There is a collapse only the timeline is reversed so we see the universe expanding..:)
That is why I said it was more like a white hole.
Also, it just doesn't work to reverse things. For example, if you reverse the timeline of the expansion of the universe you would get a decelerating collapse. Inside a black hole there is an accelerating collapse.
Even with the fact that matter creates space-time and gravitational effects, why doesn't matter simply attract all other matter in the universe?
It does.
Actually, I think I just agreed with you except if that were the case then that would mean the universe isn't actually expanding, but rather the observations we are getting from other galaxies is itself changing because of increased gravity we get the shift in the spectrum by getting less and less of that energy from other galaxy.
This is a sensible suggestion - it is called the 'tired light' idea. The reason we know it isn't the case is that light is not red shifting down the spectrum, but signals are getting stretched in length as well - space really is expanding.
Of course I am a complete layman when it comes to these things, but I think that gravity has to be affecting our observations of other galaxies in someway.
It certainly does. This is why we get gravitational lensing.
Still... Why doesn't the universe collapse then? Or maybe it is and we can't really observe it? So I don't know if that works either.
Because there may be more forces that just gravity.
A constant vacuum energy of about -1 probably rules out some of the wilder ideas about the future of the universe, like the Big Rip, in which the end of the universe could be only a few tens of billions of years away.
Honestly, there are real alternatives to the big bang theory. One of them is the idea that our "universe" is at the center of a black hole, which effectively places the same limits (you can't get out, and neither can light) on the boundary.
If that's the case, the "big bang" turns into the initial collapse; and the "dark energy" that drives expansion becomes the space-energy expansion inside the schwarzschild radius that is needed for conservation of energy.
This needs a lot more explanation. There is no expansion at the centre of a black hole, only an inevitable collapse. A black hole analogy make have made some kind of sense if the universe was closed, but it isn't - it is not only open, but accelerating. If anything, the accelerating universe is more like a white hole (where separation becomes inevitable) than a black hole. There are other types of model that approximate the universe, like gravastars, but surely not black holes.
I think this will certainly spell trouble for Linux. Not "the end of Linux" - but certainly trouble. Mostly it comes down to the fact that, when MS gets around to sueing people, some retarded judge is going to look at Novell signing a deal with MS as "admission of guilt" and - while it might not win the case for MS - it will lend a lot more creadance to their FUD for a lot of people.
Personally, I think this could spell a lot of trouble for Microsoft. This is not a matter of one judge and one case - any attempt to force patents is going to create a lot of bad feeling internationally. There is one major market which Microsoft needs to maintain in which they have aready made things bad for themselves by their attitude - Europe. Linux take-up in Europe is considerable, especially by governments. Any serious attempt by Microsoft to attack Linux would most likely result in major legal action by the EU, and Microsoft is likely to come off well.
You are arguing that both ways: You claim to have no investment and then start trying to get authority by referring to your experience with it.
Sorry, this makes no sense. Having experience in something does not mean I have investment in that thing. I have been using Microsoft products since the 70s, but I have no loyalty or investment in them! However, I certainly consider myself an authority on many of their products, because of my experience.
Adding one more layer of indirection is usually just asking for trouble. Doing this because XML has flaws in its design is usually stupid, especially as you can't guarantee trivial transformations due to that brokenness. So, no, I cannot avoid the fallout from that design mistake. Either I take the fallout in the form of adding more indirection, implementing the code for that indreiction, not being able to use the present documentation, etc - or I take the fallout in the form of having to deal with arbitrary noise being thrown into the data formats.
Indirection != transformation. It is a mapping. One of the great things about XML is the ability to filter out arbtrary noise or transform it to something less noisy.
And no matter where I stand, I often have to debug other people's code. Where they have NOT thought that clearly around this - which is obvious, given that even you, with 30 years of experience in various formats including XML, do not get the point on the first explanation. Hopefully, you got it now.
Well, I thank you for your time and patience in trying to make me 'get it'. Unfortunately, it seems not to have worked:)
I spend a significant amount of time debugging other people's code too, unfortunately. That is precisely why I am so keen on XML, because much of that debugging has involved reverse-engineering undocumented formats.
People will add indirection and mess up ANY data format. This is precisely why having a standard format which is easily transformable and parsable is so vital.
