There is a difference between government funded, government sponsored and working directly at a government larboratory or for a government agency.
For instance I work directly for CLRC, a government laboratory, however I work at a University. So while my work is government sponsered, and government funded, I don't work at a government laboratory. I therefore have alot of freedoms and (much) less bureaucracy than if I work directly at my parent institution.
The GRID? Hmm, its sort of, well, its something like...
To be honest nobody is really sure what it is yet. In academia is sort of viewed as the next generation internet, some people are deploying hardware (mostly the particle physicists to cope with their anticipated huge bandwidth needs) the rest of us are writing software to do distributed computing. You know the sort of thing, your data is spread across a bunch of machines in the States and the Caymen Islands (for instance) and you don't really want to shift it over the network to you do things to is, so you shift it somewhere else entirely, they do things to it , and the (hopefully) smaller results end up on your desktop.
Hmm, links, how about the Globus Project
, although to be honest I don't think much of the stability of Globus and all my projects are migrating to SOAP, but the site does give you some background of GRIDs and stuff.
Al.
Actually, I think frames were one of the worst things that got done to the HTML standard, the concept bends the web paradigm.
Embedable multimedia
If you mean Flash, then I really disagree. Flash is the worst thing to happen to the web. Flash entirely breaks the web paradigm.
If you mean embedable movies (and stuff), I'm not convinced I agree here either, it restricts the user with respect to the applications they use and alot of teh time make it frustratingly hard to actually download the content ratehr than watch it "online".
Plugin support
True, alhtough haven't Microsoft now gotten rid of this in their latest generation of browsers? Don't know for sure as I haven't used IE in several years.
Cookies
Cookies were a half decent idea, we needed to do something to get persistant states, but they've been used for evil and now must die.
HTTPS Support
Hardly an inovation, enrypting something isn't innovative.
Cascading Style Sheets
The best thing to the web in years, just wish all the browsers would finally support it in the same way.
XHTML Translations
Hmm...
XML Support
Well, okay, but its not really fully supported yet, is it?
Themes
Ho hum...
Integrated Mail and News
Bad, clunky and graphical. Why would you want to read news or mail inside a GUI? They're fundamentally text based media?
Personally my life has become much easier now my mail server auto-rejects all HTML formatted email before I see it. HTML email is an abomination...
(imperfect) W3C Standards support
Surely that shoul have been at the top of the list? Standards support should come before everything else. If we don't have standards, its bloody hard for software to tak to other bits of software, let alone to humans.
Browsers have progressed tremendously in the last 10 years, but mostly in ways that are not immediately visible to a layman...
I think what people are commenting on is that its been fairly slow incremental change, the sort of paradigm shifts that occured early on in teh webs life haven't occured again. For instance I'm sure alot of people (including me) are wondering why the Semantic Web never really took off...
That said the - the progress has mostly been in enabling support for various things, although significant progress has also been made in design and usability.
Right, incremental changes. I think that the GRID might shake things up a bit in the next couple of years, although since I'm working of GRID-enabled stuff I might have a somewhat skewed view of whats going on...
Either Cassini is really expensive for an unmanned research probe or poor people are being neglected. I mean, space exploration is great, but so is making sure that everyone has food to eat.
Look, we have enough money and food to feed everyone on the planet decently, we just don't choose to, or our governments don't choose to, or someboday somewhere has decided that we aren't going to...
The money spent on the space program is a drop in the ocean, and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact there are still people starving to death in the 3rd world. If we aren't going to spend it on feeding people anyway (and lets face it, we aren't) better to spend it doing something to advance science and human knowledge than buying another couple of B-1B bombers, surely?
There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green....
I can't believe Salon published the article, or that it got picked up by Slashdot. This is bogus science, and the guy is clearly a nut. Perhaps the editors should read their own articles?
Perl gives the programmer an extreeme amount of freedom of style which makes it a powerful language for the vetran programmer and a BAD BAD BAD choice for a newbie who has no concept of style, form and coding practice. It's extreemely easy to write obfuscated code in Perl.
But conversely its not extremely hard to write good object-orientated code in Perl, and to make it easily accessible to people writing a twenty line perl scripts by using CPAN. This lets the less experienced (occasional) coder do powerful things easily, and lets the rest of us build large complex applications very quickly, something that is supposed to Python's strength point.
Personally, if Python had a version of CPAN, I'd probably code in Python. It doesn't, and its hellishly hard for someone used to CPAN figure out whether there is an existing Python module to do something they need to do...
