I've only had time to skim a lot of these comments, so forgive any redundancy, but one of the first questions to ask is: Will you really spend time tagging or organizing things as you add them? Many people think they will, but then don't follow through. Perhaps make sure you have full-text indexing and search - it is costly to implement at times, but might automate some of the work of getting the stuff ready to search.
HTML and CSS are used as a presentation markup language. Adding "meaning" to those is approaching it backward. First, mark up the document / data, using XML or RDF (for this argument the preference doesn't necessarily matter). Then, use XSLT to provide a transform into the presentation language of your choice.
I guess we could argue that XHTML _is_ XML at its core, though, so adding attributes to add "meaning" might be doing what I said, anyway.
As far as 'why are the big companies agreeing to this, why isn't everyone consulted?' argument - hey, at least we're making progress. If one large group of pages is marked up in a standard way, then that's a lot of "meaning" that can suddenly be extracted and used in our apps / widgets / mashups / things-to-be-named-later-when-someone-thinks-them-up. In that sense, I'm all for it; let's get started!
There's also a mechanical precedent for this: think back to when the auto industry in the US decided to standardize the "markup" of wheels with a 5-bolt lug nut pattern, spaced the same way - suddenly wheels were interchangeable, and making special chromed add-ons for people was economically more feasible too. They didn't consult a body of international automobile enthusiasts - Ford, GM, and Chrysler pretty much drove that one.
I really don't have time to read all of these comments on the UI, but I've GOT to ask this question:
Why hasn't someone implemented a UI that spits out XML that references a stylesheet?
Seems to me, with an XML-based UI and a stylesheet, you could make the UI do whatever you want, but the underlying code would consume/produce the same XML all the time, abstracting user preferences from the rest of it.
Look, I'm just a simple caveman, unfamiliar with your ways (I am a mainframe tech, my UI is a 7-color 3270 emulator), but it sure seems that a stylesheet type solution (whether based on XML or not) would help.
"it took a Unix server on the other side to do the heavy lifting" - Oh, you mean this was an implementation of 'cloud computing'?
As a mainframe guy, 'cloud computing' takes me back to my roots, sort of. I will give credit to the idea of the 'terminal' at the user end doing the GUI part - the UI on 3270s wasn't as interactive as you'd like - but both mainframes and X-Windows could be considered 'cloud computing'.
You discuss things in terms of country boundaries, but it's the extremely local things that make timezones zig-zag all over the place. When Alice's Cake Shop in Anytown is directly across the street from Bob's Hardware, they and everyone else in their town, want them to be on the same time. So you end up with the local political bodies saying 'the zone must go around us'.
The other ideal people often ask about is 'one time zone every 15 degrees of longitude' - in other words, 24 equally spaced timezones. However at the equator, the difference in clock time from apparent or 'sun' tim varies quite a lot from the eastern to western boundaries, which also presents a problem.
I tend to lean toward others and say we should take a big step, all of us operate on UTC and just adjust our perceptions so that lunch is at 12:00 UTC in Greenwich and 00:00 UTC on Taveuni Island
In the video / "documentary" "Computer Dreams", an early 80s exploration of CGI narrated by Amanda Pays (recently of "Max Headroom") there's a small segment where an obviously CGI guy pounds on a podium and says something like "When I'm president of the guild, synthetic parts will go to synthetic actors!"
Seems like they will have to start thinking about it for real.
While the state of calendaring has gotten better, partly due to these guys, there's still plenty of distance to go. You can't do calendaring without thinking about it, like you can with e-mail. You can't write an app that _easily_ provides a button for "schedule a haircut with my favorite hair-cutter". If you're talking about mobilizing a community for changing the world, let's solve the calendar stuff.
Do they have any way to measure the accuracy of the prediction algorithm?
The article says of a 'blind study'that "The top 2 percent of manholes ranked as vulnerable by the algorithm included 11 percent of the manholes that had recently had a fire or explosion" but to me that seems like statistical blather: do they mean that if they ranked 10,000 manholes and there had been 100 incidents recently then the top 200 manholes they ranked included 11 manholes that had incidents?
And if the answer to that is 'Yes' then how does that compare to a random guess? In my view (I am not a professional statistician), you could flip a coin about whether the manhole will have a problem or not, and probably come up with 11 correct answers out of the first 200 flips.
IBM's virtual storage OSes (OS/VS1 through the current z/OS all share a lot of common componentry) in conjunction with hardware architecture have similar ideas:
Each system service runs in its own address space. You have to be an authorized system service to communicate between address spaces, if you try otherwise your program fails. If you try to store outside of your virtual address range, your program fails. To become an authorized program requires permission in one way or another from system administrators, you can create one marked "authorized" but if it isn't loaded into storage from an authorized file (controlled by admins), your program will not execute in an authorized state.