To keep cutting down your arguments (though I'm not sure why I bother - I don't think you're going to dare to pull away your investment and see the flaws in XML anyway):
One good rule about arguing is not to invent characteristics of those you are arguing against. Firstly, you can't tell, unless you have some amazing psychic ability: I know there are faults in XML. In particular the validation languages have been pretty awful (with DTDs being ghastly). But, I see so much discussion that indicates a complete lack of understanding of why XML was invented. Without such understanding the benefits, which hugely outweigh the awfulness, are often not recognised. Secondly, resorting to ad hominem attacks does not help either. Many consider that this in inself is a sign of someone who has significant investment themselves in the point of view they are trying to defend. At the very least, it is a distraction from what might well be good arguments *you* are putting forward.
Your examples of XML application does not argue for cut/paste at all; it's processing done by a machine.
Individuals can do exactly what those machines did in that example. I have seen it done with students inventing their own format for science work (such as molecular models) and embedding that within standard XML document formats, to allow embedded display. Works like a dream!
I am in favour of having a standard, structured text format we can process - I just think XML is a horrible choice. It's bloated, denormalized for a proper hierarchy by the utterly arbitrary inclusion of attributes, and then, to add insult to injury, it can't represent graphs.
(1) Then don't use attributes. You only have to write the XSTL to transform from your attribute-free format to an attribute-based format (or back the other way) once.
(2) Of course it can represent graphs. There are well-established techniques for doing this. RDFis a W3C standard which includes representation of graphs. It is pure XML.
(And I would love to see some major document format using YAML).
YAML does not allow tabs, and I've not found the end of line issue to be a real issue the last decade. It was a pain back in the early 90s. I can also never remember having had any benefit from the ability to cut out a piece of XML and use it outside its scope - so this doesn't seem to happen much in practice.
Let me give you some actual examples of when this is used. In many commercial production systems products have information associated with them as they progress through the various processes. For example, a piece of equipment may have material analyses and quality checks. The problem before XML is that all the different processes were used different manufacturers' equipment and software, each of which would produce their report in a different format - some binary, some CSV, some text. Managing this information can be a real problem.
Then, along comes XML. Each manufacturer supplies their information as a fragment of XML, with their own namespace. This means that the final report is a single XML document with all the different reports embedded. The entire report can be parsed, validated and processed using the same software, and easily transformed into different formats for printing (say RTF or PDF) using standard, even free, software.
XML is also great for document formats - embedded XML fragments can be ignored by the main document processor, but recognised by other software to help render things.
I can also never remember having had any benefit from the ability to cut out a piece of XML and use it outside its scope - so this doesn't seem to happen much in practice.
Why extrapolate your experience to everyone else?
(A) If I am to use XML where XML is appropriate - that is, for the interchange of data
No, that is not the main point of XML. One of the driving purposes behind XML was to overcome a major problem in IT - legacy data becoming unusable. In the 90s, at the time when XML was invented, there were considerable problems with old undocumented text and binary data which became useless because the software that knew how to read it was either no longer available or would not run on current hardware and systems. XML adapted a document markup and archival format SGML, in order to allow easier processing by software and to improve human readability. In 20 years you will be able to open an XML file written now (such as OpenDocument format) and will be able to, at the very least, read what it means on paper. XML is designed to be a format for data storage and archival - using it only for data transfer is not seeing the 'main picture'.
- I can't avoid attributes because *other people are using them*.
Of course you can. XML is easily transformable - that is one of its major benefits. You can use XSLT to transfer your attribute-free format to one with attributes. You can also embed (if necessary) your format in other's formats with namespaces.
(B) Your attempt at arguing about screwups with tabs/newlines are shot down by yourself, as you then argue in favour of the messups that come from distinguishing between elements and attributes,
No, because they aren't the same issue. Tabs and newlines aren't appropriate as part of robust data format because you may need to embed (in a portable way) such whitespace. XML has this facility using CCDATA. Positional and white-spaced data formats should, by now, be ancient history. White space has no intrinsic meaning! Well written tag and attributes names do.
(C) The verbosity argument is void - this does NOT argue for attributes, only that elements should be possible to write as attribute syntax.
So you might as well use attributes.
Do you happen to have a large investment in XML? If so, you should think carefully through how much you are letting that cloud your judgment - because it seems like it is. (I work with XML and also with other technologies, and I don't let my investment stop me from seeing the flaws. There are flaws in everything, yet XML is one of the worst of the bunch, IMO.)