Is Google becoming as powerful as Microsoft (or has it already happened?)
I think its happened already...
I mean there actually are viable (better!) alternatives to using MS software in nearly all cases, well appart from Powerpoint. There really isn't a decent alternative to Google.
But more about your comment - OK, it's not a traditional unix kernel, but that's never been unix to me. Unix has always been being able to/bin/ls/etc and all those other groovy unix commands...
You could do that in BeOS, it sure as heck didn't make it UNIX.
I don't see how you get off on saying that the UK has a lot fewer public holidays than the US. I can count 9 days that are holidays in the UK. In the same year, most US businesses had the following: New Years Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving (2 days) and Christmas, giving you a grand total of 7.
When I was working in the States every second Monday seemed to be a public holiday for some reason or another, they may not be mandated by law, but everything closes down anyway.
Wouldn't it then make sense to use the money to increase the tube's capacity (make it run more often, drill more tunnels,...)
Pretty hard to do, constructing more tunnels under London is a hard thing to do, as the recent land collapse while building the new Channel Tunnel link probably proves.
To put whole new underground lines in you'd more or less have to go under the existing system, and if you haven't been on the London underground, the deep stations are really a long way down, much deeper than most of the newer subway systems in the States, which are usually built by digging a big trench and then roofing it over.
I really had expected the tube to function at least as well as the L in chicago, seeing as how they've had the tube around for so long, but it is in need of a serious reworking..
Thats sort of the problem, most of the system was constructed by the Victorians, and originally carried steam trains.
...not to mention a deep cleaning!
Humpf! You haven't seen the Paris Metro, is a heck of a lot worse.
For those of you not too familiar with London, a map of central London with the congestion charging zone can be found here on the Transport for London website.
In brief, you're being charged 5 pounds per day inside to drive inside the congestion charging zone, which covers most of central London. The charge applies from 7.00am till 6.30pm Mondays to Fridays excluding Public Holidays (of which we get alot fewer than you 'merkins), the charge doesn't apply at weekends, and there exemptions and discounts available if you actually live within the zone or are disabled.
Considering how heavy the traffic in central London actually is, anything that might actually provide a bit of relief is welcome.
However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
Personally considering the mess they make of virtually everything, I wouldn't mind having a immobile, noisy mess of a government.
Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
Even if true, and I'm not convinced about the generalisation at all, this disqualifies them from being decent programmers why?
The best software people I know are dilettantes at heart, and usually easily distracted by the next neat idea to come along. Getting them to finish a project once the solution is "obvious" is the problem.
While I do think the work presented is a great idea, it seems to me that it's a lot of effort just to setup the system.
Thats pretty much the problem with meta-data based file systems. They're great for new projects, where you have a clean start and can actually add metadata to the files. The real problem is legacy data.
My home directory weighs in at just under five gigabytes, and has files dating back over ten years, and thats just the "personal stuff". My work partition has about eight gigabytes, which is mainly source code.
I'm really not going to be able to associate metadata with every individual file by hand. Until automatic tools come along that will data mine the file content and automaticlly do some minimal level of association.
On top of this a whole new generation of development tools needs to be written. At a very basic level you need a version of make that will build all C source files on the disk with associated meta data "Belonging to Project X, dated no later than last week".
When you think about it you'll realise that while as a concept its fairly powerful, we won't be switching to using this sort of thing soon. For the same reasons the semantic web and RDF are having problems getting adopted, metadata based file systems face real problems before people will start widly adpoting them...
Slashdot Mirror
You have a lot of freedoms because you are a graduate student.
What makes you think I'm a graduate student? I'm not, I actually work for a living.
In any case, if you are in the UK, isn't your university owned and run by the government as well?
Dear God! No, thats not how the University system works in the UK.
Al.Actually, I have. As have many graduate students.
There is a difference between government funded, government sponsored and working directly at a government larboratory or for a government agency.
For instance I work directly for CLRC, a government laboratory, however I work at a University. So while my work is government sponsered, and government funded, I don't work at a government laboratory. I therefore have alot of freedoms and (much) less bureaucracy than if I work directly at my parent institution.
Al.Oh boy, there speaks someone who has never worked for a Government doing research.
Really, you seriously think so? Want to back that up with some specific cases, I really doubt that is the case.
Al.Damn, the mouse slipped and I hit submit. That link should have been the Globus Project...
Al.GRID? More info please.
The GRID? Hmm, its sort of, well, its something like...
