In my experience with XML and RDBMS systems, mapping one onto another is always a dicey task. The primary reason (IMHO) is that XML's ability to represent order as well as structure as data doesn't fit into an RDBMS database without some work. I've seen people try to map both XML and regular DB's onto each other, and my opinion is that the results don't "feel right" on one side or the other unless great pains are made to preserve the structure of the XML doc in the DB schema.
That said, I'm not sure a hierarchial DB will necessarialy be any better than something like an OODBMS with well-modeled objects.
So we've spent 20 years designing computer interfaces that allow users to multi-task better and better, and perhaps to some extent at the expense of the task at hand. Is there merit in re-evaluating the windowing model to try to make it more single-task friendly? Since I'm working on a widget set of sorts, what would people suggest works best in helping them get through a single task? or are wizards it?
What do the people you're working with respect? that's the primary question here. If it's wrinkles, then that's what they'll listen too. If it's technical knowhow, then they'll get over the fact that you look about 12, I know the people I choose to work with do. I'm in a similar situation most of the time, but when you start showing the people you work with that you're a valuable asset and resource, they should swing your way. If they don't, it's time to look for employment elsewhere...if you're as good as you think you are, that is =). -----------------------
Widgets for the web
...with the level of commentray so far. Not with Mozilla.
Yeah, it has it's problems, but I'll take mozilla's problems over's NN4.x's "features" any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I build the web for a living as I suspect that a lot of slashdotters do as well, and so far the posts that have been along the lines of "well, what good does it do me?" belie a very low level of understanding about how important an applictions platform mozilla is, not just how good it is at rendering pages optimized for the horrible hack that NN 4.x is. The web will always be stuck where it is right now if you and I don't demand more, and as someone who builds this stuff, I can tell you for a certianty that mozilla and NN6 are part of that "more".
What I'm getting at is that while it may be fun to poke at the mozilla team from time to time for not producing to IE standards or our lulled standards of what is good, it misses the entire point. Mozilla has been built what the future in mind, so if it seems slower, please remember that when you first grabbed NN 4.x off an FTP you probably thought it was slow as molasses too and wanted your simple world of NN 3 back.
I guess I was just hoping that the slashdot community would get it. -----------------------
Widgets for the web
Ok, I haven't been keeping close score, so can anyone tell me who of the large memory manufactures hasn't given up the ghost to Rambus yet? Is Micron the only one left? If so, does anyone have pointers as to how they are faring in court?
It's really a crying shame that ideas stolen from a public standards group are being enforced as patents by such an ill-willed set of legal thugs. -----------------------
Widgets for the web
This is why good DHTML coders are hard to find and harder to keep.
CSS, on the other hand, is about a lot more than the writer's intended display style and acessability is one of those things. Good web developers know this and they cope. Yet another reason that good web developers are easy to spot, they aren't afriad of the undefined, their designs trive on it. Is DTHML too easy to break with a user defined sytle sheet? perhaps, but such is life, and such is the web. Since when were we ever able to use the standards the way we would like too? -----------------------
Widgets for the web
(or something like that)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a professional web developer who uses myriad different languages in a given day, and while I won't hesitate to aplaud GO's move, I am not sure where TEA will fit. On the very lowest end, we have ASP, stepping up into the real world we have PHP and JSP, and for sites that need integrated content management, we have Zope, so my question is this, where does TEA go? Reading some of the docs, I like it's compiled nature, but what makes that different from JSP? Anyone used TEA? Thoughts? +-------------------------------------- ---------+ | Sissies...real men program with `cat > file` |
As a purdue student myself, I am familiar with the site in question. While I do not make use of it frequently, I am _very_ concerned about this as I am also a professional web developer. Additionally, I have seen no harm or misuse of the University's name or good character by the site. While my misgivings about the administration's dedication to the student body at purdue stem from other experiences, this can only serve to re-affirm my view that those in charge at Purdue are severly out of touch with the students.
Hopefully this'll get enough press on campus to make a difference.
