/. is not censoring. They don't delete anything, it's all still there, and anyone on the planer can read it, even if it's at -1.
Can't posts actually go to -2 at which point they are deleted? I thought I read something like that.
On another topic: I use to get mod points quite often, but in the past several months have never. Is there a moderation perma-revoke, and if so how is it triggered? Metamods disagreeing with my mods? The Slashdot crew? I'm very curious.
As to the 'bullet immunity', apparently this is not uncommon in combat as has been described in several books (see 'About Face' by David Hackworth for one example). It's likely due to the fact that most soldiers in combat are partially deafened by the noise and may not be able to hear the cracks of passing bullets.
In this case though it was largely green soldiers with little experience with live rounds going past their head, and the total situation didn't last more than 24 hours: It doesn't seem that there was time to become desensitized to combat in such a brief period of time. After days of combat, sure, but not an hour into the situation.
Remember, this really happened. Yes, there definitely was an inbalance in firing effectiveness. For the Somalis this was mostly due to the fact that they were using AK47s on full auto (not the most accurate weapon in the world), were not marksmen by any means, and many were just shooting in the general direction of the Americans just to avoid losing face in front of their fellow clan members. Meanwhile the Americans had a lot of firing range practice, were mainly firing single shots, and were fighting for their lives.
Obviously the Somali's were fighting for their lives as well given some claims that 1000 of them perished. Regarding the AK47: I have no direct experience with anything of that sort, but I have heard that it is a very reliable, very accurate weapon: On par with an M16. The myth that it's a poor weapon is just a "not made here" Western arrogance. Again separate the movie from the reality: The reality is historical truth->Few American soldiers died considering the foes against them (obviously through talent and strategy in an extremely unbalanced situation). The movie, however, shows very dedicated Somalis in excellent shooting positions (i.e. rooftops) seemingly very dedicated at shooting them, so based upon the dramatization in the movie, coupled with a chaotic, panicky situation portrayed for the soldiers, one would expect all of the soldiers to die and the Somalis to be victorious. Again, my beef is with the dramatization which I find over-unbalanced the situation to make it even more heroic.
People aren't "writing messages" into the GPS system (I'm still astounded at how many people totally misunderstand GPS. Almost everyone who sees my GPS asks me what the `subscription' to it costs, or if I'm concerned that they're "tracking" me: People don't understand that GPS, as a base technology, is completely passive and is just the triangulation [What is it called when it's among 12 points?] of a ping from 12 points). Basically you could do something like this by making a website that took longitude/latitude, and you find the closest record to their point and send it as the response: It's neither brilliant, nor amazing, but it is an obvious merging of technologies, and it's localizing the net (which is a fantastic thing not only for the user experience, but also truly for advertising).
I have no doubt that if you pit 100 high trained, well equipped US soldiers versus 5000 Somalians, with the US soldiers being tactically smart and the Somalians suicidally running at them, that the kill ratio would be very heavily in the US' favour (as history has shown). My problem was the way things were portrayed in the movie: i.e. a convoy of unarmored vehicles driving down a road with HUNDREDS (if not thousands) of gunmen shooting from rooftops, yet barely anyone gets a scratch. The problem is that rather than showing the US soldiers having such a great survival rate (considering the odds against them hypothetically if it was only #s versus #s) because of training/skill/tactics, instead this movie shows the US soldiers surviving apparently because of magical force fields surrounding them, and DESPITE a lack of tactics or intelligence. Indeed, the Somalians managed to get snipers covering every roof on the escape route (and hence displayed a sort of intelligence that would have really swayed the odds in their favour: Vertical superiority=kills). By the portrayal in the movie all I can think is that it's implying religiously that some greater force was protecting them, because it certainly didn't make them out as great soldiers (though again REALITY shows that they must have been: My beef is with THE MOVIE as that AC apparently is too dumb to understand).
Uh, thanks for the help. Do you follow-up every AskSlashdot with a lame "search Google"? Guess what genius: I already did and found most of the links insufficient, hence the open discussion about it.
