True... but it's a PITA to try to write or read something in a language with strictly constrained alternatives -- if you don't know all the constraints.
Guess what I'm suggesting is that it's a "skill level" issue. Show hello.c to many third-graders and they'll have a hard time reading that.
... holy wars, again.
Kill for your favorite editor Take back the holy land of (insert fav language)
Burn at stake (eq "flame") advocates of (insert OS)
Granting that TIMTOWTDI is some part of the root for unreadable code -- people, after all, do use what they know, and not always neatly -- but programmers (ok, scripters if you wish to be purist) write obfuscated code in many languages... not because of the language, but because of their weaknesses (or strengths).
Columns are as published; not re-written -- RTA thru.
or is understanding why that is both a "feature" and a "flaw" hard? If so, consider the span of years... and changes in perl and its modules, over those years
Eliminating wasted words (in the true statment); revising verbs for agreement with subjects; and suggesting an alternative to the previously false (second) statement:
The bottom line is having your target audience understand you -- style be dammned.
Correct spelling and grammar are useful because they help your audience to understand.
May be worth all these words if/when the claim is supported by detail in a peer-reviewed journal, as opposed to a News Corp (read: "tabloid publication, regardless of the actual paper size) and/or Agence France Press, which, like AP, UPI, and others, frequently distributes stories printed by others without factchecking.
uhm... the NYT (goat sacrifice required and all) is neither tabloid in the sense of page size nor in the common usage meanings such as "yellow rag," "popularly oriented," or "comparatively easy to read while strap-hanging."
FWIW... from one who believes we probably DO need more nuclear-fueled power-generating plants... at least until we find something better.
In TFA, "Amec says that its latest process will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years - longer than the radioactivity will last."
The courtroom dictum, "false in one thing; false in all," may not be entirely applicable here, but you may wish to take a grain of salt with Amec's claim that its vitirification process can outlast the decay processes.
The half-life for a radioisotope is the time for half the radioactive nuclei in a sample to decay. In other words, after two half-lives, there will be one quarter the original sample left (and emitting alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation) and after three half-lives one eight the original sample will remain.
Half-lives range from tiny fractions of a second to many, many times the age of the universe.
Plutonium239, for example, has a half-life of 24,300 years; Uranium238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years.
The U238 decay chain inclues other radioactive materials (U234, thorium, radium, radon, bismuth, among others). The end product of the decay chain is lead206 which is stable; ie, not radioactive. The preceding elements in the chain each have their own half-lives, ranging from 247,000 years to 1e-5 seconds.
For privacy reasons, we are required to sample brief snippets of ambient sounds instead of recording an entire day continuously ('Big Brother is listening to you...').
compare, for example, to the latest (federal) medical privacy rules, www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
"According to Software Improvement, simply releasing election-machine code under a liberal license such as the GPL is undesirable (because)... unfettered access could lead to a compromise of the voting system, if a determined cracker could find and exploit flaws in the code."
Let's see: the audited access assures that no cracker can ever see the code, right?
And besides -- if we can't see the three-card-monte-man's hands, he can't cheat us?
The only argument that holds water is the IP/profit explanation I skipped in the quote above.
... if w3c's amaya browser w3org/Amaya is compliant?...despite the fact that's touted as supporting XHTML and html 4.01!
<rant>
Amaya v 8.5.0.0 (apparently, the current stable version) takes an HTML 4.01 transitional page, using CSS1 and that small subset of CSS2 that happens to work across-the-board with Moz, IE and Konqueror, and trashes the layout, even tho the html and css have blessed by the w3c html [http://validator.w3.org/] and css validators [http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/] -- as they were also by CSE's html validator and by Top Style's css tool).
Recognize the above is tantamount to a sideways plug (but note: no links as there would be if this were a disguised promotion) but given the stats I get off my servers, I'm going to keep on worrying about the vast preponderance of visitors who use IE, NS and Moz and who -- just BTW -- are predominantly using dialup, where compactness really counts!
