X is for the Xtensions, M is for the Metadata...
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
and L is for the Laughter it brings us.
I have not read this book, but it sounds interesting already.
XML is an interesting technology that has the potential for changing the way we use technology in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways. (And in a few ways that may not be so wonderful.) But using XML correctly is tough. I've written and discarded more DTDs and schemata than I care to admit because they were seriously flawed. Getting it right is important and very, very hard.
XML looks simple, and in some ways it is. But in so many other ways it is not simple at all - in large part because it gives us a tool to approach some very hard problems. And hard problems, often even when expressed in the simplest way around, tend to stay hard. (Calculus makes saying some things simple, for example, but understanding those things still takes work and insight.)
I will be taking a good look at this book in the near future to see what it has to say. And I'd urge those who dislike XML to do the same. And finally, even those who like XML need to think hard about how to use it well, so perhaps this would be a good read for them too.
At first glance this seemed reasonable. Then, I thought about it a bit and came up with a few minor problems.
I find it hard to believe that customers would go in to a store, aim a camera at a tv and stand there for an hour or so to get a movie on video. (Sure a gang of such could get together and have a hundred people or so each grab a couple minutes, but that seems unlikely, difficult to manage, and most importantly unprofitable)
I find it much easier to believe that employees might grab a dvd thats been returned (or otherwise opened), take it home and return it the next day. And I'm not sure this law covers that.
In theatres, it might work, but I suspect that with the improvements in technology it would not be all that hard to get tiny (tiny!) cameras on wireless networks to a van outside the theatre and grab things that way. But if the cameras are small enough they'd be close to undetectable.
And as above the insiders are probably the real problem. Don't forget the employee viewings of films on thursday nights which are (for all practical purposes) private viewings and hence it would be unlikely that the constabulary (or other authorities) would even know it was taking place.
(The copies would exist, so you might manage to shut down a minimally profitable theatre in a small town from time to time - but somehow I doubt it would have much of an effect on the process in general.)
If this only happens in Ohio it will have no effect whatever. Which means that the MPAA will need to pass these laws in every state for them to mean anything. But having such a law in one state will allow lobbyists to say "But the folks in Ohio have this law..." If they're smart though, they'll tack on extra provisions each time a law is passed so they can then go back to (say) Ohio and say "Now Indiana has a better law than you do, so you must pass this new law or you'll have a Law Gap and schoolchildren around the world will point at you and laugh!"
So the law is both silly and dangerous.
Which means we should all laugh hysterically while we flee in terror.
Wonderful what search and replace (with a bit of editing) can do, aint it?
(You need to imagine that this is spoken by an Iraqi.)
Saddam Hussein and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The US does not dictate to Iraq because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Hussein to allow the US to dictate to USA. Iraq does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention those that have attacked or are plotting to attack Iraq or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of the Iraqi Secret Police, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in Iraq and we prove it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Afghanistan and the Lebanon.
I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Saddam Hussein's main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
By the way, if you say No, I'll become Leader of the Disloyal Opposition. And will do my best to visit upon you an appropriate Fall From Power. If necessary, I'll tell the rulers of Iraq that you possess Weapons of Mass Destruction.
IOW, our algorithm says music is good if it sounds like everything else people think is good right now, and if it's different from current Top 40, it's crap.
I read that more as "our algorithm doesn't work most of the time, but if we get to rig the test, er, um, choose the musical style we want to deal with, we do ok."
If they could identify a set of interesting weights (or whatever) that their stuff comes up with, and track those weights over time, then if the time series are anywhere near smooth they could predict what will be hot next year. Then too the act of predicting the future can well change it...
The most common things in the universe...
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
... are hydrogen and stupidity.
And in washington, stupidity has the edge.
Congress can vote whatever it wants into law. Sensible or not. And they often do - especially when prodded by greed and self interest. And they have powerful allies in the avaricious, supremely (and willfully) ignorant types in and about the White House.
And what Congress does not do, the White House may impose by fiat.
Look at the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act, the move to allow foreign born citizens to become president ("President Terminator!"), the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq (expect your children to fight there),.....
The Future Fair...
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I don't know what will happen in linux, but here are some of the things I'd like to see...
Out of nowhere will come the killer office app that integrates word processing, spreadsheets and databases so they really interoperate nicely. (Think Improv, Access, and some quasi-wysiwyg word processor that works on xml schemas all bred together by a Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Brown and then make "easy" enough for the masses. Maybe even constraint propagation as the spreadsheet engine.)
A personal information manager will surface that enables us all to keep track of mail, favorite websites, IM buddylists, newsgroups and all that ephemeral, necessary information that clogs our bits and our neurons. (Ideally it will integrate with the above.)