There are times when I disagree with ESR, but I for one am thankfull today that he is on our side. The chineese govt might indeed go whole-hog for linux, as it would prevent them from having to deal with the capitalist pigs from Redmond, but I'm glad that someone is willing to stand up for the community and let it be known the our ecomomic model is only one facet of Linux and/or OpenSource.
hmmm....me thinks that this might actually be a Good Thing. Firstly, count on those outside and opposed to the linux community to trumpet this as "yet another example of linux fragmentation." To the harried IT manager with more immediate problems than whether or not M$ is telling him the whole truth, this may seem a very attractive argument. The question has also been fielded as to how the larger commercial distros will maintain the ability to develop when, in the end, anyone can re-package them from a $5 cheap-bytes CD. And so my first reactions are shock and horror at this current crop of "newbie" distributions, and, at first look, this does indeed look bad.
The good news is that the market, while it can (and often does) reward the likes of M$, also has a hard time arguing with the current success of Linux. As per fragmentation, we have seen forks come and forks go, and in the end, the best is kept and the chaff lost. Also, while at first glance closed source software seems to be the best way to guard against such code-base-raiding, since the code is open source'd, the larger distros have an easier time of gauging what is and is not valuable to users. If they fail to heed such obvious warnings, the loss is not the communities since no one paid anyone to develop the majority of this code in the first place!! The ability and responsibility to develop and maintain the code lies in the hands of that very community, not RH or Debain or SuSE.
Could this be a bad thing for linux? In the short term I think it will at least force a shakeout. As for the long term, I'm not worried.
Naysayers take heed, this revolution is not so easily squelched.
You think this is bad? Aside from the FEC's value added approach to campaign finance, more insidious still is Sen. McCain's proposed bill. It basically says that if I were to put up money to support one canidate or viewpoint, I must also put up and equal amount for the opposing viewpoint...now take into account the FEC's creative accounting and one can easily see where this becomes something more than just an exercise in stupidity. Say I post a page espousing some mainstream viewpoint (it matters not which one) and I post it to a server that I rent space on. Say it's a Sun E4000. Must I then put up funding for E4000's for the opposing viewpoint? And that's supposing there's only one!!!Thankfully, the odds of the measure passing are low. However, the bigger danger is that those voters who don't bother to think or read for themselves will become lulled into accepting such blatant abuses of Free Speech.do something about stupid voters. Vote.
I have this sneaking suspicion that IBM was the motiviating factor in all of this. I work in/around an AS/400 shop (but I am a web designer) and it seems to me that IBM is pushing Java just as fast as it'll go. Additionally, it makes sense for IBM to pursue this route in terms of client independence. IBM really doesn't have a competitive client to push into the market at this point, so by pushing Java to every other platform, they hedge their bets and can sit back and watch the client wars play out while they focus on the Big Iron behind it all without having to worry quite so much about interoperability problems. My guess is that they will drag Sun kicking and screaming along with this plan through some kind of liscensing deal that we may/may not be privy too. Heaven knows that IBM's patent arsenal affects Sun _somehow_
I'll second your first sentement. Since when did any industry become "in loco parentis" for the next generation? Perhaps I am still young and idealistic, but as a someone who claims to do a little thinking of my very own, I am rather distraught at the fervor that is raised every time the new surrogates fail at a job that shouldn't be theirs in the first place.
The fact that parents are paranoid enough to purchase such shody reporting is testament to the fact that they have shirked their duty. Who has reason to be afraid when they do something right? Not I, and I wager not many in this discussion. Our children will grow up with computers whether or not we like it, whether or not they grow up with morals or ethics is up to us.
