But Python is a language intended to be meaningful to humans.
True... but there's nothing stopping me from using meaningful (to humans) whitespace in other languages, too - it's a cornerstone of any programming effort to be clear, concise, and verbose in your explanations, so no argument there. I'm not totally comfortable with Python's explicit enforcement of white-space without brackets or parentheses or what-have-you. Just the simple fact that I can't use my editor to automatically select a block by paren-matching, for example, really bugs. It's cute that python's syntax is so crisp-looking, but sometimes all that matching-char ASCII gobbledygook in other languages is truly helpful.
I make around 55K a year (USD) and consider myself very fortunate. However, I'm more than a little tired of watching a huge chunk of my work, IE my money, vaporize in taxes each month.
Would you prefer to keep the money, and see the things it pays for vaporize? Police, fire departments, hospitals, roads, the justice system, etc....
I can't stand ridiculous government waste as much as the next guy, but I do consider it an honor and a privilege to live in a part of the world where I don't need to deal with frontier justice and nonexistent infrastructure.
This is why it's so crucial to VOTE: YOU have the right to decide where that money goes.
Collaborative PowerPoints? Um... Ok. Isn't that what source code control systems are for, even for binaries? Pure vaporware, baby.
...But it's already a reality. For example, I have been working on a project for BMW that is just that: a freak hybrid between Powerpoint and CVS. It's implemented in Flash on the client side, and backed up with a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL.
Images and documents are stored on a central webserver. All administrative interaction is mediated through the flash application. The editing environment is the playback environment. All relevant historical assets and information are immediately available. And, one of the design requirements was that the whole thing needed to run on Macs, so I don't see anything from Microsoft edging it out anytime soon. The project is like a poster child for Joel Spolsky's recent "How Microsoft Lost The API War" article.
The article failed to mention flying cars, another no-duh prediction that seemed completely obvious, and won't happen either.
A short while ago, Cory Doctorow published an piece entitled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, which mentioned two very good reasons why the semantic web won't take off the same way that these articles predict: schemas aren't neutral, and there's more than one way to describe something. These are basic problems that have been hounding AI research for years, dictionary & encyclopedia publishers for centuries, and all other academics for millenia, and they aren't going to go away.
The central problem with universal metadata is that it requires informed work on the part of data creators, and it's a major pain in the ass. The OED took almost a century to create, and the first few decades were essentially wasted figuring out that dilletantes were not adequately capable of properly cataloging use of language. Even with a profit motive, good metadata is a bitch (see EBay comment in the article above).
It's like the senator's (I forget who) comment about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Often, we don't know what it is we're looking for exactly, and we don't know how to describe what we've got so other people can find it except in very narrow terms. I have a few creative projects which I've released under the creative commons license and dutifully marked up with cc's provided RDF information, but all that code just says what the license is, not what the project is like in a way that's as meaningful as, for example, a music recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes. The porn industry (as usual, on the bleeding edge of information and communications technology) deals with this to some degree by having a very narrow semantic universe to describe: Search Extreme is a stupendously complete metadata set, but even it contains only a few kinds of information.
You probably just need a better projector. It's all about the Lumens.
Contrast ratio, the difference in luminance between light and dark parts of the image and dependent upon the quality of the LCD, is equally important. Higher CR == better picture quality, especially in low-light (vs. complete darkness) conditions.
Internet Explorer 6 only gets the box model wrong if you kick it into "quirks mode".
I'm not sure this is correct - looking at sites in IE 5/5.5/6.0, they all seem to implement the box model identically even when I provide them with a complete DOCTYPE, which *should* ensure non-quirks mode.
And, I do still have to support IE back to 5+. it would have been nice for them to have gotten it right the first time around. It's actually not that much of a problem now that I can anticipate it, but still a hassle to have to build in multiple-nested divs and not be able to rely on a given behavior.
Moz/Firefox, Opera, and IE 6 are all far more CSS compliant than Safari.
Moz & Firefox may have better implementations than Safari, but I totally disagree about IE. Its box model is so completely borked (width includes padding & content, which is in explicit violation of the spec) I don't know where to begin, and just from personal experience I've often found that sites I develop primarily using Safari tend to translate to Gecko painlessly, yet require much more tweaking to get right in IE. I think there's a significant difference between having a standard partially implemented, and a standard incorrectly implemented.
I can tell you what it's for: Mindspace tracking. A large number of people read the news every day. Each one of them gathers these little bits of information in some rough proportion to how often they're mentioned, filtered through their level of interest in any given subject.
Exactly!
The original inspiration for this (which I imagine I should put in the explanation somewhere) was a historical world-empires map, that showed relative political influences of various nations and empires throughout history as a percentage of total world power. Lines for a given political force (Egypt, Rome, HRE, USA...) widened and narrowed depending on thier relative world power at a given time. The graph went from ~3000 BC to the present day.
