There's nothing wrong with plain-old-HTML when used as a simple way to publish documents.
However, if you want tight control over it, you're in trouble. Newbies writing pages by hand don't need to worry about exact, perfect layout.
For everyone else, the more limited and structured XHTML is easier to write than plain-old-HTML. You see, limitations and structure make it more predictable. That's a good thing.
The principal is obvious; the more common the pattern, the shorter the binary pattern used to encode it.
However, determining the optimum encoding is so decidedly non-obvious that at the time Huffman figured out the algorithm, it was believed impossible. IIRC, he got his Masters and Doctorate at nearly the same time for that discovery.
I had Huffman as a teacher and he told us the story of how he came up with the Huffman optimal encoding tree algorithm. He was ready to give up and the stress was really getting to him. He'd staked his academic career on being able to solve this problem that all his teachers told him was impossible. It was the drop-dead deadline and it was stressing him out. (His wife fits in the story here somehow, but I can't remember). He dropped his work in the trash, resigned to his fate of failing his thesis. As he looked at the trashcan, he saw his notes upside down and it all clicked. The rest is history.
There is another company I can think of with great brand recognition that could get a significant percentage of the internet users to download their browser. I won't name names, but it begins with a G.
Microsoft's next OS release is a direct threat to G's current dominance, so G might as well start the fight now before MSFT's next OS is rolled out. And G just happens to have an amazing new email service that would benefit from users having their own custom email client written in XUL (and automatically updated by G's website).
Coupled with MSFT's decision NOT to update IE on XP and below, we could see some real growth in Gecko marketshare.
XHTML (HTML stored as XML) is supposed to seperate content from presentation.
XML is just a data format.
An MS Word document's presentation IS the data. Without the presentation, the data has less value. This is obvious to anyone who's ever used Word. We've been able to extract the raw text of an MS Word document for ages. Having that text as XML without any presentational information doesn't net us anything.
We'll have to wait and see what the structural information is worth before dismissing this entirely. Ostensibly, this should at least help for data mining.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
This is bad because with a Word document, the presentation IS the content.
Okay, the tapes are cheap, but the DV cameras are expensive. Furthermore, they generally have highly-compact (read failure-prone) read-write equipment.
This is a cool hack, but not very practical for most people.
It's called "humor." It is not the same thing as comedy.
Read Mark Twain's "How To Write A Story" for a good reference.
With humour, there is no pause for effect, no knock-em-dead punchline. Good humor produces a smile which gradually widens, eventually turns into a giggle that escapes when you least expect it, and occaisionally ends up as milk squirting out of your nose.
Back in the day(TM) before RDBMS were a commodity, SLAC used the SPIRES database written at Stanford running on an IBM Mainframe. Well, as these things go, the IBM Mainframe was getting long in the tooth, but there was a ton of data in this SPIRES database. SPIRES wasn't going to get ported to anything modern. I forget who exactly, but one engineer just up and decided to write an emulator for the IBM mainframe in practicly no time at all.
Now the SPIRES database is still running. However, it now runs on Solaris using a home-brewed IBM Mainframe emulator. Even though it's in emulation, it runs faster than it ever used to on the real deal (Moore's Law and all).
As a side note, the first truly useful web site was here at SLAC when George Crane and Paul Kunz hooked up a web front end to the SPIRES database so the High Energy Physics community could easily get at other's papers.
As others have pointed out, WAPs default configuration leaves them literally broadcasting the message "Here I am! Come get your internet access here." The laptop asks, "can I use your net connection?" and the WAP says, "Absolutely! Here's a key! Have a nice day!".
Using these advertised services is in no way stealing.
The ONLY reason there is any moral dilema is because we, as geeks, know that the WAP user may not have actually intended to have their WAP open to the public.
WAP makers are selling a fundamentally unsafe product. They do it because it's the status quo. It's the status quo because it will cut into their profit margins if they have to handle support calls explaining to customers how to use their shiny new WAP. Right now, you buy a WAP, connect the wires, and you're good to go. Forcing the users to choose a security mechanism or explicitly make the connection public would generate more support calls and cut into margins. All the other WAP makers do it, so why should Linksys/DLink/BrandX be the first to annoy customers?
There are two ways this can go down. Either the WAP makers can get together and simultaneously agree to ship secure by default (and raise prices or lose profit to compensate), or there will be a class action lawsuit that will force them to do it anyways.
If the music industry had a shred of sense, they'd have addressed this problem 15 years ago, when people with websites were trying to obtain legitimate licenses for music online. Instead, the industry-wide attitude was It'll go away.
