IBM are pretty clued up these days. They had a rocky patch, but they're now on their way out. They offer services these days; they're good at it, they're good team players on all manner of community-based projects (many are OpenSourced) and they're making good profits.
They're not the market share they were, they're not as influential as they were, but they're heading slowly upwards. Rather a contrast to DEC (who?), Compaq, and (It saddens me to say it) HP.
If you implement a page that doesn't work when users don't agree to widely disparaged and non-standard bolt-ons from The People Who Brought You Nimda, then your page is broken. What happens if I use it from a *nix box ?
I don't want ActiveX on a web page. It's not a safe technology, and more to the point, I just don't want it. M$oft won't take no for an answer though - even though I've turned it off by every possible option, they still hammer me with a modal dialog until I give in and sign up to The Happy Shiny World of The Microsoft Web.
All I want is for the IE coders to read M$oft's own user-interface standards. There's no need at all for a warning dialog like this to be modal - at that point it goes beyond the helpful and into the abusive.
Honestly, I would be/is a lot simpler to have the internet and all its related services (web, mail, chat, identification etc.) integrated seamlessly into the OS
Identification is The Embodiment of Pure Evil (tm). We DO NOT NEED THIS !
What we actually need is the ability to prove rights; the right to listen to streamed Metallica, the right to check a bank account balance for Fred Bloggs. Neither of these requires identification (believe me - this is what my cow-orkers at HP keep inventing).
Identification is easy though. It's the dumb, obvious, server-based architecture for M$oft drones who can't think out of the box (or similar sucky HR phrase).
What identification does in addition to proof is that not only does it make the user's requirements work, but it also allows the Nasty Evil Corporates to track when it does so. Passport is good, but it's good for M$oft, not for the users.
Sun are no better. They're riding the anti M$oft hype with a non-Passport Passport-alike that suffers all the same problems.
"if I don't get a Passport account, I may be missing out on something"
Try using IE, then turning off ActiveX controls for restricted sites and adding doubleclick and a few other banner-ad vendors to your restricted list. Now when you browse eBay (or many others, not on your restricted list) then you have a continual dialog box on each page stating "YOUR settings prevent ActiveX. The page MAY NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY". The clearly implied message is, "Use ActiveX; if you turn it off you're a Bad Person and you're going to miss a party".
I was happy enough with the BBS culture of 10 - 15 years ago
I don't want to go back to that.
Sure, you lose the morons, which is good.
On the downside though, you also lose access to two things; the enormous pro bono resources that have grown up to serve The Web of the Long September (they weren't there before because there wasn't the demand to make it worthwhile) and also the purely money-grabbing commercial sites that need a population of proles to feed off. You might hate the level to which the BBC or CNN are pitching their news stories, but I bet you still read them.
I never had Amazon@Fidonet or Terraserver@Fidonet to play with. I _like_ these huge resources of on-line data, and I might even use a M$oft product if that were my only way to maintain access.
That's not an endorsement of M$oft, you understand, just a statement of how low my morals might fall if that were the only way to access the Natalie Portman Grits archive 8-)
The problem with all of these similar grammar tests is that they're context-free, when English grammar itself is highly dependent on context. Any of these is equally acceptable, depending on the existence of a named river:
We rafted down the grand mountain river.
A river flowing steeply down an impressive mountain
We rafted down the Grand Mountain river. A dull river, on a named mountain
We rafted down the Grand Mountain River.
A river with a name
Now perhaps there is such a river, and it flows through the campus, but it's not merely confusing, it's positively incorrect to see such a variation as a grammatical error. A grammatically valid sentence exists, for which there is no capitalisation. In that case, the lack of capitalisation cannot be judged as an error. If the teacher doesn't like it, then they should write a less ambiguous test.
Spiraling in the Andromeda Galaxy, Dr. Vilhelm insists that there is alien life on the Andromeda planet called Lanulos.
Maybe Dr. Vilhelm was spiraling in the Andromeda Galaxy ? (I'm trying hard not to think of Futurama at this point)
Anyway, I like run-on sentences and parenthetical comments everywhere. It filters out the Lisp coders with brains big enough to cope.
Occasionally I've got involved in marketing (I can handle it, honest, I've just got a bit of a cold at the moment). The surprising ease of it and the ease by which it's possible to not only do it, but to get it right, makes me even more convinced that Scott Adam's view is right (marketing people are those who can't play piano well enough for a brothel). If you're going to play ball with consumerism, then you need to look at marketing. The fact that the field is full of extremely stupid people without the brains of a HR droid shouldn't put you off making your own marketing work right.
