... and haven't looked back. I got sick of the way that, say, Google searches for particular projects put the project homepage halfway down the page, with barely-relevant mailing list postings sitting higher.
I still do comparisons every so often, and Yahoo still wins most of the time.
Well, they can't. Or at least they can beat FF. They've said so. Hence having the best browser in the world again might involve using someone elses code.
They're not trying to beat FF. That's not the point.
Microsoft has repeatedly proven in the past that when it really needs to, on a small, well-defined project, it can beat the pants off most other teams out there. (A couple of examples that immediately spring to mind: IE3, IE4, the initial WMA and WMV codecs, the first JVM)
But in this case, it doesn't need to. The point of IE7 isn't to beat FF in terms of pure quality, it's just to make a browser that's good enough so that Windows users won't switch away. Hence a few basic new features like tabs, enhanced security and better standards support, which are the three main arguments used to switch non-power-users over to Firefox.
So the shareholders mind that Windows uses the BSD IP stack?
The shareholders don't know what an IP stack is. But more importantly, MS took it because it didn't have one at all before, which is not the case with web browsers. I'll bet you anything that the Longhorn IP stack bears no relation to the original BSD code, and only a few basic tools remain (like ping) that there's just no point recoding anyway. (As we all know, IE was bought in from Spyglass, but that has no leftover code either. Ditto SQL Server from Sybase.)
Why bother rewriting the wheel? Microsoft keeps publishing new OSS projects of its own, why doesn't it contribute to an existing one?
Oh, that'll go down fantastically, I'm sure. I can just imagine the shareholder meeting where Ballmer announces that, sure, they had the best browser in the world from 1996 to 2002, but apparently Microsoft now can't code its way out of a paper bag and hey, this open source stuff's better anyway. Watch the stock price rocket!
(It's also worth bearing in mind that while IE7 won't be Acid2-compliant, Firefox isn't either. IIRC only the latest Safari and Opera releases manage it.)
Anyone else remember Starship Titanic by Digital Village, Douglas Adam's game company?
Yep. I was working at TDV through most of ST's development.
I'm a web techie, so I didn't work on the AI aspects. The text parser was originally the Velocitext engine from Virtus Corp., but we ended up changing it so much (I say "we" - the vast majority of the work was done by one coder, Jason Williams, IIRC) that it got renamed - Douglas himself chose the name "Spookitalk" because its ability to show some understanding of your typing was, well, spooky. It was a long way from perfect, and it could only route you to one of the prerecorded answers (of which we had several thousand) rather than say anything new, but its ability to do so was considerably better than most other parsers that you see these days.
My point being that this concept is not nearly new at all, even with the audio element which is what people seem to be claiming is different.
How do you know? Have you actually downloaded Facade and played it?
Your reasoning seems to be entirely based on the idea that both games feature a natural language parser, therefore there's nothing new here. It's like saying that Half-Life 2 is no progression from Battlezone because they both feature 3D graphics.
If the natural language interface to Facade is not only a way of interrogating the characters but also a way of changing the state of the game and advancing the plot, then that's a fairly significant step further than Starship Titanic, which pretty much limited the parser to interrogating the characters for answers. Furthermore it sounds like there's a heavily emotional element to the AI, which sounds fascinating. (Yes, The Sims has something like that too. Facade's may be very different. I don't know, I've only just read this story, and like most Slashdorks, am happily posting away before actually playing the game in question. But at least I admit that.)
...but what's the point of running a Windows MS Office suite if Apple's already got a MS Office suite of its own, which is better than the ones that run under Windows?
Reason 1: Windows Office != Mac Office - you're missing Outlook and Access, both of which are hugely important. (No, Entourage is not a full replacement for Outlook.) Other apps worth considering are OneNote, Project and FrontPage - yes, it's far from a great web tool, but if your entire site is built in it then abandoning it isn't an easy option.
Reason 2: User may have a Windows Office licence already. Crossover Office is much cheaper than buying the whole of MS Office again.
The trouble is, I can't think of any major ISP that would willingly impose the delays that greylisting causes on their customers. There are tons of small business users who get a wide variety of mail from new customers who won't be whitelisted. Quite often, this mail is time-imperative.
It's okay if a user has made the choice to use greylisting, but the user has to be able to make that choice, not the ISP.
