If software was originally written to run on PCs, it can't be an instant switch to mainframes. Mainframes can run Linux and tons of other operating systems in virtual machines.
How easy is it to scale up with mainframes? As business grows, the mainframes become fully loaded. CPUs and RAM can be added to a mainframe as you need them. Mainframes can hold hundreds of processors and hundreds of gigs of RAM.
If I wanted to run some new software, I would rather try it out on a few servers than another massive mainframe. You don't need another mainframe, you just need another virtual machine. Mainframes can support thousands of virtual machines with no sweat.
Software availability from third parties may also hinder mainframe adoption. Software doesn't become incompatible with an operating system just because the operating system is running in a virtual machine.
Mainframes are just a whole new can of worms. Maybe to you they're new, but they've been around longer than personal computers or servers.
My first point was that TeX is not directly suitable for describing mathematical formulas on the web, and it's not. I don't know of any browsers that support TeX. I wasn't trying to imply that TeX isn't appropriate for describing documents that will eventually be displayed on the web.
My second point was that currently the best option is converting to PDFs and images, which sucks. The post I replied to said this font wasn't needed because we already had TeX, but on the web TeX isn't supported and we have MathML instead, so a freely available font like this is needed to help MathML succeed. (Trying to view some MathML in Firefox pops up a dialog telling the user to go download MathML fonts. That's not going to help MathML catch on very quickly.)
Have fun using TeX on the web. Oh wait, you can't. Well have fun throwing all your semantics away by translating your lightweight TeX into heavyweight bloated PDFs and images.
You'd either need [...], [...], or [...]. You are being ethnocentric. This problem also exists for several natural written languages, like Chinese. Do you not think anybody ever worked on this? There are several more possible solutions than the few you happened to pull off the top of your head.
Besides the options of representing these characters non-literally (MathML, TeX) there's also voice recognition software and hand-writing recognition software, often used with drawing-tablets. There's also an input method where you type in the name of the character and you get a live list of possible matches. Some input methods have a correspondence between hitting keys and drawing lines in certain directions/positions.
A better, uniform, method of choosing arbitrary Unicode characters would be nice, but this is not a new problem, and there are already several possible solutions.
Soon they're going to have way too many people with the feeling that Walmart sells 100% cheap crap products Most of the stuff Wal-Mart sells is name brand, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. The name brand stuff I buy from Wal-Mart is the exact same name brand stuff they have everywhere else. If you buy stuff that isn't name brand, perhaps Wal-Mart isn't a good place to shop, but otherwise it's the exact same stuff.
I'm libertarian, and I'm actually in favor of a base level of health care, but it should be based on concrete benefits, not emotion. It should be to improve the economy, not to make yourself feel like you're a good person.
I think spending a little money on basic health needs could help the economy more than it hurts it, due to the increased health of the workforce. After all, a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. But I want the amount of money spent decided by studies of what level is best for the economy, not whatever level sounds the nicest and gives people the warmest fuzzy feeling.
Government should not make decisions based on emotions (although it already does).
...and regulating commerce. That last one is arguable... Without intervention, companies with majority market share will fight to destroy the free market. The government shouldn't meddle with the market otherwise, but markets don't stay free on their own! We need the government to keep the market free.
I'm against stuff like tariffs, subsidies, and minimum wages, but I'd be horrified at the thought of completely unregulated "competition". (There wouldn't be much competition for long.)
What's with this party mentality? You don't have to be in a political party just to run. I hate political parties, so I will actually be much more likely to vote for Stephen Colbert if he runs as an independent.
Voting for someone who isn't supported by the Republicans or Democrats isn't throwing away your vote. It sends a message that you are not satisfied with either party. It might not be as powerful as helping decide the election, but it's still something.
C# and Python are extremely different, and C# is much nicer than Java. I understand disliking that the best came from Microsoft, but lying about it isn't going to put an openly-developed language on top again.
Java reminds me a lot of C++. It was the first to popularize some new ideas, and it was really good for its time, but now it just looks like a cludgy mess. Java is starting to really show its age, while C# is fresh and shiny. Java didn't have a foreach loop for ages, and it still doesn't have C# style properties.
When it comes to interpreted/JIT garbage collected statically typed languages, C# is the best. I wouldn't use it for long-term important projects (due to the Microsoft issue), but when I'm just playing around with something that's too big for a scripting language (e.g. Python), I use C#.
It's a really really nice language, even if it did come from Microsoft.
Jon Stewart doesn't emphasize himself. How often do you hear him talking about himself? Steven Colbert puts his name right in the show and talks about himself constantly. Steven Colbert is much much more like a politician than Jon Stewart is.
That doesn't sound bad at all. In Xenosaga I, you get random emails that pop up a big attention grabbing notice. Sometimes emails contain important information necessary to continue the game, and sometimes they contain horribly written clinical advertisements that aren't disguised in the least.