</rant>
And -- re some other comments on this story -- I find XHTML to require a significant size increase to achieve the same effect as can be done compactly with 4.01 + CSS... and without, as another poster noted, spending nearly as many hours debugging as I (for one) need to clean up XHTML. Feel free to argue that that's an experience/knowledge issue, but what are we gonna' do for those whose real contribution to the net is content -- ideas, pictures, arguments -- rather than scrupulous code.
and has everyone noticed that obtaining this "free" addin requires a soul-sucking dot net passport?
oooof!
Re:crap for layout - NOT! (well, not entirely)
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, this is a bit lengthy...
1. You're absolutely right about the 4.01 spec... but the only relevant "non-visual media" output devices I can think of are braile and text-to-speech browsers. And those can deal with tables that are properly tagged...with headers and scope.
It seems to me (and perhaps this is as dubious as my earlier use of "legal" that given the imperfect support of css in the wide world of browser implementations, the chief arguement for avoiding tables is to achieve the ends of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and its counterparts (where they exist) around the world. But as 2 and 3 below make clear (and despite the fact that the example is a a dataset traditionally presented in tabular manner), screen-readers -- and THUS, users can handle tables quite well. (open "[" sted < below)
Screen readers read text linearly; that is, they read across the line from left to right. That causes a problem when attempting to render tables meaningfully for assistive technologies. To solve this problem for simple tables, the guidelines call for labeling of table headers.
Use the summary attribute to indicate the meaning of the table and the headers attribute to associate data cells with their proper row or column. In the following example, notice the use of id attribute in the table headers. Each cell in the body of the table then has a headers attribute which relates it to a specific column.
[TABLE border="1" summary="This table charts the number of web pages analyzed by each agency head, what kind of media the pages contain, and whether or not the page is part of the Executive Branch.">
[CAPTION>Web pages Analyzed by Agency Heads
[TR>
[TH id="header1">Agency Head[/TH>
[TH id="header2">Number of pages[/TH>
[TH id="header3" abbr="Type">Media[/TH>
[TH id="header4">Executive Branch?[/TH>
[TR>
[TD headers="header1">A. Jackson[/TD>
[TD headers="header2">20[/TD>
[TD headers="header3">text, images[/TD>
[TD headers="header4">No[/TD>
[TR>
[TD headers="header1">B. Franklin[/TD>
[TD headers="header2">10[/TD>
[TD headers="header3">text, images, video[/TD>
[TD headers="header4">Yes[/TD>
[/TABLE>
A speech synthesizer might render this table as follows:
"Caption: Web pages Analyzed by Agency Heads
Summary: This table charts the number of Web pages analyzed by each agency head, what kind of media the pages contain, and whether or not the page is part of the Executive Branch.
Name: A. Jackson, number of pages: 20, Type: text, images, Executive Branch: No
Name: B. Franklin, number of pages: 10, Type: text, images, video, Executive Branch: Yes"
Re:crap for layout - NOT! (well, not entirely)
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
but first... a word in favor of tables: they're NOT deprecated for tabular data, and DESPITE the "zealots'" insistence that they are inherently EVIL for layout, they ARE still "legal" there.
... that said, the time it took to absorb (for example) position: relative; top: -2.5em; was really worth while for (dayjob=webmaster) me. As one tutorial (sorry, can't recall which) pointed out, with css one can position elements on a page with single-pixel precision... and make that work across most browsers (ie>5.5, moz>1.3, recent NS, Konqueror, Opera).
There are still issues: fonts are (render?) slightly larger in Moz 1.4 than in ie5.5 or 6. And fonts that look fine in Moz or ie>5 at 1024x768 on a 'doze box (read: MANY of our customers) look dreadful at a different rez on some other OS's. Browser makers still don't use identical DOMs, which makes margin:auto; or padding-left: nn; unreliable.
So, for now at least, you still do have to run a pragmatic test for x-resolution, x-browser, x-OS anomalies. But -- IM(not so)HO, css doesn't deserve the kind of condemnation the parent and others offer. With a little study, one can work around most browser glitches...
Seven of the uncappers were indicted in September of 2002. One case was dismissed. Two offenders struck deals and went through a diversion program (Wirtz being one), and were not prosecuted. Two others were charged with reduced misdemeanor charges and placed on probation, while one other was convicted of a felony and placed on "community control".
...
