Or possibly "12 people who were too ethical to avoid their civic duties"...
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
Whoops, I forgot to properly escape my example text. The first example was supposed to be:
<foo>{100 megabytes of the letter 'a'}</foo>
And the second was supposed to be:
<{100 MB of 'a'}>hello</foo>
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
It's been a couple of years (like, 2 or 3) since I wrote the code to which I am referring, or had the experiences to which I am alluding. So my memory of details is fuzzy, and I may have missed the mark on some of it because I may be misremembering. However, I do very clearly recall that, when I was in the thick of my XML efforts, and had a clear idea of what the problems were, that I had many 'this stuff sucks' moments like the ones I described. Maybe the details are a little off, but the point remains, that I ran into problem after problem that seemed to me to be inherent in XML, or to be so cumbersome as to cause me no surprise that there was no really good freely available parser for XML at that time (and maybe still isn't, I don't know).
As far as the separate thread thing, I guess I am definitely misremembering. You are right, you just 'feed' data into the SAX parser (in my case, expat) and it makes some number of callbacks to you as it parses that bit. I just checked a little bit of code I wrote a while ago and this is just what it does when it uses the expat parser, reads chunks out of a file and passes it to expat, and handles the callbacks as expat makes them. So I am wrong in my previous assertion, for sure. I think I might be confusing this with some DOM implementation I had seen where you *did* have to feed the document all at once.
Your example for how to limit the size of elements in a document is not using DTD, which at the time that I was working with XML, was the standard way to describe a specific XML syntax. I guess you're using XSD since you mention that later on? Is XSD a standard now, superceding DSD? If not, then what you are really saying is that *XSD-aware-parsers* let you limit the number of bytes in an element, not that the XML format itself does. Which may seem like a minor difference, but it is a difference that makes my point: XML is so lame that basic functionality like limiting field sizes had to be done in an update to the spec (XSD) or, if XSD isn't really part of the XML standard, in a non-standardized extension.
Also, how does the XSD-compatible parser know that a field it is parsing exceeds the length restriction you defined? If the limit is N, doesn't it have to read in N bytes (and parse it), and detect that there are still more bytes coming, before it can reject that document? It's a minor point, but it is inefficient.
Also your "somewhat verbose, yes" comment is just too funny. I don't think it's possible to write any XML at all without having that be true...
You asked when the last time I tried XML was, and saw poor performance? Like I said, a couple of years ago. It was not unacceptably slow performance, but it was clearly worse than necessary and also used more memory than necessary (this part being significantly more important on the memory limited platform I was working). Also, I have used the yum tool on Linux and as I understand it, part of the reason that it's insanely slow is that it stores too much in XML and the parsing thereof takes a long time when it starts up. That's just anecdotal evidence though and probably simplifies the reason for yum's slowness.
In terms of what I would recommend... I would recommend re-evaluating whether or not XML really gives you any of the things that you say that you want. I can tell you with fair certainty that it does not give you the 'takes almost no time to integrate with' part. Technologies that allow representation of hierarchical data are a dime a dozen. And standardized validation formats are only really necessary with overly complex beasts like XML.
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
Actually I have been working on this problem off and on for a couple of years. I wrote a description of a binary format which could encode any hierarchical data structure, and had all of the features of XML (that I know of) while being fast and safe for computers to parse and emit. I also had a re-entrant parser that could read a document byte by byte if necessary and properly managed its state (allowing the programmer to drive the parser using for example a select loop with sockets). It worked really well.
But then I decided that I could break the problem up into a couple of subproblems that were more elegant to solve individually than together as part of a larger system. I'm still working on that, but maybe I'll have it done soon.
I framed my initial implementation as a way to convert C++ objects to binary form and serialize/deserialize them, without any programmer intervention other than running a build-time tool to generate some extra C++ syntax to be compiled with one's program and thus enable the program to serialize and deserialize any C++ object that it defined, fast, safe, and easy. I have split that up now into two parts: one to generate full-featured reflection information for C++ data types, and the second to take that information and drive a serialization/deserialization engine using it. I completed the first part, but ran out of steam on the second part. I think I'll be getting back to that soon and maybe in a couple of months I'll have it done.
I agree with part of what you are saying; definitely there is no single technology that is applicable in all situations, as your JSON example shows.
However, I believe that XML isn't even good for marking up textual documents and data. It would be faster, smaller, and less error prone for computers if it were an intelligently defined binary format. It would be easier for humans to read and write as a non-SGML-based format. I think the correct thing that XML should have been is a format which has both a binary and human-readable form, where each form is tailored specifically to the domain in which it is defined (binary form being fast, easy, and safe for computers to parse and emit, and human-readable form being easy for humans to read and write), and each form can be converted to the other simply and easily.
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you 100%. And so the only way to parse XML in a nonbroken way is to write your own XML parser, adding "nonstandard" constraints that prevent your program from blowing up. So you don't get to re-use existing parsing technologies like expat, you have to write everything yourself. This is a direct consequence of the suckfulness of XML, which is so lame that nobody even bothers to write good free parsers for it.
An example of nonstandard constraints you have to put on your parser - DTD doesn't allow you to specify the maximum length that the text of an element can have. So someone could pass you an XML document with a fragment like this:
{100 megabytes of the letter 'a'}
expat does have facilities that let you reject this document - you can put your own checks in place to say 'if I have read more than 100K bytes of data in the address field, stop parsing and issue an error'. But you have to wait for expat to give you 100K of data before you can finally detect that the field is too long and you have to reject the document. This is wasteful. It would be much better if you could tell expat ahead of time, 'the address field has a limit of 100K' and it would do this for you. It would better still if XML format allowed expat to detect that the field was too long before even reading it. But XML doesn't support this.
What about the maximum length of element names? I think expat may have an inbuilt limit; if not, it will choke and kill your program when it encounters something like this:
hello
It will try to read 100 MB to get the element name. Bogus. Like I said, expat may have some inbuilt protection from this, but it's technically correct XML since XML doesn't limit element names at all, and expat is technically broken because it rejects valid XML. It's only because XML is so lame does a reasonable limitation to avoid your program blowing up result in a nonconforming parser.
Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have had far too many 'this stuff sucks' moments with XML to ever consider using it in any capacity where it is not forced upon me (which unfortunately, it is, with great frequency).
I first heard about XML years ago when it was new, and just the concept sucked to me. A markup language based on the ugly and unwieldy syntax of SGML (from which HTML derives)? We don't need more SGML-alikes, we need fewer, was my thought. This stuff sucks.
Then a while later I actually had to use XML. I read up on its design and features and thought, OK well at least the cool bit is that it has DTDs to describe the specifics of a domain of XML. But then I found out that DTDs are incomplete to the extreme, unable to properly specify large parts of what one should be able to specify with it. And on top of that, DTDs don't even use XML syntax - what the hell? This stuff sucks.
I then found that there were several competing specifications for XML-based replacements for the DTD syntax, and none were well-accepted enough to be considered the standard. So I realized that there was going to be no way to avoid fragmentation and incompatibility in XML schemas. This stuff sucks.
I spent some time reading through supposedly 'human readable' XML documents, and writing some. Both reading and writing XML is incredibly nonsuccinct, error-prone, and time consuming. This stuff sucks.
Finally I had to write some code to read in XML documents and operate on them. I searched around for freely available software libraries that would take care of parsing the XML documents for me. I had to read up on the 'SAX' and 'DOM' models of XML parsing. Both are ridiculously primitive and difficult to work with. This stuff sucks.
Of course I found the most widely distributed, and probably widely used, free XML parser (using the SAX style), expat. It is not re-entrant, because XML syntax is so ridiculously and overly complex that people don't even bother to write re-entrant parsers for it. So you have to dedicate a thread to keeping the stack state for the parser, or read the whole document in one big buffer and pass it to the parser. XML is so unwieldy and stupid that even the best freely available implementations of parsers are lame. This stuff sucks.
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax; you can't easily limit the size of elements in a document, for example, either in the DTD (or XML schema replacement) or expat. You just gotta accept that the parser could blow up your program if someone feeds it bad data, because the parser writers couldn't be bothered to put any kind of controls in on this, probably because they were 'thinking XML style', which basically means, not thinking much at all. This stuff sucks.
Finally, my application had poor performance because XML is so slow and bloated to read in as a wire protocol. This stuff sucks.
XML sucks in so many different ways, it's amazing. In fact I cannot think of a single thing that XML does well, or a single aspect of it that couldn't have been better planned from the beginning. I blame the creators of XML, who obviously didn't really have much of a clue.
In summary - XML sucks, and I refuse to use it, and actively fight against it every opportunity I get.
This jives very well with what multitasking 'feels like' to me. Whereas on the one hand I can imagine how doing many things at once, switching the task that I am working on according to the availability of external resources necessary to complete the task, would produce maximal productivity, I find that whenever I attempt this I am left with an unpleasant mental feeling of stress that makes me *not want* to do this anymore.
For example, as a software developer, I find that there are often many things that I could be working on 'at once'. Say I have 10 bugs assigned to me, a major architectural investigation, two features that I am working on, a document or two that I need to write, and of course emails and phone conversations to keep up on.
In the past, I have tried to maximize my productivity by switching from one to the next each time something 'blocks' me from work on the one I am actively engaged in. For example, say that I've written a bunch of code and I'm ready to check it in. But whoops, I find that there is a 'build break' and I'm not allowed to check in until whoever was responsible for it fixes it. At this point, I could switch tasks to working on some other task that is independent of this; say, some other feature that I am coding up. In order to switch to the new task, however, I have to make some mental notes of what I was doing in the first task so that I can pick up where I left off (it might just be as much as remembering that I have to hit 'return' at the end of a command line that I've already typed in, just waiting for the green light to finish the checkin; or it may be significantly more - remembering that I have to re-test a bunch of stuff to make sure it's still working in combination with whatever changes have simultaneously occurred in the code base in between now and whenever I get back to checking this code in). Once switched to this new task, I could work for a little while, only to discover that some key piece of documentation is missing that would explain to me how to use someone else's API, and that the person I need to ask about this is out of the office for the day. OK, time to switch to a new task. Once again I have to store away enough information to be able to continue where I left off on this task when I get back to it; this could mean writing some comments in the code, or sending off an email to the person who is out of the office, the response to which will be enough context to remind me of what I was doing, and pick up where I left off, or maybe doing nothing except making a mental note that I have to re-read the code when I get back to it to remember what I was doing, assuming that when I read the code again, I will come to the same conclusions and once again seek out that person, who hopefully by this time will be back in the office. At this point, I switch to the new task of, say, working on some documentation. Eventually this task will be blocked in a similar way (maybe I will just get tired of working on the documentation - this happens pretty quickly because I hate writing documentation!), and I will have to task switch again, maybe to something new, maybe back to something I was already working on.
The amount of bookkeeping involved with retaining and then re-creating enough state to effectively work on multiple tasks at once is, in a word, exhausting. It is also stressful because one feels like one can at any moment 'forget' something important, and then lose track of a task completely, or maybe just lose track of enough information about a task that getting back to it will be much more work than it should have been. Combine all of this with the feeling that one has to stay very productive within this system in order to be seen as an effective employee, and it becomes very stressful, and mentally exhausting, indeed.
So as a result, my mind eventually starts to 'resist' doing this kind of multitasking; it does so my making me feel like I don't like multitasking. And usually I don't perceive it specifically as a desire not to multitas
Thank you for explaining your viewpoint. You sound very much like a dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian. I too used to be a libertarian. In fact I have voted for the Libertarian candidate in every election since I reached voting age in 1990. I probably will continue to do so, not as much because I believe in Libertarianism - as you can tell I've fallen pretty far off the wagon over the years - but because I believe in anything that is a major change to our very broken system.
