If you ask google about "most widely spoken languages", you can find a number of good articles on the topic. Currently the first hit is http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm, which gives a number of rankings of the top languages, depending on just how you phrase the question. They point out that the number of native speakers isn't necessarily the best way to judge the importance of a language. By that simple measure, Mandarin is the top language. But it isn't used much outside of east Asia. English, French and Spanish have fewer native speakers, but are more important in most of the world, for a number of reasons.
Anyway, you can learn a lot of interesting stuff about the topic by reading a few of the things in the above google search. It's a lot more complex than you might think, especially if you live in one of the parts of the world (e.g. the US) where most everyone speaks the same language.
If they start using Chinese names it'll be us, "latin speakers", who'll be confined to our "own language and make our sites inaccesible to the rest of the world".
Not really. English has been the official second language in China for some time now, a required part of the curriculum in the school systems. The young people in China routinely sprinkle English into their speech, often in the form of prefixes and suffixes attached to Chinese words. In Chinese text, it's common to see little bursts of Latin characters here and there.
A "Chinese" DNS system would have no problems at all with Latin inclusions, and at least the younger people wouldn't be the least bit puzzled by such things. Our Latin-only sites would be quite accessible to them. It's only our own insularity that would make their part of the Internet inaccessible to us. (And don't look too closely, or you may notice the people in the West who have been studying those inscrutable Eastern languages for some time.;-)
Then there are the ones written vertically, like Japanese and Chinese - yikes!:-)
Actually, the national specs for how Japanese and Chinese are written include horizontal left-to-right as one of the two standard layouts. True, both were primarily written vertically (starting at the upper right), and there are still publications that do that. But the European horizontal printing convention has long since been decreed legal and standard in all the countries that use Chinese characters, and it's widely used.
It's no big deal, actually. Consider that it's not unusual to see English written vertically, mostly on signs hanging above the sidewalk in front of buildings. Few English-speaking people have any trouble reading those signs. Why would you think that the Japanese or Chinese would have any trouble with their language written horizontally?
(Well, OK; the Chinese used to also write horizontally from right to left. But you mostly only see that in museums and a few historic buildings nowadays, plus the equivalent of "Ye Olde ____ Shoppe" signs.;-)
Backwards compatibility with existing systems that don't support UTF-8 but still need to make DNS queries.
Well, on a couple of projects I've tested the software for the ability to handle UTF-8, and I've been duly impressed by how hard it has been to find anything that fails. In the few rare cases where there's a problem, it has usually taken a one-line change to fix it: You add code to classify all the bytes above 0x7F as a "letter". Typically that's just one pattern or range check, only a few extra characters in one line of code.
A curious case: A year or so back, I was working on some CSS that handled Chinese and Japanese text, mostly by defining classes that used a bigger font for those chunks. Just for fun, I gave those classes Chinese names, spelled with Chinese chars of course. I tested it with all the browsers I could get my hands on. I couldn't find one that didn't handle those class names correctly. I was surprised (and impressed) by this. But I eventually realized that, given the previous paragraph, I shouldn't have been surprised. The code that parses the CSS probably just dumbly looks for all the syntax chars in CSS, and everything else is "just text". Maybe I'll test this by writing some CSS with ASCII control chars as the names of classes. My prediction is that if I don't use and of the usual (\b, \n, \r, \t or \0), it'll work.
Sometime the dumbest approach works best. If your code just thinks everything above 0x7F is a letter (or unanalyzed text), it'll probably work with any encoding that preserves the meaning of ASCII chars. The only likely exceptions are for code that has to actually render the text for human legibility, and most of the world's software doesn't ever do that.
(I also experimentally wrote some C code that included variables with Chinese Japanese and Arabic names, as UTF-8 Unicode. The couple of compilers I fed it to compiled it without even any warnings. But somehow I suspect that this won't be true for all current C compilers.;-)
UTF-8 Unicode is easy to code for. It's usually harder to not handle it correctly.
Now, if the US Postal Service could figure out a way to make money by reading your mail, they might have done that, say in 1790. No, there wasn't any way to do this in 1790...
Actually, it was well understood by then how a mail carrier could profit by reading the mail carrier. That's why common-carrier laws existed then. Such laws date back to at least the 14th century, and probably earlier.
The scenario is fairly straightforward. Say that Prince A and Prince B are communicating by letters carried by your delivery service. You also deal with Prince C, know that he'd like to learn what A and C are writing to each other. So you quietly let C know that, for a price, you can have your carrier make a copy of their letters, and hand them to another carrier who will deliver them to C. (I was tempted to call them Alice, Bill, etc.;-)
The problem with this system is that eventually A and/or C may become aware of this commerce on the side. When this happens, the result is that A and C might kill your couriers. There was also a related problem that various princes sometimes responded to messages that they didn't like by killing the courier. Dead couriers aren't good for business, and once the news gets out, they're hard to replace. It's also not good for politics, because pretty soon those princes can't buy courier service from anyone. If the princes are unable to communicate, pretty soon they're starting wars, and you're likely to be part of the collateral damage (as the US DoD so nicely phrases it).
This is why the common-carrier concept was developed. It was basically an agreement between the courier services and the princes (and other powerful people). We agree that our couriers won't open any package under any circumstances, and will notify you if a brigand steals the mail. In exchange, you promise not to kill any of our couriers, which is reasonable because they won't be permitted to know the contents of the messages they are delivering to or for you. If you violate your pact and kill a courier, we will inform all the services, and your messages will become instant commodities, for sale to your enemies. If we violate our part, we expect you'll treat us the same way. We all have an interest in reliable communication between princes, so we'll all uphold our side of the agreement.
This was quite well understood in 1790, and was why such things were written into law right away. Actually, it wasn't really needed, since the default laws in the US were British Common Law until the Congress passed new laws. British Common Law already had a lot of stuff dealing with common carriers, and it was all US law from the start. But they did find it useful for Congress to officially pass new American laws, because they did have a bit of a problem like we have now. Parts of the new country's government didn't see the necessity of enforcing these laws. We'd just made ourselves independent, hadn't we? So it was obviously OK to look for traitors by reading the mail of every suspect. Uh, no, it wasn't, for exactly the same reasons that princes A, B anc C had agreed to such contracts with their carriers centuries earlier.
It's an old, old problem. We found a solution to it many centuries ago, in the form of laws that protect carriers on the condition that they not read the the contents of any messages. This setup has been violated frequently, and the result is usually disastrous for everyone involved. We're facing yet another situation where the parties to a communication scheme don't understand this, and the courts aren't enforcing such rules. Once again, we have to learn the hard way how it is that humans can solve this problem and make communication safe for all parties (especially the carriers).
And we still have the problem that it is potentially profitable for the carriers to make "commercial use" of the content of messages. Yes, it's profitable, in the short term. In the long term, however, it's suicide for the carrier, as th
Speaking of bookmarks, when I installed SM 2.0, it of course used the bookmarks from the previous SM version. But what I'd like to do is compare it with firefox, which I've been using a lot and thus have a big pile of bookmarks.
So is there any way now that I can tell SM to load FF's bookmarks, without throwing away all my old SM bookmarks? I poked around in the bookmarks stuff a bit, but couldn't find it. I suppose I could trash my SM bookmarks and SM entirely, and do a clean install, but then I'd lose my SM bookmarks, and I'd like to be able to use them, too.
