XHTML *IS* XML. Yup theres various semantic niceties to be argued but at the end of the day XML is being used as the document format for *numerous* websites.
XML != Data Interchange.
Now as to XSLT being slow...well it can be and it depends on what your doing and how youre doing it. With well written stylesheets, a good architecture to offload transforms onto, decent cache management etc. etc. a pure XSLT application can CURRENTLY equal or outstrip the performance of the equivilent perl/php/asp etc. approach. When and if the potential of XSLT is actual realised (i.e. distributed parallerl transformations), XML+XSLT should have significant performance advantages over alternative approaches.
Would like to have a good romp on this but its late...
Resolution is a little on the low side at 800x600 for me to get excited about. However it IS exciting that this technology is moving into the workplace - 5-10 years and prices should start dropping to consumer levels and the technology should have improved to a level where some of the..."funner" aspects of this technology become viable. Expect this technology to become pervasive within the next 20 years.
I really hadnt expected to see something like this at the sort of prices they are talking about for another 10 years or so - nice when the future comes early:)
Thats wayyyy too hot. I know its apples and oranges but my 3200 a64 idles at 35C and hasnt broke 50C under full load even (differnt MB though). In fact I have it set to go into shutdown at 60C!! Check the thermal compound etc because something is wrong there.
While everyone here seems to be debating presentation vs content the reason *I* have been hassling my company to start making heavy use of CSS is to comply with legislation to make our sites more accessible!!
Having had them switch to XHTML-1 transitional (heheh cant wait to drop strict on them) and attempting to ENFORCE validation, CSS is the ONLY way to retain a high level of presentational impact while still meeting our legal requirements.
Basically if you do ANY web development work professionally and you dont use or plan on using CSS then expect to find yourself working less and less as your clients get sued because of how incompetently you ply your trade.
I started off by thinking that I'd argue with the basic premise of this article - because for me programming DOESNT stink. But for me as a "web developer" the problems are relatively simple and well defined; the tools relatively mature and apt for the tasks in hand. I'm NOT having to reinvent the wheel like I often used to 5-10 years ago.
But thats just for me and with MY approach to software development atm. In areas where the tools (languages, compilers, IDE, even OS) arnt well development things do certainly stink. A few years ago I had the job of writing some apps for windows CE. One of those apps was Java based, the other C++. It was a nightmare for several reasons:-
- The LANGUAGES. I was forced to use a VERY early version of Java. It was PAINFUL having to develop libraries of essential functions and routines from scratch. For the C++ work - all I had to do was write a simple web browser. I already had the renderer - writing the remaining code, something which would have been perhaps 1 days work with perl/python/c# - took over a month. - The TOOLS. The Java IDE was OK...not great but OK. The VRE however...well lets just say that it never left beta. Visual C++ for WindowsCE? PRAY you never have to use it. - The DOCUMENTATION. Often missing, or incorrect; I would often be using guesswork to figure out how to use an API call or how to do X. - The TRAINING. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH.
The point of the above being that where a platform is mature and has had the time and investment in tool/language/documentation/knowledge asset development, it is possible to select a tool which will assist and enable the development work. PROGRAMMING SHOULD NOT STINK ON A MATURE PLATFORM WHEN THE CORRECT TOOLS ARE SELECTED FOR THE TASK IN HAND. For immature platforms - without the investment in tools, without the care and attention that is given to mature systems - then yes, it is going to suck. If you still think it "stinks" and are using a mature platform and tools...well sometimes complex problems DO stink to solve, however many people program for the joy/pleasure of solving those problems. If youre NOT enjoying it...think of a career change!!
Oh the above said though...yes SOFTWARE still stinks. Bigtime. But THAT is a seperate issue entirely and has much more to do with the fact that *software development processes* often stink.
My Kids (5 and 7) are AVID gamers. Railroad Tycoon II (History and Music), Sim City 4 (Literacy, numeracy and planning), Theme park world (Economics), Flight Simulator 4 (Geography), Robot Wars (Science) etc. etc with a good smattering of fluffy fun garbage (hand-eye co-ordination).
They will hardly touch a book of their own volition but they have THE highest reading skills in their respective classes (in fact my 5 year old is outpacing my 7 year old gah!! ) because they WANTED to read what was going on in their games.
