Although in practice, alt.animals.badgers is regularly Spammed to death ("Ganero Dinareo !") by teleline.es Whatever legal provision there is, hasn't solved the problem.
It's a bit like the K Foundation burning a million quid. It's not money that could otherwise be spent "saving the world", it's just tokens that we assign value to. When you burn a chunk of it, and there's still the amount of stuff left to value with the remaining money, then you've not "destroyed wealth", you've simply increased the value of the remaining tokens.
By playing with your Transformers, and breaking a few of them, you're fulfilling an essential role in boosting the value of the pristine and unplayed-with remainder.
But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority teachers don't even know how to use computers.
That might be true -- but is your solution going to be to train the teachers, or to simply take the computers away from them ? Seems a little unhelpful as a policy.
--
For sale: Large quantity, assorted "W" keys
Who are you ? I've never seen you before, I don't want to talk to you. Maybe you're fascinated by siege engines, but I don't know this, so I don't know that I'd enjoy talking further with you. Slashdot is "efficient" at content presentation, with threading, thresholds etc., so I don't pick up on all of these "out of band" communications. This efficiency is also detrimental to personalised chat - on Usenet, with a threaded newsreader, then I can cheerfully witter away to one person out of a million and everyone else just dumps the thread. It doesn't affect my vKarma, as that's still high due to my valuable contributions in other threads. On Slash, I'd be whacked with an "OffTopic".
It's not enough to have a communications channel, and a persistent identity. It's also necessary to allow community members to build up a profile of who they're talking to, and what they're like outside of the core topic.
Gratuitous book plug. This is a book by a colleague of mine, here at HP Labs. Everything I know about Virtual Communities, I learned at her series of talks on them, so I recommend the book.
I can't see how computers and internet access are going to help kids that can't read or do math
At what age do you think kids ought to get Net access in schools ?
At what age should they be able to read & write capably ?
The two simply aren't exclusive. The kids learn to read first, then they learn about other subjects. The Net is a useful resource for most of these, and it's even helpful with learning English in the first place. In what possible way is Net access going to hold up someone learning English ?
I work on an educational site about biodiversity. Do you really think that granting access to this content is harmful to kids learning English ?
English and maths are important, but the suggestion that somehow they're not, or that learning other skills will reduce them, is a ridiculous straw-man erected by groups who oppose these other directions for their own aims. How many subjects do kids study at school ? By your reckoning, we should strip everything from the curriculum that isn't basic English & Maths.
I think Bush is headed in the right direction
Bush might be a democratically elected idiot, but he's still an idiot. Any policy he espouses gains no credibility from the fact that he supports it.
Nearly twenty years ago, my government (UK) blew my tax dollar on this stuff, and I'm damned glad they did. This was the BBC (Ah, the old Model B !) and a plan to drastically increase the numbers of computers in schools. The kids might not have become any smarter, but they did get to learn an awful lot more about IT than they would otherwise have done. Even today you can see the difference, UK late-twentysomethings grew up with the exposure to "small desktop info gadgets" that other European kids didn't see for another decade. It's this pervasive exposure to IT from an early age that creates the conditions for an IT-literate workforce, and these days an IT-literate workforce is a more profitable one.
As a result of this, I believe I live in a country that's measurably richer than it would have been without this inititative. I'm richer for it.
Relative to the amount of time involved in using Slashdot, I would rate it as having the lowest sense of community of any on-line potential community I've yet seen.
I've done this stuff for aeons now; BBS, CIX, Usenet, mailing lists and Web-hosted boards (never did MOOs, IRC or ICQ though). The "community" of groups has definitely declined in inverse proportion to the technical complexity of their host, but Slashdot is noticeably low, even by web-hosted standards.
Why is this ? Well the "content to wittering" ratio on Slashdot is high. Even the Trolls are more about "bad content" than community-building witter. Karma also reduces witter; you can't karma-whore by being charming, just by flaming M$oft and posting links to some new geek-toy. It's the "pointless" witter that builds communities though.
I miss Usenet. I'm really hacked off with the number of e-groups I need to follow work-wise, when I know they're really better candidates for NNTP. I don't like working on shared protocol development, when the best backup is on some free-hosting DotCom with a dodgy business plan and a potential to collapse tomorrow.
I know of the non-Usenet Usenets (which I certainly won't post links to here), but this need for secrecy is what itself reduces their worth; it was great in The Old Days, when a shared interest in haddock juggling put you in touch with a worldwide community of fish flingers, but now alt.haddock is just H4XX0RZ and Pr0n spam.