It has always been a bit annoying to know that with directories of files, such things are essentially trivial. The browsers all implement a very file-and-directory sort of bookmark scheme, but they don't have any of the usual commands for copying files or directories of files around. I can use scp to copy directories of files between computers, but I can't copy bookmarks similarly between browsers, even on a single computer. It's another case where it'd be nice if the metaphor actually worked.
We've seen this sort of "logic" before, and often. The general principle is "When a computer becomes involved, all precedent is forgotten, and centuries of hard-learned lessons must be learned all over again." I've forgotten who first pointed this out, but it's a useful thing to remember.
It took many centuries, and many deaths, for the freedoms that most of the "first-world" countries have were encoded in their laws. But over and over, we've found that the courts don't apply those laws to anything that involves a computer. It takes a good list of horror stories about the actions of ISPs and other people in positions of power, plus new laws, to get the older Real World laws applied to anything involving a computer. This is just one example of many.
It's sorta funny that computers, which are the ultimate in relentless, unforgiving, mechanical logic, have an effect on humans that can be characterized as destroying our ability to use logic as simple as saying that everything we knew before still applies when there's a computer in the vicinity.
In most of the First World, it's illegal for a postal or other delivery employee to open a package and make notes on the content. There are good historic reasons for this. It's interesting to read the history of the concept of "common carrier", and understand why it came to be. People did literally die before these rules went into effect, as the result of people opening and reading the contents of messages in transit, and selling the information to interested parties. This history isn't a secret. But when its a computer transferring messages, the carriers are permitted to inspect the contents and sell the information to interested parties. This will eventually lead to laws applying the common-carrier rules to computerized communications. But this will only happen after the same sort of disasters that led to the common-carrier rules for written, printed and analog telephone communications.
The only scheme that's stable over the long term is that "carriers" of messages should not be allowed to use the contents of the messages for any purpose. In exchange for this, the people in power agree to not punish the carriers for the contents of any delivered messages. Anything else will eventually be a disaster for the people in power, when they learn too late that the carriers have made "commercial" use of the contents of messages to/from powerful people.
This isn't a hypothetical scenario; it is exactly what led to the common-carrier laws in the past. Things like this court decision just shorten the time until such disasters occur. And it's all due to our mysterious inability to remember and apply historic precedent when there's a computer involved.
Not that I think of Bush as a jock, but he certainly wasn't a nerd/geek. There should probably be three categories, 'jock','nerd','loser/lamer'
Maybe Americans should pick up on the Brits' "UCT" label. It stands for "Upper Class Twit", and George W is pretty much a prototype for the label. Check with Monty Python for more information about UCTs.
It used to be the case that a lot of people would pay for their daily newspaper. How much are you paying for your online news these days?
About $60/month, roughly the same (correcting for inflation) that a newspaper used to cost. How about you?
Of course, I get a few other things (other than ads) for that $60, in addition to news that's much better than any newspaper ever delivered around here.
I've been a bit bemused by the growing panic over the loss of the newspapers. Why do people think it's important that we buy a newspaper? What's magic about the paper? I easily find much better news coverage on the Web than I ever saw printed on paper. Of course, I had to do a bit of study to find some good sources. (Hint: news.google.com is a useful starting point that will lead you in 1 or 2 clicks to thousands of news sources). I also subscribe to several scientific publications online, because they're figuring out how to do it right, and they have a lot of the news that's actually significant.
But I fail to see why the loss of paper news formats is a major problem. Nobody ever bought a newspaper because they wanted the cheap paper, did they? If the news organizations can't adapt to a new distribution medium, and insist that it has to be on paper to be real news, why should we take them seriously?
I've also been a bit curious about all the claims that the internet is wiping out the newspapers by providing a free alternative. Where do you get internet service for free? Well, OK, there are occasional open wifi access points. But even then, they're usually in places like cafes that expect you to pay something if you're gonna sit there and read. Seriously, if you think online news is free, explain to the rest of us how to get free internet service in our homes, with our breakfast.
The US gov is just facilitating capitalism, and let it get it way through yet another financial crisis, but it just does not seem to have any effect what so ever to Corporation America.
Oh, I dunno about that. A year or so ago there were lots of big companies facing a disaster, and they were talking about firing much of their top management. Now those companies are reporting huge profits, and the top management is getting millions of dollars (per person) in bonuses. And it was all paid for from donations by the US Government.
Seriously, analysts have reported that those billions of dollars that went to corporations who were "too big to [be allowed to] fail" went mostly to 1) officer bonuses, 2) stockholder dividends, and 3) purchasing smaller companies. Hardly any of it went into investment in capital resources or infrastructure. It went straight to the bank accounts of people running the companies (and the smaller competitors who were bought out). This doesn't sound like not having "any effect what so ever"; it sounds like a major job of propping up some large companies and their top people (and helping them get rid of small competitors).
At least that's how it's being reported by much of the US media. It's interesting to see which parts of the media present this as a case of "welfare for the rich, nothing for the poor who are still losing jobs", and which parts frame it as the government heroically saving the leaders of the corporate world. It's pretty easy to find both attitudes. But nobody seems to think that the government has done nothing significant.
Yup. It's the Mayan Y2K bug. Good thing their calendar is based on mechanical circles. People discussing a 2012 apocalypse are discussing where a circle begins and ends.
Pretty much. And it's even stupider than that.
The 2012 date is when the Mayan base-20 calendar overflows from (as the common translation to decimal notation would say) 12.19.19.18.4 to 13.0.0.0.0. The 5-digit date is actually 3 years plus a 2-digit day withing the year; that's why that funny 18.4 is the end of a year. 18*20+4=364, which is the last day of the year if you start counting at zero as the Mayan calendar does. (They ignore the extra.24 day in the solar year, so their New Year day slowly drifts over the centuries.)
Overflowing to 13.0.0.0.0 is sorta like our year overflowing to 2000/1/1, of course. But it's obviously not the end of the calendar; that will be at 19.19.19.18.4, some 2400 years later. And even then, the Mayan calendar doesn't really end. There are some old inscriptions implying that the 5-digit date was considered a truncation, and it should have 2 or more likely 3 more high-order digits. So people using the Mayan calendar will just have to stop dropping 3 digits, and use at least one more. So 19.19.19.18.4 will be followed by 1.0.0.0.0.0, which will look sorta cool on the stelae that will no doubt be erected to celebrate the occasion.
Anyway, even with 5 digits for the year instead of 3, we have a few million years until the calendar runs out, and if 6 digits is the correct length, the Mayan calendar will probably outlive our species.
Base 20 numbers do use a lot fewer digits than base 10, especially when you get to big numbers.
Eating nothing but rabbit will give you protein poisoning.
Actually, that's only true for wild or "free range" domestic rabbits that get exercise. Rabbits raised in cages generally have enough fat to prevent protein poisoning, which is mostly due to eating protein without fat. This is the origin of the old practice of adding bacon to various kinds of meat, since before modern prison-style production methods most meat was fairly low in fat.
Of course, the cage-raised rabbits don't have much flavor to speak of. Sorta like chicken, y'know. I've had some squab (pigeon) that was similarly fatty and tasteless.
