At some point, there's a threshold where growth begins to fuel itself through momentum (maybe ~10% or so). We are already there. I've wanted an Apple for years, but my small company couldn't justify it. 5% is our critical mass. This means that by the end of the year we need a Mac platform to test our web-based apps, and start officially supporting our OSX customers. I'm sure there are other individuals and small corps in this situation too.
I remember it too. It was a small dish that sat on top of your building, and followed the sun's path throughout the day. It concentrated the light at the focal point, sending it down a fiber optic bundle. The sunlight was transmitted to a series of desktop lamps, which were able to supplement with incandescent light when the sunlight wasn't strong enough. As someone who loves natural light and works in a cube, I always wanted one of these things.
I think the skin cancer bit must be a myth; the ones I saw had filters at the top of the fiber bundle to remove the harmful wavelengths.
Which is why I've always used strong encryption to IM my friends.
Does the DMCA work in our favor in this case? Can I do a simple base64, call it encryption, and have it be illegal for AOL to decode? Does waiving one's rights to privacy trump the DMCA?
I'm sick of hearing how wrong the prediction was that the world only needing 10 computers. The fact is, it's roughly correct. The computers are Google, AOL, MSN, a few major ISP/Hosts, a few government and university research super computers, and that's it. The so-called computers on our desktops are simply network terminals. Yeah, they are powerful network terminals, much more capable than the dumb terminals of old, but they are still data in / data out terminal nodes on a network. If you choose to quibble - the Google "computer" happens at the moment to be thousands of PCs connected as a cluster, the AOL "computer" is made up of 5 huge mainframe sites, I have no idea what MSN is composed of, and most ISP/Hosts are clusters. These all may, in the not too distant future, become indistinguishable from a single computer. Someone, such as IBM, will build a ridiculously powerful machine with thousands of cell processors, and with some fancy virtualization software, it will allow ISPs to consolidate down to one or a small set of machines for all their hosted sites. As for the desktop - the network IS the computer. Your stand-alone PC can be a fancy calculator, a glorified word processing machine, a portable music docking station and conduit, etc. These are all "smart terminal" activities. More and more, its what you can do connected to the world that counts. I personally have found that the processor no longer matters for many of my clients and users - it's all about the browser's capabilities, how big and bright their monitor they have, and having the most comfortable chair. Give these old visionaries the respect they deserve, and embrace the fact that their prediction is coming true.
I played around with it too, but I only spent about 10 minutes training it, and I've got a cheesy microphone. So, here's "Peter Piper", spoken fairly slowly and carefully:
Peter piper picked up a bit of a purse it didn't occur to obtain the third in a bitter pill to pick a bit of a person that difficult at first in a paper picked it up ever expect people that first where's the fact that the peppers that your paper bag
Peter piper picked up at the gold that there's a lot of people that are speaking of paper that if your paper picked up at the cult members where are the people peppers that either pay for it
We're paper picked that the people that first attracted to culpeper speeder paper bag that your paper but the backup and that was where of the pickle pepper is that your profession
Peter piper pick a pack of the gold at first but the fact of the gold peppers that your paper that if your paper picked up at the people that first where are the legal matters that you have a perfect
Peter piper take an act of the cold versus. A project of the people that Bruce Weir labor on it. And we're right where they think that the legal matters, where are the people that birds that your paper that.
In many cases pressing the elevator button again DOES make a difference. When a modern elevator stops on an upper floor (not the lobby or high trafficked floor), it will close the doors when a button is pressed or after a fixed timeout, whichever is first. In some elevators, if you quickly enter and press a button before the door has fully opened, the button doesn't trigger the door close, so pressing the button again is a good idea.
You are right to compare their XML claims to what we all do with HTML.
Let's pick their abstract apart:
"Systems, methods and data structures" - yadda yadda yadda "for encompassing scripts" - a way of storing a script program "written in one or more scripting languages" - let's say JavaScript and VBScript "in a single file." - Such as within an html file
"The scripts of a computer system" - as we said, JavaScript and VBScript "are organized into a single file " - as we said, an html file "using Extensible Language Markup (XML)." - Ok, xml instead of html - but don't forget xml and html are both specific subsets of sml. We'll continue with the html analogy
"Each script is delimited by a file element" - Give each script a unique internal name "and the script's instructions" - The JavaScript or VBScript code "are delimited by a code element within each file element." - The code tag goes inside the script name tag. This is similar to a <param> tag inside an <object> in html. This is a case where xml is cleaner than html, and one of many reasons the world is moving to xml. But we'll continue with the html analogy for now anyway.
