Two decades ago, the instruction set still mattered because it was closely tied to how the processor executed things. Today, we can put enough logic between the instruction strem and the processor that the instruction set makes no difference anymore.
And VLIW in particular is quite unconvincing: processors should rely less on compilers, not impose a bigger burden on software writers.
Instead, they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun, and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
You've got to be kidding. SWT is entirely non-proprietary and open source--you can implement it freely, you can change it, you can use the code, whatever.
That is in sharp contrast to Swing. Not only are there no open source implementations of Swing, you can't even implement it without satisfying a boatload of legal requirements imposed on you by Sun.
Hats off to Sun's PR department: they have lots of people like you thinking that black is white.
1: Sun develops Java. We all owe them for that. Let's face it. Love it or hate it, Sun has created a widely used language. They control what goes into the language.
That's incredibly naive. Sun developed a failed, broken, nearly unusable language for desktop television. Most of what happened afterwards was volunteer work by the Java community. The fact that Sun has arranged to effectively turn all that volunteer work into their property only makes things worse.
But, Sun's position is understandable. The presence of programming tools, in this corporate climate, can make or break a language.
Well, golly, isn't 2004 a little too late to think about that? If Sun had genuinely thought this through, that little tidbit might have occurred to them in 1996, when Java first came out. They left it to others to create development tools and now they want to control the market for that, too?
Imagine, if Sun had more a voice in eclipse development, think of what is possible!!! What a concept? The language developers and the IDE developers working togeter?
We know what happens when Sun gets involved in GUIs and IDEs: they have a twenty year record of losing in the market. They just don't know how to do it.
JAVA IS SUN'S LANGUAGE.
Yes, and don't you forget it: Java is Sun-proprietary. And that's why people should stop using it: there are excellent, non-proprietary alternatives out there and have been since before Sun even "invented" Java.
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist [microsoft.com] at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development
Why would I care whether Sun beats Microsoft? Sun is just trying to replace one proprietary platform with another.
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
And that's a nice, sane attitude to take. In the process, open source prospers. The only one who suffers is Sun, but why should anybody really care (other than their shareholders)?
"The big-picture (goal) is a Java technology solution that ensures no 'lock in' to a given platform," the letter states.
That is, no lock-in other than into Java itself, of course.
In particular, Sun warned that the new bylaws of Eclipse give the position of executive director, now held by an IBM employee, an "unusual amount of power" to dictate the work of the open-source group. Sun also questioned whether IBM employees will continue to make up the majority of project staffers.
Sun is one to talk. Eclipse is open source. Anybody can take it and fork it if they don't like what the Eclipse effort is doing.
That's in stark contrast to Sun's Java implementation: not only is it fully owned and controlled by Sun, Sun even owns the patents and copyrights related to the specifications. And Sun's "Java Community Effort" is run by numerous people from Sun. And because Sun is so afraid that people are going to run away in droves given a choice to do their own thing, they are refusing to open up their Java specs or implementation. They say there is "a risk of forking"--you bet there is, given how poor a job Sun has been doing.
So, what does that mean? IBM has a little influence over an open source effort to produce one of many development tools, an influence that only matters as long as Eclipse does a good job because the minute they stop, people will fork it. Sun, on the other hand, has sunk their teeth and claws into the Java standard and platform and isn't letting go. Sun has the entire industry by the throat and various other unmentionable parts.
Sun's hypocrisy is simply astounding. What I can't figure out is whether anybody at Sun actually believes the PR bullshit they are releasing or whether the entire company is in on it.
You are crazy. Prove it (at least for yourself). [...] The Mac OS, in any incarnation, is more secure than Windows.
Apparently, in all that time, you haven't learned to read. The question isn't whether MacOS is "more secure" than Windows, the question is whether it is "secure out of the box", and it isn't. Otherwise, MacOS wouldn't start downloading "security updates" as soon as you give it a chance.
Even sitting in front of a Mac OS machine, one can almost ("never say never") not screw-up the system--especially the running system. I know that is not true of Windows: one wrong figure in the right file, using a text editor, and the machine is screwed up.
MacOS, like any other OS, has thousands of files in which a single byte difference would cause the system to become completely unusable. That's the way we design computers these days.
Apple machines also have no BIOS to disconfigure.
No, they have OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware lets you fubar the machine much more reliably than the BIOS (that's not a bad thing, though: OpenFirmware is pretty nice).
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free.
Well, apparently VxWorks itself has some serious bugs.
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc
There is no reason for the propulsion system to malfunction just because it "walks off the end of a garbage pointer". Systems can and should be designed that half the subcomponents can "walk off the end of a garbage pointer" and the whole thing should still function.
But you are right to this degree: the issue is not "protected memory". Protected memory is itself a poor woraround for a language that is ridiculously poor at error handling and that nothing safety-critical or even mildly important should ever get written in: C.
The sad fact is that the quality of programming for embedded systems is as poor as for anything; they simply try to compensate for that with more testing. And that's not the way to do it.
Both of those use the same markup. One is ~800px wide, the other 320px wide. This is a demo I'm preparing for a tutorial on some CSS techniques.