There isn't "an algorithm" that defines XML compression, and that's the whole point. Additionally, SourceForge most certainly is not the be all and end all (i.e. the fact that you jumped to that link and you think it answers ANYTHING [it doesn't, and just as I said in my askslashdot most of it has been abandoned long ago. Of course that's the status of most Sourceforge projects] shows that you just wanted to jump in with your great cynics wisdom). As has been shown in this discussion: There is an awful lot of ignorance out there in regards to XML compression, but thankfully a few people see through it and actually realize the domain specifics, and I have gotten helped.
In any case the Slashdot posting filter should automatically filter any "Duh, search Google!" ridiculous posts.
Personally I thought the movie stunk, and just like the support for President Bush, I have a feeling the great accolades are largely the result of a puppy-dog lemming type patriotism: What the hell was with everyone putting this movie on their "Best of 2001" lists 3 weeks ago?
The movie was irritating for several reasons: Firstly the fact that Tom Sizemore is doing the exact same role he did in Saving Private Ryan is tiring-> Standing around while bullets hit around his feet, apparently as some sort of magically protected superhero. Rather than seeming heroic, it came across as STUPID. Get in some cover asshole! Don't let yourself get hit so some other chump dies trying to save you. That aspect of it (the `heroic' immunity to fire around them) was a noticable flaw.
Secondly, this movie exemplified that classic Hollywood fantasy that a million people shooting guns and no one was hit: I mean the APCs/Hummers are driving down narrow roads with gunmen on all the rooftops (and apparently the helicopter support didn't see these rooftop snipers as a problem...): Anyone unbuttoned in a vehicle would be dead pronto. Yet in this movie they drove along and occasionally someone would get hit, ignoring the fact that the top gunmen in a vertically compromised situation like that would draw fire like flies to shit. Nope, it's another magical situation where American soldiers hit everytime they fire, but 1000 enemies can't hit anything.
Thirdly, most of the combatants didn't really have a fear of death, and it seemed largely irrelevant. The one point where a death actually seemed to matter (though he didn't die) was when a gentleman pulled out a picture of his family. In all other cases it was just another irrelevant asset being compromised. This movie does not have impact as a war movie, except in saying that foolish combat (i.e. being in HMMVs in narrow streets with snipers on all the rooftops) is dumb and probably shouldn't be done.
All in all it was two hours of people shooting randomly back and forth. For all of the talk of the gruesome nature of it, it really wasn't all that bad compared to some other movies. I left with a headache. I truly believe that this movie would have been panned as a sad wannabe in a field of great war movies, but in the current patriotic environment instead it gets kudos.
Tell that to the Afgan women who were being subjected to grossly unjust treatment at the hands of the Taliban. Or the Buddhist population of Afganistan. How about considering the trade-off between their fate under the Taliban (i.e. extinction) vs. the new set of thugs?
The US operation has absolutely nothing to do with liberating the Afghan women or saving the Afghan Buddhists: If it did they would have moved in long ago, and they would have thought twice before supporting them against the Soviets. I'm not saying this in a blaming way: The US operation SHOULDN'T be about imposing the US way of life on the world, because as has been shown countless times-> That does not work. In any case perhaps that means that countries would feel justified in attacking the US to liberate an African-American population that sees extraordinary jail time for their young males, an abbreviated lifespan, and often segregation into ghettos. BTW: I don't actually believe that, but the point is that anyone can make a moral stand to justify ANYTHING.
For the same reason that Israel spies on the US, the US spies upon Europe, etc : It sure works great at the trade table when you know exactly what the guy at the other side of the table knows, what he thinks, how he's going to approach the issues, etc. Spying has never been just among enemies, because when it comes to the almighty dollar every country acts like an enemy.
So if they were at war with said country using hardware they supplied, it's better to fight them and have casualties than to lose weapons trade? If you're a big strategist in a big room assessing the threats to your country, wouldn't it be nice to say "Oh don't worry about XYZ: They base their whole defence upon systems that we have a backdoor in to"? The US decided that it didn't like Iran any more, rendering the Iranian F-14s useless because of a lack of parts: Really it's no different than a "killswitch"-> By refusing to provide replacement parts they effectively rendered the fighters impotent.
In any case I don't imagine that a "killswitch" would be a big dashboard LED, but rather it'd be subtle -> Gosh darnit the amraam just refuses to get a lock for some reason! Why is the radar cluttered and incapable of separating targets? Etc.
