate enough.
I think you have a false idea of what a "working group" is. It is nothing like bureaucracy. The IETF has always been very open and very efficient in its structure. It's more about radically dissociating the implementation from the protocol, which is an essential step in producing a "standard" that is not a mere description of what a program does (in the same idea, for an RFC to become a Draft Standard it must have two independently developped implementations). It's about thinking before you act, and letting some well-known Internet experts give you advice.
You (and others) react as though I had attacked the idea of Freenet. I haven't. I think it's great. But I fear there's too much emphasis on the "let's implement it" rather than on the careful definition of a well-thought protocol. The implementation is nothing: the only important thing is the protocol. Of course we must fear the reverse pitfall, where the standard (like many W3 standards) never gets implemented because it was devised without any thought as to implementation. But the Internet is also too full of protocols that were engineered toward one single implementation.
And an IETF working group is the natural framework for developing a protocol. Remember: you don't need to be member of anything to do this (the IETF has no permanent members). It will bring the attention of experts who are able to address the problem of integrating the protocol defined in the mass of other existing standards. And it will bring recognition, quite simply.
Freenet is good, it came up with some pretty neat ideas, but it would be better if it had been developped and thought out in advance in the context of an IETF working group, if the specifications had been released as a Request For Comments, and, in other words, if it had paid a little more attention to existing Internet standards instead of being Yet Another anti-censorship system.
For example, why did Freenet have to come up with their own key scheme instead of using the official standard of Uniform Resource Names (URNs) defined by RFC2141 (the previous link was an example of a URN)?
I have this dream of a true world-wide distributed database founded on recognized Internet standards. It would use URNs as keys. (In particular, it would allow arbitrary Unicode character data.) It would use the ubiquitous RDF format as "semantic sugar" (pardon the expression) of its communications. It would borrow ideas from HTTP (the best Internet communications protocol we have so far) for the protocol, and Usenet and Freenet for the distribution mechanisms, as well as the public key distribution system and trust web, and the everything system. It would use public-key cryptography as the basis for its trust graph, so as to make data authentification possible and tampering impossible. Certificates and signatures would be distributed along the network itself. It would employ secret sharing mechanisms to split the risks of carrying certain data. It would be impossible to tamper with, impossible to censor, and extremely difficult to break. It would replace the lousy and obsolete DNS system (and also alleviate somewhat the power of "root registrars" in the DNS), and possibly The Web itself. And, to make my dream even more of a dream, it would be simple to implement.
Hmmm.... Nice project, for the year 2100 or so. Anyone care to start an IETF working group?
Try again. Have a look at RFC675. Read the title carefully. Notice the date? December 1974. AFAIK that's the first known occurrence of the word "Internet".
In September 1981, RFCs 791, 792 and 793 appeared, defining IP, ICMP and TCP (note the "I" in "IP") in the final version which is still theirs today (minor options and exceptions nonwithstanding).
There is nothing wrong with having been using the Internet for nearly ten years in 1990.
In fact, even though the word hadn't appeared yet, the "official birthday" of the Internet is generally taken to be April 7, 1969, the day of publication of the very first RFC by Steve Crocker. See "Thirty years of RFCs" for more historical considerations, and also the the Internet timeline.
I entirely agree. That's a comparison I like to make. When people say to me things like "we'll always need graphical user interfaces and user-friendly software like Windows: people will never learn to master the complexities of the Command Line", I reply that in the middle ages, the few literate people might have thought "we'll always need to have little icons in front of the shops so people can tell the inn from the blacksmith; these ignorant peasants will never learn to master the complexities of writing".
Guess what? In the year 2000, over half of the population of the world knows how to read and write. Let's make it our objective for 2100 that over half of the population of the world have a computer and know how to program.
I'm getting tired of repeating this all the time, but if you want to read DVDs under Linux, grab a copy of xmovie. It comes with DeCSS integrated. And it works wonderfully (though it's a pain to compile). The author does not seem to have been harrassed by the MPAA yet (he did remove DeCSS from xmovie at some point, but then he put it back again).
