...and this is why this whole notion of "race" makes no sense whatsoever. Someone who is pale-skinned and probably descended from white European settlers is not white because of the country of his origin.
Maybe they're expecting to get a below average sized iceberg, and they're probably accounting for very significant losses to melting and contamination around the edges. A lot of the ice may never make it into the water supply.
Then why transport it as ice at all? Ice is less dense than liquid water, so you're wasting a lot of space in you supertanker. Also, at the end of the road, you're now going to have to store it somewhere, whereas the iceberg is intended to be self-storing, as they have judged the loss to melting and evaporation as acceptable and they're just going to let it bob about in the gulf until they need it.
No, it lost its meaning when science decided there was no such thing as race. However, I do think that calling a country run by people with different pigmentation from you stupid probably counts as racism.
Wow, you have no dreams, curiosity or sense of adventure. It can't be done. Don't leave your basement, you might achieve something.
Since I left my comfortable job and started following my dreams, I have worked in 3 different countries overseas (and just recently accepted a job in a 4th), I've cycled the length of a country or two, I've fallen in love with women I probably shouldn't have (but enjoyed it nonetheless), and gained more qualifications than I could get in a lifetime. Even as I study and work, I'm still beavering away at home on a computer project that could change the world and how we think about language teaching.
I have dreams, I have curiosity, and I have a great sense of adventure. But that doesn't stop me being realistic. Mars is an attainable goal, but there's a lot of work still to do before we get there. To return to the marathon analogy of a previous poster: anyone can do it, but it takes a lot of work to get ready to do it.
The point is that I don't want to set the widths -- I want the rendering engine to pick whatever width suits the screen. I want to be able to same than element X should be the same size as element Y, without saying what that size actually is.
He was proven an imbecile when man-powered self-sustaining flight was proven possible. He was proven an imbecile by the first alchemist who turned lead into gold. He was proven wrong when we built colonies in the deep ocean trenches. Yes, everything -- everything -- is clearly possible.
Nope, it's completely correct and has been proven time and again over the course of human history.
Nonsense. While we have achieved many things that people at one time claimed were impossible, there are many things that they said were possible that we have not achieved. Where are our flying cars? We were expecting them last century, but they still haven't shown up. Our automatic doors are still pretty terrible. We still haven't even finished off the molten salt reactor, and that would be a relatively easy thing to do.
OO reduces complexity when it reduces coupling and encourages encapsulation. The idea of conceptualising code as a series of communicating "machines" with mutually communicating interfaces achieves this. However, inheritance may improve code reuse, but it results in high coupling. "Objects all the way down" is a design philosophy that risks reintroducing complexity into the system; and having a single class tree completely kills the idea of low coupling, as absolutely everything ends up coupled.
OO can reduce complexity, but it doesn't guarantee it -- programming needs to be taught, and we're not getting much better at teaching it, as far as I can see.
The problem OO has is that we have forgotten the mindset of the designers.
Much of the early work in computer languages was born out of the study of human language with formal grammars. I never fully appreciated OO until I started trying to do simple language generation, and OO actually seemed like the perfect model for dealing with verb conjugation groups and irregular verbs. All the examples for beginners about "mammals have four legs", "dogs are mammals", "Fido is a dog" are a bit trivial and aren't actually embodiments of the core logic.
Aside from flex-box, which is pretty new, you could also use percentages. Column 1 can be 10%, column 2 can be 30% -- you can also specify the width of the table as a percentage of the parent container. Oh, and with CSS classes, you can share those parameters across tables.
I know this can be done with CSS, but in order to do that, I need to choose a particular size
You already want to set a particular size, expressed in relative terms. Just use a relative unit, like percentages. I don't know how you've managed to miss this.
I can't say "I don't care about the actual size, but these 3 things should all be as big as each other."
Yes can. You've been able to do that for ~20 years. You just didn't know how. Now you do.