Alan Moore has had at least three movies made from his work recently, and he has seemed relatively okay with having details and stories changed around.
Whatever gave you that idea? He hated what was done to From Hell, as it turned it into exactly the kind of plot he'd set out to avoid. Plus, he's never even seen the League film. (See this interview for more)
But in Netscape 2, there were not very many hooks from JavaScript back into the HTML. You had a document object and a window object of course, but beyond that about the only "DHTML" you could do was mostly restricted to manipulating form values and popping open new windows. Useful, to be sure, but that was about it.
Not quite true - you also had document.write(), which meant that you could completely rewrite the contents of a document (though you had to do it from scratch, rather than simply manipulating the DOM like you do now). This meant that you could already go some way to creating apps that did lots of work on the client side.
With Netscape 2.0b2 (Javascript was called LiveScript at that point) I wrote a dynamic crossword app using multiple frames that would completely redraw the crossword grid to do things like adding letters and highlighting clues.
DNA was one of the first people to buy a portable phone, back in the mid-80s, when such a device was a handset attached to a massive luggable thing. The story goes that after he bought it he took it down to the beach with him one day and got so frustrated by its total failure to work that he left it there.
Saw it this morning, actually, for the second time - first was a 95% complete cut similar to the one Simpson saw, the second was the final edit. I went along with my friends Tim Browse (his review) and Sean Sollé (his review) - all of us worked with Douglas at The Digital Village, a company we joined mainly because we were already massive Hitchhiker's fans. (If you need further credentials for me, look here.
We've been involved with the film at various stages. Thus, the disclaimer. However, please also be aware that none of us would be defending a film that crapped all over Douglas's work, especially since it was such a fundamental part of our youth.
Most (though not all) of the spoilers that Simpson reveals in his review are true. Yes, the lying-in-front-of-a-bulldozer dialogue has been cut short. Yes, several key Guide entries are missing. Yes, some of the dialogue isn't as funny as it could have been, and a couple of the gags are corny rather than sharp. (Note: I said a couple. It's nearly two hours of film, there are still tons of good lines in there.)
It's at this point that Simpson's opinion of the movie and mine diverge rather radically, because he seems to think that you can judge the film's merits almost purely on what's missing, in combination with things that don't appear as quite as he'd have liked them. Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius, reimagining Douglas's creations in totally new ways that still seem completely in keeping with his intentions. It wears its Britishness in a far more open and interesting way than any previous version of the story - the Vogons, in particular, are a satire of traditional English bureaucracy that borders on Hogarthian.
I could go through MJ's review point-by-point and debunk all the stuff - and there's plenty of it - which he's blown wildly out of proportion, or which is based on utterly blinkered thinking, or which is just plain wrong. But then, that would be succumbing to exactly the kind of checklist mentality that he has, and god, how I hate that. He seems to just want the radio and TV series again, on a bigger budget, thus completely misunderstanding the demands that the different media have. His review reads like he went in with a notepad and took score through the film, subtracting ten points every time a line from the original went astray, and based his final opinion on that. As others have said in this thread, it's exactly the same kind of fanboy nonsense that had LoTR fans doomsaying before its release, and it's just bullshit.
If you're the kind of fan who works that way, who demands pure fidelity to the original and nothing but, then you won't like this movie. However, given that every incarnation of Hitchhiker's has been pretty different (and this movie is staunchly in the same tradition), I'd say that you're a fan who's utterly missing the point. Simpson, in loudly complaining that the film's plot veers wildly all over the place, makes me wonder which "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" he's a fan of, 'cos it certainly isn't one I've ever seen. His review is also the only negative one I've read from a major fan - contrast it with this review from Jens Kellenberg, who runs one of the biggest HHGTTG
That was eight years ago, and there have been at least three major new releases (I haven't been keeping up) since then. I know how hard it is for some people to credit MS with actually writing decent solid code, but it's just possible that they have, you know?
"Dubinsky holds a B.A. from Yale University in History, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School. She currently serves as a director of palmOne and of Intuit Corporation."
Sounds like a suitable CEO to me. You hire CEOs for their management capabilities. You don't hire them to do your programming.
"Dileep George was a Graduate Research Fellow at Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and a graduate student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research interests include neuronal coding, information processing, and the modeling of cortical functions."