I know nothing about all this - it's an honest question
My desktop PC (like many people's) has a DVD and a CD-RW drive. I own no DVDs, but very many shop-bought silver-disc music CDs.
Why is my DVD so pathetic at playing them ?
It's plays most of them, but the drop-out rate is terrible and a disc that has the slightest pinholing will often lose whole tracks. Is this inherent in DVDs, or do I just have a bad one ? It's gettign to the point where, as my CD drive spends more time playing music than anything else, I'm looking to junk the DVD and "downgrade".
Build a nest egg first. If the economy tanks, contractors are the first to get booted.
My (UK) experience is rather different. Contractors never get "booted" -- the paperwork is too complicated (over here we nearly all work through agencies). You'll probably not get a contract renewal, no matter how things work out, but it's really exceptional for anyone to get pushed mid-way.
On the sorts of project (usually VB/SQL business apps) I used to work on, I'd get a 3 month initial contract. Rarely did this extend, because that type of job just shouldn't take any longer unless something is badly broken.
Know you will need to live for three months without income.
That's very important -- fortunately the contracting deal is that your rewards are pretty tangible (i.e. they all hate you, there's no pension, but you're paid twice what the others are) so getting the survival money together isn't too hard (but no BMW with your first cheque !).
My first contract ('92) was at a downturn in the contract market, when everyone was going back permie. I went contracting to a Big 4 bank, where many cow-orkers were ex-contractors, all telling me how important the job security and cheap mortgages were. I, OTOH, just waved wads of cash at them - that's my idea of security. 3 months later, my contract ended (exactly as I expected and had planned for) so I went on to the next one. A week after that, the bank closed that department and made most of the others redundant. Just shows how much this "job security" thing counts for.
Cars travel in straight lines. Wobbling about is handy for parking, but for travelling any distance more than a few vehicle-lengths, choosing a direct route is more efficient.
Secondly, what about suspension ? Putting extra mass into the wheels themselves is a bad idea.
If this thing becomes valuable as a means of transport, then it will be in something we've hardly even thought of yet (like Ginger, Bunty, or whatever it's called), not as a minor tweak to the vehicles we know.
I think it might make it into small autonomous pallet trucks.
Perhaps the user interface is written with Director?
That would sound sensible to me. The suckiest part of Linux (if you're selling into the QVC-watching trailer market) is the desktop.
Why not have the thing boot straight into Director and an interface of "Click here for sports, click here for pr0n and here to buy collectible Elvis plates with genuine zirconia".
DTDs are going to be required for defining new XML grammars
Rubbish. I haven't written a DTD in over 18 months. Tool support is better than DTD, mainly because Schemas also use XML as their expression syntax and so it's trivial to build tools (often with XSLT) for them.
Schemas are still brand new, and tool support is weak to nonexistant.
Schema has been a Candidate Recommendation since October. Maybe it's not signed off yet, but it's pretty stable and usable out in the "real world".
I thank M$oft for this one. Dropping early versions of XSL and Schema onto developers a long time ago put a rocket under the W3C. This might have ended badly, except M$oft then did something unusual for them and fell back into line with a developing standard. Credit where credit's due...
I see your point, but semantics are never enforceable anyway.
Who cares ? If you're publishing the latest fat stock prices, then it's in the user's interests to get it right. Semantic publishing needs a reliable means of making them available to those who want them, it doesn't need to follow them up and enforce getting it right.
Of course, semantics aren't enough on their own. It's not too useful to know where the "creator" value is in two schemas, if you can't distinguish between one's "author" and the other's "translator". This is where an ontological understanding is needed, and there's a couple of projects out there working on that too; DAML & OIL.
I don't see how a dead, unused (sorry, never was used, ever) standard like RDF is going to help.
Admittedly RDF hasn't been used much YET. After all - it's only a year since bog-standard XML took off. I'm a contractor; Dec '99 I couldn't sell XML skills to anyone, Jan 2000 my phone melted. By Easter 2000 everyone else was an XML "guru".
Wrox don't shift their first RDF book until October. You can't store production-grade quantities of RDF in a database yet. How can you say it's "past", when we haven't even finished building the infrastructure tools yet ?
OTOH, the one widely distributed RDF app that is out there (RSS) is even part of Slash. Take a look at those Slashboxes - they aren't running DocBook.