Or another time, I was messing around with CSS and managed to create a neat little script that did text dropshadows. It took the length of the text based on font type and size (it only worked with one font) and calculated the correct offset for the top text. It worked really nice. Now I figured a neat trick like this was bound to be broken on anything but IE 6 since that was what I designed it for. To my plesant supprise it wasn't, it rendered great on IE 5 and 6 for both Mac and PC. Not on Netscape 4.7 or 6, however. The alignment was all off. Worse, it was off by different amounts on different platforms. I ended up just canning the idea.
Well duh it didn't work the same way in Netscape 6 (and probably wouldn't have in Mozilla either). IE 4, 5, and I believe 6 all get the CSS box model wrong. It has to do with whether the border adds to the padding etc. Anything that needs to be pixel-perfectly aligned will NOT work the same in Mozilla (or Mozilla-based) browsers and IE because Mozilla follows the spec and IE doesn't.
This is even more true of open source applications. As has been mentioned, one of the advantages of shared libraries is the ability to fix bugs and security problems in all applications that use the library just by upgrading the library. If there is a security fix in even one of the obscure libraries in an app that comes with the source, you can just recompile the program.
The content on the DVD is licensed to you with certain restrictive conditions
Yes it is,...
No it isn't! You purchase DVDs. You never sign any license. You never even click a button. Copyright law restricts your right to copy and distribute the DVD. Fair Use grants some specific exceptions to copyright law. Aside from that, you can do anything you want with the DVD you **own**.
Why do they expect better feedback from internet ads than they get from TV? From newspapers and magazines? They don't get a single click-through from any traditional media.
Also, for some reason they think everyone on the internet enjoys being annoyed. TV commercials and print ads are carefully crafted to either entertain or cram as much usefull information as possible into the given area. Banner ads flash, distract, and annoy the hell out of people.
And they wonder why internet advertising isn't working?
There are advertising strategies that work well on the internet. Sponsor a sight. I bought over $600 of merchandise (over several months) at www.countypaintball.com because they sponsored the model98 owner's group. If you're doing a banner, take the time to pick a specific site that caters to who you want to sell to and make the ad fit the sight design. Advertising is supposed to engender favorable brand recognition, not make people puke every time they see one of your products.
It's not necessarily how young you are, but how young you seem.
Get a good haircut, wear dockers and a good shirt, lose your sense of humor, never talk about cool music, and people will stop treating you like you're young.
Is it worth it? Not really.
Just focus on being professional and have confidence in your abilities (make sure you do have abilities though). Eventually, (around 23 to 25 in our industry), people will start respecting you.
Context menus are good. It just so happens that in Windows you get a context menu by right-clicking.
The way Windows handles clicking and right clicking works.
However, I stick by my assertion that clicking to select is the only intuitive part of using the mouse. The rest is arbitrary. Just because something doesn't do it the same way Windows does it doesn't mean it's not the right way.
Are you seriously proposing that left-clicking, then left-clicking again should have a different behavior than right-clicking alone? Sounds like a usability disaster to me.
Clicking to select or point is the only intuitive thing about using a mouse. Everything else, from click-and-drag to double-clicking to right-clicking, is just what we've learned to do. It's completely arbitrary.
For example, what if the way the UI worked was that you left click a file icon then right click an executable to use that executable to open that file? It's definitely easier on the hands than clicking on the file icon and dragging over the executable icon until the executable highights, then releasing it. This is assuming that for some reason double-clicking the file icon would not open the correct viewer/editor.
Let me make this simple for the people who never bothered to think about it.
Commercial shrinkwrap software is an abberation.
PRICE is determined by DEMAND / SUPPLY
When shrinkwrap software came on physical media, this somewhat held up. People could think of the supply as limited. In reality, software (and any digital information) is practically limitless in supply. Anything / INFINITY = 0.
The software industry developed this tricky little idea called "software licenses" to limit supply and people magically bought the idea. You still go into a store and buy the software like you would buy a shirt. You still pay for the software. However, you no longer own the software. You have a temporary license to use the software that can be revoked at the whim of the software maker.
That's not a free market. That's an artificially controlled market.
Open Source making money relies on the free market. If you don't put money or your own effort into the system, the system will die. Software makers can charge anything they want for the software, but once you buy it (or they give it to you), it's yours to do with as you please.
Communism would be the government explicitly funding and mandating the use of all the software we use.
PIVs were designed for multimedia. PIVs run at 1.4GHz+. DVD decoding in software on a PIV should be just as good as any hardware decoder out there, if not better since software is more flexible. If the software uses SSE2, then there shouldn't be much of a problem.
I think around an Athlon 750 or so, DVD playback in software has been the equal of DVD playback in hardware.
Of course, if you need to do something else while watching a DVD, it could still be an issue, but not many people do that.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with plain-old-HTML when used as a simple way to publish documents.
However, if you want tight control over it, you're in trouble. Newbies writing pages by hand don't need to worry about exact, perfect layout.
