Linux 2.5.37 (Sep 2002) is 5100081 lines of code, 152 MB.
First it was 80 lines, then a thousand, then hundreds of thousands, now a million. I'm going to grow suspicious when they start claiming ten million.
Their stock price is down today. Perhaps they need to re-think how non-credible thier claims should be. Next thing you know, North Korea will be claiming to have a million nukes.
Forget the crappy low-flow toilet that makes dimwits feel oh-so-good but takes 6 flushes to get rid of the Dark Matter. Use a regular toilet which takes 1 flush.
Why not have dual-flush toilets with a #1 handle and a #2 handle. Surely we can muster the technology. Most people don't actually want to waste water.
We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.
All you need is a means of storing off-peak supply for on-peak demand. I hear that in British Columbia, they pump water back up into hydro-electric reservoirs during the night. Maybe regular power plants can have big flywheels.
We can blame the environmental movement for there not being enough power plants.
They've have a problem. Software they create and distribute makes copies of that poem for other people.
There's no problem; they can just create a license for MS-Office users to use and copy their files in whatever ways Microsoft deems suitable to Microsoft's interests. They could also ROT-13 the file content for DMCA protections. No non-licensed software would be allowed to read the files, and Microsoft could circumvent fair use, first-amendment rights, and due process in prosecuting interoperable software providers.
Here are some screenshots of the software. Looks just like Office. Very Impressive.
I don't know about their marketing department, though. The logo looks more like a warning that says, "Caution: May cause your monitor to burst into flames".
At a time when a lot of US Companies are looking at China as a smorgesboard of potential opportunity as it slowly evolves from a Communistic to Capitalistic society, no doubt Microsoft has looked there as well.
It already is Captialistic to a degree. So, by definition, it's not Communistic. It's Fascistic.
I always wonder what MS spends their incredibly high R&D budget on.
Wine and caviar. Microsoft Research is a black hole of irrelevance. If they had any brains for practical matters, they would solve their MS-Office interoperability problem by introducing a file siguature like the following:
Roses are red, Violets are blue. This file-signature poem is copyrighted, So reverse engineers can munch my butt. Copyright (C) 2003 C. S. Bruce. All rights reserved. This poem may not be reproduced in any way by any means without express written permission.
All primitive types that are used in user-supplied textual content are type-identified by a leading-byte indicator, which is collapsed for numbers small enough to fit into the Count type. Identifying the data types in-line removes any reliance on a external schema to identify the content types and allows for great flexibility. Since the validation is defined in terms of lexical equivalence, primitive types may be arbitrarily substituted at the discretion of the file writer. For example, if a schema identified a content field as consisting of a list of double-precision floating-point numbers but the writer is aware that only integers between 0 and 255 are being written out in one particular instance, it can write the list as an array of byte values. Conversely, if a field contains a value that cannot be represented by the primitive types, such as a 200-digit integer, the writer can simply write out the number as string content instead, and the document will still validate and be correct. Allowing a string representation of numbers is no significant imposition on an implementation since most conceivable parsers will also implement XML support so they or the applications that use them need to deal with string representations of anything anyway.
Some might argue that a binary-primitive language such as ASN.1 should be used for representing primitive information. We contend that ASN.1 is a "bloated" specification that is not needed here. Some parts of the ASN.1 standard for string handling have been described informally as being "complete insanity". Given the very limited set of structures that need to be represented in content in XML (only strings, numbers, and lists since most structuring is done using the higher-level markups) and given the lexical equivalence and substitutability of strings for anything that cannot be represented more primitively, a very simple typing system is very appropriate and, in fact, desirable. Ask software developers which typing system they would rather implement and support.
I'm not attacking your right to bear arms. I was asking about why that right was given.
It's there so The People can take their BB guns and firecrackers and defeat the smart bombs, MOABs, tanks, fighter jets, and nukes of the army, navy, and air force should that ever become necessary.
I live in Ontario and work in Quebec, and one thing that I have noticed that the Quebec power is a lot less reliable in general. We have lots of power outages at the office and this causes lots of problems with our computers. At home in Ontario, until yesterday, I think there were two minor outages in the last six years. I was unaffected by the Ice Storm at home.