Which country gives communism a good name then? Seriously I'm curious.
Many people who are `anti-communism' are so not because the dreamed premise is bad, but rather because practically it always seems to devolve into China, the USSR, North Korea, etc. See the book Animal Farm : It's called human nature and it is virtually inevitable in such a scenario.
While generally I am hardly an open-source advocate (I believe that good old fashioned capitalism works for software), I would absolutely require the source code to Windows if I were in a buying position in government (or I would request that Microsoft distribute some development to my country. As it is doesn't Microsoft do all development in Redmond, and satellite offices are merely sales and consulting?), or truly I would go with Linux or some other open source variant: Exactly as you said it is disconcerting when there are keys named "NSA", etc.
Speaking of the NSA I saw an interesting thing in Maxim last month: It had the budgets of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and it was something like $1.7B, $2.5B, $7.5B respectively. That last number absolutely blew me away as so few of us even really realize it's there most of the time. I'm too tired to verify these numbers right now, but that was the #s that Maxim was stating (though it's hardly a tome of fact).
My cupboards seem to be full of "Made in China" dishes, but that doesn't mean that I live in a country that doesn't know how to make a cup. There are some countries that are good at making weapons because of the economy of scale (i.e. the US, Russia, etc.), and it doesn't make an awful lot of sense for smaller countries to even try. However that doesn't mean that you can't request the logic behind all ICs, which you can verify and overwrite if necessary. If they refuse, then how could you ever trust the hardware?
Businesses that work in the defense industry are anything BUT "private" companies: They are governed by very strict rules and are tightly leashed and very closely monitored, and I'm quite sure that they're forced to go along with devious plans every now and then. If you really think Boeing is a private company then when do you think they'll be starting to ship F-22s to China?
You know I've often wondered how countries can trust US equipment sold to them (or Russian equipment, etc): Who says that the day Saudi Arabia pisses the US off all of their F15s might respond to the "die now" signal and plummet to the ground? If I were ever to buy hardware from a country other than my own I'd go through every single mm of it with a fine tooth comb, and then I'd reflash every piece of circuitry, etc: There is no way I'd ever trust what was delivered. Sorta defeats the premise of military trade, but perhaps that's a good thing.
If this story is true then this will be a disaster for US military and commercial companies: Already there is a world wary of Echelon, but if now they have to worry about every other device being trojan horsed. Having said that, the next time you drink from that "made in China" cup, think to yourself "Would it be in their national interest to put a chemical that slowly leaches into Westerner's systems, causing cancer or just stupifying the society (i.e. lead)."
I suppose a more apt metaphor would be that there's a wormhole on either side, rather than a blackhole. Blackhole compression would be pretty good though : 1MB in, 0 bytes out!
This is exactly the sort of information I'm looking for: Thank you. I've downloaded their demo and am going to give it a try on some sample data to see how it performs (of course comparing it against the ubiquitous infamous GZip).
I do indeed control both sides: Basically imagine it as a blackhole on both sides and I want to stuff XML in one side and have it pop out the other, but unfortunately the connection in between is a limited pipe. While GZip does a nice job, other XML specific algorithms offer dramatically more compression (and 2x the throughput, for example, is pretty worthwhile).
Even having said that: Thankfully when they made HTTP they realized that GZip isn't the be-all and end-all, so if I implemented ErgoCompression my custom clients that sent the ErgoCompression Accept-Encoding header value could take advantage of it, while others could use GZip or compress of deflate, or whatever their client supported. To be honest I'm very surprized to see some of the responses that I've seen here on Slashdot, which is "GZip is the monopoly: Use it!", a sort of "Gzip is good enough". Well when it comes down to it, getting 2x or greater XML pushed through that limited pipe seems pretty worthwhile to me, especially because, as you mentioned, I control both ends of the pipe.
The problem with GZIP is quite simply that it doesn't take advantage of XML specifics (i.e. there are domain attributes of XML that make certain algorithms much more efficient than others): XMill, as an example, manages to achieve almost twice the compression of GZip with approximately the same CPU usage.
