But is that according to the people who wrote the XHTML standard, or the user who just wants to see the web page?
Just to be clear, unparseable XHTML is not XHTML. In "Matrix" terms, there is no web page. Instead, there is a string of text that may resemble XHTML to the casual observer but that doesn't really represent anything at all.
Arguing that browsers should half-support broken XHTML is like saying that a C compiler should do something whenever it encounters invalid C, since the user obviously wants to run the code and isn't interested in bowing to the pedantic demands of some irrelevant standards committee.
One is rather more important than the other in this context.
I agree completely, but I don't think it's the one that you picked.
I just watched Ken Burns' "The Civil War" with a total runtime of over 10 hours. If you think that could've been compressed to less than two hours without losing, well, everything, then I'd say you're more of a filmskr1ptk1dd1e than a filmgeek.
Sometimes it's best to get to the point. Other times it's clearly not. Do you also find Cliff's Notes superior to the original texts?
In the long run, I just don't see any way I can be competitive with offshoring.
I do: offer quality. No, seriously. Not the fake version that everyone learned to hate in "Total Quality Management", but the real thing.
My boss could probably save a few bucks by outsourcing my work, but he'd never get feedback like "hey, I though of a way we could make our whole system faster for free", or "I came up with a new service we can offer our customers without much work on our part", or "this seemed like it could be a problem down the road, so I re-worked it to scale better". Someone in a country with a cheaper cost of living could possibly re-implement my work for less money than he paid me to write it the first time, but he'd have to shell out some serious cash to get someone who knew and cared enough about his business to find ways to make it more efficient as a part of their daily job.
In other words, he's not paying me to hack code. Instead, he's paying me to design the best possible system he can get, implemented by someone who genuinely wants his company to succeed and grow. See if you can get that from an offshore shop.
So, if you want to protect your job, then make it part of your job description to integrate yourself into the rest of the company, not just solve tasks as they are handed to you. Give your manager a solid reason to look at you as an asset instead of a liability and you'll never go hungry.
By the way, none of this is specific to IT. If you decide to become a plumber, make yourself the best plumber your boss has ever had the privilege to pay. Any schmuck can learn how to copy-and-paste code or tighten a fitting, so find a way to raise yourself to a position of trust within your company and distinguish yourself from the next guy off the street.
The problem here is many of the peices they would use to track the printers are integral parts of the replacable toner cartridges and printer ink kits.
Offset each horizontal line by zero or one pixels, making the line number correspond to one bit in the binary representation of the printer's serial number:
embedPrinterID(serialnumber) { offsets = binaryvalue(serialnumber); for i in len(offsets) { page.lineoffset[i] = offsets[i]; } }
If the FBI can read zero-wiped hard drives by measuring quantum characteristics of the drive platters, then they can detect minor variations in otherwise-aligned columns of pixels.
Note: if anyone tries this and it really works, then I want my name on the patent!
Better be wearing asbestos hikers unless your feet can cope with 600 degrees Celcius rocks. Granted, the vast majority of the surface will be much colder, but I'd hate to accidentally find a new hot spot.
And I would be quite pissed if you took a phone call while I was trying to watch the movie. Your attitude is so frigging self-important. If you cannot be out of touch for 3 hours while you watch a movie, stay at home!
My wife is a doctor. If one of her post-op patients develops complications, she has to know about it now, not at the end of the movie. So by your standards, we can never see a movie in a theater again? I'll let you be the one to break that piece of news to her.
And yet you talk about self-importance, as though your enjoyment of a movie is more important than my wife discretely responding to an (true) emergency text message. Ironic, huh?
I am running on my personal system GRID.org to fight cancer and my electric bill went up $20 a month for just 3 computers.
I don't really see it. One Google result showed the difference in power consumption between an idle and loaded 3.4GHz P4 to be about 80W. I pay about $0.09 for a KWh of electricity.