Combine this with some good old-fashioned school education and some active parental involvement and I have some motivated kids who ENJOY learning about science, nature, mathematics etc. etc.
So anyways - for younger children I personally believe that they have learned more from playing computers games (and watching television) than they have learned from books so far. That said they have learned a great deal more from their parents, teachers and peers than from games...because there really is NO replacement for teaching and good parenting.
Oh one draw-back I should note - their handwriting absolutely sucks because they type everything *sigh*
I'm on my third. I'm not particularly clumsy or forgetful, but throwing a coat down in a pub and having one too many has lost me 2 phones so far. A wristphone with a comfortable cheap bluetooth headset is an absolute boon in terms of avoiding phone loss or misplacing it. The price of a relacement headset is also less than that of a phone.
All this thing needs for it to be an absolute dream as far as Im concerned is 3G.
Honest question here - could you give some specific examples of what GPL'd code/applications they are using? Sorry I havnt touched anything from SCO in years...
In the run up to the case, according to the Reading Evening Post, Mr Schofield suffered vigilante attacks and had to first hide in his home then move away to avoid continued attacks
Yet another example of why the decision to allow defendants in criminal trials to be named was a bad decision *sigh*.
As to the story - sounds strange that a trojan would do that unless someone was using his machine as a proxy and in that case why would the images be cached on his system?
Well in the UK a doubling in the number of IT jobs wont even take things back to late 90s levels (stats). I've been semi looking for work for 2 years and DESPERATELY for 4 months after my own business went nearly bankrupt ( current total clients : 0 ). Things are dire here apart from in government and niche verticle markets.
However its interesting waffle and does have some good points. I have to disagree that if we had the languages of 100 years hence that programmers would be able to use them. I still remember just how hard C++ was for those used to C and I am amazed at just how hard peeps find XSLT to be due to its lack of modifiable variables. Recursion just doesnt seem to come naturally to many.
Basically the problem isnt going to be with the languages - the problem will be with the concepts that created those language features.
Another interesting thing is that in a project I was working I never commented any of my 7000 lines of code
The point of commenting code is not so that YOU will remember what it did, but so that the poor schmuck who might have to maintain it at some point can understand what it does and why it does it! Uncommented code is poor code no matter HOW technically outstanding it may be.
I've now been unemployed for the past 3 months. I'm no longer young (31) but believe me, Id LOVE the opportunity to work with mainframes even if I was coming in at near entry level and doing "mundane, boring, repetitive tasks". However the truth of it is that the entry level jobs are just not being created for people like me. Almost every advertised position requires X years of experience in X number of very specific areas. There are THOUSANDS of *experienced* IT professionals like-me out there RIGHT NOW, who want roles in IT but cannot get the TRAINING in order to give them the experience for these positions. The problem ISN'T that people need convincing to do this type of work. Its that industry is unwilling to create entry level positions, with a *reasonable* salary and make the long term investment in people by providing the training, to give them the experience, to do these jobs. And the stupid thing is that those of us who are a little older, who have commitments, families etc. are the exact type of people who would LAST at these jobs because job security is much more important to us than the latest technology, or the highest salary. So in closing...anyone know who I apply to?
During the process of setting up ongoing, for the first time in a year or more I wrote a bunch of code to process arbitrary incoming XML, and I found it irritating, time-consuming, and error-prone.
The first reason he states that processing
arbitrary XML data is time-consuming and error-prone?!!? Well WTF does he expect? Parsing and transforming XML documents is a JOY compared to working with unstructured or non-validated data. I used to have to parse very-large full-text databases (10-500,000 records), in a broad variety of formats and write handlers for each and every format...it was a NIGHTMARE!!!
The standardisation on XML means that a limited set of standard tools can be used to do what used to take several-hundred thousand lines of bespoke code...FAR *LESS* error prone. These days if I need to chop up and transform a large dataset I can write a simple parsing routine (SAX, regex or bespoke logic), throw the extracted record to a parser for validation, then transform it to the destination format with XSLT. That used to require one-hell-of-a-lot of bespoke code to perform the same task which was a real maintenance problem.
About the only valid point that gives any credence to the assertation that "XML is too hard for programmers" was given by one of the articles he sites. The article states that the proliferation of standards and tools (e.g. XSLT, XPATH, DOM, SAX, JAXP, XPath, XQuery, XForms etc. etc.)which overall combine to make up what many consider to be the XML standard, make XML difficult for programmers to learn XML.
