The alternative is to get the free, open-source cygwin posix subsystem from Cygnus. They're the people who are doing a lot of the work on GCC (and have done for years and years).
Of course, if you just want sed, you can get standalone DOS or Windows versions.
The certainly did not excise a BSD or Solaris kernel from their complete-but-for-kernel GNU Systems and pop in Linux. That's absurd.
Ok, I take your point. Personally, I think "Debian" is a better word for what I use than either "GNU/Linux" or "Linux", for the arguments that you indicate.
I currently have 1356 fonts -- and about 80% of them are high-quality Bitstream or Adobe fonts.
AFAIK you can use those fonts on X if you want to.
Except for the rare geek who feels a need to count fonts quickly, Linux is an overall loser on the productivity front.
"All right! But apart from the sanitation, the medecine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health... WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US?" -- Monty Python
I don't think the point was that y'd need to count fonts quickly. I think the point is that there are a million other little jobs which are like that. Ever been sent a document which was in a "weird" character set? (e.g. 8859-14 or VISCII) It would take about 15 seconds to convert it to the encoding of your choice on a Debian system, including the time to install the converter (assuming you have the CD in the drive, or a reasonable network connection).
You can do things, just with sed, which you can't do with a full install of NT. Judging by your sig, I'd've thought you would know that. For example, get the last 10 lines of a 1 GB log file in a sensible amount of time. I have seen NT users trying hard to do that and not really being able to even using VB.
So I guess that there are no GNU packages required for an operational Linux OS.
If you wish to refer to a kernel as an OS, then that's up to you. But to refer to it as ``operational'' is insane. You can't do *anything* with a kernel+ld+inittab - if you have just those things, then your computer will freeze during the boot sequence. Yes, technically there is something loaded into memory, but you can't do *anything* - not even type your name. What you're saying is rather like claiming that IO.SYS is an operating system - without something like COMMAND.COM, your computer would just freeze during boot-up.
Calling something that would freeze during booting an ``operational Linux OS'' is misleading. Yes, theoretically you could port enough bits from BSD to get Linux to work without GNU, though AFAIK nobody has done this, ever. But don't try to claim that Linux can be in any way ``operational'' without *something* sitting on top.
So what is the operating system? It's the linux kernel plus anything that allows that kernel to work. Nothing more. [...] other utilities,no matter how basic, are not part of the operating system.
So you're saying that things like login and ls are not part of the operating system? How about/etc/inittab? How about mount? How about the libc? If your definition of operating system only stretches to kernel+bootloader+module loader, then it's not the definition that many other people use. To me, an operating system at least has to be something that can do *something* without the aid of additional software.
Y'used to be able to get windows 3.1 to boot and run off a single 1.44 MB floppy (though you had to zip it and make it unzip itself into memory to do that). Wonder how small you can get a modern browsing platform for the x86? D.R. Webspyder was only about 4 floppies inc DR DOS, wasn't it?
Python suffers the same problems that TCL and Perl do. They are all ad hoc languages which were not designed but hacked together and "developed" through wasted years of pure brute force Monte Carlo methods of design and debugging.
Exactly the same methods that work for human languages, human biology and capitalism. A central plan works well when you've got a closed, well-defined problem to solve: "reimplement UNIX" or "make a fast C compiler". The trouble with planned solutions to open-ended problems is that sooner or later, the planner will miss a trick which Monte Carlo methods would have hit on, which is why evolution wins in the long run.
Saying that XML standards are "better" for storing and manipulating data than SQL is kinda silly. The two solve completely different problems.
Well, yes. I wouldn't want to use XML-based tools to handle large volumes of data because all current implementations are very slow in comparison to SQL.
However, XML need not be stored in text files on a hard disk. There is talk of having DBMSs which have an XML front end instead of an SQL front end (but still store data in whatever insanely optimised format internally).
XML is cool, just a little overhyped sometimes.
Here, here. I hate it when people try to use the wrong tool for the job, just because it's fashionable.
It is, in the sense that both "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story" are valid URLs. However, the latter points at a different thing than the former.
Also, URL portions do not necessarily refer to directories and files, that just happens to be how most webservers work. It's quite possible to have a webserver return two different pages for "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story".