Ah right. So anyone who disagrees with you must either have a large investment in XML, and must have clouded judgement. Way to argue!
I don't have any particular investment in XML. What I do have is 30 years experience in IT, and I have come across all of the issues I have mentioned, and have spent considerable amounts of time dealing with 'yet another' data format. I could expound in detail the problems with different versions of Fortran data output and tracing bugs in Makefiles and so on... XML has been a major time-and-expense saver, not IMO, but FMAE (From My Actual Experience).
Attributes are useful because they allow extremely varied information at the same 'level'. For example, properties of fonts in a paragraph. You could handle this all by nested tags, but it would be extremely verbose. Attributes also make searching for particular types of data using techniques such as XPATH far more concise and meaningful.
Also, attributes aren't compulsory. If you don't want to use them in your XML format, there is nothing making you.
YAML falls into exactly the kind of traps that XML was designed to avoid. Indentation is great for programming, but awful for data; compulsory whitespace leads to all kinds of issues such as having to handle different line terminators, and having to distinguish tabs from spaces. YAML is also not easily transformable: take out a section of a YAML file and it need changing before it can stand-alone - it has a level of embedding that indicates it came from elsewhere (this sounds trivial, but it indicates a lack of design). YAML is also clumsy for very large data sets.
XML is based on a huge amount of experience of what can go wrong with data formats. YAML is retrograde.
So your argument is it is good that XML has a verbose and complex syntax, because sometimes you need to debug components that have trouble writing or reading such a verbose and complex syntax?
"Complex and verbose?"
Verbose, yes, but "complex"? Are you kidding? XML is one of the easiest formats to read, and was designed as such.
It's not like just because something's in XML that automatically makes it easily usable with new applications. Converting an old XML format to a new XML format can be just as hard as converting an old binary format to a new one.
As someone who has been involved in having to convert old binary formats, can I say..... this is way out.
Given an undocumented text format with readable markup which can be transformed with a standard mechanism (XSLT) and in any of hundreds of tools, or an undocumented binary format.
Yep, when he writes about physics he's very good. However I do worry when he writes about producing stable societies via psychological monitoring and manipulation(Therapied?). It smacks a bit of eugenics. In fact one of the most interesing threads of "Moving Mars" is the paranoia between the "Therapied" Earth and the the still wild and anarchic Mars.
Why the worry? He seems clearly on the side of the wild anarchists!
You also get to play smart-ass by pointing out how different from the 'herd' you are by holding the 'alternative' view. Cool.
Also, there does seem to be this belief that because science sometimes advances dramatically because of individuals with different ideas, that any individual with an idea that isn't mainstream is worth listening to, as if being 'alternative' is, by itself, being closer to the truth.
What those who belief this conveniently forget is that the majority of 'alternative' ideas are always wrong, and you only get to know which ones are right when they are accepted by the mainstream. Picking whichever 'alternative' idea supports what you want to believe is no way to be scientific or get to the truth.
Why does everyone here think that they are smarter than climate scientists?
That is very simple to explain. It is fear of what they (or their descendants) are likely to face if the climate scientists are right - either significant lifestyle changes or major climate problems. Far better try to convince yourself that the majority of respectable scientists are wrong than to live in fear of the future.
The interesting thing is that all new server installations are either Linux or Windows 2003
That may be the case for the government departments you know of, but it isn't the case generally. Sun's market share grew in the last year, and they now sell more servers than Dell. Their growth and high market share was substantially on the basis of servers running Solaris. In contrast to other commercial Unixes, there is little sign of Solaris dying out; quite the reverse. Linux is certainly doing very well, but it hasn't 'won' anything yet. Personally, I hope no system wins. Choice is best.
And what's the alternative? Sun has many patents on Java, has actively defended their intellectual property against FOSS projects, and open source implementations need to implement the entire Java platform in order to be useful.
How is Ruby bad if you aren't a fan of objects? You don't have to use it in an OOP manner; you can code procedurally (although that would be a real waste of its capabilities).
but are there that many people who still write Java desktop apps or web Java applets?
Yes. For some reason a myth has developed that Java is hardly used for desktop applications. This is seriously wrong. Java client-side development is a significant part of Java use, and considerable effort has been put into Java 5.0 and Java 6.0 to make the GUI good performance - indeed, in Java 6.0, much of the GUI will be native under Vista, no any comments about Java being slow and not-integrated will be out of date. (Well, they have been for years, but seem to hang around).
