Maybe I'm just letting myself get distracted by my housemates' 8 month old German Shepherd's efforts to do archaeology in our yard.
Several times I read "A dog will warm himself by the fire, but will never throw another log on it" as "never throw another dog on it" and so was infering that DaddyWanker was claiming dogs could make the moral distinction between inanimate fuel and other dogs, or maybe claiming that dogs are innately more moral than human arsonists if not crematorium operators.
Most dogs I've known can find better things to do with tree parts than accelerating greenhouse warming.
More on topic, one of my own sadly long departed dogs became quite good at taking any old branch and stripping it down until it was much better shaped for throwing and fetching, a toy maker if not a tool maker.
LIbrarians lead the way again
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
Three words: Inter Library Loans.
I am not a librarian, but half the time those of us who imagine being at the leading edge of computer technology run into a problem, we find that librarians found and addressed the same problem years earlier.*
From the article:
retailers will carry only content that can generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. But each can pull only from a limited local population - perhaps a 10-mile radius for a typical movie theater, less than that for music and bookstores, and even less (just a mile or two) for video rental shops
Inter-library loans and, even more particularly, searchable indexes spanning many academic libraries, have long provided one channel to make quite obscure books available to widely and thinly distributed autiences.
*A couple more examples
in the very early '80s, intrigued by the possibilities of online information services, I briefly joined the Australian Database Development Association which I soon discovered was driven by librarians.
Our vocal concerns over censorship trail along behind those that well organised library associations have long been expressing.
Of course like most IT types if it's not invented here we don't want to listen.
And I still buy Wired every month but rarely find time to open it:-(
The full context from the bottom of the linked Infoworld article:
E-voting has an inherent issue in that the voting public demands a high degree of certainty with the technology. "We ourselves are not going after the e-voting market or the nuclear reactor control market," Gates said.
makes that little admission a lot more significant.
It would appear to be a straightforward admission that M$ is incapable of delivering technologies embodying "a high degree of certainty".
Despite Welton and/. at large having declared Perl too uncool to mention, Perl still inconveniently produces a consistently high reponse on all measures, not as far behind C(++/#/etc) and proprietarily overpromoted Java as most everything else is behind Perl.
When was the last time anybody told you how good Perl is? It seems almost every other language has its band of zealots pushing it at any pretext, yet despite a complete absence of aggressive promotion, it seems people just keep using Perl.
Just for the record a simple Google search for "Perl" produces "about 22,300,000" results, the top 10 of which and thus presumably almost all of the rest unambiguously relating to the Perl programming language.
That search only produces one sponsored link, for generic hosting, underlining the fact that nobody is actually promoting Perl, with the nominal and quite narrow exceptions of ActiveState and O'Reilly.
I'm a logical Christian - I believe that the very definition of "god" implies infinite ability - and I don't believe it's my place to artificially limit His ability simply because it's too difficult to comprehend.
having just disclaimed...
I just don't believe that God chose to use evolution to create man. More specifically, the Bible says God created Man - it doesn't say HOW, but since it says He created us "in His image", I don't believe that leaves much room for "in the image of a monkey".
which fails "logical" at every step:
You admit your Bible doesn't say how, and immediately use that fact to arbitrarily exclude the only credible possibility.
You proclaim "in His image" and then insist that he not choose "the image of a monkey" as His own image when starting out on His logistical nightmare.
Definitions are not to be confused with facts. They are just a way to give a name to something, or meaning to a name. You need more than a definition to draw an implication.
BTW, I'm way post-logic and post-intelligence when it comes to trying to beneficially explore the possibilities of the world we find ourselves in. Neither logic nor intelligence have shown any sign of solving even a fraction of the problems that they are popularly expected to solve.
When explorations of the lands that were exposed during the last ice age begin we will discover new peoples and civilizations.
Archaeology is in a state of understandable denial about the importance of looking for evidence on the drowned margins of land masses, in a large part for the same reason that we have allowed marine ecosystems to become so much more degraded by our economic imperatives... because we do not so easily see what lies beneath the sea.
There is an accompanying problem that coastal wave action will have mangled most of the evidence of human expansion in the period when sea levels were rising after the peak of the last glaciation. But in the fullness of time we should at least be able to produce an accurate history of sea level change over that period and usably model related costal storm dynamics so as to narrow in on the most promising candidate submarine sites.