In addition, each hardware page has a storage protect key. Application programs run in key 8, important parts of other system services run in different keys. "The System" runs in key 0. To change keys requires that you be an authorized program. The astute have already figured where this is going: try to use storage that's not in your key - your program fails.
The architecture not only protects the system from applications that behave poorly, but the storage key mechanism can protect authorized parts of the system from clobbering other parts of the system.
This setup has been providing increasing high, and increasing, levels of availability since the advent of System/360 in the 1960s.
10*1024*1024*10/300/3600=97.09 hours because there are start/stop bits with each character transmitted.
Calculation needs to be further adjusted to account for any overhead of the protocol (not familiar with zmodem myself).
Here's a link to a project like this device from 2005. The project was never built (and no, I'm not claiming these guys stole it), just showing people have been thinking about this a while. Differences: the referenced project was credit-card sized, to be a pocketable notepad; and the project used old-school 'memory bank' technology to be able to have multiple pages.
Why do people always ask if the OS is ready for audio/video/futuristichyper3dmedia work? Of course the OS is: its job is to provide interfaces for hardware drivers and schedule processes to run, some of which might just be audio/video/you-get-it application programs.
Ever since Windows, the original Mac OS, and a few others started bundling all of these apps into the OS distribution, people have confused operating systems with the toys they're shipped with.
Of course, I'm old and cranky and mainframe based where we automatically delineate apps from OS functions - but I'd still like to see discourse about such things be a little more precise.
Leaving aside the fact that a "data center" could consist of two servers under Mabel's desk, this is not a "data center" disaster, nor is it a cloud catastrophe.
This a contract and contract management failure: the contract with the outsource was probably written without specifying that they must do the backups, AND no one established any sort of audit (formal or informal) test to ensure that there _were_ backups being taken and that the outsourcer was performing according to the contract.
Too often, the MBA doing the contract thinks "there, that's handled" once they've gotten all the signatures on the dotted line. "There, backups are handled now" he thinks, because many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed.
There may not be a lot of competitors on the hardware front, but anyone who wants to engineer an IBM-compatible mainframe can consult the Principles of Operation manual and build one. This is about the allowing the OS to run on that compatible hardware - I don't know, legally, nor under the 1957 Consent Decree, whether IBM is compelled to do that or not. They did do it for Amdahl and some others, and it didn't seem to hurt them a lot - they seemed to always be 6 months ahead with hardware innovations (on most things, I won't get into details here).
Maybe what IBM should do is license the OS to hardware OEMs again - but _only_ what passes for the "kernel": the basic z/OS, I/O subsystem, supervisor calls (SVCs), a few other bits which were public domain in MVS 3.8 and so probably can't be restricted.
Then they can still charge money for the pieces that are depended upon by customers: Workload Manager, ISPF editors, database management (DB2 and IMS), CICS, JES2 (spooling and job scheduling), WebSphere, Unix Systems Services, etc.
They'd still give away, I think, their z/OS ports of Apache and other open-source tools.
So - where is the setting for how Windows determines that something is inactive, and swaps it?
There are probably a few settings somewhere - should be one to determine when memory should be constrained; one or more to determine what's inactive; etcetera. Sounds like they're trying to be proactive in a way, and free physical RAM for use by things which are actually active; but not checking to see if there's actually a memory constraint which would require it.
Note - I'm reasoning from what I know about z/OS virtual memory paging which has a system-wide unreferenced interval count (UIC) which is basically a measurement of how "busy" physical memory is, and system-wide measurments of the number of free page frames, among other things. I'm not sure what the Windows equivalents are, but I do know our mainframe runs hundreds or thousands of concurrent application tasks using about 4GB of physical memory and we don't page in/out very much.
Maybe we need to create a Bugzilla site to track the bugs in various "releases" of the human hardware/firmware/software (hey, no one is sure ) like the guy you were "quoting".
Of course, I don't think the manufacturers/developers are producing any patches so it might be futile.
Try virtualizing your *nix boxen on z/VM, on a z/10 mainframe - especially if your business/organization already has a mainframe. z/Linux is just Linux, after all... Apache and Mono are already ported, among many many other things; what's not ported can be ported in the usual way.
The advantage is that you can run virtual servers on the same hardware as your mainframe "legacy" apps, without drastically increasing power consumption.
Why microSD and not regular SD? I guess there are adapters (microSD card slides into SD card adapter)... but regular SD would be good for some computers, some PDAs/phones, and digital photo frames
Slashdot Mirror
I've only had time to skim a lot of these comments, so forgive any redundancy, but one of the first questions to ask is: Will you really spend time tagging or organizing things as you add them? Many people think they will, but then don't follow through. Perhaps make sure you have full-text indexing and search - it is costly to implement at times, but might automate some of the work of getting the stuff ready to search.
