Creating a script to change 4-space-tabs to 8-space-tabs is 1 (short) line of shell-script (sed actually) without XML.
Right. Now create a script to do it when the coder has forgotten to put any tabs in it at all, when the spacing is inconsistent, when there is a mixture of tabs and spaces. Create a script to move all curly braces onto their own lines. Create a script to remove all spaces before and after brackets. Create a script to rewrap long parameter lists onto new lines.
With XML, these are not issues, by definition. Not only are they not issues, they simply can never be. XML gets rid of this entire class of problems. It's like memory management... garbage collectors came along, and an entire class of problems just disappeared. (OK, GC is not a universal panacea, but it's a close analogy.)
(I do agree with your point, though. Insurance is the only industry where discriminatorally treating individuals as if they are responsible for the actions of others in their demographic is legal, and in fact is the norm.)
With insurance, as with all discrimination, there's a large silent majority (minority?) who likes it the way it is. For example, 30-40 year white females probably like having to pay a lower insurance rate. It's this majority that we have to convince, when we tell them that paying a higher rate of insurance is better than discriminating.
Unless you can convince the bean-counters to use an insurance model that doesn't require increasing insurance rates, some of which have been discussed here.
CPU power. IDEs tend to need a fast computer to work well, which is why vi is still so appealing to programmers. The "computers are so fast..." arguments always break down it seems.
It would require about as much CPU power as an HTML editor, since that's essentially what it would be. Less power, in fact, since you're probably not doing all this fancy formatting.
Since when did you need XML for this? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't Kate/Kdevelop do this already? I understand that many of you use that leprous shit of an editor that comes with Visual Studio. But that's no excuse to eliminate plain text source code. Get a real editor and stop dragging the rest of us down to your level.
Sigh.
The point is that editors like Kate or Kdevelop would use these behind the scenes, and as a developer, you wouldn't know any better. It would still look like a text editor. It would still work like a text editor. But underneath, in the bits you don't ever consider, it would be more sophisticated.
Do you think you're typing text into the Slashdot comments text box? That's certainly what it looks like, but underneath, your web browser is translating character entities and doing other mind-numbing encodings that you don't know about. Heck, underneath, your web browser is sending a stream of numbers to the web server. But you don't care about that, nor should you. The same goes for XML code. Should be completely transparent.
You can already do all of the above. This is simply formalising it and saying, hey guys, this is the baseline from which to work. It also makes things trivial and lets you do things in a way that's not "the hard way".
You would never edit the raw XML of your source code, in fact, you would never even see it, any more than you would see the raw HTML of your web pages. (OK, so some people use notepad.exe to edit their web sites, but I ain't that hard.)
Advantages:
Formatting. As mentioned in the article. The days of 4-space vs 8-space tab debates are over. The days of curly-braces-on-the-same-line vs next-line debates are over. You view your source the way you want to, other developers view it the way they want; the underlying XML stays the same.
Changing stuff. As mentioned by the parent. If (for example) variable names are well-defined, then the IDE can go and rename them all at will.
Validation. Suddenly, parsing all that code becomes much easier, because we have a well-established XML validation mechanism.
Smarter editors. Drag an if-then block into your source code. Drag a for loop block into your source code. Your editor can collapse or expand blocks. Your editor only allows you to use declared variable names in assignments. Your editor makes it so that any code you write is, by definition, well-formed.
OK, not everybody will like this last idea (this is Slashdot, where half the population likes Emacs, and the other half likes vi), but it makes sense to me.
And, of course, for anybody who doesn't like XML, it's just a simple XSLT transform to get your original source code back.
Re:3 types of email users - what are the others?
on
Google Tidbits
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· Score: 1
You know what's interesting (IMHO) is that new software products have changed my (and others, I'd imagine) email profile. I used to be a user who filed frequently...
What I'm about to say has been said many times over, so I'll keep it brief...
In the early days of the Web, web sites were filed and categorised into huge directories with names like Yahoo. Then search engines like AltaVista and Google came along, and took off... showing that people would rather search for their stuff than follow a tedious filing structure.
Google is simply doing the same for e-mail, and who better to do it than the current search kings. Give it a few years, and you'll feel the same about filing your e-mail in folders as finding web sites in Yahoo.
(Which is not to say that it will be useless, just used... less.)
Cohen realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up.
Yet this feature has existed in other P2P applications for years.
Yeah, and Bram Cohen even coded some of them.
According to the article, he was part of the dev team on Mojo Nation, one of the first "swarming" P2P apps. It had all sorts of cool ideas like micropayments, encryption and erasure coding for redundancy, but as the article alludes, it died because it was just too damn complicated. Contrast BitTorrent, which was one window to download your file.
