Re:Why parse XML in the first place?
on
Perl & XML
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Programmers, hear my cry! Spend your precious hours working on your program interface, your error- checking, your overall design and modularity, don't spend time worrying about a scheme with a fancy name that saves data like this: value."
Argh! Slashdot cut out my pseudo-tags, in my original post I meant <variable>value</variable>.
I bet I won't be the only one to make that mistake today. If you're posting XML, be sure to save the post as "Extrans (html tags to text)" instead of "Plain old text" or "HTML formatted" to save your braces from being truncated.
This has been a public service announcement.
Now I'm depressed, I'm going to go work on my latest server. At least I have some control there. -----
Why parse XML in the first place?
on
Perl & XML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Parsing XML indeed. I mean seriously, have any of you ever actually tried to impliment XML parsing? It's an order of magnitude slower than accessing a database, ten zillion times slower than reading a flat file ASCII database, and a trillion times more expensive (well, I'm exaggerating a bit) than reading in a text file with nested variable=value pairs.
Interoperability is great and all, but I think XML is nothing but hype.
Programmers, hear my cry! Spend your precious hours working on your program interface, your error-checking, your overall design and modularity, don't spend time worrying about a scheme with a fancy name that saves data like this: value.
Don't mod me up or down, I just want to foster a discussion about this. I mean, as a standalone programmer using Perl for a majority of their web application products, what benefit does XML give you other than buzzword compliance?
The technological undergrowth has begun creeping up the slope, our personal lives are being violated in every day in greater and more devious ways -- capitalism itself, the torch guiding America's freight truck through the dark morass of today's ever-growing complications, is begetting devious practices such as remote monitoring into use under the guise of assumed permission. We go faster and faster, out of control, nobody's watching, nobody cares, the wheels are thundering, mud flies up and strikes the passengers across the cheeks, smearing their eyeglasses, a cane is dropped and no one turns, a woman screams out and is turned on, they've dumped from the cart onto the tracks for her sacriligious outburst and we all sit quietly on our assigned benches with our fucking numbers stamped on our heads, pretending that all is well.
Don't be a fuckwit.
The list of traits separating full-fledged humans from the less evolved (as reported by the poet-philosopher king, Tom Robbins) are as follows:
You would do well if you had a smidgen of chocolate rebelliousness smeared across your American flag pin. The forefathers of America weren't contract drawers, they were rebels, saints of dynamic behavior and they would wipe their shoes grimly with such a contract clause.
The original poster has every right to call this creeping abuse of quasi-authority, Orwellian (an unrelenting, abused adjective -- if there ever was one.)
Don't take this flame personally, it's not you I despise, it's your faulting the ignorance of the masses attitude that makes me want to declare your space: INVALID.
Abort, Retry, Ignore. That's a personality test if there ever was one.
-----
Re:Well, part of the reason...
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
It wasn't a joke. [shrugs]
Re:Well, part of the reason...
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Perhaps it was the opening word, "Agreed" that threw you off. "Aha" you say, "a me-too post!" If you were to read beyond this point you may have realized that the point was the metaphor, "No website is an island." It's clever; a play on, "No man is an island."
Crackers just disassemble the.exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release.
The only copy protection I've ever seen that actually worked was the CD-Key method for online games. If your game didn't have a valid CD-Key, then you were denied access to multiplayer, it was checked against the server so the checking routine was unassailable. Even a key generator didn't work because the producers of the game knew which keys they had released, and which ones they hadn't.
And they had your IP address if you tried war-dialing CD codes.
You're insane, just hit F12 in Opera then select, "Identify as MSIE 5.0"
From that point on, any webservers you visit will think you're using IE. It's a great way to get around uppidy webmasters who shut other browsers out completely before testing to see if they actually are broken.
You know what? It wasn't the AMD processor that bothered the Montego sound card, it was the VIA chipset used on the cheap motherboard I bought. It just returned to me out of the flash of the ether of memory...
Perhaps it's not the chip, but that you're reusing a crappy component each time you build the machine. Like a sound card and network card that refuse to play nice together.
To be completely fair though, I had a problem once with a $20 Montego Turtle Beach sound card, it wasn't compatible with AMD processors. Weird. I returned it and bought a cheap Sound Blaster Live. The Montego wasn't much good anyway.
Since I began smoking weed, I think more about things and accept things (blindly) less. My spirit has risen and at the same time my soul has far darkened. I feel a great blight somewhere inside me of something I did very wrong, very long ago, and remember it, I cannot. But in spite of that grave uneasiness, colors and shapes and textures seem realer and more alive to me, as if empty space itself held a potential energy waiting to be noticed.