#ob_karma_whore Paco Underhill's book Why We Buy, is a great intro to common sense applied to retail marketing. Much off it works for e-comm sites too.
DARPA didn't create the Internet, they created Arpanet. Arpanet took redundancy seriously, had central mandation of standards, and clueful admins.
The Internet (as of today) is almost entirely commercial. It's a matter of shipping cheap pr0n around at minimum cost, and that means a very small number of big fat backbones. Standards were washed away in the spew from Redmond. Nearly all the servers live in the same handful of concrete holes in the ground, and any child with a backhoe can take the lot out (and does so, on a fairly regular basis). No one has a clue, no-one cares, and it's always September. So what ? It's cheap, and eventually the Spam and IRC gets through.
Last week my ISP flamed me after a complaint that I couldn't get my mail -- because their outbound links in NY were at fault. And this is my problem ? I'm in Bristol, UK, and they're in London!)
If the government wants another intranet, and they want to spend the extra bucks to keep it working, then let them at it. And of course, if Bush really wants to fire up a "Dot.com New Deal" and fend off a recession, then buying an intranet free of Nimda is better than spending the same money on NMD
Read Usenet and c.i.w.a.h. You'll get flamed to a crisp by them (they're a little dysfunctional, to put it mildly), but there are a couple of people thereabouts who know how to do this right.
I keep getting involved in usenet flames over XML because I'm still a newbie (not quite 3 years) - and the other guys have something like 10 years experience (they're SGML dinosaurs). Flaming XML is fun - that's why the interesting work has moved beyond it - but if you're going to do this, then attack the real issues with XML, tell us what they are, and tell us what your solutions are.
After all, if you know everything about XML from just 3 months experience, then you're obviously much smarter than we are.
Re:30 MPH _is_ particularly fast
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
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· Score: 1
"fat bastard commuter" applies equally well to me 8-)
My current commute is down and up two big hills, so I'm slow on that. A typical road speed for me though is about 25mph. I don't maintain this as an average, but I certainly do cruise at it when the road is clear enough to accelerate up to speed. I can also break 30mph on the flat without too much trouble, and any time there's a downhill. I do pass plenty of riders, but there's a fair few who pass me too. One of my friends is >10 years older and had his hip joints made in a factory -- I don't even ride with him, I'd never keep up.
One of my recent commute routes involved a stretch in heavy traffic where anything slower than 25 would be dangerously out of step with the cars - I certainly never let the speed drop on that road !
The Cambridge cyclist could have legally travelled 5mph faster if he'd been in a car. How can cycling more slowly be a crime ?
What happened to the Cambridge cyclist who was pulled by the police for excessive speed and then charged with "furious cycling", or somesuch arcane law from the horse age ? AFAIR, he was only doing 30mph, or some everyday sort of speed, not even anything particularly fast.
I'd be interested to see what an IP Rate of 100 (or zero, whichever is better, also assuming a 100 point scale) could handle.
IP ratings don't work quite like that. Rather than a 0..100 scale, they're actually a string concatenation of three 0+ scales. High numbers are better. First number is dust rating (0..6), second fluids (0..8), third mechanical impact (0..9). IP67 means "no ingress of dust", "short-term water immersion to 1m" and no description of mechanical impact strength.
I paid much less than that - a bundled deal with another ISDN LANModem and a 10/100 hub. A friend of mine was using a PoS Ascend router to connect to ISDN at the time, and he now uses my extra LANModem.
If you want obscure an inpenetrable config, try that Bob-awful Ascend.
I don't grok Unix. I wanted something in a box with negligible maintenance, I had no time and I had adequate money. My ISDN LanModem and hub were 3Coms, so I bought their baby firewall; OfficeConnect Internet Firewall 25. You'll need the link - 3Com's site is impossible to navigate.
I liked it. Seemed robust, and dead easy to admin. Setting up logging was a little awkward, as it needs to log to a remote external box.
Blew up inside a year (I think it may have been mains-surge related, and the firewall was one of few things I didn't have off the UPS). No one is interested in warranty claims 8-( Maybe I was unlucky.
XML doesn't need a Nutshell
on
XML in a Nutshell
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· Score: 2, Informative
XML is hard to learn, and easy to remember. Nutshell guides are best for complex lists of obscure settings in little-used config files. I have a bunch of similar Nutshell guides, and they see much hard and useful service.