That works out to about $5.62 extra per month per computer - assuming that the CPU would otherwise be completely idle for the entire month. This is for a particularly power-hungry CPU, and most would be cheaper to operate.
Note that the same system (from the source above) would already cost $10.60 per month per machine to run at the price I'm paying, no you're not exactly getting to use it for free anyhow. This has nothing to do with the discussion; it's just a side observation.
Can you quantify that? Since the equipment was already paid for, the only marginal cost to run SETI-at-home was the electricity his CPU consumed over and above how much it would have used were SETI not running. How much did we pay for the power to fuel those extra cycles? Unless you can answer that, it's not obvious that he wasted a measurable number of tax dollars.
Maybe he even felt happy and empowered by contributing to what he saw as a worthwhile cause, and the state got an extra hour's worth of work out of him that year. That seems every bit as likely to me.
They may be a private entity, but they're using public property, namely airwaves and university grounds. So, the assertion that they should be free to regulate who takes part in the debates as they please is fallacious. Public resources equals public responsibility.
So if a local university broadcasts a class, I have the right to appear in that telecast? After all, my tax money paid for the venue and they're using my airwaves, right?
Oh. Well, then, surely I should be allowed to take my guitar on stage at a charity concert held in a park, right? Public land, public airwaves, correct?
No. The property may have been public, but the event was decidedly private.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, moving to a pure data-in-HTML, presentation-in-CSS model works wonders for helping machines decipher the mess. On the other hand, when I see things like
<font size=+1><font color=red><font face=verdana><font color=blue><font face=arial><font size=+2><font size=+1>Welcome to Example.com! (best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600 with at least 256 colors)</font></font></font></font></font></font></font>
I can follow the exact chain of thought that the webmonkey worked through to get the end result. It's kind of like a built-in RCS; you can peel back the tags one at a time to see what the site looked like two months ago.
it feels like a waste of time because if the field has advanced beyond my education what have learned other than I have alot more to learn.
Did you really expect to learn the current state of the art in its entirety? Do you think that would actually help you in any way?
I had a processor design class less than five years ago where we dug into the core of a MIPS CPU. I learned a lot about the inner workings of a modern processor, but to this day I've never physically seen a MIPS machine. Was it a waste of my time? No way!
And such is yours. Like you said, your mission is to learn how to interface a generic processor with a generic system. Get that and substituting other variables is a piece o' cake.
A turned-off computer is stable. Stability means nothing unless the results are correct.
Robustness - isn't that the same as stability? Also, speed is nice if you can get it without sacrificing correctness, but the real solution to both problems at once is designing good algorithms. If you use methods appropriate to your situation, then the resulting code will be fast, correct, and concise.
Not gonna bother. Were you serious about that?
You're getting bogged with the implementation of one language.
You're getting bogged with the implementation of one language.
I write largish commerce websites - some of which you might've used yourself. I don't care at all about speed because I know that the fundamental algorithms are sound, and the slow parts (such as waiting for approval from a credit card processor) can't be touched anyway. Hand-tuned assembler may be important (albeit likely futile unless you're smarter than a modern optimizing compiler, and very very few people actually are) for your niche product, but in my systems knowing when and where to use an O(n) algorithm versus an O(log n) system with a higher coefficient is infinitely more productive.
Feel free to argue your points, but I doubt that anyone outside your particular coding group will agree with you.
why are they publizing it. all they are doing is using this as a bargaining chip with microsoft.
You are the CTO of a large company. Is your goal 1) to explore all of the alternatives, including getting discounts on upgrades to your current setup, or 2) promoting the products of another non-related company?
the next story is that micorosft is now the tco winner because they are basically giving them the os at some extra low rate and that it is now cheaper than if we switched and had to train everybody.
But what if *shock* that's true? If MS caves and gives a steep discount so that it really is cheaper for them to stay with their current setup than to switch, then what's the problem?
people just don't get it that have to pay the bills.
Oh, they get it all right. The difference is that their metric is "savings", but yours is "switching".