Converting XML to binary? Why go to all the trouble to run it through an XML parser etc. first if you're just going to send a binary file?
Actually, you're misunderstanding this. That would be pretty strange to emit textual XML, parse it back into an internal representaiton and then re-generate binary-encoded XML. You just emit the binary-encoded XML in the first place. Duh! And use a library that does it transparently and can also emit textual XML and/or GZIPped or BZIP2ed output if you so desire. The binary-XML-encoded imagery data in the example was written at a speed of 109 MB/sec.
Do you not see the huge absurdity of BINARY XML? It's an oxymoron!
Lots of people use GZIP encoding with XML data to make it suitable for sending over a network. Surprise, GZIP is a _BINARY_ format! And yet, it interoperates between systems very nicely. The page you are viewing was probably GZIP encoded too on the way to your browser. Most XML parsers will accept an GZIPped XML stream and recover the original content transparently. Binary data can be just as interoperable as text data, and hugely more efficient when done right.
XML is 'supposed' to be a nice little data interchange format. It's not a data storage mechanism (because relational DBMSs are far, far superior) yet misguided people like this are trying to use it as one.
Lots of 'misguided' people are using XML encoding for lots of purposes, such as word-processor documents. Do you propose that word-processor documents be stored and interchanged in a relational-database format? That's pretty bizarre.
Converting XML to binary? Why go to all the trouble to run it through an XML parser etc. first if you're just going to send a binary file? Use a more efficient file format!
The absurdity with the plethora of binary file formats is that people have kept reinventing the same things over and over again. These are the misguided ones. This situation is what gave rise to XML format in the first place: people were tired of inventing one-off formats that all required custom tools to use or edit or parse or transform or whatever. Imagine the flexibility of XML combined with the efficiency of binary encoding.
Yep, the standard XML-bloat joke. Here is the serious solution: binary encoding. I have done some testing by defining a simple demonstration XML image format as:
<XmlDemoImage version="1.1.0">
<Header>
<Width>x</Width>
<Height>y</Height>
<SampleType>byte</SampleType>
</Header>
<Scanline row="i"> <!-- optional attr: filter="diff" -->
<RgbSamples>r g b r g b...</RgbSamples>
</Scanline>... </XmlDemoImage>
If we can avoid the bizarre and hugely self-defeating but all-too-common urge to way-overstructure the pixel representation and use raw binary encoding especially for the dense arrays of numbers, the representation and performance is essentially equivalent to that of PNG format itself (though for some images, BZIP2 compression is significantly better). Here is a study of the issue. On an Athlon-XP1800+ Linux box, I get a raw (Binary)XML reading speed of 188 MB/sec for an uncompressed image. W3C is holding a workshop on binary XML encoding in September, so it may finally be prepared to humour such radical efficiency with XML.
Why not just ZIP, RAR, or otherwise compress the file? Does there need to be a separate standard?
Because processing reams of text-delimited markups and arrays of text-encoded numbers or blobs is sloooooow. It's not about compression, but you can GZIP/whatever either text or binary.
For scientific data in XML, the process is to take an array of numbers, convert the numbers to text (expensive), compress the numbers (which is slow, especially because of the bulk of the numbers), transport, uncompress, and re-parse the numbers (expensive) back into binary. It's much more sensible to take the binary numbers, dump them out in a raw write(), compress (faster, because of less input plus extra speedup with GZIP anyway because of data properties), fetch with a raw read(), and sometimes do endian swap. No encode/decode, and the GZIP compressed data anyway is actually smaller (less redundant junk in the stream to begin with).
If I really want to do some web browsing secure from local sniffers I could fire up netscape from my basement but with the display on my notebook. (X has some bebefits.) It would be slow, but it would work.
How about setting up a secure proxy server on the Linux box in your basement that serves out everything as "https:". Is there such a thing? Does Squid do this?
Humour aside, probabky won't be long before we have spam wagons. Spammers in converted trucks crusing the highways to find wireless access points for spamming.
At least driving trucks around will cost them actual money.