"Other information" - attributes "such as a name of the script" - in html this might be implemented as <script type="text/javascript" name="somename">. In reality, each JavaScript function has its own name, and a programmer refers to the code by the functions. "and a functional description of the script may also be included in the file" - same as the last snipit, where you might have script type="text/javascript" description="This is a description">. Typically html programmers just put this into comments and documentation. "using other XML elements to delimit that information." - As stated above, xml is better because of its ability to create tags. But I'm going to continue dragging the html example along.
"The language in which a particular script is written is also included within the XML format." - Similar to the type attribute in <script type="text/javascript"> or the old language attribute in <script language="javascript">
"When a particular script is executed," - When a user browses to a page with JavaScript, or runs in some other shell "the file is parsed" - yeah, I hope so "to create a list of the script names" - similar to function names, albeit with some encapsulation "or of the functional descriptions of the scripts." - Its always nice to have a more human-readable version, especially if users are going to see program names.
"One or more scripts are selected" - On an html page, some JavaScript scripts may run when the page is loaded, others when a form is validated "and the code for those scripts is extracted from the file" - read the script into memory into some blob text object "and executed" - interpreted and run the script "by the appropriate scripting process." JavaScript is done by a JavaScript interpreter, VBScript by a VBScript interpreter, etc.
"The scripting process that executes a particular script" - The JavaScript or VBScript interpreter "is identified from the scripting extension attribute" - Is identified by the "type" attribute as seen in <script type="text/javascript">" "that is included in the XML format of the file." - Yeah, this analogy uses html, and we're all slowly moving to an xml world.
In summary: We're all moving to xml for many obvious reasons, and Microsoft has patented one of them. We've all been adding multiple scripts to our html files for years, and there have been pain points. One promise of xml is to have more easily parsed data and meta-data due to the ability to define tags and the use of hierarchical tags instead of a fixed list of attributes. Every html file I've ever written falls into this classification where xml is desired, and this includes my javascript code. We've all been doing this for years within html.
What Microsoft has patented is an obvious extension of current industry practices to anyone skilled in the art, and the patent should not have been granted.
In the late 80's and early 90's I was at Carnegie Mellon University. At the time Microsoft was recruiting an enormous number of CMU grads, but MS was becoming distressed by the cowboy mentality and lack of team skills. The rumor was that Microsoft told CMU to fix their product or MS would shop elsewhere for fresh bodies. I was in some of the first classes where everyone had to work on teams for everything. It was a culture shock, for the professors as much as the students, but in the end I think I was more prepared for my professional career. A well designed and properly sized team assignment requires everyone to participate, and at least in my experience, everyone is forced to do the fundamentals. The projects where I got poor marks were the projects where the team couldn't get along - which was a much more important life lesson.
I am sitting in the back of an MS CMS training class as I write this. I've been taking notes on the issues, and here's what I've got so far:
Searching - You can't use the MS Indexing Service because everything is in a database, and SharePoint can't be used if you are using Exchange Enterprise. Therefore, there is no way to do a free-form search.
Licences - Their "Best Practices" shows a dev server, an authoring server, a QA server, and a series of production servers - at the low low price of $35K per processor.
Other Web-based Content - MS CMS is great for content, and not very good for everything else. Two memebers of the class have been struggling to get a couple of simple ASP pages to work within the CMS structure. Apparently each mage must be implemented as a "Template". What a pain.
Multiple Domains - CMS can only host one domain per box. If you want a second domain, get a second box.
More to come -...and I've got another day to go!
To be fair, there is plenty to recommend the tool - it will be great for technically challenged users who have knowledge that needs to be published. However, with the technical rough edges, I would wait for the next version.