These aren't toy home systems. At my last job, we dropped $BIGNUM on several systems that only came with Windows clients. Yes, it would be shiny and happy to use the (non-existent) well-tested and cross-platform Linux-compatible versions of those apps but that wasn't an alternative. So, how would we have just up and switched? Would you really advise us to ditch our working enterprise systems (definition: running on redundant high-end Sun servers with gigs of RAM and terrabytes of storage) in favor of home-rolled equivalents just so we could switch a $200 desktop OS to a $0 desktop OS?
Look, I'm typing this from a PC running Linux. If I were at home, I might be typing on an iMac running OS X. I am in no way a Windows fanboy. Having said that, it's beyond ignorant to suggest that all (or even most, or, heck, even an appreciable amount of) companies can just walk in on a Monday morning, unplug the PCs, and plunk down a few hundred or thousand non-PCs and expect to get any work done that month. In the real world, many PCs in large companies are still running as clients to a giant system located elsewhere, and unless you can get access to client software for your new candidate system, the whole idea is a non-starter.
Kudos to AT&T for getting as far as actually considering it. That alone speaks volumes. Regardless of what happens next, I'm just happy to hear that they're even weighing the alternatives.
And I know POSIX compliance is important to everyone, but the directory scheme will have to go someday. What is wrong with/system ("don't touch anything in the system folder!")/users/joecubicle ("Just backup the/users folder, and all your data and prefs are okay"), and/trash? ("you can delete anything in there")
So you've have a root directory with/system/{bin,lib,sbin,usr,var,etc.},/users, and/trash? How 'bout this instead that you can use today:
"All of your stuff is in/home - that's all you need to back up. Don't touch anything outside of/home (not that the system will let you anyway). Oh, treat everything in/tmp as though it could be deleted at any time, but feel free to put things there for a few minutes if you need to."
It has been receiving large rollouts for corporate use
That seems to be Jabber's killer app. My office uses Jabber as its exclusive IM system. We operate our private internal server, and there's never even the possibility of our intra-office messages leaving our own LAN. Honestly, selling our boss on Jabber and one of the Free clients was one of the easiest projects I've had.
We're now looking at implementing Jabber into our website so that customers can submit a support request and get a flashing "New Message!" icon at the bottom of the page whenever our employees send a reply. This doesn't require any change to our Jabber server or client programs at all - it's completely transparent to all entities involved except me (the web developer). I guess we could use email instead of IM as the transport layer but that lacks the interactivity we're hoping to achieve. I don't know if such a solution exists (especially for Unix server platforms) at any price from the proprietary vendors.
Full stop, end of story. XML is nothing more or less than a structured way to store data. What would they get by not using XML, other than having to write their own container format, their own parser, their own editors, their own portable libraries to deal with it, and their their own inevitable screwups that happen every single time someone decides to reinvent the wheel?
Since it's pretty clear that writing ad-hoc parses for structured data is an obsolete practice, what else could they have used? EDI?
No, they chose to use the established standard that can take advantage of the optimized and field-tested libraries that are already in widespread use. Frankly, inventing their own representational language would've been the naive alternative that would have resulted in Yet Another Unused Instant Messaging Protocol. They were fortunately more far-sighted than yourself and we now have something useful to show for it.
OK, it's clear that you're trying to do the right thing and for that I applaud your effect. Seriously - keep it up and encourage those around you to do the same.
However, you must be smoking crack. Are all of your apps secure against the recent JPG decoding vulnerabilities (because you "open" things you don't know about each and every time you view an image on the web)? Have you read the line-by-line security audit of your VPN software and have a reasonable belief that it's mathematically correct (because I see IPSEC patches coming by every now and then)? Is your SSH client immune to the attacking hosts? Is your router provably correct or does it have "features" such as diverting random outbound port 80 requests to its manufacturers website? Is that ActiveX control that your bank makes you used safe, and are you sure that your bank isn't sending out a compromised version? Do you monitor 1337 IRC channels to learn about exploits before your OS vendor has issued patches for them so that you can isolate the problems on your own?