If you're not happy about the legal shit, just ignore it.
though I still want an open source player to come to fruit
Try xmovie. It is really nice, it is Open Source, and it comes with DeCSS integrated. Beware, however, that it is really a pain to compile (and there is nothing remotely resembling documentation).
Look, this is not an RFC, it's an Internet Draft. Anyone can submit an Internet Draft. I can submit an Internet Draft on the Frobnification of Foobars tomorrow if I want, and that won't mean the Frobnification of Foobars is in any way endorsed by anyone in the Internet standards process.
An Internet Draft shouldn't even be referred to. And if it is, it should always be indicated as WORK IN PROGRESS (in capitals). An Internet Draft is only valid for six months after last modification: when it expires, every copy should be deleted. Internet Drafts should not be archived. One should not adhere to the standards described in Internet Drafts, nor claim conformance to one. (Of course, these are the "official" guidelines. In practice, Internet Drafts are often followed if they come from a well-known or authoritative source like an IETF working group or the author of a previous RFC on the subject.)
Before an Internet Draft becomes an RFC, it must be accepted by the RFC Editor after approval from the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group).
In any case, M$ is not officially involved in this draft. Merely because the author is one of their employees does not mean they endorse it.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape doesn't have MathML. Mozilla does. In fact, this is the essential difference between Netscape 6 and Mozilla at this stage.
But I agree with the fact that I hope MathML will replace this obsolete and obfuscated TeX format in future mathematical publications.
As for the "soon to be followed", I hope you're saying that tongue-in-cheek. Goldbach's conjecture may be just around the corner (but nobody's interested in it, anyway), but the Riemann hypothesis is as far as ever. Nobody ever made any kind of progress towards proving it (Deligne's proof of the Riemann hypothesis on varieties in characteristic p doesn't count, because it's a local result that's completely trivial in the classical case).
You're assuming that election is a single round process, but nothing says it has to be. You can have a first round between every candidate, and then a second round allowing only the two candidates that got the most votes in the first round. This is how the president is elected in most countries where he is elected directly by popular vote. Thus, small parties can exist without spoiling the election, because on the second round they must instruct their legions to vote for one of the two popular candidates.
Permit me to applaud. Wonderfully insightful post (moderators, hint, hint).
George Lucas is clearly capable of the better and the worse. One movie I liked better than the whole Star Wars series was Willow (he wrote the plot). Also, I've heard much praise of his earlier THX 11, but I haven't seen it; has anyone? If he hadn't been driven away by his success, he would have done much better than he has.
Sorry. 7.10 seconds when speaking rather fast. 10.75 seconds when speaking at a normal rate.
Mind you, even the plot of The Wizard of Oz is hard to tell in under 5 seconds.
It's billg@microsoft.com .
--
This slashdot post generated by Mozilla. Click "here" for details.
Wait 'till they start using Unicode characters which you don't even understand or know how to type.
Like "ACME" (if your browser supports Unicode and you have the right fonts you should see a smiling face after "ACME"), or "Esterica" or "Fbar" whatever. (Not to mention that artist whose name used to be "Prince" and who changed it to some unspeakable hieroglyph.)
Then, with I-DNS they can even have domain names with their weird and untypable characters. Yuck.
Yes. Sorry. Actually I hesitated for some time about the spelling. I should have checked from a reliable source.
(I guess since this is an AC posting I don't have much chance of a reply, but I'll try anyway.)
Really? Could you give a reference? (Reply by mail preferedly.) I'm supposed to have read The Divine Comedy, and I don't recall this.
One thing in the same lines which I did find striking in The Divine Comedy, however, is the fact that, when Dante and Virgil come out of Hell by the "hidden path", Dante describes the constellation of "Crux Australis" which I don't understand how he could have known about at the time.
Isaac Newton practically drove himself blind by staring at the sun for hours regularly, watching for sunspots.