There are even popular shrink-wrapped desktop applications out there in Java, like Moneydance (a well-reviewed personal finance package), and software reviewers make no comment at all about poor quality GUI or performance.
They must realize that desktop Java has seen its day
No, they know the market well. Desktop Java is, if anything, growing.
The good news is that many curent internet applications have trained the user to expect much slower responses, so they are less likely to keep hitting the [Enter] key or press the [Submit] button on client server systems.
# First, as far as web programming is concerned, the users are always slower than the slowest of all programming languages : they read the text, fill in the forms, etc.
What matters is how fast responses are once forms are submitted.
# Second, as Python is used in games to implement AI, so I guess it isn't THAT slow.
Python is almost always (when used in this circumstance) used to script what happens in game AI, not the AI itself. When Python is used for such coding, performance-critical functions are usually implemented in C or C++.
Third, "scripting language = slow" has been proven false for long now...
If this were true, then developers needing performance would not need to implement extensions in C or C++.
The specialized media has been aghast with the result of such fruitful collaboration.
People are clamoring, no, begging, for more of it.
The strange thing about supposedly ironic and sarcastic comments is that very occasionally they are, in contrast to the intentions of the author.
One of the results of the collaboration has been Java 6 integration with Windows. No matter what the common belief, Java desktop development is widespread, but what is really needed is GUI integration and performance that makes it comparable to other Windows applications. This has been one of the areas of collaboration, with Sun providing, in Java 6, such capabilities.
So yes, there is publicity about what this collaboration has delivered for desktop Java. And many developers have indeed been 'begging' for it; Java on the desktop has been held back, many say.
So, before posting ironic comments, it is a good idea to make sure you have your facts straight....
Slashdot Mirror
There is a collapse only the timeline is reversed so we see the universe expanding .. :)
That is why I said it was more like a white hole.
Also, it just doesn't work to reverse things. For example, if you reverse the timeline of the expansion of the universe you would get a decelerating collapse. Inside a black hole there is an accelerating collapse.
Even with the fact that matter creates space-time and gravitational effects, why doesn't matter simply attract all other matter in the universe?
It does.
Actually, I think I just agreed with you except if that were the case then that would mean the universe isn't actually expanding, but rather the observations we are getting from other galaxies is itself changing because of increased gravity we get the shift in the spectrum by getting less and less of that energy from other galaxy.
This is a sensible suggestion - it is called the 'tired light' idea. The reason we know it isn't the case is that light is not red shifting down the spectrum, but signals are getting stretched in length as well - space really is expanding.
Of course I am a complete layman when it comes to these things, but I think that gravity has to be affecting our observations of other galaxies in someway.
It certainly does. This is why we get gravitational lensing.
Still... Why doesn't the universe collapse then? Or maybe it is and we can't really observe it? So I don't know if that works either.
Because there may be more forces that just gravity.
A constant vacuum energy of about -1 probably rules out some of the wilder ideas about the future of the universe, like the Big Rip, in which the end of the universe could be only a few tens of billions of years away.
So this is kind of good news....
Honestly, there are real alternatives to the big bang theory. One of them is the idea that our "universe" is at the center of a black hole, which effectively places the same limits (you can't get out, and neither can light) on the boundary.
If that's the case, the "big bang" turns into the initial collapse; and the "dark energy" that drives expansion becomes the space-energy expansion inside the schwarzschild radius that is needed for conservation of energy.
This needs a lot more explanation. There is no expansion at the centre of a black hole, only an inevitable collapse. A black hole analogy make have made some kind of sense if the universe was closed, but it isn't - it is not only open, but accelerating. If anything, the accelerating universe is more like a white hole (where separation becomes inevitable) than a black hole. There are other types of model that approximate the universe, like gravastars, but surely not black holes.
I think this will certainly spell trouble for Linux. Not "the end of Linux" - but certainly trouble. Mostly it comes down to the fact that, when MS gets around to sueing people, some retarded judge is going to look at Novell signing a deal with MS as "admission of guilt" and - while it might not win the case for MS - it will lend a lot more creadance to their FUD for a lot of people.