It's possible to violate copyright with a lot of different items - cameras, CD Burners, pencil and paper, a photocopier, a scanner, etc. But - that's not exactly "newsworthy", is it?
For cameras, CD burners, pencil and paper, photocopiers, scanners, etc., copyright infringement is not the primary use (or at least the most popular use) of the tool. For BitTorrent, it is. (OK, perhaps CD burners too, but then, you could argue that a lot of that comes from BitTorrent...)
I could argue that the legal uses are numerous, and I can think of a number of sites like this one that have numerous, legal Torrent links, and looking at the traffic stats, Distrowatch gets a lot of hits.
Do you really believe that 35% of the Internet's traffic is people downloading Linux ISO files over BitTorrent? Or even if that counts for a significant fraction (say 5%)? You see things like 10,000+ users downloading a new-release game like Doom 3 or a new-release movie like Meet the Fockers, and it hits home. OK, it's not metrics. But it's strong anecdotal evidence to me.
Ever wondered why MP3 files aren't "gapless" and there are short gaps of silence between tracks that should otherwise run together? This is why. It's not a problem with your player; it's the way the MP3 spec works... it pads your sound file out to be a multiple of x samples.
No one is still insisting that Paperclip was better than Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Write (though I'm sure a few will as soon as I hit "submit")...
Hmm, I'll bite.
I submit that no big advances have been made to word processors in the last 10 years. (OK, this rules out Paperclip/GeoWrite/Superscript, but includes things like WriteNow, WordPerfect and MacWrite Pro.)
Put another way, you could use a word processor from 1994 (or 1995, depending on when you read this) and get along fine.
The most recent innovation at that time was the concept of style sheets. I don't think they've had any big innovations ever since. From memory, they had grammar checkers and squiggly red lines for misspellings at the time. What came after? Workflow features like tracking and revision control? Publishing to the Web? Nah, not significant.
Maybe one day this will happen with web browsers or (insert application of choice here): it'll become so complete that it doesn't need any more evolution.
If you look at Yeahronimo's website, there's talk about selling ringtones and realtones (presumably for cellphones).
I've often wondered why mobile phones don't embed a SID chip for their ringtones... it's a step above what most phones have, and the SID is capable of some pretty amazing sound effects. The SID isn't exactly expensive, either. Plus, all those game tunes as your ringtone!
Well, this would have been relevant back in 2003. Phones nowadays can play any arbitrary sampled sound (read: MP3) as a ringtone.
Nothing like finding yourself surrounded by a small army of the toughest aliens the game has to throw at you, and then suddenly a platoon teleports in to save yer ass.
Not only that... when you were in a big firefight with a bunch of aliens, and some of them got hit by friendly fire from other aliens, they'd break off from fighting you and turn on their own. I loved that!
And why would signing the code make it more secure?
OK, as we have established, code signing is a flimsy way of providing security or trust. I still think that the Firefox people should do it anyway.
Why? Well, the cert doesn't cost much ($695; they have a lot more in the coffers). You gain nothing except a tick and a nice green icon when Internet Explorer users try to download Firefox. This makes people feel more secure (illusion), and therefore more likely to install it.
Given that $695 isn't much, the certificate is well worth it for that reason alone. Sure, it doesn't buy you much, but you're not paying much. You have nothing to lose except some money and a bit of time. Provide it on top of all the md5sums and PGP signatures, which people can use when they really care.
Don't send it in the form of electricty..send it in the form of radiation energy just like how the Sun provides us energy wirelessly.
The problems with this are:
1) It's not hugely efficient with our current technology... the Sun provides us energy wirelessly, and our current photovoltaic cells are expensive and are 1-2% efficient (could be higher by the time you read this). There are other technologies, but they don't provide huge amounts of energy either, which leads us to...
2) If you increase the power, it becomes a hazard to anybody who walks in its path. Sunlight is hazardous enough; you don't want to get microwaved, burnt through with laser beams, etc. etc.
When developing Palm OS applications, there's a similar feature called Gremlins. You load your program into the Palm OS Emulator (or Simulator) on your computer - this is how you do most of your testing anyway. Give it a random number seed, and activate Gremlins.
It randomly taps all over the screen, fast. It pays special attention to buttons, menus, etc., but also taps on blank spaces. It types random characters into text fields, or sometimes for no reason. Sometimes it'll write fragments of Shakespeare... If your application survives a few million events, you can say with a good degree of certainty that it's reliable. If it doesn't, you get all the Palm debugging tools.
His device was defective. There is no background hiss with this device...
What kind of headphones do you have?
