There are no standards on what that structure should be, past definite rules on how the structure is described, and no way to automagically convert one type of XML construct to another.
Believing that XML will unify file formats is akin to believing that SQL will make data held in one database magically interoperate with data from another...
Regardless of how the information is stored, you still need to know what the information is and in what context to use it.
XML does not address this at all. You could quite happily embed an entire binary word file in a CDATA section of an XML file, call it well-formed, say you're file format is XML-based, and have it pass through any XML validator in existence.
The data would still be as useless as if it was a binary word file.
By trivially encrypting or obfuscating user info, surely it would be a federal offense in the US for Napsters lawyers to recover this information?
Since under the DMCA any attempt to bypass a copy-protection scheme, however feeble, is an offense.
Surely Napster owns the copyright on it's 'database' of users - didn't Metallica's lawyers illegally copy and republish this information? Surely it's Napsters right to maintain control over the addresses of it's users - The RIAA is copying them and using this information to make a profit.
Seriously, the easiest way to do this is to write your own code in Perl.
I use this for all my sites, putting a set of variables into a flatfile database, and using Perl regular expressions to replace tags in an HTML template. Its essentially a quick n dirty approach that i keep extending as i make new sites, but it gives me exactly the results i want.
You could get an off-the-shelf tool, but typically you'll find that off-the-shelf tools support everything except the one function you really need.
You'll also have to spend time learning the tool's syntax, and if youre going to have to provide support to your clients, you'll probably want a good understanding of how it works at a fairly low level.
Zope, PHP and others are also valid approaches, but if you ask me, time spent learning perl is time well spent, and after Perl, PHP is a breeze.
Not being a Python man, i can't really comment on the merits of Pyhton/Zope but Zope certainly looks like a very functional and complete product for lots of web publishing tasks.
Dre, and many other artists' music clearly ENCOURAGES people to break the law - shooting people on the street, all that gangsta rap bullshit.
If its OK to sue napster over providing 'encouragement' to pirate music, surely its ok to prosecute Dre for murder since he 'encouraged' this kind of behaviour.
Personally, i don't think any true artist would want to prosecute somebody for listening to their music.
Take away all the recording contracts, the glitzy videos and the lawyers, and people will still be making great music.
But i guess Dr. Dre and Metallica wouldn't be among them because without the money to finance their coke habits, they'll be too strung out to even pick up an instrument.
I am pretty jaded by all this graphics-card hoopla.
It started when i bought a Matrox G200, which was advertised as having a full OpenGL implementation. Thinking 'woah, this'll mean i'll be able to run lightwave at a great pace!' i bought one.
Turns out, as with a lot of hardware these days, that the OpenGL drivers weren't ready when they shipped the product, and they only actually released them when the G400 shipped. This is about a year later.
Suffice to say i'll never buy another matrox product again.
The Nvidia GeForce is now out, supposedly bringing the wonders of hardware T&L to the world. Well, i have yet to see anything, bar NVidia demos, that actually use the geometry acceleration. Why? 'oh, the drivers that support it aren't ready yet'
And on my current TNT2 card, i have to use the 2.08 drivers (lst time i looked the drivers were up to release 3.58) because the later drivers break OpenGL 1.2 compliance.
How long does it take to get a decent set of drivers for a chipset???
And if i was a betting man, i'd put $100 on the fact that theres no way ATI are going to ship a product with all features enabled and working in the first release.
Is this article actually suggesting that the results of their scientific experiment really depend on what they think the results should be at the time?
Surely this is somewhat circular.. What you see depends on what you want to see... I think theyre dealing with a cognitive psychology problem, not a quantum physics one.
And lets face it, bones and soft tissue don't handle hard vaccuum, intense radiation or temperature extremes very well.
NASA have also aptly demonstrated how its bloody hard to accurately pilot a vechicle when its a few hundred million miles from home.
I think we, as a race, will need to 'evolve' into a much hardier form..
When your lifetime is in the range of the halflife of silicon, as well as the possibility of unlimited digital replication, rather than something under 100 years, suddenly a few thousand light years travel doesn't seem so far.
