the aesthetically and functionally perfect curve of a katana doesn't form until the nearly-finished blade is quenched, and it forms naturally
Rubbish. They're forged. They do warp somewhat during the later stages of forging and hardening, which is why the hot copper block on the back edge is used to reduce this curve.
The "functionally perfect" curve has also changed somewhat over time. Some of the older shapes (esp. tachi and longer katana) are impossible to draw quickly, but they have a more sabre-like slashing action for use from horseback.
What is your point ? That the 1st amendment protects your rights ? Oh, I hadn't realised he wasn't actually in prison.
I agree with the A/C. Americans have an incredible capacity for doublethink. You quote the Constitution (a fine document) on all possible opportunities, but rarely realise that it's no longer in operation - OCP (for a fictional analogy) own you. Ever since cattle barons fenced the West, or Pinkertons shot union miners dead in the '20s, del Monte called the Marines into Central America to protect their plantations, or Disney had copyright stretched just to protect a mouse, then the US government has been in the pocket of big business and your Constitution is failing to protect you.
Respect the Constitution, but don't fool yourself that your government is still working to enforce it.
Ursula le Guin's Earthsea trilogy ?
(if you're the age I am, and read the first three long ago, then go and find the more recent fourth book - very different, and well worth the read)
TAOCP is a 7 volume set - always has been. He just took his time getting around to >3.
OTOH, Trilogy (capitalised) and CML should be burnt at the stake. 8-(
No-one reads Knuth. *nix programmers just claim they did.
It's the same with K& R, K & P, Stroustroup, (Eric | Bertrand) Meyer et al. OTOH, at lest they're aware the names are worth dropping, so I guess your fundamental point is right.
Why not let the sysadmins who chose to use IIS keep up with the latest security patches and such?
They aren't the ones with the problem:
Those getting thwacked often don't even know it has happened.
Code Red is causing more trouble by traffic swamping than it is by nuking some IIS boxes that the admins clearly weren't all that concerned about. This affects everyone, even those who kept their boxes clean.
If you're an admin in a large organisation, you'll be knee deep in Code Red hassle from desktop boxes you didn't even know existed. M$oft think everyone needed to be running a web server. I wouldn't be surprised if M$oft Barney had an embedded copy of Exchange in it (probably with XML and.NET extensions too). Pervasive intelligence is great, but not when it's coded by the clueless and security-inept morons of M$oft.
So what if it's wasteful ? Bytes are cheap. The entropy content of XML isn't inefficient (as could also be said of ASN.1), so low-level compression algorithms can equally well compress them. The message "Your Amazon order has billed your credit card $23 and sent you a copy of 'Fly Fishing'" compresses down to much the same size in either encoding.
If your network transport layers don't do compression, blame the network not the content.
Secondly, when did "generic" become a criticism ?
Thirdly, XML isn't just a serialization format. Admittedly it is now, was even more so in the early days, and the "XML For Morons" books get it entirely wrong, but the
XML Infoset WG are trying to steer it back. Think data model, not just bytes on the wire - that's the real reason why ASN.1 is an inappropriate comparison.
ASN.1 is like EDI and Read Codes. It's an application-level solution to byte squashing. The things are nightmares to work with, and simply not needed any more.
in 1991 there were not that many adolescents on the Net
There have always been loads of adolescents on the 'Net - they're the ones with the trainspotter compulsive mentality and the free time to exercise it.
I had Net access in 1980 - OK, so I had to go down to a local university to get it, rather than from school, and "the Net" (or at least the accessible part) was a somewhat limited collection of half-a-dozen machines at other universities. I still had acccess as a 16 year old, just by asking, to as much of a "Net" as was there to be had.
Some of the other kids there, doing just the same thing, became the first wave of kid-millionaires, riding on the Spectrum games boom.
Home "Net" access (in the UK) kicked off in around '87, when 2400 modems became cheap. The BBS scene Fido, Opus et al. was pretty lively (and full of teenagers) for years before TCP/IP came to dominate the local loop.