I do think we need this extensible binary formatting language or what-ever it would be, but until then XML is allowing groups of people to agree on standard file/data formats a lot quicker and easier than starting from a blank piece of paper.
OGC (Open GIS Consortium), an organization that was involved in the development of SensorML, has also developed a open straightforward binary representation for XML documents that features the direct, raw, binary representation of arrays of numbers that makes it well suited for representing scientific data. Unfortunately, bureaucratic processes prevent me from giving you a pointer to the document (it's in the early stages of any receiving any official endorsement).
There are also some other binary encodings for XML out there that are either inadequate (WAP-XML) or which are propietary or highly complicated.
The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2)
Sorry Mr. Pomakis, but F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2. The masses are multiplied, and I believe that both bodies exert the same amount of force on each other. Though, you'd probably get all kinds of light/space/time/distance distortions with a super-dense blowling ball (plus a strike every time, since the bowling pins would jump at the ball like a magnet).
These items and memory sticks, digital camers & mp3 players can be hidden in people's clothing, and therefore, the real solution is to disallow all clothing on the premises of the business. People could also hide such items up their butt, so you'll need to check there too before allowing employees admittance. (Well, maybe not the CD...)
Re:Isn't this the point of the Cybiko?
on
PDAs For Kids
·
· Score: 1
http://www.cybikoxtreme.com/
The site won't let me in without a cookie. Buh-bye!
Though I suppose it won't be long before all sites are like this.
Capitalism at least has a shorter feedback loop, although in practical there's not much else going for it. If the people in a political system are hardworking and altruistically inclined, almost any political system will work. Which is why the top-down political approach always fails.
There is a complexity issue as well. Modern economies are so complex that it simply is not possible to centrally plan production in an efficient way. You also get idealism/corruption (same diff) in the central planners where they produce what people "should" want rather than what they actually do want.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux 2.5.37 (Sep 2002) is 5100081 lines of code, 152 MB.
First it was 80 lines, then a thousand, then hundreds of thousands, now a million. I'm going to grow suspicious when they start claiming ten million.
Their stock price is down today. Perhaps they need to re-think how non-credible thier claims should be. Next thing you know, North Korea will be claiming to have a million nukes.
Forget the crappy low-flow toilet that makes dimwits feel oh-so-good but takes 6 flushes to get rid of the Dark Matter. Use a regular toilet which takes 1 flush.
Why not have dual-flush toilets with a #1 handle and a #2 handle. Surely we can muster the technology. Most people don't actually want to waste water.
We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.
All you need is a means of storing off-peak supply for on-peak demand. I hear that in British Columbia, they pump water back up into hydro-electric reservoirs during the night. Maybe regular power plants can have big flywheels.
We can blame the environmental movement for there not being enough power plants.
They've have a problem. Software they create and distribute makes copies of that poem for other people.
There's no problem; they can just create a license for MS-Office users to use and copy their files in whatever ways Microsoft deems suitable to Microsoft's interests. They could also ROT-13 the file content for DMCA protections. No non-licensed software would be allowed to read the files, and Microsoft could circumvent fair use, first-amendment rights, and due process in prosecuting interoperable software providers.
Here are some screenshots of the software. Looks just like Office. Very Impressive.
I don't know about their marketing department, though. The logo looks more like a warning that says, "Caution: May cause your monitor to burst into flames".
At a time when a lot of US Companies are looking at China as a smorgesboard of potential opportunity as it slowly evolves from a Communistic to Capitalistic society, no doubt Microsoft has looked there as well.
It already is Captialistic to a degree. So, by definition, it's not Communistic. It's Fascistic.
I always wonder what MS spends their incredibly high R&D budget on.
Wine and caviar. Microsoft Research is a black hole of irrelevance. If they had any brains for practical matters, they would solve their MS-Office interoperability problem by introducing a file siguature like the following:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
This file-signature poem is copyrighted,
So reverse engineers can munch my butt.
Copyright (C) 2003 C. S. Bruce. All rights reserved.
This poem may not be reproduced in any way by any means without express
written permission.
Have you ever heard of ASN.1 ?