Avoiding your duty and then whining that the system isn't doing it's job is an attribute that should be attributed to either ignorance or cowardice. I don't see a good option there
SGI migration charts from the past few months show that they will continue to support some version of IRIX on their server and supercomputing class machines for quite some time to come. While it may be true that IRIX is going to disappear from the desktop, the point is that the profit margins on OS and OS Care deals are too high for these large vendors for them to abandon them totally. The point isn't that SGI is ditching IRIX, but rather that these vendors answer only to themselves, which is why we should support Linux and FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience with XML and RDBMS systems, mapping one onto another is always a dicey task. The primary reason (IMHO) is that XML's ability to represent order as well as structure as data doesn't fit into an RDBMS database without some work. I've seen people try to map both XML and regular DB's onto each other, and my opinion is that the results don't "feel right" on one side or the other unless great pains are made to preserve the structure of the XML doc in the DB schema.
That said, I'm not sure a hierarchial DB will necessarialy be any better than something like an OODBMS with well-modeled objects.
So we've spent 20 years designing computer interfaces that allow users to multi-task better and better, and perhaps to some extent at the expense of the task at hand. Is there merit in re-evaluating the windowing model to try to make it more single-task friendly? Since I'm working on a widget set of sorts, what would people suggest works best in helping them get through a single task? or are wizards it?
Alex
alex@netWindows.org
What do the people you're working with respect? that's the primary question here. If it's wrinkles, then that's what they'll listen too. If it's technical knowhow, then they'll get over the fact that you look about 12, I know the people I choose to work with do. I'm in a similar situation most of the time, but when you start showing the people you work with that you're a valuable asset and resource, they should swing your way. If they don't, it's time to look for employment elsewhere...if you're as good as you think you are, that is =).
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
...with the level of commentray so far. Not with Mozilla.
Yeah, it has it's problems, but I'll take mozilla's problems over's NN4.x's "features" any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I build the web for a living as I suspect that a lot of slashdotters do as well, and so far the posts that have been along the lines of "well, what good does it do me?" belie a very low level of understanding about how important an applictions platform mozilla is, not just how good it is at rendering pages optimized for the horrible hack that NN 4.x is. The web will always be stuck where it is right now if you and I don't demand more, and as someone who builds this stuff, I can tell you for a certianty that mozilla and NN6 are part of that "more".
What I'm getting at is that while it may be fun to poke at the mozilla team from time to time for not producing to IE standards or our lulled standards of what is good, it misses the entire point. Mozilla has been built what the future in mind, so if it seems slower, please remember that when you first grabbed NN 4.x off an FTP you probably thought it was slow as molasses too and wanted your simple world of NN 3 back.
I guess I was just hoping that the slashdot community would get it.
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
Ok, I haven't been keeping close score, so can anyone tell me who of the large memory manufactures hasn't given up the ghost to Rambus yet? Is Micron the only one left? If so, does anyone have pointers as to how they are faring in court?
It's really a crying shame that ideas stolen from a public standards group are being enforced as patents by such an ill-willed set of legal thugs.
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
This is why good DHTML coders are hard to find and harder to keep.
CSS, on the other hand, is about a lot more than the writer's intended display style and acessability is one of those things. Good web developers know this and they cope. Yet another reason that good web developers are easy to spot, they aren't afriad of the undefined, their designs trive on it. Is DTHML too easy to break with a user defined sytle sheet? perhaps, but such is life, and such is the web. Since when were we ever able to use the standards the way we would like too?
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
(or something like that)
creative or slick?
I'm not sure I see what part is creative...and I do this kind of stuff for a living...
Don't get me wrong, I love the site. The props section is espically slick, and the sounds are top notch for a flash animation.
But what part represents new thought in interface design? And what part would be particularly usefull in the design of internet apps?
I don't mean to flame, I'm just curious. I probably just missed something...
-----------------------
Widgets for the web
(or something like that)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a professional web developer who uses myriad different languages in a given day, and while I won't hesitate to aplaud GO's move, I am not sure where TEA will fit. On the very lowest end, we have ASP, stepping up into the real world we have PHP and JSP, and for sites that need integrated content management, we have Zope, so my question is this, where does TEA go? Reading some of the docs, I like it's compiled nature, but what makes that different from JSP? Anyone used TEA? Thoughts?- ---------+
+-------------------------------------
| Sissies...real men program with `cat > file` |
As a purdue student myself, I am familiar with the site in question. While I do not make use of it frequently, I am _very_ concerned about this as I am also a professional web developer. Additionally, I have seen no harm or misuse of the University's name or good character by the site. While my misgivings about the administration's dedication to the student body at purdue stem from other experiences, this can only serve to re-affirm my view that those in charge at Purdue are severly out of touch with the students.