We need to clear our mind of what we know of our modern world in order to see that in very many circumstances through prehistory, a primitive boat would have been the most productive means of expanding into new territory. By comparison, travelling overland in the wild tropics is a particularly tortuous process. So it becomes unsurprising that those cultures which saw the seas as their highways would have spread further and faster.
This human journey is our greatest story.
We are still one species, so all those stories should be seen as parts of our story, not as something to be appropriated by a particular subculture. And we will only start to really appreciate the wealth of human prehistory when we let go of our speciest blinders and learn to respect and admire the different achievements of other critters with whom we share this ball of rock.
Ok, it's the last item of three in the rightmost of three columns near the bottom of the page, or at least it was for me.
That seems about fair, especially seeing as last time I tried it (0.8) I went back to the suite within minutes, and that despite having never wanted nor used a mail client integrated into my browser.
It's prolly safer I mention the authors list first which started out pleasantly nostalgic (Asimov, Wyndham) but took to number 9 to produce anybody (Herbert) who rated near as high on my list:
Frank Herbert David Zindell Douglas Adams William Gibson Isaac Asimov Robert Heinlein Larry Niven Greg Egan Vernor Vinge John Wyndham
I'm also first to admit that my taste in movies seems to be on another dimension from everybody else's, but I have to confess having already voluntarily watched Episode II at least as many times as I've watched any other movie, possibly equalled by Koyaanisqatsi and a movie staring Wil Wheaton, though I neither keep such records nor watch all that many movies.
I'd like it if there could be a database where if a subject header is reported as spam by one user it effects other users' scoring.
One of my accounts is a catch all for a domain which has gotten addresses misentered into both legitimate mailing lists and as the erroneous e-mail address of people who are copied and sometimes even directly addresses by genuine personal e-mails. But to me they are all equivalent to spam, so if I was reporting spam to some authoritative list there would likely be an outbreak of false positives.
Proponents of Process Physics claim that Einstien's original case for general relativity was built on a misinterpretation of critical 19th century experimental data and contend that the consequential abandonment of the ancient notion of Æther was wrong headed.
From their perspective, gravity should not be seen as a force field but rather as the cummulative effect of all massive bodies continuously absorbing/dissipating Æther. Locally the earth sucks most of the Æther and we experience the resulting downwards pressure.
I only had one mod point left to try to divide between the parent post, the grandparent post and at least a couple of others further up, so I'd better burn a few minutes and have one tenth part of the supporting rant I'm tempted towards.
If their basic needs (aren't*) met, they'll probably end up being mean to get what they need. However, if their needs are pretty much met, they can and will start to look after the needs of others.
*I'm guessing dj_virto mistyped "are" here when he meant the opposite.
If only it were so simple. There was a moment of hope and even greater humanity much more recently that the Victorian enlightenment: Woodstock, but even the ultimately sweeping victories of the anti-Vietnam war, civil rights, women's and gay movements could not prevent another resurgence of authoritarianism.
My problem with the paragraph I quoted above is that by any reasonable standards almost everybody in the west and even a good portion of the developing world really do not have any pressing needs, at least not if we leave aside our collective need to repay our debts to the natural world. What we all consider are our needs are things we have come to think we need through far too long in the comfort zone.
During the heady interlude of the late '60s and early '70s, tests for authoritarian tendencies were taught as an exemplar of psychology's ability to detect dysfunctionality. A third of a century later, we are bombarded by media insisting on party unity and strong leadership. Meanwhile standards of education and nurture fell away disproportionately for an underbelly which is increasingly happy to be told how to live their lives rather than think for themselves.
Ike's failed warning against the rise of the military industrial complex should have been paralleled by a similar warning about letting vital social safety nets metamorphise into the growth-seeking fear industries of today. Once upon a time the likes of the law and insurance were supposed to only be there for when things came unstuck, but they offered meal tickets to empire builders. In some areas they have even achieved budget growth effectively immune from prudential scrutiny, silencing dissent with their virulent proclamations about unspeakable evils to be vanquished.
And of course we all must have a job. How else can the growing underbelly gain a sense of self worth and avoid the destructive path to hopelessness? Jobs have also become a nice lazy way to redistribute a shrinking but still amply sufficient portion of the ever more devalued cash sloshing around the capitalist economies.
Time to get some new memes out there. Lets start by valuing "sharing" more than "saving" and "hobbies" more than "shopping".