I despair at the daily gray monotony I suffer through, sitting still in an occupation I'm so good at, but feel my temperament fits so poorly against. I look around sometimes at my friendships, my relationships, and I see how hollow and empty they are, but also see the potential there for something beautiful and wonder why I'm so distant while so ripe with possibilities.
The more answers I uncover from the damp misty sand, the more the polarities stand out, stark and constrasted, like great charcoal and pearl pillars of universal truths between which hangs the vast majority of life's offerings. I have learned patience, the futility of resisting change, and the importance of seeing many sides in a day. Shallow truths these seem, but important they feel to me.
Physically, when looking at a clear blue sky I see waving, rippling effects. Almost as if static is superimposed over my vision. And in my apartment I see flashes of light in my peripheral vision at night. These little pinpricks flare up and catch my attention, but disappear when looked at directly.
My girlfriend is impressed, she said she heard me talking snake in my sleep. She said I hissed a jabbing conversation, complete with clearly defined syllables and changing lilts as if I were answering unheard questions. But in the powder blue dawn I only remember dreaming of magic.
So I awake, and sit under a florescent lamp who's buzz would no doubt irritate me if it weren't drowned out by the nearly psychic hiss of the work computer's power supply fan. Some day I'm going to leave the technology by the side of the road and never look back. I'm going to sculpt or create furniture. I think. I would love to form an uneasy truce with progress and discover the wonders of the natural world for I'm afraid that I don't even feel the wind on my face properly some days. In fact, I wonder if I even know how.
Prohibition and digital copying are not really the same thing. But, I appreciate and agree entirely with the point that if enough people raise their voices in a way that the establishment is willing to hear (or cannot refuse to ignore) then we can change things.
That's the point I was trying to make. If enough people are flaunting the law on a grey issue, the law that prohibits it is probably a mistake.
My prohibition argument in retrospect seems pretty weak. (I think I've spent too much time with the marijuana legislation crowd at marijuana.com.)
You know, as a computer programmer, I don't want someone stealing my programs without paying me. These programs were hard to write. They took blood, sweat, and more of my soul than I want to admit. My programs (while not exciting) pay my bills. So I'm very concerned about digital theft of them.
But on the other hand, as an artist, I'm delighted when other people share my music. I feel that my music is a community service of sorts. As long as I entertain people or offer them an alternative view of the reality they inhabit, then I've done good and I feel good about myself. Widespread appreciation only leads to Good Things for me.
Remember the Offspring? They planned to release their last album over the web and were threatened with a lawsuit from their record company.
You know, nobody likes a middleman that makes too much profit on their wares. So it's a shame that the main alternative (downloading an MP3 off the artist's site for a small fee) is actively suppressed by the recording industry -- thereby increasing the number of people who just copy it.
{doh!}
It's such a silly mess to debate, isn't it?
--
yes there are a few with redeaming qualities and are not part of the larger crowd, but for the most part, we have a corupt, inept, retarded set of leaders who pass legislation based on the cash they get rather than what their constituents would want, or what there best intrests would be.
I wouldn't exactly call them "leaders." When was the last time you saw a politician lead?
This is all part of a much larger question though. We all agree that stealing is wrong. But digital copying is a grey area. Perhaps most digital-copying of works is done by people who wouldn't buy that product in the first place.
Prohibition in the 20's didn't work because a large percentage of the common man dabbled in the black market alongside the real criminals. Farmer Joe, a righteous christian man, turned out to have a barrel of fermenting hops in his basement. People were breaking the law left and right. Not just breaking the law, but flaunting their transgressions. The parties were incredible I hear.
So how is prohibition different from today's digital copyright battle?
Currently, it's illegal to digitaly copy copyrighted works. But if a sys-admin would go through every computer on their network, I bet they'd find a surprisingly large collection of MP3s. Certainly in the thousands for any middle-sized corporate network.
It's boring. Your sims are like dolls living in a doll-house. You send them to work, feed them, clean up after them, put them in bed. Rinse. Repeat. Forever.
It's really not all that fun. I gave it away to a friend's girlfriend after playing it twice.
Do you/.ers seriously think that Napster hasn't developed any new software? They've had two years to work on their code base. Of course they have assets.
All that today's file-sharing networks have on the old Napster are multiple-source downloads and gratuitous spyware. Napster's old client may be old news, but I wouldn't discount whatever they've developed in the meantime.
The Portland Public School switchboard was jammed for two days with calls from Linux users volunteering to come to PDX from all over the west coast to help with software migration.