Sounds like a suitable Chief Engineer to me. I have no idea where you got that "no background in hardcore computer science" from, unless you're unbelievably narrow-minded about skill domains.
Next Generation AI?
Oh, wait, you haven't actually read what the company does. Okay, explains it.
Okay, this argument has gone on well beyond its sell-by date and, while it confuses me that you'd rather lower barriers to entry for browser developers than to content producers (even though the latter outweigh the former by hundreds to one, and the former are the ones with the existing heavy technical skills), that's your prerogative.
DNA was upset when MIB came out because he felt they borrowed his ideas very heavily, while his movie was still being rejected by the studios.
But in the end, MiB is what got the long-abandoned movie project going again. Hollywood studios saw the success of MiB, said "Sci-fi comedy! We gots to get us some of that!" and that led to Hitchhiker's. (Seriously, that's how it happened.)
Zaphod's second head, even though it's one of the better-known bits of Hitchhiker's, is hardly vital. It was an offhand, silly joke that DNA threw into the radio series for the hell of it, mainly because the non-visual nature meant he could get away with it.
Unfortunately, it's been an utter pain in the arse for almost every other adaptation, and as a result DNA regretted it ever since. Personally, I think the movie has a fantastic solution for keeping it without having to spend half of the effects money on it.
Maybe that used to be the case, but right now, people simply open FrontPage and write web pages in a WYSIWYMGOSB (What You See Is What You Might Get On Selected Browsers) kind of way.
And that always produces 100% valid XHTML, does it?
If common web browsers interpreted HTML and CSS rigidly, users wouldn't see any errors because web developers simply wouldn't upload broken files in the first place.
... and the web would be about 0.1% of the size it is now.
No, really, this is a vital point. You want to know why the web got so big, with so many people coding web pages?
User sees web pages, thinks, "Ooh, I wouldn't mind making some of those."
User finds HTML tutorial that describes how simple HTML tags work.
User opens text editor and types one line:
Hello my name is <b>Fred</b>
User saves file and drags it into web browser.
Despite the file being completely invalid HTML, the browser renders it just fine.
"Oh, that was easy!" says User, and for an encore goes on to prove that #00000 is #FFFFFF and gets to build www.nextzebracrossing.com.
90% of web builders started this way. If they'd had to create fully valid HTML before the browser gave them the time of day, they'd probably have fallen at the first hurdle. But they didn't, they went on to create web pages, which is why the web is as huge and popular and useful as it is today.
"But it's full of malformed crap!" you say. Frankly, who gives a shit? The fact that browser authors have to create nasty code to handle this stuff is a tiny price to pay for something as fantastic as the World Wide Web. Yeah, so it's not 100% XHTML compliant. Big Fat Hairy Deal. If you're writing executable code, you want it to be completely valid, but HTML is not executable code (and before you jump on it, Javascript gets treated differently). HTML is document markup, and half a document is better than no document at all. (And the security problems you mention above are not due to liberal parsing.)
But, hey, if you want to make a web browser that treats everything fully strictly, go right ahead. If you want to make a new hypertext network where everything has to be 100% valid to work, go right ahead. No one's ever gonna use 'em, because the world doesn't work that way.
In the end, we ended up doing lots of work moving people to WordPress.
Why didn't you just stick with MT 2.6? That's what I've done on our colo. I'm tempted by WordPress, but so far I haven't found any major reason to switch.
I understand your concerns with the big MT licensing debacle, but then SA admits it was a debacle, and they substantially changed the pricing structure as a result. Now they've seen how hard the community can bite, I'd be surprised if they'll easily tread on 6.5 million users.
(1) "meta-abstract", meaning that they are discussions about discussions and seperated from actual implementation, and (2) "pseudo-intellectual", meaning that are carried out with a intellectual attitude (big words, big principles) but they are lacking the actual academic rigour that would make them truly intellectual. In response, you basically called me stupid and lazy.
Okay, I apologise. I didn't fully appreciate what you were saying.
I feel picky about your point 2, though: just because a thorough empirical study hasn't been applied, it doesn't mean that the comments aren't intellectual (and more importantly, intelligent).
Response: I have no problem with people learning and explaining things. Still, I am correct to refer to those who are inventing this folksonomie thing as "self appointed experts".