Yet another case of SciFi blazing the trail for (suspect) science. In War in Heaven (1998), the final book of the follow up trilogy to his still largely overlooked classic Neverness, David Zindell writes:
"Because this secret is part of the Elder Eddas," Danlo said. "And the Eddas are believed to be encoded only in human DNA."
In truth, no one knew what the Elder Eddas really were. Supposedly, some fifty thousand years ago on Old Earth, the mythical Ieldra had written all their godly wisdom into the human genome.
Rather than humans being "Children of the Gods", Zindell has a few of us becoming "gods" and makes an almost convincing case that it would be an inescapable development in a universe with FTL travel.
Paul Davies usually does a pretty good job of representing the perspective of mainstream physics, even adding a few details from his own work, but this time he really seems to have gone out on a limb. While it's a great idea for a SciFi plot, it isn't going to take too many more species' genome maps to make the null hypothesis look very safe.
E.g. Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of the Life Cellular Automaton contains 236 animated GIFs.
With the patent expiry happening, I even developed a CGI script which inputs a particular subset of patterns written by Andrew Trevorrow's LifeLab and outputs an animation of however many generations and whatever display window is nominated, but I'm not about to invite a Slashdotting of a tool only designed for personal use and running on a limited capacity server.
The Melbourne Herald-Sun is so provincial that in the only issue I've had in my hands for yonks (needed to check a death notice) you had to get to page 25 for a single page of "World News" and blessedly only a solitary story on Iraq.
The real question is what inspired them to suddenly think of running something from the other side of the asteroid belt. Must have been the ultimate slow news day.
I don't actually mean to collect them but I can't break the habit of buying them, always at newsstands as I don't like subscriptions, and I can never find the heart to dump them.
Beyond New Scientist which I like more for its timeliness than its quality, I'm most likely to try to read National Geographic then, in descending order, Discover, Scientific American, Sportdiving and Wired.
While SVG is not switched on by default in official Mozilla builds, the code is checked into the Mozilla CVS repository and you can either build it yourself or download a binary for the most popular platforms. (my emphasis)
and provides clickable downloads for Mac OS X, Linux and Windoze.
I tried playing with the Mac build a couple of months back, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time.
If I had access to serious funding for software development, the first thing I would do would be hire somebody to work on finishing Moz SVG, but there are better reasons than that why I'm never likely to have such funding.
(I just used my mod points in another thread, so I gotta hope other mods recognise the parent post.)
In the world of self taught dabblers, NULL is not well enough understood to be expected to do anything more than cause the kind of problems you alude to with the likes of '-' to (partially) imply what NULL should be used for.
SQL has to coexist with other components where an empty string and a numeric zero are assumed null and treated accordingly, the quantity shipped example you give being just as easy to understand and implement with zero meaning not shipped as with a separate null (just add "where quanity shipped > 0").
There are also several possible reasons for a data value to be left NULL or undef, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Is it "not yet", "not known" or "not applicable"? In the real world we sometimes need to pair a status enum and a (numeric or string) value column to properly represent a single logical datum which needs to sometimes take state values not sensibly representable by numbers or strings.
We used to use a string of 9s in a numeric key field to represent end of data and even today Perl's DBI interface uses the 0E0 kludge to represent a "true" zero.
It's only 3 weeks since I posted more about this in my journal, so I won't try to do more than reiterate a couple of points here.
A ground up implementation of what is thought to be the Longhorn spec is probably not doable, no matter how many $billions, given the current state of the art of software engineering.
However at some point Microsoft will bring out something that they claim to be their next great operating system, but it will soon be shown to be just another a cobbled together incremental development.
So while I think two earlier respondents to the parent have made valid points, they haven't quite seen past the "just throw money at it" assumption about software development, to which Fred Brooks's Mythical Man Month still has something to say. (Another earlier respondent is just living in fantasy land, so I'm posting this as we don't have mod categories better than "interesting" for "half right" and "plain wrong".)
As far as our grand social systems are concerned, the people are indistinguishable from grey goo.
Those institutions we have created during the short history of civilisation -- government, finance, law, industry, commerce, media, academic, religious, military, sport, etc., etc. -- are as far removed from the cares of billions of individual humans as each human is from the billions of individual cells of her body.
As basically caring human beings, this is the hardest truth to swallow -- that we have all but lost the capacity to act, not even collectively, to substantially change the dynamics of those systems, systems which are inherently indifferent to our individual and our collective well being.
One area in which intentionality has been shown to be more efficient than nature had been previously is in the development of production systems, where we don't have the overheads of full reproduction and its requirement for endless mutable copies of an encoding of the design.