HTML and CSS are used as a presentation markup language. Adding "meaning" to those is approaching it backward. First, mark up the document / data, using XML or RDF (for this argument the preference doesn't necessarily matter). Then, use XSLT to provide a transform into the presentation language of your choice. I guess we could argue that XHTML _is_ XML at its core, though, so adding attributes to add "meaning" might be doing what I said, anyway. As far as 'why are the big companies agreeing to this, why isn't everyone consulted?' argument - hey, at least we're making progress. If one large group of pages is marked up in a standard way, then that's a lot of "meaning" that can suddenly be extracted and used in our apps / widgets / mashups / things-to-be-named-later-when-someone-thinks-them-up. In that sense, I'm all for it; let's get started! There's also a mechanical precedent for this: think back to when the auto industry in the US decided to standardize the "markup" of wheels with a 5-bolt lug nut pattern, spaced the same way - suddenly wheels were interchangeable, and making special chromed add-ons for people was economically more feasible too. They didn't consult a body of international automobile enthusiasts - Ford, GM, and Chrysler pretty much drove that one.
I am announcing that I would prefer to use Puddle(TM), which will keep my data right here in my yard, thank you very much,
I really don't have time to read all of these comments on the UI, but I've GOT to ask this question: Why hasn't someone implemented a UI that spits out XML that references a stylesheet? Seems to me, with an XML-based UI and a stylesheet, you could make the UI do whatever you want, but the underlying code would consume/produce the same XML all the time, abstracting user preferences from the rest of it. Look, I'm just a simple caveman, unfamiliar with your ways (I am a mainframe tech, my UI is a 7-color 3270 emulator), but it sure seems that a stylesheet type solution (whether based on XML or not) would help.
"it took a Unix server on the other side to do the heavy lifting" - Oh, you mean this was an implementation of 'cloud computing'? As a mainframe guy, 'cloud computing' takes me back to my roots, sort of. I will give credit to the idea of the 'terminal' at the user end doing the GUI part - the UI on 3270s wasn't as interactive as you'd like - but both mainframes and X-Windows could be considered 'cloud computing'.
You discuss things in terms of country boundaries, but it's the extremely local things that make timezones zig-zag all over the place. When Alice's Cake Shop in Anytown is directly across the street from Bob's Hardware, they and everyone else in their town, want them to be on the same time. So you end up with the local political bodies saying 'the zone must go around us'. The other ideal people often ask about is 'one time zone every 15 degrees of longitude' - in other words, 24 equally spaced timezones. However at the equator, the difference in clock time from apparent or 'sun' tim varies quite a lot from the eastern to western boundaries, which also presents a problem. I tend to lean toward others and say we should take a big step, all of us operate on UTC and just adjust our perceptions so that lunch is at 12:00 UTC in Greenwich and 00:00 UTC on Taveuni Island
"I'm sorry, Dave, I just can't agree with the idea that AI is getting too commonplace"
In the video / "documentary" "Computer Dreams", an early 80s exploration of CGI narrated by Amanda Pays (recently of "Max Headroom") there's a small segment where an obviously CGI guy pounds on a podium and says something like "When I'm president of the guild, synthetic parts will go to synthetic actors!" Seems like they will have to start thinking about it for real.
While the state of calendaring has gotten better, partly due to these guys, there's still plenty of distance to go. You can't do calendaring without thinking about it, like you can with e-mail. You can't write an app that _easily_ provides a button for "schedule a haircut with my favorite hair-cutter". If you're talking about mobilizing a community for changing the world, let's solve the calendar stuff.
Do they have any way to measure the accuracy of the prediction algorithm? The article says of a 'blind study'that "The top 2 percent of manholes ranked as vulnerable by the algorithm included 11 percent of the manholes that had recently had a fire or explosion" but to me that seems like statistical blather: do they mean that if they ranked 10,000 manholes and there had been 100 incidents recently then the top 200 manholes they ranked included 11 manholes that had incidents? And if the answer to that is 'Yes' then how does that compare to a random guess? In my view (I am not a professional statistician), you could flip a coin about whether the manhole will have a problem or not, and probably come up with 11 correct answers out of the first 200 flips.
IBM's virtual storage OSes (OS/VS1 through the current z/OS all share a lot of common componentry) in conjunction with hardware architecture have similar ideas: Each system service runs in its own address space. You have to be an authorized system service to communicate between address spaces, if you try otherwise your program fails. If you try to store outside of your virtual address range, your program fails. To become an authorized program requires permission in one way or another from system administrators, you can create one marked "authorized" but if it isn't loaded into storage from an authorized file (controlled by admins), your program will not execute in an authorized state. In addition, each hardware page has a storage protect key. Application programs run in key 8, important parts of other system services run in different keys. "The System" runs in key 0. To change keys requires that you be an authorized program. The astute have already figured where this is going: try to use storage that's not in your key - your program fails. The architecture not only protects the system from applications that behave poorly, but the storage key mechanism can protect authorized parts of the system from clobbering other parts of the system. This setup has been providing increasing high, and increasing, levels of availability since the advent of System/360 in the 1960s.