I think you're being unfair by implying a hubris that I just don't see here. The commenters are expressing opinions, but not claiming to be experts. And it is perfectly possible, given the youth of the field, that people like Merholz have read most of the major essays on the topic.
My objection is to the scientific veneer placed over a fairly interesting, but simply problem: how to make classification of information simple and straightforward.
Ah, except you're missing a huge chunk of what this is about: Not just how we can classify things, but what happens if you give such an open, simple and flexible classification system to a diverse, separated bunch of users and then aggregate the results.
Instead of all of this bullshit about taxonomies and synonym control, how about we see some code, or even pseudo-code?
But there's code already. del.icio.us and Flickr have been around for a while. If you look at the Taggle suggestion, there are already several implementations in the comments. This is about post-implementation discussion and analysis.
these meta-abstract pseudo-intellectual discussions
"big words I don't understand and can't be bothered to click on"
self appointed experts
"people actually learning about things and explaining them"
It seems every week, there is some new Paradigm That Will Change The Way We Process Information.
This one's been around for months. Tens of thousands of people are using it already. That's worth commenting on, isn't it?
"I would take practical advice any day"... and I use this kind of tagging every day. People are building it into new applications as we speak. It's not abstract, it's working and useful right now.
I always thought that OPML and Google-like search powers was the beast for this job. Is it being used? It would certainly gather together the disparate threads in a self boot-strapping manner.
OPML differs in a couple of vital respects:
It's hierarchical. The tag systems discussed here are deliberately flat. (One can argue for hours about the relative merits of each, but let's just say there are strong opinions on both sides)
OPML takes a one-to-many approach to categorisation (one category can hold many items, but each item can only appear in one category). One of the most powerful things about these tag systems is their many-to-many approach, and the ease of filing and finding goes hand-in-hand with that. A text search can be laid on top (and is in del.icio.us) but it's a secondary method of finding after tag-browsing.
The one-to-many aspect of OPML is quite bizarre given Winer's history with outliners, of which MORE was his first. One of MORE's primary innovations, which is still fantastically useful, is the ability to file the same item at multiple points in the tree, using a system similar to hard linking in filesystems. Changing the item changes it at all places in the tree. OPML doesn't have that at all, for some reason.
Slashdot Mirror
... and haven't looked back. I got sick of the way that, say, Google searches for particular projects put the project homepage halfway down the page, with barely-relevant mailing list postings sitting higher.
I still do comparisons every so often, and Yahoo still wins most of the time.
Well, they can't. Or at least they can beat FF. They've said so. Hence having the best browser in the world again might involve using someone elses code.
They're not trying to beat FF. That's not the point.
Microsoft has repeatedly proven in the past that when it really needs to, on a small, well-defined project, it can beat the pants off most other teams out there. (A couple of examples that immediately spring to mind: IE3, IE4, the initial WMA and WMV codecs, the first JVM)
But in this case, it doesn't need to. The point of IE7 isn't to beat FF in terms of pure quality, it's just to make a browser that's good enough so that Windows users won't switch away. Hence a few basic new features like tabs, enhanced security and better standards support, which are the three main arguments used to switch non-power-users over to Firefox.
So the shareholders mind that Windows uses the BSD IP stack?
The shareholders don't know what an IP stack is. But more importantly, MS took it because it didn't have one at all before, which is not the case with web browsers. I'll bet you anything that the Longhorn IP stack bears no relation to the original BSD code, and only a few basic tools remain (like ping) that there's just no point recoding anyway. (As we all know, IE was bought in from Spyglass, but that has no leftover code either. Ditto SQL Server from Sybase.)
Why bother rewriting the wheel? Microsoft keeps publishing new OSS projects of its own, why doesn't it contribute to an existing one?
Oh, that'll go down fantastically, I'm sure. I can just imagine the shareholder meeting where Ballmer announces that, sure, they had the best browser in the world from 1996 to 2002, but apparently Microsoft now can't code its way out of a paper bag and hey, this open source stuff's better anyway. Watch the stock price rocket!
(It's also worth bearing in mind that while IE7 won't be Acid2-compliant, Firefox isn't either. IIRC only the latest Safari and Opera releases manage it.)