That's mighty impressive. There's a lot of awfully good people in the Linux world. With a sense of community and pride like they have, who knows what they'll have accomplished in a few years time.
It makes me think. How can Mercenary programmers working for corporations possibly compete with those doing it for the love of the game?
I'm not a 100% Microsoft hater, but it's hard to see them vanquishing a determined, diversified foe like this (who doesn't have to make a profit to continue fighting.) I'm betting my future skill training on Linux. They're absolute berserkers on the OS battlefield!
Perhaps the original poster should subscribe to the O'Reilly books they've purchased (for a month) and then save each chapter locally.
Even at Safari's upper subscription levels of $100/mo you get access to 200 books. There's no way you could get a quality scanner with a feeder and OCR software for less than $100.
Re-inventing the wheel is instructive, but silly.
------
I'm not knocking the benefits to humanity from an invention like this, but the inventor of High-Intensity LEDs said back in December that the Blue LED with an inexpensive phosphorent coating (thereby changing the blue light to white in the naked eye) is vastly superior to the White LEDs in efficiency and cost.
Inventor of the high-intensity white, blue and green LEDs, Shuji Nakamura of UC Santa Barbara, in a keynote address last Dec 11th at the International Electron Devices Meeting, put forth the idea that blue LEDs are vastly superior in efficiency and cost to the common white LED. Blue and green high-intensity LEDs are based on indium gallium nitride, [providing] a higher output per watt than the common high-intensity white LED. Nakamura claims that it is a industry wide freeze on high-intensity blue LEDs that prevents the world from realizing their inherit benefits to mankind. Blue LEDs, he claims, are more efficient than incandescent lights by a factor of ten, and last more than a hundred times longer. Compare that to the white LEDs which in addition to costing more to produce, are less efficient than the blue lights by 20%, and last a mere 86% as long.
Anyone owning a modded Nokia cellphone could have told you that white high-intensity LEDs are old news. They should have used the blue LEDs with the white phosphor coating. There's really no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
"Programmers, hear my cry! Spend your precious hours working on your program interface, your error- checking, your overall design and modularity, don't spend time worrying about a scheme with a fancy name that saves data like this: value."
Argh! Slashdot cut out my pseudo-tags, in my original post I meant <variable>value</variable>.
I bet I won't be the only one to make that mistake today. If you're posting XML, be sure to save the post as "Extrans (html tags to text)" instead of "Plain old text" or "HTML formatted" to save your braces from being truncated.
This has been a public service announcement.
Now I'm depressed, I'm going to go work on my latest server. At least I have some control there.
-----
Parsing XML indeed. I mean seriously, have any of you ever actually tried to impliment XML parsing? It's an order of magnitude slower than accessing a database, ten zillion times slower than reading a flat file ASCII database, and a trillion times more expensive (well, I'm exaggerating a bit) than reading in a text file with nested variable=value pairs.
Interoperability is great and all, but I think XML is nothing but hype.
Programmers, hear my cry! Spend your precious hours working on your program interface, your error-checking, your overall design and modularity, don't spend time worrying about a scheme with a fancy name that saves data like this: value.
Don't mod me up or down, I just want to foster a discussion about this. I mean, as a standalone programmer using Perl for a majority of their web application products, what benefit does XML give you other than buzzword compliance?
----
The technological undergrowth has begun creeping up the slope, our personal lives are being violated in every day in greater and more devious ways -- capitalism itself, the torch guiding America's freight truck through the dark morass of today's ever-growing complications, is begetting devious practices such as remote monitoring into use under the guise of assumed permission. We go faster and faster, out of control, nobody's watching, nobody cares, the wheels are thundering, mud flies up and strikes the passengers across the cheeks, smearing their eyeglasses, a cane is dropped and no one turns, a woman screams out and is turned on, they've dumped from the cart onto the tracks for her sacriligious outburst and we all sit quietly on our assigned benches with our fucking numbers stamped on our heads, pretending that all is well.
b elliousness
Don't be a fuckwit.
The list of traits separating full-fledged humans from the less evolved (as reported by the poet-philosopher king, Tom Robbins) are as follows:
Humor
Imagination
Eroticism
Spirituality
Re
Aesthetics
You would do well if you had a smidgen of chocolate rebelliousness smeared across your American flag pin. The forefathers of America weren't contract drawers, they were rebels, saints of dynamic behavior and they would wipe their shoes grimly with such a contract clause.
The original poster has every right to call this creeping abuse of quasi-authority, Orwellian (an unrelenting, abused adjective -- if there ever was one.)