You can't stop risks; you can merely work to reduce them. Even OpenBSD has had remote holes in the default installation, and those guys pay a lot more attention to the minute details than you or I are likely to. I'd say that the odds of getting pwn3d are several orders of magnitude higher than getting hit by lightning or beating the tax on people bad at math.
Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon and is currently serving time at Attica Prison. My brother-in-law is a correctional officer there and said that Chapman is actually a pretty nice guy and fairly intelligent. He said they had this conversation one day:
Bro-in-law: "Hey, man, I've gotta know. What made you shoot John Lennon?"
MDC: "I was on acid. I thought that if I killed him, I could be him."
Occam's Razor seems heavily in favor of that explanation.
I'd have to disagree. I display my real address here (using Slashdot's possibly-effective anti-harvester mangling) and say all sorts of stuff that isn't popular:
I'm a born-again Southern Baptist.
I'm a staunch conservative.
I don't hate Microsoft (although I don't use their products).
I'm married and have kids.
I practice censorship in my home by not allowing them unmonitored Internet access.
I support tort reform.
I don't support campaign finance reform.
I eat meat.
In spite of the fact that I'm pretty vocal about those things, I've never, not once, gotten an email either supporting or complaining about my opinions.
Part of it is knowing how to be persuasive. I've actually received a lot of interesting and conversational replies here on Slashdot for unpopular opinions when I was careful to explain why I believe the way I do and avoided attacking others' beliefs. You'll always get the errant jackass, of course, but it's easy enough to ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, unparseable XHTML is not XHTML. In "Matrix" terms, there is no web page. Instead, there is a string of text that may resemble XHTML to the casual observer but that doesn't really represent anything at all.
Arguing that browsers should half-support broken XHTML is like saying that a C compiler should do something whenever it encounters invalid C, since the user obviously wants to run the code and isn't interested in bowing to the pedantic demands of some irrelevant standards committee.
One is rather more important than the other in this context.
I agree completely, but I don't think it's the one that you picked.
Sometimes it's best to get to the point. Other times it's clearly not. Do you also find Cliff's Notes superior to the original texts?
I do: offer quality. No, seriously. Not the fake version that everyone learned to hate in "Total Quality Management", but the real thing.
My boss could probably save a few bucks by outsourcing my work, but he'd never get feedback like "hey, I though of a way we could make our whole system faster for free", or "I came up with a new service we can offer our customers without much work on our part", or "this seemed like it could be a problem down the road, so I re-worked it to scale better". Someone in a country with a cheaper cost of living could possibly re-implement my work for less money than he paid me to write it the first time, but he'd have to shell out some serious cash to get someone who knew and cared enough about his business to find ways to make it more efficient as a part of their daily job.
In other words, he's not paying me to hack code. Instead, he's paying me to design the best possible system he can get, implemented by someone who genuinely wants his company to succeed and grow. See if you can get that from an offshore shop.
So, if you want to protect your job, then make it part of your job description to integrate yourself into the rest of the company, not just solve tasks as they are handed to you. Give your manager a solid reason to look at you as an asset instead of a liability and you'll never go hungry.
By the way, none of this is specific to IT. If you decide to become a plumber, make yourself the best plumber your boss has ever had the privilege to pay. Any schmuck can learn how to copy-and-paste code or tighten a fitting, so find a way to raise yourself to a position of trust within your company and distinguish yourself from the next guy off the street.
If the FBI can read zero-wiped hard drives by measuring quantum characteristics of the drive platters, then they can detect minor variations in otherwise-aligned columns of pixels.
Note: if anyone tries this and it really works, then I want my name on the patent!
Better be wearing asbestos hikers unless your feet can cope with 600 degrees Celcius rocks. Granted, the vast majority of the surface will be much colder, but I'd hate to accidentally find a new hot spot.
Not a problem. I was "there" yesterday.