I have Win NT/2K servers to worry about. I'd love it if M$oft started to use TCP/IP here first - half of the tools I need to use still work with odd bits of legacy NetBIOS. If you thought IP networking had holes in it, just imagine trying to work with public-visible servers and a protocol that doesn't route and doesn't do any sort of security.
I visited Boston for the first time at the end of last year. I had a few days spare, so the Boston Computer Museum was an obvious visit. Finding that it had been absorbed into the Museum of Science wasn't too bad, but what
happened to all the exhibits ? Shipped out to storage in California and "... The Best Software for Kids Gallery(TM), now part of an expanded Cahners ComputerPlace". - Just as you describe, it had been reduced to a trivialised version of MSN.
I've a better computer museum in my own shed 8-(
OK, so the Virtual FishTank is excellent, but that's an exhibit on behaviours, not on computer history.
[...] used it in a single message at what was then Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service (now part of Google).
For your information, Usenet isn't a "message board", neither is if "part of Google". Idiot comments like this perhaps explain some of the naive "Hi Guys, welcome to my chatroom" Usenet postings that keep coming from CNet.
An open source encyclopedia has problems, certainly. It might not even qualify for the strict use of the term "encyclopedia", but I'd still hate to lose them.
Here's a couple of "open source data repositories". See what you think:
Norman Yarvin's hand-selected Usenet Archive
Hand filtering of old Usenet that one guy thought was "useful". Idiosyncratic, unauthorative, and terribly useful. It's also quite nostalgic for the "good old days" of Usenet; names like John De Armond and Garry Coffman
Hitchiker's Guide
What started out as a very pure attempt at an "open source encyclopedia", but now has some serious issues over moderation and editorial control. Now it seems to be de-evolving into a chatroom
So where's the quality control in these 'open' encyclopaedias?
You either didn't read the article, or you're experienced enough in the field of journals to see the flaw in the article's argument.
"many Wikipedia articles so far are of surprisingly high quality."
The article misses the point. "Surprisingly high quality" is what wins the Booker prize for fiction. In a reference work, you don't need a few great pieces, you need to avoid any number of bad ones. It's not the greatness that makes a useful encyclopedia, it's the avoidance of error.
I still don't think a HDTV is the way to go though - why not a nice big plasma display ? These are great for Quaking, they're dirt cheap at the moment (oh, I love recessions) and even brand new you're within that $7K budget for something decent.
But when do you get the value of what you paid for out of anything anymore.
Nearly every time. If you're not going to - then DON'T BUY IT !
Here's a clue - If you don't need it personally, send it on to your president; You don't NEED all this crap. Consume Less America ! - you'll get better stuff, and you'll enjoy it more. I can think of plenty of stuff I'd love to buy for $7,000 - but I'd think it a very poor deal to end up with a mere TV. How about a low-end tank ? There are plenty around for that price. A video edit suite, and make your _own_ movie ? You don't need all your fun pre-packaged at the factory, and sold to you by the AOL-Cola-Disney corporation. Get off your butts and do something.
30K for a car ? Why should I change the 200hp Alfa Romeo I bought for $1800 ? OK, so I travel by bike most of the time (and my best bike cost as much as the car), but the Alfa is a blast 8-)
Re:Is better TV definition needed ?
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
You need to see to to believe it.
Even on a conventional TV, an HD signal is PHENOMENAL
HDTV isn't phenomenal, it's just slightly better.
Oh, sorry. I forgot you were in America and used to watching NTSC. Here in Europe (well, apart from France) we've had PAL for 30 years and almost such good quality as standard.
Here's a clue for you: ventilation don't go through wood
He's too smart for us ! In a year's time, when $7,000 of flash new gadget has been relegated to obsolete museum piece, then it will be just about ready to collapse from heat exhaustion. The TV is dead, so he just has to go out and buy a new and even more complicated one.
The the real kicker is that he gets to write another LA Times column about it all, bemoaning the poor reliability of TV's !
XPath is a partial query language for XML - it can read, but it has no way of updating the document.
There's also the issue that XPath is very much an XML tool, with a tight binding between semantics and structure (which is the whole thing that I'm saying about XML in the first place). If you have a graph represented in XML, then it's hard to write XPath expressions that can traverse it. If you have RDF stored in XML (which has several possible serialisations for the same semantic content) then it's possible to write XPath that expands these, but it's hard, error-prone, and generally unworkable.