To make it vividly clear how dangerous it is to stare at the sun, consider this. Total luminous flux from a given source drops down quadratically with distance; but so does the apparent angle. So the luminous intensity (luminous flux per unit solid angle) does not decrease with distance. In other words, neglecting absorbtion by the atmosphere, and so long as you are not near-sighted, a cell in your retina receives as much intensity from the sun when you stare at it from Earth as it would do if you were three meters from the sun.
(Of course, some would argue the same should hold for the stars. The reason it doens't is that the stars' apparent angle is smaller than one retinal cell. However, if the Universe were infinite in space and time, with stars uniformly distributed among it, the entire sky would be as luminous as the surface of the sun. This is the well known Ober's paradox.)
I love that quote!
You mean 0 through 0x7f not 0xff. ASCII is 7-bit only. Actually, it's even 0x20 through 0x7e.
Secondly, I think you're being terribly unfair toward CJK unification. I see it more like unifying the Latin letter "V" that serves both as "U" and "V" with the "V" in later Latin scripts. Or Unifying the Gothic script with the Roman script.
Remember, after all, that simplified radicals are not identified with the corresponding traditional radical. It seems to me to be the sane way of proceeding.
If you need metadata, use XML. The following DTD should suit your needs exactly:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii" ?>
<!DOCTYPE t [
<!ELEMENT t (#PCDATA | t)*>
<ATTLIST t xml:lang NMTOKEN #IMPLIED>
]>
So you can just use the <t> tag with the xml:lang attribute to define the language.
Mozilla is already faaaar more useful than Konqueror. Much slower, of course, but much better in every other respect. I really don't see why it should be overtaken by it.
What new k3wl stuff? I don't see any of it. Every feature request in the bugzilla database is being marked as "future" now, and even bugs are often marked "future" or "nsbeta3-".
(For those who don't know the Mozilla jargon, "nsbeta3-" means "not now" and "future" means "really not now".:-)
Look, even if the time expectancy for all of mankind being destroyed by an asteroid is even as low as 4000 years (and expect it to be pretty much higher than that), it only reduces your life expectancy by about one year. Not negligible, but not terribly high either.
That's the reason for splitting the data, as is done by my Random Pads proposal or, better even, the Publius system.
See here for an implementation of a secret-sharing mechanism.
Who mentioned closed doors? IETF working groups are as open as you can get. Internet working drafts and RFCs are public documents. They get ample public scrutiny. Much more than Yet Another open source project on sourceforge in which the protocol and the implementation are hopelessly tangled.
What I am saying is that the implementation is far less important than the definition of the protocol. It should serve as a Proof of Concept, but it should not lead the way. The two should be kept separate enough.
I think you have a false idea of what a "working group" is. It is nothing like bureaucracy. The IETF has always been very open and very efficient in its structure. It's more about radically dissociating the implementation from the protocol, which is an essential step in producing a "standard" that is not a mere description of what a program does (in the same idea, for an RFC to become a Draft Standard it must have two independently developped implementations). It's about thinking before you act, and letting some well-known Internet experts give you advice.
You (and others) react as though I had attacked the idea of Freenet. I haven't. I think it's great. But I fear there's too much emphasis on the "let's implement it" rather than on the careful definition of a well-thought protocol. The implementation is nothing: the only important thing is the protocol. Of course we must fear the reverse pitfall, where the standard (like many W3 standards) never gets implemented because it was devised without any thought as to implementation. But the Internet is also too full of protocols that were engineered toward one single implementation.
And an IETF working group is the natural framework for developing a protocol. Remember: you don't need to be member of anything to do this (the IETF has no permanent members). It will bring the attention of experts who are able to address the problem of integrating the protocol defined in the mass of other existing standards. And it will bring recognition, quite simply.
Freenet is good, it came up with some pretty neat ideas, but it would be better if it had been developped and thought out in advance in the context of an IETF working group, if the specifications had been released as a Request For Comments, and, in other words, if it had paid a little more attention to existing Internet standards instead of being Yet Another anti-censorship system.