This book isn't a good tutorial (it isn't meant to be) and I see no need for a "handy quick reference" guide to the parts of XML that are covered here. It's not a bad book, but I see no real useful purpose to it.
Sometimes I need to read the XML Spec. This is only ever for really obscure and bizarre minutiae, and in those cases I have to go back to the W3C original. Fortunately that's on-line and already on my desk in a well-thumbed paper copy. I've never felt the slightest need for an XML Nutshell.
Omitting Schema is a real drawback. The Schema spec is one of the very few XML-related specs that's at all large and can't easily be memorised.
It doesn't stink, it just smells different. It's a functional language, not a procedural language, and those of us who didn't grow up at MIT still find that a bit weird. There's certainly a culture shock, but once you start to get it, then it's no harder than anything else.
There's nothing wrong with variables that you can't change the value of ! You just need to lose that inate fear of recursion most of us procedural people still carry around.
XPath does look a bit like Martian, granted, but it's no worse than regexes.
A really good text on XSLT needs to go beyond the reprinted standard level, and Michael Kay's is pretty good for that. Lots of useful cookbook stuff, and the 2nd edition is also well up to date.
Now xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl" used to pong a bit... Nested templates ? Blaurgh !
XML is an extremely important standard and I urge everyone to learn it
I couldn't give a damn if people learn it. Those who haven't already learned it are just grooming themselves for being the next generation of COBOL programmers. We'll always need someone to be the industry's under-achievers.
HTML is a formatting language for displaying information in web browsers
Formatting language for display ? 8-) That's fighting talk ! Get over to news:c.i.w.a.h and try saying that rendering behaviour is implicit in HTML semantics.
I do not expect any more advances in web technologies
Of course not. After all, the world only needs six computers at most, so whay do we need this web thing ? Telephones are superfluous - after all, there are plenty of office boys to act as couriers.
Just think of it as Micropayments in action
on
XML in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
Great. I look forward to reading them. Sorry I don't have any other convenient way to pay you for writing it.
I would support military action as a method of threat elimination.
I'd support that too, if it were possible.
I don't believe it is though. Show me any (please !) situation where a military response has eradicated a terrorist group. The nearest I can think of is the Cathars ! - certainly nothing in the 20th century has been solved by this means.
It's a nice idea, and I think it's justifiable - I just don't think it's workable.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM are pretty clued up these days. They had a rocky patch, but they're now on their way out. They offer services these days; they're good at it, they're good team players on all manner of community-based projects (many are OpenSourced) and they're making good profits.
They're not the market share they were, they're not as influential as they were, but they're heading slowly upwards. Rather a contrast to DEC (who?), Compaq, and (It saddens me to say it) HP.
If you implement a page that doesn't work when users don't agree to widely disparaged and non-standard bolt-ons from The People Who Brought You Nimda, then your page is broken. What happens if I use it from a *nix box ?
I don't want ActiveX on a web page. It's not a safe technology, and more to the point, I just don't want it. M$oft won't take no for an answer though - even though I've turned it off by every possible option, they still hammer me with a modal dialog until I give in and sign up to The Happy Shiny World of The Microsoft Web.
All I want is for the IE coders to read M$oft's own user-interface standards. There's no need at all for a warning dialog like this to be modal - at that point it goes beyond the helpful and into the abusive.
Honestly, I would be/is a lot simpler to have the internet and all its related services (web, mail, chat, identification etc.) integrated seamlessly into the OS
Identification is The Embodiment of Pure Evil (tm). We DO NOT NEED THIS !
What we actually need is the ability to prove rights; the right to listen to streamed Metallica, the right to check a bank account balance for Fred Bloggs. Neither of these requires identification (believe me - this is what my cow-orkers at HP keep inventing).
Identification is easy though. It's the dumb, obvious, server-based architecture for M$oft drones who can't think out of the box (or similar sucky HR phrase).
What identification does in addition to proof is that not only does it make the user's requirements work, but it also allows the Nasty Evil Corporates to track when it does so. Passport is good, but it's good for M$oft, not for the users.
Sun are no better. They're riding the anti M$oft hype with a non-Passport Passport-alike that suffers all the same problems.
"if I don't get a Passport account, I may be missing out on something"
Try using IE, then turning off ActiveX controls for restricted sites and adding doubleclick and a few other banner-ad vendors to your restricted list. Now when you browse eBay (or many others, not on your restricted list) then you have a continual dialog box on each page stating "YOUR settings prevent ActiveX. The page MAY NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY". The clearly implied message is, "Use ActiveX; if you turn it off you're a Bad Person and you're going to miss a party".