Bugger.
s/pretty much/mostly/
(I think my point still stands, um, mostly.)
Anyone else remember Starship Titanic by Digital Village, Douglas Adam's game company?
Yep. I was working at TDV through most of ST's development.
I'm a web techie, so I didn't work on the AI aspects. The text parser was originally the Velocitext engine from Virtus Corp., but we ended up changing it so much (I say "we" - the vast majority of the work was done by one coder, Jason Williams, IIRC) that it got renamed - Douglas himself chose the name "Spookitalk" because its ability to show some understanding of your typing was, well, spooky. It was a long way from perfect, and it could only route you to one of the prerecorded answers (of which we had several thousand) rather than say anything new, but its ability to do so was considerably better than most other parsers that you see these days.
My point being that this concept is not nearly new at all, even with the audio element which is what people seem to be claiming is different.
How do you know? Have you actually downloaded Facade and played it?
Your reasoning seems to be entirely based on the idea that both games feature a natural language parser, therefore there's nothing new here. It's like saying that Half-Life 2 is no progression from Battlezone because they both feature 3D graphics.
If the natural language interface to Facade is not only a way of interrogating the characters but also a way of changing the state of the game and advancing the plot, then that's a fairly significant step further than Starship Titanic, which pretty much limited the parser to interrogating the characters for answers. Furthermore it sounds like there's a heavily emotional element to the AI, which sounds fascinating. (Yes, The Sims has something like that too. Facade's may be very different. I don't know, I've only just read this story, and like most Slashdorks, am happily posting away before actually playing the game in question. But at least I admit that.)
...but what's the point of running a Windows MS Office suite if Apple's already got a MS Office suite of its own, which is better than the ones that run under Windows?
Reason 1: Windows Office != Mac Office - you're missing Outlook and Access, both of which are hugely important. (No, Entourage is not a full replacement for Outlook.) Other apps worth considering are OneNote, Project and FrontPage - yes, it's far from a great web tool, but if your entire site is built in it then abandoning it isn't an easy option.
Reason 2: User may have a Windows Office licence already. Crossover Office is much cheaper than buying the whole of MS Office again.
The trouble is, I can't think of any major ISP that would willingly impose the delays that greylisting causes on their customers. There are tons of small business users who get a wide variety of mail from new customers who won't be whitelisted. Quite often, this mail is time-imperative.
It's okay if a user has made the choice to use greylisting, but the user has to be able to make that choice, not the ISP.
Alan Moore has had at least three movies made from his work recently, and he has seemed relatively okay with having details and stories changed around.
Whatever gave you that idea? He hated what was done to From Hell, as it turned it into exactly the kind of plot he'd set out to avoid. Plus, he's never even seen the League film. (See this interview for more)
But in Netscape 2, there were not very many hooks from JavaScript back into the HTML. You had a document object and a window object of course, but beyond that about the only "DHTML" you could do was mostly restricted to manipulating form values and popping open new windows. Useful, to be sure, but that was about it.
Not quite true - you also had document.write(), which meant that you could completely rewrite the contents of a document (though you had to do it from scratch, rather than simply manipulating the DOM like you do now). This meant that you could already go some way to creating apps that did lots of work on the client side.
With Netscape 2.0b2 (Javascript was called LiveScript at that point) I wrote a dynamic crossword app using multiple frames that would completely redraw the crossword grid to do things like adding letters and highlighting clues.
DNA was one of the first people to buy a portable phone, back in the mid-80s, when such a device was a handset attached to a massive luggable thing. The story goes that after he bought it he took it down to the beach with him one day and got so frustrated by its total failure to work that he left it there.
Saw it this morning, actually, for the second time - first was a 95% complete cut similar to the one Simpson saw, the second was the final edit. I went along with my friends Tim Browse (his review) and Sean Sollé (his review) - all of us worked with Douglas at The Digital Village, a company we joined mainly because we were already massive Hitchhiker's fans. (If you need further credentials for me, look here.
We've been involved with the film at various stages. Thus, the disclaimer. However, please also be aware that none of us would be defending a film that crapped all over Douglas's work, especially since it was such a fundamental part of our youth.