Eventually he (Wirtz) wound up agreeing to pay $3200 in Restitution, $300 for a "diversion program" class, and forty hours of community service. Another offender wound up settling to the tune of $30,000, and others still walked away without paying a dime. Broadband reports.com
Many comments speak up for the "kids" or "students" whom the writers seem to presume were the targets.
Uh,... not necessarily.
See, for example, another recent schoolhouse raid and aftermath, in this case involving a university:
Two
employees(emphasis supplied) of the State University of New York at Albany have pleaded guilty to copyright-infringement charges after federal agents accused the pair of running servers that collected pirated sound and movie files and software. (10/9/2003)
NewsBits for October 3, 2003...
Four Plead Guilty in Online Piracy Ring
Four men have pleaded guilty for their roles in an online piracy ring that illegally distributed tens of thousands of copyrighted items through the Internet. Federal prosecutors said Thursday that the guilty pleas were part of a national probe into pirated video games, movies, music files and computer software. Some of the file servers were located at the State University of New York at Albany.
(omitted: AP, CNN, etc citations and links)
The article DOES say, afterall, that the "computer command center" was the target.
From the C&D letter: "This material (the "Infringing Material ") blatantly copies the sequential display of a series of items belonging to one or more individuals, showing, the "price" of each item, and, at the end, infringes, with impunity (emph supplied), the MASTERCARD Mark and the Priceless Marks."
from one of 3 nearly identical cites at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=impunity
impunity: Exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.
Granting -- since IANAL and have NO desire to be one (henceforward: IANALAHNDTBO) -- legalese may give some counterintuitive meaning to impunity, one might still wonder if the pinheads really did graduate only from "Billy-Bob's Loyeering Skool" (after flunking hs english?)
Please distinguish among "interesing," "insightful" and "informative." The latter two require substantiation!
I'm the (volunteer, written contract, $1 per year cuz the town's lawyer insisted on that) webmaster for my town. My recall may be faulty, but when I tried to get a.gov and/or a.ny.us address (about 3 years ago;.com is taken by a summer camp for kids) for the town (small, and not many geeks in the town office) one or both registrars declined, asserting that those are allowed ONLY if there is a zipcode assigned to that name. Now, in my case, there's an "East Schodack" and a "Schodack Landing" but NO postoffice or zipcode that's an (unmodified) "Schodack."
And as to whether the subject of the story is an evildoer or not -- well, one might want to recall the some media accounts of disputes contain errors.
BUT, this all certainly makes me happy that the hosting and bandwidth bills go straight to the Comptroller. [grin]
Slashdot Mirror
The quote (blockquoted) in the OP dates from last June... when DHS kicked this effort into gear.
True... but it's a PITA to try to write or read something in a language with strictly constrained alternatives -- if you don't know all the constraints.
Guess what I'm suggesting is that it's a "skill level" issue. Show hello.c to many third-graders and they'll have a hard time reading that.
... holy wars, again.
Kill for your favorite editor
Take back the holy land of (insert fav language)
Burn at stake (eq "flame") advocates of (insert OS)
Granting that TIMTOWTDI is some part of the root for unreadable code -- people, after all, do use what they know, and not always neatly -- but programmers (ok, scripters if you wish to be purist) write obfuscated code in many languages... not because of the language, but because of their weaknesses (or strengths).
or is understanding why that is both a "feature" and a "flaw" hard? If so, consider the span of years... and changes in perl and its modules, over those years
The bottom line is having your target audience understand you -- style be dammned.
Correct spelling and grammar are useful because they help your audience to understand.
...and, oh, gosh; it's shorter too!
believe parent may be using "Imperial" pints -- England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, et al -- rather than the somewhat smaller pints we colonials use.
May be worth all these words if/when the claim is supported by detail in a peer-reviewed journal, as opposed to a News Corp (read: "tabloid publication, regardless of the actual paper size) and/or Agence France Press, which, like AP, UPI, and others, frequently distributes stories printed by others without factchecking.
refutes != rebutts.
If you don't know the difference, do what the story did: use "denies."
uhm... the NYT (goat sacrifice required and all) is neither tabloid in the sense of page size nor in the common usage meanings such as "yellow rag," "popularly oriented," or "comparatively easy to read while strap-hanging."