10*1024*1024*10/300/3600=97.09 hours because there are start/stop bits with each character transmitted. Calculation needs to be further adjusted to account for any overhead of the protocol (not familiar with zmodem myself).
We will see 'blipverts' before long in this Network 23-like world.
Here's a link to a project like this device from 2005. The project was never built (and no, I'm not claiming these guys stole it), just showing people have been thinking about this a while. Differences: the referenced project was credit-card sized, to be a pocketable notepad; and the project used old-school 'memory bank' technology to be able to have multiple pages.
Why do people always ask if the OS is ready for audio/video/futuristichyper3dmedia work? Of course the OS is: its job is to provide interfaces for hardware drivers and schedule processes to run, some of which might just be audio/video/you-get-it application programs. Ever since Windows, the original Mac OS, and a few others started bundling all of these apps into the OS distribution, people have confused operating systems with the toys they're shipped with. Of course, I'm old and cranky and mainframe based where we automatically delineate apps from OS functions - but I'd still like to see discourse about such things be a little more precise.
Leaving aside the fact that a "data center" could consist of two servers under Mabel's desk, this is not a "data center" disaster, nor is it a cloud catastrophe.
This a contract and contract management failure: the contract with the outsource was probably written without specifying that they must do the backups, AND no one established any sort of audit (formal or informal) test to ensure that there _were_ backups being taken and that the outsourcer was performing according to the contract.
Too often, the MBA doing the contract thinks "there, that's handled" once they've gotten all the signatures on the dotted line. "There, backups are handled now" he thinks, because many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed.
There may not be a lot of competitors on the hardware front, but anyone who wants to engineer an IBM-compatible mainframe can consult the Principles of Operation manual and build one. This is about the allowing the OS to run on that compatible hardware - I don't know, legally, nor under the 1957 Consent Decree, whether IBM is compelled to do that or not. They did do it for Amdahl and some others, and it didn't seem to hurt them a lot - they seemed to always be 6 months ahead with hardware innovations (on most things, I won't get into details here). Maybe what IBM should do is license the OS to hardware OEMs again - but _only_ what passes for the "kernel": the basic z/OS, I/O subsystem, supervisor calls (SVCs), a few other bits which were public domain in MVS 3.8 and so probably can't be restricted. Then they can still charge money for the pieces that are depended upon by customers: Workload Manager, ISPF editors, database management (DB2 and IMS), CICS, JES2 (spooling and job scheduling), WebSphere, Unix Systems Services, etc. They'd still give away, I think, their z/OS ports of Apache and other open-source tools.
I think so, Brain, but the implementation is left as an exercise for the student.
So - where is the setting for how Windows determines that something is inactive, and swaps it? There are probably a few settings somewhere - should be one to determine when memory should be constrained; one or more to determine what's inactive; etcetera. Sounds like they're trying to be proactive in a way, and free physical RAM for use by things which are actually active; but not checking to see if there's actually a memory constraint which would require it. Note - I'm reasoning from what I know about z/OS virtual memory paging which has a system-wide unreferenced interval count (UIC) which is basically a measurement of how "busy" physical memory is, and system-wide measurments of the number of free page frames, among other things. I'm not sure what the Windows equivalents are, but I do know our mainframe runs hundreds or thousands of concurrent application tasks using about 4GB of physical memory and we don't page in/out very much.
Maybe we need to create a Bugzilla site to track the bugs in various "releases" of the human hardware/firmware/software (hey, no one is sure ) like the guy you were "quoting". Of course, I don't think the manufacturers/developers are producing any patches so it might be futile.
If I pull the book via some cURL-like software to my flash drive, is that "reading" it online?
Try virtualizing your *nix boxen on z/VM, on a z/10 mainframe - especially if your business/organization already has a mainframe. z/Linux is just Linux, after all... Apache and Mono are already ported, among many many other things; what's not ported can be ported in the usual way. The advantage is that you can run virtual servers on the same hardware as your mainframe "legacy" apps, without drastically increasing power consumption.
Why microSD and not regular SD? I guess there are adapters (microSD card slides into SD card adapter)... but regular SD would be good for some computers, some PDAs/phones, and digital photo frames
Read the first chapter or two of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for some low-tech ideas on defeating gait analysis.
Reminds me of the story "Dogfight" in William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" collection - story written by Gibson and Michael Swanwick