Most (though not all) of the spoilers that Simpson reveals in his review are true. Yes, the lying-in-front-of-a-bulldozer dialogue has been cut short. Yes, several key Guide entries are missing. Yes, some of the dialogue isn't as funny as it could have been, and a couple of the gags are corny rather than sharp. (Note: I said a couple. It's nearly two hours of film, there are still tons of good lines in there.)
It's at this point that Simpson's opinion of the movie and mine diverge rather radically, because he seems to think that you can judge the film's merits almost purely on what's missing, in combination with things that don't appear as quite as he'd have liked them. Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius, reimagining Douglas's creations in totally new ways that still seem completely in keeping with his intentions. It wears its Britishness in a far more open and interesting way than any previous version of the story - the Vogons, in particular, are a satire of traditional English bureaucracy that borders on Hogarthian.
I could go through MJ's review point-by-point and debunk all the stuff - and there's plenty of it - which he's blown wildly out of proportion, or which is based on utterly blinkered thinking, or which is just plain wrong. But then, that would be succumbing to exactly the kind of checklist mentality that he has, and god, how I hate that. He seems to just want the radio and TV series again, on a bigger budget, thus completely misunderstanding the demands that the different media have. His review reads like he went in with a notepad and took score through the film, subtracting ten points every time a line from the original went astray, and based his final opinion on that. As others have said in this thread, it's exactly the same kind of fanboy nonsense that had LoTR fans doomsaying before its release, and it's just bullshit.
If you're the kind of fan who works that way, who demands pure fidelity to the original and nothing but, then you won't like this movie. However, given that every incarnation of Hitchhiker's has been pretty different (and this movie is staunchly in the same tradition), I'd say that you're a fan who's utterly missing the point. Simpson, in loudly complaining that the film's plot veers wildly all over the place, makes me wonder which "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" he's a fan of, 'cos it certainly isn't one I've ever seen. His review is also the only negative one I've read from a major fan - contrast it with this review from Jens Kellenberg, who runs one of the biggest HHGTTG
That was eight years ago, and there have been at least three major new releases (I haven't been keeping up) since then. I know how hard it is for some people to credit MS with actually writing decent solid code, but it's just possible that they have, you know?
"Dubinsky holds a B.A. from Yale University in History, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School. She currently serves as a director of palmOne and of Intuit Corporation."
Sounds like a suitable CEO to me. You hire CEOs for their management capabilities. You don't hire them to do your programming.
"Dileep George was a Graduate Research Fellow at Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and a graduate student in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research interests include neuronal coding, information processing, and the modeling of cortical functions."
Sounds like a suitable Chief Engineer to me. I have no idea where you got that "no background in hardcore computer science" from, unless you're unbelievably narrow-minded about skill domains.
Next Generation AI?
Oh, wait, you haven't actually read what the company does. Okay, explains it.
Okay, this argument has gone on well beyond its sell-by date and, while it confuses me that you'd rather lower barriers to entry for browser developers than to content producers (even though the latter outweigh the former by hundreds to one, and the former are the ones with the existing heavy technical skills), that's your prerogative.
However, I think these two pieces argue against your position more thoroughly than I ever could:
Thought Experiment
The history of draconian error handling in XML
Enjoy.
DNA was upset when MIB came out because he felt they borrowed his ideas very heavily, while his movie was still being rejected by the studios.
But in the end, MiB is what got the long-abandoned movie project going again. Hollywood studios saw the success of MiB, said "Sci-fi comedy! We gots to get us some of that!" and that led to Hitchhiker's. (Seriously, that's how it happened.)
Zaphod's second head, even though it's one of the better-known bits of Hitchhiker's, is hardly vital. It was an offhand, silly joke that DNA threw into the radio series for the hell of it, mainly because the non-visual nature meant he could get away with it.
Unfortunately, it's been an utter pain in the arse for almost every other adaptation, and as a result DNA regretted it ever since. Personally, I think the movie has a fantastic solution for keeping it without having to spend half of the effects money on it.
Maybe that used to be the case, but right now, people simply open FrontPage and write web pages in a WYSIWYMGOSB (What You See Is What You Might Get On Selected Browsers) kind of way.
And that always produces 100% valid XHTML, does it?
If common web browsers interpreted HTML and CSS rigidly, users wouldn't see any errors because web developers simply wouldn't upload broken files in the first place.