For example, why did Freenet have to come up with their own key scheme instead of using the official standard of Uniform Resource Names (URNs) defined by RFC2141 (the previous link was an example of a URN)?
I have this dream of a true world-wide distributed database founded on recognized Internet standards. It would use URNs as keys. (In particular, it would allow arbitrary Unicode character data.) It would use the ubiquitous RDF format as "semantic sugar" (pardon the expression) of its communications. It would borrow ideas from HTTP (the best Internet communications protocol we have so far) for the protocol, and Usenet and Freenet for the distribution mechanisms, as well as the public key distribution system and trust web, and the everything system. It would use public-key cryptography as the basis for its trust graph, so as to make data authentification possible and tampering impossible. Certificates and signatures would be distributed along the network itself. It would employ secret sharing mechanisms to split the risks of carrying certain data. It would be impossible to tamper with, impossible to censor, and extremely difficult to break. It would replace the lousy and obsolete DNS system (and also alleviate somewhat the power of "root registrars" in the DNS), and possibly The Web itself. And, to make my dream even more of a dream, it would be simple to implement.
Hmmm.... Nice project, for the year 2100 or so. Anyone care to start an IETF working group?
Try again. Have a look at RFC675. Read the title carefully. Notice the date? December 1974. AFAIK that's the first known occurrence of the word "Internet".
In September 1981, RFCs 791, 792 and 793 appeared, defining IP, ICMP and TCP (note the "I" in "IP") in the final version which is still theirs today (minor options and exceptions nonwithstanding).
There is nothing wrong with having been using the Internet for nearly ten years in 1990.
In fact, even though the word hadn't appeared yet, the "official birthday" of the Internet is generally taken to be April 7, 1969, the day of publication of the very first RFC by Steve Crocker. See "Thirty years of RFCs" for more historical considerations, and also the the Internet timeline.
Of course.
I entirely agree. That's a comparison I like to make. When people say to me things like "we'll always need graphical user interfaces and user-friendly software like Windows: people will never learn to master the complexities of the Command Line", I reply that in the middle ages, the few literate people might have thought "we'll always need to have little icons in front of the shops so people can tell the inn from the blacksmith; these ignorant peasants will never learn to master the complexities of writing".
Guess what? In the year 2000, over half of the population of the world knows how to read and write. Let's make it our objective for 2100 that over half of the population of the world have a computer and know how to program.
(b) is correct. It was removed only in version 1.3.1.
I'm getting tired of repeating this all the time, but if you want to read DVDs under Linux, grab a copy of xmovie. It comes with DeCSS integrated. And it works wonderfully (though it's a pain to compile). The author does not seem to have been harrassed by the MPAA yet (he did remove DeCSS from xmovie at some point, but then he put it back again).
If you're not happy about the legal shit, just ignore it.
though I still want an open source player to come to fruit
Try xmovie. It is really nice, it is Open Source, and it comes with DeCSS integrated. Beware, however, that it is really a pain to compile (and there is nothing remotely resembling documentation).
Look, this is not an RFC, it's an Internet Draft. Anyone can submit an Internet Draft. I can submit an Internet Draft on the Frobnification of Foobars tomorrow if I want, and that won't mean the Frobnification of Foobars is in any way endorsed by anyone in the Internet standards process.
An Internet Draft shouldn't even be referred to. And if it is, it should always be indicated as WORK IN PROGRESS (in capitals). An Internet Draft is only valid for six months after last modification: when it expires, every copy should be deleted. Internet Drafts should not be archived. One should not adhere to the standards described in Internet Drafts, nor claim conformance to one. (Of course, these are the "official" guidelines. In practice, Internet Drafts are often followed if they come from a well-known or authoritative source like an IETF working group or the author of a previous RFC on the subject.)
Before an Internet Draft becomes an RFC, it must be accepted by the RFC Editor after approval from the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group).
In any case, M$ is not officially involved in this draft. Merely because the author is one of their employees does not mean they endorse it.