Personally, I think this could spell a lot of trouble for Microsoft. This is not a matter of one judge and one case - any attempt to force patents is going to create a lot of bad feeling internationally. There is one major market which Microsoft needs to maintain in which they have aready made things bad for themselves by their attitude - Europe. Linux take-up in Europe is considerable, especially by governments. Any serious attempt by Microsoft to attack Linux would most likely result in major legal action by the EU, and Microsoft is likely to come off well.
You are arguing that both ways: You claim to have no investment and then start trying to get authority by referring to your experience with it.
:)
Sorry, this makes no sense. Having experience in something does not mean I have investment in that thing. I have been using Microsoft products since the 70s, but I have no loyalty or investment in them! However, I certainly consider myself an authority on many of their products, because of my experience.
Adding one more layer of indirection is usually just asking for trouble. Doing this because XML has flaws in its design is usually stupid, especially as you can't guarantee trivial transformations due to that brokenness. So, no, I cannot avoid the fallout from that design mistake. Either I take the fallout in the form of adding more indirection, implementing the code for that indreiction, not being able to use the present documentation, etc - or I take the fallout in the form of having to deal with arbitrary noise being thrown into the data formats.
Indirection != transformation. It is a mapping. One of the great things about XML is the ability to filter out arbtrary noise or transform it to something less noisy.
And no matter where I stand, I often have to debug other people's code. Where they have NOT thought that clearly around this - which is obvious, given that even you, with 30 years of experience in various formats including XML, do not get the point on the first explanation. Hopefully, you got it now.
Well, I thank you for your time and patience in trying to make me 'get it'. Unfortunately, it seems not to have worked
I spend a significant amount of time debugging other people's code too, unfortunately. That is precisely why I am so keen on XML, because much of that debugging has involved reverse-engineering undocumented formats.
People will add indirection and mess up ANY data format. This is precisely why having a standard format which is easily transformable and parsable is so vital.
To keep cutting down your arguments (though I'm not sure why I bother - I don't think you're going to dare to pull away your investment and see the flaws in XML anyway):
One good rule about arguing is not to invent characteristics of those you are arguing against. Firstly, you can't tell, unless you have some amazing psychic ability: I know there are faults in XML. In particular the validation languages have been pretty awful (with DTDs being ghastly). But, I see so much discussion that indicates a complete lack of understanding of why XML was invented. Without such understanding the benefits, which hugely outweigh the awfulness, are often not recognised. Secondly, resorting to ad hominem attacks does not help either. Many consider that this in inself is a sign of someone who has significant investment themselves in the point of view they are trying to defend. At the very least, it is a distraction from what might well be good arguments *you* are putting forward.
Your examples of XML application does not argue for cut/paste at all; it's processing done by a machine.
Individuals can do exactly what those machines did in that example. I have seen it done with students inventing their own format for science work (such as molecular models) and embedding that within standard XML document formats, to allow embedded display. Works like a dream!
I am in favour of having a standard, structured text format we can process - I just think XML is a horrible choice. It's bloated, denormalized for a proper hierarchy by the utterly arbitrary inclusion of attributes, and then, to add insult to injury, it can't represent graphs.
(1) Then don't use attributes. You only have to write the XSTL to transform from your attribute-free format to an attribute-based format (or back the other way) once.
(2) Of course it can represent graphs. There are well-established techniques for doing this. RDFis a W3C standard which includes representation of graphs. It is pure XML.
(And I would love to see some major document format using YAML).
YAML does not allow tabs, and I've not found the end of line issue to be a real issue the last decade. It was a pain back in the early 90s. I can also never remember having had any benefit from the ability to cut out a piece of XML and use it outside its scope - so this doesn't seem to happen much in practice.
Let me give you some actual examples of when this is used. In many commercial production systems products have information associated with them as they progress through the various processes. For example, a piece of equipment may have material analyses and quality checks. The problem before XML is that all the different processes were used different manufacturers' equipment and software, each of which would produce their report in a different format - some binary, some CSV, some text. Managing this information can be a real problem.
Then, along comes XML. Each manufacturer supplies their information as a fragment of XML, with their own namespace. This means that the final report is a single XML document with all the different reports embedded. The entire report can be parsed, validated and processed using the same software, and easily transformed into different formats for printing (say RTF or PDF) using standard, even free, software.
XML is also great for document formats - embedded XML fragments can be ignored by the main document processor, but recognised by other software to help render things.
I can also never remember having had any benefit from the ability to cut out a piece of XML and use it outside its scope - so this doesn't seem to happen much in practice.
