Because HTML was never designed for page layout. It is a highly stripped version of SGML, which is probably too complex for a reasonable page markup language without a tool to assist in keeping the tags straight.
There are several formats which seem to serve the same purpose: Troff (The UNIX classic), TeX (The Knuth "hobby" turned golden. LaTex an extention), and lout (from the land down under.)
Any of these, with required extentions can represent a document with sufficient detail to track both the document structure and the document look. For that matter, so can MS Word or Framemaker.
Cheers
the Reverend Mother's accent made me think of Ambassador Delenn
The movie was largely filmed in the Czech Republic which is geographically close to Yugoslavia, which is where Mira Furlan is from.
As an FYI, SITA is one of the largest and oldest computer network companies in the world that until recently exclusively served the worlds airline industry.
Given that most of the worlds airlines already have domain names, it will be interesting to see if there will be a shift to the.areo TLD.
This really doesn't have to do with writing good ro bad code. I've seen programmers on all levels write bad code. I'd like to discuss how a good programmer and an average programmer can approach a problem in two different ways.
I work for a company with a "universal help desk." That is all kinds of issues, even some non-IT issues like building maintance, are handled by a single phone bank.
The calls are then dispatched to the different support units. The project team was focused on how the support units were different. They specified five different modules for the five different units. These are not dumb people either -- just incapable of seeing the elegant beauty of simplicity.
The good programmer or good analyst would have focued on how similar the support units are. Write one module for the 95% similarity and the remaining differences are small.
Re:Nobel Prizes for Mathematics
on
Nobel Prizes
·
· Score: 1
Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896) was rather a pratical chemical engineer from Sweden who invented dynamite in 1866. He to say the least, dynamite revolutionized mining and made him very wealthy.
The Nobel Prize was established shortly after Nobel, a pacifist, had an epiphany after he saw his invention being used in warfare and killing people. The Nobel Foundation was created in 1900 and the Swedish Academy of Sciences has been governing it since.
There is no reason a mathematics prize cant be added. In 1968 the Economics Prize was added.
Don Becker, while at NASA's atmopheric labs, had the vision of using many Linux boxes as a cluster before Linux was even at the 1.0 revision level. He is often creditied as being the inventor of Beowulf. He wrote over half the network drivers in Linux and Beowulf as a means to an end.
Hey look, it's not like anyone (Sun) is hiding the source code. The main principal behind GPL is that no one can horde the source code -- ever. The Sun binary is just a transliteration of the Linux binary. The original source code for any of those driver binaries can be found thousands of sites all across the 'Net.
Sun isn't changing the source code much less adding any features to the source code. Changes like that would have to be distributed.
I don't think this is a hole in anything.
The only thing Sun must do, in my mind, is include a few URL pointers to driver source.
That would be called in the United States a "D" check. If memory serves, it is after several thousand flying hours. Most aircraft never see a "D" check until ten years. A "C" check (less intensive) is a reasonable time to add "fluff work" due to the face the aircraft is off-line so long.
Huge Costs
Many modern aircraft are equiped with a device called ACARS. In short it is a VHF communication device between the onboard computerized (mostly) avionics and ground based computers. The VHF band is totally unsuitable for bandwidth over 32k. Airlines use ACARS to track their aircraft and the performance of onboard systems.
The small monopoly of companies that provide this kind of service charge an arm and a leg for the service. This puts it out of reach for anyone other than big fleet operators.
I fly a lot. I work for an airline. I really can't remember actually seeing anyone actually using that seat back phone. The airphone provider ate the cost of installation (but not aircraft interest; see below) and gives a percentage back to the airline. I can't imagine there is much revenue from those things. The airlines simply don't get enough money from those phones.
There is a good reason airlines are against it. There is an old addage: airplanes don't make any money on the ground. Airlines put their newest, best aircraft of premium routes. Taking an aircraft down for a week to install a few ethernet jacks and routers is huge amounts of lost revenue and the non-deferrable cost of whatever financing arangements (read interest) the airline has for that aircraft. Airlines who are still licking their fuel cost wounds aren't interested in opening up the money chests.
In short, the air to ground technology is still not mature enough to keep the cost low enough to get get enough people to use it.