Practically every 3D game out there makes extensive, if not sole use of hand-drawn texture maps. Theres no way you can reasonably procedurally texture a low-poly model and make it look like, say, a face.
Practically every broadcast or film 3D project uses hand-drawn or photgraphically based texture maps.
I agree, these are often combined with procedural maps and volume shaders, but a chrome sphere on a checkerboard with a marble column in the background rendered in POV-Ray doesn't exactly cut it when it comes to games and other professionally produced 3D content.
Whoever moderated this as 'informative' needs to get their head checked.
Won't the MPAA try to ban it?
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
Surely technology such as this could be used to BREAK THE ENCRYPTION ON COPYRIGHTED WORKS! Isn't it therefore illegal under the terms of the DMCA?
Laser scanners do this, just much more accurately
on
Minolta 3D Camera
·
· Score: 1
You can go out and buy a handheld laser scanner from Polhemus, that will let you scan 3D objects to a high level of precision in point-cloud form, as well as capture a colour texture map, a bump-map for extra realism, and have all your scans automatically aligned in 3D for the fastest possible processing into a mesh.
You can then either triangulate the point cloud for a dense triangular mesh, or fit splines or maybe a subdivision surface cage to it.
Appply the bump/colour maps, and voila, an excellent, truly 3D representation of the object being scanned.
This technology, of course, costs a lot more than the camera from minolta, but gives results that are probably about 100x better over a wide variety of objects.
Someone should come up with a cheap-ass laser scanner.. whats involved in making one of these?
Thats the whole point of applying a robust security model to Java and Javascript.
Lets just not mention ActiveX, thats the incredibly scary one.
Any decent web programmer knows that you can't trust user input. The companies who pay the web programmers' salaries had better realise that we need to allocate time to closing these holes, proper testing of apps in a hostile online environment is *necessary*.
Server-side holes can usually be fixed quickly, as the server software is usually available in script or source form.. This is not the case, of course, with proprietary systems from many companies.
To me, primary responsibility for this problem lies firstly with the user, and secondly with the browser manufacturers.
If you *do not want the possibility of remote code executing on your computer*, then turn support for those features off in your browser.
Browser manufacturers should ship their products with these options off by default, requiring users to turn them on if they *want* them.
Hopefully Mozilla will lead the pack in this respect.
All engines that execute remote code should require options to be *explicitly enabled by the user* in order to perform potentially security-threatening functions.
This should be called an 'Internet Explorer Advisory' more than anything else.
IE is the only browser that allows remote code to format your hard drive through ActiveX.
'Signed ActiveX Controls' are a joke... i bet any 16 year old norwegian hacker could break the security on this stuff.
will software need to be recompiled to run on the HURD, or is it binary compatible with Linux?
I think its a bit premature to say the HURD is 'theoretically better than Linux' i mean, shit, you could say that Windows NT is 'theoretically better than Linux', but i know which OS i'd rather run.
GTK/QT enable the programmer to create apps that don't look like theyre from the 1970s. While, admittedly, this has little do do with functionality, it is somewhat important that your app looks as attractive on *NIX as it does on MacOS or Windows. GTK
I'd love a true 3D interface, only because i do a lot of 3D modelling and animation work..
I would gladly work in a 3D computer environment, using avatars and interacting with others in a VR environment.
However, this is impractical on a monitor. If you want to implement a 3D interface, you need to have:
a) a true 3D input device - there are several, including 'haptics' arms which track the point of a stylus in 3D and provide motion-feedback, '3D' mouse-type controllers which respond to pushing, pulling and twisting in 6-DOF, and various others.
b) a true 3D output device - lightweight 3D glasses would be the most immediately practical, available in some level of functionality in products like Sony's Glasstron. This would need some type of motion tracking built in so you could turn your head etc.
Only now do we have the hardware that really makes it possible anyway... an NVidia GeForce with its geometry acceleration enabled will approach the level of performance that will enable primitive real-time 3D environments at reasonable cost.
None of our current 'Office' applications will benefit much from a 3D interface, the entire OS will have to mutate into something with a totally different 'metaphor'...