For everyone else, the more limited and structured XHTML is easier to write than plain-old-HTML. You see, limitations and structure make it more predictable. That's a good thing.
I'll grant RLE is obvious, but Huffman?
The principal is obvious; the more common the pattern, the shorter the binary pattern used to encode it.
However, determining the optimum encoding is so decidedly non-obvious that at the time Huffman figured out the algorithm, it was believed impossible. IIRC, he got his Masters and Doctorate at nearly the same time for that discovery.
I had Huffman as a teacher and he told us the story of how he came up with the Huffman optimal encoding tree algorithm. He was ready to give up and the stress was really getting to him. He'd staked his academic career on being able to solve this problem that all his teachers told him was impossible. It was the drop-dead deadline and it was stressing him out. (His wife fits in the story here somehow, but I can't remember). He dropped his work in the trash, resigned to his fate of failing his thesis. As he looked at the trashcan, he saw his notes upside down and it all clicked. The rest is history.
There is another.
There is another company I can think of with great brand recognition that could get a significant percentage of the internet users to download their browser. I won't name names, but it begins with a G.
Microsoft's next OS release is a direct threat to G's current dominance, so G might as well start the fight now before MSFT's next OS is rolled out. And G just happens to have an amazing new email service that would benefit from users having their own custom email client written in XUL (and automatically updated by G's website).
Coupled with MSFT's decision NOT to update IE on XP and below, we could see some real growth in Gecko marketshare.
AFAIK, the .torrent can be hosted anywhere, attached to an email, etc. The torrent is a metadata file that tells BitTorrent how to find the tracker.
Using BitTorrent in no way guarantees you get people viewing advertising.
It will, however, reduce the chance that downloaders will see advertisements for competitors when they go to FilePlanet to download your app.
I think the AC comes from the electric motor in the shaver creating an alternating magnetic field.
Of course, the magnets in the motor are probably at least an inch away from your face anyhow.
...then why do we have so many criminals in the .gov?
XHTML (HTML stored as XML) is supposed to seperate content from presentation.
XML is just a data format.
An MS Word document's presentation IS the data. Without the presentation, the data has less value. This is obvious to anyone who's ever used Word. We've been able to extract the raw text of an MS Word document for ages. Having that text as XML without any presentational information doesn't net us anything.
We'll have to wait and see what the structural information is worth before dismissing this entirely. Ostensibly, this should at least help for data mining.
This is bad because with a Word document, the presentation IS the content.
SPIRES also happens to be the DB that was hooked to the first EVAR dynamic website (at SLAC). Can you say "killer app" kids?
Okay, the tapes are cheap, but the DV cameras are expensive. Furthermore, they generally have highly-compact (read failure-prone) read-write equipment.
This is a cool hack, but not very practical for most people.
It's called "humor." It is not the same thing as comedy.
Read Mark Twain's "How To Write A Story" for a good reference.
With humour, there is no pause for effect, no knock-em-dead punchline. Good humor produces a smile which gradually widens, eventually turns into a giggle that escapes when you least expect it, and occaisionally ends up as milk squirting out of your nose.
Well, in a tech way.
I say we assassinate Mickey Mouse.
Make a Mickey Mouse and the 7 dwarves porno cartoon.
Make a Mickey Mouse ultra-violent video game.
Spread stickers with pictures of Mickey smoking a roach with Walt.
And on each of them put "In response to the Sony Bono Copyright Extension act. Have nice day."
I work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Back in the day(TM) before RDBMS were a commodity, SLAC used the SPIRES database written at Stanford running on an IBM Mainframe. Well, as these things go, the IBM Mainframe was getting long in the tooth, but there was a ton of data in this SPIRES database. SPIRES wasn't going to get ported to anything modern. I forget who exactly, but one engineer just up and decided to write an emulator for the IBM mainframe in practicly no time at all.
Now the SPIRES database is still running. However, it now runs on Solaris using a home-brewed IBM Mainframe emulator. Even though it's in emulation, it runs faster than it ever used to on the real deal (Moore's Law and all).
As a side note, the first truly useful web site was here at SLAC when George Crane and Paul Kunz hooked up a web front end to the SPIRES database so the High Energy Physics community could easily get at other's papers.
As others have pointed out, WAPs default configuration leaves them literally broadcasting the message "Here I am! Come get your internet access here." The laptop asks, "can I use your net connection?" and the WAP says, "Absolutely! Here's a key! Have a nice day!".
Using these advertised services is in no way stealing.
The ONLY reason there is any moral dilema is because we, as geeks, know that the WAP user may not have actually intended to have their WAP open to the public.