I know about percentages, but percentages are useless. If I have a small table (say 3 columns of 1-10 characters each), it may well be 100% of a mobile phone screen, but I wouldn't want to fill out 100% of desktop monitor with it. As soon as we start using percentages (which I learned ~20 years ago, incidentally) we are talking about size. I don't want to talk specifics, I just want to state a semantic relation between two items.
Because the browser is supposed to render the page however it feels is best for the end user. As a web developer, you're not supposed to be manually doing that.
That's why the web is so fucked up. Very few people actually use it the way it was designed to be used. Instead now we have shit pilled on crap to do things that were supposed to be taken care of for us. I don't fully understand my industry. Apparently if it isn't hard to do then it isn't worth doing. We have to artificially make everything harder than it needs to be.
My mistake was mentioning proportionality. The most basic use case for parametrisation of column widths would be a semantic one, and not a design one. If I have two tables that are supposed to be the same -- that are supposed to mean the same thing -- and I leave them to render as the engine sees fit, then visually they become different and semantics of the content are lost to the human reader. Maybe verb tables on a language learning site; maybe a single table that I want to break into sets of rows with annotations between them. If/. allowed tables in HTML posts I'd show you an example.
The reason HTML doesn't do that is that it's not about prentation. It's a semantic language, describing types and the semantic relationship of things to other things. CSS is a presentational language, concerned with layout (like width/height), colour, size, and other visual relationships. Properties like height don't mean anything to a screenreader.
I completely, completely get the point of semantic markup. However, I see "these two things are the same" as being part of semantics. Say I want to take a table published by someone else, and split it into multiple segments and comment on them after the rows. Suddenly, I now have ten tables instead of one single table. Each time I start a "new" table, the HTML renderer will render it independently of the previous ones. If I could set the column widths to table_col_width1, table_col_width2,... , table_col_widthN; the renderer would know that the columns in all the tables are the same, and to me that's entirely in line with the concept of semantic markup.
The Github page doesn't give any examples that look like OO to me, which is A) not surprising, because what the hell would an OO markup language look like and B) very surprising, given that the whole DOM is OO from the ground up in modern rendering engines.
Anyway, on a tangent...
I see no real call for OO in web rendering, but the one thing I think is missing from HTML is the ability to parameterise things like column widths etc. Why cant I call column 1's width "x" and ask the renderer to make column 2's width "3x"? Or use these parameters across tables, so that the columns in table 1, table 2 and table 3 are all the same size?
I know this can be done with CSS, but in order to do that, I need to choose a particular size -- I can say "I don't care about the actual size, but these 3 things should all be as big as each other."
Mythbusters does less science than the catholic church.
Not surprising, given that the entire university system was invented by Catholic monks who sought to uncover the physical rules of the universe. (Investigating the rules of physics was seen as investigating God's work, and therefore a holy endeavour.)
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
It's a bit of an open secret, this -- a laptop battery shows up on an x-ray as a big block, and an appropriately-shaped explosive device in a battery compartment is therefore not incongruous. This is why we had to switch on our laptops at security in the late naughties, and still do in some airports. What baffles me is how this latest move helps -- a laptop in hand luggage can easily be x-rayed, swab tested and sniffed by a dog. A laptop wrapped up in the middle of a hold bag is a lot harder to check.
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Two problems:
1) Tribalism is a massive problem because we (the west) didn't give any consideration to tribal boundaries when we carved the Middle East and Africa into "colonies", and we didn't try to correct that before we granted independence, so the modern countries share the same moronic borders as the old colonies
2) Tribalism isn't even the biggest problem -- we've continually interfered in the building of power structures in the quest for cheap mineral resources for our countries' companies. We've installed dictator after dictator, constantly destabilising the region decade after decade.
Every single time a new "threat" has been promoted (shoebombs, binary liquid juju etc), there are people all over the internet saying "yeah, but the easiest way would be to replace your laptop battery with a block of C4. They look the same on the X-ray.
They've been saying this for the best part of 20 years, and only now has it become a credible threat? Terrorists don't read the internet enough....
Lots of current models of printer can print JPEGs off memory sticks -- compute power has returned to the printer. But even then, an open-source printer with an open source driver would be in the same place.
