I wouldn't be surprised if this type of move kills them. Think about it- they're talking about censoring the very basic service that's being offered. It's like they're trying to sell a damaged highway to people, expecting them to take it because the potholes are on purpose. People will vote with their wallets, I hope.
I have one question -- How?? This isn't about AT&T bugging their consumer-level services, this is about AT&T bugging their backbone, meaning just about *any* ISP in the US (and probably in many other countries too) is going to have their traffic sniffed. As far as I can tell, there's precisely Jacques Merde that people can do about it with their wallets, unless you start talking about people like George Soros and Ted Turner and the like.
Often times, when Automatic Updates pulls down patches for XP, it requires a reboot... well it DEMANDS a reboot. Often times at the office, I could be working on a project, or taking web-based training where I can't reboot the system. However, XP will pop up a box every 10 minutes asking if I want to reboot now, or later.
That brings up another aspect of Windows that I so LOVE -- the modal dialogs. So I can be in the middle of typing an email, and an alert will pop up and very annoyingly force itself to the front of the Z order only long enough for me to barely notice it as I type, and lo I've hit a key that corresponds to one of the dialog buttons, and BAM! I'm suddenly rebooting, or installing an update I'm not ready for, or gods only know what else. I much prefer the alerts in Kubuntu -- they simply flash from the Taskbar, and politely stay behind the active window, thus ensuring that I know they're there, but I don't accidentally confirm something simply because some jackass UI designers thought it would be smart to interrupt people mid-sentence.
I'd certainly mod you up myself if I had any points today -- my only puzzlement is whether "Informative" or "Insightful" would be more appropriate.:)
Cheers,
Normalization has practical limitations
on
Sun Buys MySQL
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The practical reason is that this turns out to be a quite useful behavior. Suppose s represents a social security number on a person record. In some cases that person has declined to provide is SSN, in which case we must put a null in that column. So two or more people can provide null for their social security number, thus many rows can have null there; but if two people provide the SAME SSN, that's an error.
Or you could normalize the data. If you're expecting missing SSN's from multiple people, a separate SSN table would be required. This table would contain two columns - PersonID and SSN. A person without a SSN listed would not be included in the table, thus solving the multi-null problem.
Sure, but excessive normalization can also be a pain in the arse. Theoretically speaking, complete normalization throughout would obviate any need for NULL. Practically speaking, this is unreasonable, given the resulting complexity and increased time required for queries and other operations -- which is why databases still use NULL. As the GP noted, allowing NULL values "turns out to be a quite useful behavior."
Given how much my blood pressure skyrockets under the influence of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, I'm not sure that MS really will want this data due to liability issues. If MS collects data that shows that MS products reduce the health and wellbeing of users, that makes MS more culpable for those products.
Thing is, I somehow suspect that any such system would likely be running Microsoft-only software, so there would be no means of comparing the effects of MS software vs other software. Thus, it would be impossible to distinguish reduced health due to MS software, and reduced health due to work in general. Then again, "reduced health" suggests some sort of healthier baseline, and if your vital signs are *always* crappy whenever you're working, and your vital signs are only ever monitored while you're working, you might instead just wind up with a terrible health insurance rating. All pretty insidious no matter how it's sliced.
...all fruit is transplanted on root stocks and cloned from the same tree's over and over.it's been done this way for hundreds of years with no ill effects...
Um, dude, I hate to break it to you, but cuttings of any sort, grafted to root stocks or planted on their own, are not cloned, but are rather in effect offshoots of the same original plant. As numerous other posters have noted, cloning is an entirely different process, which involves taking the genetic stock of an adult organism and creating an embryo using that same genetic material. This therefore means that the new cloned embryo includes all of the genetic damage and aging present in the adult. This is more relevant when dealing with animals (maybe even mammals more specifically?) rather than plants, given how protein encoding can become damaged over time, and given how telomeres regulate the lifetime of the organism. This is why clones generally do not live as long as regularly bred animals -- the shortened telomeres alone dictate a shorter lifespan, let alone any possible genetic damage inherited from the clonestock.
And, as other posters have noted, genetic damage = changes in protein manufacture. As we have seen with mad cow disease, the consumption of aberrant animal proteins can lead to some very nasty incurable diseases in humans. And we simply do not have the breadth of data truly required to be able to accurately and fairly judge whether the consumption of cloned livestock is truly safe.