Yes CSS is useful. There are quite a few properties that can be abstracted out of the content using CSS (and even more with JavaScript). My point is just that CSS is still pretty far away from the kinds of separations of style/content that other common typesetting systems routinely achieve.
I didn't add extraneous divs to achieve the second layout, just structured my document correctly from the start.
Right, but in both layouts, the main content just flows straight down inside a single rectangle and the stuff around it is fairly static from a layout perspective as well, so it wouldn't need more DIVs.
Note that your navigational elements don't adapt when I force a bigger font (try 24px). That might actually be fixable, but it is quite common: most of the more interesting layouts . But you also use a lot of text-in-graphics.
Also, neither of those two layouts seems to adapt in any interesting way to window size. In fact, rather than degrading properly for small windows, the navigational elements on the overcaffeinated.net home page just disappear entirely to the left (and can't even be reached with scrolling) in Mozilla 1.5.
The holy grail is really to let you mark things up in XML and then specify presentation using some combination of something-like-XSLT, something-like-CSS, and maybe something-like-JavaScript. But we aren't there yet. And that's a shame because the technology is well-known in some circles, just, apparently, not by the people who designed those standards.
"FBI security guys are using Macs because, 'those machines can do just about anything: run software for Mac, Unix, or Windows, using either a GUI or the command line. And they're secure out of the box.'
I think this quote is more a testament to the incompetence of the FBI security guys than a testament to the security of the Mac. Yes, the Mac indeed comes with security problems out of the box, just like Windows and Linux and almost everything else.
Under UNIX, people traditionally use the file system as the database. It's an intuitive, hierarchical database supporting many of the features you expect from databases. You get hierarchical string-based keys and arbitrary binary content (up to many Gigabytes per key). This works best with ReiserFS, but works well enough with the other file systems as well. And everything knows how to access the file system.
The next database system people use a lot is dbm and its variants. They are good for when you need to hold lots of tiny data items and you need high performance. If your data items are big or you don't need high performance, go back to the file system. Dbm is, again, intuitive, simple, and powerful. And it's accessible from lots of different languages.
If you want something close to an RDBMS without using an RDBMS, have a look at Metakit.
Altogether, I think UNIX/Linux developers should mostly stick with using the file system as a database.
There is really nothing "extreme" or new about XP--it's simply that someone gave a name to decades old practices. Many OSS projects are already using XP, whether they call it that or not.
Are those practices good? That depends on the specific people, user community, and the project. XP is no more a silver bullet than anything else.
Ok. Those things can't be done with pure CSS. You have a point there. They can be done with a combination of javascript/CSS, though
Oh? Give it a try. A lot of them involve some pretty tricky optimization, not the kind of thing you could do in JavaScript even if JavaScript had all the information actually available to it.
What you're describing is stuff that graphic designers love and wish web pages could do. It's also stuff that doesn't work for the internet. You can't assume that everyone uses the same software/hardware, or that everyone has X font.
Actually, the complete opposite is true. It is precisely because CSS can't do these things that web pages mix content and presentation. For example, it is precisely because CSS can't get at precise font metrics that graphic designers have to hard-code assumptions about fonts into the sizes of bounding boxes and cross their fingers. It is exactly those things that then break when users don't have the "right" fonts or try to override font choices.
What's more: even if you can do all that stuff, are you really doing it to arbitrary text?
Not "arbitrary text", but "arbitrary text marked up for that style". The point is that LaTeX can have dozens of wildly different "article" styles and hundreds of thousands of different article texts, and you can mix and match them, and they work.
The same is not true for CSS: you cannot design anything even remotely close to article styles with CSS (or even CSS and JS). You can't even do a simple two column style that works reliably.
And if you're really putting this all together from outside the document (which would be just arbitrary text) doesn't that defeat the purpose originally stated,
Again, you misread. I didn't claim that LaTeX can render "arbitrary text", I claimed (carefully) that it can render "arbitrary textual content", that is, as long as that content that has been marked up correctly logically (OK, LaTeX has some glitches in the implementation, but it is at least trying to do the right thing and usually succeeding).
We're not just talking columns and alignment here. We're talking a full-fledged web site layout.
Yes, and the logical layout for that would consist of logical markup like like identifying link relationships, link text, body text, and all that. You know, roughly like what people are actually trying to do with CSS: a DIV for site navigation, a DIV for related information, a DIV for body text, a DIV for page information, a DIV for the header, and a DIV for the company logo. With a decent layout system, I should be able to define styles that transform that into separate pages, or into a sequence of balanced columns, or lots of other things, independent of what those DIVs actually contain. But with CSS, I just can't (and neither can you...).
Another problem with CSS is that what it actually does do in terms of making geometric tradeoffs (e.g., table column sizing, float placement) is often so horrendously complex that it is essentially unpredictable (read the sections on table sizing or float placement and try to reason about them).
It's "safe" to eat, because your body can't digest it. It just passes through and give you the radioactive shits. My favorite link on the subject is the most infuriating to environmentalists.
There is nothing "infuriating" about that link--it is just bogus, stupid, and irrelevant.