Programming paradigms like JavaBeans which let you string objects together with 'connectors' would be a candidate for 3D representation, but even that is pretty efficiently represented in 2D.
Lets face it, we work with information that is deliberately 'abstracted' from the natural '3D' world to such a degree that putting these abstract representations back into 3D is pointless.
I mean, if you are using 'ifconfig eth0 mtu=1440' rather than watching your 'packet flows' through the pipes that connect your PC to your network, and setting the 'valves' accordingly to minimise the turbulence in your plumbing system, then a 3D interface won't be much good.
I've toyed with the idea of writing a simple GUI system using Macromedia's Flash standard.
This is openly available, and would allow some reasonably sophisticated behaviours, including transparency, antialiasing etc.
The Flash plugin isn't huge, yet delivers some nice multimedia functionality.. vector rendering, sound and animation facilities, along with freeform behaviours for widgets etc.
It does lack a lot of back-end and interactive functionality especially where native GUI widgets would normally be used, but i imagine a Flash renderer running on top of something like GNOME would provide a pretty amazing GUI.
Flash is also designed to be streamed over internet connections, and can be viewed inside web browsers on pretty much any platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Napster may allow users to share MP3s - an illegal act.
But a gun manufacturer allows users to kill each other and themselves, certainly a far more serious crime.
So why is it so acceptable to shut down napster, and so hard to shut down gun manufacturers?
Who'd they get to preside over this case? Judge Judy?
So posting a notice saying that you prohibit illegal use of your service is not enough any more?
Youre now responsible for the way your service is used.
Should this case succeed it is a confirmation by the US legal system that corporations are indeed responsible for your actions as a citizen.
Hence, they own you, and should be allowed to control your actions to maximize their shareholder value and minimize their liability.
Fuck your constitution, you do what the man with the most money tells you to do.
It was sitting in the same shelf as 'UNIX for dummies' and 'Windows 95 for Dummies', so i just had to have it.
Its quite informative actually... Well written with clear illustrations.
XML is just a structured text file.
There are no standards on what that structure should be, past definite rules on how the structure is described, and no way to automagically convert one type of XML construct to another.
Believing that XML will unify file formats is akin to believing that SQL will make data held in one database magically interoperate with data from another...
Regardless of how the information is stored, you still need to know what the information is and in what context to use it.
XML does not address this at all. You could quite happily embed an entire binary word file in a CDATA section of an XML file, call it well-formed, say you're file format is XML-based, and have it pass through any XML validator in existence.
The data would still be as useless as if it was a binary word file.
By trivially encrypting or obfuscating user info, surely it would be a federal offense in the US for Napsters lawyers to recover this information?
Since under the DMCA any attempt to bypass a copy-protection scheme, however feeble, is an offense.
Surely Napster owns the copyright on it's 'database' of users - didn't Metallica's lawyers illegally copy and republish this information? Surely it's Napsters right to maintain control over the addresses of it's users - The RIAA is copying them and using this information to make a profit.
Seriously, the easiest way to do this is to write your own code in Perl.
I use this for all my sites, putting a set of variables into a flatfile database, and using Perl regular expressions to replace tags in an HTML template. Its essentially a quick n dirty approach that i keep extending as i make new sites, but it gives me exactly the results i want.
You could get an off-the-shelf tool, but typically you'll find that off-the-shelf tools support everything except the one function you really need.
You'll also have to spend time learning the tool's syntax, and if youre going to have to provide support to your clients, you'll probably want a good understanding of how it works at a fairly low level.
Zope, PHP and others are also valid approaches, but if you ask me, time spent learning perl is time well spent, and after Perl, PHP is a breeze.
Not being a Python man, i can't really comment on the merits of Pyhton/Zope but Zope certainly looks like a very functional and complete product for lots of web publishing tasks.
FFS, i've seen some bullshit on Slashdot, but this takes the cake.
'Turn your SD-RAM into RD-RAM??'
I used to respect slashdot, most everything on it was both interesting and factual.
Lately, its just infantile ranting and, in this case, lies.
Screw you, Hemos
-ikekrull.