Added to which you can employ namespaces to form compound documents from many schemas,
That's just a quicker recipe for tag soup. The ability to have five different ways to express an author's address doesn't make it any easier to move data between applications or avoid "Dear Mr. Occupier" errors.
"It's the Semantics, Stupid"
Look at DocBook, as an example - people have been able to use it for years without concern that the next revision would destroy their document semantics.
What document semantics ? DocBook doesn't do semantics, and it has a structure that thinks everything is a computer manual. A schema that has a <GUIMenuItem> element, but doesn't have a means of expressing a target readership age ? Rights management that's a bare copyright element with an implied recommendation to attach generated text of "All Rights Reserved" when you render it ? (What if the rights _aren't_ all being reserved ?)
DocBook is a pile of bodges and hacks, and I only use it because I don't know anything else that's out there, and I'm reluctant to roll my own and add another one to the pile.
DocBook is Perl for text documents; lot's of "There's More Than One Way To Do It", and not a lot of "Done. Sorted.".
My current project (the next version of ARKive) is a huge graph of linked nodes, most of which are either text or rich-media. The directed nature of the graph blows plain XML out of the water - there's just no way to handle the referencing problem in XML; you're either fooling around with the inadequate ID & IDREF, or you do it through either XLink, or your own href attributes and lose support for any notion of document structure based on these links, unless you code it yourself at the application level. With RDF, I just talk to an API like Jena and when I make things related, they stay related (and the underlying engine will hand them back to me on demand, as whatever relevant fragment of the document I might need).
I am using DocBook to represent the text content nodes. It's not much more advanced than HTML though - I need a huge amount of markup on each node to select the appropriate set (what it refers to, what it says about it, whether it's written for 7 or 17 year olds) and I hold this trivially in RDF, with DocBook under a content property.
There's simply no way I could express this in DocBook alone. I could express it in DocBook with embedded LOM markup, and I could do that very easily just by namespacing two schemas as you suggest. Ther trouble with that approach though is that the only code that could ever make sense of it would be my own. With RDF, any RDF app (like the Redland app framework) can wander through it and make a pretty good use of it, even if it hasn't seen the documents before.
XML has no mechanism for a semantic schema. Attempting to use the structural schema it does have, as one, doesn't work well and it certainly doesn't travel.
This is another example of What's Wrong With XML (and particularly, what's wrong with proliferating schemas all over the place).
A schema isn't a means of publishing your data to a wider audience, it's a means of locking-out everyone who doesn't have a copy of it.
Look at real user of RDF for how to do this in a better way. XML is great, but the coupling between structure and semantics that comes from using an XML schema to represent both is a nightmare for interworking between teams that overlap, but aren't identical enough to use exactly the same schema.
A couple of years ago, we watched a bunch of old guys slaving over COBOL legacy conversion programs, desperately trying to suck the data out and into SQL, before Cinderella's glass computer turned back into the Y2K pumpkin. I don't want my future to turn into the same thing, scratching together n^2 XSL transforms to convert fooML into foo'ML.
The system is far from perfect. Any system, where the best president that a country the size of the USA can come up with, is as dumb as Bush is a failing system.
Bill Gates for president !
Charlton Heston for President !
Larry Lessig for President !
Harrison Ford for President
Maybe none of these would be to your particular taste, but are you really saying that Bush is the best the USA can do ? Is there no-one out there who could do a less-worse job of it than this dork ?
The fact that we [...] bitch and moan about the United States and its problems proves just how great and strong our nation still is.
Maybe it just proves how powerless you are ?
As Gore Vidal recently said, the USA doesn't even have two political parties; it has only one party, the Capitalism Party, and that has two right wings.
You, I, and the rest of Slashdot, are just a small sticky smear on the tyres of capitalism. See that flat raccoon on the roadside ? That's you that is. One day you're a consumer demographic, the next you're economic roadkill. We don't matter.
I don't know who runs America. Maybe it is the Illuminati, because it sure as hell ain't who it's advertised to be. I don't know who they are, but they pay attention to money and only a little to power and media control, because both are easily bought with money. You and I though, we're just nothing.
Whine and grumble all you like. You're allowed to whine, because it keeps you happy in thinking that your opinions matter, and it's cheaper than prescribing soma.
To quote Gore Vidal again, it's hard to have effective politics when the vast majority are fat, dumb and happy.