If the technology exists to build such a thing, including moving the asteroid to tether the other end, the technology certianly exists to build the Island to tether the other end.
I would also say it is rather short sighted to believe that in a hundred years time the unstable governments of today will still be unstable and that stable governments today will still be stable. Compared to the empires of centuries gone by, Western Democracy is still so new that one could say it is still in beta testing.
Most English sentences are subject, verb, direct object. English verbs are quite different than the Roman derived languages like French and Spanish. In English the verb is conjugated with a subject word. In Spanish and French, the subject are verb are combined into one word.
For example, in English one would say "I Go", "You Go" and "It Goes" for the verb "To Go". But in Spanish, the same would by "Voy" (I go), "Vas" (you go) and "Va" (it goes).
As a side note, Chevrolete had a hard time selling the Chevy Nova in Latin America. Someone finnaly realised that Nova or "No Va" means "It Doesn't Go".
Most programming languages in the C, Java, fortran, or basic paradigm are dumbed downed versions of English written in second person singular. English also has an Implicit Subject feature for second person singular. "You (the machine in this case) loop or begin or write".
Changing all the verbs in a computer language to a dumbed down version of Spanish or German or Russian could be done. But to be complete you would also need to change the function names like print, open, fetch and others.
There are character set issues, of course, which are important, but beyond what I want to talk about now.
Cheers
In his song "Intruder" off the untitled album commonly known as "Melting Faces" It sounds like he sampled a dot matrix printer and pitched bended it. Way cool. I think it would have been in the early 1980's.
Again, I do not speak for my company AFAIK, GPS navigation is not really widespread. None of our aircraft have it. GPS naviagation requires a correction signal transmitted from the ground to the air to compensate for GPS error (both artificial and natural error). The idea is to survey the exact location of the end of the runway and install a GPS receiver that listens to the GPS signals and transmits GPS error compensation data. GPS Navigation will never replace existing methods. Nor should it - redundency in navagation data is good. Of course, if the data do disagree, which version of the truth do you want to go with. Until somebody dies and the NTSB concludes GPS would have prevented it, it isn't likely to be mandatory. Commercial aviation tends to be highly regulated and the FAA inspectors tend to be reluctant to allow airlines to change procedures and processes when the operating carriers have good safety records. Everything in flight is scripted. What will put GPS in commercial aircraft is something called "Free Flight". Aircraft don't flight straight from point A to point B. They follow a connect-the-dots route with NavAides every one to three hundred miles. These form highways in the sky. Free Flight will allow aircraft to "Off Road." With a proposed implementation arround 2006, this will take a while. Another impediment is there are many carriers with aircraft fleets older than the average Slashdot reader. (FYI - not mine.) There isn't anything to plug a GPS into. Cheers!
My airline does allow cell phone use on the aircraft as long as the main door is open. When the door is close an announcement is made to discontinue cell phone use.
It is a well established here that ground crew who use their two-way radios inside the cargo compartment often trigger the fire detectors. Say what you want about "That shouldn't happen," but it does. If the same thing happens in the air; first, the crew dumps halon into the cargo hold (fluffy the cat dies, too) and they land immediately. If the investigation shows a passenger cell phone caused it. That passenger will be fined lots of money.
Aircraft use a landing signal system called ILS or "Glide Slope" to guide the aircraft to the end of the runway. There are big radio transmitters at each end of the runway which emit multiple finely tuned radio signals that form an interference pattern that the onboard aircraft use to determine if it is properly aligned in the runway. This is a "Good Thing." It is very good if the pilot can't see the runway. Stray radio signals from almost anything can mess up the the interference pattern. This is why you are required to switch off your laptops, palm pilots, walkmans, etc... During takeoff and landing. In case you were wondering why takeoffs too, is because every takeoff procedure assumes that there might be an immediate emergency landing.
Inside a every US flaged airplane and US airport, the FAA is god. FAA regulations are gospel. (Except for the US Secret Service, but that's another matter isn't it) If the FAA has a rule regarding radio gear, any FCC ruling doesn't mean jack. Many aviation agencies of other countries are set up the same way.