But we do need the veggies for their vitamins (and flavor) content. Humans just weren't designed to survive on a simple diet. We're mandatory omnivores, mostly because we need so many different kinds of trace substances that aren't all available from any single source. Your dog or cat can survive eating nothing but rodents or small birds, but you can't.
Finally, the issues or rotted with US has the worst telecommunication business model, capitalism really suck shit and just does not work for the people!
Well, that's just silly. Capitalism isn't supposed to work "for the people". It's supposed to work for the shareholders and top management. If you're working for "the people", you're a socialist, which is a theory that has been firmly rejected by the American political system. If you've been reading slashdot long, you should have read about a zillion explanations of this by now. Anyway, stick around, and eventually you'll reach enlightenment, and it'll all make sense.
Like Marxism, [libertarianism] aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics.
Actually, this isn't quite accurate. A few years ago, when my wife was working on her Econ degree, she had a lot of interesting comments about an ongoing discussion of the position of Marxism inside the economics community. The basis of the discussions was that in the econ field's ongoing attempts to appear scientific, there is a general understanding that a primary test of a scientific theory is whether it can successfully make predictions about the real world. It's a bit of an embarrassment that some of the "Marxist" economists (both self-acknowledged and externally labelled;-) have by far the best track record for accurate predictions. The reason for this seems clear: The "Marxists" don't model human behavior solely on money; they also consider power as a primary motivator. In fact, they tend to treat money as a proxy for power, rather than as a goal in itself. What tends to come out in the behind-the-scene discussions is that this is right, and it makes sense of a lot of economic behavior that others can't explain, but you can't publicly say that in any clear terms. If you do, you get labelled a Marxist, which in much of the current "first world" is the kiss of death to any professional career in economics.
There seems to be a background conjecture among economists that their field can't become a real science until they find a way to overcome this terminological problem. Some attempts have been made to introduce alternative, isomorphic terminology, but people tend to see through this and label you Marxist. It's possible that the field just has to wait for the emotional and political reactions to the word "Marxist" to die out. But considering how long such reactions to insult terms like "fascist" and "nazi" have hung on, this could be long after we're all gone from this mortal plane. OTOH, hardly anyone knows what "fascist" or "nazi" mean these days, and people are getting away with pushing similar policies under different names without much fear of being labelled for what they are. Similarly, "Marxist" may similarly reduce to just a meaningless insult word in the near future, in which case the approach may be revived under a different name with nobody understanding the fact, possibly leading to an improvement in the predictive powers of some economics theories.
In a few discussions with her associates, I've suggested that economics, like politics, simply can't be made scientific, due to our innate inability to view such things in a detached, objective manner. But of course, I'm not an economist (or a politician;-); I'm just one of those weird computer geeks, so my comments are instantly discarded as not relevant, and I go back into lurk mode.
(She's working as a data cruncher in the medical field now, and getting more and more worried about what's going on in the American medical "industry". We might be in for some fun times in the next decade or so. If we survive; which isn't guaranteed by the models.;-)
I could get plenty of stuff for free, but I choose not to.
Yeah; I still keep up my AAAS membership, which I've hardly ever used for anything except reading Science. OK; I did take advantage of the discount that you get with things like this Macbook Pro.;-) But there are still some things worth subscribing to. YMMV, of course.
OTOH, we've long since canceled our subscription to the local paper (the Boston Globe), because frankly it's news has been surpassed by news.google.com, in content if not in format. And, um, we also subscribe to nytimes.com...
But I did think it was sorta funny seeing people talking about DVDs. Doncha know they're obsolete now? Even if you're responsible and pay for them. Well, at least I thought I'd respond with something appropriately flippant, even though we still have a DVD player, and as with CDs, DVDs are useful if you want to keep a copy of a movie. My wife does have a small DVD collection, but nothing like the size of the music CD collection (which is entirely read into our computers and functions as backup and for migrating to a new machine).
Now if there were only better ways of ensuring that the money we pay for CDs and DVDs ends up mostly in the hands of the artists, rather than in the fat pockets of the big corporations that still mostly control the distribution channels.
... how do you expect the games industry (or any industry beyond OS and productivity software) to work in that model? That would be like getting millions of big budget movies for free just because you bought a DVD player.
Hey, you don't buy a DVD. You buy (or rent) an Internet connection, and then you can get any of those movies for free any time you want.
It's sorta like software, y'know. Movies and games are just a bunch of bits.
Might be one way to convince the religious right... "We must stop homocentric warming!"
Of course, most people of the "religious right" would probably interpret "homocentric warming" as meaning something about gay people getting all hot, which is something they'd definitely agree should be stopped.
There's gotta be an instance of Rule 34 inside there somewhere...
Funny, my experience with the iPhone (which my wife has) is rather different. We keep finding that on most web pages, including pages I've written that are just text with no width=, height=, size=, or any css that forces sizes, either the text is too tiny to read, or when we enlarge it, the "window" becomes much larger than the screen, so we have to scroll around to read it. It's really awful.
OTOH, I have a G1 (Android) phone, and when I use any of its methods to resize things, its browser usually automatically reformats things so that the window is no wider than the screen, and the only scrolling you need to do is vertical. This is a lot easier to read than something that requires 2-dimensional scrolling.
One problem is that on the iPhone, lots of poking around haven't turned up anything that controls font size or anything related. Maybe it's there, but we're both just too dumb to find it. I'd guess that this is a problem for other iPhone users, too, since it's heavily marketed at non-geeks. What we'd like to say is "Make the text a bit larger, and reformat it to fit within the screen's margins." That's what other browsers usually do; it's strange that Safari on the iPhone doesn't. Or maybe we just haven't found the Setting that controls it.
Maybe others don't mind having the screen a tiny window into a much larger page, so you have to constantly scroll left and right to read a single line of text. But I find that very annoying, and a good reason to avoid the iPhone. I am a bit mystified by people who like it. Do they actually use Safari? Or do they just use iPhone apps, and think that those are browsers?
Perhaps a better way to express it is: Your resume can be as long as you think is necessary to describe your experience. But you should be aware that very few hiring managers will read past the first page. So the first page should list the experiences that you would like managers to know about when they're deciding whether to hire you.
The rest of your resume may be read (or skimmed) by lower-level managers (and your friends), and it may be searched for keywords by HR's software, but it usually won't contribute significantly to any hiring decisions.
This may all be disregarded if you know that the company's hiring managers are intelligent and knowledgeable in the company's field. Such people do tend to read entire resumes, and even understand them. This mostly applies to the smallest companies, since in large companies hiring is done by professional managers, not by people knowledgeable in their subject area.
Disagree, if the OS tricks you out of common sense, then it's a terrible OS, not clever.
Ah, but you're thinking in terms like "logic", "usability", "user-friendly", or some other such good design.
What I was doing was explicitly treating programming as a game, in which the programmers and "system" builders are opponents, with each team trying to defeat the other team's nefarious plans. That way, you avoid explicitly calling the others by insulting words. You pretend they are "honorable opponents". Of course, if you're interested in good, usable software, this is a terrible way to view it. But I've found that many software developers can really relate to the adversarial view of their undertaking. A lot of things in "the system" make a lot more sense if you think in terms of an opponent force that is actively trying to defeat you.