So while it would most likely be possible over a long history of evolving design to produce a reproducing molecular (nano) system an order of magnitude more efficient than bacteria, pushing micro efficiency too far would most likely fail to produce components with sufficient adaptability to do anything we or our systemic masters might consider useful.
It appears that two decades on Drexler is finally conceding the likelihood of the scenario that some of us saw as soon as the overwhelming optimism of Engines of Creation started to lose its immediacy -- that the development of automated production processes for not just nano components but also nano component factories is likely to be much easier than the development of reproducing nanobots. That should remove any lingering incentive to tackle the hard problem of nanobot reproduction, even if possible exponential production was still imagined to have potential advantages over proven polynomial production.
Some of these arguments might get turned on their head if we can ever bootstrap a robotic economy off planet, but that is another topic.
On this planet, resource constraints have so far always found ways to keep some kind of check on exponential reproduction. Whether that will continue to apply to certain ethereal products of "the system" is an open question.
Sure I would also like the form improvements that WHAT WG are promising, but I've already got a bag of tools which do pretty much all I really need in that direction, as ugly a hack as CGI might be.
But until SVG is fully integrated into a browser and the DOM, the most important projects that have built up over a lifetime still cannot get started, and the stuff I have been working towards is only a tiny fraction of the potential applications of object graphics, an almost endless territory I became a lot more aware of in early PostScript days when potential players were attracted like bees to a honeypot.
Most people seem to have convinced themselves that SVG is primarily a more open alternative to Flash, but I see it being far more important that SVG bring the interactivity of the Web to areas which nowadays are mostly represented by static PDFs, obviously beyond print previewing.
It's really quite strange, when so much of the heritage of cooperative development came out of the technical research communities, that all that half of the current generation seems to want to do is reemulate a very tired set of office applications.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a meaningful schematic diagram is worth ten thousand and a manipulable schematic diagram would be worth a hundred thousand.
While Flash could technically be used for such tasks it suffers from PDF's failure of not playing nicely with the browser model at the next level, and from a whole lot of historic perceptions.
For a brief moment earlier this year it appeared that the Mozilla team was going to get serious about SVG. There is another "last" opportunity during the Longhorn FUD to make some real inroads against the monopolist.
If we can finally get SVG to the point where we can seriously start building a technical visualisation web then I may not have to go to my grave with quite so many incomplete projects.
The development pathway that unites all animals includes a stage in which a viable (usually fertilised) egg cell (zygote) divides a number of times to form a ball of cells (morula, blastula) gradually differentiating because of (dorsal/ventral etc.) gradients in (HOX) gene expression.
Sponges (porifera) are a likely candidate for the oldest surviving animal lineage, potentially dating from the recently annointed Ediacaran Epoch through the Cambrian explosion, so called because the basic developmental forms of animals diversified wildly in a (geologically) short time.
Hermaphroditic sponges produce sperm and eggs at different times, obviating themselves, and thus the last common ancestor of all sexually reproducing animals, from any requirement for different male and female phenotypes.
Sexual dimorphism came later and very differently in different taxa.
Such "all or nothing" questions are a standard intellectual trap for people who cannot see the overwhelming evidence for the fact of evolution, a fact that various theories strive to account for without ever needing to overturn the core Darwinian insight that everything alive today is the product of a very long history of variation and selection from multitudinous common ancestors.
It was great to see really good use being made of SVG, but I let myself get sidetracked by some of the technical comments elsewhere in this thread and managed to blow away my browser, so I'm writing this before attempting a second look.
Having used the smallest possible amount of non-animated SVG on one of my own sites, I some time ago settled on the still current release Mozilla (1.6) with the Adobe plug in, because the SVG build for Mac really isn't there yet. There was a brief period in which I was checking some of my stuff with Safari first, but once I fixed my code there was nothing that Safari did better than Moz, so I switched back to the only standards compliant browser that shows on my and my clients' traffic stats. (5-25% for those who must know, and not near all mine!)
At first Moz seemed not to be keen to actually finish loading the page linked from the submission, most likely because our DSL is having a bad afternoon, so I booted Safari which loaded it completely quite quickly, by which time Moz had finished too. Safari also showed a couple of the animations, which Moz started on and then gave up (spinning cursor) so I quit Safari and still had to kill Moz.