Yes, bulk Plutonium (grains to chunks) is relatively inert as long as it isn't close to critical. As such, it is pretty harmless. You may well be able to swallow pellets and get away with it.
But Plutonium powder combusts spontaneously in air and the resulting fine particles are quite harmful when inhaled. In the environment, Plutonium may also form various salts that may then be more readily absorbed and stored in tissues. And once it's in the body, either as fine particles or as salts, Plutonium is a serious radiological poison.
And if you release it into the environment, it decays into a lot of radioactive junk that you don't want to have around either.
So, again, the fact that chunks of pure, fresh, metallic Plutonium may be fairly inert tells you nothing about the dangers resulting from a release during an accident. And it is also completely irrelevant to the question of whether you want to scatter it all over Mars in an accident, where the concern is scientific, not safety.
Seems to mean, nothing. It's not going to produce a nuclear blast (which no one would care about), it's not going to kill a bunch of inhabitants, it's not even going to increase the background radiation by much. (Mars already gets quite a dose.)
Why do you think I give a damn about the human explorers? The fallout is going to mess up scientific experiments, whether or not there is a chain reaction. The fact that you put several hundred of pounds of meat and bacteria on board, which may also get scattered across the landscape if the crash is milder, is far worse than the radioactivity. And if they happen to make a smooth landing and actually walk around, that's no better.
In fact, NASA burnt up an RTG in the atmosphere without any ill effects to anyone.
Now, harm to people on earth, that is something to worry about. They don't have a choice. You seem to live by the out-of-sight-out-of-mind philosophy. It doesn't matter if your release of radioactivity is known to kill, say, 100 people statistically because, hey, nobody can ever track it down.
Then why was NERVA created? Why is GCNR being developed? Why is JIMO going to Jupiter with a fully loaded Nuclear Reactor?
So far, nobody has tried to land a nuclear reactor on a planet that we are actually interested in. And, yes, people pushing nuclear technology obviously manage to get funding for something at some point but that doesn't mean it makes sense or it will make it into a project when all is said and done.
NASA's only problem is the FUD surrounding nuclear power. I'm just doing my part to clear that out of the way.
By doing what? By proposing to add the certainty and disaster of biological contamination to the risk and inconvenience of nuclear contamination? By just ignoring risks to people where deaths can't be attributed to individuals?
Manned exploration of Mars is a collossal waste of money and would constitute a scientific disaster. And nuclear propulsion is both unnecessary for Mars exploration and has some unnecessary additional risks.
As for JIMO, it is completely different technology and doesn't involve people (although if you volunteer, maybe we can encase you in plastic and leave you in orbit without too much risk to the mission). Whether JIMO will happen still needs to be seen. With JIMO, the issues are more political anyway: Europe and Asia may not want the US putting fission reactors in space.
We have the technology already. We just need to stop putzing around and *use* nuclear power.
Yes, just what we need: two out of three Mars landers crashing, only this time with lots of highly radioactive materials on board. That will just have amazing potential for messing up lots of future scientific experiments. And if they surive the landing, hey, they probably have a century of sitting around, being subjected to all sorts of environmental conditions we have no experience with, to deteriorate and fall apart.
After all, how dare NASA send up a few pounds of plutonium on space craft. Why, that Cassini thing nearly killed everyone!
Spare us your sarcasm. By your reasoning, smoking isn't dangerous either; I mean, we see people smoke every day and you don't see them fall over dead, do you? And people drive in cars all the time without problems, so obviously--by your reasoning--driving cars must be risk free. Give me a break.
Thankfully, people like you don't run our space program.
You could just as easily have asked what the scientific or monetary reasons were for Marco Polo to go to Asia, da Gama to go around the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus to go to America, or Magellan to sail around the world.
Yes, one could easily have asked that, and one did ask that. And those kinds of expeditions fall into two categories: those that were financed because the people putting in the money hoped to make a decent return (the usual case), and those who put in money because they had too much of it and wanted to do something fun with it.
Or what the scientific or monetary reasons for NASA to put men on the moon 40 years ago.
None whatsoever. The moon landing was a useless, overly expensive PR stunt in America's arms race with the Soviets.
So, the benchmarks show maybe a 10-15% difference in favor of Sun's compiler. Does that Sun's compiler a "clear winner"? I think not.
First of all, it's far from clear that those differences are real. You can get much bigger differences from just changes in caching behavior, even with the same compiler.
Then, there is the question of whether Sun's compiler is actually correct. A lot of commercial compilers intentionally skirt or break the letter of the ANSI standards once you start enabling optimizations. GNU C/C++ is usually more careful.
Finally, you have to ask whether it matters. So, Sun's overpriced machines using their overpriced compilers run a bit faster than their overpriced machines using a free compiler. So what? If you want bang for the buck, or even just maximum bang, why in the world would you buy a Sun these days anyway?
Please suggest what you think LaTeX can do that CSS can't. Prior to that, though, you may want to take a look at the spec (and yes, most of that stuff does have good support, even in Explorer).
Here are some things:
Write a style sheet that takes text, breaks it into screen sized pages.