I don't know anything about this machine (I'm a Brit) but machinery of that era often used long words, that would still be a respectable length today. Computers then were mathematical number crunchers, not text processors, so the data word was usually long enough to hold a floating point number in a single word. In the '70s, mini computers started to be dedicated to handling real-time data from A/D converters (often 10 bit) and so they in turn used words of 10 or 12 bits; tailored closely to the size of their most significant external data, not their internal chippery.
Secondly, another poster mentioned mercury being used for memory. This would have been an acoustic delay line, and some of the architectures with those were wholly serial machines - effectively single bit parallel. Only one bit at a time was represented electronically, the rest were being stored as acoustic signals travelling down a pipe full of mercury.
As a complete guess, I'd expect the CSIRAC to be a serial machine with one bit words.
Bytes only become significant when eight bit memory ICs are available as commodity products. The natural word size of the valve and soldered joint is a single bit, so '50s generation kit simply didn't have the same fondness for standardised word lengths that we know today.
There's a lot of truth in what you say, but don't neglect the theatre. Derek Jacobi's role in "The Enigma of Intelligence" was a superb homage to Turing, and at the time (late '80s) Turing was almost unknown.
I don't know if there's any film or video version of this play, but catch it if you can.
Besides, I don't believe it's just homophobia. Alan Blumlein (One of several people with a good claim to be "The Inventor of Television") was a straight contemporary of Turing, yet is even less well known today. There's a recent Blumlein biography (Amazon), but I was less than impressed with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Spamm is prohibited in Spain,
Although in practice, alt.animals.badgers is regularly Spammed to death ("Ganero Dinareo !") by teleline.es Whatever legal provision there is, hasn't solved the problem.
Look, I like badgers, OK ?
It's a bit like the K Foundation burning a million quid. It's not money that could otherwise be spent "saving the world", it's just tokens that we assign value to. When you burn a chunk of it, and there's still the amount of stuff left to value with the remaining money, then you've not "destroyed wealth", you've simply increased the value of the remaining tokens.
By playing with your Transformers, and breaking a few of them, you're fulfilling an essential role in boosting the value of the pristine and unplayed-with remainder.
--
For sale: Bulk lot of "W" keys.
But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority teachers don't even know how to use computers.
That might be true -- but is your solution going to be to train the teachers, or to simply take the computers away from them ? Seems a little unhelpful as a policy. -- For sale: Large quantity, assorted "W" keys
It takes more than sticky to make a community.
Who are you ? I've never seen you before, I don't want to talk to you. Maybe you're fascinated by siege engines, but I don't know this, so I don't know that I'd enjoy talking further with you. Slashdot is "efficient" at content presentation, with threading, thresholds etc., so I don't pick up on all of these "out of band" communications. This efficiency is also detrimental to personalised chat - on Usenet, with a threaded newsreader, then I can cheerfully witter away to one person out of a million and everyone else just dumps the thread. It doesn't affect my vKarma, as that's still high due to my valuable contributions in other threads. On Slash, I'd be whacked with an "OffTopic".
It's not enough to have a communications channel, and a persistent identity. It's also necessary to allow community members to build up a profile of who they're talking to, and what they're like outside of the core topic.
Gratuitous book plug. This is a book by a colleague of mine, here at HP Labs. Everything I know about Virtual Communities, I learned at her series of talks on them, so I recommend the book.
I can't see how computers and internet access are going to help kids that can't read or do math
At what age do you think kids ought to get Net access in schools ?
At what age should they be able to read & write capably ?
The two simply aren't exclusive. The kids learn to read first, then they learn about other subjects. The Net is a useful resource for most of these, and it's even helpful with learning English in the first place. In what possible way is Net access going to hold up someone learning English ?
I work on an educational site about biodiversity. Do you really think that granting access to this content is harmful to kids learning English ?
English and maths are important, but the suggestion that somehow they're not, or that learning other skills will reduce them, is a ridiculous straw-man erected by groups who oppose these other directions for their own aims. How many subjects do kids study at school ? By your reckoning, we should strip everything from the curriculum that isn't basic English & Maths.
I think Bush is headed in the right direction
Bush might be a democratically elected idiot, but he's still an idiot. Any policy he espouses gains no credibility from the fact that he supports it.
don't blow my tax dollar on this stuff.