At one time my Libertarian convictions were strong, and it all seemed to simple and straightforward. 25 years on, I have seen too many stupid people doing too many stupid things to feel as comfortable as I used to with leaving everything up to the market.
Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to respond.
Actually your Al Gore comments are exactly Ad Hominem To Quoquo. The point being, that whether or not what Al Gore says is true, is completely independent of how Al Gore chooses to live his personal life. Al Gore is a proponent of the position that global warming is a real phenomenon and that people should reduce their resource useage to counteract this. Whether or not Al Gore "practices what he preaches" is immaterial to the question of whether or not a) global warming is a real phenomenon and b) whether or not people should reduce their resource useage to combat global warming.
As to whether or not I would listen to a preacher who is screwing his secretary? I would listen to him just as much as I would listen to a preacher who is not screwing his secretary. Honestly. I would try hard to evaluate whatever he is telling me based on the merits of his arguments and their presentation. What either preacher does in his or her own personal life would not matter to me.
Would I believe you if you tell me that the milk you are drinking is bad? Probably not - because other facts in evidence (the fact that you are drinking it without any apparent ill effect) would override your statement.
Also, the "whole global warming argument" is obviously a set of extremely complex arguments based on observed phenomenon. You can dispute each argument in turn, and you can dispute the validity of each observed phenomenon, but to say that the whole theory suffers from a single logical fallacy is ludicrous. I think that just by saying that you demonstrate that you don't actually want to understand enough about the theory of global warming to dispute it in a meaningful way, but would rather sweep the whole thing under a rug of generality that conveniently fits the conclusion that you would like to achieve.
I think one of the main problems of the global warming debate is that too few people familiarize themselves with the theory in sufficient detail to be able to come to a conclusion based on rational decisions. Most people have made their minds up without even having to see any real evidence or even understand the complexities of the theory at all. Some people come to the table with a predisposition to want to believe that other people are 'out for them' and just want to limit their freedoms arbitrarily, presumably just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority or something. And some people come to the table with the predisposition to want to believe that industry and capitalism and the modern way of life is inherently evil and so it's immediately 'obvious' to them that anyone attacking global warming has a self-serving greedy agenda.
Either viewpoint is bogus and contributes nothing to the debate, and doesn't even do the question justice. It is in everyone's best interest to form an opinion based on sound science and clear thinking; wouldn't you rather spend the time studying the problem and finding out that you're wrong rather than destroying the earth for no good reason/destroying the economy for no good reason (pick whichever one fits your preconceptions)?
My '2x cost of everything' statement was meant as a generalization. The real discussion is about the price of gasoline and its effects on the cost of all other goods. Obviously there would be a great number of factors affecting the cost of every single consumer good if the price of gasoline were to go up. Consider that economies outside of the USA *do* have gasoline that costs 2x as much or more (for example, where I live, in New Zealand), and trust me, people in these countries are not starving, unable to house themselves, or walking 6 miles to work.
What you are talking about is an example of a "false dilemma". You're saying that our only choices are either cheap gasoline, or unaffordable food, housing, and transportation. There is no reason to believe that there aren't a huge number of possibilities in between as well.
I'm not making a choice for you. I'm expressing an opinion. If enough people share that opinion, then collectively we could make a choice that would affect everyone. That's called democracy. I am sure you have heard of it. Although, I get the feeling that you don't really support it, since it's clear that you want instead to silence alternative viewpoints on questions like this. Your tone of voice doesn't really express interest in exploring the topic, it expresses an interest in beating down anyone with a different viewpoint.
Because there are equivalent standards of living at different levels of purchasing power, at least I think so.
This gets rather philosophical, because it begs the question of exactly what is a "standard of living" - one could say that it is the maximization of quality of life that one can get given a certain purchasing power, which will of course make by definition any change in purchasing power equivalent to a change in standard of living.
However, I believe that there are some other aspects of standard of living which do not depend on purchasing power.
For example, regardless of your purchasing power, if the environment around you is polluted, you will have a lower standard of living (on average - it's true that people with sufficiently high purchasing power could pay to live further from the pollution, or even pay to have it cleaned up - but not everyone will be able to do this; it's a zero-sum game, where those who can afford a better environment get one at the expense of those who can't). If there is high crime, you will have a lower standard of living regardless of your purchasing power (once again, on average - you could hire bodyguards and build huge fences around your property and buy expensive alarm systems to reduce the effect that crime has on you personally - but other people who can't do these things will still suffer).
I believe that humans do not make perfect choices; and that the standard of life that people will have is determined not just by the money that they have (which is in essense their own personal power to shape their environment locally), but also by the environment in which they live, that shapes their outlook and value structure. You can change a person's standard of living by giving them more money - i.e. more ability to change their local environment. Or you can change a person's standard of living by making the environment around them more conducive to them making the "correct" choices.
Now this does get philosophical because it assumes that there are "correct" choices to be made - that, for example, it is "better" from a standard of living perspective to have a good relationship with your neighbors than a bad one. Of course there are probably people who personally enjoy having an antagonistic relationship with their neighbors, so to them it would be a reduction in standard of living for their to be greater harmony in the neighborhood. But I believe that a) those people are in the vast minority, and b) those people could actually change if their belief structure, as dictated by the environment around them, were to change.
So it's partially that we want to make our own standard of living better, and partially that we want changes in our environment to work to change people's way of thinking, so that they become better at making choices that improve their standard of living.
With automobiles, I think that they have a certain negative impact socially when used to the excesses that they have been. So I think that, for example, a group of people might have a *better* standard of living if gas were too expensive and they were forced to change their behavior, than they might have in the more "convenient" world where they can make choices based on an artificially low price of gasoline, the result of those choices being a greater "ease" of some parts of life, but at the expense of more far-reaching and important aspects of life (personal health, health of the environment, relationships with others, pace of life, etc, etc). If we change the variables that such people use to make decisions about how to live their life, we might actually find that it's better for everyone in general, even though on the face of it it just looks like it's taking away everyone's ability to maximize their personal standard of living. In reality it might just collectively improve everyone's standard of living, when you take society as a whole.