I was happy enough with the BBS culture of 10 - 15 years ago
I don't want to go back to that.
Sure, you lose the morons, which is good.
On the downside though, you also lose access to two things; the enormous pro bono resources that have grown up to serve The Web of the Long September (they weren't there before because there wasn't the demand to make it worthwhile) and also the purely money-grabbing commercial sites that need a population of proles to feed off. You might hate the level to which the BBC or CNN are pitching their news stories, but I bet you still read them.
I never had Amazon@Fidonet or Terraserver@Fidonet to play with. I _like_ these huge resources of on-line data, and I might even use a M$oft product if that were my only way to maintain access.
That's not an endorsement of M$oft, you understand, just a statement of how low my morals might fall if that were the only way to access the Natalie Portman Grits archive 8-)
Flame grilled
The problem with all of these similar grammar tests is that they're context-free, when English grammar itself is highly dependent on context. Any of these is equally acceptable, depending on the existence of a named river:
A river flowing steeply down an impressive mountain
A dull river, on a named mountain
A river with a name
Now perhaps there is such a river, and it flows through the campus, but it's not merely confusing, it's positively incorrect to see such a variation as a grammatical error. A grammatically valid sentence exists, for which there is no capitalisation. In that case, the lack of capitalisation cannot be judged as an error. If the teacher doesn't like it, then they should write a less ambiguous test.
Maybe Dr. Vilhelm was spiraling in the Andromeda Galaxy ? (I'm trying hard not to think of Futurama at this point)
Anyway, I like run-on sentences and parenthetical comments everywhere. It filters out the Lisp coders with brains big enough to cope.
-19 or more ?
President of the USA !
The really scary parts of marketing are that:
We (geeks) are good at it.
It's fun !
Occasionally I've got involved in marketing (I can handle it, honest, I've just got a bit of a cold at the moment). The surprising ease of it and the ease by which it's possible to not only do it, but to get it right , makes me even more convinced that Scott Adam's view is right (marketing people are those who can't play piano well enough for a brothel). If you're going to play ball with consumerism, then you need to look at marketing. The fact that the field is full of extremely stupid people without the brains of a HR droid shouldn't put you off making your own marketing work right.
#ob_karma_whore
Paco Underhill's book Why We Buy, is a great intro to common sense applied to retail marketing. Much off it works for e-comm sites too.
Of course Disney own Gonzo...
- but they're so afraid of Hunter S. Thompson, they'll never enforce it.
Any journo who shoots his own typewriter is OK by me 8-)
DARPA didn't create the Internet, they created Arpanet. Arpanet took redundancy seriously, had central mandation of standards, and clueful admins.
The Internet (as of today) is almost entirely commercial. It's a matter of shipping cheap pr0n around at minimum cost, and that means a very small number of big fat backbones. Standards were washed away in the spew from Redmond. Nearly all the servers live in the same handful of concrete holes in the ground, and any child with a backhoe can take the lot out (and does so, on a fairly regular basis). No one has a clue, no-one cares, and it's always September. So what ? It's cheap, and eventually the Spam and IRC gets through.
Last week my ISP flamed me after a complaint that I couldn't get my mail -- because their outbound links in NY were at fault. And this is my problem ? I'm in Bristol, UK, and they're in London!)
If the government wants another intranet, and they want to spend the extra bucks to keep it working, then let them at it.
And of course, if Bush really wants to fire up a "Dot.com New Deal" and fend off a recession, then buying an intranet free of Nimda is better than spending the same money on NMD
Read Usenet and c.i.w.a.h. You'll get flamed to a crisp by them (they're a little dysfunctional, to put it mildly), but there are a couple of people thereabouts who know how to do this right.
Actually I used XML for 3 months
So you know almost nothing then ?
I keep getting involved in usenet flames over XML because I'm still a newbie (not quite 3 years) - and the other guys have something like 10 years experience (they're SGML dinosaurs). Flaming XML is fun - that's why the interesting work has moved beyond it - but if you're going to do this, then attack the real issues with XML, tell us what they are, and tell us what your solutions are.
After all, if you know everything about XML from just 3 months experience, then you're obviously much smarter than we are.
"fat bastard commuter" applies equally well to me 8-)
My current commute is down and up two big hills, so I'm slow on that. A typical road speed for me though is about 25mph. I don't maintain this as an average, but I certainly do cruise at it when the road is clear enough to accelerate up to speed. I can also break 30mph on the flat without too much trouble, and any time there's a downhill. I do pass plenty of riders, but there's a fair few who pass me too. One of my friends is >10 years older and had his hip joints made in a factory -- I don't even ride with him, I'd never keep up.
