Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1
It's actually pretty easy to make cryptic XML even when you're familiar with the domain, because for most reasonably complicated domains there's any number of ways to store data. One particular problem which XML deals with poorly is references, where you've got a common data element which is references from multiple locations. I object to the idea that a data file is somehow automatically more understandable just because it's in XML.
Re:The Problem With XML
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1
In fairness, this is only true if there's been an effort made by the XML schema designer to make it so. It's perfectly possible, and even easy, to make perfectly valid and well-formed XML which is inscrutable.
Are you just being annoying, or are you actually serious? You need to have a signifigant amount of up-front money. That's a very real and very important barrier to entry. It's not free in any sense of the word, especially since you might lose.
There's a lot of fairly intelligent people who read too much who like guns and like to tote out this "an armed society is a polite society" thing every so often. They probably believe it because they're intelligent, polite people who like guns and who mainly interact with people like themselves and gun clubs, and therfore believe that gun ownership is somehow tied to intelligence and politeness. An obvious counterexample would be every single society in the history of the human race where being armed was ubiquitous.
I suspect that you're wrong. I needed a license to *register* a car, but not to own one. The dealership will want ID for their records and to put information on the title, but it shouldn't need to be a license per se.
I supsect that the truth is that it's airline policy but that they want to farm it off as FAA policy. Most of the people involved, indcluding the guard, probably believe that it is a law. A law that everyone believes exists is just as dangerous as a secret one, imo.
Not to mention all the tax subsidies and payoffs associated with building an airport. The degree to which an airline is a "private entity" is actually pretty questionable.
The !ptr form is actually more likely to be a performance problem in higher level/interperted languages, strangely enough, where it forces a type coercion to boolean rather than an integer compare.
Why not, lets get into it. Then every one of you retards who can't understand that technical definitions are not neccesarily the ones in general purpose dictionaries can all post about that, too. Wine isn't an emulator in the technical sense of the term. In the generic "anything that emulates is an emulator", then all you software is an emulator. Your fucking mouse is an emulator. Wine is a re-implementation of the Win32 API, a compatability layer if you will. It's not an emulator any more than Firefox is an IE emulator, or GNU libc is a BSD libc emulator.
It's a hard concept for advertisers to grasp, but annoying people doesn't work when they have the power to easily turn you off. A few years ago, pop up blocking was a pretty technical thing and you needed to be a geek to have it. Then it moved into the mainstream. Same will happen here. People don't bother to block adds which are unobtrusive and non-annoying. Use those, and all will be well.
I'm sure you get this because you refer to it in your others posts, but just for everyone else out there - the window itself resizes smoothly, sure. That lag while the window contents re-fix themselves (because the WM doesn't get resize events synchronously with the actual mouse movements) is what causes the graphical effect. This is actually a classic case of percieved vrs real performance, because the X server is actually painting faster. But because it's doing it in an awkward and unsychronized manner, it looks slower.
I use the W3C dom for client-side RPC and don't have any trouble, but I can see how it'd be usefull. I'm not against the use of XHTML if thats what floats your boat, but I'm against mandating it without a specific reason. Your performance results are interesting but don't match my experience, I haven't seen any difference between HTML 4.0 Strict (or Transitional) and XHTML 1.0/1.1, assuming everything else is the same.
I wouldn't neccesarily recommend using client-side XSLT, outside a closed environment, just mentioning that it is possible.
Google giving priority to validating pages is interesting. I suppose it's possible, as an effort to promote web standards (which I generally support, although I have quite a few rants I won't bother you with).
I see no reason why. There's no objective advantages to outputing XHTML as opposed to HTML. The only advantage at all is that you can check off a list on your buzzword compliance list, which is a pretty crappy reason to make technical decisions.
Anyone who tells you that you should use technology X without being able to provide some concrete reasons, including comparing it to other similiar technologies, is someone you should toss. Personally, I think you can get a lot more done a lot faster if you consider HTML to be a rich-text markup language, as it was originally intended, and largely dispense with the dreams of purely semantic markup. The existing tools simply don't realize that goal. Store your source data in XML and transform it on demand if you want/need effective programmatic access to your data.