It's philosophical I know, and very subject to lots of valid debate. But that's how I see it.
So far in two posts almost every point you made has been a logical fallacy (well I didn't read all of your first post, just enough to see your first logical fallacy).
These have been:
* Ad Hominem: First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting)
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you attacked me personally
* Ad Hominem Tu Quoque: This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that a person's claim is false because 1) it is inconsistent with something else a person has said or 2) what a person says is inconsistent with her actions.
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you questioned the validity of Al Gore's position on global warming because of the personal behaviors (that you misrepresent, to boot) of Al Gore
* False Dilemma: A False Dilemma is a fallacy in which a person uses the following pattern of "reasoning":
1. Either claim X is true or claim Y is true (when X and Y could both be false).
2. Claim Y is false.
3. Therefore claim X is true.
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you gave a false choice between "freedom" and the "environment", as if they are mutually exclusive
There may be more, but I didn't read your first post so I can't say for sure.
My point: if you want to take the time to write down your arguments on such issues, it would behoove you to study logical fallacies so that you could train yourself to notice when you are committing one. Those of us who can spot them, easily do so when presented with posts like yours, and it's really not worth anyone's time to discuss falsehoods that are so easily detected.
I guess it's different if you are the one being insulted. Although I suppose that I should realize that there is no real meaning in insults hurled at you by someone you don't know. Still, when someone has to reduce themselves to personal insults, I tend to believe that they haven't distanced themselves intellectually from the discussion enough to produce logical and coherent arguments. They have too much emotion in it and will invariably appeal to emotion rather than making logical points. From what you say, it seems that ArcherB did some of both. But as for me, it's not worth my time to read posts of low quality; if I could detect which posts were low quality I could save myself alot of time in reading garbage, and so for those few posts where I can detect it straight away (as in this case), I gladly skip them.
I meant that he "wasted his time in writing it" if his goal was to communicate to me, the person he was directly responding to. However, you are right - his goal wasn't just to get me to read his post, it was to get lots of people to read his post. But I do think that the number of people who will bother to read his post is reduced by the tone which he takes, which wastes at least some of the potential of his post.
Of course, maybe the choice of language he used will be even more convincing to some other set of people who do read such things? Maybe it's a wash. Who knows. I personally would like to see a more civil discussion regardless.
Just so you know, as soon as I read the first five words or so of your rant and saw the ad hominem attacks coming, I stopped reading. If you want to make a point, try to do it without resorting to insults. Obviously you cared enough about what you wrote to wrote a large diatribe, and if you want your time to be used effectively, you shouldn't hurl insults, because it just means you will have wasted your time in writing it.
Wouldn't the justification be, not that the tax is used to maintain the roads, but that they are trying to discourage road use, to keep traffic numbers down, as you stated in your first sentence? If so, does it surprise you that they want to make alternative fuels just as costly as gasoline?
I'm all for two things:
1) Tax the hell out of automobile fuel to keep automobile useage down 2) Tax it all at a base rate sufficient to accomplish (1), and then tax gasoline users 2x that to discourage them from fucking up the environment so badly
It's rather sad that, given an opportunity to drive the same car using more environmentally-friendly fuel, you, and people like you, of whom there are MANY (I'd say the vast majority perhaps?) will choose instead to simply choose to use more fuel, thus entirely counteracting any positive effect that the technology could have on the world around you.
Not to mention the fact that this larger vehicle that you want to buy is more dangerous to everyone else on the road except yourself.
But hey, on both counts, *you're* the only one who really matters, right?
That's not a problem for me. I'd accept an N% reduction in purchasing power, as long as everyone else is subject to the same N%. If everything that I could possibly buy went up 2x in cost as a result of what I suggest, then so be it. It would be the same for everyone, and as long as we're all in the same boat together, I don't mind making sacrifices. I wouldn't mind seeing a more progressive tax rate applied at the same time to help out the lower income brackets who would be most severely affected by this 2x rise in costs. However, I do believe that a significant percentage of people could have a standard of living at least as good, if they just changed their habits, even if they did have to pay 2x as much for everything.
I thought that E85 was 85% gasoline and 15% ethanol. It's actually 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. So nothing I said in my previous post makes any sense. Please ignore it, sorry for the trouble.
* A gallon of 85% gasoline with 15% ethanol produces a difference in mileage of 30% when compared with a gallon of 100% gasoline
But wouldn't 70% of a gallon of pure gasoline also produce a difference in mileage of 30% when compared with a gallon of 100% gasoline?
And yet in the first case you are using 85% of a gallon of gasoline (plus 15% of a gallon of ethanol), to get the same mileage that you would get with 70% of a gallon of 100% gasoline.
Why not just use 70% of a gallon of gasoline instead of 85% of a gallon of gasoline + 15% of a gallon of ethanol, to go the same distance?
Your figures (and they are not unique, I have seen similar figures elsewhere in this discussion) would seem to suggest that the 15% ethanol in E85 contributes no useful energy, and at the same time *decreases* the amount of energy available in the gasoline that is present.
Sounds good to me. I'm all for artificially limiting the supply of gasoline to force people to improve their efficiency and seek out alternative fuels. I hope they don't build anymore oil refineries, ever.
"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."
This has not been my experience. I have met countless stupid people who will drive 20 miles to save 2 cents per gallon on gas. People would probably drive 50 miles to save 5 cents per gallon of gas.
If this stuff was sufficiently cheap, I'll bet there are people who would drive for hours just to fill up and save themselves $20 at the pump.
Slashdot Mirror
Or possibly "12 people who were too ethical to avoid their civic duties" ...