Don't take this flame personally, it's not you I despise, it's your faulting the ignorance of the masses attitude that makes me want to declare your space: INVALID.
Abort, Retry, Ignore. That's a personality test if there ever was one.
-----
It wasn't a joke.
[shrugs]
Perhaps it was the opening word, "Agreed" that threw you off. "Aha" you say, "a me-too post!" If you were to read beyond this point you may have realized that the point was the metaphor, "No website is an island." It's clever; a play on, "No man is an island."
But of course you understood that.
--
>> Hopefully this exposure will wake them up, and get their policy re-grounded in reality.
Agreed. No website is an island.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
.exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release.
Crackers just disassemble the
The only copy protection I've ever seen that actually worked was the CD-Key method for online games. If your game didn't have a valid CD-Key, then you were denied access to multiplayer, it was checked against the server so the checking routine was unassailable. Even a key generator didn't work because the producers of the game knew which keys they had released, and which ones they hadn't.
And they had your IP address if you tried war-dialing CD codes.
Clever as hell.
You're insane, just hit F12 in Opera then select, "Identify as MSIE 5.0"
From that point on, any webservers you visit will think you're using IE. It's a great way to get around uppidy webmasters who shut other browsers out completely before testing to see if they actually are broken.
You know what? It wasn't the AMD processor that bothered the Montego sound card, it was the VIA chipset used on the cheap motherboard I bought. It just returned to me out of the flash of the ether of memory...
Smart man, it sounds like you covered all the bases.
I'm running a similiar setup: AMD 1600+ XP & GeForce 2 MX-400. It seems as stable as most Windows ME running computers. (It's never crashed in Linux.)
Sorry to hear that you got stuck with a lemon, I once had a Cyrix 686 and well -- we all know about those.
Perhaps it's not the chip, but that you're reusing a crappy component each time you build the machine. Like a sound card and network card that refuse to play nice together.
To be completely fair though, I had a problem once with a $20 Montego Turtle Beach sound card, it wasn't compatible with AMD processors. Weird. I returned it and bought a cheap Sound Blaster Live. The Montego wasn't much good anyway.
Since I began smoking weed, I think more about things and accept things (blindly) less. My spirit has risen and at the same time my soul has far darkened. I feel a great blight somewhere inside me of something I did very wrong, very long ago, and remember it, I cannot. But in spite of that grave uneasiness, colors and shapes and textures seem realer and more alive to me, as if empty space itself held a potential energy waiting to be noticed.
I despair at the daily gray monotony I suffer through, sitting still in an occupation I'm so good at, but feel my temperament fits so poorly against. I look around sometimes at my friendships, my relationships, and I see how hollow and empty they are, but also see the potential there for something beautiful and wonder why I'm so distant while so ripe with possibilities.
The more answers I uncover from the damp misty sand, the more the polarities stand out, stark and constrasted, like great charcoal and pearl pillars of universal truths between which hangs the vast majority of life's offerings. I have learned patience, the futility of resisting change, and the importance of seeing many sides in a day. Shallow truths these seem, but important they feel to me.
Physically, when looking at a clear blue sky I see waving, rippling effects. Almost as if static is superimposed over my vision. And in my apartment I see flashes of light in my peripheral vision at night. These little pinpricks flare up and catch my attention, but disappear when looked at directly.
My girlfriend is impressed, she said she heard me talking snake in my sleep. She said I hissed a jabbing conversation, complete with clearly defined syllables and changing lilts as if I were answering unheard questions. But in the powder blue dawn I only remember dreaming of magic.
So I awake, and sit under a florescent lamp who's buzz would no doubt irritate me if it weren't drowned out by the nearly psychic hiss of the work computer's power supply fan. Some day I'm going to leave the technology by the side of the road and never look back. I'm going to sculpt or create furniture. I think. I would love to form an uneasy truce with progress and discover the wonders of the natural world for I'm afraid that I don't even feel the wind on my face properly some days. In fact, I wonder if I even know how.