... and the web would be about 0.1% of the size it is now.
No, really, this is a vital point. You want to know why the web got so big, with so many people coding web pages?
Hello my name is <b>Fred</b>
90% of web builders started this way. If they'd had to create fully valid HTML before the browser gave them the time of day, they'd probably have fallen at the first hurdle. But they didn't, they went on to create web pages, which is why the web is as huge and popular and useful as it is today.
"But it's full of malformed crap!" you say. Frankly, who gives a shit? The fact that browser authors have to create nasty code to handle this stuff is a tiny price to pay for something as fantastic as the World Wide Web. Yeah, so it's not 100% XHTML compliant. Big Fat Hairy Deal. If you're writing executable code, you want it to be completely valid, but HTML is not executable code (and before you jump on it, Javascript gets treated differently). HTML is document markup, and half a document is better than no document at all. (And the security problems you mention above are not due to liberal parsing.)
But, hey, if you want to make a web browser that treats everything fully strictly, go right ahead. If you want to make a new hypertext network where everything has to be 100% valid to work, go right ahead. No one's ever gonna use 'em, because the world doesn't work that way.
... is the name of a talk that was given at a small London geek conference (NotCon 2004) by Tom Dolan.
I thought it was excellent - short and to the point, with lots of good tips.
You can find his notes and PowerPoint (alas) slides here.
IIRC, WO is used in parts of BBC News Online, and Perl is the most popular webapp language for the main BBC site.
In the end, we ended up doing lots of work moving people to WordPress.
Why didn't you just stick with MT 2.6? That's what I've done on our colo. I'm tempted by WordPress, but so far I haven't found any major reason to switch.
I understand your concerns with the big MT licensing debacle, but then SA admits it was a debacle, and they substantially changed the pricing structure as a result. Now they've seen how hard the community can bite, I'd be surprised if they'll easily tread on 6.5 million users.
See press release.
(1) "meta-abstract", meaning that they are discussions about discussions and seperated from actual implementation, and
(2) "pseudo-intellectual", meaning that are carried out with a intellectual attitude (big words, big principles) but they are lacking the actual academic rigour that would make them truly intellectual.
In response, you basically called me stupid and lazy.
Okay, I apologise. I didn't fully appreciate what you were saying.
I feel picky about your point 2, though: just because a thorough empirical study hasn't been applied, it doesn't mean that the comments aren't intellectual (and more importantly, intelligent).
Response: I have no problem with people learning and explaining things. Still, I am correct to refer to those who are inventing this folksonomie thing as "self appointed experts".
I think you're being unfair by implying a hubris that I just don't see here. The commenters are expressing opinions, but not claiming to be experts. And it is perfectly possible, given the youth of the field, that people like Merholz have read most of the major essays on the topic.
My objection is to the scientific veneer placed over a fairly interesting, but simply problem: how to make classification of information simple and straightforward.
Ah, except you're missing a huge chunk of what this is about: Not just how we can classify things, but what happens if you give such an open, simple and flexible classification system to a diverse, separated bunch of users and then aggregate the results.
Instead of all of this bullshit about taxonomies and synonym control, how about we see some code, or even pseudo-code?
But there's code already. del.icio.us and Flickr have been around for a while. If you look at the Taggle suggestion, there are already several implementations in the comments. This is about post-implementation discussion and analysis.
these meta-abstract pseudo-intellectual discussions
... and I use this kind of tagging every day. People are building it into new applications as we speak. It's not abstract, it's working and useful right now.
"big words I don't understand and can't be bothered to click on"
self appointed experts
"people actually learning about things and explaining them"
It seems every week, there is some new Paradigm That Will Change The Way We Process Information.
This one's been around for months. Tens of thousands of people are using it already. That's worth commenting on, isn't it?
"I would take practical advice any day"
OPML differs in a couple of vital respects:
that. A text search can be laid on top (and is in del.icio.us) but it's a secondary method of finding after tag-browsing.
The one-to-many aspect of OPML is quite bizarre given Winer's history with outliners, of which MORE was his first. One of MORE's primary innovations, which is still fantastically useful, is the ability to file the same item at multiple points in the tree, using a system similar to hard linking in filesystems. Changing the item changes it at all places in the tree. OPML doesn't have that at all, for some reason.