In my experience, the more sensitive your headphones, the more you'll pick up the background hiss. Standard earbuds won't get it at all. I have a set of Sony in-ear headphones, the same as the reviewer had, and get slight hiss from the electronics on my Dell. I also have a set of Audio-Technica headphones (one step up from consumer-grade), and on the same output, the hiss from my Dell drives me nuts.
Reviewer was using Shure E5c headphones, which are sensitive. So it's possible that he hears things you don't.
...In practice, with even remotely accurate headphones this amount of EQ makes for incredibly overblown bass. I question whether anyone who finds this insufficient is qualified to make an audio quality judgement about anything.
That's intriguing.
On one hand, I don't doubt the credentials of the site you posted. On the other hand, the review was from Head-Fi, which is one of the big audiophile headphone forums (they review $2000+ headphones, as well as a whole bunch of lesser ones). And the reviewer was using Shure E5c headphones, which are high-end.
Maybe he didn't discover the equalizer settings. Hard to say.
But the point isn't to use PayPal to buy music from itms, it's to use PayPal to buy music from the American itms.
Right. As I said, people outside the US with PayPal accounts have tried to sign up but have been knocked back. So whilst you may want cheaper music, you're not getting it.
...why don't you organise a light party at your house...
I'm not so sure about this, from what I can gather, right now at his place it's an epileptic's nightmare. It might be cool for a few minutes, but a few hours and the influence of alcohol and I can see it being annoying.
He says that it's too bandwidth-intensive to stream video... and I believe him. Here's another idea: once a Slashdotting starts, put up a video camera and film it. The next day, when the webcam is off, start a torrent and share it around...
Can overseas buyers buy from iTunes USA @ USD 99 cents?
According to some other forums I've been reading, people outside the US with PayPal accounts have tried to sign up but have been knocked back. So I'm guessing that it's still US-only. (Maybe Apple will extend it to their international iTunes Music Stores in the future.)
I've often wondered why forums don't support PGP directly. Scenario:
You want to post on Slashdot.
You click "Post" and paste in a PGP-signed message.
Slashdot verifies the signature and puts "Verified" or a lock icon in the message header. Also makes available the original text. Maybe gives you a karma boost;-)
You don't need to log in, as Slashdot checks the signature against the PGP public key you have on file.
Could work with a lot of other forums out there. Never tried coding it myself, but the technology is certainly there.
If Apple files a Cease & Desist order, then maybe there's some truth to it.
Not so. They could be doing it even though it's false, to muddy the waters. If they did so, it means that people can't take a "cease and desist" order as confirmation that it's true.
It's like companies not commenting on rumours. If they did, and started debunking obvious rumours, then people will think that any rumours they don't comment on are true by default.
Slashdot Mirror
just google for pretty print __your_language___
You have pointed me to a bunch of very fine solutions to a problem that should not exist in the first place.
Creating a script to change 4-space-tabs to 8-space-tabs is 1 (short) line of shell-script (sed actually) without XML.
Right. Now create a script to do it when the coder has forgotten to put any tabs in it at all, when the spacing is inconsistent, when there is a mixture of tabs and spaces. Create a script to move all curly braces onto their own lines. Create a script to remove all spaces before and after brackets. Create a script to rewrap long parameter lists onto new lines.
With XML, these are not issues, by definition. Not only are they not issues, they simply can never be. XML gets rid of this entire class of problems. It's like memory management... garbage collectors came along, and an entire class of problems just disappeared. (OK, GC is not a universal panacea, but it's a close analogy.)
(I do agree with your point, though. Insurance is the only industry where discriminatorally treating individuals as if they are responsible for the actions of others in their demographic is legal, and in fact is the norm.)
With insurance, as with all discrimination, there's a large silent majority (minority?) who likes it the way it is. For example, 30-40 year white females probably like having to pay a lower insurance rate. It's this majority that we have to convince, when we tell them that paying a higher rate of insurance is better than discriminating.
Unless you can convince the bean-counters to use an insurance model that doesn't require increasing insurance rates, some of which have been discussed here.
CPU power. IDEs tend to need a fast computer to work well, which is why vi is still so appealing to programmers. The "computers are so fast..." arguments always break down it seems.
It would require about as much CPU power as an HTML editor, since that's essentially what it would be. Less power, in fact, since you're probably not doing all this fancy formatting.
Since when did you need XML for this? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but doesn't Kate/Kdevelop do this already? I understand that many of you use that leprous shit of an editor that comes with Visual Studio. But that's no excuse to eliminate plain text source code. Get a real editor and stop dragging the rest of us down to your level.
Sigh.