Of course,
there is a lot of money invested in our DTD, so what if competitors
try to steal it?
How difficult would it be for a competitor to "steal" the DTD anyway? I mean, copy your ideas whilst renaming tags, restructuring the DTD a bit, and so on, till it wasn't provably derived from your DTD? The only point of you having a non-free license to defend your DTD is if this kind of defense might work. If your DTD would be easy to duplicate anyway, then you're not getting any security from a non-free license.
As to whether copylefting the DTD would help your company, I think the answer largely depends upon who you are, and your relationship with your suppliers. If you are having problems persuading your suppliers to use your DTD, then being able to point to the open license might help: "this is poised to become the standard". On the other hand, if all your suppliers are happy to use the DTD already, then you won't make any short-term gain. You might make long-term gain if future suppliers would be more willing to use a copylefted DTD; but that depends on what your industry's like and what
kind of stance your suppliers are likely to take.
I do not expect [confusion to the distinction between a hostname and a URL] of programmers
I don't think it's as obvious as you say. "http://slashdot.org:80/story/" , "http://slashdot.org:80/story", "http://slashdot.org/story/", "http://slashdot.org/story", "slashdot.org/story/", "slashdot.org/story" . I don't think it's obvious which of those are conforming URLs, unless you've read the RFC (in fact, the:80 is optional and meaningless (i.e. default behaviour), and the trailing slash is optional but meaningful).
if a programmer can't get over something that most people learn in "HTML for Complete Imbeciles," (s)he should power down and back away from the computer slowly.
In the real world there are many people who've learned about HTML and the WWW by observing how it works only. If you learn that way, there's no way to distinguish between "what is correct" and "what the software allows you to do". For example, Windows allows you to write IP addresses with trailing zeroes, for example '064.028.067.048' instead of '64.28.67.48'. On the other hand, if you try to do this with some versions of ifconfig(1), then they will interpret part of the numbers in *octal*, and assume that you mean '42.28.45.48'. I've no idea which is the correct behaviour, or if both are, because I've only learned how to do this by using the software. If I wrote software which imitated one of those behaviours, then it could well be wrong.
Re:BAD xml standards have made the w3 MORE irrelev
on
W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
·
· Score: 2
And before anyone out there thinks of offering a rebuttal in support for XSL, programming in XML is a silly idea
I agree to an extent. When you first see XSL and realise that it is a real programming language (unlike CSS), it becomes tempting to see it as a panacea. In reality, it's best for things which are more simple than a traditional program would do.
To do more complicated stuff, where you want reuse and modularity, something like Python+(DOM|Sax) or Perl+XPath is a better "XML-way of doing things".
XPath is actually very powerful when combined with a decent programming language. For example, to pull out all <code>d text below a certain node of a document, into an array of strings, a single perl statement will do:
$codelines = $xp->find('./code/text()', $node);
Fairly complicated parsing, which would be pretty fiddly to do by hand, becomes as simple as describing the location of a file in a subdirectory. XML Query Language will take over from XPath for tasks which are even more complicated - things like inner joins in SQL, etc.
You actually need to type in http:// in the "Open" field at the top of the screen. Every other browser maker got over this fixation in '95. Why can't the W3C?
Cos the job of Amaya is not to save 0.7 seconds of typing. It is to allow more people to use open, interoperable standards instead of proprietory HTML tags. If you emit the http:// from a URL, then it is no longer a valid URL.
You could argue that "everybody knows that www.w3c.org means http://www.w3c.org". That's true. Except that some programmer will assume that therefore "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL, and he will break interoperability between his program and another program which is expecting a real URL. If Amaya's job is to be strictly correct, then it must do this for URLs too.
My business website, painstakingly html-validated (ON THEIR VALIDATOR!!) doesnt even render right.[...] it doesnt support frames AT ALL
Your site uses HTML 4.0 Transitional (<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"...). If you want to use Frames, you should use HTML 4.0 Frameset. Or did you mean frames on other sites?