Linux will finally have a sound system that works and without it being a pain to deal with.
A way to build and install kernels and modules that requires less than serious geekery to get to work.
Package management will mature enough that we wont have to chase dependencies manually, and so that packages will install cleanly.
A good dictation package.
A linux based PDA about the size of a paperback with handwriting recognition and (of course) all of the above.
I remember a scheduling algorithm to read disk blocks in a Video-On-Demand server ... (today) you can use simpler, memory-hungry, buffering methods
True enough. But the methods use in the algorithm may still be of use in other contexts. For example, maybe the video application is not a problem on workstations or dedicated video appliances. (Or not - using the better algorithm might make using less memory possible which could make something like a pocket video viewer less expensive.) But maybe it would be useful in loading sequential blocks of data for processing if you want to generate fast visualizations of huge data sets. Or it might be useful in a very different context (who knows what).
We can't all read all the literature out there. But we can try to keep up with at least a good sample of it and that can help a lot.
A search for "Charles Dickens" shows us that it finds :
Results 1-15 of about 50 containing ""charles dickens""
Going to the next page gives 16-30 and so on.
It is only the patient searcher who will discover that after all 45 of the 50 hits are seen that there are 151383 results left to go.
So I agree, its not that MSN Search is biased against Linux. It is that MSN Search is biased toward those willing to spend money to be listed. And (as a direct effect of that) MSN Search is biased against those trying to find information.
They're not being dishonest for ideological reasons - they're just not interested in honesty or usefulness so much as they're interested in selling themselves. (I'll resist direct comparisons with the kind of prostitutes who are honest about what they're doing.) (OK, so my resistance crumbled.)
And of course, they'll never go broke underestimating the american public.
I get seriously annoyed at windows users who ask me for help when I say "start a browser and we'll search for it in Google" and they say "Whats a browser?"
Docbook is a flexible, configurable, way to do just what you're asking. You can change output formats - produce PDF or RTF or HTML or Latex or text. You can parameterize it, and script it pretty easily.
There are already Docbook to filters available and you can adapt them to other uses with a bit of poking around.
The trend seems to be more and more to charge juveniles as adults. At least when the prosecutors think they'll get good tv time out of it or good coverage if they need to get re-elected.
So someone might start in a juvenile detention center, but end up in a more interesting environment where they can learn the essential skills they'll need on their return to society. That is, how to be a criminal that actually harms people instead of one that just reduces the profits of a corporation.
I have to say that as an educator I've come to appreciate the value of an easy-install linux to recommend to students (as well as install on workstations/servers). Unless fedora is as easy to install as redhat has been, it will be much harder for me to recommend it.
I'd like to encourage RedHat to continue to make an educational/research oriented distribution at a nicely low price that I can continue to recommend to students, as well as to those faculty (both CS and not so much) who might be interested in alternatives.
I spent some time working on making intermezzo work on my machines a few months back. Eventually gave it up as a very bad idea. I don't remember right now what was the last straw, but I did spend a week or so working on it.
A shame too, it looked pretty good and like it could have quite a bit of promise.
Building a reliable, easy to install, distributed filesystem that allows for disconnected operation, updates and similar kinds of things would be very, very useful. (Notice the recent post on using CVS to maintain a distributed home directory.)
It is quite legal for governmental institutions and representatives to lie as part of their duties. So how can anyone tell if anything they say is the truth?
Or (about the same) imagine if everyone got to not only ignore people, but had the power (as the UN would) to compel everyone else to ignore them. Eventually every statement made would annoy someone and would be censored.
And I don't mind saying that if I had the idea that there was someone who was censoring all that I said, I'd do my best to censor everything that they said. Eventually there'd be nothing left but silence.
I've been teaching programming for a bit now and get copied assignments from students often enough. I'm sure I don't find them all but I think I find a fair number of them and these code snippets would not have even begun to arouse my suspicions.
Perhaps there is more that is stronger evidence, but this is seriously unconvincing.
Imagine the internet run along these lines. Everyone gets to censor whatever they (or their government or puppets) don't like or find offensive.
Pretty much nothing at all would escape.
At that price I'd personally prefer to buy a bunch of disposable cameras and give one to everyone invited to the wedding and ask them to snap away. Then collect them and develop the pictures taken.
Sure you'd probably not get the greatest formal poses ever, but I'd bet that the pictures taken would give a much better rememberance of the event. Like "Oh, here's Aunt Tilly pouring the punch onto Uncle Walter", and "Yah, remember that awful tie George wore." Much more fun.