XML as a standard by-itself however is very easy to learn and the benefits are ENORMOUS when compared to the disadvantages of not-having any such standard!! If the standard hadnt been made we might have been left with SGML...and theres a rant that I would HAPPILY join in with!!
Even on Intel, Linux outperforms Windows....The irony here is that Windows gets an unfair market-share boost because it is inferior to Linux and requires more installations to do the same work.
Can he provide references to the studies which show that "Linux outperforms windows" and show any corroborating evidence of real-world installations where a higher volume of Windows systems were actually deployed?
I don't live in either the Windows or Linux camps - each has it uses - but I have to say that I consider Mr. Petreleys article to be one of the shoddiest pieces of analysis I have ever encountered. Does LinuxWorld practice open-source journalism now as well?
Even on Intel, Linux outperforms Windows....The irony here is that Windows gets an unfair market-share boost because it is inferior to Linux and requires more installations to do the same work.
What garbage!! I've developed for both platforms and know that there are some things Linux does well and others which Windows does well. I challenge anyone to show a test which substantiates the above statement.
This article is pure garbage, which is a pity because I'm sure the underlying data would show some interesting trends.
Aye, I did some research into this area recently and Rhetorical were FAR superior to any thing else I could find. I really hope that they come out with some form of "packaged product" at some point since I'd LOVE to use their technology.
From personal experience I have to say that the language barrier is THE number one problem with overseas IT people. Ive had to work with Russian and Chinese programmers in the past and it would have been faster for me to do the work myself because I had to *continually* monitor their work to ensure they understood the specification. The amount of time I spent explaining reasonably simple *business* related concepts to them...*sigh*
Anyways after the company I and they worked for had been sold a couple of times(!!) and everyone fired (and I mean EVERYONE) I looked up the Russian programmer to see how he was doing - he'd moved back home and was now SELLING a version of the software that I had developed!!! Since I didnt own rights to the software though.....
The above are hopefully 2 examples of the trend of exporting tech jobs will bottom out but its very much a wait-and-see situation as-is.
You dont say who your fellow coders are...are they programmers/designers/domain experts?
If they are not PROGRAMMERS then obviously the training that they have recieved is insufficient for the project and realistically the short term answer is that you should finish the project yourself and in the long term they need more training.
However if they ARE "programmers"...well I was going to say "follow many of the excellent constructive suggestions given by others" but on second thoughts I say sack them and make sure your company doesnt hire any more muppets. If they do...walk. Trust me on this one.
just dont call them mid-july. Any other time they will obviously be happy to answer you're questions without checking that you are authorised to recieve that information:)
10Mbps!!!! A few more years of American environmental policy and it might be warm enough to live there too;) Only problem then:- Jag kan inter tarla svenksa!! *sigh*
Everyone seems to be looking at the worse case scenario with palladium though and until we get detail on how things will be implimented none of us really know just how bad....or good it may be.
On the positive side the entertainment industary will finally have a way to make their content available on-line and semi-securely. Corporates and home users should suffer from fewer viral infections and data thefts. Software/media producers may benifit from a reduction in piracy.
On the negative side - what happens to all those DVDs, CDs and other software which are unsigned? Would the process of creating secure media be so restrictive/prohibitively technical or expensive so as to bar the small company/private individual from creating (innovating) new secure/signed software/media?
If MS actually come up with a good implimentation/system/process this need not be a bad thing......its just based upon the current state of things I agree it is likely to be so. I'll wait on the white papers personaly before jumping to conclusions
Thanks for the link - youre 100% correct. I'm MUCH better informed now:) I really hope Tosh improve the graphics performance - its such a nice machine that apart.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah! Sorry, rubbish!!
XHTML *IS* XML. Yup theres various semantic niceties to be argued but at the end of the day XML is being used as the document format for *numerous* websites.
XML != Data Interchange.
Now as to XSLT being slow...well it can be and it depends on what your doing and how youre doing it. With well written stylesheets, a good architecture to offload transforms onto, decent cache management etc. etc. a pure XSLT application can CURRENTLY equal or outstrip the performance of the equivilent perl/php/asp etc. approach. When and if the potential of XSLT is actual realised (i.e. distributed parallerl transformations), XML+XSLT should have significant performance advantages over alternative approaches.