There's still a lot of thought out there that XSLT can translate magically between schemas. Some groups see XML Schema as improving this (Hunter & Lagoze, WWW10). Although Alison Cawsey's paper from WWW 9 shows just why this approach doesn't work. I've abandoned my own work in this field for similar reasons; even though I managed to build something workable, I just never trusted it to be reliable.
XML Schema tries hard to provide a strong notion of type
Although that's a valid point (and I haven't written DTDs in over 2 years, in favour of schema) it's not the issue I was talking about.
Look at the Infoset draft or the recent Processing Model workshop. You can barely tell the difference between reading infoset and the syntax spec, because XML just doesn't put enough distance between semantics of the content and its representation in a document.
XML doesn't
"represent" anything. It never has done, it never will, and all attempts to
pretend that it does will end in failure.
XML (and XML Schema) is a low-level transport and manipulation platform, but
it doesn't have the ability to do any form of abstract representation. Its
structure and implied semantic meaning are so closely fastened together that
it's impossible to squeeze a gap between them. "Representation" is the act
of stretching this gap, between structure and implied meaning, so as to
infer a higher level meaning.
The problem is fundamental to XML, and won't be fixed by tools at this
level. There's no abstraction in XML; any attempt to indicate semantics also
drags along its structural baggage, because that's the only way XML-Schema
allows you to work. No number of "sideways" solutions to this; namespacing
to allow parallel co-existence, BizTalk to allow sharing of schemas, will
fix this - XML just doesn't offer any "upwards" in a semantic direction.
To separate two authors with the same name you need more information to make a key.
Again, I agree with you in general, but that's not quite the issue I was thinking of. Clearly we need more structure to distinguish them, although in fact we don;t need any more information (RDF can do this entirely within the document structure, with no need to start "allocating author indexes" or similar).
The symptom of this problem, in the XML world, though is an over-dependence on flat text comparisons. It's like search engines that only compare at the text level and can't tell "goat sex" from animal husbandry or a Slashdot Troll. Because XML has nothing useful beyond the text node, that's what gets used. If it's easy to do it all just by comparing author names, then that's what lazy coders do. Disambiguation between resources like this needs a simple and lightweight mechanism, because if it isn't, no-one will use it. RDF manages it with rdf:resource and rdf:about attributes. In XML then you'd have to build some identifying system at the application level (so a generic parser can't understand it) and impose its use on your data. No wonder people stick with just using the names and ignoring truly identifying relationships with resources.
ID & IDREF are just broken. If you want to do it that way, build a proper architecture for doing it and join the RDF WG.
...the 300 page monster that is XML Schema.
Tell me about it 8-(
Compare the XML Schema spec, the SMIL spec, and the even more gargantuan MPEG-7 spec. Now take a look at DAML and see that complexity can be described, without needing a spec like a phone book.
XML doesn't replace databases. It _can't_ do, because it has no query mechanism. If you want to compare something to an RDBMS, then you have to look at the combination of XML + XPath. This is actually quite a good choice for some small systems (although it has no large-volume performance).
What's a more important issue (and this is one of my personal hobby-horses) is to separate the data model from the serialisation. XML does serialisations, and it does them quite well. It's poor though on data modelling. XML Schema is also very poor on data modelling, because it has no separation between a structural schema (which element goes inside the other) and a semantic schema (what each element means, when placed inside another). As a result, it's possible to serialise XML documents to represent "One view of the data, for one context" but it's really not possible to build an XML representation of a large data modelling problem for anything beyond the trivial.
How do you represent shared resource in XML; such as an author of several modules ? How do you distinguish such an author for another author with the same name ?
How do you represent graphs in XML, such as "foo depends on bar, which dependss on wibble" ?
Now (obviously) people have built XML solutions that work around these problems, but XML itself doesn't support them. It doesn't have a portable solution to such commonplace problems that a generic parser (like SiRPAC) could understand, and it doesn't support the development of particularly good solutions to them.