One of my recent commute routes involved a stretch in heavy traffic where anything slower than 25 would be dangerously out of step with the cars - I certainly never let the speed drop on that road !
The Cambridge cyclist could have legally travelled 5mph faster if he'd been in a car.
How can cycling more slowly be a crime ?
What happened to the Cambridge cyclist who was pulled by the police for excessive speed and then charged with "furious cycling", or somesuch arcane law from the horse age ? AFAIR, he was only doing 30mph, or some everyday sort of speed, not even anything particularly fast.
IP ratings don't work quite like that. Rather than a 0..100 scale, they're actually a string concatenation of three 0+ scales. High numbers are better. First number is dust rating (0..6), second fluids (0..8), third mechanical impact (0..9). IP67 means "no ingress of dust", "short-term water immersion to 1m" and no description of mechanical impact strength.
There's a few on-line resources around with the full list.
If you want obscure an inpenetrable config, try that Bob-awful Ascend.
I don't grok Unix. I wanted something in a box with negligible maintenance, I had no time and I had adequate money. My ISDN LanModem and hub were 3Coms, so I bought their baby firewall; OfficeConnect Internet Firewall 25. You'll need the link - 3Com's site is impossible to navigate.
I liked it. Seemed robust, and dead easy to admin. Setting up logging was a little awkward, as it needs to log to a remote external box.
Blew up inside a year (I think it may have been mains-surge related, and the firewall was one of few things I didn't have off the UPS). No one is interested in warranty claims 8-( Maybe I was unlucky.
I found this firewall eval site helpful.
XML is hard to learn, and easy to remember. Nutshell guides are best for complex lists of obscure settings in little-used config files. I have a bunch of similar Nutshell guides, and they see much hard and useful service.
This book isn't a good tutorial (it isn't meant to be) and I see no need for a "handy quick reference" guide to the parts of XML that are covered here. It's not a bad book, but I see no real useful purpose to it.
Sometimes I need to read the XML Spec. This is only ever for really obscure and bizarre minutiae, and in those cases I have to go back to the W3C original. Fortunately that's on-line and already on my desk in a well-thumbed paper copy. I've never felt the slightest need for an XML Nutshell.
Omitting Schema is a real drawback. The Schema spec is one of the very few XML-related specs that's at all large and can't easily be memorised.
the current incarnation of XSL stinks.
It doesn't stink, it just smells different. It's a functional language, not a procedural language, and those of us who didn't grow up at MIT still find that a bit weird. There's certainly a culture shock, but once you start to get it, then it's no harder than anything else.
There's nothing wrong with variables that you can't change the value of ! You just need to lose that inate fear of recursion most of us procedural people still carry around.
XPath does look a bit like Martian, granted, but it's no worse than regexes.
A really good text on XSLT needs to go beyond the reprinted standard level, and Michael Kay's is pretty good for that. Lots of useful cookbook stuff, and the 2nd edition is also well up to date.
Now xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl" used to pong a bit... Nested templates ? Blaurgh !
XML is an extremely important standard and I urge everyone to learn it
I couldn't give a damn if people learn it. Those who haven't already learned it are just grooming themselves for being the next generation of COBOL programmers. We'll always need someone to be the industry's under-achievers.
HTML is a formatting language for displaying information in web browsers
Formatting language for display ? 8-) That's fighting talk ! Get over to news:c.i.w.a.h and try saying that rendering behaviour is implicit in HTML semantics.
I do not expect any more advances in web technologies
Of course not. After all, the world only needs six computers at most, so whay do we need this web thing ? Telephones are superfluous - after all, there are plenty of office boys to act as couriers.
Great. I look forward to reading them. Sorry I don't have any other convenient way to pay you for writing it.
I would support military action as a method of threat elimination.
I'd support that too, if it were possible.
I don't believe it is though. Show me any (please !) situation where a military response has eradicated a terrorist group. The nearest I can think of is the Cathars ! - certainly nothing in the 20th century has been solved by this means.
It's a nice idea, and I think it's justifiable - I just don't think it's workable.
start carpet bombing their cities
Which cities do you suggest ?
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (plenty of handy Palestinians) ?
Jeddah (that's in Saudi Arabia, Beavis) - home capital of Osama Bin Laden ?