Nearly twenty years ago, my government (UK) blew my tax dollar on this stuff, and I'm damned glad they did. This was the BBC (Ah, the old Model B !) and a plan to drastically increase the numbers of computers in schools. The kids might not have become any smarter, but they did get to learn an awful lot more about IT than they would otherwise have done. Even today you can see the difference, UK late-twentysomethings grew up with the exposure to "small desktop info gadgets" that other European kids didn't see for another decade. It's this pervasive exposure to IT from an early age that creates the conditions for an IT-literate workforce, and these days an IT-literate workforce is a more profitable one.
As a result of this, I believe I live in a country that's measurably richer than it would have been without this inititative. I'm richer for it.
My "tax dollar" was well spent on this one.
Relative to the amount of time involved in using Slashdot, I would rate it as having the lowest sense of community of any on-line potential community I've yet seen.
I've done this stuff for aeons now; BBS, CIX, Usenet, mailing lists and Web-hosted boards (never did MOOs, IRC or ICQ though). The "community" of groups has definitely declined in inverse proportion to the technical complexity of their host, but Slashdot is noticeably low, even by web-hosted standards.
Why is this ? Well the "content to wittering" ratio on Slashdot is high. Even the Trolls are more about "bad content" than community-building witter. Karma also reduces witter; you can't karma-whore by being charming, just by flaming M$oft and posting links to some new geek-toy. It's the "pointless" witter that builds communities though.
I miss Usenet. I'm really hacked off with the number of e-groups I need to follow work-wise, when I know they're really better candidates for NNTP. I don't like working on shared protocol development, when the best backup is on some free-hosting DotCom with a dodgy business plan and a potential to collapse tomorrow.
I know of the non-Usenet Usenets (which I certainly won't post links to here), but this need for secrecy is what itself reduces their worth; it was great in The Old Days, when a shared interest in haddock juggling put you in touch with a worldwide community of fish flingers, but now alt.haddock is just H4XX0RZ and Pr0n spam.
Specifically the Netscape RDF format
I guess you're referring to RSS. It's a good means of exchanging "news" and "news" has a pretty broad interpretation in RSS 1.0
I know nothing about all this - it's an honest question
My desktop PC (like many people's) has a DVD and a CD-RW drive. I own no DVDs, but very many shop-bought silver-disc music CDs.
Why is my DVD so pathetic at playing them ?
It's plays most of them, but the drop-out rate is terrible and a disc that has the slightest pinholing will often lose whole tracks. Is this inherent in DVDs, or do I just have a bad one ? It's gettign to the point where, as my CD drive spends more time playing music than anything else, I'm looking to junk the DVD and "downgrade".
Build a nest egg first. If the economy tanks, contractors are the first to get booted.
My (UK) experience is rather different. Contractors never get "booted" -- the paperwork is too complicated (over here we nearly all work through agencies). You'll probably not get a contract renewal, no matter how things work out, but it's really exceptional for anyone to get pushed mid-way.
On the sorts of project (usually VB/SQL business apps) I used to work on, I'd get a 3 month initial contract. Rarely did this extend, because that type of job just shouldn't take any longer unless something is badly broken.
Know you will need to live for three months without income.
That's very important -- fortunately the contracting deal is that your rewards are pretty tangible (i.e. they all hate you, there's no pension, but you're paid twice what the others are) so getting the survival money together isn't too hard (but no BMW with your first cheque !).
My first contract ('92) was at a downturn in the contract market, when everyone was going back permie. I went contracting to a Big 4 bank, where many cow-orkers were ex-contractors, all telling me how important the job security and cheap mortgages were. I, OTOH, just waved wads of cash at them - that's my idea of security. 3 months later, my contract ended (exactly as I expected and had planned for) so I went on to the next one. A week after that, the bank closed that department and made most of the others redundant. Just shows how much this "job security" thing counts for.
Not cars.
Cars travel in straight lines. Wobbling about is handy for parking, but for travelling any distance more than a few vehicle-lengths, choosing a direct route is more efficient.
Secondly, what about suspension ? Putting extra mass into the wheels themselves is a bad idea.
If this thing becomes valuable as a means of transport, then it will be in something we've hardly even thought of yet (like Ginger, Bunty, or whatever it's called), not as a minor tweak to the vehicles we know.
I think it might make it into small autonomous pallet trucks.
But he also regretted his failure to buy Microsoft in 1979, when he had the opportunity.
I'm going to keep hold of that quote to scare small children with.
Imagine the bastard child of M$oft and EDS !
Perhaps the user interface is written with Director?