In this case adding in a module that would do XMill on the server side (of course obeying the Accept-Encoding that the HTTP client passes in, so a client that didn't handle the custom compression would not be thwarted) would allow us to use a custom HTTP client that could do the compression and achieve twice the throughput on the limited pipe. As I mentioned in the submission: We have more CPU power than bandwidth, so that 2x compression improvement is very significant (i.e. there is a world of low bandwidth vertical uses out there: satellite, frame relay, CDPD, etc). For those who cringe at the idea of using XML to begin with, please realize that with the proper compression XML encoded data is smaller than any proprietary packaging because of its high degree of predictability.
The legal use? In Canada it is illegal to use a gun (or threaten use of a gun) unless you're law enforcement or are in perilous immediate obvious danger (i.e. some guy stealing your TV set does not qualify. Indeed some guy coming at you with a bat doesn't qualify if you could hop out a window and get away): It is ILLEGAL to pull your gun out against a burglar, so that isn't a very good example of a "legal" use. The only legal uses of guns in Canada is hunting, and at the shooting range, or perhaps to rub gently while dreaming of the ultimate power that you hold against all those meanies out there.
The _overwhelming_ majority of guns on the streets illegally in Canada got there by being stolen from "lawful" owners in home/gun shop burglaries, or by being pilfered over from the US (which of course is a gun haven: Again the US has such an epidemic because of lax gun control laws). I'm not even commenting on whether or not gun control is right or wrong, or whether violence would decrease if guns were banned world wide (i.e. People still can kill each other with bats and knives), but just that it is idiotic to compare gun control with encryption control, and it is ridiculous to claim that "legal" gun ownership has no effect on "illegal" gun ownership, as the former DIRECTLY leads to the latter (i.e. how many guns are on the streets in countries where guns are heavily prohibited?).
Don't bring up gun control laws: There is NO comparison. Guns can be physically controlled, and guns as physical entities generally conform to border laws (ergo: Don't bring your guns with you on trips to Canada). The next time a variety store clerk is shot with a gun that a 17 year old got robbing a home think long and hard about the proliferation of weapons and what gun control laws really do.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always get Opera if you want.
Can't posts actually go to -2 at which point they are deleted? I thought I read something like that.
On another topic: I use to get mod points quite often, but in the past several months have never. Is there a moderation perma-revoke, and if so how is it triggered? Metamods disagreeing with my mods? The Slashdot crew? I'm very curious.
As to the 'bullet immunity', apparently this is not uncommon in combat as has been described in several books (see 'About Face' by David Hackworth for one example). It's likely due to the fact that most soldiers in combat are partially deafened by the noise and may not be able to hear the cracks of passing bullets.
In this case though it was largely green soldiers with little experience with live rounds going past their head, and the total situation didn't last more than 24 hours: It doesn't seem that there was time to become desensitized to combat in such a brief period of time. After days of combat, sure, but not an hour into the situation.
Remember, this really happened. Yes, there definitely was an inbalance in firing effectiveness. For the Somalis this was mostly due to the fact that they were using AK47s on full auto (not the most accurate weapon in the world), were not marksmen by any means, and many were just shooting in the general direction of the Americans just to avoid losing face in front of their fellow clan members. Meanwhile the Americans had a lot of firing range practice, were mainly firing single shots, and were fighting for their lives.
Obviously the Somali's were fighting for their lives as well given some claims that 1000 of them perished. Regarding the AK47: I have no direct experience with anything of that sort, but I have heard that it is a very reliable, very accurate weapon: On par with an M16. The myth that it's a poor weapon is just a "not made here" Western arrogance. Again separate the movie from the reality: The reality is historical truth->Few American soldiers died considering the foes against them (obviously through talent and strategy in an extremely unbalanced situation). The movie, however, shows very dedicated Somalis in excellent shooting positions (i.e. rooftops) seemingly very dedicated at shooting them, so based upon the dramatization in the movie, coupled with a chaotic, panicky situation portrayed for the soldiers, one would expect all of the soldiers to die and the Somalis to be victorious. Again, my beef is with the dramatization which I find over-unbalanced the situation to make it even more heroic.