And those formal poses. Just photoshop faces into one and it will look fine. Just like every other formal wedding picture ever taken and thereafter ignored by everyone.
Its hard to keep straight what the mozart project was aiming at and what the xl project is aiming at as the pages use almost identical kinds of layout and style.
I would prefer iterators the way Sather did it though :
Slashdot Mirror
I have not read this book, but it sounds interesting already.
XML is an interesting technology that has the potential for changing the way we use technology in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways. (And in a few ways that may not be so wonderful.) But using XML correctly is tough. I've written and discarded more DTDs and schemata than I care to admit because they were seriously flawed. Getting it right is important and very, very hard.
XML looks simple, and in some ways it is. But in so many other ways it is not simple at all - in large part because it gives us a tool to approach some very hard problems. And hard problems, often even when expressed in the simplest way around, tend to stay hard. (Calculus makes saying some things simple, for example, but understanding those things still takes work and insight.)
I will be taking a good look at this book in the near future to see what it has to say. And I'd urge those who dislike XML to do the same. And finally, even those who like XML need to think hard about how to use it well, so perhaps this would be a good read for them too.
At first glance this seemed reasonable. Then, I thought about it a bit and came up with a few minor problems.
I find it hard to believe that customers would go in to a store, aim a camera at a tv and stand there for an hour or so to get a movie on video. (Sure a gang of such could get together and have a hundred people or so each grab a couple minutes, but that seems unlikely, difficult to manage, and most importantly unprofitable)
I find it much easier to believe that employees might grab a dvd thats been returned (or otherwise opened), take it home and return it the next day. And I'm not sure this law covers that.
In theatres, it might work, but I suspect that with the improvements in technology it would not be all that hard to get tiny (tiny!) cameras on wireless networks to a van outside the theatre and grab things that way. But if the cameras are small enough they'd be close to undetectable.
And as above the insiders are probably the real problem. Don't forget the employee viewings of films on thursday nights which are (for all practical purposes) private viewings and hence it would be unlikely that the constabulary (or other authorities) would even know it was taking place. (The copies would exist, so you might manage to shut down a minimally profitable theatre in a small town from time to time - but somehow I doubt it would have much of an effect on the process in general.)
If this only happens in Ohio it will have no effect whatever. Which means that the MPAA will need to pass these laws in every state for them to mean anything. But having such a law in one state will allow lobbyists to say "But the folks in Ohio have this law..." If they're smart though, they'll tack on extra provisions each time a law is passed so they can then go back to (say) Ohio and say "Now Indiana has a better law than you do, so you must pass this new law or you'll have a Law Gap and schoolchildren around the world will point at you and laugh!"
So the law is both silly and dangerous.
Which means we should all laugh hysterically while we flee in terror.
Wonderful what search and replace (with a bit of editing) can do, aint it?
(You need to imagine that this is spoken by an Iraqi.)
Saddam Hussein and his government do not listen to the UN, detain prisoners with no charges, and therefore do not believe in democracy.
The US does not dictate to Iraq because we are a sovereign country. It would unconstitutional for President Hussein to allow the US to dictate to USA. Iraq does not detain "prisoners" without charges. We do, however, place into detention those that have attacked or are plotting to attack Iraq or its military. It is very simple not become a guest of the Iraqi Secret Police, do not conspire with terrorist organizations that threaten to cause mass casualties. We do believe in democracy in Iraq and we prove it to many nations around the world. Two shining examples are Afghanistan and the Lebanon.I understand that it is vogue in many minority "clickish" groups to engage in vitriolic hyperbole in regards to our President. Those that have underestimated our President's intelligence or will have found themselves on the losing side of not only elections but of history. There are many complaints that can be brought up about our President such as his love of big government programs but it is rare to ever hear valid ones from his foes, much to their electoral peril. President Saddam Hussein's main strength is that he is constantly underestimated and overly mocked.
Pretty Please?
By the way, if you say No, I'll become Leader of the Disloyal Opposition. And will do my best to visit upon you an appropriate Fall From Power. If necessary, I'll tell the rulers of Iraq that you possess Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Patent It!
File Patent ...
Build Board
Buy Monkeys
Arrange For Shipments of Bananas
Sell services to Friendster
Profit!
(Ok, so it was obvious.)
I read that more as "our algorithm doesn't work most of the time, but if we get to rig the test, er, um, choose the musical style we want to deal with, we do ok."
If they could identify a set of interesting weights (or whatever) that their stuff comes up with, and track those weights over time, then if the time series are anywhere near smooth they could predict what will be hot next year. Then too the act of predicting the future can well change it...
And in washington, stupidity has the edge.