If I was hired to find all those users. I would do one of two things:
Install a "honeypot" site. Napster works by providing two endpoints with knowledge of what one has to what the other wants. We know that Napster shares the downloader's handle with the connection establishment. Also, the transfer is over TCP. Keep track of every handle and IP address. This type of download is a clear violation copyright. Of course I don't know if it would be considered entrapment.
To support the "resume download" feature, Napster clients track MD5 checksums of songs so that you can resume download of the same song from a different site. Write a 'bot that searches for MD5 checksums of songs known to be copyright violations. The RIAA would assert that any of their songs on any computer violates the DMCA because computers don't implement serial copy management and aren't registered with the copyright office.
The bit about serving paper to Napster is clearly to bog them down in administrative overload. I hope Napster has a good sheet feeding OCR scanner!
There are different kinds computers like there are different kinds of transportation. We have fast sporty cars, big trucks, and for some transportation needs we have trains. The average company does not need to buy a locomotive. But if you have big transportation needs, the workload scale of that locomotive overshadows massively parallel.
You wouldn't want to drive one million cars from the factory to the dealer. No, first you load hundreds of cars on a train to a regional facility then truck a dozen cars from there to a dealer.
Large Data shouldn't be any different. Crunch large transaction sets on big systems, then transfer those numbers to smaller systems.
Getting the board to function, at least in 3.3.5 and before, involves adding the nobitblt option which disables hardware accelerated block pixel transfers. Unfortunately this severely drags performance down. Don't even think trying to move a window in opaque mode.
My big hope is that the nobitblt cripple is now longer required on the 6326. This would let the board really work.
The problem with most methodologies is the people who apply it. There is an old joke: "What's the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist? -- you can negotiate with the terrorist."
A methodology must be flexible. In the projects I work on, my company is spending millions of dollars on outsourced mega-applications. One of our big management issues is vendor management. I've got to say, that some of them are dicy, but in the air transportation industry, there aren't many vendors to choose from.
The Space Shuttle programming team, has one of the most rigorous methodolgies in the world. They also have one of the lowest defect rates in the world.. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I think that all this Y2K paranoia IS the Y2K bug. More often than not, remedies for Y2K were worse than the problem. Senseless date expansion in interface files caused needless work. I hope that VW is really upgrading their site. As a VW driver, I found using their site quite unworthy of their automobiles. As an outsourced function, my companies web site will stay up as long as our ISP doesn't have any problems hosting it. There are no date sensitive components on our site. Of course, I think it is silly that my company grounded the fleet over midnight local time, but is in full swing at 00:00 GMT. sigh
Let's not forget how DVD disks are manufactured in the first place. The DVD mastering plant creates a glass master which has the digital bit pits in reverse. That glass master is used to stamp out thousands and thousands of DVD disks. Disks with all the encryption keys needed to decode that disk already on it
I submit is could be possible to create a machine that using pure mechanical optics can make a pit for pit, bump for bump, scratch for scratch copy of a DVD without using a computer much less any trade secrets, knowledge of encryption or reverse engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, but then the karma whores wouldn't have anything to do.
Because HTML was never designed for page layout. It is a highly stripped version of SGML, which is probably too complex for a reasonable page markup language without a tool to assist in keeping the tags straight.
There are several formats which seem to serve the same purpose: Troff (The UNIX classic), TeX (The Knuth "hobby" turned golden. LaTex an extention), and lout (from the land down under.)
Any of these, with required extentions can represent a document with sufficient detail to track both the document structure and the document look. For that matter, so can MS Word or Framemaker.
Cheers
the Reverend Mother's accent made me think of Ambassador Delenn
The movie was largely filmed in the Czech Republic which is geographically close to Yugoslavia, which is where Mira Furlan is from.
As an FYI, SITA is one of the largest and oldest computer network companies in the world that until recently exclusively served the worlds airline industry. .areo TLD.
Given that most of the worlds airlines already have domain names, it will be interesting to see if there will be a shift to the
This really doesn't have to do with writing good ro bad code. I've seen programmers on all levels write bad code. I'd like to discuss how a good programmer and an average programmer can approach a problem in two different ways.
I work for a company with a "universal help desk." That is all kinds of issues, even some non-IT issues like building maintance, are handled by a single phone bank.
The calls are then dispatched to the different support units. The project team was focused on how the support units were different. They specified five different modules for the five different units. These are not dumb people either -- just incapable of seeing the elegant beauty of simplicity.