That would sound sensible to me. The suckiest part of Linux (if you're selling into the QVC-watching trailer market) is the desktop.
Why not have the thing boot straight into Director and an interface of "Click here for sports, click here for pr0n and here to buy collectible Elvis plates with genuine zirconia".
DTDs are going to be required for defining new XML grammars
Rubbish. I haven't written a DTD in over 18 months. Tool support is better than DTD, mainly because Schemas also use XML as their expression syntax and so it's trivial to build tools (often with XSLT) for them.
Schemas are still brand new, and tool support is weak to nonexistant.
Schema has been a Candidate Recommendation since October. Maybe it's not signed off yet, but it's pretty stable and usable out in the "real world".
I thank M$oft for this one. Dropping early versions of XSL and Schema onto developers a long time ago put a rocket under the W3C. This might have ended badly, except M$oft then did something unusual for them and fell back into line with a developing standard. Credit where credit's due...
I see your point, but semantics are never enforceable anyway.
Who cares ? If you're publishing the latest fat stock prices, then it's in the user's interests to get it right. Semantic publishing needs a reliable means of making them available to those who want them, it doesn't need to follow them up and enforce getting it right.
you haven't told me how RDF gets around this
Take a look at RDF Schema.
Of course, semantics aren't enough on their own. It's not too useful to know where the "creator" value is in two schemas, if you can't distinguish between one's "author" and the other's "translator". This is where an ontological understanding is needed, and there's a couple of projects out there working on that too; DAML & OIL.
I already have an electric wok with (home built) temperature control. I wish I'd been able to buy it conveniently off the shelf.
How else do you accurately control the melt temperature for oxidiser/binder mixtures ? 8-)
I don't see how a dead, unused (sorry, never was used, ever) standard like RDF is going to help.
Admittedly RDF hasn't been used much YET. After all - it's only a year since bog-standard XML took off. I'm a contractor; Dec '99 I couldn't sell XML skills to anyone, Jan 2000 my phone melted. By Easter 2000 everyone else was an XML "guru".
Wrox don't shift their first RDF book until October. You can't store production-grade quantities of RDF in a database yet. How can you say it's "past", when we haven't even finished building the infrastructure tools yet ?
OTOH, the one widely distributed RDF app that is out there (RSS) is even part of Slash. Take a look at those Slashboxes - they aren't running DocBook.
Added to which you can employ namespaces to form compound documents from many schemas,
That's just a quicker recipe for tag soup. The ability to have five different ways to express an author's address doesn't make it any easier to move data between applications or avoid "Dear Mr. Occupier" errors.
"It's the Semantics, Stupid"
Look at DocBook, as an example - people have been able to use it for years without concern that the next revision would destroy their document semantics.
What document semantics ? DocBook doesn't do semantics, and it has a structure that thinks everything is a computer manual. A schema that has a <GUIMenuItem> element, but doesn't have a means of expressing a target readership age ? Rights management that's a bare copyright element with an implied recommendation to attach generated text of "All Rights Reserved" when you render it ? (What if the rights _aren't_ all being reserved ?)
DocBook is a pile of bodges and hacks, and I only use it because I don't know anything else that's out there, and I'm reluctant to roll my own and add another one to the pile.
DocBook is Perl for text documents; lot's of "There's More Than One Way To Do It", and not a lot of "Done. Sorted.".
My current project (the next version of ARKive) is a huge graph of linked nodes, most of which are either text or rich-media. The directed nature of the graph blows plain XML out of the water - there's just no way to handle the referencing problem in XML; you're either fooling around with the inadequate ID & IDREF, or you do it through either XLink, or your own href attributes and lose support for any notion of document structure based on these links, unless you code it yourself at the application level. With RDF, I just talk to an API like Jena and when I make things related, they stay related (and the underlying engine will hand them back to me on demand, as whatever relevant fragment of the document I might need).
I am using DocBook to represent the text content nodes. It's not much more advanced than HTML though - I need a huge amount of markup on each node to select the appropriate set (what it refers to, what it says about it, whether it's written for 7 or 17 year olds) and I hold this trivially in RDF, with DocBook under a content property.
There's simply no way I could express this in DocBook alone. I could express it in DocBook with embedded LOM markup, and I could do that very easily just by namespacing two schemas as you suggest. Ther trouble with that approach though is that the only code that could ever make sense of it would be my own. With RDF, any RDF app (like the Redland app framework) can wander through it and make a pretty good use of it, even if it hasn't seen the documents before.