Call me a cynic, but I rather suspect that this FDA ruling has more to do with business concerns than with sound public health policy.
Or at the very least, read the post and have a look at the links. This is particularly damning of/. editors:
Of particular concern to me is the replacement of one the original post's links with one that references a newspaper I consider to be a parody of press oversight. I would never source that bloated, piss-stained, corporate catamite in any post I write.
So, when/. writes "Windrip writes", they're lying. I didn't write what was posted on the front page of/. I didn't even provide one of the links in the story.
A database file is just data, to be interpreted by a database program.
But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU.
Data vs. document is a spectrum. There is no clear distinction....
Everything is just data. What makes it meaningful is the order and interpretation that we impose on it.
How very Hinduistically existential of you, actually. Quoting from a recent Natl. Geo. article, Faces of the Divine in the January 2008 issue (which I received earlier this week, thanks apparently to time-traveling magazine editors):
... Beauty meant nothing in itself: A work of art, whether a bronze statue of Shiva engaged in his cosmic dance of creating and destroying the universe or a painting of the Buddha attaining enlightenment under the bodhi tree, amounted to no more than base metal or dried pigment until a viewer responded to it. Seeing a painting or sculpture in a temple opened the minds of receptive worshippers to intimate communion with the divine. Seeing was believing.
Hindus call this intense participatory relationship with art an act of darshan, or "seeing" the deity. "Such seeing does not literally mean merely using one's eyes," according to art historian Vidya Dehejia, "but is a dynamic act of awareness." For the Buddhist monks and their patrons at Ajanta monastery, paintings of the Buddha served the same potent function, providing a key to revelation.
So I suppose what you describe would be the CPU's darshan of the code. (Though one could probably make a reasonable argument about which is data and which the program on the basis of specifically how dynamic the darshan needs to be to make sense of it.)
I find it somehow reassuring, and deeply cool, that certain wisdoms of the ancients can be perfectly relevant in wildly different contexts. It's also humbling to find how much our supposedly "primitive" ancestors got right in areas that we have forgotten or set aside.:)
Thanks, ed, interesting stuff. Thanks too for noting the 'file' utility, I didn't even know that existed. Incidentally, SciTE saves the "this app can break" file as 18 bytes, apparently minus any header info, so it must do something differently from Notepad upon opening. 'file' reports "ASCII text, with no line terminators". After replacing the initial "th" with the corresponding kanji and saving, the file size is still 18 bytes, and 'file' reports "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with no line terminators".
Hello, ed, thanks for your replies. Wow, an actual discussion on Slashdot!:D
The entirety of the problem is that the file is not marked as ASCII. No encoding is indicated. If you think that.txt implies plain ASCII you'd be wrong - when you get a.TXT file from any source (including from non-Windows machines....) you have no idea if it's plain ASCII, the Windows Latin 1 encoding, UTF-8, UTF-16, or anything else. Trust me that you'd be pretty annoyed if your text editor didn't try to guess the encodings. The fact is, Notepad does a decent job of it - as I've never seen it render anything other than "this app can break" incorrectly. In fact, I'd bet that this example was discovered by someone with a good sense of encodings who wanted to see which way this ambiguity be resolved.
Very interesting. So if no encoding is indicated, why does Notepad offer different encoding options if one clicks on the "save as" dropdown? I'm certainly fuzzy in my understanding:), but I was under the impression that (at least under Unixy systems) files included some sort of header info that gave the filetype and other metadata, allowing us to dispense with filename extensions. Windows doesn't do too well without extensions, to be sure, but the dropdown in Notepad had lulled me into the belief that Windows allowed at least some metadata to be saved with the file. Is this purely a misundertanding on my part?
I find all of this at least tangentially interesting in that I'm a Japanese->English translator, dabbling in other linguistic areas to boot, and have long combated the various bugaboos surrounding encoding issues. I'm still waiting for the apps I use (or want to use) in my business and hobby lives to *finally* fully use Unicode throughout... Mind you, I'm not holding my breath.:-/
SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".
That's what I would expect. You saved the file in one of the Unicode encodings so the bytes were not the same as the original example. If you saved it as UTF-16, the first two bytes (representing the 6874) would be the same as in the original, while each of the subsequent Latin letters would now be represented by two bytes rather than 1 byte of the original. For example, the 6874 would be followed by 0069, while in the original file the letter 'i' was represented by a single byte with value 69.