The good programmer or good analyst would have focued on how similar the support units are. Write one module for the 95% similarity and the remaining differences are small.
Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896) was rather a pratical chemical engineer from Sweden who invented dynamite in 1866. He to say the least, dynamite revolutionized mining and made him very wealthy.
The Nobel Prize was established shortly after Nobel, a pacifist, had an epiphany after he saw his invention being used in warfare and killing people. The Nobel Foundation was created in 1900 and the Swedish Academy of Sciences has been governing it since.
There is no reason a mathematics prize cant be added. In 1968 the Economics Prize was added.
Don Becker, while at NASA's atmopheric labs, had the vision of using many Linux boxes as a cluster before Linux was even at the 1.0 revision level. He is often creditied as being the inventor of Beowulf. He wrote over half the network drivers in Linux and Beowulf as a means to an end.
Hey look, it's not like anyone (Sun) is hiding the source code. The main principal behind GPL is that no one can horde the source code -- ever. The Sun binary is just a transliteration of the Linux binary. The original source code for any of those driver binaries can be found thousands of sites all across the 'Net.
Sun isn't changing the source code much less adding any features to the source code. Changes like that would have to be distributed.
I don't think this is a hole in anything.
The only thing Sun must do, in my mind, is include a few URL pointers to driver source.
That would be called in the United States a "D" check. If memory serves, it is after several thousand flying hours. Most aircraft never see a "D" check until ten years. A "C" check (less intensive) is a reasonable time to add "fluff work" due to the face the aircraft is off-line so long.
Many modern aircraft are equiped with a device called ACARS. In short it is a VHF communication device between the onboard computerized (mostly) avionics and ground based computers. The VHF band is totally unsuitable for bandwidth over 32k. Airlines use ACARS to track their aircraft and the performance of onboard systems.
The small monopoly of companies that provide this kind of service charge an arm and a leg for the service. This puts it out of reach for anyone other than big fleet operators.
I fly a lot. I work for an airline. I really can't remember actually seeing anyone actually using that seat back phone. The airphone provider ate the cost of installation (but not aircraft interest; see below) and gives a percentage back to the airline. I can't imagine there is much revenue from those things. The airlines simply don't get enough money from those phones.
There is a good reason airlines are against it. There is an old addage: airplanes don't make any money on the ground. Airlines put their newest, best aircraft of premium routes. Taking an aircraft down for a week to install a few ethernet jacks and routers is huge amounts of lost revenue and the non-deferrable cost of whatever financing arangements (read interest) the airline has for that aircraft. Airlines who are still licking their fuel cost wounds aren't interested in opening up the money chests.
In short, the air to ground technology is still not mature enough to keep the cost low enough to get get enough people to use it.
If the technology exists to build such a thing, including moving the asteroid to tether the other end, the technology certianly exists to build the Island to tether the other end.
I would also say it is rather short sighted to believe that in a hundred years time the unstable governments of today will still be unstable and that stable governments today will still be stable. Compared to the empires of centuries gone by, Western Democracy is still so new that one could say it is still in beta testing.
Most English sentences are subject, verb, direct object. English verbs are quite different than the Roman derived languages like French and Spanish. In English the verb is conjugated with a subject word. In Spanish and French, the subject are verb are combined into one word.
For example, in English one would say "I Go", "You Go" and "It Goes" for the verb "To Go". But in Spanish, the same would by "Voy" (I go), "Vas" (you go) and "Va" (it goes). As a side note, Chevrolete had a hard time selling the Chevy Nova in Latin America. Someone finnaly realised that Nova or "No Va" means "It Doesn't Go".
Most programming languages in the C, Java, fortran, or basic paradigm are dumbed downed versions of English written in second person singular. English also has an Implicit Subject feature for second person singular. "You (the machine in this case) loop or begin or write".
Changing all the verbs in a computer language to a dumbed down version of Spanish or German or Russian could be done. But to be complete you would also need to change the function names like print, open, fetch and others.
There are character set issues, of course, which are important, but beyond what I want to talk about now.
Cheers
Hmm ... kind of tough on your microwave. ... :)
I prefer drink coasters
Can I take my next holiday there?