FWIW... from one who believes we probably DO need more nuclear-fueled power-generating plants... at least until we find something better.
In TFA, "Amec says that its latest process will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years - longer than the radioactivity will last."
The courtroom dictum, "false in one thing; false in all," may not be entirely applicable here, but you may wish to take a grain of salt with Amec's claim that its vitirification process can outlast the decay processes.
The half-life for a radioisotope is the time for half the radioactive nuclei in a sample to decay. In other words, after two half-lives, there will be one quarter the original sample left (and emitting alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation) and after three half-lives one eight the original sample will remain.
Half-lives range from tiny fractions of a second to many, many times the age of the universe.
Plutonium239, for example, has a half-life of 24,300 years; Uranium238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years.
The U238 decay chain inclues other radioactive materials (U234, thorium, radium, radon, bismuth, among others). The end product of the decay chain is lead206 which is stable; ie, not radioactive. The preceding elements in the chain each have their own half-lives, ranging from 247,000 years to 1e-5 seconds.
the OP said as much
compare, for example, to the latest (federal) medical privacy rules, www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
"According to Software Improvement, simply releasing election-machine code under a liberal license such as the GPL is undesirable (because) ... unfettered access could lead to a compromise of the voting system, if a determined cracker could find and exploit flaws in the code."
Let's see: the audited access assures that no cracker can ever see the code, right?
And besides -- if we can't see the three-card-monte-man's hands, he can't cheat us?
The only argument that holds water is the IP/profit explanation I skipped in the quote above.
yech!<rant> Amaya v 8.5.0.0 (apparently, the current stable version) takes an HTML 4.01 transitional page, using CSS1 and that small subset of CSS2 that happens to work across-the-board with Moz, IE and Konqueror, and trashes the layout, even tho the html and css have blessed by the w3c html [http://validator.w3.org/] and css validators [http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/] -- as they were also by CSE's html validator and by Top Style's css tool).
Recognize the above is tantamount to a sideways plug (but note: no links as there would be if this were a disguised promotion) but given the stats I get off my servers, I'm going to keep on worrying about the vast preponderance of visitors who use IE, NS and Moz and who -- just BTW -- are predominantly using dialup, where compactness really counts!
</rant>
And -- re some other comments on this story -- I find XHTML to require a significant size increase to achieve the same effect as can be done compactly with 4.01 + CSS... and without, as another poster noted, spending nearly as many hours debugging as I (for one) need to clean up XHTML. Feel free to argue that that's an experience/knowledge issue, but what are we gonna' do for those whose real contribution to the net is content -- ideas, pictures, arguments -- rather than scrupulous code.
and has everyone noticed that obtaining this "free" addin requires a soul-sucking dot net passport? oooof!
1. You're absolutely right about the 4.01 spec... but the only relevant "non-visual media" output devices I can think of are braile and text-to-speech browsers. And those can deal with tables that are properly tagged...with headers and scope.
It seems to me (and perhaps this is as dubious as my earlier use of "legal" that given the imperfect support of css in the wide world of browser implementations, the chief arguement for avoiding tables is to achieve the ends of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and its counterparts (where they exist) around the world. But as 2 and 3 below make clear (and despite the fact that the example is a a dataset traditionally presented in tabular manner), screen-readers -- and THUS, users can handle tables quite well. (open "[" sted < below)2. From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/synd/20 01/11/30/accessibility.html?page=2
Screen readers read text linearly; that is, they read across the line from left to right. That causes a problem when attempting to render tables meaningfully for assistive technologies. To solve this problem for simple tables, the guidelines call for labeling of table headers.
Use the summary attribute to indicate the meaning of the table and the headers attribute to associate data cells with their proper row or column. In the following example, notice the use of id attribute in the table headers. Each cell in the body of the table then has a headers attribute which relates it to a specific column.
