One of the most important (and stomach churning) things about the book is how it shows how cheap human life became in the first half of the 20th century.
Uhhhh right. If you travel outside the US at all you would notice that life is still pretty cheap.
I rented one from a blockbuster for a weekend when it came out. Even now, thinking of it after all these years, I can still remmeber the searing head pain...
Anything with a label on it telling you it will give you a headache in 20 minutes has to be a failure. Plus the 3 games developed for it sucked ass.
OCR is getting better for recognizing language because it increasingly relies on linguistics (morphology, syntax and to a limited degree semantics). If you have something that isn't linguistic in nature (i.e. long strings of digits), it won't do a very good job for similar reasons as you find it easier to memorize Simpsons quotes than to memorize a 100 digit long string of random characters.
Lazy in this circumstance is often good. What you just described is a bunch of work, which translates into *money*. The important question to ask is what is the utility of creating this schema, vs what is the cost of doing so. The answer varies from case to case.
Work does translate into *money*, not doing work doesn't translate into *saving money* except maybe in the extremely short term.
Furthermore, XML messages (with the exception of configuration files where schema may actually be quite useful) are normally generated by computers, not people. The rules to generate those messages are then embedded in code (or tables, which is code by another name). Once it works, it will usually continue to work. So again, the schema has offered no advantage, while adding bureaucracy.
It's true that XMLSchema provides syntactic rather than semantic constraints. But that's *really* useful information. For example XML Schema allows type checking. Sure you can just treat everything as a string and ignore the problem. You can also use it to contrain the valid values for something with regular expressions. This allows you to do assertions at the protocol level. Again, I can get away with not using them but in the long term, that's just stupid.
And if your schema is generated by computer doesn't that make it more useful, not less? It's like saying that COM/CORBA interfaces are nice but IDL is just pointless niggling...
As an analogy, consider a schema to be like a syntax checker. It can tell you if the niggling details are right, but it can't tell you about the whether the proram will work. Since in many cases of message exchange, the niggling details are not even important, this is often a waste of time!
Yes, you could consider an XMLSchema as kind of type checking and syntax checking for your XML. It's been my experience that most real problems are niggling details (unless your doing demoware). Given the broad spectrum of programming tasks out there using XML these days, it would be careless to say that they *all* need Schema (and/or schema validation) which I didn't. But saying that Schemas are always (or for that matter often) a waste of time is IMO a lazy attitude.
This approach to interfaces allows systems to interchange messages without exact version consistency, and without requiring a tight congruence of the applications. It allows a system to "tell what it knows" and another system to "read what it needs" without further ado.
Unfortunately, the use of schemas goes against this idea. It is IMHO a more old fashioned approach of rigidly constraining the messages to an exact specification. This can make interfaces far less robust and flexible, and increase the amount of work.
If your talking about using XML for data messaging not using schemas is just lazy. XML Schema allows optional elements and attributes and/or default values. So if it isn't required, then just make it optional. If you want multiversion interfaces, you have a different XMLSchema for each version. Then each side knows explicitly what the messaging protocol is.
While it's probably true that things mostly kinda work if the versions don't match, you shouldn't be relying on this. There's lots of software out there that does this but that doesn't mean it's the ideal.
If your using XML for markup of documents, schemas are somewhat less useful since the underlying semantics of the tags is usually more important.
Arial, courier and times are font families. So Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic are 3 different fonts. If they go by the strict definition of fonts, it's not a big deal.
Just run an open WiFi connection and say it's someone else!
How names are created
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Salon had a great article about the way that names were created (back in 99). The company came up with a name JamCracker that no-one wanted:
It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."
I was somewhat amused in 2000 when a company started up using that name!
Yes, it's all true. Their software is an obnoxious piece of crap and I'm for one won't take it anymore -- I'm uninstalling it as we speak. The only thing I ever used it for is listening to Cartalk on NPR.com. If some site you like uses it, tell them you won't be returning until they get rid of realplayer for something else like streaming mp3.
I read in some other news piece about this that HP were excluded by Forbes because they went through a merger (as opposed I guess to a takeover) -- this is apparently a rule of the list.
Why even bother going to the class if your going to surf and read email in class? Grannted this will prepare you for a career as a seat warmer "bragging" about how many hours you spend at the office without really accomplishing much.