In a consulting job two years ago I helped a client install an over-priced and under-supported suite of tools called Process Continuum. The "suite" was actually a set of discrete tools that didn't really work together, and I cannot recommend it. However, it contain a gem called the Process Library, originally developed by LBMS, which contained rich project plan templates and outline documents that mesh very nicely with the project plans. Exposure to these materials has changed my professional life.
This type of high-end packaged methodology is designed to help huge organizations run $1M+ projects, and they do not scale down very well. I don't think this is a solution for our cold fusion programmer friend. However, the best practices of building not only standard project plans, but project documentation templates, is an important first step. If one of your clients' methodologies includes one of these huge libraries, don't snub it - learn all you can.
Document everything using your internal best practice documentation templates. As a last step, conform the deliverable to the client's methodology. If yours is good, the conversion will be relatively fast and painless. If you come across an outside idea that's better than what you're currently doing, plow it back into your best practice templates.
The poster has a need for a tool to control documentation content. That's fine. There are lots of good suggestions from other Slashdot readers. But even more important in my mind is the robust base structure and succinct fleshing out of the deliverable documentation.
When my home.com email address goes away, I will be assigned a comcast.net address. My user ID will remain the same, so it will be fairly easy to guess my new email address. A spammer who knows about email address xxxx@home.com can easily translate it to xxxx@comcastonline.net, xxxx@attbi.com, and whatever domain Cox is using. Its a 3-for-one address swap, but the spammer would be likely to have at least one valid address. And given the number of @home users, it may be worth their while. My question is, is this legal? If there has been no communication with the new address, a user can easily prove the address was not obtained through an opt-in process. Can companies legitimately make this kind of change automatically to their "existing customers"? I've been looking forward to a drop-off of SPAM, but I'm concerned I won't live to see the dream com true.
There was a slashdot story not long ago about Andromeda and our galaxy colliding. If there are black holes at the center of each galaxy, what happens when black holes collide? What does this do to the predicted models of the collision? Is such an impact significant enough to allow matter to escape from the black holes, or possibly big enough to disburse the matter and make it no longer a black hole? On the other hand, how could a black hole be torn apart since it is impossible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light? No answers here, just some interesting questions...
Slashdot Mirror
At some point, there's a threshold where growth begins to fuel itself through momentum (maybe ~10% or so).
We are already there. I've wanted an Apple for years, but my small company couldn't justify it. 5% is our critical mass. This means that by the end of the year we need a Mac platform to test our web-based apps, and start officially supporting our OSX customers. I'm sure there are other individuals and small corps in this situation too.
I remember it too. It was a small dish that sat on top of your building, and followed the sun's path throughout the day. It concentrated the light at the focal point, sending it down a fiber optic bundle. The sunlight was transmitted to a series of desktop lamps, which were able to supplement with incandescent light when the sunlight wasn't strong enough. As someone who loves natural light and works in a cube, I always wanted one of these things.
I think the skin cancer bit must be a myth; the ones I saw had filters at the top of the fiber bundle to remove the harmful wavelengths.
Which is why I've always used strong encryption to IM my friends.
Does the DMCA work in our favor in this case? Can I do a simple base64, call it encryption, and have it be illegal for AOL to decode? Does waiving one's rights to privacy trump the DMCA?
I'm sick of hearing how wrong the prediction was that the world only needing 10 computers. The fact is, it's roughly correct. The computers are Google, AOL, MSN, a few major ISP/Hosts, a few government and university research super computers, and that's it.
The so-called computers on our desktops are simply network terminals. Yeah, they are powerful network terminals, much more capable than the dumb terminals of old, but they are still data in / data out terminal nodes on a network.
If you choose to quibble - the Google "computer" happens at the moment to be thousands of PCs connected as a cluster, the AOL "computer" is made up of 5 huge mainframe sites, I have no idea what MSN is composed of, and most ISP/Hosts are clusters. These all may, in the not too distant future, become indistinguishable from a single computer. Someone, such as IBM, will build a ridiculously powerful machine with thousands of cell processors, and with some fancy virtualization software, it will allow ISPs to consolidate down to one or a small set of machines for all their hosted sites.
As for the desktop - the network IS the computer. Your stand-alone PC can be a fancy calculator, a glorified word processing machine, a portable music docking station and conduit, etc. These are all "smart terminal" activities. More and more, its what you can do connected to the world that counts. I personally have found that the processor no longer matters for many of my clients and users - it's all about the browser's capabilities, how big and bright their monitor they have, and having the most comfortable chair.