Teaching RDF, one of the hardest (and most important) lessons to communicate is that there's an underlying data model, and there's a serialisation, and that the serialisation is only one usage-dependent view onto what ought to be a much better structured and flexible internal model. For RDF it is, but for XML it isn't.
Someone should create an HTTP interface to a dmoz XML database, which would allow users to place XPATH queries which would return XML nodesets to the requesting client.
That's an interesting idea, but it's not quite the same problem. You describe a good solution to a "pull" scenario, which is great for queries instigated by a client, but it's not as good as a "push" for providing a newsfeed from a site.
I'd suggest RSS 1.0 as a good format to produce (possibly based on the same XPath-based pull that you describe). Once it's in RSS 1.0, then it's trivial to make it appear on any number of sites, or to aggregate it into other more generalised newsfeeds.
For implementing the "pull" side, then XPath encapsulated in SOAP is an easy way to build clients, and not too hard for the endpoint server. I've been doing this recently, so that a UI component (DHTML in Javascript) could selectively retrieve pieces of a big taxonomy document that was >MB in total.
My one concern (and my own personal bias) is that I see many of these items as running off the limits of what XML (and XMLDB) is good at, and being better handled in RDF. Certainly RSS 0.91 (which is XML) couldn't do this, but RSS 1.0 (which is RDF) could easily. Of course, that then makes XPath unworkable as a query language and there's not yet a stable "RDFPath" equivalent for RDF.
I'm also interested in working on this. Anyone else, drop me a mail if you are too.
So, does having a program to change the display rather than sliding in a different bit of card justify a $300 price tag?
Of course it does. The things are probably practically hand-made by their original designer. Start shifting product volume, get them to be the "must have" for the next hot game, and they'll be $50 from Taiwan.
The great advantage of this over the BBC strip, is that it's context sensitive. Why have 15 incomprehensible buttons, when you can make it display a relevant set of 4, as you need them.
Don't underestimate funny keyboards though. We've just receievd a video edit suite built out of a bog-standard Mac, but with a keyboard that looks like a bag of coloured Lego. The gimmick is that it matches the colours of an industry-standard Avid edit suite, with resultant savings in training etc.
Slashdot Mirror
the aesthetically and functionally perfect curve of a katana doesn't form until the nearly-finished blade is quenched, and it forms naturally
Rubbish. They're forged. They do warp somewhat during the later stages of forging and hardening, which is why the hot copper block on the back edge is used to reduce this curve.
The "functionally perfect" curve has also changed somewhat over time. Some of the older shapes (esp. tachi and longer katana) are impossible to draw quickly, but they have a more sabre-like slashing action for use from horseback.
What is your point ? That the 1st amendment protects your rights ? Oh, I hadn't realised he wasn't actually in prison.
I agree with the A/C. Americans have an incredible capacity for doublethink. You quote the Constitution (a fine document) on all possible opportunities, but rarely realise that it's no longer in operation - OCP (for a fictional analogy) own you. Ever since cattle barons fenced the West, or Pinkertons shot union miners dead in the '20s, del Monte called the Marines into Central America to protect their plantations, or Disney had copyright stretched just to protect a mouse, then the US government has been in the pocket of big business and your Constitution is failing to protect you.
Respect the Constitution, but don't fool yourself that your government is still working to enforce it.
another trilogy extension
Ursula le Guin's Earthsea trilogy ?
(if you're the age I am, and read the first three long ago, then go and find the more recent fourth book - very different, and well worth the read)
TAOCP is a 7 volume set - always has been. He just took his time getting around to >3.
OTOH, Trilogy (capitalised) and CML should be burnt at the stake. 8-(
Funny, I always thought his Tex manual had claimed the title of "mythical 4th volume".
No-one reads Knuth. *nix programmers just claim they did.
It's the same with K& R, K & P, Stroustroup, (Eric | Bertrand) Meyer et al. OTOH, at lest they're aware the names are worth dropping, so I guess your fundamental point is right.
Why not let the sysadmins who chose to use IIS keep up with the latest security patches and such?
They aren't the ones with the problem:
XML is a very wasteful and generic file format.