I'm sure it would start as a niche geek item, but there would be sectors that would quickly see the benefits -- small language schools, tutors etc.
Not to mention the number of manufacturers in China that would quickly commoditise the thing.
Yes, but that's the wrong way round. What we need is the courts to ban this behaviour; then the printer manufacturers will have to start making the printers more expensive to make their profits on the first sale. At that point, the market will be balanced.
PSA: Canon printers (at least the cheapo models I've bought at walmart) will use whatever cartridge and let you bleed them completely dry, instead of suddenly refusing to work when they hit 10% full or whatever like some models. IIRC a warning light turns on when you're low on ink but you're free to just ignore it.
Plus you don't need a color cartridge installed if you only want to print b&w.
As I recall it, back in the 90s, clogged nozzles were a huge problem for inkjet printers. Canon addressed the problem by making the print-head assembly part of the cartridge, so if there was problem with the heads, new ink sorted it -- it resulted in a more expensive ink cartridge, but it was a selling point for a lot of customers. I believe Canon still have the heads on the cartridge (or at least for some models), although now with the massive profit margins on cartridges, theirs don't seem to be much different in price from other manufacturers'.
This has also meant that with Canon, you can run ink cartridges as low as you like without risking damage to your printer -- with Epson etc, if you run the ink too low, you risk getting an airlock in the print head, killing the printer, so the devices are set to avoid letting you do that. This is also why Epson printers run so much ink through the heads after a cartridge change -- to clear the heads just in case the user had left it lying a week or so between changes.
But if printers were designed to be maintainable, with modular heads that could be snapped out and replaced, this wouldn't be a problem....
There's more to it than that though -- the entire printer market is a mess that's good for manufacturers, but bad for consumers, the economy and the environment.
There has been no major innovation in printing technology since the start of the century. Ink dot sizes are limited by physics and as small as they need to be for most consumer uses. Manufacturers basically sell us the same thing every five years. To encourage us to upgrade, they make the cartridges harder to buy locally... but that strategy is now useless as all they've achieved is that it's now a practical impossibility for any average-sized shop to stock ink cartridges, and you can only get them from superstores or order them online, and in the process they've killed off stationers, as they can't supply the office consumables you're mostly likely to want to buy at short notice. As a result, we're dumping otherwise serviceable printers at an unsustainable rate (and in the process, we're ditching working scanners, too). And the custom firmware on each one means that you have to ditch a working wifi printer and spring for a new one because that new tablet you got for Christmas only uses a particular protocol.
It is time that someone stepped up to the plate and produced an international standard for serviceable inkjet printers with a standard head assembly that can be easily pulled out and replaced on breaking, featuring refillable ink reservoirs, and with a standard firmware that can be updated when new protocols like Airprint come out.
A modular design that means you can upgrade from A4 printing to A3 by buying a bigger case with a longer print track. Where upgrading from mono to 4-ink or even to 7 ink isn't a matter of buying a whole new machine, but just swapping out the head assembly.
Not only would this reduce waste and long-term running costs, but local shops would be able to stock ink and printer supplies again. Everyone wins. Except HP, Epson and Lexmark.
Currently Python is most popular language as it is very easy to learn. The reason is we don't need to have much experience of coding to learn this language.
I'm not sure that's true in a general. Python is at heart just another generic C-alike.
Python's strength lies in the fact that it was designed with iterables at its core, and for k in keys: is a lot easier to deal with than for (i=0; i . In a sense, this makes it easier to learn -- iterables just make for more accessible and readily understandable learning tasks -- but at the end of the day, a heck of a lot of teaching syllabuses still assume C-style programming, whether simply because that's the way it was before or because the course organisers want to teach a generic paradigm and want their students to be able to transfer to C easily.
As I understand it, Python is the most common language used in high school computing classes in Scotland; however, the national curriculum mandates teaching of arrays and the number-controlled for loop. Python doesn't have arrays (the CS curriculum talks about fixed length and all data being of the same type, and kids can quickly find out for themselves that that's not true in Python) and everyone ends up teaching kids to write for i in range(0,len(listname)): and then immediately item=listname[i] rather than for item in listname .