Give these old visionaries the respect they deserve, and embrace the fact that their prediction is coming true.
I played around with it too, but I only spent about 10 minutes training it, and I've got a cheesy microphone. So, here's "Peter Piper", spoken fairly slowly and carefully:
Peter piper picked up a bit of a purse it didn't occur to obtain the third in a bitter pill to pick a bit of a person that difficult at first in a paper picked it up ever expect people that first where's the fact that the peppers that your paper bag
Peter piper picked up at the gold that there's a lot of people that are speaking of paper that if your paper picked up at the cult members where are the people peppers that either pay for it
We're paper picked that the people that first attracted to culpeper speeder paper bag that your paper but the backup and that was where of the pickle pepper is that your profession
Peter piper pick a pack of the gold at first but the fact of the gold peppers that your paper that if your paper picked up at the people that first where are the legal matters that you have a perfect
Peter piper take an act of the cold versus. A project of the people that Bruce Weir labor on it. And we're right where they think that the legal matters, where are the people that birds that your paper that.
In many cases pressing the elevator button again DOES make a difference. When a modern elevator stops on an upper floor (not the lobby or high trafficked floor), it will close the doors when a button is pressed or after a fixed timeout, whichever is first. In some elevators, if you quickly enter and press a button before the door has fully opened, the button doesn't trigger the door close, so pressing the button again is a good idea.
You are right to compare their XML claims to what we all do with HTML.
Let's pick their abstract apart:
"Systems, methods and data structures" - yadda yadda yadda
"for encompassing scripts" - a way of storing a script program
"written in one or more scripting languages" - let's say JavaScript and VBScript
"in a single file." - Such as within an html file
"The scripts of a computer system" - as we said, JavaScript and VBScript
"are organized into a single file " - as we said, an html file
"using Extensible Language Markup (XML)." - Ok, xml instead of html - but don't forget xml and html are both specific subsets of sml. We'll continue with the html analogy
"Each script is delimited by a file element" - Give each script a unique internal name
"and the script's instructions" - The JavaScript or VBScript code
"are delimited by a code element within each file element." - The code tag goes inside the script name tag. This is similar to a <param> tag inside an <object> in html. This is a case where xml is cleaner than html, and one of many reasons the world is moving to xml. But we'll continue with the html analogy for now anyway.
"Other information" - attributes
"such as a name of the script" - in html this might be implemented as <script type="text/javascript" name="somename">. In reality, each JavaScript function has its own name, and a programmer refers to the code by the functions.
"and a functional description of the script may also be included in the file" - same as the last snipit, where you might have script type="text/javascript" description="This is a description">. Typically html programmers just put this into comments and documentation.
"using other XML elements to delimit that information." - As stated above, xml is better because of its ability to create tags. But I'm going to continue dragging the html example along.
"The language in which a particular script is written is also included within the XML format." - Similar to the type attribute in <script type="text/javascript"> or the old language attribute in <script language="javascript">
"When a particular script is executed," - When a user browses to a page with JavaScript, or runs in some other shell
"the file is parsed" - yeah, I hope so
"to create a list of the script names" - similar to function names, albeit with some encapsulation
"or of the functional descriptions of the scripts." - Its always nice to have a more human-readable version, especially if users are going to see program names.
"One or more scripts are selected" - On an html page, some JavaScript scripts may run when the page is loaded, others when a form is validated
"and the code for those scripts is extracted from the file" - read the script into memory into some blob text object
"and executed" - interpreted and run the script
"by the appropriate scripting process." JavaScript is done by a JavaScript interpreter, VBScript by a VBScript interpreter, etc.
"The scripting process that executes a particular script" - The JavaScript or VBScript interpreter
"is identified from the scripting extension attribute" - Is identified by the "type" attribute as seen in <script type="text/javascript">"
"that is included in the XML format of the file." - Yeah, this analogy uses html, and we're all slowly moving to an xml world.