Why extrapolate your experience to everyone else?
(A) If I am to use XML where XML is appropriate - that is, for the interchange of data
No, that is not the main point of XML. One of the driving purposes behind XML was to overcome a major problem in IT - legacy data becoming unusable. In the 90s, at the time when XML was invented, there were considerable problems with old undocumented text and binary data which became useless because the software that knew how to read it was either no longer available or would not run on current hardware and systems. XML adapted a document markup and archival format SGML, in order to allow easier processing by software and to improve human readability. In 20 years you will be able to open an XML file written now (such as OpenDocument format) and will be able to, at the very least, read what it means on paper. XML is designed to be a format for data storage and archival - using it only for data transfer is not seeing the 'main picture'.
- I can't avoid attributes because *other people are using them*.
Of course you can. XML is easily transformable - that is one of its major benefits. You can use XSLT to transfer your attribute-free format to one with attributes. You can also embed (if necessary) your format in other's formats with namespaces.
(B) Your attempt at arguing about screwups with tabs/newlines are shot down by yourself, as you then argue in favour of the messups that come from distinguishing between elements and attributes,
No, because they aren't the same issue. Tabs and newlines aren't appropriate as part of robust data format because you may need to embed (in a portable way) such whitespace. XML has this facility using CCDATA. Positional and white-spaced data formats should, by now, be ancient history. White space has no intrinsic meaning! Well written tag and attributes names do.
(C) The verbosity argument is void - this does NOT argue for attributes, only that elements should be possible to write as attribute syntax.
So you might as well use attributes.
Do you happen to have a large investment in XML? If so, you should think carefully through how much you are letting that cloud your judgment - because it seems like it is. (I work with XML and also with other technologies, and I don't let my investment stop me from seeing the flaws. There are flaws in everything, yet XML is one of the worst of the bunch, IMO.)
Ah right. So anyone who disagrees with you must either have a large investment in XML, and must have clouded judgement. Way to argue!
I don't have any particular investment in XML. What I do have is 30 years experience in IT, and I have come across all of the issues I have mentioned, and have spent considerable amounts of time dealing with 'yet another' data format. I could expound in detail the problems with different versions of Fortran data output and tracing bugs in Makefiles and so on... XML has been a major time-and-expense saver, not IMO, but FMAE (From My Actual Experience).
The security algorithm was good. The problem was they did not keep the keys secure.
Attributes are useful because they allow extremely varied information at the same 'level'. For example, properties of fonts in a paragraph. You could handle this all by nested tags, but it would be extremely verbose. Attributes also make searching for particular types of data using techniques such as XPATH far more concise and meaningful.
Also, attributes aren't compulsory. If you don't want to use them in your XML format, there is nothing making you.
YAML falls into exactly the kind of traps that XML was designed to avoid. Indentation is great for programming, but awful for data; compulsory whitespace leads to all kinds of issues such as having to handle different line terminators, and having to distinguish tabs from spaces. YAML is also not easily transformable: take out a section of a YAML file and it need changing before it can stand-alone - it has a level of embedding that indicates it came from elsewhere (this sounds trivial, but it indicates a lack of design). YAML is also clumsy for very large data sets.
XML is based on a huge amount of experience of what can go wrong with data formats. YAML is retrograde.
Marketing to PHBs, mostly.
Yes, because only PHBs would be interested in portable data that can be easily transformed, and have new formats added without losing old data.
I mean, developers would never want that, would then?
So your argument is it is good that XML has a verbose and complex syntax, because sometimes you need to debug components that have trouble writing or reading such a verbose and complex syntax?
"Complex and verbose?"
Verbose, yes, but "complex"? Are you kidding? XML is one of the easiest formats to read, and was designed as such.
It's not like just because something's in XML that automatically makes it easily usable with new applications. Converting an old XML format to a new XML format can be just as hard as converting an old binary format to a new one.
As someone who has been involved in having to convert old binary formats, can I say..... this is way out.
Given an undocumented text format with readable markup which can be transformed with a standard mechanism (XSLT) and in any of hundreds of tools, or an undocumented binary format.
I know which I would choose.
We have better alternatives today
Such as?
Yep, when he writes about physics he's very good. However I do worry when he writes about producing stable societies via psychological monitoring and manipulation(Therapied?). It smacks a bit of eugenics. In fact one of the most interesing threads of "Moving Mars" is the paranoia between the "Therapied" Earth and the the still wild and anarchic Mars.