Write a style sheet that breaks text into a sequence of columns of fixed width and with the same height as the viewport, letting the user scroll horizontally through the columns.
Write a style sheet that puts text into two columns and balances the height of the two columns.
Place two boxes onto the page and have text first fill one box then the other (i.e., have the text flow between them).
Put text into a tight-fitting box with an aspect ration of 4:3 for a chosen font.
Resize an image to be the same size as a piece of text.
Resize an image to be the same size as the upper case character "X" in the font that is used in the default paragraph mode.
Load just enough text and graphics from the server to fill a single window.
The list goes on and on and on. LaTeX can do all of those because (1) it's a full programming language and (2) it has full access to font metrics.
Parts can be moved around, floated, made to disappear, etc. The only thing you need is to mark up each thing as what it is (paragraphs, blockquotes, headers, etc).
Yup, but that's not what separating content and presentation means. In order to separate content and presentation, you'd have to be able to write interesting style files that work for lots of different kinds of content. But the set of CSS styles that actually work correctly independent of content is very limited. Try doing something as trivial as turning arbitrary text into two balanced side-by-side columns. You can't do it with CSS.
So, using CSS, you can do nearly arbitrary things with a specific piece of content, or you can do a very limited set of things with almost any content. But to separate content and presentation, the style needs to be able to adapt to a wide range of textual content, and that CSS can't do. TeX/LaTeX can, as can many other formatters, so it's not like it's an unsolved problem. CSS is just way too limited.
Still, if you're 61 years old, it makes sense to borrow a page from Charlie Chaplin and try to throw a wrench into the machine. John Bauman is 61 years old. More than a year ago, Northeast Utilities fired Bauman and 200 other IT consultants. From his home in Meriden, Connecticut, he created the Organization for the Rights of American Workers. The mission: to protest H1-B and L-1 visas.
Bauman's problem isn't the H1-B's and L-1's. It's not the Indians who are competing with him. Bauman's problem is the lack of job protection for US workers, the lack of life planning, and the lack of insurance.
On the one hand, Americans are screaming for low taxes and smaller government. They pride themselves on a capitalist economy with few restraints and few protections.
Fine, but then Americans should be investing their money in private insurance and retirement plans. Instead, it goes into SUVs, gas, and other consumables. The net result is that people end up with no income and no retirement funds at age 61 and then they blame the Indians for their plight.
A compassionate society must somehow help its John Baumans.
The US isn't a compassionate society--the voters don't want it to be. If the US were a compassionate society, the choice wouldn't be between people like Bush, Reagan, and Clinton, who are basically outdoing each other on trying to ratchet down social services.
And I wonder where John Bauman was during past elections. Did he work for the candidates that preached compassion and that advocated more protections, more social services, and a tighter social safety net? Or did he laugh at them as wimps and whiners, like 90% of America?
While those designs vary color and text a lot, they actually illustrate how primitive CSS is: almost all of them are single column text with some stuff shoved into the margins.
Some of the style sheets have deep knowledge about the content (i.e., the individual paragraphs). Almost all of them are highly resolution dependent and fail to render correctly for fonts whose metrics differ from those they assume. Many place things incorrectly at absolute coordinates and don't work correctly at small or large window sizes. Some depend on text-rendered-as-graphics, which obviously won't work if you apply it to different content.
Most importantly, however, all those styles only work for very specific content: you can't apply those CSS styles to other documents and obtain any kind of decent rendition. All the Zen Garden shows is that you can vary the appearance of a single piece of text with many styles. That is not "separating content and presentation".
LaTeX comes close to separating content and presentation: you can have many different kinds of texts and many different kinds of styles, and you can mix and match them.
CSS, on the other hand, just isn't powerful enough to separate content and presentation in any interesting, general way. It doesn't even come close. CSS is a useful tool for coding some minor variations of the presentation of content, but that's all. And you have to be very careful; the examples in the Zen Garden are clear examples of how not to do it.
I'd have to disagree with that. Most of the standards movement for web design focuses on "semantic markup". Only headings, paragraphs, and the like should be included here. No fonts, colors, etc. This is your content. Yes it has tags, but when using XHTML 1.0 Strict it is also XML, meaning that an XSLT could be used to generate that content from some XML source on the server if necessary. Using CSS to do placement & styling of elements is very feasible for 95+% of the market.
You're missing my point. My point is that CSS is insufficient to let people express the kinds of presentations of content they might want to create. Yes, it lets you fiddle a little with font sizes, colors, and some placement and floats. But none of that support even comes close to what one would need to do the kinds of things that people who design document styles would want to do.
In fact, the link "A List Apart" that you point to shows some of the inadequacies of CSS for specifying presentations; but, frankly, it barely scratches the surface.
No, adding XSLT into the mix is not sufficient either. XSL:FO was an attempt to give people more control, but even XSL:FO is insufficiently powerful for expressing quite common document style design choices (and both CSL and XSL:FO are far too complex for the limited functionality they actually offer).
Hence my point: you get a very limited set of presentation choices with CSS; take advantage of them as much as you can. But because the set of choices is so limited, there are many aspects of the presentation that will, effectively, be hard coded into your HTML even if you use all facilities for semantic markup available in HTML (or XML+XSLT).