So what if it's wasteful ? Bytes are cheap. The entropy content of XML isn't inefficient (as could also be said of ASN.1), so low-level compression algorithms can equally well compress them. The message "Your Amazon order has billed your credit card $23 and sent you a copy of 'Fly Fishing'" compresses down to much the same size in either encoding.
If your network transport layers don't do compression, blame the network not the content.
Secondly, when did "generic" become a criticism ?
Thirdly, XML isn't just a serialization format. Admittedly it is now, was even more so in the early days, and the "XML For Morons" books get it entirely wrong, but the XML Infoset WG are trying to steer it back. Think data model, not just bytes on the wire - that's the real reason why ASN.1 is an inappropriate comparison.
ASN.1 is like EDI and Read Codes. It's an application-level solution to byte squashing. The things are nightmares to work with, and simply not needed any more.
I don't think these '15 year-olds' are really THAT brilliant
The obvious counter-example is the Irish cryptographer Sarah Flannery.
And RSS developers might recognise Aaron Swartz.
in 1991 there were not that many adolescents on the Net
There have always been loads of adolescents on the 'Net - they're the ones with the trainspotter compulsive mentality and the free time to exercise it.
I had Net access in 1980 - OK, so I had to go down to a local university to get it, rather than from school, and "the Net" (or at least the accessible part) was a somewhat limited collection of half-a-dozen machines at other universities. I still had acccess as a 16 year old, just by asking, to as much of a "Net" as was there to be had.
Some of the other kids there, doing just the same thing, became the first wave of kid-millionaires, riding on the Spectrum games boom.
Home "Net" access (in the UK) kicked off in around '87, when 2400 modems became cheap. The BBS scene Fido, Opus et al. was pretty lively (and full of teenagers) for years before TCP/IP came to dominate the local loop.
I have Win NT/2K servers to worry about. I'd love it if M$oft started to use TCP/IP here first - half of the tools I need to use still work with odd bits of legacy NetBIOS. If you thought IP networking had holes in it, just imagine trying to work with public-visible servers and a protocol that doesn't route and doesn't do any sort of security.
These things are just Broken 8-(
I visited Boston for the first time at the end of last year. I had a few days spare, so the Boston Computer Museum was an obvious visit. Finding that it had been absorbed into the Museum of Science wasn't too bad, but what happened to all the exhibits ? Shipped out to storage in California and "... The Best Software for Kids Gallery(TM), now part of an expanded Cahners ComputerPlace". - Just as you describe, it had been reduced to a trivialised version of MSN.
I've a better computer museum in my own shed 8-(
OK, so the Virtual FishTank is excellent, but that's an exhibit on behaviours, not on computer history.
obkarmawhore: Not quite computers, but immensely cool electrical oddities.
There's a cute usage of them here, for parachute drop cushioning.
The culprit: an unscrupulous message board
[...] used it in a single message at what was then Deja.com's Usenet Discussion Service (now part of Google).
For your information, Usenet isn't a "message board", neither is if "part of Google". Idiot comments like this perhaps explain some of the naive "Hi Guys, welcome to my chatroom" Usenet postings that keep coming from CNet.
do we really need an "open source" enclopedia?
Yes. Definitely so.
An open source encyclopedia has problems, certainly. It might not even qualify for the strict use of the term "encyclopedia", but I'd still hate to lose them.
Here's a couple of "open source data repositories". See what you think:
Hand filtering of old Usenet that one guy thought was "useful". Idiosyncratic, unauthorative, and terribly useful. It's also quite nostalgic for the "good old days" of Usenet; names like John De Armond and Garry Coffman
What started out as a very pure attempt at an "open source encyclopedia", but now has some serious issues over moderation and editorial control. Now it seems to be de-evolving into a chatroom
So where's the quality control in these 'open' encyclopaedias?
You either didn't read the article, or you're experienced enough in the field of journals to see the flaw in the article's argument.
"many Wikipedia articles so far are of surprisingly high quality."
The article misses the point. "Surprisingly high quality" is what wins the Booker prize for fiction. In a reference work, you don't need a few great pieces, you need to avoid any number of bad ones. It's not the greatness that makes a useful encyclopedia, it's the avoidance of error.