Congress can vote whatever it wants into law. Sensible or not. And they often do - especially when prodded by greed and self interest. And they have powerful allies in the avaricious, supremely (and willfully) ignorant types in and about the White House.
And what Congress does not do, the White House may impose by fiat.
Look at the DMCA, the Communications Decency Act, the move to allow foreign born citizens to become president ("President Terminator!"), the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq (expect your children to fight there), .....
Out of nowhere will come the killer office app that integrates word processing, spreadsheets and databases so they really interoperate nicely. (Think Improv, Access, and some quasi-wysiwyg word processor that works on xml schemas all bred together by a Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Brown and then make "easy" enough for the masses. Maybe even constraint propagation as the spreadsheet engine.)
A personal information manager will surface that enables us all to keep track of mail, favorite websites, IM buddylists, newsgroups and all that ephemeral, necessary information that clogs our bits and our neurons. (Ideally it will integrate with the above.)
Linux will finally have a sound system that works and without it being a pain to deal with.
A way to build and install kernels and modules that requires less than serious geekery to get to work.
Package management will mature enough that we wont have to chase dependencies manually, and so that packages will install cleanly.
A good dictation package.
A linux based PDA about the size of a paperback with handwriting recognition and (of course) all of the above.
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
"An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles."
Or it could also work well if you're in a wheelchair and have to keep fighting with your right arm.
True enough. But the methods use in the algorithm may still be of use in other contexts. For example, maybe the video application is not a problem on workstations or dedicated video appliances. (Or not - using the better algorithm might make using less memory possible which could make something like a pocket video viewer less expensive.) But maybe it would be useful in loading sequential blocks of data for processing if you want to generate fast visualizations of huge data sets. Or it might be useful in a very different context (who knows what).
We can't all read all the literature out there. But we can try to keep up with at least a good sample of it and that can help a lot.
Results 1-15 of about 50 containing ""charles dickens""
Going to the next page gives 16-30 and so on.
It is only the patient searcher who will discover that after all 45 of the 50 hits are seen that there are 151383 results left to go.
So I agree, its not that MSN Search is biased against Linux. It is that MSN Search is biased toward those willing to spend money to be listed. And (as a direct effect of that) MSN Search is biased against those trying to find information.
They're not being dishonest for ideological reasons - they're just not interested in honesty or usefulness so much as they're interested in selling themselves. (I'll resist direct comparisons with the kind of prostitutes who are honest about what they're doing.) (OK, so my resistance crumbled.)
And of course, they'll never go broke underestimating the american public.
Whine.
Bark!
Docbook is a flexible, configurable, way to do just what you're asking. You can change output formats - produce PDF or RTF or HTML or Latex or text. You can parameterize it, and script it pretty easily. There are already Docbook to filters available and you can adapt them to other uses with a bit of poking around.
So someone might start in a juvenile detention center, but end up in a more interesting environment where they can learn the essential skills they'll need on their return to society. That is, how to be a criminal that actually harms people instead of one that just reduces the profits of a corporation.
I'd like to encourage RedHat to continue to make an educational/research oriented distribution at a nicely low price that I can continue to recommend to students, as well as to those faculty (both CS and not so much) who might be interested in alternatives.
A shame too, it looked pretty good and like it could have quite a bit of promise.
Building a reliable, easy to install, distributed filesystem that allows for disconnected operation, updates and similar kinds of things would be very, very useful. (Notice the recent post on using CVS to maintain a distributed home directory.)
I want to see all these folks on the stand on Court TV. Probably won't happen, sigh.
It is quite legal for governmental institutions and representatives to lie as part of their duties. So how can anyone tell if anything they say is the truth?
Not good for democracy, I suspect.
Why is it so bad if one parent buys the tape and makes copies for all the rest?
Or (about the same) imagine if everyone got to not only ignore people, but had the power (as the UN would) to compel everyone else to ignore them. Eventually every statement made would annoy someone and would be censored.
And I don't mind saying that if I had the idea that there was someone who was censoring all that I said, I'd do my best to censor everything that they said. Eventually there'd be nothing left but silence.
Perhaps there is more that is stronger evidence, but this is seriously unconvincing.
You might as well shut the whole thing down now.
Sure you'd probably not get the greatest formal poses ever, but I'd bet that the pictures taken would give a much better rememberance of the event. Like "Oh, here's Aunt Tilly pouring the punch onto Uncle Walter", and "Yah, remember that awful tie George wore." Much more fun.
And those formal poses. Just photoshop faces into one and it will look fine. Just like every other formal wedding picture ever taken and thereafter ignored by everyone.
I would prefer iterators the way Sather did it though :
loopi
end ;