To quote from the report:
All primitive types that are used in user-supplied textual content are type-identified by a leading-byte indicator, which is collapsed for numbers small enough to fit into the Count type. Identifying the data types in-line removes any reliance on a external schema to identify the content types and allows for great flexibility. Since the validation is defined in terms of lexical equivalence, primitive types may be arbitrarily substituted at the discretion of the file writer. For example, if a schema identified a content field as consisting of a list of double-precision floating-point numbers but the writer is aware that only integers between 0 and 255 are being written out in one particular instance, it can write the list as an array of byte values. Conversely, if a field contains a value that cannot be represented by the primitive types, such as a 200-digit integer, the writer can simply write out the number as string content instead, and the document will still validate and be correct. Allowing a string representation of numbers is no significant imposition on an implementation since most conceivable parsers will also implement XML support so they or the applications that use them need to deal with string representations of anything anyway.
Some might argue that a binary-primitive language such as ASN.1 should be used for representing primitive information. We contend that ASN.1 is a "bloated" specification that is not needed here. Some parts of the ASN.1 standard for string handling have been described informally as being "complete insanity". Given the very limited set of structures that need to be represented in content in XML (only strings, numbers, and lists since most structuring is done using the higher-level markups) and given the lexical equivalence and substitutability of strings for anything that cannot be represented more primitively, a very simple typing system is very appropriate and, in fact, desirable. Ask software developers which typing system they would rather implement and support.
I'm not attacking your right to bear arms. I was asking about why that right was given.
It's there so The People can take their BB guns and firecrackers and defeat the smart bombs, MOABs, tanks, fighter jets, and nukes of the army, navy, and air force should that ever become necessary.
I live in Ontario and work in Quebec, and one thing that I have noticed that the Quebec power is a lot less reliable in general. We have lots of power outages at the office and this causes lots of problems with our computers. At home in Ontario, until yesterday, I think there were two minor outages in the last six years. I was unaffected by the Ice Storm at home.
The absurdity with the plethora of binary file formats is that people have kept reinventing the same things over and over again.
I should have said that they keep reinventing the same things over and over again, POORLY.
Converting XML to binary? Why go to all the trouble to run it through an XML parser etc. first if you're just going to send a binary file?
Actually, you're misunderstanding this. That would be pretty strange to emit textual XML, parse it back into an internal representaiton and then re-generate binary-encoded XML. You just emit the binary-encoded XML in the first place. Duh! And use a library that does it transparently and can also emit textual XML and/or GZIPped or BZIP2ed output if you so desire. The binary-XML-encoded imagery data in the example was written at a speed of 109 MB/sec.
Do you not see the huge absurdity of BINARY XML? It's an oxymoron!
Lots of people use GZIP encoding with XML data to make it suitable for sending over a network. Surprise, GZIP is a _BINARY_ format! And yet, it interoperates between systems very nicely. The page you are viewing was probably GZIP encoded too on the way to your browser. Most XML parsers will accept an GZIPped XML stream and recover the original content transparently. Binary data can be just as interoperable as text data, and hugely more efficient when done right.
XML is 'supposed' to be a nice little data interchange format. It's not a data storage mechanism (because relational DBMSs are far, far superior) yet misguided people like this are trying to use it as one.
Lots of 'misguided' people are using XML encoding for lots of purposes, such as word-processor documents. Do you propose that word-processor documents be stored and interchanged in a relational-database format? That's pretty bizarre.
Converting XML to binary? Why go to all the trouble to run it through an XML parser etc. first if you're just going to send a binary file? Use a more efficient file format!
The absurdity with the plethora of binary file formats is that people have kept reinventing the same things over and over again. These are the misguided ones. This situation is what gave rise to XML format in the first place: people were tired of inventing one-off formats that all required custom tools to use or edit or parse or transform or whatever. Imagine the flexibility of XML combined with the efficiency of binary encoding.
<element x="0" y="0"> /> ...
...</RgbSamples> ...