The interesting point was that world influence was considered a zero-sum game: the total amount of power shared stayed constant. In this case, I'm treating the "In The News" sidebar as an expression of news prevalence: sampled every 15 minutes, a term can be considered to have "maximum" mindshare if it appears in that list every time. George Bush, John Kerry, Abu Ghraib are good examples of terms that have consistently maintained near-maximum share. Scroll back to mid-to-late March to see Richard Clarke, Condi Rice, and National Security dominate.
It's a bug - the issue seems to come up with names that have too many synonyms, e.g. Mr. Reagan / Ronald Reagan / Ronald Wilson Reagan / etc. I've had the same issue with Osama / Osama Bin Laden / Bin Laden, and it's being investigated.
I'm talking about the Semantic Web, which is an attempt to deal with the IMO biggest problem with the web, and especially searching the web for information: you can only search according to syntax. Words, regexes, etc. is really the best you can do right now.... An example: searching for "a yellow car for sale in $CITY, with a cost between $VAL1 and $VAL2." would not give a lot of unusable results today, but the semantic web would return what is actually asked for.
The "Semantic Web" is mostly an academic pipe dream, and here's a great explanation why:
Many networked projects, including things like business-to-business markets and Web Services, have started with the unobjectionable hypothesis that communication would be easier if everyone described things the same way. From there, it is a short but fatal leap to conclude that a particular brand of unifying description will therefore be broadly and swiftly adopted (the "this will work because it would be good if it did" fallacy.) Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview.
--Clay Shirky
While I think that Shirky is taking a bit of an extremist stance, I do believe that the web as we know has been successful for the very same reasons that the standards brigade finds it frustrating. A profoundly easy learning curve, a well-defined though flexible standard, and few requirements for semantic correctness all go a long way. The success of google is proof that useful meaning can be strained from a sufficiently large corpus of disorganized data, and I think it's generally the right approach: provide a few obvious places for semantic meta-information to go (title tags, hyperlinks, headers), and let the masses decide how far to take it. The entire SEO field is based on providing economic rationales for good meta-data, but it's not a pre-requisite.
It's easy to give a yes or no answer when you don't have to prove that you know anything about the subject!
Indeed -- I was recently polled by a rep from the NFIB, and one of the questions was about whether I supported repealing the inheritance tax. The other poll participant I was with was just about to agree that it should be repealed, when I pointed out that it's only triggered by inheritances above $x million, and only in ~%2 of cases. The person taking the poll confirmed this, but she didn't exactly volunteer that information before I brought it up, either. It doesn't do much to engender trust in poll results.
It's already been done. Personally, I don't know how well it works, but it sounds promising.
Daapd works very, very well. I use it on a linux machine and have never had a problem with iTunes compatibility. Drawbacks include having to restart the server when new music is added (though I'm open to the possibility that this is just a case of me not being diligent enough with the docs), and lack of support for AAC files.
So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people to their network who exist on other servers.
Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance, the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.
It's truly wonderful how all these new systems (blog trackbacks, social networking aggregators, feedback forms, instant message systems, etc.) are all desperately struggling to acheive the robust featureset of e-mail and usenet.
Reagan got a hell of a lot of mileage out of anecdotes ("rich welfare moms", etc.), but I find them pretty suspect when they make it into policy debates. I have a gut feeling that the kinds of homeless making 45K/yr are few and far between. My own anecdotal evidence from the streets of Oakland and SF (I live in a slummy part of West Oakland, though there aren't that many homeless so much as really poorly-off families living in run-down apartments) is a lot bleaker - most of the people I encounter around my office in the Mission area are too far off the deep end to even panhandle -- it's outrageously bad here.
Did you know, however, that the average panhandler in NYC makes more than the average NYC police officer? "Homelessness" can be very lucrative. 45 k a year - tax free, and with very low overhead.
Is this "average" also "typical"? I.e., what's the median and mode, and the stddev?
Not trying to flame, just really curious where stats like this come from, how they're verified, and what the rest of the data look like.
Now you can plug so much junk into HTML that you can create whole applications. HTML is bursting at the seams because of all these hacks and extra languages tacked on to the end, but it still works. I think that's amazing.
Uhh... no. HTML now is basically the same as HTML then, with a few minor add-ons (tables, frames) and some structural re-tooling and semantic refinement (xHTML).
The differences that allow for app creation and extra hacks are either technologies that reside next to HTML, such as client-side scripting languages, display specifications that apply style to content (CSS), file formats that are displayed in-line with HTML via plug-ins such as flash or quicktime, and development environments that generate HTML as output, such as CGI.