This sort of contortion hides the logic behind Python and makes programming seem even more arcane and arbitrary.
Slashdot Mirror
...and this is why this whole notion of "race" makes no sense whatsoever. Someone who is pale-skinned and probably descended from white European settlers is not white because of the country of his origin.
Maybe they're expecting to get a below average sized iceberg, and they're probably accounting for very significant losses to melting and contamination around the edges. A lot of the ice may never make it into the water supply.
Then why transport it as ice at all? Ice is less dense than liquid water, so you're wasting a lot of space in you supertanker. Also, at the end of the road, you're now going to have to store it somewhere, whereas the iceberg is intended to be self-storing, as they have judged the loss to melting and evaporation as acceptable and they're just going to let it bob about in the gulf until they need it.
No, it lost its meaning when science decided there was no such thing as race. However, I do think that calling a country run by people with different pigmentation from you stupid probably counts as racism.
Wow, you have no dreams, curiosity or sense of adventure. It can't be done. Don't leave your basement, you might achieve something.
Since I left my comfortable job and started following my dreams, I have worked in 3 different countries overseas (and just recently accepted a job in a 4th), I've cycled the length of a country or two, I've fallen in love with women I probably shouldn't have (but enjoyed it nonetheless), and gained more qualifications than I could get in a lifetime. Even as I study and work, I'm still beavering away at home on a computer project that could change the world and how we think about language teaching.
I have dreams, I have curiosity, and I have a great sense of adventure. But that doesn't stop me being realistic. Mars is an attainable goal, but there's a lot of work still to do before we get there. To return to the marathon analogy of a previous poster: anyone can do it, but it takes a lot of work to get ready to do it.
The point is that I don't want to set the widths -- I want the rendering engine to pick whatever width suits the screen. I want to be able to same than element X should be the same size as element Y, without saying what that size actually is.
He was proven an imbecile when man-powered self-sustaining flight was proven possible. He was proven an imbecile by the first alchemist who turned lead into gold. He was proven wrong when we built colonies in the deep ocean trenches. Yes, everything -- everything -- is clearly possible.
Nope, it's completely correct and has been proven time and again over the course of human history.
Nonsense. While we have achieved many things that people at one time claimed were impossible, there are many things that they said were possible that we have not achieved. Where are our flying cars? We were expecting them last century, but they still haven't shown up. Our automatic doors are still pretty terrible. We still haven't even finished off the molten salt reactor, and that would be a relatively easy thing to do.
OO can reduce complexity, but it doesn't guarantee it -- programming needs to be taught, and we're not getting much better at teaching it, as far as I can see.
The problem OO has is that we have forgotten the mindset of the designers.
Much of the early work in computer languages was born out of the study of human language with formal grammars. I never fully appreciated OO until I started trying to do simple language generation, and OO actually seemed like the perfect model for dealing with verb conjugation groups and irregular verbs. All the examples for beginners about "mammals have four legs", "dogs are mammals", "Fido is a dog" are a bit trivial and aren't actually embodiments of the core logic.
Aside from flex-box, which is pretty new, you could also use percentages. Column 1 can be 10%, column 2 can be 30% -- you can also specify the width of the table as a percentage of the parent container. Oh, and with CSS classes, you can share those parameters across tables.
I know this can be done with CSS, but in order to do that, I need to choose a particular size
You already want to set a particular size, expressed in relative terms. Just use a relative unit, like percentages. I don't know how you've managed to miss this.
I can't say "I don't care about the actual size, but these 3 things should all be as big as each other."
Yes can. You've been able to do that for ~20 years. You just didn't know how. Now you do.
I know about percentages, but percentages are useless. If I have a small table (say 3 columns of 1-10 characters each), it may well be 100% of a mobile phone screen, but I wouldn't want to fill out 100% of desktop monitor with it. As soon as we start using percentages (which I learned ~20 years ago, incidentally) we are talking about size. I don't want to talk specifics, I just want to state a semantic relation between two items.