Ill Wind Amazon has used copies for $.99
It's a good book. The Andromeda Strain
Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters
You can buy it used on Amazon for $1.10
Prohibition and digital copying are not really the same thing. But, I appreciate and agree entirely with the point that if enough people raise their voices in a way that the establishment is willing to hear (or cannot refuse to ignore) then we can change things. That's the point I was trying to make. If enough people are flaunting the law on a grey issue, the law that prohibits it is probably a mistake. My prohibition argument in retrospect seems pretty weak. (I think I've spent too much time with the marijuana legislation crowd at marijuana.com.) You know, as a computer programmer, I don't want someone stealing my programs without paying me. These programs were hard to write. They took blood, sweat, and more of my soul than I want to admit. My programs (while not exciting) pay my bills. So I'm very concerned about digital theft of them. But on the other hand, as an artist, I'm delighted when other people share my music. I feel that my music is a community service of sorts. As long as I entertain people or offer them an alternative view of the reality they inhabit, then I've done good and I feel good about myself. Widespread appreciation only leads to Good Things for me. Remember the Offspring? They planned to release their last album over the web and were threatened with a lawsuit from their record company. You know, nobody likes a middleman that makes too much profit on their wares. So it's a shame that the main alternative (downloading an MP3 off the artist's site for a small fee) is actively suppressed by the recording industry -- thereby increasing the number of people who just copy it. {doh!} It's such a silly mess to debate, isn't it? --
Is that a referrer number in the URL?
Making your 15% I see. I'm not impressed.
--
yes there are a few with redeaming qualities and are not part of the larger crowd, but for the most part, we have a corupt, inept, retarded set of leaders who pass legislation based on the cash they get rather than what their constituents would want, or what there best intrests would be.
I wouldn't exactly call them "leaders." When was the last time you saw a politician lead?
This is all part of a much larger question though. We all agree that stealing is wrong. But digital copying is a grey area. Perhaps most digital-copying of works is done by people who wouldn't buy that product in the first place.
Prohibition in the 20's didn't work because a large percentage of the common man dabbled in the black market alongside the real criminals. Farmer Joe, a righteous christian man, turned out to have a barrel of fermenting hops in his basement. People were breaking the law left and right. Not just breaking the law, but flaunting their transgressions. The parties were incredible I hear.
So how is prohibition different from today's digital copyright battle?
Currently, it's illegal to digitaly copy copyrighted works. But if a sys-admin would go through every computer on their network, I bet they'd find a surprisingly large collection of MP3s. Certainly in the thousands for any middle-sized corporate network.
Has anyone here actually played The Sims?
It's boring. Your sims are like dolls living in a doll-house. You send them to work, feed them, clean up after them, put them in bed. Rinse. Repeat. Forever.
It's really not all that fun. I gave it away to a friend's girlfriend after playing it twice.
However, she loved it. [shrugs]
--
Do you /.ers seriously think that Napster hasn't developed any new software? They've had two years to work on their code base. Of course they have assets.
All that today's file-sharing networks have on the old Napster are multiple-source downloads and gratuitous spyware. Napster's old client may be old news, but I wouldn't discount whatever they've developed in the meantime.
--
That's mighty impressive. There's a lot of awfully good people in the Linux world. With a sense of community and pride like they have, who knows what they'll have accomplished in a few years time.
It makes me think. How can Mercenary programmers working for corporations possibly compete with those doing it for the love of the game?
I'm not a 100% Microsoft hater, but it's hard to see them vanquishing a determined, diversified foe like this (who doesn't have to make a profit to continue fighting.) I'm betting my future skill training on Linux. They're absolute berserkers on the OS battlefield!
Hand me that stack of O'Reilly books.
----
Perhaps the original poster should subscribe to the O'Reilly books they've purchased (for a month) and then save each chapter locally. Even at Safari's upper subscription levels of $100/mo you get access to 200 books. There's no way you could get a quality scanner with a feeder and OCR software for less than $100. Re-inventing the wheel is instructive, but silly. ------
Lots of college students at $5/hour.
I'm not knocking the benefits to humanity from an invention like this, but the inventor of High-Intensity LEDs said back in December that the Blue LED with an inexpensive phosphorent coating (thereby changing the blue light to white in the naked eye) is vastly superior to the White LEDs in efficiency and cost.
Inventor of the high-intensity white, blue and green LEDs, Shuji Nakamura of UC Santa Barbara, in a keynote address last Dec 11th at the International Electron Devices Meeting, put forth the idea that blue LEDs are vastly superior in efficiency and cost to the common white LED. Blue and green high-intensity LEDs are based on indium gallium nitride, [providing] a higher output per watt than the common high-intensity white LED. Nakamura claims that it is a industry wide freeze on high-intensity blue LEDs that prevents the world from realizing their inherit benefits to mankind. Blue LEDs, he claims, are more efficient than incandescent lights by a factor of ten, and last more than a hundred times longer. Compare that to the white LEDs which in addition to costing more to produce, are less efficient than the blue lights by 20%, and last a mere 86% as long.
Anyone owning a modded Nokia cellphone could have told you that white high-intensity LEDs are old news. They should have used the blue LEDs with the white phosphor coating. There's really no difference.
- SystemFork