The key is that none of this was impossible in 1995 - the HTTP spec has remained pretty much stable since that time, and the basic HTML tagset remains valid today.
I think what you're getting at is the proliferation of new browser technologies that make all this stuff run more quickly and predictably, and the refinement of web design and development methodologies. The junk, as you put it, is David Siegel's fault.:)
...ball-shaped musical toys which are covered with 'a patented thread containing sensors that react to the way the child handles them. The child manipulates a preprogrammed "little seed" of music and helps it "grow" by the way he or she shapes it.'
Okay, I'm not a parent, but I play one on TV.
I'm not strictly a luddite, either, but I think it's tremendously important that toys given to children not be technological black boxes. The true fallout of the current generation of playstation zombies won't be any sort of attention span issues or predilection towards violence, but the total lack of intellectual stimulation and natural curiousity brought on by the use of toys that discourage (or forbid, thanks to the DMCA) tinkering and explorative destruction/reconstruction.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suggesting that Apple is sending you actual electrons or photons?
What a great essay, thank you!
True... but there's nothing stopping me from using meaningful (to humans) whitespace in other languages, too - it's a cornerstone of any programming effort to be clear, concise, and verbose in your explanations, so no argument there. I'm not totally comfortable with Python's explicit enforcement of white-space without brackets or parentheses or what-have-you. Just the simple fact that I can't use my editor to automatically select a block by paren-matching, for example, really bugs. It's cute that python's syntax is so crisp-looking, but sometimes all that matching-char ASCII gobbledygook in other languages is truly helpful.
For the same reason it has comments. I don't expect those to be meaningful to the interpreter or compiler, either.
Would you prefer to keep the money, and see the things it pays for vaporize? Police, fire departments, hospitals, roads, the justice system, etc....
I can't stand ridiculous government waste as much as the next guy, but I do consider it an honor and a privilege to live in a part of the world where I don't need to deal with frontier justice and nonexistent infrastructure.
This is why it's so crucial to VOTE: YOU have the right to decide where that money goes.
All right, a bunch of white guys talking about computer stuff. :P
...But it's already a reality. For example, I have been working on a project for BMW that is just that: a freak hybrid between Powerpoint and CVS. It's implemented in Flash on the client side, and backed up with a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL.
Images and documents are stored on a central webserver. All administrative interaction is mediated through the flash application. The editing environment is the playback environment. All relevant historical assets and information are immediately available. And, one of the design requirements was that the whole thing needed to run on Macs, so I don't see anything from Microsoft edging it out anytime soon. The project is like a poster child for Joel Spolsky's recent "How Microsoft Lost The API War" article.
The article failed to mention flying cars, another no-duh prediction that seemed completely obvious, and won't happen either.
A short while ago, Cory Doctorow published an piece entitled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, which mentioned two very good reasons why the semantic web won't take off the same way that these articles predict: schemas aren't neutral, and there's more than one way to describe something. These are basic problems that have been hounding AI research for years, dictionary & encyclopedia publishers for centuries, and all other academics for millenia, and they aren't going to go away.
The central problem with universal metadata is that it requires informed work on the part of data creators, and it's a major pain in the ass. The OED took almost a century to create, and the first few decades were essentially wasted figuring out that dilletantes were not adequately capable of properly cataloging use of language. Even with a profit motive, good metadata is a bitch (see EBay comment in the article above).
It's like the senator's (I forget who) comment about pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." Often, we don't know what it is we're looking for exactly, and we don't know how to describe what we've got so other people can find it except in very narrow terms. I have a few creative projects which I've released under the creative commons license and dutifully marked up with cc's provided RDF information, but all that code just says what the license is, not what the project is like in a way that's as meaningful as, for example, a music recommendation from a friend who knows your tastes. The porn industry (as usual, on the bleeding edge of information and communications technology) deals with this to some degree by having a very narrow semantic universe to describe: Search Extreme is a stupendously complete metadata set, but even it contains only a few kinds of information.
Contrast ratio, the difference in luminance between light and dark parts of the image and dependent upon the quality of the LCD, is equally important. Higher CR == better picture quality, especially in low-light (vs. complete darkness) conditions.
I'm not sure this is correct - looking at sites in IE 5/5.5/6.0, they all seem to implement the box model identically even when I provide them with a complete DOCTYPE, which *should* ensure non-quirks mode.
And, I do still have to support IE back to 5+. it would have been nice for them to have gotten it right the first time around. It's actually not that much of a problem now that I can anticipate it, but still a hassle to have to build in multiple-nested divs and not be able to rely on a given behavior.
Moz & Firefox may have better implementations than Safari, but I totally disagree about IE. Its box model is so completely borked (width includes padding & content, which is in explicit violation of the spec) I don't know where to begin, and just from personal experience I've often found that sites I develop primarily using Safari tend to translate to Gecko painlessly, yet require much more tweaking to get right in IE. I think there's a significant difference between having a standard partially implemented, and a standard incorrectly implemented.