An add-on comment that I've found also gets knowing grins is that I much prefer to work on unix-like systems, because I've found that I can usually win at the Programming Game when working on them. As unix's detractors will tell you, the people who build unix systems are generally a poorly-organized, bumbling lot, and their best evidence of this is that the parts of those systems tend to be simple and logical, without very many of the surprises that are lurking in other systems. So programmers can often write things that "Just Work" the first time. This is proof that the system builders aren't trying very hard. Either that, or they're all a bunch of simple-minded people who can't handle the complexity of most other computer systems.
(Actually, it's because on unix systems, the designers and builders are also the programmers and users, so they're playing for both teams. But it's fairly clear that in most industrial software development, as in sports, this is considered "cheating". In commercial software development, you are usually not permitted to talk directly to end users, and you only rarely get to communicate with customers' software people. This partitioning into two teams is quite intentional, and is an effective way to prevent your developers from "playing for the other side".;-)
Apple's multitouch trackpads on their current notebook lines have it right.
Oh, I dunno; I've had a Macbook Pro for a few months now, and I find the trackpad frustrating. Most of the stuff I do involves typing text into various windows. I find that I can't type at any speed without accidentally touching the trackpad. So as I type, the windows frequently resize or rotate their contents, and I have to stop what I'm doing to restore the window to the right size and orientation. Yes, I do have the "ignore accidental input" thingy checked; it doesn't seem to do much to alleviate this problem.
In fact, they are so good that I wish they would sell a stand alone trackpad to add onto a desktop keyboard.
Actuall, that might be a lot better. A standalone trackpad with a wired connection could be moved to a position where I can type without touching the trackpad. I wonder if such a trackpad could be plugged into a Macbook, too. Of course, one of the points of a laptop is portability, and if it's like most "portable" mice or those add-on keyoards for handhelds, I probably wouldn't find it something convenient to carry around. But it's something to think about.
So, what would you regexp for if all you had was a ":"? Normal text quite often does contain colons....
Back in the early 1980s, before the folks at CERN gave us the first browser, there was another notation that was implemented by an assortment of networking software. It originated, as far as I can tell, with The Newcastle Connection (from the U of Newcastle-upon-Tyne" in England), one of the first fully-distributed unix file systems. What it did conceptually was to define a conceptual network directory one level above your root directory, named "/../". So to reference a file on machine X.Y.Z, you'd use a path like "/../X.Y.Z/...". The actual server on each machine typically wouldn't export its "/" directory, but rather would do what web servers do, and supply only a server-root directory (which could also be mounted by other machines by the unix mount command). So if you tried to access the file/../X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt, you'd get the file that the remote machine had at/server-root/some/dir/foo.txt, so files outside the/server-root/ directory would be invisible to outsiders.
This is, of course, merely another syntax for what the WWW calls "http://X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt", but without the protocol field. The TPC implementation made the file readable or writable, depending on what the permission module allowed, via the usual open(), read(), write(), etc. library routines. This meant that all of the software on your machine was automatically able to use accessible files on other machines without any special coding. As with the Web, you just needed the machine name and the file's location relative to the server-root directory.
The advantage of the Web's "http://" notation, of course, is that it allow the explicit use of different protocols. TNC's "/../" notation doesn't do that; the implementation gives direct access via the usual file-system routines, and hides the comm protocol inside the kernel's file-system code just as is done with local file I/O.
Note that the "/../" notation isn't any more difficult to match than "http://", and it's a string that's equally unlikely to occur anywhere but in a TNC-style file reference. And note that there's no problem with adding a ":port" to the machine name with either notation.
I've sometimes wondered why various browsers, especially the mozilla suite, haven't quietly implemented TNC notation and invited users to start using it. You don't need permission from any standards body to do this. It would only take a few lines of new code, wherever the software parses URLs. You'd have to add "/\.\./" as an alternative to "(\w*)://" at the start of the match, and make 'HTTP' the default protocol if omitted. While you're at it, add another * after the//, so omitting the second / will also work. But that's probably too user-friendly for any real web developer to bother implementing.;-)
(Actually, I've done this in a few projects that I've worked on. It doesn't break anything, and when people see that notation, they usually really like it and the new conceptual model of the Net that it puts into their mind. The Net becomes just a large, slow bus connecting millions of machines and their disks, joining them into one huge virtual computer. Replacing a big, messy communication protocol with a big, tree-structured file system gives a major reduction in complexity and points to a much easier way to do things.)
But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet--logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging?
I can't see where you got that quote from, since it's not in the summary or any other message I can see. But in any case, it's totally wrong. When the term "Internet" was first officially defined, around 1980 or so, and on its predecessor the ARPAnet, there was no logging on/of for the Internet. Since the mid-1970s at least, it has always-on, and email has always been instantaneous from a human viewpoint. The only delay back then was how long it took for the recipient to notice that they had a message, type a reply, and send it. Of course, they might have been away from their machine, which is still true, or they might be too busy to check their emial. But those are true of IM and the other modern schemes that are nothing more than the original email design with a different name.
The main reason that people ever talk about "logging on/off the Internet" is because when the Internet became available to the latecomers using Microsoft software, DOS and Windows couldn't implement Internet email correctly, because they couldn't run servers. Until 1995 or so, they couldn't even connect directly to the Internet; they had to connect via modem to a "server" machine somewhere. So the original design of an end-to-end connection and a file copy couldn't be implemented on those machines, and we had to come up with the kludge of using a third-party "server" machine to store the email until the MS system called up and asked for it. This was also forced on a lot of the rest of us by ISPs that had (and often still have) a "no servers allowed" rule, which was (and still is) a total violation of the Internet's design docs (the RFCs).
If anything, it's the IM, twitter, Facebook, etc. crowds that are the clumsy ones, because they all depend on a third-party server that saves your message,and often depend on time-wasting polling by your machine to deliver the messages. And they still do nothing at all about the fact that the recipient can ignore the message, or can read it but wait a while to reply, perhaps because they want to give you a good, thoughtful reply rather than just dashing off the first thing that comes to their mind.
In any case, if your Internet service and email work like the RFCs say it should, email sent use the RFC 821 standard protocol (dated August 1982) should be faster than IM, Facebook or twitter. The sender's machine will connect to yours, the message will be transmitted, and it'll be on your machine it a few milliseconds, as it was in 1982. If your messaging system is slower than this, it's incredibly badly designed, and can't even match a 27-year-old Internet standard that's now considered obsolete. If your ISP or OS can't (or refuses to) do even that, you're not using a modern messaging system; you're using something that's so badly engineered that Internet users back in the early 1980s would have laughed at it.
(Yes, I know that email back then was often a lot slower. But I also remember working on a project in 1983, in which we timed Internet email between machines scattered around North America. If we dropped the numbers for machines that were offline during the test, the mean delivery time for messages of a few hundred bytes was around one second. Connecting to other continents wasn't good at the time, and the first try usually failed for them, so the email became "store and forward" via an almost-always-on server. So the Internet itself, when all the links in the path were live, was capable of delivering messages within a second. The main problem was the frequent lack of connectivity. It got worse in the early 1990s as people started using modems for Internet access.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you ask google about "most widely spoken languages", you can find a number of good articles on the topic. Currently the first hit is http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm, which gives a number of rankings of the top languages, depending on just how you phrase the question. They point out that the number of native speakers isn't necessarily the best way to judge the importance of a language. By that simple measure, Mandarin is the top language. But it isn't used much outside of east Asia. English, French and Spanish have fewer native speakers, but are more important in most of the world, for a number of reasons.