Whoops, I forgot to properly escape my example text. The first example was supposed to be:
<foo>{100 megabytes of the letter 'a'}</foo>
And the second was supposed to be:
<{100 MB of 'a'}>hello</foo>
It's been a couple of years (like, 2 or 3) since I wrote the code to which I am referring, or had the experiences to which I am alluding. So my memory of details is fuzzy, and I may have missed the mark on some of it because I may be misremembering. However, I do very clearly recall that, when I was in the thick of my XML efforts, and had a clear idea of what the problems were, that I had many 'this stuff sucks' moments like the ones I described. Maybe the details are a little off, but the point remains, that I ran into problem after problem that seemed to me to be inherent in XML, or to be so cumbersome as to cause me no surprise that there was no really good freely available parser for XML at that time (and maybe still isn't, I don't know).
...
... I would recommend re-evaluating whether or not XML really gives you any of the things that you say that you want. I can tell you with fair certainty that it does not give you the 'takes almost no time to integrate with' part. Technologies that allow representation of hierarchical data are a dime a dozen. And standardized validation formats are only really necessary with overly complex beasts like XML.
As far as the separate thread thing, I guess I am definitely misremembering. You are right, you just 'feed' data into the SAX parser (in my case, expat) and it makes some number of callbacks to you as it parses that bit. I just checked a little bit of code I wrote a while ago and this is just what it does when it uses the expat parser, reads chunks out of a file and passes it to expat, and handles the callbacks as expat makes them. So I am wrong in my previous assertion, for sure. I think I might be confusing this with some DOM implementation I had seen where you *did* have to feed the document all at once.
Your example for how to limit the size of elements in a document is not using DTD, which at the time that I was working with XML, was the standard way to describe a specific XML syntax. I guess you're using XSD since you mention that later on? Is XSD a standard now, superceding DSD? If not, then what you are really saying is that *XSD-aware-parsers* let you limit the number of bytes in an element, not that the XML format itself does. Which may seem like a minor difference, but it is a difference that makes my point: XML is so lame that basic functionality like limiting field sizes had to be done in an update to the spec (XSD) or, if XSD isn't really part of the XML standard, in a non-standardized extension.
Also, how does the XSD-compatible parser know that a field it is parsing exceeds the length restriction you defined? If the limit is N, doesn't it have to read in N bytes (and parse it), and detect that there are still more bytes coming, before it can reject that document? It's a minor point, but it is inefficient.
Also your "somewhat verbose, yes" comment is just too funny. I don't think it's possible to write any XML at all without having that be true
You asked when the last time I tried XML was, and saw poor performance? Like I said, a couple of years ago. It was not unacceptably slow performance, but it was clearly worse than necessary and also used more memory than necessary (this part being significantly more important on the memory limited platform I was working). Also, I have used the yum tool on Linux and as I understand it, part of the reason that it's insanely slow is that it stores too much in XML and the parsing thereof takes a long time when it starts up. That's just anecdotal evidence though and probably simplifies the reason for yum's slowness.
In terms of what I would recommend
Actually I have been working on this problem off and on for a couple of years. I wrote a description of a binary format which could encode any hierarchical data structure, and had all of the features of XML (that I know of) while being fast and safe for computers to parse and emit. I also had a re-entrant parser that could read a document byte by byte if necessary and properly managed its state (allowing the programmer to drive the parser using for example a select loop with sockets). It worked really well.
But then I decided that I could break the problem up into a couple of subproblems that were more elegant to solve individually than together as part of a larger system. I'm still working on that, but maybe I'll have it done soon.
I framed my initial implementation as a way to convert C++ objects to binary form and serialize/deserialize them, without any programmer intervention other than running a build-time tool to generate some extra C++ syntax to be compiled with one's program and thus enable the program to serialize and deserialize any C++ object that it defined, fast, safe, and easy. I have split that up now into two parts: one to generate full-featured reflection information for C++ data types, and the second to take that information and drive a serialization/deserialization engine using it. I completed the first part, but ran out of steam on the second part. I think I'll be getting back to that soon and maybe in a couple of months I'll have it done.
The first part, if you are curious, is at:
http://www.ischo.com/xrtti
I agree with part of what you are saying; definitely there is no single technology that is applicable in all situations, as your JSON example shows.
However, I believe that XML isn't even good for marking up textual documents and data. It would be faster, smaller, and less error prone for computers if it were an intelligently defined binary format. It would be easier for humans to read and write as a non-SGML-based format. I think the correct thing that XML should have been is a format which has both a binary and human-readable form, where each form is tailored specifically to the domain in which it is defined (binary form being fast, easy, and safe for computers to parse and emit, and human-readable form being easy for humans to read and write), and each form can be converted to the other simply and easily.
I agree with you 100%. And so the only way to parse XML in a nonbroken way is to write your own XML parser, adding "nonstandard" constraints that prevent your program from blowing up. So you don't get to re-use existing parsing technologies like expat, you have to write everything yourself. This is a direct consequence of the suckfulness of XML, which is so lame that nobody even bothers to write good free parsers for it.
An example of nonstandard constraints you have to put on your parser - DTD doesn't allow you to specify the maximum length that the text of an element can have. So someone could pass you an XML document with a fragment like this:
{100 megabytes of the letter 'a'}
expat does have facilities that let you reject this document - you can put your own checks in place to say 'if I have read more than 100K bytes of data in the address field, stop parsing and issue an error'. But you have to wait for expat to give you 100K of data before you can finally detect that the field is too long and you have to reject the document. This is wasteful. It would be much better if you could tell expat ahead of time, 'the address field has a limit of 100K' and it would do this for you. It would better still if XML format allowed expat to detect that the field was too long before even reading it. But XML doesn't support this.
What about the maximum length of element names? I think expat may have an inbuilt limit; if not, it will choke and kill your program when it encounters something like this:
hello
It will try to read 100 MB to get the element name. Bogus. Like I said, expat may have some inbuilt protection from this, but it's technically correct XML since XML doesn't limit element names at all, and expat is technically broken because it rejects valid XML. It's only because XML is so lame does a reasonable limitation to avoid your program blowing up result in a nonconforming parser.