XML has no mechanism for a semantic schema. Attempting to use the structural schema it does have, as one, doesn't work well and it certainly doesn't travel.
I say, SCREW 'EM. Cut 'em off. Give the residents of CA a few more days without electricity,
Damn good idea.
We need a new Mad Max movie, and Hollywood is already there to film it.
This is another example of What's Wrong With XML (and particularly, what's wrong with proliferating schemas all over the place).
A schema isn't a means of publishing your data to a wider audience, it's a means of locking-out everyone who doesn't have a copy of it.
Look at real user of RDF for how to do this in a better way. XML is great, but the coupling between structure and semantics that comes from using an XML schema to represent both is a nightmare for interworking between teams that overlap, but aren't identical enough to use exactly the same schema.
A couple of years ago, we watched a bunch of old guys slaving over COBOL legacy conversion programs, desperately trying to suck the data out and into SQL, before Cinderella's glass computer turned back into the Y2K pumpkin. I don't want my future to turn into the same thing, scratching together n^2 XSL transforms to convert fooML into foo'ML.
check out this amazing site I just found: (Real or not, who cares? [...] it makes for the BEST sci-fi I've read in years!
I did. What's good about it ? It's just another bunch of self-deluding New Age Loons doing bad science that Elron would be ashamed to have penned.
"Swiss watch of conspiracy theories" ? I get weirder things in my cornflakes.
The system is far from perfect. Any system, where the best president that a country the size of the USA can come up with, is as dumb as Bush is a failing system.
Bill Gates for president !
Charlton Heston for President !
Larry Lessig for President !
Harrison Ford for President
Maybe none of these would be to your particular taste, but are you really saying that Bush is the best the USA can do ? Is there no-one out there who could do a less-worse job of it than this dork ?
The fact that we [...] bitch and moan about the United States and its problems proves just how great and strong our nation still is.
Maybe it just proves how powerless you are ?
As Gore Vidal recently said, the USA doesn't even have two political parties; it has only one party, the Capitalism Party, and that has two right wings.
You, I, and the rest of Slashdot, are just a small sticky smear on the tyres of capitalism. See that flat raccoon on the roadside ? That's you that is. One day you're a consumer demographic, the next you're economic roadkill. We don't matter.
I don't know who runs America. Maybe it is the Illuminati, because it sure as hell ain't who it's advertised to be. I don't know who they are, but they pay attention to money and only a little to power and media control, because both are easily bought with money. You and I though, we're just nothing.
Whine and grumble all you like. You're allowed to whine, because it keeps you happy in thinking that your opinions matter, and it's cheaper than prescribing soma.
To quote Gore Vidal again, it's hard to have effective politics when the vast majority are fat, dumb and happy.
How long were "words" then?
I don't know anything about this machine (I'm a Brit) but machinery of that era often used long words, that would still be a respectable length today. Computers then were mathematical number crunchers, not text processors, so the data word was usually long enough to hold a floating point number in a single word. In the '70s, mini computers started to be dedicated to handling real-time data from A/D converters (often 10 bit) and so they in turn used words of 10 or 12 bits; tailored closely to the size of their most significant external data, not their internal chippery.
Secondly, another poster mentioned mercury being used for memory. This would have been an acoustic delay line, and some of the architectures with those were wholly serial machines - effectively single bit parallel. Only one bit at a time was represented electronically, the rest were being stored as acoustic signals travelling down a pipe full of mercury.
As a complete guess, I'd expect the CSIRAC to be a serial machine with one bit words.
Bytes only become significant when eight bit memory ICs are available as commodity products. The natural word size of the valve and soldered joint is a single bit, so '50s generation kit simply didn't have the same fondness for standardised word lengths that we know today.
There's a lot of truth in what you say, but don't neglect the theatre. Derek Jacobi's role in "The Enigma of Intelligence" was a superb homage to Turing, and at the time (late '80s) Turing was almost unknown.
I don't know if there's any film or video version of this play, but catch it if you can.
Besides, I don't believe it's just homophobia. Alan Blumlein (One of several people with a good claim to be "The Inventor of Television") was a straight contemporary of Turing, yet is even less well known today. There's a recent Blumlein biography (Amazon), but I was less than impressed with it.
You want dada ?
You want hacked toys ?
You want situationist consumerism ?
Try the Cement Cuddlers