Slashdot Mirror
Two decades ago, the instruction set still mattered because it was closely tied to how the processor executed things. Today, we can put enough logic between the instruction strem and the processor that the instruction set makes no difference anymore.
And VLIW in particular is quite unconvincing: processors should rely less on compilers, not impose a bigger burden on software writers.
for desktop television.
Oops--make that settop boxes.
Instead, they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun, and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
You've got to be kidding. SWT is entirely non-proprietary and open source--you can implement it freely, you can change it, you can use the code, whatever.
That is in sharp contrast to Swing. Not only are there no open source implementations of Swing, you can't even implement it without satisfying a boatload of legal requirements imposed on you by Sun.
Hats off to Sun's PR department: they have lots of people like you thinking that black is white.
1: Sun develops Java. We all owe them for that. Let's face it. Love it or hate it, Sun has created a widely used language. They control what goes into the language.
That's incredibly naive. Sun developed a failed, broken, nearly unusable language for desktop television. Most of what happened afterwards was volunteer work by the Java community. The fact that Sun has arranged to effectively turn all that volunteer work into their property only makes things worse.
But, Sun's position is understandable. The presence of programming tools, in this corporate climate, can make or break a language.
Well, golly, isn't 2004 a little too late to think about that? If Sun had genuinely thought this through, that little tidbit might have occurred to them in 1996, when Java first came out. They left it to others to create development tools and now they want to control the market for that, too?
Imagine, if Sun had more a voice in eclipse development, think of what is possible!!! What a concept? The language developers and the IDE developers working togeter?
We know what happens when Sun gets involved in GUIs and IDEs: they have a twenty year record of losing in the market. They just don't know how to do it.
JAVA IS SUN'S LANGUAGE.
Yes, and don't you forget it: Java is Sun-proprietary. And that's why people should stop using it: there are excellent, non-proprietary alternatives out there and have been since before Sun even "invented" Java.
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist [microsoft.com] at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development
Why would I care whether Sun beats Microsoft? Sun is just trying to replace one proprietary platform with another.
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
And that's a nice, sane attitude to take. In the process, open source prospers. The only one who suffers is Sun, but why should anybody really care (other than their shareholders)?
"The big-picture (goal) is a Java technology solution that ensures no 'lock in' to a given platform," the letter states.
That is, no lock-in other than into Java itself, of course.
In particular, Sun warned that the new bylaws of Eclipse give the position of executive director, now held by an IBM employee, an "unusual amount of power" to dictate the work of the open-source group. Sun also questioned whether IBM employees will continue to make up the majority of project staffers.
Sun is one to talk. Eclipse is open source. Anybody can take it and fork it if they don't like what the Eclipse effort is doing.
That's in stark contrast to Sun's Java implementation: not only is it fully owned and controlled by Sun, Sun even owns the patents and copyrights related to the specifications. And Sun's "Java Community Effort" is run by numerous people from Sun. And because Sun is so afraid that people are going to run away in droves given a choice to do their own thing, they are refusing to open up their Java specs or implementation. They say there is "a risk of forking"--you bet there is, given how poor a job Sun has been doing.
So, what does that mean? IBM has a little influence over an open source effort to produce one of many development tools, an influence that only matters as long as Eclipse does a good job because the minute they stop, people will fork it. Sun, on the other hand, has sunk their teeth and claws into the Java standard and platform and isn't letting go. Sun has the entire industry by the throat and various other unmentionable parts.
Sun's hypocrisy is simply astounding. What I can't figure out is whether anybody at Sun actually believes the PR bullshit they are releasing or whether the entire company is in on it.
You are crazy. Prove it (at least for yourself). [...] The Mac OS, in any incarnation, is more secure than Windows.
Apparently, in all that time, you haven't learned to read. The question isn't whether MacOS is "more secure" than Windows, the question is whether it is "secure out of the box", and it isn't. Otherwise, MacOS wouldn't start downloading "security updates" as soon as you give it a chance.
Even sitting in front of a Mac OS machine, one can almost ("never say never") not screw-up the system--especially the running system. I know that is not true of Windows: one wrong figure in the right file, using a text editor, and the machine is screwed up.
MacOS, like any other OS, has thousands of files in which a single byte difference would cause the system to become completely unusable. That's the way we design computers these days.
Apple machines also have no BIOS to disconfigure.
No, they have OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware lets you fubar the machine much more reliably than the BIOS (that's not a bad thing, though: OpenFirmware is pretty nice).
Stuff running in such environments is damn near bug-free.
Well, apparently VxWorks itself has some serious bugs.
There's usually no point in memory protection. If the propulsion system walks off the end of a garbage pointer, mission's over. No real use in keeping the guidance system going; it's already on a ballistic uncontrollable arc
There is no reason for the propulsion system to malfunction just because it "walks off the end of a garbage pointer". Systems can and should be designed that half the subcomponents can "walk off the end of a garbage pointer" and the whole thing should still function.