Dre, and many other artists' music clearly ENCOURAGES people to break the law - shooting people on the street, all that gangsta rap bullshit.
If its OK to sue napster over providing 'encouragement' to pirate music, surely its ok to prosecute Dre for murder since he 'encouraged' this kind of behaviour.
Personally, i don't think any true artist would want to prosecute somebody for listening to their music.
Take away all the recording contracts, the glitzy videos and the lawyers, and people will still be making great music.
But i guess Dr. Dre and Metallica wouldn't be among them because without the money to finance their coke habits, they'll be too strung out to even pick up an instrument.
I am pretty jaded by all this graphics-card hoopla.
It started when i bought a Matrox G200, which was advertised as having a full OpenGL implementation. Thinking 'woah, this'll mean i'll be able to run lightwave at a great pace!' i bought one.
Turns out, as with a lot of hardware these days, that the OpenGL drivers weren't ready when they shipped the product, and they only actually released them when the G400 shipped. This is about a year later.
Suffice to say i'll never buy another matrox product again.
The Nvidia GeForce is now out, supposedly bringing the wonders of hardware T&L to the world. Well, i have yet to see anything, bar NVidia demos, that actually use the geometry acceleration. Why? 'oh, the drivers that support it aren't ready yet'
And on my current TNT2 card, i have to use the 2.08 drivers (lst time i looked the drivers were up to release 3.58) because the later drivers break OpenGL 1.2 compliance.
How long does it take to get a decent set of drivers for a chipset???
And if i was a betting man, i'd put $100 on the fact that theres no way ATI are going to ship a product with all features enabled and working in the first release.
Is this article actually suggesting that the results of their scientific experiment really depend on what they think the results should be at the time?
Surely this is somewhat circular.. What you see depends on what you want to see... I think theyre dealing with a cognitive psychology problem, not a quantum physics one.
Seriously, i thought the Phantom Menace was a pretty lame flick.
You don't see stories on Slashdot about all the other films that aren't immediately released on DVD.
FFS, this isn't 'Stuff that Matters'.. not IMNSHO, anyway.
Is that IE5 on windows has tab-completion for its URLS, while any version on Netscape on *NIX hasn't.
And lets face it, bones and soft tissue don't handle hard vaccuum, intense radiation or temperature extremes very well.
NASA have also aptly demonstrated how its bloody hard to accurately pilot a vechicle when its a few hundred million miles from home.
I think we, as a race, will need to 'evolve' into a much hardier form..
When your lifetime is in the range of the halflife of silicon, as well as the possibility of unlimited digital replication, rather than something under 100 years, suddenly a few thousand light years travel doesn't seem so far.
You don't see 300-million dollar punitive damages being paid by the US government when they wrongly imprison someone.
Just another example of US arrogance and stupidity.
'nuff said
Yeah but Excel was a rip of some other spreadsheet for the Mac - 'Wingz' or something like that.
What planet are you on?
Practically every 3D game out there makes extensive, if not sole use of hand-drawn texture maps. Theres no way you can reasonably procedurally texture a low-poly model and make it look like, say, a face.
Practically every broadcast or film 3D project uses hand-drawn or photgraphically based texture maps.
I agree, these are often combined with procedural maps and volume shaders, but a chrome sphere on a checkerboard with a marble column in the background rendered in POV-Ray doesn't exactly cut it when it comes to games and other professionally produced 3D content.
Whoever moderated this as 'informative' needs to get their head checked.
Surely technology such as this could be used to BREAK THE ENCRYPTION ON COPYRIGHTED WORKS! Isn't it therefore illegal under the terms of the DMCA?
You can go out and buy a handheld laser scanner from Polhemus, that will let you scan 3D objects to a high level of precision in point-cloud form, as well as capture a colour texture map, a bump-map for extra realism, and have all your scans automatically aligned in 3D for the fastest possible processing into a mesh.
You can then either triangulate the point cloud for a dense triangular mesh, or fit splines or maybe a subdivision surface cage to it.
Appply the bump/colour maps, and voila, an excellent, truly 3D representation of the object being scanned.