So then SciTE automatically saves as UTF-16? I certainly didn't specify anything but a filename at save time.
Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.
That's wrong too. Most sentences which begin with "th" do not have a byte representation that can be confused for UTF-16. For example, no odd number of bytes can be considered to be UTF-16 since UTF-16 encodes each character as 2 or 4 bytes. It's a rare coincidence that all the byte pairs in "this app can break" look like valid UTF-16. The longer the (plain) text, the lower the probability that its byte representation looks like valid UTF-16. Of course since "this app can break" maps to valid UTF-16, any number of repetitions of it do too.
So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart.
There's actually no smart way to do this. Let's say I open a plain text editor that saves into pure ASCII and type up "this app can break". Save it as file1.txt. You open some text editor which knows how to encode to UTF-16 and enter characters 6874 7369 6120 7070 6320 6e61 6220 6572 6b61. Save with with UTF-16 encoding (Not "unicode" or UTF-8) as file2.txt.
Ah, you cleared something up here (in the bolded portions) -- from what you're saying, Notepad would check the whole string for possible Unicode-ness, not just the first few bytes.
But even then, I'm puzzled about why, which leaves me still with questions about how smart Notepad is being. If a text file is marked as ASCII, what utility is there in trying by default to display it as anything else? Wouldn't it make more sense to display it as ASCII, and if that's not correct, leave some means for the user to choose a different encoding? Perhaps this is a leftover of older non-internationalized legacy coding decisions Microsoft made in the pre-Unicode past, in that Notepad maybe used to save everything as ASCII regardless of the Windows localization settings?
This is one of those situations where it's very easy for a human to know what the correct thing to do is (after all you just saved it as Windows 1252) but very difficult for the computer to get it right 100% of the time. Text files have no headers to tell Notepad or any other app what the encoding it, so Notepad has to guess. In this case, the 18 bytes that represent "this app can break" in Windows 1252 (or ASCII for that matter) also represent a string of 9 Japanese characters encoded as UTF-16.
For example: t is 0x74 and h is 0x68, and 6874 happens to be the Unicode codepoint of the first character displayed (these would not be unprintable to you if Asian language support was installed on your machine) - and so on - the byte representation of every subsequent pair of letters matches up to a UTF-16 representation of a valid Japanese Unicode character.
Notepad probably calls IsTextUnicode to figure these things out.
If that's all Notepad is doing, then it's being kinda dumb. I just tried this with the SciTE editor under a full-patched WinXP install, and SciTE was able to correctly open the file (though admittedly SciTE might be smart enough to add encoding info somewhere in the save process). I started with just "this app can break"; SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".
So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart. And it's somehow no surprise that its dumb behaviour hasn't been fixed by MS.
Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.
As I understand things have gotten worse under the No Child Left Behind act(my mother's a teacher.) She refers to it as "No child gets ahead." Almost everything is taught by being focused on test results. The attitude from administrators is now, "Who cares if they'll learn anything, just make sure they pass the tests." Funding is everything for the schools, so that's what matters the most now, tests.
My wife's a teacher too, and she has (mostly) scorn for No Child Left Behind. She's been known to call the law No Child's Behind Left. The one good thing that she says has come of it is that schools *do* test now across the boards, which at least gives them some metrics for how a whole school population is doing.
That aside, one excellent illustration of how broken the law is would be my wife's previous school, a middle school. It was the best in the district in terms of student advancement -- i.e. how much they left with versus what they came in with. She had kids coming in at 6th grade with a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level, leaving the year on at least a 5th grade level. This was partly cleaning up from disastrously misguided elementary school ideas in California, things like taking whole language too far. (The concept was partly to accept any spelling a child provides without criticism, in order not to damage their fragile egos. While okay at the very beginning of literacy work, as it can be more important to simply ensure that they're getting the idea [and I employed this successfully myself much later in life when starting to learn to read Japanese], it's really not a good idea to continue much past the early stages, or kids wind up unable to spell at all -- which becomes a problem when they try to use the dictionary, among other things.)