But you are right to this degree: the issue is not "protected memory". Protected memory is itself a poor woraround for a language that is ridiculously poor at error handling and that nothing safety-critical or even mildly important should ever get written in: C.
The sad fact is that the quality of programming for embedded systems is as poor as for anything; they simply try to compensate for that with more testing. And that's not the way to do it.
Both of those use the same markup. One is ~800px wide, the other 320px wide. This is a demo I'm preparing for a tutorial on some CSS techniques.
Yes CSS is useful. There are quite a few properties that can be abstracted out of the content using CSS (and even more with JavaScript). My point is just that CSS is still pretty far away from the kinds of separations of style/content that other common typesetting systems routinely achieve.
I didn't add extraneous divs to achieve the second layout, just structured my document correctly from the start.
Right, but in both layouts, the main content just flows straight down inside a single rectangle and the stuff around it is fairly static from a layout perspective as well, so it wouldn't need more DIVs.
Note that your navigational elements don't adapt when I force a bigger font (try 24px). That might actually be fixable, but it is quite common: most of the more interesting layouts . But you also use a lot of text-in-graphics.
Also, neither of those two layouts seems to adapt in any interesting way to window size. In fact, rather than degrading properly for small windows, the navigational elements on the overcaffeinated.net home page just disappear entirely to the left (and can't even be reached with scrolling) in Mozilla 1.5.
The holy grail is really to let you mark things up in XML and then specify presentation using some combination of something-like-XSLT, something-like-CSS, and maybe something-like-JavaScript. But we aren't there yet. And that's a shame because the technology is well-known in some circles, just, apparently, not by the people who designed those standards.
"FBI security guys are using Macs because, 'those machines can do just about anything: run software for Mac, Unix, or Windows, using either a GUI or the command line. And they're secure out of the box.'
I think this quote is more a testament to the incompetence of the FBI security guys than a testament to the security of the Mac. Yes, the Mac indeed comes with security problems out of the box, just like Windows and Linux and almost everything else.
Under UNIX, people traditionally use the file system as the database. It's an intuitive, hierarchical database supporting many of the features you expect from databases. You get hierarchical string-based keys and arbitrary binary content (up to many Gigabytes per key). This works best with ReiserFS, but works well enough with the other file systems as well. And everything knows how to access the file system.
The next database system people use a lot is dbm and its variants. They are good for when you need to hold lots of tiny data items and you need high performance. If your data items are big or you don't need high performance, go back to the file system. Dbm is, again, intuitive, simple, and powerful. And it's accessible from lots of different languages.
If you want something close to an RDBMS without using an RDBMS, have a look at Metakit.
Altogether, I think UNIX/Linux developers should mostly stick with using the file system as a database.
There is really nothing "extreme" or new about XP--it's simply that someone gave a name to decades old practices. Many OSS projects are already using XP, whether they call it that or not.
Are those practices good? That depends on the specific people, user community, and the project. XP is no more a silver bullet than anything else.
Ok. Those things can't be done with pure CSS. You have a point there. They can be done with a combination of javascript/CSS, though
Oh? Give it a try. A lot of them involve some pretty tricky optimization, not the kind of thing you could do in JavaScript even if JavaScript had all the information actually available to it.
What you're describing is stuff that graphic designers love and wish web pages could do. It's also stuff that doesn't work for the internet. You can't assume that everyone uses the same software/hardware, or that everyone has X font.
Actually, the complete opposite is true. It is precisely because CSS can't do these things that web pages mix content and presentation. For example, it is precisely because CSS can't get at precise font metrics that graphic designers have to hard-code assumptions about fonts into the sizes of bounding boxes and cross their fingers. It is exactly those things that then break when users don't have the "right" fonts or try to override font choices.
What's more: even if you can do all that stuff, are you really doing it to arbitrary text?
Not "arbitrary text", but "arbitrary text marked up for that style". The point is that LaTeX can have dozens of wildly different "article" styles and hundreds of thousands of different article texts, and you can mix and match them, and they work.
The same is not true for CSS: you cannot design anything even remotely close to article styles with CSS (or even CSS and JS). You can't even do a simple two column style that works reliably.
And if you're really putting this all together from outside the document (which would be just arbitrary text) doesn't that defeat the purpose originally stated,
Again, you misread. I didn't claim that LaTeX can render "arbitrary text", I claimed (carefully) that it can render "arbitrary textual content", that is, as long as that content that has been marked up correctly logically (OK, LaTeX has some glitches in the implementation, but it is at least trying to do the right thing and usually succeeding).
We're not just talking columns and alignment here. We're talking a full-fledged web site layout.
Yes, and the logical layout for that would consist of logical markup like like identifying link relationships, link text, body text, and all that. You know, roughly like what people are actually trying to do with CSS: a DIV for site navigation, a DIV for related information, a DIV for body text, a DIV for page information, a DIV for the header, and a DIV for the company logo. With a decent layout system, I should be able to define styles that transform that into separate pages, or into a sequence of balanced columns, or lots of other things, independent of what those DIVs actually contain. But with CSS, I just can't (and neither can you...).
Another problem with CSS is that what it actually does do in terms of making geometric tradeoffs (e.g., table column sizing, float placement) is often so horrendously complex that it is essentially unpredictable (read the sections on table sizing or float placement and try to reason about them).