The point is that editors like Kate or Kdevelop would use these behind the scenes, and as a developer, you wouldn't know any better. It would still look like a text editor. It would still work like a text editor. But underneath, in the bits you don't ever consider, it would be more sophisticated.
Do you think you're typing text into the Slashdot comments text box? That's certainly what it looks like, but underneath, your web browser is translating character entities and doing other mind-numbing encodings that you don't know about. Heck, underneath, your web browser is sending a stream of numbers to the web server. But you don't care about that, nor should you. The same goes for XML code. Should be completely transparent.
I should clarify.
You can already do all of the above. This is simply formalising it and saying, hey guys, this is the baseline from which to work. It also makes things trivial and lets you do things in a way that's not "the hard way".
You would never edit the raw XML of your source code, in fact, you would never even see it, any more than you would see the raw HTML of your web pages. (OK, so some people use notepad.exe to edit their web sites, but I ain't that hard.)
Advantages:
OK, not everybody will like this last idea (this is Slashdot, where half the population likes Emacs, and the other half likes vi), but it makes sense to me.
And, of course, for anybody who doesn't like XML, it's just a simple XSLT transform to get your original source code back.
You know what's interesting (IMHO) is that new software products have changed my (and others, I'd imagine) email profile. I used to be a user who filed frequently...
What I'm about to say has been said many times over, so I'll keep it brief...
In the early days of the Web, web sites were filed and categorised into huge directories with names like Yahoo. Then search engines like AltaVista and Google came along, and took off... showing that people would rather search for their stuff than follow a tedious filing structure.
Google is simply doing the same for e-mail, and who better to do it than the current search kings. Give it a few years, and you'll feel the same about filing your e-mail in folders as finding web sites in Yahoo.
(Which is not to say that it will be useless, just used... less.)
How would you define the "target market"? Would it be: "people who buy flash players"?
I would define it as "people who buy flash players who don't give a flying fuck about Ogg Vorbis". By definition, they don't care about Ogg Vorbis.
Yeah, and Bram Cohen even coded some of them.
According to the article, he was part of the dev team on Mojo Nation, one of the first "swarming" P2P apps. It had all sorts of cool ideas like micropayments, encryption and erasure coding for redundancy, but as the article alludes, it died because it was just too damn complicated. Contrast BitTorrent, which was one window to download your file.
It's possible to violate copyright with a lot of different items - cameras, CD Burners, pencil and paper, a photocopier, a scanner, etc. But - that's not exactly "newsworthy", is it?
For cameras, CD burners, pencil and paper, photocopiers, scanners, etc., copyright infringement is not the primary use (or at least the most popular use) of the tool. For BitTorrent, it is. (OK, perhaps CD burners too, but then, you could argue that a lot of that comes from BitTorrent...)
I could argue that the legal uses are numerous, and I can think of a number of sites like this one that have numerous, legal Torrent links, and looking at the traffic stats, Distrowatch gets a lot of hits.
Do you really believe that 35% of the Internet's traffic is people downloading Linux ISO files over BitTorrent? Or even if that counts for a significant fraction (say 5%)? You see things like 10,000+ users downloading a new-release game like Doom 3 or a new-release movie like Meet the Fockers, and it hits home. OK, it's not metrics. But it's strong anecdotal evidence to me.
MP3 files most definately have frames
Ever wondered why MP3 files aren't "gapless" and there are short gaps of silence between tracks that should otherwise run together? This is why. It's not a problem with your player; it's the way the MP3 spec works... it pads your sound file out to be a multiple of x samples.
No one is still insisting that Paperclip was better than Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Write (though I'm sure a few will as soon as I hit "submit")...
Hmm, I'll bite.
I submit that no big advances have been made to word processors in the last 10 years. (OK, this rules out Paperclip/GeoWrite/Superscript, but includes things like WriteNow, WordPerfect and MacWrite Pro.)
Put another way, you could use a word processor from 1994 (or 1995, depending on when you read this) and get along fine.
The most recent innovation at that time was the concept of style sheets. I don't think they've had any big innovations ever since. From memory, they had grammar checkers and squiggly red lines for misspellings at the time. What came after? Workflow features like tracking and revision control? Publishing to the Web? Nah, not significant.
Maybe one day this will happen with web browsers or (insert application of choice here): it'll become so complete that it doesn't need any more evolution.
If you look at Yeahronimo's website, there's talk about selling ringtones and realtones (presumably for cellphones).
I've often wondered why mobile phones don't embed a SID chip for their ringtones... it's a step above what most phones have, and the SID is capable of some pretty amazing sound effects. The SID isn't exactly expensive, either. Plus, all those game tunes as your ringtone!