It was the comment about alpha not rendering that particulary intrigued me as one of the really pleasing discovery for me in recent works is that Unicode characters really work in my set up, though I haven't gone so far as to try to use them within SVG yet.
I belatedly posted more of my continuing hopes for SVG in another thread the other day and won't repeat them here.
I'm sorry but just because you can't see it does not mean that SVG does not have the potential to make your goal of accessing information a whole lot more efficient, once it is sufficiently deployed and a new generation of creative people have had a chance to develop with it.
Sure there will be those who abuse SVG to do cheap Flash imitations, but you can kill somebody with a hammer too.
What you need to think about is areas where many people still find a pencil and paper or a whiteboard easier to use than a computer, and that starts with diagrams. Words alone often have a lot of trouble telling you what a simple diagram can make perfectly clear.
It is an unfortunate accident of history that when the original Macintosh came out, Bill Atkinson's neat trick (MacPaint) beat the promised object oriented MacDraw to market by many months and the Mac offered independent Font, Style and Size menus unmediated by styles, thus setting expectations about graphical computer interfaces back for 20 years and counting. Then we got the Web with two raster formats and no object graphics and Web representation of useful graphical information was left stranded in the too hard basket.
I recently bit the bullet on an esoteric website and put as SVG diagram on the front page, along with other things like Unicode characters that seriously test the limits of browser and system support, but that SVG for now must rely on a plug in for viewing and is only one tenth of one percent of what I'd be trying to do if the tools were in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm just letting myself get distracted by my housemates' 8 month old German Shepherd's efforts to do archaeology in our yard.
Several times I read "A dog will warm himself by the fire, but will never throw another log on it" as "never throw another dog on it" and so was infering that DaddyWanker was claiming dogs could make the moral distinction between inanimate fuel and other dogs, or maybe claiming that dogs are innately more moral than human arsonists if not crematorium operators.
Most dogs I've known can find better things to do with tree parts than accelerating greenhouse warming.
More on topic, one of my own sadly long departed dogs became quite good at taking any old branch and stripping it down until it was much better shaped for throwing and fetching, a toy maker if not a tool maker.
I am not a librarian, but half the time those of us who imagine being at the leading edge of computer technology run into a problem, we find that librarians found and addressed the same problem years earlier.*
From the article:Inter-library loans and, even more particularly, searchable indexes spanning many academic libraries, have long provided one channel to make quite obscure books available to widely and thinly distributed autiences.
*A couple more examples
- in the very early '80s, intrigued by the possibilities of online information services, I briefly joined the Australian Database Development Association which I soon discovered was driven by librarians.
- Our vocal concerns over censorship trail along behind those that well organised library associations have long been expressing.
Of course like most IT types if it's not invented here we don't want to listen.And I still buy Wired every month but rarely find time to open it:-(
It would appear to be a straightforward admission that M$ is incapable of delivering technologies embodying "a high degree of certainty".
Like p0rn isn't still the biggest driver of the net nor the one least disrupted by the bubble?
/.'s regular featuring of Paul Graham's essays. There really isn't anybody better going around at the moment.
The moderators must be suffering a severe case of literalism.
And I for one celebrate
Despite Welton and /. at large having declared Perl too uncool to mention, Perl still inconveniently produces a consistently high reponse on all measures, not as far behind C(++/#/etc) and proprietarily overpromoted Java as most everything else is behind Perl.
When was the last time anybody told you how good Perl is? It seems almost every other language has its band of zealots pushing it at any pretext, yet despite a complete absence of aggressive promotion, it seems people just keep using Perl.
Just for the record a simple Google search for "Perl" produces "about 22,300,000" results, the top 10 of which and thus presumably almost all of the rest unambiguously relating to the Perl programming language.
That search only produces one sponsored link, for generic hosting, underlining the fact that nobody is actually promoting Perl, with the nominal and quite narrow exceptions of ActiveState and O'Reilly.
- You admit your Bible doesn't say how, and immediately use that fact to arbitrarily exclude the only credible possibility.
- You proclaim "in His image" and then insist that he not choose "the image of a monkey" as His own image when starting out on His logistical nightmare.
- Definitions are not to be confused with facts. They are just a way to give a name to something, or meaning to a name. You need more than a definition to draw an implication.