Next you'll say that the university / school should force everyone to have a laptop so they can "participate" in the class. If people really have time to surf and read email, the prof should just start making the class harder.
It's called pragmatism. Look into it. I was simply pointing out that it's somewhat hypocritical to get bent out of shape about pay phones (which you will note, I said is approximately zero as in insignificant) because of all the much more insignificant crap that everyone (including you, yes you) don't bitch about because it's too damn hard to give them up. Now you will right a response about how you live in an igloo made of recycled tires and diapers and only eat food you grew from your own garden.
Now, honestly, do you really thing that the small # of recycled pay phones is seriously worthy of any social discussion?
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
Ummmm. How about approximately 0? How many pay phones per person? Like 1/100 at best. Now think about all of the diapers and soda bottles and old tires and other crap that people throw out without thinking. There are things worth worrying about and then there is the noise.
As for getting rid of pay phones, I'm fine with it. I mean, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone?
The term shell does not necessarily imply command line shell. That's just the typical unix implementation. In Windows, the Explorer GUI is the shell and the command window is just an application executing in it.
I've seen some virtual worlds done in Alan Kay's Squeak that are more or less what the original poster described. Because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, you can use late binding to add properties at run time anywhere in the class hierarchy. Also, because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, it's kind slow so I can't imagine doing a fully functional virtual world in it...
You mean Sony isn't concerned for my personal welfare? That they just want my **money**? Next thing you'll be saying is that they don't really care about those recording artists they represent either.
Last week they were going to buy Rational and Borland. This week they're going to buy Macromedia. Maybe next week they will buy IBM and Adobe. If people spent half as much effort fighting the things microsoft actually does as what they say they will do, we would all be a little better off. Microsoft acquisitions are actually pretty rare -- they can usually get you to do what they want without buying you so why sould they.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most important (and stomach churning) things about the book is how it shows how cheap human life became in the first half of the 20th century.
Uhhhh right. If you travel outside the US at all you would notice that life is still pretty cheap.
The comment # is 5,250,560 not the user #.
You must be new here.
with more film!!
Ahhh, touché!
At the bottom of the article, it states that the coating doesn't fade:
It never fades. Sunlight's ultraviolet rays trigger a chemical reaction in the Sollx film, forming a protective outer coating that won't decay.
I'd be more concerned about scratches -- how do I touchup a film?
I rented one from a blockbuster for a weekend when it came out. Even now, thinking of it after all these years, I can still remmeber the searing head pain...
Anything with a label on it telling you it will give you a headache in 20 minutes has to be a failure. Plus the 3 games developed for it sucked ass.
OCR is getting better for recognizing language because it increasingly relies on linguistics (morphology, syntax and to a limited degree semantics). If you have something that isn't linguistic in nature (i.e. long strings of digits), it won't do a very good job for similar reasons as you find it easier to memorize Simpsons quotes than to memorize a 100 digit long string of random characters.
Lazy in this circumstance is often good. What you just described is a bunch of work, which translates into *money*. The important question to ask is what is the utility of creating this schema, vs what is the cost of doing so. The answer varies from case to case.
Work does translate into *money*, not doing work doesn't translate into *saving money* except maybe in the extremely short term.
Furthermore, XML messages (with the exception of configuration files where schema may actually be quite useful) are normally generated by computers, not people. The rules to generate those messages are then embedded in code (or tables, which is code by another name). Once it works, it will usually continue to work. So again, the schema has offered no advantage, while adding bureaucracy.
It's true that XMLSchema provides syntactic rather than semantic constraints. But that's *really* useful information. For example XML Schema allows type checking. Sure you can just treat everything as a string and ignore the problem. You can also use it to contrain the valid values for something with regular expressions. This allows you to do assertions at the protocol level. Again, I can get away with not using them but in the long term, that's just stupid.
And if your schema is generated by computer doesn't that make it more useful, not less? It's like saying that COM/CORBA interfaces are nice but IDL is just pointless niggling...
As an analogy, consider a schema to be like a syntax checker. It can tell you if the niggling details are right, but it can't tell you about the whether the proram will work. Since in many cases of message exchange, the niggling details are not even important, this is often a waste of time!
Yes, you could consider an XMLSchema as kind of type checking and syntax checking for your XML. It's been my experience that most real problems are niggling details (unless your doing demoware). Given the broad spectrum of programming tasks out there using XML these days, it would be careless to say that they *all* need Schema (and/or schema validation) which I didn't. But saying that Schemas are always (or for that matter often) a waste of time is IMO a lazy attitude.