Anyway, part of NCLB dictates that for a school to maintain funding, it must show test score improvement for each grade level every year. The problem is that this ignores the simple fact that the kids in each grade are different kids every year. So my wife's school had 6th graders testing in the mid 90-percentile when NCLB came out. Rather than tracking those same kids to see that they tested better the following year, NCLB dictated that the *incoming 6th graders* had to test better than last year's. Now, my wife's school was in California, and like most any public school, they couldn't dictate who they'd accept. So one year they happened to get a crop of more functional students; the next, they had more barely literate non-English-speaking migrant worker kids, and wouldn't you know it, their test scores were lower. But rather than tracking how each crop of kids progressed, NCLB only looked at how the school itself tested for the same grade level year to year, and demands ongoing improvement or penalties kick in. This is fundamentally flawed on the face of it, as anyone with a modicum of mathematical understanding should be able to figure out that things can only improve so far before you're at 100% and no more improvement is possible.
Anyway, long story short, my wife's previous school went from being the best in the district to being on NCLB probation, complete with effective veteran teachers being cut and funding levels dropping, despite a track record of consistently bringing kids up to speed in time for high school -- all because each year's incoming kids were different than the ones from the year before.
Looks like there's at least one utility to go the other way (OOo -> LaTeX), but otherwise the best I can find in a brief search of the OOo site is this macro extension, but given that it's macros, I'm not too sure how robust it is. There's mention of a latex2oo filter, but I can't seem to find it. (Don't need it, just went looking out of curiosity.)
With LaTeX, it automatically does two spaces after a period when it lays out the document, because it assumes it's the end of the sentence. If you want only one space after the period (for an abbreviation), then put Mr.~Smith, where the ~ means that it is the break in an abbreviation.
Yay for LaTeX! (I assume that the tilde is replaced with a single space during final layout?) It's a pity word processors can't seem to find a way to leverage LaTeX. For that matter, I dimly recall hearing about some FOSS app that does just that (i.e. making LaTeX, or at least TeX, more accessible to the lay user). Anyone recall what that app is?
Since when is free equal to $130 or whatever MS Office is at now?
See, that's the beauty of "Free!" (TM) (c) [Pat. Pend.] [All rights withheld by Microsoft, 2007] -- you can "Freely!" make anything equal anything else! What convenience, what ease of use, what utility! A few examples: Winter is the new summer, Stay the course, Up is down, Copyright is good for the consumer! Rinsema is simply worried that not enough people know about this Fantastic! New! Opportunity!, and is trying to make sure everyone knows that "Free!" is actually equal to $130 or whatever MS Office sells for.
A funder of the OpenDoc Society invited Microsoft to join that organization, saying: "This plan is not about Microsoft, it's about ensuring the perpetual availability of data without any obstacles."
... which actually makes it very much about Microsoft, since they have purposefully done so much to ensure precisely the opposite. Planned obsolescence and crufty undocumented file formats are perfectly in Microsoft's favor as a means of forcing MS Office users to pay the upgrade tax every few years, regardless of whether the new Office versions include any compelling new functionality, what with older versions suddenly no longer able to read the "same".doc file format produced by the newer versions. With ODF, we know what we're getting -- and that's what scares the pants of Microsoft.
Coincidentally, it was a regular poster to comp.infosystems.www.html.authoring. His tag line quoted a past professor of his, saying something like: "A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As journalists, you are expected to know the difference."
Brilliant, yes, I recall it had something to do with journalism, so this is very probably what I was dimly remembering. Thank you for posting the more elegantly put original.:)
By definition, the shareholders should be revolting--but they're not.
Well, I think that might be a matter of individual taste. Personally, I find them pretty revolting, supporting a company as morally bankrupt and actively obstructionist as Microsoft.
When you try to use Firefox, you're told that you need to "upgrade" to Internet Explorer. That's the damn word they use--"upgrade."
I used to work at a big multinational corporation, and the intranet was set up to be IE-only -- and would obnoxiously remind any non-IE user of this fact whenever we logged in, showing only the warning and locking us out of anything else. However, a quick change to the user agent string in Firefox (google for it) to identify us instead as IE users allowed us to bypass the dumbshit "warning" and access about 98% of the intranet's functionality (all we were excluded from was some of the more nitpicky Sharepoint pages, and "View Page in IE Tab" worked just fine for those).
It might be worth a try for your kid's sites too.:)
That's because this hypothetical client doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, if you'll pardon my French.