Ah. Quake. Now maybe you have a point 8-)
I still don't think a HDTV is the way to go though - why not a nice big plasma display ? These are great for Quaking, they're dirt cheap at the moment (oh, I love recessions) and even brand new you're within that $7K budget for something decent.
But when do you get the value of what you paid for out of anything anymore.
Nearly every time. If you're not going to - then DON'T BUY IT !
Here's a clue - If you don't need it personally, send it on to your president; You don't NEED all this crap.
Consume Less America ! - you'll get better stuff, and you'll enjoy it more. I can think of plenty of stuff I'd love to buy for $7,000 - but I'd think it a very poor deal to end up with a mere TV. How about a low-end tank ? There are plenty around for that price. A video edit suite, and make your _own_ movie ? You don't need all your fun pre-packaged at the factory, and sold to you by the AOL-Cola-Disney corporation. Get off your butts and do something.
30K for a car ? Why should I change the 200hp Alfa Romeo I bought for $1800 ? OK, so I travel by bike most of the time (and my best bike cost as much as the car), but the Alfa is a blast 8-)
You need to see to to believe it.
Even on a conventional TV, an HD signal is PHENOMENAL
HDTV isn't phenomenal, it's just slightly better.
Oh, sorry. I forgot you were in America and used to watching NTSC. Here in Europe (well, apart from France) we've had PAL for 30 years and almost such good quality as standard.
The programmes are better in PAL too 8-)
Here's a clue for you: ventilation don't go through wood
He's too smart for us ! In a year's time, when $7,000 of flash new gadget has been relegated to obsolete museum piece, then it will be just about ready to collapse from heat exhaustion. The TV is dead, so he just has to go out and buy a new and even more complicated one.
The the real kicker is that he gets to write another LA Times column about it all, bemoaning the poor reliability of TV's !
XPath is a partial query language for XML - it can read, but it has no way of updating the document.
There's also the issue that XPath is very much an XML tool, with a tight binding between semantics and structure (which is the whole thing that I'm saying about XML in the first place). If you have a graph represented in XML, then it's hard to write XPath expressions that can traverse it. If you have RDF stored in XML (which has several possible serialisations for the same semantic content) then it's possible to write XPath that expands these, but it's hard, error-prone, and generally unworkable.
There's still a lot of thought out there that XSLT can translate magically between schemas. Some groups see XML Schema as improving this (Hunter & Lagoze, WWW10). Although Alison Cawsey's paper from WWW 9 shows just why this approach doesn't work. I've abandoned my own work in this field for similar reasons; even though I managed to build something workable, I just never trusted it to be reliable.
XML Schema tries hard to provide a strong notion of type
Although that's a valid point (and I haven't written DTDs in over 2 years, in favour of schema) it's not the issue I was talking about. Look at the Infoset draft or the recent Processing Model workshop. You can barely tell the difference between reading infoset and the syntax spec, because XML just doesn't put enough distance between semantics of the content and its representation in a document.
XML doesn't "represent" anything. It never has done, it never will, and all attempts to pretend that it does will end in failure. XML (and XML Schema) is a low-level transport and manipulation platform, but it doesn't have the ability to do any form of abstract representation. Its structure and implied semantic meaning are so closely fastened together that it's impossible to squeeze a gap between them. "Representation" is the act of stretching this gap, between structure and implied meaning, so as to infer a higher level meaning.
The problem is fundamental to XML, and won't be fixed by tools at this level. There's no abstraction in XML; any attempt to indicate semantics also drags along its structural baggage, because that's the only way XML-Schema allows you to work. No number of "sideways" solutions to this; namespacing to allow parallel co-existence, BizTalk to allow sharing of schemas, will fix this - XML just doesn't offer any "upwards" in a semantic direction.
To separate two authors with the same name you need more information to make a key.
Again, I agree with you in general, but that's not quite the issue I was thinking of. Clearly we need more structure to distinguish them, although in fact we don;t need any more information (RDF can do this entirely within the document structure, with no need to start "allocating author indexes" or similar).