Because the browser is supposed to render the page however it feels is best for the end user. As a web developer, you're not supposed to be manually doing that.
That's why the web is so fucked up. Very few people actually use it the way it was designed to be used. Instead now we have shit pilled on crap to do things that were supposed to be taken care of for us. I don't fully understand my industry. Apparently if it isn't hard to do then it isn't worth doing. We have to artificially make everything harder than it needs to be.
My mistake was mentioning proportionality. The most basic use case for parametrisation of column widths would be a semantic one, and not a design one. If I have two tables that are supposed to be the same -- that are supposed to mean the same thing -- and I leave them to render as the engine sees fit, then visually they become different and semantics of the content are lost to the human reader. Maybe verb tables on a language learning site; maybe a single table that I want to break into sets of rows with annotations between them. If /. allowed tables in HTML posts I'd show you an example.
The reason HTML doesn't do that is that it's not about prentation. It's a semantic language, describing types and the semantic relationship of things to other things. CSS is a presentational language, concerned with layout (like width /height), colour, size, and other visual relationships. Properties like height don't mean anything to a screenreader.
I completely, completely get the point of semantic markup. However, I see "these two things are the same" as being part of semantics. Say I want to take a table published by someone else, and split it into multiple segments and comment on them after the rows. Suddenly, I now have ten tables instead of one single table. Each time I start a "new" table, the HTML renderer will render it independently of the previous ones. If I could set the column widths to table_col_width1, table_col_width2, ... , table_col_widthN; the renderer would know that the columns in all the tables are the same, and to me that's entirely in line with the concept of semantic markup.
The Github page doesn't give any examples that look like OO to me, which is A) not surprising, because what the hell would an OO markup language look like and B) very surprising, given that the whole DOM is OO from the ground up in modern rendering engines.
Anyway, on a tangent...
I see no real call for OO in web rendering, but the one thing I think is missing from HTML is the ability to parameterise things like column widths etc. Why cant I call column 1's width "x" and ask the renderer to make column 2's width "3x"? Or use these parameters across tables, so that the columns in table 1, table 2 and table 3 are all the same size?
I know this can be done with CSS, but in order to do that, I need to choose a particular size -- I can say "I don't care about the actual size, but these 3 things should all be as big as each other."
Mythbusters does less science than the catholic church.
Not surprising, given that the entire university system was invented by Catholic monks who sought to uncover the physical rules of the universe. (Investigating the rules of physics was seen as investigating God's work, and therefore a holy endeavour.)
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
It's a bit of an open secret, this -- a laptop battery shows up on an x-ray as a big block, and an appropriately-shaped explosive device in a battery compartment is therefore not incongruous. This is why we had to switch on our laptops at security in the late naughties, and still do in some airports. What baffles me is how this latest move helps -- a laptop in hand luggage can easily be x-rayed, swab tested and sniffed by a dog. A laptop wrapped up in the middle of a hold bag is a lot harder to check.
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Two problems:
1) Tribalism is a massive problem because we (the west) didn't give any consideration to tribal boundaries when we carved the Middle East and Africa into "colonies", and we didn't try to correct that before we granted independence, so the modern countries share the same moronic borders as the old colonies
2) Tribalism isn't even the biggest problem -- we've continually interfered in the building of power structures in the quest for cheap mineral resources for our countries' companies. We've installed dictator after dictator, constantly destabilising the region decade after decade.
They've been saying this for the best part of 20 years, and only now has it become a credible threat? Terrorists don't read the internet enough....
Lots of current models of printer can print JPEGs off memory sticks -- compute power has returned to the printer. But even then, an open-source printer with an open source driver would be in the same place.
I'm sure it would start as a niche geek item, but there would be sectors that would quickly see the benefits -- small language schools, tutors etc.
Not to mention the number of manufacturers in China that would quickly commoditise the thing.
Yes, but that's the wrong way round. What we need is the courts to ban this behaviour; then the printer manufacturers will have to start making the printers more expensive to make their profits on the first sale. At that point, the market will be balanced.