This approach to interfaces allows systems to interchange messages without exact version consistency, and without requiring a tight congruence of the applications. It allows a system to "tell what it knows" and another system to "read what it needs" without further ado.
Unfortunately, the use of schemas goes against this idea. It is IMHO a more old fashioned approach of rigidly constraining the messages to an exact specification. This can make interfaces far less robust and flexible, and increase the amount of work.
If your talking about using XML for data messaging not using schemas is just lazy. XML Schema allows optional elements and attributes and/or default values. So if it isn't required, then just make it optional. If you want multiversion interfaces, you have a different XMLSchema for each version. Then each side knows explicitly what the messaging protocol is.
While it's probably true that things mostly kinda work if the versions don't match, you shouldn't be relying on this. There's lots of software out there that does this but that doesn't mean it's the ideal.
If your using XML for markup of documents, schemas are somewhat less useful since the underlying semantics of the tags is usually more important.
Arial, courier and times are font families. So Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic are 3 different fonts. If they go by the strict definition of fonts, it's not a big deal.
Also, it might be 10 versions of Symbol...
Just run an open WiFi connection and say it's someone else!
Salon had a great article about the way that names were created (back in 99). The company came up with a name JamCracker that no-one wanted:
It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."
I was somewhat amused in 2000 when a company started up using that name!
They could call it .tax
Yes, it's all true. Their software is an obnoxious piece of crap and I'm for one won't take it anymore -- I'm uninstalling it as we speak. The only thing I ever used it for is listening to Cartalk on NPR.com. If some site you like uses it, tell them you won't be returning until they get rid of realplayer for something else like streaming mp3.
I read in some other news piece about this that HP were excluded by Forbes because they went through a merger (as opposed I guess to a takeover) -- this is apparently a rule of the list.
What do you have to do to get them to listen? Eight years!
Easy. Sue them.
Why even bother going to the class if your going to surf and read email in class? Grannted this will prepare you for a career as a seat warmer "bragging" about how many hours you spend at the office without really accomplishing much.
Next you'll say that the university / school should force everyone to have a laptop so they can "participate" in the class. If people really have time to surf and read email, the prof should just start making the class harder.
Insightful? Since when?
It's called pragmatism. Look into it. I was simply pointing out that it's somewhat hypocritical to get bent out of shape about pay phones (which you will note, I said is approximately zero as in insignificant) because of all the much more insignificant crap that everyone (including you, yes you) don't bitch about because it's too damn hard to give them up. Now you will right a response about how you live in an igloo made of recycled tires and diapers and only eat food you grew from your own garden.
Now, honestly, do you really thing that the small # of recycled pay phones is seriously worthy of any social discussion?
1. Terrorists and other street criminals don't use public telephones -- mostly they don't work, it's inconvenient and there's no privacy.
2. Criminals use stolen cell phones to make their calls and throw them away every couple of days.
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
Ummmm. How about approximately 0? How many pay phones per person? Like 1/100 at best. Now think about all of the diapers and soda bottles and old tires and other crap that people throw out without thinking. There are things worth worrying about and then there is the noise.
As for getting rid of pay phones, I'm fine with it. I mean, when was the last time you saw a working pay phone?
The term shell does not necessarily imply command line shell. That's just the typical unix implementation. In Windows, the Explorer GUI is the shell and the command window is just an application executing in it.
recursion
\Re*cur"sion\ (-sh?n), n.
See recursion.
I've seen some virtual worlds done in Alan Kay's Squeak that are more or less what the original poster described. Because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, you can use late binding to add properties at run time anywhere in the class hierarchy. Also, because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, it's kind slow so I can't imagine doing a fully functional virtual world in it...
You mean Sony isn't concerned for my personal welfare? That they just want my **money**? Next thing you'll be saying is that they don't really care about those recording artists they represent either.
Capitalism can be a cruel mistress...
Last week they were going to buy Rational and Borland. This week they're going to buy Macromedia. Maybe next week they will buy IBM and Adobe. If people spent half as much effort fighting the things microsoft actually does as what they say they will do, we would all be a little better off. Microsoft acquisitions are actually pretty rare -- they can usually get you to do what they want without buying you so why sould they.
It just takes a while...