BTW, I'm way post-logic and post-intelligence when it comes to trying to beneficially explore the possibilities of the world we find ourselves in. Neither logic nor intelligence have shown any sign of solving even a fraction of the problems that they are popularly expected to solve.There is an accompanying problem that coastal wave action will have mangled most of the evidence of human expansion in the period when sea levels were rising after the peak of the last glaciation. But in the fullness of time we should at least be able to produce an accurate history of sea level change over that period and usably model related costal storm dynamics so as to narrow in on the most promising candidate submarine sites.
We need to clear our mind of what we know of our modern world in order to see that in very many circumstances through prehistory, a primitive boat would have been the most productive means of expanding into new territory. By comparison, travelling overland in the wild tropics is a particularly tortuous process. So it becomes unsurprising that those cultures which saw the seas as their highways would have spread further and faster.We are still one species, so all those stories should be seen as parts of our story, not as something to be appropriated by a particular subculture. And we will only start to really appreciate the wealth of human prehistory when we let go of our speciest blinders and learn to respect and admire the different achievements of other critters with whom we share this ball of rock.
Ok, it's the last item of three in the rightmost of three columns near the bottom of the page, or at least it was for me.
That seems about fair, especially seeing as last time I tried it (0.8) I went back to the suite within minutes, and that despite having never wanted nor used a mail client integrated into my browser.
You could only ever expect his ads to be misleading.
Case closed!
It's prolly safer I mention the authors list first which started out pleasantly nostalgic (Asimov, Wyndham) but took to number 9 to produce anybody (Herbert) who rated near as high on my list:
Frank Herbert
David Zindell
Douglas Adams
William Gibson
Isaac Asimov
Robert Heinlein
Larry Niven
Greg Egan
Vernor Vinge
John Wyndham
I'm also first to admit that my taste in movies seems to be on another dimension from everybody else's, but I have to confess having already voluntarily watched Episode II at least as many times as I've watched any other movie, possibly equalled by Koyaanisqatsi and a movie staring Wil Wheaton, though I neither keep such records nor watch all that many movies.
Books tell most stories better.
Proponents of Process Physics claim that Einstien's original case for general relativity was built on a misinterpretation of critical 19th century experimental data and contend that the consequential abandonment of the ancient notion of Æther was wrong headed.
From their perspective, gravity should not be seen as a force field but rather as the cummulative effect of all massive bodies continuously absorbing/dissipating Æther. Locally the earth sucks most of the Æther and we experience the resulting downwards pressure.
My problem with the paragraph I quoted above is that by any reasonable standards almost everybody in the west and even a good portion of the developing world really do not have any pressing needs, at least not if we leave aside our collective need to repay our debts to the natural world. What we all consider are our needs are things we have come to think we need through far too long in the comfort zone.
During the heady interlude of the late '60s and early '70s, tests for authoritarian tendencies were taught as an exemplar of psychology's ability to detect dysfunctionality. A third of a century later, we are bombarded by media insisting on party unity and strong leadership. Meanwhile standards of education and nurture fell away disproportionately for an underbelly which is increasingly happy to be told how to live their lives rather than think for themselves.
Ike's failed warning against the rise of the military industrial complex should have been paralleled by a similar warning about letting vital social safety nets metamorphise into the growth-seeking fear industries of today. Once upon a time the likes of the law and insurance were supposed to only be there for when things came unstuck, but they offered meal tickets to empire builders. In some areas they have even achieved budget growth effectively immune from prudential scrutiny, silencing dissent with their virulent proclamations about unspeakable evils to be vanquished.
And of course we all must have a job. How else can the growing underbelly gain a sense of self worth and avoid the destructive path to hopelessness? Jobs have also become a nice lazy way to redistribute a shrinking but still amply sufficient portion of the ever more devalued cash sloshing around the capitalist economies.
Time to get some new memes out there. Lets start by valuing "sharing" more than "saving" and "hobbies" more than "shopping".
Rather than humans being "Children of the Gods", Zindell has a few of us becoming "gods" and makes an almost convincing case that it would be an inescapable development in a universe with FTL travel.
Paul Davies usually does a pretty good job of representing the perspective of mainstream physics, even adding a few details from his own work, but this time he really seems to have gone out on a limb. While it's a great idea for a SciFi plot, it isn't going to take too many more species' genome maps to make the null hypothesis look very safe.
E.g. Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of the Life Cellular Automaton contains 236 animated GIFs.
With the patent expiry happening, I even developed a CGI script which inputs a particular subset of patterns written by Andrew Trevorrow's LifeLab and outputs an animation of however many generations and whatever display window is nominated, but I'm not about to invite a Slashdotting of a tool only designed for personal use and running on a limited capacity server.