I can't take credit for this, but I read a wonderful snippet somewhere that coined a different phrase, about people who don't know their burro from their burrow...
Thing is, the word processor should be handling the layout, including putting spaces after sentences.
I get a lot of documents for papers that have the extra spaces injected. I feel that this is wrong since the paper is going to be distributed as a PDF and probably printed, and the word processor/page layout program ought to handle it just fine.
Fair enough. But there's "ought to", and then there's "does". Thus the question then becomes, do word processors and page layout programs properly distinguish between punctuation after abbreviations, and sentence-final punctuation? I suspect current products do not (Word 2003 doesn't) -- which leaves it up to the document author to manually make the distinction, if so desired.
Do this for me: point out a single book, magazine, or newspaper that uses two spaces:)
Okay.:) Just wandering around the living room, I find the following:
Books:
1898 edition of Die Heilige Schrift (the Bible in German, but published in Milwaukee WI), double spaces after ending punctuation
1908 edition of Landholding in England by Mary A. M. Marks, double spaces
Unknown (but old) edition of Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes, double spaces
1966 editions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both the older, leather-bound Green Book and Red Book versions, double spaces
1969 edition of Perrault's Fairy Tales by Gustave Doré and Charles Perrault, double spaces
1972 edition of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse, double spaces
1976 edition of The Value of Kindness: The Story of Elizabeth Fry by Spencer Johnson, 1.5 spaces
1983 edition of The Saga of Erik the Viking by Terry Jones, 1.5 spaces
1995 edition of Maxfield Parrish: A Restrospective, edited by Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art Brain Trust, double spaces
It's interesting to note that the bulk of our home library (newer, post-internet books) uses single spacing, while older printings tend to use 1.5 spaces, and the oldest use double spacing.
Magazines:
Nope, you win. A quick look through Der Spiegel, Time, and Real Simple shows that all use single spaces, as do the numerous catalogs lying about. That said, I have a hunch that magazines might show a similar trend to books, with old issues of Natl Geo, for instance, possibly using double spaces.
Newspapers:
I don't subscribe to any dead-tree newspapers, so I have none lying about to check.
Glancing over a few business letters sent to me, I find that some use double spacing, and some use single, regardless of whether the font is proportional or monospace.
Though older books tended to use double spacing more, the trend was not entirely consistent. Older works using single spacing include a 1946 edition of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict, a 1934 edition of The Road Leads On by Knut Hamsun, and a 1962 edition of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I have to wonder if the economics of paper-based texts might have dictated that some books were more likely to use single spacing, thereby using less paper? It appears that once the web kicked in, though, all paper texts adopted the HTML standard of single spacing. I've yet to find any post-internet books using double spaces, at any rate.
Yet for all that, I personally find that the older, double-spaced texts are much easier on the eyes...:)
Slashdot Mirror
So then why does a Google search for "vern32" produce nothing but warnings of malware and instructions on how to remove it?
Caveat downloader.
Cheers,
Now there's a fun idea... I wonder?
Cheers,
I have one question -- How?? This isn't about AT&T bugging their consumer-level services, this is about AT&T bugging their backbone, meaning just about *any* ISP in the US (and probably in many other countries too) is going to have their traffic sniffed. As far as I can tell, there's precisely Jacques Merde that people can do about it with their wallets, unless you start talking about people like George Soros and Ted Turner and the like.
Cheers,
That brings up another aspect of Windows that I so LOVE -- the modal dialogs. So I can be in the middle of typing an email, and an alert will pop up and very annoyingly force itself to the front of the Z order only long enough for me to barely notice it as I type, and lo I've hit a key that corresponds to one of the dialog buttons, and BAM! I'm suddenly rebooting, or installing an update I'm not ready for, or gods only know what else. I much prefer the alerts in Kubuntu -- they simply flash from the Taskbar, and politely stay behind the active window, thus ensuring that I know they're there, but I don't accidentally confirm something simply because some jackass UI designers thought it would be smart to interrupt people mid-sentence.
Meh.
I'd certainly mod you up myself if I had any points today -- my only puzzlement is whether "Informative" or "Insightful" would be more appropriate. :)
Cheers,
Sure, but excessive normalization can also be a pain in the arse. Theoretically speaking, complete normalization throughout would obviate any need for NULL. Practically speaking, this is unreasonable, given the resulting complexity and increased time required for queries and other operations -- which is why databases still use NULL. As the GP noted, allowing NULL values "turns out to be a quite useful behavior."