In summary: We're all moving to xml for many obvious reasons, and Microsoft has patented one of them. We've all been adding multiple scripts to our html files for years, and there have been pain points. One promise of xml is to have more easily parsed data and meta-data due to the ability to define tags and the use of hierarchical tags instead of a fixed list of attributes. Every html file I've ever written falls into this classification where xml is desired, and this includes my javascript code. We've all been doing this for years within html.
What Microsoft has patented is an obvious extension of current industry practices to anyone skilled in the art, and the patent should not have been granted.
I got a T-shirt that reads "Kermit the GORF".
Obscure childhood references rock.
All speech is equal but some speech is more equal than others.
In the late 80's and early 90's I was at Carnegie Mellon University. At the time Microsoft was recruiting an enormous number of CMU grads, but MS was becoming distressed by the cowboy mentality and lack of team skills. The rumor was that Microsoft told CMU to fix their product or MS would shop elsewhere for fresh bodies. I was in some of the first classes where everyone had to work on teams for everything. It was a culture shock, for the professors as much as the students, but in the end I think I was more prepared for my professional career. A well designed and properly sized team assignment requires everyone to participate, and at least in my experience, everyone is forced to do the fundamentals. The projects where I got poor marks were the projects where the team couldn't get along - which was a much more important life lesson.
- Searching - You can't use the MS Indexing Service because everything is in a database, and SharePoint can't be used if you are using Exchange Enterprise. Therefore, there is no way to do a free-form search.
- Licences - Their "Best Practices" shows a dev server, an authoring server, a QA server, and a series of production servers - at the low low price of $35K per processor.
- Other Web-based Content - MS CMS is great for content, and not very good for everything else. Two memebers of the class have been struggling to get a couple of simple ASP pages to work within the CMS structure. Apparently each mage must be implemented as a "Template". What a pain.
- Multiple Domains - CMS can only host one domain per box. If you want a second domain, get a second box.
- More to come -
...and I've got another day to go!
To be fair, there is plenty to recommend the tool - it will be great for technically challenged users who have knowledge that needs to be published. However, with the technical rough edges, I would wait for the next version.In a consulting job two years ago I helped a client install an over-priced and under-supported suite of tools called Process Continuum. The "suite" was actually a set of discrete tools that didn't really work together, and I cannot recommend it. However, it contain a gem called the Process Library, originally developed by LBMS, which contained rich project plan templates and outline documents that mesh very nicely with the project plans. Exposure to these materials has changed my professional life.
This type of high-end packaged methodology is designed to help huge organizations run $1M+ projects, and they do not scale down very well. I don't think this is a solution for our cold fusion programmer friend. However, the best practices of building not only standard project plans, but project documentation templates, is an important first step. If one of your clients' methodologies includes one of these huge libraries, don't snub it - learn all you can.
Document everything using your internal best practice documentation templates. As a last step, conform the deliverable to the client's methodology. If yours is good, the conversion will be relatively fast and painless. If you come across an outside idea that's better than what you're currently doing, plow it back into your best practice templates.
The poster has a need for a tool to control documentation content. That's fine. There are lots of good suggestions from other Slashdot readers. But even more important in my mind is the robust base structure and succinct fleshing out of the deliverable documentation.
When my home.com email address goes away, I will be assigned a comcast.net address. My user ID will remain the same, so it will be fairly easy to guess my new email address. A spammer who knows about email address xxxx@home.com can easily translate it to xxxx@comcastonline.net, xxxx@attbi.com, and whatever domain Cox is using. Its a 3-for-one address swap, but the spammer would be likely to have at least one valid address. And given the number of @home users, it may be worth their while. My question is, is this legal? If there has been no communication with the new address, a user can easily prove the address was not obtained through an opt-in process. Can companies legitimately make this kind of change automatically to their "existing customers"? I've been looking forward to a drop-off of SPAM, but I'm concerned I won't live to see the dream com true.
There was a slashdot story not long ago about Andromeda and our galaxy colliding. If there are black holes at the center of each galaxy, what happens when black holes collide? What does this do to the predicted models of the collision? Is such an impact significant enough to allow matter to escape from the black holes, or possibly big enough to disburse the matter and make it no longer a black hole? On the other hand, how could a black hole be torn apart since it is impossible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light?
No answers here, just some interesting questions...