Some people do use client-side XML/XSLT transforms, by the way. It's more portable and supports a wider range of clients to do it on the server, though.
An XML document full of crappy non-semantic markup (like the CSS Zen Garden) is just so much text. It's stupid to insist on XML validation when you aren't going to work with it as raw data, and if you're going to work with it as raw data your an utter cretin if you store it in XHTML instead of a usefull XML dialect thats transformed via XSLT. In addition, in the real world, browser compatability is important (maps.google.com doesn't validate against strict, for example), and IE 6 isn't going anywhere for at least 3 years, whether longhorn ships on time or not.
I didn't say they didn't brand it, I said it didn't qualify. It's not especially suprising, MS is hardly rigid about compliance with the logo, at least with it's big business partners. Apple is the same way, except they actually change the HIG everytime they decide to violate it (the creep of the "allowed" scope of brushed metal being the most obvious).
In your case, the answer is simple: don't use this software, it's not for you. It's a tool for skilled admins, not a point & click "removal" tool like Spybot.
On what grounds should they be expected to forward information about this one specific crime, but not about information they may have about other crimes such rape, murder, abduction or fraud?
On the grounds that it's quite difficult to make political hay out of your support of bills "attempting to eradicate child pornography" if said bill doesn't directly say something about child porn. It the US, we'll give it some contrived backronym, too.
- For the life of god i can't fanthom how downloading a picture hurts anything else then people's sensibilities. It's ok to watch snuff films, it's ok to watch terrorists decapitating people, but to have on your computer a girl in various degrees of nudity is a crime, and a serious one at that. Why?`
The "official" reasoning is that it reduces the market for child porn, thus reducing the chances that a child will be abused to create it. This argument falls down with faked or digitally created child porn, which is still illegal in many states, so we rely on the secondary reason, which I believe is actually more important to most people: it's sick and disturbing and we don't like it so it should be illegal.
- There is very very little information in the media (and elswhere) about the psihological damage caused by sex (not rape, not sex with a relative, just sex) at various young ages. We probably all agree that sex at 6 is (besides gross) bad for the child, but what about 9? 12? 14? 16? How and why is it bad? Doesn't it make anyone curious or is it that just asking is a tabu? Or a risk?
Well, it's not the sort of thing you can easily test by expiriment. Certainly a casual view of sexual relations from a young age has consequences. I question whether these would neccesarily be bad, but I'm not going to advocate it as a neccesarily good thing, either.
- And let me conclude with a bit of conspiracy teory here. Exactly how many electronic surveillance systems were installed because of this fear? How easy it is to destroy a public/private person with unproved accusation? It seems to be an awfully convenient tool... makes one almost think if it didn't exist it should be invented.
An accusation of being a child pornographer can, and often will, totally destroy the life of a private person. A public persona has more power to spin and control it, and is more likely to have emotionally invested supporters who will stick with him (see Michael Jackson). I personally know someone who had his life pretty much ruined by an unreasonable accusation (and in fact conviction) as a sexual predator and ended up leaving the country because of it. It's been known to come up in divorce/custody hearings as well, where it's particularly dirty. One reason I think we should to temper our extreme emotional response to it, so that we can address accusations rationally.
It can be harder than you think to break that cycle (it's not just child abuse that's involved in this sort of thing, it's just one of the more extreme examples). You aren't breaking it, after all, you're just reacting. That said, it's a reason and not an excuse. I believe that people should be given the opportunity to get help in breaking those kinds of cycles, although that shouldn't excuse them from responsiblity. We take a very visceral no-tolerance view of child pornography, which is kind of wierd in view of our much more lenient (as a society) views of plain old non-sexual abuse, and I don't think it neccesarily helps. Address causes, not symptoms.
That doesn't mean, of course, that you should ignore child abusers, nor that they get free passes, nor that they get away scott free.
I see no proof of that with a modern version of office (files saved in an xml office format). Perhaps in the past this was partly true.