Cheers,
Thing is, I somehow suspect that any such system would likely be running Microsoft-only software, so there would be no means of comparing the effects of MS software vs other software. Thus, it would be impossible to distinguish reduced health due to MS software, and reduced health due to work in general. Then again, "reduced health" suggests some sort of healthier baseline, and if your vital signs are *always* crappy whenever you're working, and your vital signs are only ever monitored while you're working, you might instead just wind up with a terrible health insurance rating. All pretty insidious no matter how it's sliced.
Cheers, :-\
Um, dude, I hate to break it to you, but cuttings of any sort, grafted to root stocks or planted on their own, are not cloned, but are rather in effect offshoots of the same original plant. As numerous other posters have noted, cloning is an entirely different process, which involves taking the genetic stock of an adult organism and creating an embryo using that same genetic material. This therefore means that the new cloned embryo includes all of the genetic damage and aging present in the adult. This is more relevant when dealing with animals (maybe even mammals more specifically?) rather than plants, given how protein encoding can become damaged over time, and given how telomeres regulate the lifetime of the organism. This is why clones generally do not live as long as regularly bred animals -- the shortened telomeres alone dictate a shorter lifespan, let alone any possible genetic damage inherited from the clonestock.
And, as other posters have noted, genetic damage = changes in protein manufacture. As we have seen with mad cow disease, the consumption of aberrant animal proteins can lead to some very nasty incurable diseases in humans. And we simply do not have the breadth of data truly required to be able to accurately and fairly judge whether the consumption of cloned livestock is truly safe.
Call me a cynic, but I rather suspect that this FDA ruling has more to do with business concerns than with sound public health policy.
Cheers,
Or at the very least, read the post and have a look at the links. This is particularly damning of /. editors:
Cheers,
How very Hinduistically existential of you, actually. Quoting from a recent Natl. Geo. article, Faces of the Divine in the January 2008 issue (which I received earlier this week, thanks apparently to time-traveling magazine editors):
So I suppose what you describe would be the CPU's darshan of the code. (Though one could probably make a reasonable argument about which is data and which the program on the basis of specifically how dynamic the darshan needs to be to make sense of it.)
I find it somehow reassuring, and deeply cool, that certain wisdoms of the ancients can be perfectly relevant in wildly different contexts. It's also humbling to find how much our supposedly "primitive" ancestors got right in areas that we have forgotten or set aside. :)
Cheers,
When the perp has a name like "Sodomsky", I really gotta wonder if this is for real...
Cheers,
Thanks, ed, interesting stuff. Thanks too for noting the 'file' utility, I didn't even know that existed. Incidentally, SciTE saves the "this app can break" file as 18 bytes, apparently minus any header info, so it must do something differently from Notepad upon opening. 'file' reports "ASCII text, with no line terminators". After replacing the initial "th" with the corresponding kanji and saving, the file size is still 18 bytes, and 'file' reports "Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with no line terminators".
Cheers,
Hello, ed, thanks for your replies. Wow, an actual discussion on Slashdot! :D
Very interesting. So if no encoding is indicated, why does Notepad offer different encoding options if one clicks on the "save as" dropdown? I'm certainly fuzzy in my understanding :), but I was under the impression that (at least under Unixy systems) files included some sort of header info that gave the filetype and other metadata, allowing us to dispense with filename extensions. Windows doesn't do too well without extensions, to be sure, but the dropdown in Notepad had lulled me into the belief that Windows allowed at least some metadata to be saved with the file. Is this purely a misundertanding on my part?
I find all of this at least tangentially interesting in that I'm a Japanese->English translator, dabbling in other linguistic areas to boot, and have long combated the various bugaboos surrounding encoding issues. I'm still waiting for the apps I use (or want to use) in my business and hobby lives to *finally* fully use Unicode throughout... Mind you, I'm not holding my breath. :-/
Cheers,
So then SciTE automatically saves as UTF-16? I certainly didn't specify anything but a filename at save time.
Ah, you cleared something up here (in the bolded portions) -- from what you're saying, Notepad would check the whole string for possible Unicode-ness, not just the first few bytes.