Would like to have a good romp on this but its late...
http://www.mvis.com/nomadexpert/info.html
:)
Resolution is a little on the low side at 800x600 for me to get excited about. However it IS exciting that this technology is moving into the workplace - 5-10 years and prices should start dropping to consumer levels and the technology should have improved to a level where some of the..."funner" aspects of this technology become viable. Expect this technology to become pervasive within the next 20 years.
I really hadnt expected to see something like this at the sort of prices they are talking about for another 10 years or so - nice when the future comes early
Thats wayyyy too hot. I know its apples and oranges but my 3200 a64 idles at 35C and hasnt broke 50C under full load even (differnt MB though). In fact I have it set to go into shutdown at 60C!! Check the thermal compound etc because something is wrong there.
While everyone here seems to be debating presentation vs content the reason *I* have been hassling my company to start making heavy use of CSS is to comply with legislation to make our sites more accessible!!
Having had them switch to XHTML-1 transitional (heheh cant wait to drop strict on them) and attempting to ENFORCE validation, CSS is the ONLY way to retain a high level of presentational impact while still meeting our legal requirements.
Basically if you do ANY web development work professionally and you dont use or plan on using CSS then expect to find yourself working less and less as your clients get sued because of how incompetently you ply your trade.
I started off by thinking that I'd argue with the basic premise of this article - because for me programming DOESNT stink. But for me as a "web developer" the problems are relatively simple and well defined; the tools relatively mature and apt for the tasks in hand. I'm NOT having to reinvent the wheel like I often used to 5-10 years ago.
:-
But thats just for me and with MY approach to software development atm. In areas where the tools (languages, compilers, IDE, even OS) arnt well development things do certainly stink. A few years ago I had the job of writing some apps for windows CE. One of those apps was Java based, the other C++. It was a nightmare for several reasons
- The LANGUAGES. I was forced to use a VERY early version of Java. It was PAINFUL having to develop libraries of essential functions and routines from scratch. For the C++ work - all I had to do was write a simple web browser. I already had the renderer - writing the remaining code, something which would have been perhaps 1 days work with perl/python/c# - took over a month.
- The TOOLS. The Java IDE was OK...not great but OK. The VRE however...well lets just say that it never left beta. Visual C++ for WindowsCE? PRAY you never have to use it.
- The DOCUMENTATION. Often missing, or incorrect; I would often be using guesswork to figure out how to use an API call or how to do X.
- The TRAINING. HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH.
The point of the above being that where a platform is mature and has had the time and investment in tool/language/documentation/knowledge asset development, it is possible to select a tool which will assist and enable the development work. PROGRAMMING SHOULD NOT STINK ON A MATURE PLATFORM WHEN THE CORRECT TOOLS ARE SELECTED FOR THE TASK IN HAND. For immature platforms - without the investment in tools, without the care and attention that is given to mature systems - then yes, it is going to suck. If you still think it "stinks" and are using a mature platform and tools...well sometimes complex problems DO stink to solve, however many people program for the joy/pleasure of solving those problems. If youre NOT enjoying it...think of a career change!!
Oh the above said though...yes SOFTWARE still stinks. Bigtime. But THAT is a seperate issue entirely and has much more to do with the fact that *software development processes* often stink.
My Kids (5 and 7) are AVID gamers. Railroad Tycoon II (History and Music), Sim City 4 (Literacy, numeracy and planning), Theme park world (Economics), Flight Simulator 4 (Geography), Robot Wars (Science) etc. etc with a good smattering of fluffy fun garbage (hand-eye co-ordination).
They will hardly touch a book of their own volition but they have THE highest reading skills in their respective classes (in fact my 5 year old is outpacing my 7 year old gah!! ) because they WANTED to read what was going on in their games.
Combine this with some good old-fashioned school education and some active parental involvement and I have some motivated kids who ENJOY learning about science, nature, mathematics etc. etc.
So anyways - for younger children I personally believe that they have learned more from playing computers games (and watching television) than they have learned from books so far. That said they have learned a great deal more from their parents, teachers and peers than from games...because there really is NO replacement for teaching and good parenting.
Oh one draw-back I should note - their handwriting absolutely sucks because they type everything *sigh*
Heh I was just thinking the exact same thing before I read your comment. Great album.