Anyway, you can learn a lot of interesting stuff about the topic by reading a few of the things in the above google search. It's a lot more complex than you might think, especially if you live in one of the parts of the world (e.g. the US) where most everyone speaks the same language.
If they start using Chinese names it'll be us, "latin speakers", who'll be confined to our "own language and make our sites inaccesible to the rest of the world".
Not really. English has been the official second language in China for some time now, a required part of the curriculum in the school systems. The young people in China routinely sprinkle English into their speech, often in the form of prefixes and suffixes attached to Chinese words. In Chinese text, it's common to see little bursts of Latin characters here and there.
A "Chinese" DNS system would have no problems at all with Latin inclusions, and at least the younger people wouldn't be the least bit puzzled by such things. Our Latin-only sites would be quite accessible to them. It's only our own insularity that would make their part of the Internet inaccessible to us. (And don't look too closely, or you may notice the people in the West who have been studying those inscrutable Eastern languages for some time. ;-)
Then there are the ones written vertically, like Japanese and Chinese - yikes! :-)
Actually, the national specs for how Japanese and Chinese are written include horizontal left-to-right as one of the two standard layouts. True, both were primarily written vertically (starting at the upper right), and there are still publications that do that. But the European horizontal printing convention has long since been decreed legal and standard in all the countries that use Chinese characters, and it's widely used.
It's no big deal, actually. Consider that it's not unusual to see English written vertically, mostly on signs hanging above the sidewalk in front of buildings. Few English-speaking people have any trouble reading those signs. Why would you think that the Japanese or Chinese would have any trouble with their language written horizontally?
(Well, OK; the Chinese used to also write horizontally from right to left. But you mostly only see that in museums and a few historic buildings nowadays, plus the equivalent of "Ye Olde ____ Shoppe" signs. ;-)
Backwards compatibility with existing systems that don't support UTF-8 but still need to make DNS queries.
Well, on a couple of projects I've tested the software for the ability to handle UTF-8, and I've been duly impressed by how hard it has been to find anything that fails. In the few rare cases where there's a problem, it has usually taken a one-line change to fix it: You add code to classify all the bytes above 0x7F as a "letter". Typically that's just one pattern or range check, only a few extra characters in one line of code.
A curious case: A year or so back, I was working on some CSS that handled Chinese and Japanese text, mostly by defining classes that used a bigger font for those chunks. Just for fun, I gave those classes Chinese names, spelled with Chinese chars of course. I tested it with all the browsers I could get my hands on. I couldn't find one that didn't handle those class names correctly. I was surprised (and impressed) by this. But I eventually realized that, given the previous paragraph, I shouldn't have been surprised. The code that parses the CSS probably just dumbly looks for all the syntax chars in CSS, and everything else is "just text". Maybe I'll test this by writing some CSS with ASCII control chars as the names of classes. My prediction is that if I don't use and of the usual (\b, \n, \r, \t or \0), it'll work.
Sometime the dumbest approach works best. If your code just thinks everything above 0x7F is a letter (or unanalyzed text), it'll probably work with any encoding that preserves the meaning of ASCII chars. The only likely exceptions are for code that has to actually render the text for human legibility, and most of the world's software doesn't ever do that.
(I also experimentally wrote some C code that included variables with Chinese Japanese and Arabic names, as UTF-8 Unicode. The couple of compilers I fed it to compiled it without even any warnings. But somehow I suspect that this won't be true for all current C compilers. ;-)
UTF-8 Unicode is easy to code for. It's usually harder to not handle it correctly.
Now, if the US Postal Service could figure out a way to make money by reading your mail, they might have done that, say in 1790. No, there wasn't any way to do this in 1790 ...
Actually, it was well understood by then how a mail carrier could profit by reading the mail carrier. That's why common-carrier laws existed then. Such laws date back to at least the 14th century, and probably earlier.
The scenario is fairly straightforward. Say that Prince A and Prince B are communicating by letters carried by your delivery service. You also deal with Prince C, know that he'd like to learn what A and C are writing to each other. So you quietly let C know that, for a price, you can have your carrier make a copy of their letters, and hand them to another carrier who will deliver them to C. (I was tempted to call them Alice, Bill, etc. ;-)
The problem with this system is that eventually A and/or C may become aware of this commerce on the side. When this happens, the result is that A and C might kill your couriers. There was also a related problem that various princes sometimes responded to messages that they didn't like by killing the courier. Dead couriers aren't good for business, and once the news gets out, they're hard to replace. It's also not good for politics, because pretty soon those princes can't buy courier service from anyone. If the princes are unable to communicate, pretty soon they're starting wars, and you're likely to be part of the collateral damage (as the US DoD so nicely phrases it).
This is why the common-carrier concept was developed. It was basically an agreement between the courier services and the princes (and other powerful people). We agree that our couriers won't open any package under any circumstances, and will notify you if a brigand steals the mail. In exchange, you promise not to kill any of our couriers, which is reasonable because they won't be permitted to know the contents of the messages they are delivering to or for you. If you violate your pact and kill a courier, we will inform all the services, and your messages will become instant commodities, for sale to your enemies. If we violate our part, we expect you'll treat us the same way. We all have an interest in reliable communication between princes, so we'll all uphold our side of the agreement.
This was quite well understood in 1790, and was why such things were written into law right away. Actually, it wasn't really needed, since the default laws in the US were British Common Law until the Congress passed new laws. British Common Law already had a lot of stuff dealing with common carriers, and it was all US law from the start. But they did find it useful for Congress to officially pass new American laws, because they did have a bit of a problem like we have now. Parts of the new country's government didn't see the necessity of enforcing these laws. We'd just made ourselves independent, hadn't we? So it was obviously OK to look for traitors by reading the mail of every suspect. Uh, no, it wasn't, for exactly the same reasons that princes A, B anc C had agreed to such contracts with their carriers centuries earlier.
It's an old, old problem. We found a solution to it many centuries ago, in the form of laws that protect carriers on the condition that they not read the the contents of any messages. This setup has been violated frequently, and the result is usually disastrous for everyone involved. We're facing yet another situation where the parties to a communication scheme don't understand this, and the courts aren't enforcing such rules. Once again, we have to learn the hard way how it is that humans can solve this problem and make communication safe for all parties (especially the carriers).
And we still have the problem that it is potentially profitable for the carriers to make "commercial use" of the content of messages. Yes, it's profitable, in the short term. In the long term, however, it's suicide for the carrier, as th
Speaking of bookmarks, when I installed SM 2.0, it of course used the bookmarks from the previous SM version. But what I'd like to do is compare it with firefox, which I've been using a lot and thus have a big pile of bookmarks.
So is there any way now that I can tell SM to load FF's bookmarks, without throwing away all my old SM bookmarks? I poked around in the bookmarks stuff a bit, but couldn't find it. I suppose I could trash my SM bookmarks and SM entirely, and do a clean install, but then I'd lose my SM bookmarks, and I'd like to be able to use them, too.