The symptom of this problem, in the XML world, though is an over-dependence on flat text comparisons. It's like search engines that only compare at the text level and can't tell "goat sex" from animal husbandry or a Slashdot Troll. Because XML has nothing useful beyond the text node, that's what gets used. If it's easy to do it all just by comparing author names, then that's what lazy coders do. Disambiguation between resources like this needs a simple and lightweight mechanism, because if it isn't, no-one will use it. RDF manages it with rdf:resource and rdf:about attributes. In XML then you'd have to build some identifying system at the application level (so a generic parser can't understand it) and impose its use on your data. No wonder people stick with just using the names and ignoring truly identifying relationships with resources.
ID & IDREF are just broken. If you want to do it that way, build a proper architecture for doing it and join the RDF WG.
Tell me about it 8-(
Compare the XML Schema spec, the SMIL spec, and the even more gargantuan MPEG-7 spec. Now take a look at DAML and see that complexity can be described, without needing a spec like a phone book.
That's some of the worst XML schema design I've seen in years (OK, I know it wasn't yours).
Secondly, which pair of moronic moderators moderated this down as a troll ?
but xml was not designed to replace databases
XML doesn't replace databases. It _can't_ do, because it has no query mechanism. If you want to compare something to an RDBMS, then you have to look at the combination of XML + XPath. This is actually quite a good choice for some small systems (although it has no large-volume performance).
What's a more important issue (and this is one of my personal hobby-horses) is to separate the data model from the serialisation. XML does serialisations, and it does them quite well. It's poor though on data modelling. XML Schema is also very poor on data modelling, because it has no separation between a structural schema (which element goes inside the other) and a semantic schema (what each element means, when placed inside another). As a result, it's possible to serialise XML documents to represent "One view of the data, for one context" but it's really not possible to build an XML representation of a large data modelling problem for anything beyond the trivial.
How do you distinguish such an author for another author with the same name ?
Now (obviously) people have built XML solutions that work around these problems, but XML itself doesn't support them. It doesn't have a portable solution to such commonplace problems that a generic parser (like SiRPAC) could understand, and it doesn't support the development of particularly good solutions to them.
Teaching RDF, one of the hardest (and most important) lessons to communicate is that there's an underlying data model, and there's a serialisation, and that the serialisation is only one usage-dependent view onto what ought to be a much better structured and flexible internal model. For RDF it is, but for XML it isn't.
Someone should create an HTTP interface to a dmoz XML database, which would allow users to place XPATH queries which would return XML nodesets to the requesting client.
That's an interesting idea, but it's not quite the same problem. You describe a good solution to a "pull" scenario, which is great for queries instigated by a client, but it's not as good as a "push" for providing a newsfeed from a site.
I'd suggest RSS 1.0 as a good format to produce (possibly based on the same XPath-based pull that you describe). Once it's in RSS 1.0, then it's trivial to make it appear on any number of sites, or to aggregate it into other more generalised newsfeeds.
For implementing the "pull" side, then XPath encapsulated in SOAP is an easy way to build clients, and not too hard for the endpoint server. I've been doing this recently, so that a UI component (DHTML in Javascript) could selectively retrieve pieces of a big taxonomy document that was >MB in total.
My one concern (and my own personal bias) is that I see many of these items as running off the limits of what XML (and XMLDB) is good at, and being better handled in RDF. Certainly RSS 0.91 (which is XML) couldn't do this, but RSS 1.0 (which is RDF) could easily. Of course, that then makes XPath unworkable as a query language and there's not yet a stable "RDFPath" equivalent for RDF.
I'm also interested in working on this. Anyone else, drop me a mail if you are too.
So, does having a program to change the display rather than sliding in a different bit of card justify a $300 price tag?
Of course it does. The things are probably practically hand-made by their original designer. Start shifting product volume, get them to be the "must have" for the next hot game, and they'll be $50 from Taiwan.
The great advantage of this over the BBC strip, is that it's context sensitive. Why have 15 incomprehensible buttons, when you can make it display a relevant set of 4, as you need them.
Don't underestimate funny keyboards though. We've just receievd a video edit suite built out of a bog-standard Mac, but with a keyboard that looks like a bag of coloured Lego. The gimmick is that it matches the colours of an industry-standard Avid edit suite, with resultant savings in training etc.