All this thing needs for it to be an absolute dream as far as Im concerned is 3G.
Honest question here - could you give some specific examples of what GPL'd code/applications they are using? Sorry I havnt touched anything from SCO in years...
Yet another example of why the decision to allow defendants in criminal trials to be named was a bad decision *sigh*.
As to the story - sounds strange that a trojan would do that unless someone was using his machine as a proxy and in that case why would the images be cached on his system?
Basically the problem isnt going to be with the languages - the problem will be with the concepts that created those language features.
The point of commenting code is not so that YOU will remember what it did, but so that the poor schmuck who might have to maintain it at some point can understand what it does and why it does it! Uncommented code is poor code no matter HOW technically outstanding it may be.
I've now been unemployed for the past 3 months. I'm no longer young (31) but believe me, Id LOVE the opportunity to work with mainframes even if I was coming in at near entry level and doing "mundane, boring, repetitive tasks". However the truth of it is that the entry level jobs are just not being created for people like me. Almost every advertised position requires X years of experience in X number of very specific areas. There are THOUSANDS of *experienced* IT professionals like-me out there RIGHT NOW, who want roles in IT but cannot get the TRAINING in order to give them the experience for these positions. The problem ISN'T that people need convincing to do this type of work. Its that industry is unwilling to create entry level positions, with a *reasonable* salary and make the long term investment in people by providing the training, to give them the experience, to do these jobs. And the stupid thing is that those of us who are a little older, who have commitments, families etc. are the exact type of people who would LAST at these jobs because job security is much more important to us than the latest technology, or the highest salary. So in closing...anyone know who I apply to?
Sorry, couldnt resist ;)
This article is pure garbage, which is a pity because I'm sure the underlying data would show some interesting trends.
Aye, I did some research into this area recently and Rhetorical were FAR superior to any thing else I could find. I really hope that they come out with some form of "packaged product" at some point since I'd LOVE to use their technology.
From personal experience I have to say that the language barrier is THE number one problem with overseas IT people. Ive had to work with Russian and Chinese programmers in the past and it would have been faster for me to do the work myself because I had to *continually* monitor their work to ensure they understood the specification. The amount of time I spent explaining reasonably simple *business* related concepts to them...*sigh*
Anyways after the company I and they worked for had been sold a couple of times(!!) and everyone fired (and I mean EVERYONE) I looked up the Russian programmer to see how he was doing - he'd moved back home and was now SELLING a version of the software that I had developed!!! Since I didnt own rights to the software though.....
The above are hopefully 2 examples of the trend of exporting tech jobs will bottom out but its very much a wait-and-see situation as-is.
You dont say who your fellow coders are...are they programmers/designers/domain experts?
If they are not PROGRAMMERS then obviously the training that they have recieved is insufficient for the project and realistically the short term answer is that you should finish the project yourself and in the long term they need more training.
However if they ARE "programmers"...well I was going to say "follow many of the excellent constructive suggestions given by others" but on second thoughts I say sack them and make sure your company doesnt hire any more muppets. If they do...walk. Trust me on this one.
just dont call them mid-july. Any other time they will obviously be happy to answer you're questions without checking that you are authorised to recieve that information :)
10Mbps!!!! A few more years of American environmental policy and it might be warm enough to live there too ;) Only problem then :- Jag kan inter tarla svenksa!! *sigh*
Everyone seems to be looking at the worse case scenario with palladium though and until we get detail on how things will be implimented none of us really know just how bad....or good it may be.
On the positive side the entertainment industary will finally have a way to make their content available on-line and semi-securely. Corporates and home users should suffer from fewer viral infections and data thefts. Software/media producers may benifit from a reduction in piracy.
On the negative side - what happens to all those DVDs, CDs and other software which are unsigned? Would the process of creating secure media be so restrictive/prohibitively technical or expensive so as to bar the small company/private individual from creating (innovating) new secure/signed software/media?
If MS actually come up with a good implimentation/system/process this need not be a bad thing......its just based upon the current state of things I agree it is likely to be so. I'll wait on the white papers personaly before jumping to conclusions
Thanks for the link - youre 100% correct. I'm MUCH better informed now :) I really hope Tosh improve the graphics performance - its such a nice machine that apart.