The Melbourne Herald-Sun is so provincial that in the only issue I've had in my hands for yonks (needed to check a death notice) you had to get to page 25 for a single page of "World News" and blessedly only a solitary story on Iraq.
The real question is what inspired them to suddenly think of running something from the other side of the asteroid belt. Must have been the ultimate slow news day.
I don't actually mean to collect them but I can't break the habit of buying them, always at newsstands as I don't like subscriptions, and I can never find the heart to dump them.
Beyond New Scientist which I like more for its timeliness than its quality, I'm most likely to try to read National Geographic then, in descending order, Discover, Scientific American, Sportdiving and Wired.
And I still miss Mondo 2000.
I tried playing with the Mac build a couple of months back, but it wasn't quite ready for prime time.
If I had access to serious funding for software development, the first thing I would do would be hire somebody to work on finishing Moz SVG, but there are better reasons than that why I'm never likely to have such funding.
(I just used my mod points in another thread, so I gotta hope other mods recognise the parent post.)
In the world of self taught dabblers, NULL is not well enough understood to be expected to do anything more than cause the kind of problems you alude to with the likes of '-' to (partially) imply what NULL should be used for.
SQL has to coexist with other components where an empty string and a numeric zero are assumed null and treated accordingly, the quantity shipped example you give being just as easy to understand and implement with zero meaning not shipped as with a separate null (just add "where quanity shipped > 0").
There are also several possible reasons for a data value to be left NULL or undef, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Is it "not yet", "not known" or "not applicable"? In the real world we sometimes need to pair a status enum and a (numeric or string) value column to properly represent a single logical datum which needs to sometimes take state values not sensibly representable by numbers or strings.
We used to use a string of 9s in a numeric key field to represent end of data and even today Perl's DBI interface uses the 0E0 kludge to represent a "true" zero.
It's only 3 weeks since I posted more about this in my journal, so I won't try to do more than reiterate a couple of points here.
A ground up implementation of what is thought to be the Longhorn spec is probably not doable, no matter how many $billions, given the current state of the art of software engineering.
However at some point Microsoft will bring out something that they claim to be their next great operating system, but it will soon be shown to be just another a cobbled together incremental development.
So while I think two earlier respondents to the parent have made valid points, they haven't quite seen past the "just throw money at it" assumption about software development, to which Fred Brooks's Mythical Man Month still has something to say. (Another earlier respondent is just living in fantasy land, so I'm posting this as we don't have mod categories better than "interesting" for "half right" and "plain wrong".)
As far as our grand social systems are concerned, the people are indistinguishable from grey goo.
Those institutions we have created during the short history of civilisation -- government, finance, law, industry, commerce, media, academic, religious, military, sport, etc., etc. -- are as far removed from the cares of billions of individual humans as each human is from the billions of individual cells of her body.
As basically caring human beings, this is the hardest truth to swallow -- that we have all but lost the capacity to act, not even collectively, to substantially change the dynamics of those systems, systems which are inherently indifferent to our individual and our collective well being.
One area in which intentionality has been shown to be more efficient than nature had been previously is in the development of production systems, where we don't have the overheads of full reproduction and its requirement for endless mutable copies of an encoding of the design.
So while it would most likely be possible over a long history of evolving design to produce a reproducing molecular (nano) system an order of magnitude more efficient than bacteria, pushing micro efficiency too far would most likely fail to produce components with sufficient adaptability to do anything we or our systemic masters might consider useful.
It appears that two decades on Drexler is finally conceding the likelihood of the scenario that some of us saw as soon as the overwhelming optimism of Engines of Creation started to lose its immediacy -- that the development of automated production processes for not just nano components but also nano component factories is likely to be much easier than the development of reproducing nanobots. That should remove any lingering incentive to tackle the hard problem of nanobot reproduction, even if possible exponential production was still imagined to have potential advantages over proven polynomial production.
Some of these arguments might get turned on their head if we can ever bootstrap a robotic economy off planet, but that is another topic.
On this planet, resource constraints have so far always found ways to keep some kind of check on exponential reproduction. Whether that will continue to apply to certain ethereal products of "the system" is an open question.
Sure I would also like the form improvements that WHAT WG are promising, but I've already got a bag of tools which do pretty much all I really need in that direction, as ugly a hack as CGI might be.