It's "safe" to eat, because your body can't digest it. It just passes through and give you the radioactive shits. My favorite link on the subject is the most infuriating to environmentalists.
There is nothing "infuriating" about that link--it is just bogus, stupid, and irrelevant.
Yes, bulk Plutonium (grains to chunks) is relatively inert as long as it isn't close to critical. As such, it is pretty harmless. You may well be able to swallow pellets and get away with it.
But Plutonium powder combusts spontaneously in air and the resulting fine particles are quite harmful when inhaled. In the environment, Plutonium may also form various salts that may then be more readily absorbed and stored in tissues. And once it's in the body, either as fine particles or as salts, Plutonium is a serious radiological poison.
And if you release it into the environment, it decays into a lot of radioactive junk that you don't want to have around either.
So, again, the fact that chunks of pure, fresh, metallic Plutonium may be fairly inert tells you nothing about the dangers resulting from a release during an accident. And it is also completely irrelevant to the question of whether you want to scatter it all over Mars in an accident, where the concern is scientific, not safety.
Seems to mean, nothing. It's not going to produce a nuclear blast (which no one would care about), it's not going to kill a bunch of inhabitants, it's not even going to increase the background radiation by much. (Mars already gets quite a dose.)
Why do you think I give a damn about the human explorers? The fallout is going to mess up scientific experiments, whether or not there is a chain reaction. The fact that you put several hundred of pounds of meat and bacteria on board, which may also get scattered across the landscape if the crash is milder, is far worse than the radioactivity. And if they happen to make a smooth landing and actually walk around, that's no better.
In fact, NASA burnt up an RTG in the atmosphere without any ill effects to anyone.
Now, harm to people on earth, that is something to worry about. They don't have a choice. You seem to live by the out-of-sight-out-of-mind philosophy. It doesn't matter if your release of radioactivity is known to kill, say, 100 people statistically because, hey, nobody can ever track it down.
Then why was NERVA created? Why is GCNR being developed? Why is JIMO going to Jupiter with a fully loaded Nuclear Reactor?
So far, nobody has tried to land a nuclear reactor on a planet that we are actually interested in. And, yes, people pushing nuclear technology obviously manage to get funding for something at some point but that doesn't mean it makes sense or it will make it into a project when all is said and done.
NASA's only problem is the FUD surrounding nuclear power. I'm just doing my part to clear that out of the way.
By doing what? By proposing to add the certainty and disaster of biological contamination to the risk and inconvenience of nuclear contamination? By just ignoring risks to people where deaths can't be attributed to individuals?
Manned exploration of Mars is a collossal waste of money and would constitute a scientific disaster. And nuclear propulsion is both unnecessary for Mars exploration and has some unnecessary additional risks.
As for JIMO, it is completely different technology and doesn't involve people (although if you volunteer, maybe we can encase you in plastic and leave you in orbit without too much risk to the mission). Whether JIMO will happen still needs to be seen. With JIMO, the issues are more political anyway: Europe and Asia may not want the US putting fission reactors in space.
A cold, dusty, rocky place that's hard to get to. Probably completly dry and lifeless. Now, why is that exciting again?
I'm all for sending probes and making sure that it's as dull as it seems. But, please, let's not lose perspective.
We have the technology already. We just need to stop putzing around and *use* nuclear power.
Yes, just what we need: two out of three Mars landers crashing, only this time with lots of highly radioactive materials on board. That will just have amazing potential for messing up lots of future scientific experiments. And if they surive the landing, hey, they probably have a century of sitting around, being subjected to all sorts of environmental conditions we have no experience with, to deteriorate and fall apart.
After all, how dare NASA send up a few pounds of plutonium on space craft. Why, that Cassini thing nearly killed everyone!
Spare us your sarcasm. By your reasoning, smoking isn't dangerous either; I mean, we see people smoke every day and you don't see them fall over dead, do you? And people drive in cars all the time without problems, so obviously--by your reasoning--driving cars must be risk free. Give me a break.
Thankfully, people like you don't run our space program.
You could just as easily have asked what the scientific or monetary reasons were for Marco Polo to go to Asia, da Gama to go around the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus to go to America, or Magellan to sail around the world.
Yes, one could easily have asked that, and one did ask that. And those kinds of expeditions fall into two categories: those that were financed because the people putting in the money hoped to make a decent return (the usual case), and those who put in money because they had too much of it and wanted to do something fun with it.
Or what the scientific or monetary reasons for NASA to put men on the moon 40 years ago.
None whatsoever. The moon landing was a useless, overly expensive PR stunt in America's arms race with the Soviets.
So, the benchmarks show maybe a 10-15% difference in favor of Sun's compiler. Does that Sun's compiler a "clear winner"? I think not.
First of all, it's far from clear that those differences are real. You can get much bigger differences from just changes in caching behavior, even with the same compiler.
Then, there is the question of whether Sun's compiler is actually correct. A lot of commercial compilers intentionally skirt or break the letter of the ANSI standards once you start enabling optimizations. GNU C/C++ is usually more careful.