PSA: Canon printers (at least the cheapo models I've bought at walmart) will use whatever cartridge and let you bleed them completely dry, instead of suddenly refusing to work when they hit 10% full or whatever like some models. IIRC a warning light turns on when you're low on ink but you're free to just ignore it.
Plus you don't need a color cartridge installed if you only want to print b&w.
As I recall it, back in the 90s, clogged nozzles were a huge problem for inkjet printers. Canon addressed the problem by making the print-head assembly part of the cartridge, so if there was problem with the heads, new ink sorted it -- it resulted in a more expensive ink cartridge, but it was a selling point for a lot of customers. I believe Canon still have the heads on the cartridge (or at least for some models), although now with the massive profit margins on cartridges, theirs don't seem to be much different in price from other manufacturers'.
This has also meant that with Canon, you can run ink cartridges as low as you like without risking damage to your printer -- with Epson etc, if you run the ink too low, you risk getting an airlock in the print head, killing the printer, so the devices are set to avoid letting you do that. This is also why Epson printers run so much ink through the heads after a cartridge change -- to clear the heads just in case the user had left it lying a week or so between changes.
But if printers were designed to be maintainable, with modular heads that could be snapped out and replaced, this wouldn't be a problem....
never buy anything Lexmark.
There's more to it than that though -- the entire printer market is a mess that's good for manufacturers, but bad for consumers, the economy and the environment.
There has been no major innovation in printing technology since the start of the century. Ink dot sizes are limited by physics and as small as they need to be for most consumer uses. Manufacturers basically sell us the same thing every five years. To encourage us to upgrade, they make the cartridges harder to buy locally... but that strategy is now useless as all they've achieved is that it's now a practical impossibility for any average-sized shop to stock ink cartridges, and you can only get them from superstores or order them online, and in the process they've killed off stationers, as they can't supply the office consumables you're mostly likely to want to buy at short notice. As a result, we're dumping otherwise serviceable printers at an unsustainable rate (and in the process, we're ditching working scanners, too). And the custom firmware on each one means that you have to ditch a working wifi printer and spring for a new one because that new tablet you got for Christmas only uses a particular protocol.
It is time that someone stepped up to the plate and produced an international standard for serviceable inkjet printers with a standard head assembly that can be easily pulled out and replaced on breaking, featuring refillable ink reservoirs, and with a standard firmware that can be updated when new protocols like Airprint come out.
A modular design that means you can upgrade from A4 printing to A3 by buying a bigger case with a longer print track. Where upgrading from mono to 4-ink or even to 7 ink isn't a matter of buying a whole new machine, but just swapping out the head assembly.
Not only would this reduce waste and long-term running costs, but local shops would be able to stock ink and printer supplies again. Everyone wins. Except HP, Epson and Lexmark.
That suggests to me that you've had a very narrow experience of programming languages, and have stuck to the C-alikes.
Currently Python is most popular language as it is very easy to learn. The reason is we don't need to have much experience of coding to learn this language.
I'm not sure that's true in a general. Python is at heart just another generic C-alike.
Python's strength lies in the fact that it was designed with iterables at its core, and for k in keys: is a lot easier to deal with than for (i=0; i . In a sense, this makes it easier to learn -- iterables just make for more accessible and readily understandable learning tasks -- but at the end of the day, a heck of a lot of teaching syllabuses still assume C-style programming, whether simply because that's the way it was before or because the course organisers want to teach a generic paradigm and want their students to be able to transfer to C easily.
As I understand it, Python is the most common language used in high school computing classes in Scotland; however, the national curriculum mandates teaching of arrays and the number-controlled for loop. Python doesn't have arrays (the CS curriculum talks about fixed length and all data being of the same type, and kids can quickly find out for themselves that that's not true in Python) and everyone ends up teaching kids to write for i in range(0,len(listname)): and then immediately item=listname[i] rather than for item in listname .
This sort of contortion hides the logic behind Python and makes programming seem even more arcane and arbitrary.
Yeah, this winter it's been utterly wrecking my bike chain.