WAP makers are selling a fundamentally unsafe product. They do it because it's the status quo. It's the status quo because it will cut into their profit margins if they have to handle support calls explaining to customers how to use their shiny new WAP. Right now, you buy a WAP, connect the wires, and you're good to go. Forcing the users to choose a security mechanism or explicitly make the connection public would generate more support calls and cut into margins. All the other WAP makers do it, so why should Linksys/DLink/BrandX be the first to annoy customers?
There are two ways this can go down. Either the WAP makers can get together and simultaneously agree to ship secure by default (and raise prices or lose profit to compensate), or there will be a class action lawsuit that will force them to do it anyways.
Um, the web is only about 10 years old.
Well duh it didn't work the same way in Netscape 6 (and probably wouldn't have in Mozilla either). IE 4, 5, and I believe 6 all get the CSS box model wrong. It has to do with whether the border adds to the padding etc. Anything that needs to be pixel-perfectly aligned will NOT work the same in Mozilla (or Mozilla-based) browsers and IE because Mozilla follows the spec and IE doesn't.
This is even more true of open source applications. As has been mentioned, one of the advantages of shared libraries is the ability to fix bugs and security problems in all applications that use the library just by upgrading the library. If there is a security fix in even one of the obscure libraries in an app that comes with the source, you can just recompile the program.
No it isn't! You purchase DVDs. You never sign any license. You never even click a button. Copyright law restricts your right to copy and distribute the DVD. Fair Use grants some specific exceptions to copyright law. Aside from that, you can do anything you want with the DVD you **own**.
Why do they expect better feedback from internet ads than they get from TV? From newspapers and magazines? They don't get a single click-through from any traditional media. Also, for some reason they think everyone on the internet enjoys being annoyed. TV commercials and print ads are carefully crafted to either entertain or cram as much usefull information as possible into the given area. Banner ads flash, distract, and annoy the hell out of people. And they wonder why internet advertising isn't working? There are advertising strategies that work well on the internet. Sponsor a sight. I bought over $600 of merchandise (over several months) at www.countypaintball.com because they sponsored the model98 owner's group. If you're doing a banner, take the time to pick a specific site that caters to who you want to sell to and make the ad fit the sight design. Advertising is supposed to engender favorable brand recognition, not make people puke every time they see one of your products.
It's not necessarily how young you are, but how young you seem.
Get a good haircut, wear dockers and a good shirt, lose your sense of humor, never talk about cool music, and people will stop treating you like you're young.
Is it worth it? Not really.
Just focus on being professional and have confidence in your abilities (make sure you do have abilities though). Eventually, (around 23 to 25 in our industry), people will start respecting you.
Context menus are good. It just so happens that in Windows you get a context menu by right-clicking.
The way Windows handles clicking and right clicking works.
However, I stick by my assertion that clicking to select is the only intuitive part of using the mouse. The rest is arbitrary. Just because something doesn't do it the same way Windows does it doesn't mean it's not the right way.
Are you seriously proposing that left-clicking, then left-clicking again should have a different behavior than right-clicking alone? Sounds like a usability disaster to me.
Clicking to select or point is the only intuitive thing about using a mouse. Everything else, from click-and-drag to double-clicking to right-clicking, is just what we've learned to do. It's completely arbitrary.
For example, what if the way the UI worked was that you left click a file icon then right click an executable to use that executable to open that file? It's definitely easier on the hands than clicking on the file icon and dragging over the executable icon until the executable highights, then releasing it. This is assuming that for some reason double-clicking the file icon would not open the correct viewer/editor.
http://www.borland.com/kylix
Real Soon Now, I hope.
Linux != Communism
Let me make this simple for the people who never bothered to think about it.
Commercial shrinkwrap software is an abberation.
PRICE is determined by DEMAND / SUPPLY
When shrinkwrap software came on physical media, this somewhat held up. People could think of the supply as limited. In reality, software (and any digital information) is practically limitless in supply. Anything / INFINITY = 0.
The software industry developed this tricky little idea called "software licenses" to limit supply and people magically bought the idea. You still go into a store and buy the software like you would buy a shirt. You still pay for the software. However, you no longer own the software. You have a temporary license to use the software that can be revoked at the whim of the software maker.
That's not a free market. That's an artificially controlled market.
Open Source making money relies on the free market. If you don't put money or your own effort into the system, the system will die. Software makers can charge anything they want for the software, but once you buy it (or they give it to you), it's yours to do with as you please.
Communism would be the government explicitly funding and mandating the use of all the software we use.
PIVs were designed for multimedia. PIVs run at 1.4GHz+. DVD decoding in software on a PIV should be just as good as any hardware decoder out there, if not better since software is more flexible. If the software uses SSE2, then there shouldn't be much of a problem.
I think around an Athlon 750 or so, DVD playback in software has been the equal of DVD playback in hardware.
Of course, if you need to do something else while watching a DVD, it could still be an issue, but not many people do that.