[TABLE border="1" summary="This table charts the number of web pages analyzed by each agency head, what kind of media the pages contain, and whether or not the page is part of the Executive Branch.">[CAPTION>Web pages Analyzed by Agency Heads
[TR>
[TH id="header1">Agency Head[/TH>
[TH id="header2">Number of pages[/TH>
[TH id="header3" abbr="Type">Media[/TH>
[TH id="header4">Executive Branch?[/TH>
[TR>
[TD headers="header1">A. Jackson[/TD> [TD headers="header2">20[/TD>
[TD headers="header3">text, images[/TD>
[TD headers="header4">No[/TD>
[TR>
[TD headers="header1">B. Franklin[/TD>
[TD headers="header2">10[/TD>
[TD headers="header3">text, images, video[/TD>
[TD headers="header4">Yes[/TD>
[/TABLE>
A speech synthesizer might render this table as follows:
"Caption: Web pages Analyzed by Agency Heads
Summary: This table charts the number of Web pages analyzed by each agency head, what kind of media the pages contain, and whether or not the page is part of the Executive Branch.
Name: A. Jackson, number of pages: 20, Type: text, images, Executive Branch: No
Name: B. Franklin, number of pages: 10, Type: text, images, video, Executive Branch: Yes"
3. See also: http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.h tm#(g), produced by The Access Board, "a federal agency committed to accessible design."
... that said, the time it took to absorb (for example) position: relative; top: -2.5em; was really worth while for (dayjob=webmaster) me. As one tutorial (sorry, can't recall which) pointed out, with css one can position elements on a page with single-pixel precision... and make that work across most browsers (ie>5.5, moz>1.3, recent NS, Konqueror, Opera).
There are still issues: fonts are (render?) slightly larger in Moz 1.4 than in ie5.5 or 6. And fonts that look fine in Moz or ie>5 at 1024x768 on a 'doze box (read: MANY of our customers) look dreadful at a different rez on some other OS's. Browser makers still don't use identical DOMs, which makes margin:auto; or padding-left: nn; unreliable.
So, for now at least, you still do have to run a pragmatic test for x-resolution, x-browser, x-OS anomalies. But -- IM(not so)HO, css doesn't deserve the kind of condemnation the parent and others offer. With a little study, one can work around most browser glitches...
from Broadband's followup :
maybe. But at least you [Zadr] mentioned "staff"
Many comments speak up for the "kids" or "students" whom the writers seem to presume were the targets.
Uh, ... not necessarily.
See, for example, another recent schoolhouse raid and aftermath, in this case involving a university:
...and further (excerpted from: infocon
The article DOES say, afterall, that the "computer command center" was the target.
From the C&D letter: "This material (the "Infringing Material ") blatantly copies the sequential display of a series of items belonging to one or more individuals, showing, the "price" of each item, and, at the end, infringes, with impunity (emph supplied), the MASTERCARD Mark and the Priceless Marks."
from one of 3 nearly identical cites at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=impunity
Granting -- since IANAL and have NO desire to be one (henceforward: IANALAHNDTBO) -- legalese may give some counterintuitive meaning to impunity, one might still wonder if the pinheads really did graduate only from "Billy-Bob's Loyeering Skool" (after flunking hs english?)Please distinguish among "interesing," "insightful" and "informative." The latter two require substantiation!
Pessimists are never disappointed.
uh.... Commander? Don't you mean the ad-posters (link targets) pay Google?
I don't see any p/w or other protection mentioned in the PIM-in-NSBIOS (Not So Basic I/O sys)... so now I'm gonna need a dongle to secure the data?
Amen to all who said vendors should leave the BIOS "basic."lightspawn writes I'm sick of .gov and .mil sites using .com....
I'm the (volunteer, written contract, $1 per year cuz the town's lawyer insisted on that) webmaster for my town. My recall may be faulty, but when I tried to get a .gov and/or a .ny.us address (about 3 years ago; .com is taken by a summer camp for kids) for the town (small, and not many geeks in the town office) one or both registrars declined, asserting that those are allowed ONLY if there is a zipcode assigned to that name. Now, in my case, there's an "East Schodack" and a "Schodack Landing" but NO postoffice or zipcode that's an (unmodified) "Schodack."
And as to whether the subject of the story is an evildoer or not -- well, one might want to recall the some media accounts of disputes contain errors.
BUT, this all certainly makes me happy that the hosting and bandwidth bills go straight to the Comptroller. [grin]
uhhhm? With that level of ability to absorb info (or that IQ), why did she bother going to a libtary?