In his song "Intruder" off the untitled album commonly known as "Melting Faces" It sounds like he sampled a dot matrix printer and pitched bended it. Way cool. I think it would have been in the early 1980's.
Again, I do not speak for my company
AFAIK, GPS navigation is not really widespread. None of our aircraft have it.
GPS naviagation requires a correction signal transmitted from the ground to the air to compensate for GPS error (both artificial and natural error). The idea is to survey the exact location of the end of the runway and install a GPS receiver that listens to the GPS signals and transmits GPS error compensation data.
GPS Navigation will never replace existing methods. Nor should it - redundency in navagation data is good. Of course, if the data do disagree, which version of the truth do you want to go with. Until somebody dies and the NTSB concludes GPS would have prevented it, it isn't likely to be mandatory.
Commercial aviation tends to be highly regulated and the FAA inspectors tend to be reluctant to allow airlines to change procedures and processes when the operating carriers have good safety records. Everything in flight is scripted.
What will put GPS in commercial aircraft is something called "Free Flight". Aircraft don't flight straight from point A to point B. They follow a connect-the-dots route with NavAides every one to three hundred miles. These form highways in the sky. Free Flight will allow aircraft to "Off Road." With a proposed implementation arround 2006, this will take a while.
Another impediment is there are many carriers with aircraft fleets older than the average Slashdot reader. (FYI - not mine.) There isn't anything to plug a GPS into.
Cheers!
... Formerly known as Ultrix
- Install a "honeypot" site. Napster works by providing two endpoints with knowledge of what one has to what the other wants. We know that Napster shares the downloader's handle with the connection establishment. Also, the transfer is over TCP. Keep track of every handle and IP address. This type of download is a clear violation copyright. Of course I don't know if it would be considered entrapment.
- To support the "resume download" feature, Napster clients track MD5 checksums of songs so that you can resume download of the same song from a different site. Write a 'bot that searches for MD5 checksums of songs known to be copyright violations. The RIAA would assert that any of their songs on any computer violates the DMCA because computers don't implement serial copy management and aren't registered with the copyright office.
The bit about serving paper to Napster is clearly to bog them down in administrative overload.I hope Napster has a good sheet feeding OCR scanner!
There are different kinds computers like there are different kinds of transportation. We have fast sporty cars, big trucks, and for some transportation needs we have trains. The average company does not need to buy a locomotive. But if you have big transportation needs, the workload scale of that locomotive overshadows massively parallel.
You wouldn't want to drive one million cars from the factory to the dealer. No, first you load hundreds of cars on a train to a regional facility then truck a dozen cars from there to a dealer.
Large Data shouldn't be any different. Crunch large transaction sets on big systems, then transfer those numbers to smaller systems.
I've even heard a rumor that Bill had a one week out of the year vacation with another woman written into his pre-nuptual.
My big hope is that the nobitblt cripple is now longer required on the 6326. This would let the board really work.
The problem with most methodologies is the people who apply it. There is an old joke: "What's the difference between a methodologist and a terrorist? -- you can negotiate with the terrorist."
A methodology must be flexible. In the projects I work on, my company is spending millions of dollars on outsourced mega-applications. One of our big management issues is vendor management. I've got to say, that some of them are dicy, but in the air transportation industry, there aren't many vendors to choose from.
The Space Shuttle programming team, has one of the most rigorous methodolgies in the world. They also have one of the lowest defect rates in the world.. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I think that all this Y2K paranoia IS the Y2K bug.
More often than not, remedies for Y2K were worse than the problem. Senseless date expansion in interface files caused needless work.
I hope that VW is really upgrading their site. As a VW driver, I found using their site quite unworthy of their automobiles.
As an outsourced function, my companies web site will stay up as long as our ISP doesn't have any problems hosting it. There are no date sensitive components on our site.
Of course, I think it is silly that my company grounded the fleet over midnight local time, but is in full swing at 00:00 GMT. sigh
Disks with all the encryption keys needed to decode that disk already on it
I submit is could be possible to create a machine that using pure mechanical optics can make a pit for pit, bump for bump, scratch for scratch copy of a DVD without using a computer much less any trade secrets, knowledge of encryption or reverse engineering.