I have had far too many 'this stuff sucks' moments with XML to ever consider using it in any capacity where it is not forced upon me (which unfortunately, it is, with great frequency).
I first heard about XML years ago when it was new, and just the concept sucked to me. A markup language based on the ugly and unwieldy syntax of SGML (from which HTML derives)? We don't need more SGML-alikes, we need fewer, was my thought. This stuff sucks.
Then a while later I actually had to use XML. I read up on its design and features and thought, OK well at least the cool bit is that it has DTDs to describe the specifics of a domain of XML. But then I found out that DTDs are incomplete to the extreme, unable to properly specify large parts of what one should be able to specify with it. And on top of that, DTDs don't even use XML syntax - what the hell? This stuff sucks.
I then found that there were several competing specifications for XML-based replacements for the DTD syntax, and none were well-accepted enough to be considered the standard. So I realized that there was going to be no way to avoid fragmentation and incompatibility in XML schemas. This stuff sucks.
I spent some time reading through supposedly 'human readable' XML documents, and writing some. Both reading and writing XML is incredibly nonsuccinct, error-prone, and time consuming. This stuff sucks.
Finally I had to write some code to read in XML documents and operate on them. I searched around for freely available software libraries that would take care of parsing the XML documents for me. I had to read up on the 'SAX' and 'DOM' models of XML parsing. Both are ridiculously primitive and difficult to work with. This stuff sucks.
Of course I found the most widely distributed, and probably widely used, free XML parser (using the SAX style), expat. It is not re-entrant, because XML syntax is so ridiculously and overly complex that people don't even bother to write re-entrant parsers for it. So you have to dedicate a thread to keeping the stack state for the parser, or read the whole document in one big buffer and pass it to the parser. XML is so unwieldy and stupid that even the best freely available implementations of parsers are lame. This stuff sucks.
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax; you can't easily limit the size of elements in a document, for example, either in the DTD (or XML schema replacement) or expat. You just gotta accept that the parser could blow up your program if someone feeds it bad data, because the parser writers couldn't be bothered to put any kind of controls in on this, probably because they were 'thinking XML style', which basically means, not thinking much at all. This stuff sucks.
Finally, my application had poor performance because XML is so slow and bloated to read in as a wire protocol. This stuff sucks.
XML sucks in so many different ways, it's amazing. In fact I cannot think of a single thing that XML does well, or a single aspect of it that couldn't have been better planned from the beginning. I blame the creators of XML, who obviously didn't really have much of a clue.
In summary - XML sucks, and I refuse to use it, and actively fight against it every opportunity I get.
This jives very well with what multitasking 'feels like' to me. Whereas on the one hand I can imagine how doing many things at once, switching the task that I am working on according to the availability of external resources necessary to complete the task, would produce maximal productivity, I find that whenever I attempt this I am left with an unpleasant mental feeling of stress that makes me *not want* to do this anymore.
For example, as a software developer, I find that there are often many things that I could be working on 'at once'. Say I have 10 bugs assigned to me, a major architectural investigation, two features that I am working on, a document or two that I need to write, and of course emails and phone conversations to keep up on.
In the past, I have tried to maximize my productivity by switching from one to the next each time something 'blocks' me from work on the one I am actively engaged in. For example, say that I've written a bunch of code and I'm ready to check it in. But whoops, I find that there is a 'build break' and I'm not allowed to check in until whoever was responsible for it fixes it. At this point, I could switch tasks to working on some other task that is independent of this; say, some other feature that I am coding up. In order to switch to the new task, however, I have to make some mental notes of what I was doing in the first task so that I can pick up where I left off (it might just be as much as remembering that I have to hit 'return' at the end of a command line that I've already typed in, just waiting for the green light to finish the checkin; or it may be significantly more - remembering that I have to re-test a bunch of stuff to make sure it's still working in combination with whatever changes have simultaneously occurred in the code base in between now and whenever I get back to checking this code in). Once switched to this new task, I could work for a little while, only to discover that some key piece of documentation is missing that would explain to me how to use someone else's API, and that the person I need to ask about this is out of the office for the day. OK, time to switch to a new task. Once again I have to store away enough information to be able to continue where I left off on this task when I get back to it; this could mean writing some comments in the code, or sending off an email to the person who is out of the office, the response to which will be enough context to remind me of what I was doing, and pick up where I left off, or maybe doing nothing except making a mental note that I have to re-read the code when I get back to it to remember what I was doing, assuming that when I read the code again, I will come to the same conclusions and once again seek out that person, who hopefully by this time will be back in the office. At this point, I switch to the new task of, say, working on some documentation. Eventually this task will be blocked in a similar way (maybe I will just get tired of working on the documentation - this happens pretty quickly because I hate writing documentation!), and I will have to task switch again, maybe to something new, maybe back to something I was already working on.
The amount of bookkeeping involved with retaining and then re-creating enough state to effectively work on multiple tasks at once is, in a word, exhausting. It is also stressful because one feels like one can at any moment 'forget' something important, and then lose track of a task completely, or maybe just lose track of enough information about a task that getting back to it will be much more work than it should have been. Combine all of this with the feeling that one has to stay very productive within this system in order to be seen as an effective employee, and it becomes very stressful, and mentally exhausting, indeed.
So as a result, my mind eventually starts to 'resist' doing this kind of multitasking; it does so my making me feel like I don't like multitasking. And usually I don't perceive it specifically as a desire not to multitas
Thank you for explaining your viewpoint. You sound very much like a dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian. I too used to be a libertarian. In fact I have voted for the Libertarian candidate in every election since I reached voting age in 1990. I probably will continue to do so, not as much because I believe in Libertarianism - as you can tell I've fallen pretty far off the wagon over the years - but because I believe in anything that is a major change to our very broken system.
At one time my Libertarian convictions were strong, and it all seemed to simple and straightforward. 25 years on, I have seen too many stupid people doing too many stupid things to feel as comfortable as I used to with leaving everything up to the market.
Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to respond.
Actually your Al Gore comments are exactly Ad Hominem To Quoquo. The point being, that whether or not what Al Gore says is true, is completely independent of how Al Gore chooses to live his personal life. Al Gore is a proponent of the position that global warming is a real phenomenon and that people should reduce their resource useage to counteract this. Whether or not Al Gore "practices what he preaches" is immaterial to the question of whether or not a) global warming is a real phenomenon and b) whether or not people should reduce their resource useage to combat global warming.
As to whether or not I would listen to a preacher who is screwing his secretary? I would listen to him just as much as I would listen to a preacher who is not screwing his secretary. Honestly. I would try hard to evaluate whatever he is telling me based on the merits of his arguments and their presentation. What either preacher does in his or her own personal life would not matter to me.
Would I believe you if you tell me that the milk you are drinking is bad? Probably not - because other facts in evidence (the fact that you are drinking it without any apparent ill effect) would override your statement.
Also, the "whole global warming argument" is obviously a set of extremely complex arguments based on observed phenomenon. You can dispute each argument in turn, and you can dispute the validity of each observed phenomenon, but to say that the whole theory suffers from a single logical fallacy is ludicrous. I think that just by saying that you demonstrate that you don't actually want to understand enough about the theory of global warming to dispute it in a meaningful way, but would rather sweep the whole thing under a rug of generality that conveniently fits the conclusion that you would like to achieve.
I think one of the main problems of the global warming debate is that too few people familiarize themselves with the theory in sufficient detail to be able to come to a conclusion based on rational decisions. Most people have made their minds up without even having to see any real evidence or even understand the complexities of the theory at all. Some people come to the table with a predisposition to want to believe that other people are 'out for them' and just want to limit their freedoms arbitrarily, presumably just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority or something. And some people come to the table with the predisposition to want to believe that industry and capitalism and the modern way of life is inherently evil and so it's immediately 'obvious' to them that anyone attacking global warming has a self-serving greedy agenda.
Either viewpoint is bogus and contributes nothing to the debate, and doesn't even do the question justice. It is in everyone's best interest to form an opinion based on sound science and clear thinking; wouldn't you rather spend the time studying the problem and finding out that you're wrong rather than destroying the earth for no good reason/destroying the economy for no good reason (pick whichever one fits your preconceptions)?
My '2x cost of everything' statement was meant as a generalization. The real discussion is about the price of gasoline and its effects on the cost of all other goods. Obviously there would be a great number of factors affecting the cost of every single consumer good if the price of gasoline were to go up. Consider that economies outside of the USA *do* have gasoline that costs 2x as much or more (for example, where I live, in New Zealand), and trust me, people in these countries are not starving, unable to house themselves, or walking 6 miles to work.
What you are talking about is an example of a "false dilemma". You're saying that our only choices are either cheap gasoline, or unaffordable food, housing, and transportation. There is no reason to believe that there aren't a huge number of possibilities in between as well.
I'm not making a choice for you. I'm expressing an opinion. If enough people share that opinion, then collectively we could make a choice that would affect everyone. That's called democracy. I am sure you have heard of it. Although, I get the feeling that you don't really support it, since it's clear that you want instead to silence alternative viewpoints on questions like this. Your tone of voice doesn't really express interest in exploring the topic, it expresses an interest in beating down anyone with a different viewpoint.
Because there are equivalent standards of living at different levels of purchasing power, at least I think so.
This gets rather philosophical, because it begs the question of exactly what is a "standard of living" - one could say that it is the maximization of quality of life that one can get given a certain purchasing power, which will of course make by definition any change in purchasing power equivalent to a change in standard of living.
However, I believe that there are some other aspects of standard of living which do not depend on purchasing power.
For example, regardless of your purchasing power, if the environment around you is polluted, you will have a lower standard of living (on average - it's true that people with sufficiently high purchasing power could pay to live further from the pollution, or even pay to have it cleaned up - but not everyone will be able to do this; it's a zero-sum game, where those who can afford a better environment get one at the expense of those who can't). If there is high crime, you will have a lower standard of living regardless of your purchasing power (once again, on average - you could hire bodyguards and build huge fences around your property and buy expensive alarm systems to reduce the effect that crime has on you personally - but other people who can't do these things will still suffer).
I believe that humans do not make perfect choices; and that the standard of life that people will have is determined not just by the money that they have (which is in essense their own personal power to shape their environment locally), but also by the environment in which they live, that shapes their outlook and value structure. You can change a person's standard of living by giving them more money - i.e. more ability to change their local environment. Or you can change a person's standard of living by making the environment around them more conducive to them making the "correct" choices.
Now this does get philosophical because it assumes that there are "correct" choices to be made - that, for example, it is "better" from a standard of living perspective to have a good relationship with your neighbors than a bad one. Of course there are probably people who personally enjoy having an antagonistic relationship with their neighbors, so to them it would be a reduction in standard of living for their to be greater harmony in the neighborhood. But I believe that a) those people are in the vast minority, and b) those people could actually change if their belief structure, as dictated by the environment around them, were to change.
So it's partially that we want to make our own standard of living better, and partially that we want changes in our environment to work to change people's way of thinking, so that they become better at making choices that improve their standard of living.
With automobiles, I think that they have a certain negative impact socially when used to the excesses that they have been. So I think that, for example, a group of people might have a *better* standard of living if gas were too expensive and they were forced to change their behavior, than they might have in the more "convenient" world where they can make choices based on an artificially low price of gasoline, the result of those choices being a greater "ease" of some parts of life, but at the expense of more far-reaching and important aspects of life (personal health, health of the environment, relationships with others, pace of life, etc, etc). If we change the variables that such people use to make decisions about how to live their life, we might actually find that it's better for everyone in general, even though on the face of it it just looks like it's taking away everyone's ability to maximize their personal standard of living. In reality it might just collectively improve everyone's standard of living, when you take society as a whole.