It has always been a bit annoying to know that with directories of files, such things are essentially trivial. The browsers all implement a very file-and-directory sort of bookmark scheme, but they don't have any of the usual commands for copying files or directories of files around. I can use scp to copy directories of files between computers, but I can't copy bookmarks similarly between browsers, even on a single computer. It's another case where it'd be nice if the metaphor actually worked.
Anyone know how to do it?
We've seen this sort of "logic" before, and often. The general principle is "When a computer becomes involved, all precedent is forgotten, and centuries of hard-learned lessons must be learned all over again." I've forgotten who first pointed this out, but it's a useful thing to remember.
It took many centuries, and many deaths, for the freedoms that most of the "first-world" countries have were encoded in their laws. But over and over, we've found that the courts don't apply those laws to anything that involves a computer. It takes a good list of horror stories about the actions of ISPs and other people in positions of power, plus new laws, to get the older Real World laws applied to anything involving a computer. This is just one example of many.
It's sorta funny that computers, which are the ultimate in relentless, unforgiving, mechanical logic, have an effect on humans that can be characterized as destroying our ability to use logic as simple as saying that everything we knew before still applies when there's a computer in the vicinity.
In most of the First World, it's illegal for a postal or other delivery employee to open a package and make notes on the content. There are good historic reasons for this. It's interesting to read the history of the concept of "common carrier", and understand why it came to be. People did literally die before these rules went into effect, as the result of people opening and reading the contents of messages in transit, and selling the information to interested parties. This history isn't a secret. But when its a computer transferring messages, the carriers are permitted to inspect the contents and sell the information to interested parties. This will eventually lead to laws applying the common-carrier rules to computerized communications. But this will only happen after the same sort of disasters that led to the common-carrier rules for written, printed and analog telephone communications.
The only scheme that's stable over the long term is that "carriers" of messages should not be allowed to use the contents of the messages for any purpose. In exchange for this, the people in power agree to not punish the carriers for the contents of any delivered messages. Anything else will eventually be a disaster for the people in power, when they learn too late that the carriers have made "commercial" use of the contents of messages to/from powerful people.
This isn't a hypothetical scenario; it is exactly what led to the common-carrier laws in the past. Things like this court decision just shorten the time until such disasters occur. And it's all due to our mysterious inability to remember and apply historic precedent when there's a computer involved.
Not that I think of Bush as a jock, but he certainly wasn't a nerd/geek. There should probably be three categories, 'jock','nerd','loser/lamer'
Maybe Americans should pick up on the Brits' "UCT" label. It stands for "Upper Class Twit", and George W is pretty much a prototype for the label. Check with Monty Python for more information about UCTs.
It used to be the case that a lot of people would pay for their daily newspaper. How much are you paying for your online news these days?
About $60/month, roughly the same (correcting for inflation) that a newspaper used to cost. How about you?
Of course, I get a few other things (other than ads) for that $60, in addition to news that's much better than any newspaper ever delivered around here.
I've been a bit bemused by the growing panic over the loss of the newspapers. Why do people think it's important that we buy a newspaper? What's magic about the paper? I easily find much better news coverage on the Web than I ever saw printed on paper. Of course, I had to do a bit of study to find some good sources. (Hint: news.google.com is a useful starting point that will lead you in 1 or 2 clicks to thousands of news sources). I also subscribe to several scientific publications online, because they're figuring out how to do it right, and they have a lot of the news that's actually significant.
But I fail to see why the loss of paper news formats is a major problem. Nobody ever bought a newspaper because they wanted the cheap paper, did they? If the news organizations can't adapt to a new distribution medium, and insist that it has to be on paper to be real news, why should we take them seriously?
I've also been a bit curious about all the claims that the internet is wiping out the newspapers by providing a free alternative. Where do you get internet service for free? Well, OK, there are occasional open wifi access points. But even then, they're usually in places like cafes that expect you to pay something if you're gonna sit there and read. Seriously, if you think online news is free, explain to the rest of us how to get free internet service in our homes, with our breakfast.
The US gov is just facilitating capitalism, and let it get it way through yet another financial crisis, but it just does not seem to have any effect what so ever to Corporation America.
Oh, I dunno about that. A year or so ago there were lots of big companies facing a disaster, and they were talking about firing much of their top management. Now those companies are reporting huge profits, and the top management is getting millions of dollars (per person) in bonuses. And it was all paid for from donations by the US Government.
Seriously, analysts have reported that those billions of dollars that went to corporations who were "too big to [be allowed to] fail" went mostly to 1) officer bonuses, 2) stockholder dividends, and 3) purchasing smaller companies. Hardly any of it went into investment in capital resources or infrastructure. It went straight to the bank accounts of people running the companies (and the smaller competitors who were bought out). This doesn't sound like not having "any effect what so ever"; it sounds like a major job of propping up some large companies and their top people (and helping them get rid of small competitors).
At least that's how it's being reported by much of the US media. It's interesting to see which parts of the media present this as a case of "welfare for the rich, nothing for the poor who are still losing jobs", and which parts frame it as the government heroically saving the leaders of the corporate world. It's pretty easy to find both attitudes. But nobody seems to think that the government has done nothing significant.
Yup. It's the Mayan Y2K bug. Good thing their calendar is based on mechanical circles. People discussing a 2012 apocalypse are discussing where a circle begins and ends.
Pretty much. And it's even stupider than that.
The 2012 date is when the Mayan base-20 calendar overflows from (as the common translation to decimal notation would say) 12.19.19.18.4 to 13.0.0.0.0. The 5-digit date is actually 3 years plus a 2-digit day withing the year; that's why that funny 18.4 is the end of a year. 18*20+4=364, which is the last day of the year if you start counting at zero as the Mayan calendar does. (They ignore the extra .24 day in the solar year, so their New Year day slowly drifts over the centuries.)
Overflowing to 13.0.0.0.0 is sorta like our year overflowing to 2000/1/1, of course. But it's obviously not the end of the calendar; that will be at 19.19.19.18.4, some 2400 years later. And even then, the Mayan calendar doesn't really end. There are some old inscriptions implying that the 5-digit date was considered a truncation, and it should have 2 or more likely 3 more high-order digits. So people using the Mayan calendar will just have to stop dropping 3 digits, and use at least one more. So 19.19.19.18.4 will be followed by 1.0.0.0.0.0, which will look sorta cool on the stelae that will no doubt be erected to celebrate the occasion.
Anyway, even with 5 digits for the year instead of 3, we have a few million years until the calendar runs out, and if 6 digits is the correct length, the Mayan calendar will probably outlive our species.
Base 20 numbers do use a lot fewer digits than base 10, especially when you get to big numbers.
Eating nothing but rabbit will give you protein poisoning.
Actually, that's only true for wild or "free range" domestic rabbits that get exercise. Rabbits raised in cages generally have enough fat to prevent protein poisoning, which is mostly due to eating protein without fat. This is the origin of the old practice of adding bacon to various kinds of meat, since before modern prison-style production methods most meat was fairly low in fat.
Of course, the cage-raised rabbits don't have much flavor to speak of. Sorta like chicken, y'know. I've had some squab (pigeon) that was similarly fatty and tasteless.
But we do need the veggies for their vitamins (and flavor) content. Humans just weren't designed to survive on a simple diet. We're mandatory omnivores, mostly because we need so many different kinds of trace substances that aren't all available from any single source. Your dog or cat can survive eating nothing but rodents or small birds, but you can't.