My wife is a doctor. If one of her post-op patients develops complications, she has to know about it now, not at the end of the movie. So by your standards, we can never see a movie in a theater again? I'll let you be the one to break that piece of news to her.
And yet you talk about self-importance, as though your enjoyment of a movie is more important than my wife discretely responding to an (true) emergency text message. Ironic, huh?
Should I start appending smileys to my posts? :-)
I don't really see it. One Google result showed the difference in power consumption between an idle and loaded 3.4GHz P4 to be about 80W. I pay about $0.09 for a KWh of electricity. That works out to about $5.62 extra per month per computer - assuming that the CPU would otherwise be completely idle for the entire month. This is for a particularly power-hungry CPU, and most would be cheaper to operate.
Note that the same system (from the source above) would already cost $10.60 per month per machine to run at the price I'm paying, no you're not exactly getting to use it for free anyhow. This has nothing to do with the discussion; it's just a side observation.
Maybe he even felt happy and empowered by contributing to what he saw as a worthwhile cause, and the state got an extra hour's worth of work out of him that year. That seems every bit as likely to me.
So if a local university broadcasts a class, I have the right to appear in that telecast? After all, my tax money paid for the venue and they're using my airwaves, right?
Oh. Well, then, surely I should be allowed to take my guitar on stage at a charity concert held in a park, right? Public land, public airwaves, correct?
No. The property may have been public, but the event was decidedly private.
Did you really expect to learn the current state of the art in its entirety? Do you think that would actually help you in any way?
I had a processor design class less than five years ago where we dug into the core of a MIPS CPU. I learned a lot about the inner workings of a modern processor, but to this day I've never physically seen a MIPS machine. Was it a waste of my time? No way!
And such is yours. Like you said, your mission is to learn how to interface a generic processor with a generic system. Get that and substituting other variables is a piece o' cake.
I write largish commerce websites - some of which you might've used yourself. I don't care at all about speed because I know that the fundamental algorithms are sound, and the slow parts (such as waiting for approval from a credit card processor) can't be touched anyway. Hand-tuned assembler may be important (albeit likely futile unless you're smarter than a modern optimizing compiler, and very very few people actually are) for your niche product, but in my systems knowing when and where to use an O(n) algorithm versus an O(log n) system with a higher coefficient is infinitely more productive.
Feel free to argue your points, but I doubt that anyone outside your particular coding group will agree with you.
Get it? Quine? Hah! Oh. See, there're these things called "quines", and they... oh, forget it.
You are the CTO of a large company. Is your goal 1) to explore all of the alternatives, including getting discounts on upgrades to your current setup, or 2) promoting the products of another non-related company?
the next story is that micorosft is now the tco winner because they are basically giving them the os at some extra low rate and that it is now cheaper than if we switched and had to train everybody.
But what if *shock* that's true? If MS caves and gives a steep discount so that it really is cheaper for them to stay with their current setup than to switch, then what's the problem?
people just don't get it that have to pay the bills.
Oh, they get it all right. The difference is that their metric is "savings", but yours is "switching".
These aren't toy home systems. At my last job, we dropped $BIGNUM on several systems that only came with Windows clients. Yes, it would be shiny and happy to use the (non-existent) well-tested and cross-platform Linux-compatible versions of those apps but that wasn't an alternative. So, how would we have just up and switched? Would you really advise us to ditch our working enterprise systems (definition: running on redundant high-end Sun servers with gigs of RAM and terrabytes of storage) in favor of home-rolled equivalents just so we could switch a $200 desktop OS to a $0 desktop OS?
Look, I'm typing this from a PC running Linux. If I were at home, I might be typing on an iMac running OS X. I am in no way a Windows fanboy. Having said that, it's beyond ignorant to suggest that all (or even most, or, heck, even an appreciable amount of) companies can just walk in on a Monday morning, unplug the PCs, and plunk down a few hundred or thousand non-PCs and expect to get any work done that month. In the real world, many PCs in large companies are still running as clients to a giant system located elsewhere, and unless you can get access to client software for your new candidate system, the whole idea is a non-starter.