Can you elaborate on the 'height' part?
Exactly!
The original inspiration for this (which I imagine I should put in the explanation somewhere) was a historical world-empires map, that showed relative political influences of various nations and empires throughout history as a percentage of total world power. Lines for a given political force (Egypt, Rome, HRE, USA...) widened and narrowed depending on thier relative world power at a given time. The graph went from ~3000 BC to the present day.
The interesting point was that world influence was considered a zero-sum game: the total amount of power shared stayed constant. In this case, I'm treating the "In The News" sidebar as an expression of news prevalence: sampled every 15 minutes, a term can be considered to have "maximum" mindshare if it appears in that list every time. George Bush, John Kerry, Abu Ghraib are good examples of terms that have consistently maintained near-maximum share. Scroll back to mid-to-late March to see Richard Clarke, Condi Rice, and National Security dominate.
It's a bug - the issue seems to come up with names that have too many synonyms, e.g. Mr. Reagan / Ronald Reagan / Ronald Wilson Reagan / etc. I've had the same issue with Osama / Osama Bin Laden / Bin Laden, and it's being investigated.
The "Semantic Web" is mostly an academic pipe dream, and here's a great explanation why:
While I think that Shirky is taking a bit of an extremist stance, I do believe that the web as we know has been successful for the very same reasons that the standards brigade finds it frustrating. A profoundly easy learning curve, a well-defined though flexible standard, and few requirements for semantic correctness all go a long way. The success of google is proof that useful meaning can be strained from a sufficiently large corpus of disorganized data, and I think it's generally the right approach: provide a few obvious places for semantic meta-information to go (title tags, hyperlinks, headers), and let the masses decide how far to take it. The entire SEO field is based on providing economic rationales for good meta-data, but it's not a pre-requisite.
Or your O, in the case of the goatse fella.
Indeed -- I was recently polled by a rep from the NFIB, and one of the questions was about whether I supported repealing the inheritance tax. The other poll participant I was with was just about to agree that it should be repealed, when I pointed out that it's only triggered by inheritances above $x million, and only in ~%2 of cases. The person taking the poll confirmed this, but she didn't exactly volunteer that information before I brought it up, either. It doesn't do much to engender trust in poll results.
Daapd works very, very well. I use it on a linux machine and have never had a problem with iTunes compatibility. Drawbacks include having to restart the server when new music is added (though I'm open to the possibility that this is just a case of me not being diligent enough with the docs), and lack of support for AAC files.
It's truly wonderful how all these new systems (blog trackbacks, social networking aggregators, feedback forms, instant message systems, etc.) are all desperately struggling to acheive the robust featureset of e-mail and usenet.
ahem - the Polish Marie Curie!
This guy beat me. :\
...Like an open source No Homers Club
Reagan got a hell of a lot of mileage out of anecdotes ("rich welfare moms", etc.), but I find them pretty suspect when they make it into policy debates. I have a gut feeling that the kinds of homeless making 45K/yr are few and far between. My own anecdotal evidence from the streets of Oakland and SF (I live in a slummy part of West Oakland, though there aren't that many homeless so much as really poorly-off families living in run-down apartments) is a lot bleaker - most of the people I encounter around my office in the Mission area are too far off the deep end to even panhandle -- it's outrageously bad here.
Is this "average" also "typical"? I.e., what's the median and mode, and the stddev?
Not trying to flame, just really curious where stats like this come from, how they're verified, and what the rest of the data look like.
Uhh... no. HTML now is basically the same as HTML then, with a few minor add-ons (tables, frames) and some structural re-tooling and semantic refinement (xHTML).
The differences that allow for app creation and extra hacks are either technologies that reside next to HTML, such as client-side scripting languages, display specifications that apply style to content (CSS), file formats that are displayed in-line with HTML via plug-ins such as flash or quicktime, and development environments that generate HTML as output, such as CGI.
The key is that none of this was impossible in 1995 - the HTTP spec has remained pretty much stable since that time, and the basic HTML tagset remains valid today.
I think what you're getting at is the proliferation of new browser technologies that make all this stuff run more quickly and predictably, and the refinement of web design and development methodologies. The junk, as you put it, is David Siegel's fault. :)
Okay, I'm not a parent, but I play one on TV.
I'm not strictly a luddite, either, but I think it's tremendously important that toys given to children not be technological black boxes. The true fallout of the current generation of playstation zombies won't be any sort of attention span issues or predilection towards violence, but the total lack of intellectual stimulation and natural curiousity brought on by the use of toys that discourage (or forbid, thanks to the DMCA) tinkering and explorative destruction/reconstruction.