To be honest nobody is really sure what it is yet. In academia is sort of viewed as the next generation internet, some people are deploying hardware (mostly the particle physicists to cope with their anticipated huge bandwidth needs) the rest of us are writing software to do distributed computing. You know the sort of thing, your data is spread across a bunch of machines in the States and the Caymen Islands (for instance) and you don't really want to shift it over the network to you do things to is, so you shift it somewhere else entirely, they do things to it , and the (hopefully) smaller results end up on your desktop.
Hmm, links, how about the Globus Project
, although to be honest I don't think much of the stability of Globus and all my projects are migrating to SOAP, but the site does give you some background of GRIDs and stuff. Al.Mot an unmixed blessing...
The document object modelGood point.
PNG supportNot exactly a major achievement.
Frames supportActually, I think frames were one of the worst things that got done to the HTML standard, the concept bends the web paradigm.
Embedable multimediaIf you mean Flash, then I really disagree. Flash is the worst thing to happen to the web. Flash entirely breaks the web paradigm.
If you mean embedable movies (and stuff), I'm not convinced I agree here either, it restricts the user with respect to the applications they use and alot of teh time make it frustratingly hard to actually download the content ratehr than watch it "online".
Plugin supportTrue, alhtough haven't Microsoft now gotten rid of this in their latest generation of browsers? Don't know for sure as I haven't used IE in several years.
CookiesCookies were a half decent idea, we needed to do something to get persistant states, but they've been used for evil and now must die.
HTTPS SupportHardly an inovation, enrypting something isn't innovative.
Cascading Style SheetsThe best thing to the web in years, just wish all the browsers would finally support it in the same way.
XHTML TranslationsHmm...
XML SupportWell, okay, but its not really fully supported yet, is it?
ThemesHo hum...
Integrated Mail and NewsBad, clunky and graphical. Why would you want to read news or mail inside a GUI? They're fundamentally text based media?
Personally my life has become much easier now my mail server auto-rejects all HTML formatted email before I see it. HTML email is an abomination...
(imperfect) W3C Standards supportSurely that shoul have been at the top of the list? Standards support should come before everything else. If we don't have standards, its bloody hard for software to tak to other bits of software, let alone to humans.
Browsers have progressed tremendously in the last 10 years, but mostly in ways that are not immediately visible to a layman...
I think what people are commenting on is that its been fairly slow incremental change, the sort of paradigm shifts that occured early on in teh webs life haven't occured again. For instance I'm sure alot of people (including me) are wondering why the Semantic Web never really took off...
That said the - the progress has mostly been in enabling support for various things, although significant progress has also been made in design and usability.
Right, incremental changes. I think that the GRID might shake things up a bit in the next couple of years, although since I'm working of GRID-enabled stuff I might have a somewhat skewed view of whats going on...
Al.Either Cassini is really expensive for an unmanned research probe or poor people are being neglected. I mean, space exploration is great, but so is making sure that everyone has food to eat.
Look, we have enough money and food to feed everyone on the planet decently, we just don't choose to, or our governments don't choose to, or someboday somewhere has decided that we aren't going to...
The money spent on the space program is a drop in the ocean, and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact there are still people starving to death in the 3rd world. If we aren't going to spend it on feeding people anyway (and lets face it, we aren't) better to spend it doing something to advance science and human knowledge than buying another couple of B-1B bombers, surely?
Al.There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green....
I can't believe Salon published the article, or that it got picked up by Slashdot. This is bogus science, and the guy is clearly a nut. Perhaps the editors should read their own articles?
Al.Perl gives the programmer an extreeme amount of freedom of style which makes it a powerful language for the vetran programmer and a BAD BAD BAD choice for a newbie who has no concept of style, form and coding practice. It's extreemely easy to write obfuscated code in Perl.
But conversely its not extremely hard to write good object-orientated code in Perl, and to make it easily accessible to people writing a twenty line perl scripts by using CPAN. This lets the less experienced (occasional) coder do powerful things easily, and lets the rest of us build large complex applications very quickly, something that is supposed to Python's strength point.
Personally, if Python had a version of CPAN, I'd probably code in Python. It doesn't, and its hellishly hard for someone used to CPAN figure out whether there is an existing Python module to do something they need to do...
Al.Either you like to live dangerously, or you've found a miracle recipe against nasty porn spam...
SpamAssassin, I get one or two spams a week now, down from over a hundred a day (yes, seriously) before I implemented the filters.
Al.Is Google becoming as powerful as Microsoft (or has it already happened?)
I think its happened already...