Kudos to AT&T for getting as far as actually considering it. That alone speaks volumes. Regardless of what happens next, I'm just happy to hear that they're even weighing the alternatives.
So you've have a root directory with /system/{bin,lib,sbin,usr,var,etc.}, /users, and /trash? How 'bout this instead that you can use today:
"All of your stuff is in /home - that's all you need to back up. Don't touch anything outside of /home (not that the system will let you anyway). Oh, treat everything in /tmp as though it could be deleted at any time, but feel free to put things there for a few minutes if you need to."
And along those lines, what should I list as my favorite color?
That seems to be Jabber's killer app. My office uses Jabber as its exclusive IM system. We operate our private internal server, and there's never even the possibility of our intra-office messages leaving our own LAN. Honestly, selling our boss on Jabber and one of the Free clients was one of the easiest projects I've had.
We're now looking at implementing Jabber into our website so that customers can submit a support request and get a flashing "New Message!" icon at the bottom of the page whenever our employees send a reply. This doesn't require any change to our Jabber server or client programs at all - it's completely transparent to all entities involved except me (the web developer). I guess we could use email instead of IM as the transport layer but that lacks the interactivity we're hoping to achieve. I don't know if such a solution exists (especially for Unix server platforms) at any price from the proprietary vendors.
Full stop, end of story. XML is nothing more or less than a structured way to store data. What would they get by not using XML, other than having to write their own container format, their own parser, their own editors, their own portable libraries to deal with it, and their their own inevitable screwups that happen every single time someone decides to reinvent the wheel?
Since it's pretty clear that writing ad-hoc parses for structured data is an obsolete practice, what else could they have used? EDI?
No, they chose to use the established standard that can take advantage of the optimized and field-tested libraries that are already in widespread use. Frankly, inventing their own representational language would've been the naive alternative that would have resulted in Yet Another Unused Instant Messaging Protocol. They were fortunately more far-sighted than yourself and we now have something useful to show for it.
Thanks for the pictures! I just grabbed some really sweet desktop backgrounds.
Were you listening to "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the same time, only breaking to hear "If I Had A Hammer" whenever he mentioned Leonard Nimoy?
I liked Star Trek, too, but to read the book? Oh, man, you've got me beat.
However, you must be smoking crack. Are all of your apps secure against the recent JPG decoding vulnerabilities (because you "open" things you don't know about each and every time you view an image on the web)? Have you read the line-by-line security audit of your VPN software and have a reasonable belief that it's mathematically correct (because I see IPSEC patches coming by every now and then)? Is your SSH client immune to the attacking hosts? Is your router provably correct or does it have "features" such as diverting random outbound port 80 requests to its manufacturers website? Is that ActiveX control that your bank makes you used safe, and are you sure that your bank isn't sending out a compromised version? Do you monitor 1337 IRC channels to learn about exploits before your OS vendor has issued patches for them so that you can isolate the problems on your own?
You can't stop risks; you can merely work to reduce them. Even OpenBSD has had remote holes in the default installation, and those guys pay a lot more attention to the minute details than you or I are likely to. I'd say that the odds of getting pwn3d are several orders of magnitude higher than getting hit by lightning or beating the tax on people bad at math.
Bro-in-law: "Hey, man, I've gotta know. What made you shoot John Lennon?"
MDC: "I was on acid. I thought that if I killed him, I could be him."
Occam's Razor seems heavily in favor of that explanation.
In spite of the fact that I'm pretty vocal about those things, I've never, not once, gotten an email either supporting or complaining about my opinions.
Part of it is knowing how to be persuasive. I've actually received a lot of interesting and conversational replies here on Slashdot for unpopular opinions when I was careful to explain why I believe the way I do and avoided attacking others' beliefs. You'll always get the errant jackass, of course, but it's easy enough to ignore them.