You HAVE to enter http://
The "scheme://" part of a URL is compulsory. See RFC 1738. Maybe it's good for a normal browser to allow you to omit "http://", but if the W3C's reference browser did this it could lead people to think that "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL.
What in the hell?!?!
Amaya is there to educate web designers and web-browser designers, so it has to be picky. That probably means that it's not a good web browser to use for browsing today's largely non-conforming www.
Actually, it would be a an interesting stat that Google might be ableto pump out... Run HTML verifying the utility against every page in their cache:)
You could try telnetting to port 80 on randomly selected IP addresses, and then validating the page sent as a response (if there is a response, and it's not an error message). That would be enlightening.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the alternative is sometimes that no company survives. Market economics works a lot of the time, but it's not a panacea.
The alternative is to get the free, open-source cygwin posix subsystem from Cygnus. They're the people who are doing a lot of the work on GCC (and have done for years and years).
Of course, if you just want sed, you can get standalone DOS or Windows versions.
Ok, I take your point. Personally, I think "Debian" is a better word for what I use than either "GNU/Linux" or "Linux", for the arguments that you indicate.
Doh! Don't know how I managed to miss that
Hanzi in Mandarin Chinese, Hanja in Korean. All basically the same thing, though they have evolved apart quite a bit over the centuries.
AFAIK you can use those fonts on X if you want to.
"All right! But apart from the sanitation, the medecine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health... WHAT HAVE THE ROMANS EVER DONE FOR US?" -- Monty Python
I don't think the point was that y'd need to count fonts quickly. I think the point is that there are a million other little jobs which are like that. Ever been sent a document which was in a "weird" character set? (e.g. 8859-14 or VISCII) It would take about 15 seconds to convert it to the encoding of your choice on a Debian system, including the time to install the converter (assuming you have the CD in the drive, or a reasonable network connection).
You can do things, just with sed, which you can't do with a full install of NT. Judging by your sig, I'd've thought you would know that. For example, get the last 10 lines of a 1 GB log file in a sensible amount of time. I have seen NT users trying hard to do that and not really being able to even using VB.
If you wish to refer to a kernel as an OS, then that's up to you. But to refer to it as ``operational'' is insane. You can't do *anything* with a kernel+ld+inittab - if you have just those things, then your computer will freeze during the boot sequence. Yes, technically there is something loaded into memory, but you can't do *anything* - not even type your name. What you're saying is rather like claiming that IO.SYS is an operating system - without something like COMMAND.COM, your computer would just freeze during boot-up.
Calling something that would freeze during booting an ``operational Linux OS'' is misleading. Yes, theoretically you could port enough bits from BSD to get Linux to work without GNU, though AFAIK nobody has done this, ever. But don't try to claim that Linux can be in any way ``operational'' without *something* sitting on top.
So you're saying that things like login and ls are not part of the operating system? How about
Do you seriously think Netscape will deliberately introduce defects into their version of gecko?
This seems to be a common thing these days, and good it is too, I say.
If you use the normal install program, then choose "custom install", it's got an option for a UK language pack.
Yeah, but to be fair, the readme that comes with the autoinstaller says minimum 26 MB for Windows / Linux and minimum 36 MB for Mac.
Y'used to be able to get windows 3.1 to boot and run off a single 1.44 MB floppy (though you had to zip it and make it unzip itself into memory to do that). Wonder how small you can get a modern browsing platform for the x86? D.R. Webspyder was only about 4 floppies inc DR DOS, wasn't it?
Exactly the same methods that work for human languages, human biology and capitalism. A central plan works well when you've got a closed, well-defined problem to solve: "reimplement UNIX" or "make a fast C compiler". The trouble with planned solutions to open-ended problems is that sooner or later, the planner will miss a trick which Monte Carlo methods would have hit on, which is why evolution wins in the long run.
Well, yes. I wouldn't want to use XML-based tools to handle large volumes of data because all current implementations are very slow in comparison to SQL.
However, XML need not be stored in text files on a hard disk. There is talk of having DBMSs which have an XML front end instead of an SQL front end (but still store data in whatever insanely optimised format internally).
Here, here. I hate it when people try to use the wrong tool for the job, just because it's fashionable.