It's philosophical I know, and very subject to lots of valid debate. But that's how I see it.
You really need to read this document:
"42 informal logical fallacies explained"
It's at:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
So far in two posts almost every point you made has been a logical fallacy (well I didn't read all of your first post, just enough to see your first logical fallacy).
These have been:
* Ad Hominem: First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting)
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you attacked me personally
* Ad Hominem Tu Quoque: This fallacy is committed when it is concluded that a person's claim is false because 1) it is inconsistent with something else a person has said or 2) what a person says is inconsistent with her actions.
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you questioned the validity of Al Gore's position on global warming because of the personal behaviors (that you misrepresent, to boot) of Al Gore
* False Dilemma: A False Dilemma is a fallacy in which a person uses the following pattern of "reasoning":
1. Either claim X is true or claim Y is true (when X and Y could both be false).
2. Claim Y is false.
3. Therefore claim X is true.
-- You committed this logical fallacy when you gave a false choice between "freedom" and the "environment", as if they are mutually exclusive
There may be more, but I didn't read your first post so I can't say for sure.
My point: if you want to take the time to write down your arguments on such issues, it would behoove you to study logical fallacies so that you could train yourself to notice when you are committing one. Those of us who can spot them, easily do so when presented with posts like yours, and it's really not worth anyone's time to discuss falsehoods that are so easily detected.
I guess it's different if you are the one being insulted. Although I suppose that I should realize that there is no real meaning in insults hurled at you by someone you don't know. Still, when someone has to reduce themselves to personal insults, I tend to believe that they haven't distanced themselves intellectually from the discussion enough to produce logical and coherent arguments. They have too much emotion in it and will invariably appeal to emotion rather than making logical points. From what you say, it seems that ArcherB did some of both. But as for me, it's not worth my time to read posts of low quality; if I could detect which posts were low quality I could save myself alot of time in reading garbage, and so for those few posts where I can detect it straight away (as in this case), I gladly skip them.
I meant that he "wasted his time in writing it" if his goal was to communicate to me, the person he was directly responding to. However, you are right - his goal wasn't just to get me to read his post, it was to get lots of people to read his post. But I do think that the number of people who will bother to read his post is reduced by the tone which he takes, which wastes at least some of the potential of his post.
Of course, maybe the choice of language he used will be even more convincing to some other set of people who do read such things? Maybe it's a wash. Who knows. I personally would like to see a more civil discussion regardless.
Just so you know, as soon as I read the first five words or so of your rant and saw the ad hominem attacks coming, I stopped reading. If you want to make a point, try to do it without resorting to insults. Obviously you cared enough about what you wrote to wrote a large diatribe, and if you want your time to be used effectively, you shouldn't hurl insults, because it just means you will have wasted your time in writing it.
Wouldn't the justification be, not that the tax is used to maintain the roads, but that they are trying to discourage road use, to keep traffic numbers down, as you stated in your first sentence? If so, does it surprise you that they want to make alternative fuels just as costly as gasoline?
I'm all for two things:
1) Tax the hell out of automobile fuel to keep automobile useage down
2) Tax it all at a base rate sufficient to accomplish (1), and then tax gasoline users 2x that to discourage them from fucking up the environment so badly
It's rather sad that, given an opportunity to drive the same car using more environmentally-friendly fuel, you, and people like you, of whom there are MANY (I'd say the vast majority perhaps?) will choose instead to simply choose to use more fuel, thus entirely counteracting any positive effect that the technology could have on the world around you.
Not to mention the fact that this larger vehicle that you want to buy is more dangerous to everyone else on the road except yourself.
But hey, on both counts, *you're* the only one who really matters, right?
That's not a problem for me. I'd accept an N% reduction in purchasing power, as long as everyone else is subject to the same N%. If everything that I could possibly buy went up 2x in cost as a result of what I suggest, then so be it. It would be the same for everyone, and as long as we're all in the same boat together, I don't mind making sacrifices. I wouldn't mind seeing a more progressive tax rate applied at the same time to help out the lower income brackets who would be most severely affected by this 2x rise in costs. However, I do believe that a significant percentage of people could have a standard of living at least as good, if they just changed their habits, even if they did have to pay 2x as much for everything.
I thought that E85 was 85% gasoline and 15% ethanol. It's actually 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. So nothing I said in my previous post makes any sense. Please ignore it, sorry for the trouble.
Here is what I do not get. You say that:
* A gallon of 85% gasoline with 15% ethanol produces a difference in mileage of 30% when compared with a gallon of 100% gasoline
But wouldn't 70% of a gallon of pure gasoline also produce a difference in mileage of 30% when compared with a gallon of 100% gasoline?
And yet in the first case you are using 85% of a gallon of gasoline (plus 15% of a gallon of ethanol), to get the same mileage that you would get with 70% of a gallon of 100% gasoline.
Why not just use 70% of a gallon of gasoline instead of 85% of a gallon of gasoline + 15% of a gallon of ethanol, to go the same distance?
Your figures (and they are not unique, I have seen similar figures elsewhere in this discussion) would seem to suggest that the 15% ethanol in E85 contributes no useful energy, and at the same time *decreases* the amount of energy available in the gasoline that is present.
This just cannot be true. So what am I missing?
Better that "you" (i.e. whoever the "we" that you were referring to) should bend over, than the environment. Keep the gas prices going up, I say.
Sounds good to me. I'm all for artificially limiting the supply of gasoline to force people to improve their efficiency and seek out alternative fuels. I hope they don't build anymore oil refineries, ever.
From TA:
"Even if you produce it county by county, you still need an infrastructure," he said. "People aren't going to go to some remote location for fuel."
This has not been my experience. I have met countless stupid people who will drive 20 miles to save 2 cents per gallon on gas. People would probably drive 50 miles to save 5 cents per gallon of gas.
If this stuff was sufficiently cheap, I'll bet there are people who would drive for hours just to fill up and save themselves $20 at the pump.