But even then, I'm puzzled about why, which leaves me still with questions about how smart Notepad is being. If a text file is marked as ASCII, what utility is there in trying by default to display it as anything else? Wouldn't it make more sense to display it as ASCII, and if that's not correct, leave some means for the user to choose a different encoding? Perhaps this is a leftover of older non-internationalized legacy coding decisions Microsoft made in the pre-Unicode past, in that Notepad maybe used to save everything as ASCII regardless of the Windows localization settings?
Cheers,
If that's all Notepad is doing, then it's being kinda dumb. I just tried this with the SciTE editor under a full-patched WinXP install, and SciTE was able to correctly open the file (though admittedly SciTE might be smart enough to add encoding info somewhere in the save process). I started with just "this app can break"; SciTE opened it and showed me "this app can break". So I tried explicitly entering the Unicode character found at 0x6874 for Japanese (for the record, ikada "raft", or bachi "pick / plectrum / drumstick") in place of the initial "th"; SciTE opened it and showed me that same Japanese character followed immediately by "is app can break".
So sure, what you describe might be what Notepad does, but it's not smart. And it's somehow no surprise that its dumb behaviour hasn't been fixed by MS.
Incidentally, if your analysis is correct as to why Notepad screws this up, it should then theoretically screw up when opening any text document beginning with "th". Can anyone confirm this? I no longer have Notepad on my machine.
Cheers,
My wife's a teacher too, and she has (mostly) scorn for No Child Left Behind. She's been known to call the law No Child's Behind Left. The one good thing that she says has come of it is that schools *do* test now across the boards, which at least gives them some metrics for how a whole school population is doing.
That aside, one excellent illustration of how broken the law is would be my wife's previous school, a middle school. It was the best in the district in terms of student advancement -- i.e. how much they left with versus what they came in with. She had kids coming in at 6th grade with a 2nd or 3rd grade reading level, leaving the year on at least a 5th grade level. This was partly cleaning up from disastrously misguided elementary school ideas in California, things like taking whole language too far. (The concept was partly to accept any spelling a child provides without criticism, in order not to damage their fragile egos. While okay at the very beginning of literacy work, as it can be more important to simply ensure that they're getting the idea [and I employed this successfully myself much later in life when starting to learn to read Japanese], it's really not a good idea to continue much past the early stages, or kids wind up unable to spell at all -- which becomes a problem when they try to use the dictionary, among other things.)
Anyway, part of NCLB dictates that for a school to maintain funding, it must show test score improvement for each grade level every year. The problem is that this ignores the simple fact that the kids in each grade are different kids every year. So my wife's school had 6th graders testing in the mid 90-percentile when NCLB came out. Rather than tracking those same kids to see that they tested better the following year, NCLB dictated that the *incoming 6th graders* had to test better than last year's. Now, my wife's school was in California, and like most any public school, they couldn't dictate who they'd accept. So one year they happened to get a crop of more functional students; the next, they had more barely literate non-English-speaking migrant worker kids, and wouldn't you know it, their test scores were lower. But rather than tracking how each crop of kids progressed, NCLB only looked at how the school itself tested for the same grade level year to year, and demands ongoing improvement or penalties kick in. This is fundamentally flawed on the face of it, as anyone with a modicum of mathematical understanding should be able to figure out that things can only improve so far before you're at 100% and no more improvement is possible.
Anyway, long story short, my wife's previous school went from being the best in the district to being on NCLB probation, complete with effective veteran teachers being cut and funding levels dropping, despite a track record of consistently bringing kids up to speed in time for high school -- all because each year's incoming kids were different than the ones from the year before.
Meh.
Thanks! Now to Google...
Looks like there's at least one utility to go the other way (OOo -> LaTeX), but otherwise the best I can find in a brief search of the OOo site is this macro extension, but given that it's macros, I'm not too sure how robust it is. There's mention of a latex2oo filter, but I can't seem to find it. (Don't need it, just went looking out of curiosity.)
Cheers,
Yay for LaTeX! (I assume that the tilde is replaced with a single space during final layout?) It's a pity word processors can't seem to find a way to leverage LaTeX. For that matter, I dimly recall hearing about some FOSS app that does just that (i.e. making LaTeX, or at least TeX, more accessible to the lay user). Anyone recall what that app is?