I'm not sure what planet you've been living on. It has certainly been true, and it's well known how difficult it is to parse and understand arbitrary Office documents. The XML file format may be a step in the right direction, although last I heard there wasn't a lot of usefull information in there.
How do you explain the large number of conversion filters available for the MS office products. It seems to me that they have the most compatible Office environment available.
This has nothing to do with the ability of *other* applications to read Office files, which is the problem.
How many apps support 25 different formats out of the box? MS Word does. Open up a doc and click File -- Save As, count them for yourself.
Just about every other office application out there. Stop deluding yourself. Regardless, you're talking about something totally different than what the OP is.
On your other point, I personally think that everyone exagerates those other companies, and governments use of Linux.
You're still describing exactly what wxWidgets does - it's the toolkit that *has* to support this sort of thing, although the platform can encourage or assist it, as GNOME does.
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It's actually pretty easy to make cryptic XML even when you're familiar with the domain, because for most reasonably complicated domains there's any number of ways to store data. One particular problem which XML deals with poorly is references, where you've got a common data element which is references from multiple locations. I object to the idea that a data file is somehow automatically more understandable just because it's in XML.
In fairness, this is only true if there's been an effort made by the XML schema designer to make it so. It's perfectly possible, and even easy, to make perfectly valid and well-formed XML which is inscrutable.
Are you just being annoying, or are you actually serious? You need to have a signifigant amount of up-front money. That's a very real and very important barrier to entry. It's not free in any sense of the word, especially since you might lose.
And countersuing is free, right?
Independent invention should be de facto evidence that a patent is insufficently non-obvious. Sadly, it's almost the opposite.
There's a lot of fairly intelligent people who read too much who like guns and like to tote out this "an armed society is a polite society" thing every so often. They probably believe it because they're intelligent, polite people who like guns and who mainly interact with people like themselves and gun clubs, and therfore believe that gun ownership is somehow tied to intelligence and politeness. An obvious counterexample would be every single society in the history of the human race where being armed was ubiquitous.
I suspect that you're wrong. I needed a license to *register* a car, but not to own one. The dealership will want ID for their records and to put information on the title, but it shouldn't need to be a license per se.
I supsect that the truth is that it's airline policy but that they want to farm it off as FAA policy. Most of the people involved, indcluding the guard, probably believe that it is a law. A law that everyone believes exists is just as dangerous as a secret one, imo.
Is it really? An enormous percentage of US politicians are former lawyers or at least went to law school.
Not to mention all the tax subsidies and payoffs associated with building an airport. The degree to which an airline is a "private entity" is actually pretty questionable.
The !ptr form is actually more likely to be a performance problem in higher level/interperted languages, strangely enough, where it forces a type coercion to boolean rather than an integer compare.
Why not, lets get into it. Then every one of you retards who can't understand that technical definitions are not neccesarily the ones in general purpose dictionaries can all post about that, too. Wine isn't an emulator in the technical sense of the term. In the generic "anything that emulates is an emulator", then all you software is an emulator. Your fucking mouse is an emulator. Wine is a re-implementation of the Win32 API, a compatability layer if you will. It's not an emulator any more than Firefox is an IE emulator, or GNU libc is a BSD libc emulator.
It's a hard concept for advertisers to grasp, but annoying people doesn't work when they have the power to easily turn you off. A few years ago, pop up blocking was a pretty technical thing and you needed to be a geek to have it. Then it moved into the mainstream. Same will happen here. People don't bother to block adds which are unobtrusive and non-annoying. Use those, and all will be well.
I'm sure you get this because you refer to it in your others posts, but just for everyone else out there - the window itself resizes smoothly, sure. That lag while the window contents re-fix themselves (because the WM doesn't get resize events synchronously with the actual mouse movements) is what causes the graphical effect. This is actually a classic case of percieved vrs real performance, because the X server is actually painting faster. But because it's doing it in an awkward and unsychronized manner, it looks slower.
I wouldn't neccesarily recommend using client-side XSLT, outside a closed environment, just mentioning that it is possible.
Google giving priority to validating pages is interesting. I suppose it's possible, as an effort to promote web standards (which I generally support, although I have quite a few rants I won't bother you with).