Well, this would have been relevant back in 2003. Phones nowadays can play any arbitrary sampled sound (read: MP3) as a ringtone.
Nothing like finding yourself surrounded by a small army of the toughest aliens the game has to throw at you, and then suddenly a platoon teleports in to save yer ass.
Not only that... when you were in a big firefight with a bunch of aliens, and some of them got hit by friendly fire from other aliens, they'd break off from fighting you and turn on their own. I loved that!
And why would signing the code make it more secure?
OK, as we have established, code signing is a flimsy way of providing security or trust. I still think that the Firefox people should do it anyway.
Why? Well, the cert doesn't cost much ($695; they have a lot more in the coffers). You gain nothing except a tick and a nice green icon when Internet Explorer users try to download Firefox. This makes people feel more secure (illusion), and therefore more likely to install it.
Given that $695 isn't much, the certificate is well worth it for that reason alone. Sure, it doesn't buy you much, but you're not paying much. You have nothing to lose except some money and a bit of time. Provide it on top of all the md5sums and PGP signatures, which people can use when they really care.
Don't send it in the form of electricty..send it in the form of radiation energy just like how the Sun provides us energy wirelessly.
The problems with this are:
1) It's not hugely efficient with our current technology... the Sun provides us energy wirelessly, and our current photovoltaic cells are expensive and are 1-2% efficient (could be higher by the time you read this). There are other technologies, but they don't provide huge amounts of energy either, which leads us to...
2) If you increase the power, it becomes a hazard to anybody who walks in its path. Sunlight is hazardous enough; you don't want to get microwaved, burnt through with laser beams, etc. etc.
When developing Palm OS applications, there's a similar feature called Gremlins. You load your program into the Palm OS Emulator (or Simulator) on your computer - this is how you do most of your testing anyway. Give it a random number seed, and activate Gremlins.
It randomly taps all over the screen, fast. It pays special attention to buttons, menus, etc., but also taps on blank spaces. It types random characters into text fields, or sometimes for no reason. Sometimes it'll write fragments of Shakespeare... If your application survives a few million events, you can say with a good degree of certainty that it's reliable. If it doesn't, you get all the Palm debugging tools.
His device was defective. There is no background hiss with this device...
What kind of headphones do you have?
In my experience, the more sensitive your headphones, the more you'll pick up the background hiss. Standard earbuds won't get it at all. I have a set of Sony in-ear headphones, the same as the reviewer had, and get slight hiss from the electronics on my Dell. I also have a set of Audio-Technica headphones (one step up from consumer-grade), and on the same output, the hiss from my Dell drives me nuts.
Reviewer was using Shure E5c headphones, which are sensitive. So it's possible that he hears things you don't.
Or maybe he got a dodgy device.
...In practice, with even remotely accurate headphones this amount of EQ makes for incredibly overblown bass. I question whether anyone who finds this insufficient is qualified to make an audio quality judgement about anything.
That's intriguing.
On one hand, I don't doubt the credentials of the site you posted. On the other hand, the review was from Head-Fi, which is one of the big audiophile headphone forums (they review $2000+ headphones, as well as a whole bunch of lesser ones). And the reviewer was using Shure E5c headphones, which are high-end.
Maybe he didn't discover the equalizer settings. Hard to say.
But the point isn't to use PayPal to buy music from itms, it's to use PayPal to buy music from the American itms.
Right. As I said, people outside the US with PayPal accounts have tried to sign up but have been knocked back. So whilst you may want cheaper music, you're not getting it.
...why don't you organise a light party at your house...
I'm not so sure about this, from what I can gather, right now at his place it's an epileptic's nightmare. It might be cool for a few minutes, but a few hours and the influence of alcohol and I can see it being annoying.
He says that it's too bandwidth-intensive to stream video... and I believe him. Here's another idea: once a Slashdotting starts, put up a video camera and film it. The next day, when the webcam is off, start a torrent and share it around...
Can overseas buyers buy from iTunes USA @ USD 99 cents?
According to some other forums I've been reading, people outside the US with PayPal accounts have tried to sign up but have been knocked back. So I'm guessing that it's still US-only. (Maybe Apple will extend it to their international iTunes Music Stores in the future.)
Could work with a lot of other forums out there. Never tried coding it myself, but the technology is certainly there.
If Apple files a Cease & Desist order, then maybe there's some truth to it.
Not so. They could be doing it even though it's false, to muddy the waters. If they did so, it means that people can't take a "cease and desist" order as confirmation that it's true.
It's like companies not commenting on rumours. If they did, and started debunking obvious rumours, then people will think that any rumours they don't comment on are true by default.