Cheers,
See, that's the beauty of " Free! " (TM) (c) [Pat. Pend.] [All rights withheld by Microsoft, 2007] -- you can " Freely! " make anything equal anything else! What convenience, what ease of use, what utility! A few examples: Winter is the new summer, Stay the course, Up is down, Copyright is good for the consumer! Rinsema is simply worried that not enough people know about this Fantastic! New! Opportunity!, and is trying to make sure everyone knows that " Free! " is actually equal to $130 or whatever MS Office sells for.
It's all perfectly logical, really.
... which actually makes it very much about Microsoft, since they have purposefully done so much to ensure precisely the opposite. Planned obsolescence and crufty undocumented file formats are perfectly in Microsoft's favor as a means of forcing MS Office users to pay the upgrade tax every few years, regardless of whether the new Office versions include any compelling new functionality, what with older versions suddenly no longer able to read the "same" .doc file format produced by the newer versions. With ODF, we know what we're getting -- and that's what scares the pants of Microsoft.
Cheers,
Brilliant, yes, I recall it had something to do with journalism, so this is very probably what I was dimly remembering. Thank you for posting the more elegantly put original. :)
Cheers,
Well, I think that might be a matter of individual taste. Personally, I find them pretty revolting, supporting a company as morally bankrupt and actively obstructionist as Microsoft.
Cheers,
I used to work at a big multinational corporation, and the intranet was set up to be IE-only -- and would obnoxiously remind any non-IE user of this fact whenever we logged in, showing only the warning and locking us out of anything else. However, a quick change to the user agent string in Firefox (google for it) to identify us instead as IE users allowed us to bypass the dumbshit "warning" and access about 98% of the intranet's functionality (all we were excluded from was some of the more nitpicky Sharepoint pages, and "View Page in IE Tab" worked just fine for those).
It might be worth a try for your kid's sites too. :)
HTH,
I can't take credit for this, but I read a wonderful snippet somewhere that coined a different phrase, about people who don't know their burro from their burrow...
Cheers,
Fair enough. But there's "ought to", and then there's "does". Thus the question then becomes, do word processors and page layout programs properly distinguish between punctuation after abbreviations, and sentence-final punctuation? I suspect current products do not (Word 2003 doesn't) -- which leaves it up to the document author to manually make the distinction, if so desired.
Okay. :) Just wandering around the living room, I find the following:
- 1898 edition of Die Heilige Schrift (the Bible in German, but published in Milwaukee WI), double spaces after ending punctuation
- 1908 edition of Landholding in England by Mary A. M. Marks, double spaces
- Unknown (but old) edition of Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes, double spaces
- 1966 editions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both the older, leather-bound Green Book and Red Book versions, double spaces
- 1969 edition of Perrault's Fairy Tales by Gustave Doré and Charles Perrault, double spaces
- 1972 edition of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse, double spaces
- 1976 edition of The Value of Kindness: The Story of Elizabeth Fry by Spencer Johnson, 1.5 spaces
- 1983 edition of The Saga of Erik the Viking by Terry Jones, 1.5 spaces
- 1995 edition of Maxfield Parrish: A Restrospective, edited by Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art Brain Trust, double spaces
It's interesting to note that the bulk of our home library (newer, post-internet books) uses single spacing, while older printings tend to use 1.5 spaces, and the oldest use double spacing.Nope, you win. A quick look through Der Spiegel, Time, and Real Simple shows that all use single spaces, as do the numerous catalogs lying about. That said, I have a hunch that magazines might show a similar trend to books, with old issues of Natl Geo, for instance, possibly using double spaces.
I don't subscribe to any dead-tree newspapers, so I have none lying about to check.
Glancing over a few business letters sent to me, I find that some use double spacing, and some use single, regardless of whether the font is proportional or monospace.
Though older books tended to use double spacing more, the trend was not entirely consistent. Older works using single spacing include a 1946 edition of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict, a 1934 edition of The Road Leads On by Knut Hamsun, and a 1962 edition of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I have to wonder if the economics of paper-based texts might have dictated that some books were more likely to use single spacing, thereby using less paper? It appears that once the web kicked in, though, all paper texts adopted the HTML standard of single spacing. I've yet to find any post-internet books using double spaces, at any rate.
Yet for all that, I personally find that the older, double-spaced texts are much easier on the eyes... :)
Cheers,