Why the worry? He seems clearly on the side of the wild anarchists!
You also get to play smart-ass by pointing out how different from the 'herd' you are by holding the 'alternative' view. Cool.
Also, there does seem to be this belief that because science sometimes advances dramatically because of individuals with different ideas, that any individual with an idea that isn't mainstream is worth listening to, as if being 'alternative' is, by itself, being closer to the truth.
What those who belief this conveniently forget is that the majority of 'alternative' ideas are always wrong, and you only get to know which ones are right when they are accepted by the mainstream. Picking whichever 'alternative' idea supports what you want to believe is no way to be scientific or get to the truth.
Dangerous, self-defeating, stupid...
I agree - very dangerous.
Why does everyone here think that they are smarter than climate scientists?
That is very simple to explain. It is fear of what they (or their descendants) are likely to face if the climate scientists are right - either significant lifestyle changes or major climate problems. Far better try to convince yourself that the majority of respectable scientists are wrong than to live in fear of the future.
The interesting thing is that all new server installations are either Linux or Windows 2003
That may be the case for the government departments you know of, but it isn't the case generally. Sun's market share grew in the last year, and they now sell more servers than Dell. Their growth and high market share was substantially on the basis of servers running Solaris. In contrast to other commercial Unixes, there is little sign of Solaris dying out; quite the reverse. Linux is certainly doing very well, but it hasn't 'won' anything yet. Personally, I hope no system wins. Choice is best.
And what's the alternative? Sun has many patents on Java, has actively defended their intellectual property against FOSS projects, and open source implementations need to implement the entire Java platform in order to be useful.
Ok, I am curious. When have they done this?
My apologies; in that case I have no issues with what you said :)
How is Ruby bad if you aren't a fan of objects? You don't have to use it in an OOP manner; you can code procedurally (although that would be a real waste of its capabilities).
but are there that many people who still write Java desktop apps or web Java applets?
Yes. For some reason a myth has developed that Java is hardly used for desktop applications. This is seriously wrong. Java client-side development is a significant part of Java use, and considerable effort has been put into Java 5.0 and Java 6.0 to make the GUI good performance - indeed, in Java 6.0, much of the GUI will be native under Vista, no any comments about Java being slow and not-integrated will be out of date. (Well, they have been for years, but seem to hang around).
There are even popular shrink-wrapped desktop applications out there in Java, like Moneydance (a well-reviewed personal finance package), and software reviewers make no comment at all about poor quality GUI or performance.
They must realize that desktop Java has seen its day
No, they know the market well. Desktop Java is, if anything, growing.
The good news is that many curent internet applications have trained the user to expect much slower responses, so they are less likely to keep hitting the [Enter] key or press the [Submit] button on client server systems.
:)
You really don't know my users
# First, as far as web programming is concerned, the users are always slower than the slowest of all programming languages : they read the text, fill in the forms, etc.
What matters is how fast responses are once forms are submitted.
# Second, as Python is used in games to implement AI, so I guess it isn't THAT slow.
Python is almost always (when used in this circumstance) used to script what happens in game AI, not the AI itself. When Python is used for such coding, performance-critical functions are usually implemented in C or C++.
Third, "scripting language = slow" has been proven false for long now...
If this were true, then developers needing performance would not need to implement extensions in C or C++.
The specialized media has been aghast with the result of such fruitful collaboration.
_ SE_6_in_a_nutshell/0,339024620,339266522,00.htm
People are clamoring, no, begging, for more of it.
The strange thing about supposedly ironic and sarcastic comments is that very occasionally they are, in contrast to the intentions of the author.
One of the results of the collaboration has been Java 6 integration with Windows. No matter what the common belief, Java desktop development is widespread, but what is really needed is GUI integration and performance that makes it comparable to other Windows applications. This has been one of the areas of collaboration, with Sun providing, in Java 6, such capabilities.
Here is one such 'specialised media' article:
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30722
"Java SE 6 First Impressions: A Desktop Winner"
here is another:
http://www.builderau.com.au/program/java/soa/Java
"Java SE6: A Desktop Revolution?"
So yes, there is publicity about what this collaboration has delivered for desktop Java. And many developers have indeed been 'begging' for it; Java on the desktop has been held back, many say.
So, before posting ironic comments, it is a good idea to make sure you have your facts straight....