Finally, you have to ask whether it matters. So, Sun's overpriced machines using their overpriced compilers run a bit faster than their overpriced machines using a free compiler. So what? If you want bang for the buck, or even just maximum bang, why in the world would you buy a Sun these days anyway?
Here are some things:
The list goes on and on and on. LaTeX can do all of those because (1) it's a full programming language and (2) it has full access to font metrics.
You don't know much about CSS, do you?
You don't know much about layout, do you?
Parts can be moved around, floated, made to disappear, etc. The only thing you need is to mark up each thing as what it is (paragraphs, blockquotes, headers, etc).
Yup, but that's not what separating content and presentation means. In order to separate content and presentation, you'd have to be able to write interesting style files that work for lots of different kinds of content. But the set of CSS styles that actually work correctly independent of content is very limited. Try doing something as trivial as turning arbitrary text into two balanced side-by-side columns. You can't do it with CSS.
So, using CSS, you can do nearly arbitrary things with a specific piece of content, or you can do a very limited set of things with almost any content. But to separate content and presentation, the style needs to be able to adapt to a wide range of textual content, and that CSS can't do. TeX/LaTeX can, as can many other formatters, so it's not like it's an unsolved problem. CSS is just way too limited.
Still, if you're 61 years old, it makes sense to borrow a page from Charlie Chaplin and try to throw a wrench into the machine. John Bauman is 61 years old. More than a year ago, Northeast Utilities fired Bauman and 200 other IT consultants. From his home in Meriden, Connecticut, he created the Organization for the Rights of American Workers. The mission: to protest H1-B and L-1 visas.
Bauman's problem isn't the H1-B's and L-1's. It's not the Indians who are competing with him. Bauman's problem is the lack of job protection for US workers, the lack of life planning, and the lack of insurance.
On the one hand, Americans are screaming for low taxes and smaller government. They pride themselves on a capitalist economy with few restraints and few protections.
Fine, but then Americans should be investing their money in private insurance and retirement plans. Instead, it goes into SUVs, gas, and other consumables. The net result is that people end up with no income and no retirement funds at age 61 and then they blame the Indians for their plight.
A compassionate society must somehow help its John Baumans.
The US isn't a compassionate society--the voters don't want it to be. If the US were a compassionate society, the choice wouldn't be between people like Bush, Reagan, and Clinton, who are basically outdoing each other on trying to ratchet down social services.
And I wonder where John Bauman was during past elections. Did he work for the candidates that preached compassion and that advocated more protections, more social services, and a tighter social safety net? Or did he laugh at them as wimps and whiners, like 90% of America?
While those designs vary color and text a lot, they actually illustrate how primitive CSS is: almost all of them are single column text with some stuff shoved into the margins.
Some of the style sheets have deep knowledge about the content (i.e., the individual paragraphs). Almost all of them are highly resolution dependent and fail to render correctly for fonts whose metrics differ from those they assume. Many place things incorrectly at absolute coordinates and don't work correctly at small or large window sizes. Some depend on text-rendered-as-graphics, which obviously won't work if you apply it to different content.
Most importantly, however, all those styles only work for very specific content: you can't apply those CSS styles to other documents and obtain any kind of decent rendition. All the Zen Garden shows is that you can vary the appearance of a single piece of text with many styles. That is not "separating content and presentation".
LaTeX comes close to separating content and presentation: you can have many different kinds of texts and many different kinds of styles, and you can mix and match them.
CSS, on the other hand, just isn't powerful enough to separate content and presentation in any interesting, general way. It doesn't even come close. CSS is a useful tool for coding some minor variations of the presentation of content, but that's all. And you have to be very careful; the examples in the Zen Garden are clear examples of how not to do it.
Some people can slap together million dollar software in six moths. But they aren't going to be out of work...
I'd have to disagree with that. Most of the standards movement for web design focuses on "semantic markup". Only headings, paragraphs, and the like should be included here. No fonts, colors, etc. This is your content. Yes it has tags, but when using XHTML 1.0 Strict it is also XML, meaning that an XSLT could be used to generate that content from some XML source on the server if necessary. Using CSS to do placement & styling of elements is very feasible for 95+% of the market.
You're missing my point. My point is that CSS is insufficient to let people express the kinds of presentations of content they might want to create. Yes, it lets you fiddle a little with font sizes, colors, and some placement and floats. But none of that support even comes close to what one would need to do the kinds of things that people who design document styles would want to do.
In fact, the link "A List Apart" that you point to shows some of the inadequacies of CSS for specifying presentations; but, frankly, it barely scratches the surface.
No, adding XSLT into the mix is not sufficient either. XSL:FO was an attempt to give people more control, but even XSL:FO is insufficiently powerful for expressing quite common document style design choices (and both CSL and XSL:FO are far too complex for the limited functionality they actually offer).
Hence my point: you get a very limited set of presentation choices with CSS; take advantage of them as much as you can. But because the set of choices is so limited, there are many aspects of the presentation that will, effectively, be hard coded into your HTML even if you use all facilities for semantic markup available in HTML (or XML+XSLT).