Here is one. Okay so it's $110, but it's pretty damn close to $100! :-)
People aren't "writing messages" into the GPS system (I'm still astounded at how many people totally misunderstand GPS. Almost everyone who sees my GPS asks me what the `subscription' to it costs, or if I'm concerned that they're "tracking" me: People don't understand that GPS, as a base technology, is completely passive and is just the triangulation [What is it called when it's among 12 points?] of a ping from 12 points). Basically you could do something like this by making a website that took longitude/latitude, and you find the closest record to their point and send it as the response: It's neither brilliant, nor amazing, but it is an obvious merging of technologies, and it's localizing the net (which is a fantastic thing not only for the user experience, but also truly for advertising).
I have no doubt that if you pit 100 high trained, well equipped US soldiers versus 5000 Somalians, with the US soldiers being tactically smart and the Somalians suicidally running at them, that the kill ratio would be very heavily in the US' favour (as history has shown). My problem was the way things were portrayed in the movie: i.e. a convoy of unarmored vehicles driving down a road with HUNDREDS (if not thousands) of gunmen shooting from rooftops, yet barely anyone gets a scratch. The problem is that rather than showing the US soldiers having such a great survival rate (considering the odds against them hypothetically if it was only #s versus #s) because of training/skill/tactics, instead this movie shows the US soldiers surviving apparently because of magical force fields surrounding them, and DESPITE a lack of tactics or intelligence. Indeed, the Somalians managed to get snipers covering every roof on the escape route (and hence displayed a sort of intelligence that would have really swayed the odds in their favour: Vertical superiority=kills). By the portrayal in the movie all I can think is that it's implying religiously that some greater force was protecting them, because it certainly didn't make them out as great soldiers (though again REALITY shows that they must have been: My beef is with THE MOVIE as that AC apparently is too dumb to understand).
Uh, thanks for the help. Do you follow-up every AskSlashdot with a lame "search Google"? Guess what genius: I already did and found most of the links insufficient, hence the open discussion about it.
There isn't "an algorithm" that defines XML compression, and that's the whole point. Additionally, SourceForge most certainly is not the be all and end all (i.e. the fact that you jumped to that link and you think it answers ANYTHING [it doesn't, and just as I said in my askslashdot most of it has been abandoned long ago. Of course that's the status of most Sourceforge projects] shows that you just wanted to jump in with your great cynics wisdom). As has been shown in this discussion: There is an awful lot of ignorance out there in regards to XML compression, but thankfully a few people see through it and actually realize the domain specifics, and I have gotten helped.
In any case the Slashdot posting filter should automatically filter any "Duh, search Google!" ridiculous posts.
Personally I thought the movie stunk, and just like the support for President Bush, I have a feeling the great accolades are largely the result of a puppy-dog lemming type patriotism: What the hell was with everyone putting this movie on their "Best of 2001" lists 3 weeks ago?
The movie was irritating for several reasons: Firstly the fact that Tom Sizemore is doing the exact same role he did in Saving Private Ryan is tiring-> Standing around while bullets hit around his feet, apparently as some sort of magically protected superhero. Rather than seeming heroic, it came across as STUPID. Get in some cover asshole! Don't let yourself get hit so some other chump dies trying to save you. That aspect of it (the `heroic' immunity to fire around them) was a noticable flaw.
Secondly, this movie exemplified that classic Hollywood fantasy that a million people shooting guns and no one was hit: I mean the APCs/Hummers are driving down narrow roads with gunmen on all the rooftops (and apparently the helicopter support didn't see these rooftop snipers as a problem...): Anyone unbuttoned in a vehicle would be dead pronto. Yet in this movie they drove along and occasionally someone would get hit, ignoring the fact that the top gunmen in a vertically compromised situation like that would draw fire like flies to shit. Nope, it's another magical situation where American soldiers hit everytime they fire, but 1000 enemies can't hit anything.
Thirdly, most of the combatants didn't really have a fear of death, and it seemed largely irrelevant. The one point where a death actually seemed to matter (though he didn't die) was when a gentleman pulled out a picture of his family. In all other cases it was just another irrelevant asset being compromised. This movie does not have impact as a war movie, except in saying that foolish combat (i.e. being in HMMVs in narrow streets with snipers on all the rooftops) is dumb and probably shouldn't be done.
All in all it was two hours of people shooting randomly back and forth. For all of the talk of the gruesome nature of it, it really wasn't all that bad compared to some other movies. I left with a headache. I truly believe that this movie would have been panned as a sad wannabe in a field of great war movies, but in the current patriotic environment instead it gets kudos.