<component name="red" value="10"
Yep, the standard XML-bloat joke. Here is the serious solution: binary encoding. I have done some testing by defining a simple demonstration XML image format as:
<XmlDemoImage version="1.1.0">
<Header>
<Width>x</Width>
<Height>y</Height>
<SampleType>byte</SampleType>
</Header>
<Scanline row="i"> <!-- optional attr: filter="diff" -->
<RgbSamples>r g b r g b
</Scanline>
</XmlDemoImage>
If we can avoid the bizarre and hugely self-defeating but all-too-common urge to way-overstructure the pixel representation and use raw binary encoding especially for the dense arrays of numbers, the representation and performance is essentially equivalent to that of PNG format itself (though for some images, BZIP2 compression is significantly better). Here is a study of the issue. On an Athlon-XP1800+ Linux box, I get a raw (Binary)XML reading speed of 188 MB/sec for an uncompressed image. W3C is holding a workshop on binary XML encoding in September, so it may finally be prepared to humour such radical efficiency with XML.
Why not just ZIP, RAR, or otherwise compress the file? Does there need to be a separate standard?
Because processing reams of text-delimited markups and arrays of text-encoded numbers or blobs is sloooooow. It's not about compression, but you can GZIP/whatever either text or binary.
For scientific data in XML, the process is to take an array of numbers, convert the numbers to text (expensive), compress the numbers (which is slow, especially because of the bulk of the numbers), transport, uncompress, and re-parse the numbers (expensive) back into binary. It's much more sensible to take the binary numbers, dump them out in a raw write(), compress (faster, because of less input plus extra speedup with GZIP anyway because of data properties), fetch with a raw read(), and sometimes do endian swap. No encode/decode, and the GZIP compressed data anyway is actually smaller (less redundant junk in the stream to begin with).
If I really want to do some web browsing secure from local sniffers I could fire up netscape from my basement but with the display on my notebook. (X has some bebefits.) It would be slow, but it would work.
How about setting up a secure proxy server on the Linux box in your basement that serves out everything as "https:". Is there such a thing? Does Squid do this?
Humour aside, probabky won't be long before we have spam wagons. Spammers in converted trucks crusing the highways to find wireless access points for spamming.
At least driving trucks around will cost them actual money.
Check out BXML for a binary encoding of XML to efficiently carry scientific/array-type data. Feedback appreciated.
I do think we need this extensible binary formatting language or what-ever it would be, but until then XML is allowing groups of people to agree on standard file/data formats a lot quicker and easier than starting from a blank piece of paper.
OGC (Open GIS Consortium), an organization that was involved in the development of SensorML, has also developed a open straightforward binary representation for XML documents that features the direct, raw, binary representation of arrays of numbers that makes it well suited for representing scientific data. Unfortunately, bureaucratic processes prevent me from giving you a pointer to the document (it's in the early stages of any receiving any official endorsement).
There are also some other binary encodings for XML out there that are either inadequate (WAP-XML) or which are propietary or highly complicated.
Microsoft has got .NET out quickly, and is saturating the marketplace, ensuring their success into the future.
Did this happen last night, because I just woke up?
M$ should be forced to pay one million ... no one billion dollars to the FSF.
And $39-billion back to their customers.
The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2)
Sorry Mr. Pomakis, but F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2. The masses are multiplied, and I believe that both bodies exert the same amount of force on each other. Though, you'd probably get all kinds of light/space/time/distance distortions with a super-dense blowling ball (plus a strike every time, since the bowling pins would jump at the ball like a magnet).
You could just bring a floppy/cd with you
These items and memory sticks, digital camers & mp3 players can be hidden in people's clothing, and therefore, the real solution is to disallow all clothing on the premises of the business. People could also hide such items up their butt, so you'll need to check there too before allowing employees admittance. (Well, maybe not the CD...)
http://www.cybikoxtreme.com/
The site won't let me in without a cookie. Buh-bye!
Though I suppose it won't be long before all sites are like this.
Capitalism at least has a shorter feedback loop, although in practical there's not much else going for it. If the people in a political system are hardworking and altruistically inclined, almost any political system will work. Which is why the top-down political approach always fails.
There is a complexity issue as well. Modern economies are so complex that it simply is not possible to centrally plan production in an efficient way. You also get idealism/corruption (same diff) in the central planners where they produce what people "should" want rather than what they actually do want.