Finally, the issues or rotted with US has the worst telecommunication business model, capitalism really suck shit and just does not work for the people!
Well, that's just silly. Capitalism isn't supposed to work "for the people". It's supposed to work for the shareholders and top management. If you're working for "the people", you're a socialist, which is a theory that has been firmly rejected by the American political system. If you've been reading slashdot long, you should have read about a zillion explanations of this by now. Anyway, stick around, and eventually you'll reach enlightenment, and it'll all make sense.
Like Marxism, [libertarianism] aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics.
Actually, this isn't quite accurate. A few years ago, when my wife was working on her Econ degree, she had a lot of interesting comments about an ongoing discussion of the position of Marxism inside the economics community. The basis of the discussions was that in the econ field's ongoing attempts to appear scientific, there is a general understanding that a primary test of a scientific theory is whether it can successfully make predictions about the real world. It's a bit of an embarrassment that some of the "Marxist" economists (both self-acknowledged and externally labelled ;-) have by far the best track record for accurate predictions. The reason for this seems clear: The "Marxists" don't model human behavior solely on money; they also consider power as a primary motivator. In fact, they tend to treat money as a proxy for power, rather than as a goal in itself. What tends to come out in the behind-the-scene discussions is that this is right, and it makes sense of a lot of economic behavior that others can't explain, but you can't publicly say that in any clear terms. If you do, you get labelled a Marxist, which in much of the current "first world" is the kiss of death to any professional career in economics.
There seems to be a background conjecture among economists that their field can't become a real science until they find a way to overcome this terminological problem. Some attempts have been made to introduce alternative, isomorphic terminology, but people tend to see through this and label you Marxist. It's possible that the field just has to wait for the emotional and political reactions to the word "Marxist" to die out. But considering how long such reactions to insult terms like "fascist" and "nazi" have hung on, this could be long after we're all gone from this mortal plane. OTOH, hardly anyone knows what "fascist" or "nazi" mean these days, and people are getting away with pushing similar policies under different names without much fear of being labelled for what they are. Similarly, "Marxist" may similarly reduce to just a meaningless insult word in the near future, in which case the approach may be revived under a different name with nobody understanding the fact, possibly leading to an improvement in the predictive powers of some economics theories.
In a few discussions with her associates, I've suggested that economics, like politics, simply can't be made scientific, due to our innate inability to view such things in a detached, objective manner. But of course, I'm not an economist (or a politician ;-); I'm just one of those weird computer geeks, so my comments are instantly discarded as not relevant, and I go back into lurk mode.
(She's working as a data cruncher in the medical field now, and getting more and more worried about what's going on in the American medical "industry". We might be in for some fun times in the next decade or so. If we survive; which isn't guaranteed by the models. ;-)
... they don't trust ESRB ratings do they?
Wait ... Eric (S) Raymond's Blog has ratings of phone apps now? I gotta check this out ...
I could get plenty of stuff for free, but I choose not to.
Yeah; I still keep up my AAAS membership, which I've hardly ever used for anything except reading Science. OK; I did take advantage of the discount that you get with things like this Macbook Pro. ;-) But there are still some things worth subscribing to. YMMV, of course.
OTOH, we've long since canceled our subscription to the local paper (the Boston Globe), because frankly it's news has been surpassed by news.google.com, in content if not in format. And, um, we also subscribe to nytimes.com ...
But I did think it was sorta funny seeing people talking about DVDs. Doncha know they're obsolete now? Even if you're responsible and pay for them. Well, at least I thought I'd respond with something appropriately flippant, even though we still have a DVD player, and as with CDs, DVDs are useful if you want to keep a copy of a movie. My wife does have a small DVD collection, but nothing like the size of the music CD collection (which is entirely read into our computers and functions as backup and for migrating to a new machine).
Now if there were only better ways of ensuring that the money we pay for CDs and DVDs ends up mostly in the hands of the artists, rather than in the fat pockets of the big corporations that still mostly control the distribution channels.
... how do you expect the games industry (or any industry beyond OS and productivity software) to work in that model? That would be like getting millions of big budget movies for free just because you bought a DVD player.
Hey, you don't buy a DVD. You buy (or rent) an Internet connection, and then you can get any of those movies for free any time you want.
It's sorta like software, y'know. Movies and games are just a bunch of bits.
Might be one way to convince the religious right...
"We must stop homocentric warming!"
Of course, most people of the "religious right" would probably interpret "homocentric warming" as meaning something about gay people getting all hot, which is something they'd definitely agree should be stopped.
There's gotta be an instance of Rule 34 inside there somewhere ...
Ah, but what causes the correlation? Can we correlate the causes?
Funny, my experience with the iPhone (which my wife has) is rather different. We keep finding that on most web pages, including pages I've written that are just text with no width=, height=, size=, or any css that forces sizes, either the text is too tiny to read, or when we enlarge it, the "window" becomes much larger than the screen, so we have to scroll around to read it. It's really awful.
OTOH, I have a G1 (Android) phone, and when I use any of its methods to resize things, its browser usually automatically reformats things so that the window is no wider than the screen, and the only scrolling you need to do is vertical. This is a lot easier to read than something that requires 2-dimensional scrolling.
One problem is that on the iPhone, lots of poking around haven't turned up anything that controls font size or anything related. Maybe it's there, but we're both just too dumb to find it. I'd guess that this is a problem for other iPhone users, too, since it's heavily marketed at non-geeks. What we'd like to say is "Make the text a bit larger, and reformat it to fit within the screen's margins." That's what other browsers usually do; it's strange that Safari on the iPhone doesn't. Or maybe we just haven't found the Setting that controls it.
Maybe others don't mind having the screen a tiny window into a much larger page, so you have to constantly scroll left and right to read a single line of text. But I find that very annoying, and a good reason to avoid the iPhone. I am a bit mystified by people who like it. Do they actually use Safari? Or do they just use iPhone apps, and think that those are browsers?
Perhaps a better way to express it is: Your resume can be as long as you think is necessary to describe your experience. But you should be aware that very few hiring managers will read past the first page. So the first page should list the experiences that you would like managers to know about when they're deciding whether to hire you.
The rest of your resume may be read (or skimmed) by lower-level managers (and your friends), and it may be searched for keywords by HR's software, but it usually won't contribute significantly to any hiring decisions.
This may all be disregarded if you know that the company's hiring managers are intelligent and knowledgeable in the company's field. Such people do tend to read entire resumes, and even understand them. This mostly applies to the smallest companies, since in large companies hiring is done by professional managers, not by people knowledgeable in their subject area.
Disagree, if the OS tricks you out of common sense, then it's a terrible OS, not clever.
Ah, but you're thinking in terms like "logic", "usability", "user-friendly", or some other such good design.
What I was doing was explicitly treating programming as a game, in which the programmers and "system" builders are opponents, with each team trying to defeat the other team's nefarious plans. That way, you avoid explicitly calling the others by insulting words. You pretend they are "honorable opponents". Of course, if you're interested in good, usable software, this is a terrible way to view it. But I've found that many software developers can really relate to the adversarial view of their undertaking. A lot of things in "the system" make a lot more sense if you think in terms of an opponent force that is actively trying to defeat you.