Tell that to the Afgan women who were being subjected to grossly unjust treatment at the hands of the Taliban. Or the Buddhist population of Afganistan. How about considering the trade-off between their fate under the Taliban (i.e. extinction) vs. the new set of thugs?
The US operation has absolutely nothing to do with liberating the Afghan women or saving the Afghan Buddhists: If it did they would have moved in long ago, and they would have thought twice before supporting them against the Soviets. I'm not saying this in a blaming way: The US operation SHOULDN'T be about imposing the US way of life on the world, because as has been shown countless times-> That does not work. In any case perhaps that means that countries would feel justified in attacking the US to liberate an African-American population that sees extraordinary jail time for their young males, an abbreviated lifespan, and often segregation into ghettos. BTW: I don't actually believe that, but the point is that anyone can make a moral stand to justify ANYTHING.
Why would the US be spying on CANADA?
For the same reason that Israel spies on the US, the US spies upon Europe, etc : It sure works great at the trade table when you know exactly what the guy at the other side of the table knows, what he thinks, how he's going to approach the issues, etc. Spying has never been just among enemies, because when it comes to the almighty dollar every country acts like an enemy.
So if they were at war with said country using hardware they supplied, it's better to fight them and have casualties than to lose weapons trade? If you're a big strategist in a big room assessing the threats to your country, wouldn't it be nice to say "Oh don't worry about XYZ: They base their whole defence upon systems that we have a backdoor in to"? The US decided that it didn't like Iran any more, rendering the Iranian F-14s useless because of a lack of parts: Really it's no different than a "killswitch"-> By refusing to provide replacement parts they effectively rendered the fighters impotent.
In any case I don't imagine that a "killswitch" would be a big dashboard LED, but rather it'd be subtle -> Gosh darnit the amraam just refuses to get a lock for some reason! Why is the radar cluttered and incapable of separating targets? Etc.
China gives communism a bad name
Which country gives communism a good name then? Seriously I'm curious.
Many people who are `anti-communism' are so not because the dreamed premise is bad, but rather because practically it always seems to devolve into China, the USSR, North Korea, etc. See the book Animal Farm : It's called human nature and it is virtually inevitable in such a scenario.
While generally I am hardly an open-source advocate (I believe that good old fashioned capitalism works for software), I would absolutely require the source code to Windows if I were in a buying position in government (or I would request that Microsoft distribute some development to my country. As it is doesn't Microsoft do all development in Redmond, and satellite offices are merely sales and consulting?), or truly I would go with Linux or some other open source variant: Exactly as you said it is disconcerting when there are keys named "NSA", etc.
Speaking of the NSA I saw an interesting thing in Maxim last month: It had the budgets of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and it was something like $1.7B, $2.5B, $7.5B respectively. That last number absolutely blew me away as so few of us even really realize it's there most of the time. I'm too tired to verify these numbers right now, but that was the #s that Maxim was stating (though it's hardly a tome of fact).
My cupboards seem to be full of "Made in China" dishes, but that doesn't mean that I live in a country that doesn't know how to make a cup. There are some countries that are good at making weapons because of the economy of scale (i.e. the US, Russia, etc.), and it doesn't make an awful lot of sense for smaller countries to even try. However that doesn't mean that you can't request the logic behind all ICs, which you can verify and overwrite if necessary. If they refuse, then how could you ever trust the hardware?
Businesses that work in the defense industry are anything BUT "private" companies: They are governed by very strict rules and are tightly leashed and very closely monitored, and I'm quite sure that they're forced to go along with devious plans every now and then. If you really think Boeing is a private company then when do you think they'll be starting to ship F-22s to China?
You know I've often wondered how countries can trust US equipment sold to them (or Russian equipment, etc): Who says that the day Saudi Arabia pisses the US off all of their F15s might respond to the "die now" signal and plummet to the ground? If I were ever to buy hardware from a country other than my own I'd go through every single mm of it with a fine tooth comb, and then I'd reflash every piece of circuitry, etc: There is no way I'd ever trust what was delivered. Sorta defeats the premise of military trade, but perhaps that's a good thing.