It is, in the sense that both "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story" are valid URLs. However, the latter points at a different thing than the former.
Also, URL portions do not necessarily refer to directories and files, that just happens to be how most webservers work. It's quite possible to have a webserver return two different pages for "http://slashdot.org/story/" and "http://slashdot.org/story".
How difficult would it be for a competitor to "steal" the DTD anyway? I mean, copy your ideas whilst renaming tags, restructuring the DTD a bit, and so on, till it wasn't provably derived from your DTD? The only point of you having a non-free license to defend your DTD is if this kind of defense might work. If your DTD would be easy to duplicate anyway, then you're not getting any security from a non-free license.
As to whether copylefting the DTD would help your company, I think the answer largely depends upon who you are, and your relationship with your suppliers. If you are having problems persuading your suppliers to use your DTD, then being able to point to the open license might help: "this is poised to become the standard". On the other hand, if all your suppliers are happy to use the DTD already, then you won't make any short-term gain. You might make long-term gain if future suppliers would be more willing to use a copylefted DTD; but that depends on what your industry's like and what kind of stance your suppliers are likely to take.
I don't think it's as obvious as you say. "http://slashdot.org:80/story/" , "http://slashdot.org:80/story", "http://slashdot.org/story/", "http://slashdot.org/story", "slashdot.org/story/", "slashdot.org/story" . I don't think it's obvious which of those are conforming URLs, unless you've read the RFC (in fact, the :80 is optional and meaningless (i.e. default behaviour), and the trailing slash is optional but meaningful).
In the real world there are many people who've learned about HTML and the WWW by observing how it works only. If you learn that way, there's no way to distinguish between "what is correct" and "what the software allows you to do". For example, Windows allows you to write IP addresses with trailing zeroes, for example '064.028.067.048' instead of '64.28.67.48'. On the other hand, if you try to do this with some versions of ifconfig(1), then they will interpret part of the numbers in *octal*, and assume that you mean '42.28.45.48'. I've no idea which is the correct behaviour, or if both are, because I've only learned how to do this by using the software. If I wrote software which imitated one of those behaviours, then it could well be wrong.
I agree to an extent. When you first see XSL and realise that it is a real programming language (unlike CSS), it becomes tempting to see it as a panacea. In reality, it's best for things which are more simple than a traditional program would do.
To do more complicated stuff, where you want reuse and modularity, something like Python+(DOM|Sax) or Perl+XPath is a better "XML-way of doing things".
XPath is actually very powerful when combined with a decent programming language. For example, to pull out all <code>d text below a certain node of a document, into an array of strings, a single perl statement will do:
$codelines = $xp->find('./code/text()', $node);Fairly complicated parsing, which would be pretty fiddly to do by hand, becomes as simple as describing the location of a file in a subdirectory. XML Query Language will take over from XPath for tasks which are even more complicated - things like inner joins in SQL, etc.
Yep, ok, fair enough.
Cos the job of Amaya is not to save 0.7 seconds of typing. It is to allow more people to use open, interoperable standards instead of proprietory HTML tags. If you emit the http:// from a URL, then it is no longer a valid URL.
You could argue that "everybody knows that www.w3c.org means http://www.w3c.org". That's true. Except that some programmer will assume that therefore "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL, and he will break interoperability between his program and another program which is expecting a real URL. If Amaya's job is to be strictly correct, then it must do this for URLs too.
Your site uses HTML 4.0 Transitional (<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"...). If you want to use Frames, you should use HTML 4.0 Frameset. Or did you mean frames on other sites?
The "scheme://" part of a URL is compulsory. See RFC 1738. Maybe it's good for a normal browser to allow you to omit "http://", but if the W3C's reference browser did this it could lead people to think that "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL.
Amaya is there to educate web designers and web-browser designers, so it has to be picky. That probably means that it's not a good web browser to use for browsing today's largely non-conforming www.
You could try telnetting to port 80 on randomly selected IP addresses, and then validating the page sent as a response (if there is a response, and it's not an error message). That would be enlightening.
Wonder what the chances are of getting it to run on Darwin. Might help accomplish what you speak of.
I can't believe I missed out XSL Transformations and XML Query!