I mean there actually are viable (better!) alternatives to using MS software in nearly all cases, well appart from Powerpoint. There really isn't a decent alternative to Google.
Al.But more about your comment - OK, it's not a traditional unix kernel, but that's never been unix to me. Unix has always been being able to /bin/ls /etc and all those other groovy unix commands...
You could do that in BeOS, it sure as heck didn't make it UNIX.
Al.Now, if I can get a panel like Gnome's that doesn't require Gnome or KDE...
You might want to take a look at WindowMaker.
Al.The other great example is Swordfish, when Hugh Jackman hacks into a computer system in 60 seconds, at gunpoint, with a woman giving him head.
What, you mean your life isn't like that?
Al.I don't see how you get off on saying that the UK has a lot fewer public holidays than the US. I can count 9 days that are holidays in the UK. In the same year, most US businesses had the following: New Years Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving (2 days) and Christmas, giving you a grand total of 7.
When I was working in the States every second Monday seemed to be a public holiday for some reason or another, they may not be mandated by law, but everything closes down anyway.
Al.I assume you know what a merkin is?
Please note the apostrophy in the original post... ;)
Al.Wouldn't it then make sense to use the money to increase the tube's capacity (make it run more often, drill more tunnels, ...)
Pretty hard to do, constructing more tunnels under London is a hard thing to do, as the recent land collapse while building the new Channel Tunnel link probably proves.
To put whole new underground lines in you'd more or less have to go under the existing system, and if you haven't been on the London underground, the deep stations are really a long way down, much deeper than most of the newer subway systems in the States, which are usually built by digging a big trench and then roofing it over.
Al.I really had expected the tube to function at least as well as the L in chicago, seeing as how they've had the tube around for so long, but it is in need of a serious reworking..
Thats sort of the problem, most of the system was constructed by the Victorians, and originally carried steam trains.
Humpf! You haven't seen the Paris Metro, is a heck of a lot worse.
Al.For those of you not too familiar with London, a map of central London with the congestion charging zone can be found here on the Transport for London website.
In brief, you're being charged 5 pounds per day inside to drive inside the congestion charging zone, which covers most of central London. The charge applies from 7.00am till 6.30pm Mondays to Fridays excluding Public Holidays (of which we get alot fewer than you 'merkins), the charge doesn't apply at weekends, and there exemptions and discounts available if you actually live within the zone or are disabled.
Considering how heavy the traffic in central London actually is, anything that might actually provide a bit of relief is welcome.
Al.Enlighten me, what terrorists do we support?
The IRA, and no, they're not freedom fighters...
Al.However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
Personally considering the mess they make of virtually everything, I wouldn't mind having a immobile, noisy mess of a government.
Al.On the other hand, eating off someone's plate in public is traditionally a way of signalling that one is in a somewhat intimate relationship.
Maybe in the States? Certainly I wouldn't say that its the case in UK, the traditioanl shout of "You gonna eat that?" goes up at virtally every meal.
Al.Girls do not like doing anything that involves concentrating on one single thing for long periods. They like to switch from one thought to another, and keep many balls up in the air at one time.
Even if true, and I'm not convinced about the generalisation at all, this disqualifies them from being decent programmers why?
The best software people I know are dilettantes at heart, and usually easily distracted by the next neat idea to come along. Getting them to finish a project once the solution is "obvious" is the problem.
Al.While I do think the work presented is a great idea, it seems to me that it's a lot of effort just to setup the system.
Thats pretty much the problem with meta-data based file systems. They're great for new projects, where you have a clean start and can actually add metadata to the files. The real problem is legacy data.
My home directory weighs in at just under five gigabytes, and has files dating back over ten years, and thats just the "personal stuff". My work partition has about eight gigabytes, which is mainly source code.
I'm really not going to be able to associate metadata with every individual file by hand. Until automatic tools come along that will data mine the file content and automaticlly do some minimal level of association.
On top of this a whole new generation of development tools needs to be written. At a very basic level you need a version of make that will build all C source files on the disk with associated meta data "Belonging to Project X, dated no later than last week".
When you think about it you'll realise that while as a concept its fairly powerful, we won't be switching to using this sort of thing soon. For the same reasons the semantic web and RDF are having problems getting adopted, metadata based file systems face real problems before people will start widly adpoting them...
Al.Also, why the Exeter? Is there any reason given as to why the Federation would name a ship after an East Coast prep school with a history of buggery?
Possibly they named the vessel after the other, more historic, Exeter? Al.