If this story is true then this will be a disaster for US military and commercial companies: Already there is a world wary of Echelon, but if now they have to worry about every other device being trojan horsed. Having said that, the next time you drink from that "made in China" cup, think to yourself "Would it be in their national interest to put a chemical that slowly leaches into Westerner's systems, causing cancer or just stupifying the society (i.e. lead)."
In the Windows world apps should conform to the regional settings, though personally I'd rather all apps followed ISO 8601 for dates, but alas.
The perception among many people, both in Asia and here, is that software corporations are mostly run by greedy bastards who don't deserve your money.
Ah, the good old thieves creed. Knew it wouldn't be long before that appeared in this thread.
I suppose a more apt metaphor would be that there's a wormhole on either side, rather than a blackhole. Blackhole compression would be pretty good though : 1MB in, 0 bytes out!
This is exactly the sort of information I'm looking for: Thank you. I've downloaded their demo and am going to give it a try on some sample data to see how it performs (of course comparing it against the ubiquitous infamous GZip).
I do indeed control both sides: Basically imagine it as a blackhole on both sides and I want to stuff XML in one side and have it pop out the other, but unfortunately the connection in between is a limited pipe. While GZip does a nice job, other XML specific algorithms offer dramatically more compression (and 2x the throughput, for example, is pretty worthwhile).
Even having said that: Thankfully when they made HTTP they realized that GZip isn't the be-all and end-all, so if I implemented ErgoCompression my custom clients that sent the ErgoCompression Accept-Encoding header value could take advantage of it, while others could use GZip or compress of deflate, or whatever their client supported. To be honest I'm very surprized to see some of the responses that I've seen here on Slashdot, which is "GZip is the monopoly: Use it!", a sort of "Gzip is good enough". Well when it comes down to it, getting 2x or greater XML pushed through that limited pipe seems pretty worthwhile to me, especially because, as you mentioned, I control both ends of the pipe.
The problem with GZIP is quite simply that it doesn't take advantage of XML specifics (i.e. there are domain attributes of XML that make certain algorithms much more efficient than others): XMill, as an example, manages to achieve almost twice the compression of GZip with approximately the same CPU usage.
In this case adding in a module that would do XMill on the server side (of course obeying the Accept-Encoding that the HTTP client passes in, so a client that didn't handle the custom compression would not be thwarted) would allow us to use a custom HTTP client that could do the compression and achieve twice the throughput on the limited pipe. As I mentioned in the submission: We have more CPU power than bandwidth, so that 2x compression improvement is very significant (i.e. there is a world of low bandwidth vertical uses out there: satellite, frame relay, CDPD, etc). For those who cringe at the idea of using XML to begin with, please realize that with the proper compression XML encoded data is smaller than any proprietary packaging because of its high degree of predictability.
The legal use? In Canada it is illegal to use a gun (or threaten use of a gun) unless you're law enforcement or are in perilous immediate obvious danger (i.e. some guy stealing your TV set does not qualify. Indeed some guy coming at you with a bat doesn't qualify if you could hop out a window and get away): It is ILLEGAL to pull your gun out against a burglar, so that isn't a very good example of a "legal" use. The only legal uses of guns in Canada is hunting, and at the shooting range, or perhaps to rub gently while dreaming of the ultimate power that you hold against all those meanies out there.
The _overwhelming_ majority of guns on the streets illegally in Canada got there by being stolen from "lawful" owners in home/gun shop burglaries, or by being pilfered over from the US (which of course is a gun haven: Again the US has such an epidemic because of lax gun control laws). I'm not even commenting on whether or not gun control is right or wrong, or whether violence would decrease if guns were banned world wide (i.e. People still can kill each other with bats and knives), but just that it is idiotic to compare gun control with encryption control, and it is ridiculous to claim that "legal" gun ownership has no effect on "illegal" gun ownership, as the former DIRECTLY leads to the latter (i.e. how many guns are on the streets in countries where guns are heavily prohibited?).
Don't bring up gun control laws: There is NO comparison. Guns can be physically controlled, and guns as physical entities generally conform to border laws (ergo: Don't bring your guns with you on trips to Canada). The next time a variety store clerk is shot with a gun that a 17 year old got robbing a home think long and hard about the proliferation of weapons and what gun control laws really do.
Just had to say that before some Belgians get angry about that. Whoops. :-)