But until SVG is fully integrated into a browser and the DOM, the most important projects that have built up over a lifetime still cannot get started, and the stuff I have been working towards is only a tiny fraction of the potential applications of object graphics, an almost endless territory I became a lot more aware of in early PostScript days when potential players were attracted like bees to a honeypot.
Most people seem to have convinced themselves that SVG is primarily a more open alternative to Flash, but I see it being far more important that SVG bring the interactivity of the Web to areas which nowadays are mostly represented by static PDFs, obviously beyond print previewing.
It's really quite strange, when so much of the heritage of cooperative development came out of the technical research communities, that all that half of the current generation seems to want to do is reemulate a very tired set of office applications.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a meaningful schematic diagram is worth ten thousand and a manipulable schematic diagram would be worth a hundred thousand.
While Flash could technically be used for such tasks it suffers from PDF's failure of not playing nicely with the browser model at the next level, and from a whole lot of historic perceptions.
For a brief moment earlier this year it appeared that the Mozilla team was going to get serious about SVG. There is another "last" opportunity during the Longhorn FUD to make some real inroads against the monopolist.
If we can finally get SVG to the point where we can seriously start building a technical visualisation web then I may not have to go to my grave with quite so many incomplete projects.
Bacteria exchange genetic material.
Viruses mediate the exchange of genetic material.
The development pathway that unites all animals includes a stage in which a viable (usually fertilised) egg cell (zygote) divides a number of times to form a ball of cells (morula, blastula) gradually differentiating because of (dorsal/ventral etc.) gradients in (HOX) gene expression.
Sponges (porifera) are a likely candidate for the oldest surviving animal lineage, potentially dating from the recently annointed Ediacaran Epoch through the Cambrian explosion, so called because the basic developmental forms of animals diversified wildly in a (geologically) short time.
Hermaphroditic sponges produce sperm and eggs at different times, obviating themselves, and thus the last common ancestor of all sexually reproducing animals, from any requirement for different male and female phenotypes.
Sexual dimorphism came later and very differently in different taxa.
Such "all or nothing" questions are a standard intellectual trap for people who cannot see the overwhelming evidence for the fact of evolution, a fact that various theories strive to account for without ever needing to overturn the core Darwinian insight that everything alive today is the product of a very long history of variation and selection from multitudinous common ancestors.
It was great to see really good use being made of SVG, but I let myself get sidetracked by some of the technical comments elsewhere in this thread and managed to blow away my browser, so I'm writing this before attempting a second look.
Having used the smallest possible amount of non-animated SVG on one of my own sites, I some time ago settled on the still current release Mozilla (1.6) with the Adobe plug in, because the SVG build for Mac really isn't there yet. There was a brief period in which I was checking some of my stuff with Safari first, but once I fixed my code there was nothing that Safari did better than Moz, so I switched back to the only standards compliant browser that shows on my and my clients' traffic stats. (5-25% for those who must know, and not near all mine!)
At first Moz seemed not to be keen to actually finish loading the page linked from the submission, most likely because our DSL is having a bad afternoon, so I booted Safari which loaded it completely quite quickly, by which time Moz had finished too. Safari also showed a couple of the animations, which Moz started on and then gave up (spinning cursor) so I quit Safari and still had to kill Moz.
It was the comment about alpha not rendering that particulary intrigued me as one of the really pleasing discovery for me in recent works is that Unicode characters really work in my set up, though I haven't gone so far as to try to use them within SVG yet.
I belatedly posted more of my continuing hopes for SVG in another thread the other day and won't repeat them here.
Sure there will be those who abuse SVG to do cheap Flash imitations, but you can kill somebody with a hammer too.
What you need to think about is areas where many people still find a pencil and paper or a whiteboard easier to use than a computer, and that starts with diagrams. Words alone often have a lot of trouble telling you what a simple diagram can make perfectly clear.
It is an unfortunate accident of history that when the original Macintosh came out, Bill Atkinson's neat trick (MacPaint) beat the promised object oriented MacDraw to market by many months and the Mac offered independent Font, Style and Size menus unmediated by styles, thus setting expectations about graphical computer interfaces back for 20 years and counting. Then we got the Web with two raster formats and no object graphics and Web representation of useful graphical information was left stranded in the too hard basket.
I recently bit the bullet on an esoteric website and put as SVG diagram on the front page, along with other things like Unicode characters that seriously test the limits of browser and system support, but that SVG for now must rely on a plug in for viewing and is only one tenth of one percent of what I'd be trying to do if the tools were in place.