Anyone who tells you that you should use technology X without being able to provide some concrete reasons, including comparing it to other similiar technologies, is someone you should toss. Personally, I think you can get a lot more done a lot faster if you consider HTML to be a rich-text markup language, as it was originally intended, and largely dispense with the dreams of purely semantic markup. The existing tools simply don't realize that goal. Store your source data in XML and transform it on demand if you want/need effective programmatic access to your data.
Some people do use client-side XML/XSLT transforms, by the way. It's more portable and supports a wider range of clients to do it on the server, though.
An XML document full of crappy non-semantic markup (like the CSS Zen Garden) is just so much text. It's stupid to insist on XML validation when you aren't going to work with it as raw data, and if you're going to work with it as raw data your an utter cretin if you store it in XHTML instead of a usefull XML dialect thats transformed via XSLT. In addition, in the real world, browser compatability is important (maps.google.com doesn't validate against strict, for example), and IE 6 isn't going anywhere for at least 3 years, whether longhorn ships on time or not.
I didn't say they didn't brand it, I said it didn't qualify. It's not especially suprising, MS is hardly rigid about compliance with the logo, at least with it's big business partners. Apple is the same way, except they actually change the HIG everytime they decide to violate it (the creep of the "allowed" scope of brushed metal being the most obvious).
In your case, the answer is simple: don't use this software, it's not for you. It's a tool for skilled admins, not a point & click "removal" tool like Spybot.
Amusingly, large portions of MS software don't qualify for the "Designed for Windows" logo. Office springs immediately to mind - violates the HIG.
On the grounds that it's quite difficult to make political hay out of your support of bills "attempting to eradicate child pornography" if said bill doesn't directly say something about child porn. It the US, we'll give it some contrived backronym, too.
- There is very very little information in the media (and elswhere) about the psihological damage caused by sex (not rape, not sex with a relative, just sex) at various young ages. We probably all agree that sex at 6 is (besides gross) bad for the child, but what about 9? 12? 14? 16? How and why is it bad? Doesn't it make anyone curious or is it that just asking is a tabu? Or a risk?
Well, it's not the sort of thing you can easily test by expiriment. Certainly a casual view of sexual relations from a young age has consequences. I question whether these would neccesarily be bad, but I'm not going to advocate it as a neccesarily good thing, either.
- And let me conclude with a bit of conspiracy teory here. Exactly how many electronic surveillance systems were installed because of this fear? How easy it is to destroy a public/private person with unproved accusation? It seems to be an awfully convenient tool... makes one almost think if it didn't exist it should be invented.
An accusation of being a child pornographer can, and often will, totally destroy the life of a private person. A public persona has more power to spin and control it, and is more likely to have emotionally invested supporters who will stick with him (see Michael Jackson). I personally know someone who had his life pretty much ruined by an unreasonable accusation (and in fact conviction) as a sexual predator and ended up leaving the country because of it. It's been known to come up in divorce/custody hearings as well, where it's particularly dirty. One reason I think we should to temper our extreme emotional response to it, so that we can address accusations rationally.
That doesn't mean, of course, that you should ignore child abusers, nor that they get free passes, nor that they get away scott free.
I'm not sure what planet you've been living on. It has certainly been true, and it's well known how difficult it is to parse and understand arbitrary Office documents. The XML file format may be a step in the right direction, although last I heard there wasn't a lot of usefull information in there.
How do you explain the large number of conversion filters available for the MS office products. It seems to me that they have the most compatible Office environment available.
This has nothing to do with the ability of *other* applications to read Office files, which is the problem.
How many apps support 25 different formats out of the box? MS Word does. Open up a doc and click File -- Save As, count them for yourself.
Just about every other office application out there. Stop deluding yourself. Regardless, you're talking about something totally different than what the OP is.
On your other point, I personally think that everyone exagerates those other companies, and governments use of Linux.
Why would you think that, and why does it matter?
You're still describing exactly what wxWidgets does - it's the toolkit that *has* to support this sort of thing, although the platform can encourage or assist it, as GNOME does.