By comparison, some dusty posters on the walls are hardly anything to be bothered about.
What part of "can't reproduce" do you not understand? Are you seriously worried about non-reproducing plants reproducing with other plants and creating hybrid plants that can't reproduce?
If you don't want this crazy new-fangled genetically modified evil getting out into the wild, you should be in favor of stuff like this. The whole idea is that it can be contained and controlled instead of just blowing around free all over the place.
The parent post is one sentence. Seriously, WTF? This isn't about fighting against the evolution of language, or minor grammar/spelling errors, or snobby stylistic preferences. It's about basic readability. I felt like I was running out of breath trying to read that nasty thing. I started racing faster and faster for a period or semicolon or question mark or anything, but nothing!
The article is about Subcommittee 34 (SC 34), which pertains to "Document Description and Processing Languages". It is a part of Joint Technical Committee 1, a joint committee between ISO and IEC.
ISO is enormously huge and important. It isn't limited to technical specifications. It also define standards for lots of other stuff like food, screws, cars, and timber.
The people who created OpenISO are clueless. Have you seen their website? They, like many, don't seem to realize that ISO does more than just approve technical documents.
So here's where the problem is: ISO > JTC1 > SC 34 And you want to replace all of ISO? That's ridiculous!
And why is it that people talk so much about replacing ISO, but nothing about replacing IEC? Is it because their name comes second in "ISO/IEC", and nobody's gotten around to looking after the slash yet?
ISO isn't going anywhere. The joint committee between ISO and IEC isn't going anywhere. Maybe subcommittee 34 of the joint committee between ISO and IEC will be dissolved, but that is nowhere near the enormity of dissolving ISO.
Maybe the ISO Standards Committee should dissolve itself It's not the entire ISO that's suffering from Microsoft here. It's not even the joint committee between ISO and IEC. It's only a subcommittee of the joint committee between ISO and IEC.
Perhaps the subcommittee should be dissolved, but that doesn't mean all of ISO should be. Don't burn down the house just because the refrigerator stopped working.
It's sister site, run by the same people, bayimg does. (Unless the copyright laws that apply to it make an absolute exemption for user-submitted content.)
I believe you lose your rights to the archival copy when you pass on the original copy. I don't know if you're supposed to get rid of it or just not access the data anymore, but either way you can't legally continue using it.
ATI is releasing specs, and Nvidia isn't, so why should I care about Nvidia? I'm building a new computer soon, and it will definitely have an ATI graphics card (unless Nvidia also promises soon to release specs).
If Internet Explorer was sending Firefox a valid URL, it wouldn't have to worry about escaping anything. Valid URLs don't contain whitespace, quotation marks, backslashes, or anything else that would need to be escaped. Why should Firefox expect to receive malformed URLs?
I think the point was that Vista adds so little that even a small amount of relearning isn't justified. Why learn anything new at all if you get so little out of it?
Ok, I see what you mean, but that's not just "English". You could call it English English, Anglo-English, England English, etc, but there is no one true English dialect that deserves the title of "English".
Slashdot Mirror
RFC 4880 - OpenPGP Message Format I hate those idiots using that proprietary crap GnuPG
My first point was that TeX is not directly suitable for describing mathematical formulas on the web, and it's not. I don't know of any browsers that support TeX. I wasn't trying to imply that TeX isn't appropriate for describing documents that will eventually be displayed on the web.
My second point was that currently the best option is converting to PDFs and images, which sucks. The post I replied to said this font wasn't needed because we already had TeX, but on the web TeX isn't supported and we have MathML instead, so a freely available font like this is needed to help MathML succeed. (Trying to view some MathML in Firefox pops up a dialog telling the user to go download MathML fonts. That's not going to help MathML catch on very quickly.)
Admittedly, I wasn't very clear.
Have fun using TeX on the web. Oh wait, you can't. Well have fun throwing all your semantics away by translating your lightweight TeX into heavyweight bloated PDFs and images.
Besides the options of representing these characters non-literally (MathML, TeX) there's also voice recognition software and hand-writing recognition software, often used with drawing-tablets. There's also an input method where you type in the name of the character and you get a live list of possible matches. Some input methods have a correspondence between hitting keys and drawing lines in certain directions/positions.
A better, uniform, method of choosing arbitrary Unicode characters would be nice, but this is not a new problem, and there are already several possible solutions.
I'm libertarian, and I'm actually in favor of a base level of health care, but it should be based on concrete benefits, not emotion. It should be to improve the economy, not to make yourself feel like you're a good person.
I think spending a little money on basic health needs could help the economy more than it hurts it, due to the increased health of the workforce. After all, a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. But I want the amount of money spent decided by studies of what level is best for the economy, not whatever level sounds the nicest and gives people the warmest fuzzy feeling.
Government should not make decisions based on emotions (although it already does).