This technology, of course, costs a lot more than the camera from minolta, but gives results that are probably about 100x better over a wide variety of objects.
Someone should come up with a cheap-ass laser scanner.. whats involved in making one of these?
This is what Javascript is ****FOR****
Thats the whole point of applying a robust security model to Java and Javascript.
Lets just not mention ActiveX, thats the incredibly scary one.
Any decent web programmer knows that you can't trust user input. The companies who pay the web programmers' salaries had better realise that we need to allocate time to closing these holes, proper testing of apps in a hostile online environment is *necessary*.
Server-side holes can usually be fixed quickly, as the server software is usually available in script or source form.. This is not the case, of course, with proprietary systems from many companies.
To me, primary responsibility for this problem lies firstly with the user, and secondly with the browser manufacturers.
If you *do not want the possibility of remote code executing on your computer*, then turn support for those features off in your browser.
Browser manufacturers should ship their products with these options off by default, requiring users to turn them on if they *want* them.
Hopefully Mozilla will lead the pack in this respect.
All engines that execute remote code should require options to be *explicitly enabled by the user* in order to perform potentially security-threatening functions.
This should be called an 'Internet Explorer Advisory' more than anything else.
IE is the only browser that allows remote code to format your hard drive through ActiveX.
'Signed ActiveX Controls' are a joke... i bet any 16 year old norwegian hacker could break the security on this stuff.
will software need to be recompiled to run on the HURD, or is it binary compatible with Linux?
I think its a bit premature to say the HURD is 'theoretically better than Linux' i mean, shit, you could say that Windows NT is 'theoretically better than Linux', but i know which OS i'd rather run.
GTK/QT enable the programmer to create apps that don't look like theyre from the 1970s. While, admittedly, this has little do do with functionality, it is somewhat important that your app looks as attractive on *NIX as it does on MacOS or Windows. GTK
If you were forced, at gunpoint, to make love to Natalie Portman, what position would you choose?
I'd love a true 3D interface, only because i do a lot of 3D modelling and animation work..
I would gladly work in a 3D computer environment, using avatars and interacting with others in a VR environment.
However, this is impractical on a monitor. If you want to implement a 3D interface, you need to have:
a) a true 3D input device - there are several, including 'haptics' arms which track the point of a stylus in 3D and provide motion-feedback, '3D' mouse-type controllers which respond to pushing, pulling and twisting in 6-DOF, and various others.
b) a true 3D output device - lightweight 3D glasses would be the most immediately practical, available in some level of functionality in products like Sony's Glasstron. This would need some type of motion tracking built in so you could turn your head etc.
Only now do we have the hardware that really makes it possible anyway... an NVidia GeForce with its geometry acceleration enabled will approach the level of performance that will enable primitive real-time 3D environments at reasonable cost.
None of our current 'Office' applications will benefit much from a 3D interface, the entire OS will have to mutate into something with a totally different 'metaphor'...
Programming paradigms like JavaBeans which let you string objects together with 'connectors' would be a candidate for 3D representation, but even that is pretty efficiently represented in 2D.
Lets face it, we work with information that is deliberately 'abstracted' from the natural '3D' world to such a degree that putting these abstract representations back into 3D is pointless.
I mean, if you are using 'ifconfig eth0 mtu=1440' rather than watching your 'packet flows' through the pipes that connect your PC to your network, and setting the 'valves' accordingly to minimise the turbulence in your plumbing system, then a 3D interface won't be much good.
I've toyed with the idea of writing a simple GUI system using Macromedia's Flash standard.
This is openly available, and would allow some reasonably sophisticated behaviours, including transparency, antialiasing etc.
The Flash plugin isn't huge, yet delivers some nice multimedia functionality.. vector rendering, sound and animation facilities, along with freeform behaviours for widgets etc.
It does lack a lot of back-end and interactive functionality especially where native GUI widgets would normally be used, but i imagine a Flash renderer running on top of something like GNOME would provide a pretty amazing GUI.
Flash is also designed to be streamed over internet connections, and can be viewed inside web browsers on pretty much any platform.
Any thoughts?