An add-on comment that I've found also gets knowing grins is that I much prefer to work on unix-like systems, because I've found that I can usually win at the Programming Game when working on them. As unix's detractors will tell you, the people who build unix systems are generally a poorly-organized, bumbling lot, and their best evidence of this is that the parts of those systems tend to be simple and logical, without very many of the surprises that are lurking in other systems. So programmers can often write things that "Just Work" the first time. This is proof that the system builders aren't trying very hard. Either that, or they're all a bunch of simple-minded people who can't handle the complexity of most other computer systems.
(Actually, it's because on unix systems, the designers and builders are also the programmers and users, so they're playing for both teams. But it's fairly clear that in most industrial software development, as in sports, this is considered "cheating". In commercial software development, you are usually not permitted to talk directly to end users, and you only rarely get to communicate with customers' software people. This partitioning into two teams is quite intentional, and is an effective way to prevent your developers from "playing for the other side". ;-)
Apple's multitouch trackpads on their current notebook lines have it right.
Oh, I dunno; I've had a Macbook Pro for a few months now, and I find the trackpad frustrating. Most of the stuff I do involves typing text into various windows. I find that I can't type at any speed without accidentally touching the trackpad. So as I type, the windows frequently resize or rotate their contents, and I have to stop what I'm doing to restore the window to the right size and orientation. Yes, I do have the "ignore accidental input" thingy checked; it doesn't seem to do much to alleviate this problem.
In fact, they are so good that I wish they would sell a stand alone trackpad to add onto a desktop keyboard.
Actuall, that might be a lot better. A standalone trackpad with a wired connection could be moved to a position where I can type without touching the trackpad. I wonder if such a trackpad could be plugged into a Macbook, too. Of course, one of the points of a laptop is portability, and if it's like most "portable" mice or those add-on keyoards for handhelds, I probably wouldn't find it something convenient to carry around. But it's something to think about.
So, what would you regexp for if all you had was a ":"? Normal text quite often does contain colons....
Back in the early 1980s, before the folks at CERN gave us the first browser, there was another notation that was implemented by an assortment of networking software. It originated, as far as I can tell, with The Newcastle Connection (from the U of Newcastle-upon-Tyne" in England), one of the first fully-distributed unix file systems. What it did conceptually was to define a conceptual network directory one level above your root directory, named "/../". So to reference a file on machine X.Y.Z, you'd use a path like "/../X.Y.Z/...". The actual server on each machine typically wouldn't export its "/" directory, but rather would do what web servers do, and supply only a server-root directory (which could also be mounted by other machines by the unix mount command). So if you tried to access the file /../X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt, you'd get the file that the remote machine had at /server-root/some/dir/foo.txt, so files outside the /server-root/ directory would be invisible to outsiders.
This is, of course, merely another syntax for what the WWW calls "http://X.Y.Z/some/dir/foo.txt", but without the protocol field. The TPC implementation made the file readable or writable, depending on what the permission module allowed, via the usual open(), read(), write(), etc. library routines. This meant that all of the software on your machine was automatically able to use accessible files on other machines without any special coding. As with the Web, you just needed the machine name and the file's location relative to the server-root directory.
The advantage of the Web's "http://" notation, of course, is that it allow the explicit use of different protocols. TNC's "/../" notation doesn't do that; the implementation gives direct access via the usual file-system routines, and hides the comm protocol inside the kernel's file-system code just as is done with local file I/O.
Note that the "/../" notation isn't any more difficult to match than "http://", and it's a string that's equally unlikely to occur anywhere but in a TNC-style file reference. And note that there's no problem with adding a ":port" to the machine name with either notation.
I've sometimes wondered why various browsers, especially the mozilla suite, haven't quietly implemented TNC notation and invited users to start using it. You don't need permission from any standards body to do this. It would only take a few lines of new code, wherever the software parses URLs. You'd have to add "/\.\./" as an alternative to "(\w*)://" at the start of the match, and make 'HTTP' the default protocol if omitted. While you're at it, add another * after the //, so omitting the second / will also work. But that's probably too user-friendly for any real web developer to bother implementing. ;-)
(Actually, I've done this in a few projects that I've worked on. It doesn't break anything, and when people see that notation, they usually really like it and the new conceptual model of the Net that it puts into their mind. The Net becomes just a large, slow bus connecting millions of machines and their disks, joining them into one huge virtual computer. Replacing a big, messy communication protocol with a big, tree-structured file system gives a major reduction in complexity and points to a much easier way to do things.)
I can't see where you got that quote from, since it's not in the summary or any other message I can see. But in any case, it's totally wrong. When the term "Internet" was first officially defined, around 1980 or so, and on its predecessor the ARPAnet, there was no logging on/of for the Internet. Since the mid-1970s at least, it has always-on, and email has always been instantaneous from a human viewpoint. The only delay back then was how long it took for the recipient to notice that they had a message, type a reply, and send it. Of course, they might have been away from their machine, which is still true, or they might be too busy to check their emial. But those are true of IM and the other modern schemes that are nothing more than the original email design with a different name.
The main reason that people ever talk about "logging on/off the Internet" is because when the Internet became available to the latecomers using Microsoft software, DOS and Windows couldn't implement Internet email correctly, because they couldn't run servers. Until 1995 or so, they couldn't even connect directly to the Internet; they had to connect via modem to a "server" machine somewhere. So the original design of an end-to-end connection and a file copy couldn't be implemented on those machines, and we had to come up with the kludge of using a third-party "server" machine to store the email until the MS system called up and asked for it. This was also forced on a lot of the rest of us by ISPs that had (and often still have) a "no servers allowed" rule, which was (and still is) a total violation of the Internet's design docs (the RFCs).
If anything, it's the IM, twitter, Facebook, etc. crowds that are the clumsy ones, because they all depend on a third-party server that saves your message,and often depend on time-wasting polling by your machine to deliver the messages. And they still do nothing at all about the fact that the recipient can ignore the message, or can read it but wait a while to reply, perhaps because they want to give you a good, thoughtful reply rather than just dashing off the first thing that comes to their mind.
In any case, if your Internet service and email work like the RFCs say it should, email sent use the RFC 821 standard protocol (dated August 1982) should be faster than IM, Facebook or twitter. The sender's machine will connect to yours, the message will be transmitted, and it'll be on your machine it a few milliseconds, as it was in 1982. If your messaging system is slower than this, it's incredibly badly designed, and can't even match a 27-year-old Internet standard that's now considered obsolete. If your ISP or OS can't (or refuses to) do even that, you're not using a modern messaging system; you're using something that's so badly engineered that Internet users back in the early 1980s would have laughed at it.
(Yes, I know that email back then was often a lot slower. But I also remember working on a project in 1983, in which we timed Internet email between machines scattered around North America. If we dropped the numbers for machines that were offline during the test, the mean delivery time for messages of a few hundred bytes was around one second. Connecting to other continents wasn't good at the time, and the first try usually failed for them, so the email became "store and forward" via an almost-always-on server. So the Internet itself, when all the links in the path were live, was capable of delivering messages within a second. The main problem was the frequent lack of connectivity. It got worse in the early 1990s as people started using modems for Internet access.)
(Should I add "Get off my lawn!"? ;-)