...and regulating commerce. That last one is arguable... Without intervention, companies with majority market share will fight to destroy the free market. The government shouldn't meddle with the market otherwise, but markets don't stay free on their own! We need the government to keep the market free.I'm against stuff like tariffs, subsidies, and minimum wages, but I'd be horrified at the thought of completely unregulated "competition". (There wouldn't be much competition for long.)
What's with this party mentality? You don't have to be in a political party just to run. I hate political parties, so I will actually be much more likely to vote for Stephen Colbert if he runs as an independent.
Voting for someone who isn't supported by the Republicans or Democrats isn't throwing away your vote. It sends a message that you are not satisfied with either party. It might not be as powerful as helping decide the election, but it's still something.
Why was this bigot modded insightful?
C# and Python are extremely different, and C# is much nicer than Java. I understand disliking that the best came from Microsoft, but lying about it isn't going to put an openly-developed language on top again.
Java reminds me a lot of C++. It was the first to popularize some new ideas, and it was really good for its time, but now it just looks like a cludgy mess. Java is starting to really show its age, while C# is fresh and shiny. Java didn't have a foreach loop for ages, and it still doesn't have C# style properties.
When it comes to interpreted/JIT garbage collected statically typed languages, C# is the best. I wouldn't use it for long-term important projects (due to the Microsoft issue), but when I'm just playing around with something that's too big for a scripting language (e.g. Python), I use C#.
It's a really really nice language, even if it did come from Microsoft.
Closed Source Binary Blobs: The Solution To All Our Problems?
Maybe we should just replace all of Linux/GNU/X/etc with closed source binary blobs. Oh wait, that's called Windows and it sucks.
Jon Stewart doesn't emphasize himself. How often do you hear him talking about himself? Steven Colbert puts his name right in the show and talks about himself constantly. Steven Colbert is much much more like a politician than Jon Stewart is.
That doesn't sound bad at all. In Xenosaga I, you get random emails that pop up a big attention grabbing notice. Sometimes emails contain important information necessary to continue the game, and sometimes they contain horribly written clinical advertisements that aren't disguised in the least.
By comparison, some dusty posters on the walls are hardly anything to be bothered about.
What part of "can't reproduce" do you not understand? Are you seriously worried about non-reproducing plants reproducing with other plants and creating hybrid plants that can't reproduce?
If you don't want this crazy new-fangled genetically modified evil getting out into the wild, you should be in favor of stuff like this. The whole idea is that it can be contained and controlled instead of just blowing around free all over the place.
The parent post is one sentence. Seriously, WTF? This isn't about fighting against the evolution of language, or minor grammar/spelling errors, or snobby stylistic preferences. It's about basic readability. I felt like I was running out of breath trying to read that nasty thing. I started racing faster and faster for a period or semicolon or question mark or anything, but nothing!
The article is about Subcommittee 34 (SC 34), which pertains to "Document Description and Processing Languages". It is a part of Joint Technical Committee 1, a joint committee between ISO and IEC.
ISO is enormously huge and important. It isn't limited to technical specifications. It also define standards for lots of other stuff like food, screws, cars, and timber.
The people who created OpenISO are clueless. Have you seen their website? They, like many, don't seem to realize that ISO does more than just approve technical documents.
So here's where the problem is:
ISO > JTC1 > SC 34
And you want to replace all of ISO? That's ridiculous!
And why is it that people talk so much about replacing ISO, but nothing about replacing IEC? Is it because their name comes second in "ISO/IEC", and nobody's gotten around to looking after the slash yet?
ISO isn't going anywhere. The joint committee between ISO and IEC isn't going anywhere. Maybe subcommittee 34 of the joint committee between ISO and IEC will be dissolved, but that is nowhere near the enormity of dissolving ISO.
Perhaps the subcommittee should be dissolved, but that doesn't mean all of ISO should be. Don't burn down the house just because the refrigerator stopped working.
It's sister site, run by the same people, bayimg does. (Unless the copyright laws that apply to it make an absolute exemption for user-submitted content.)
I believe you lose your rights to the archival copy when you pass on the original copy. I don't know if you're supposed to get rid of it or just not access the data anymore, but either way you can't legally continue using it.
ATI is releasing specs, and Nvidia isn't, so why should I care about Nvidia? I'm building a new computer soon, and it will definitely have an ATI graphics card (unless Nvidia also promises soon to release specs).
If Internet Explorer was sending Firefox a valid URL, it wouldn't have to worry about escaping anything. Valid URLs don't contain whitespace, quotation marks, backslashes, or anything else that would need to be escaped. Why should Firefox expect to receive malformed URLs?
I think the point was that Vista adds so little that even a small amount of relearning isn't justified. Why learn anything new at all if you get so little out of it?
Ok, I see what you mean, but that's not just "English". You could call it English English, Anglo-English, England English, etc, but there is no one true English dialect that deserves the title of "English".