Hopefully this'll get enough press on campus to make a difference.
There are times when I disagree with ESR, but I for one am thankfull today that he is on our side. The chineese govt might indeed go whole-hog for linux, as it would prevent them from having to deal with the capitalist pigs from Redmond, but I'm glad that someone is willing to stand up for the community and let it be known the our ecomomic model is only one facet of Linux and/or OpenSource.
The good news is that the market, while it can (and often does) reward the likes of M$, also has a hard time arguing with the current success of Linux. As per fragmentation, we have seen forks come and forks go, and in the end, the best is kept and the chaff lost. Also, while at first glance closed source software seems to be the best way to guard against such code-base-raiding, since the code is open source'd, the larger distros have an easier time of gauging what is and is not valuable to users. If they fail to heed such obvious warnings, the loss is not the communities since no one paid anyone to develop the majority of this code in the first place!! The ability and responsibility to develop and maintain the code lies in the hands of that very community, not RH or Debain or SuSE.
Could this be a bad thing for linux? In the short term I think it will at least force a shakeout. As for the long term, I'm not worried.
Naysayers take heed, this revolution is not so easily squelched.
You think this is bad? Aside from the FEC's value added approach to campaign finance, more insidious still is Sen. McCain's proposed bill. It basically says that if I were to put up money to support one canidate or viewpoint, I must also put up and equal amount for the opposing viewpoint...now take into account the FEC's creative accounting and one can easily see where this becomes something more than just an exercise in stupidity. Say I post a page espousing some mainstream viewpoint (it matters not which one) and I post it to a server that I rent space on. Say it's a Sun E4000. Must I then put up funding for E4000's for the opposing viewpoint? And that's supposing there's only one!!!Thankfully, the odds of the measure passing are low. However, the bigger danger is that those voters who don't bother to think or read for themselves will become lulled into accepting such blatant abuses of Free Speech.do something about stupid voters. Vote.
I have this sneaking suspicion that IBM was the motiviating factor in all of this. I work in/around an AS/400 shop (but I am a web designer) and it seems to me that IBM is pushing Java just as fast as it'll go. Additionally, it makes sense for IBM to pursue this route in terms of client independence. IBM really doesn't have a competitive client to push into the market at this point, so by pushing Java to every other platform, they hedge their bets and can sit back and watch the client wars play out while they focus on the Big Iron behind it all without having to worry quite so much about interoperability problems. My guess is that they will drag Sun kicking and screaming along with this plan through some kind of liscensing deal that we may/may not be privy too. Heaven knows that IBM's patent arsenal affects Sun _somehow_
I'll second your first sentement.
Since when did any industry become "in loco parentis" for the next generation? Perhaps I am still young and idealistic, but as a someone who claims to do a little thinking of my very own, I am rather distraught at the fervor that is raised every time the new surrogates fail at a job that shouldn't be theirs in the first place.
The fact that parents are paranoid enough to purchase such shody reporting is testament to the fact that they have shirked their duty. Who has reason to be afraid when they do something right?
Not I, and I wager not many in this discussion.
Our children will grow up with computers whether or not we like it, whether or not they grow up with morals or ethics is up to us.
Avoiding your duty and then whining that the system isn't doing it's job is an attribute that should be attributed to either ignorance or cowardice. I don't see a good option there
SGI migration charts from the past few months show that they will continue to support some version of IRIX on their server and supercomputing class machines for quite some time to come. While it may be true that IRIX is going to disappear from the desktop, the point is that the profit margins on OS and OS Care deals are too high for these large vendors for them to abandon them totally. The point isn't that SGI is ditching IRIX, but rather that these vendors answer only to themselves, which is why we should support Linux and FreeBSD.