Occam never "demands" anything. It might suggest, but it's never a definitive proof of any falsehood, no matter how complicated and superfluous it appears. Sometimes things really are just gratuitously complex.
If God exists, and God was a prime creator, then even this doesn't contradict Darwin (or even most modern views of evolutionary theory) -- simply because the existence question is a matter of faith, and there's just no rational debate with a belief-based system. God's mechanism of creation might well have been evolution, evolution might be an ongoing process in a post-Fall world -- the Bible is simply silent on this.
Most churches with any sense accept this, and have stopped trying to regard evolution as a threat -- there's space for both. Only the trailer-park end of religion, that particularly American institution of money-grubbing televangelists with the sexual temperance of an Arkansas President, still needs to argue against it on a regular basis. Still, it makes for good foam-flecked ranting, and no-one ever lost money underestimating the public (and Barnum had never even seen a cable TV audience).
I find it easier to understand why one would spy for the US than the USSR. The US _loves_ spies -- maybe it's too many Bond films, but there's a cultural perception that spies are secretly heroic and motivated by a sense of higher moral purpose. After they finally escape and defect, they're feted as either heroes or merely fascinating and rewarded with well-paid lecture tours. In England, they even sprung the clearly guilty George Blake from prison, because some Guardian-reading liberals felt sorry for him.
In the East, spying is evil disloyalty whoever does it, and a "loyal" spy is regarded as barely any better than an enemy agent. There's a Russian phrase for it that translates as "Not Quite Dead Yet", meaning that even the most loyal and decorated of their own agents is only one step away from political disfavour, imprisonment and purging. Any sensible Worker would merely keep their head down and ignore the whole immoral process.
Of course, my own loyalty to the Communist International and the impending Dictatorship of the Proleteriat would outweigh any mere capitalist greed. We of Geeknatz have already destroyed faith in your stock market system with our hugely inflated boo.com's and lastminute.com's. Importing real Budweiser beer; beer that tastes of beer, not just malted rice, will destroy faith in your military-brewski complex. When your Mickey Mouse is out of copyright in 2004, we shall destroy your capitalist marketing system entirely.
Bluetooth has certainly taken surprisingly long to appear. I now have 802.11 devices I never expected to have, because I thought they'd go straight to Bluetooth. The Bluetooth kit that is out is also staggering expensive (a 200 quid DECT phone goes to 500 with Bluetooth).
The same thing happened with USB. Why did I buy my last scanner with a pain-in-the-ass SCSI interface, when I knew all along that I really wanted USB, but just couldn't get them yet ? In the end though, I'm now happily using it - maybe two years after I expected it to become pervasive.
USB wasn't a failure, and isn't a failure now. It does something useful, it's cheap, and it got there eventually.
So why has WAP been such an unmitigated disaster ? (and for the Americans reading this, it's yet another cellphone technology where Europe is far ahead of you).
IMHO, WAP failed because it wasn't adventurous enough. The tiny deck size limit was too rigidly fixed around a phone-sized display, just as PDAs were gaining radio links. Although WAP was capable (barely) of driving a Yellow-Pages interface, it ran out of steam for ordering pizza/
I'm still not sure about Bluetooth. I don't like it, because (like WAP) I see some huge limitations in how far they've pushed it. Making my phone headset talk to my fridge ? Yes, it will do that. Maybe (radio permitting) we'll all have Bluetooth phone headsets like Lt. Uhura in a couple of years.
The thing I'm really unsure of about Bluetooh are the discovery protocols. It's one thing to make my phone talk to my fridge, but what about all that useful stuff I'm already doing with my IR Palm and someone else's hardware ? How do you "beam" a business card between two Bluetooth PDAs if they've never been introduced before ? How do you stop everyone in radio range overhearing it too ? How can Bluetooth support a railway season ticket, so that I'm let through the barrier, but not the guy in front ? IMHO, the Bluetooth SDP is painfully weak on these areas - yet they're the areas of neo-Gibson tech that I want to be inventing (and buying) in the next few years.
LEDs (and laser diodes) keep getting better and better. Will we see IrDA making a comeback, on the back of more powerful optics, longer range, and a simple to understand line-of-sight discovery protocol ?
PS - And Bluetooth should fix their damned website if they want developers to adopt it. How can I judge the spec if it takes an hour to download it ?
Has anyone else noticed their HTML is well-formed since they started using XML?
HTML is generally well-formed anyway, because unless you're deliberately using the XHTML doctype, then there's no reason for it to conform to XML well-formedness anyway. Non-XML well-formedness isn't bad, it's just SGML and not XML.
I switched to authoring XHTML about 18 months ago and have never regretted it. Sometimes it just keeps the code neat, sometimes it's enormously useful (when I want to either read it or write it with XML tools) and it's always consistent with the rest of what I'm authoring.
Swapping HTML to XHTML is full of pitfalls though. You can't just fix up the structural well-formedness, there's a load of character set and entity issues to fix too, especially if you use a range of character sets or encodings. Running it through Tidy will warn you on many of these, but it doesn't fix them for you automatically.
BTW - Does Slashdot still ignore <br/> ?
(If that was on one line, then yes it does)
SGML and Lisp language similarities
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 1
any XML book that's any larger than a post-it note, to largely be filled with useless information on unrelated topics.
My "XML Book" is mainly double-sided prints of TR's from the W3C site in a ring-binder. It recently spilled over into a second 2" thick binder. I use all of this stuff on a regular basis - I also have most of it available as off-line webbage on my laptop.
Do you understand HTML tags
There's more to it than that. If you said SGML, then you might be closer to it.
Try this - Is a "naked ampersand" (i.e. not ) valid HTML ? Is it valid XML ? If anyone still reads Usenet, and the webmastering groups, then follow the recent thread in there on just this subject (where I had my butt spanked for getting it wrong). It's not as simple as you think, and it's not all the same as HTML.
ASN and XML (and that includes SGML) address different ends of the same problem, although they do overlap hugely.
ASN is a "wire protocol", and that's all it is. It takes some pretty low-level data typing concepts and describes a serialization for them. It's a very good serialization, and it's robust against a whole range of platform variables, but they just never lift their heads out of the trenches to look over the parapet.
SGML / XML are pretty low level too, but they're a whole level above ASN. Read the XML Infoset TR -- Can you imagine ASN describing that level of abstraction ? SGML (but not so much XML) let you deal with a bunch of structural issues by use of a DTD -- again, ASN would be left far behind.
Bad book - terrible RDF section
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 1
In a world of terrible computer books, and XML books being notably worse than usual, this one is at the lower end of the scale.
The RDF chapter misses the point completely, and given how stable (OK, moribund) the RDF spec was for a long time, it doesn't even have the usual excuses of a fast-changing field.
Don't buy any books on XML alone. They're all pretty uninspred. Go to xml101.com or somewhere for a tutorial instead. Download the Microsoft XML SDK - even if you're using a non-MS dev platform, it's a damn good desktop DOM & XSLT reference (although you'll need a Windows box to read it).
The only book worth reading is Michael Kay's XSLT book from Wrox. You need to know XML pretty well beforehand, but it's a good XSLT tutorial and a decent reference.
At work, we've used DOM-like trees with SGML for years
You're lucky then, and you're definitely the exception.
I went shopping for SGML solutions in '97, and I couldn't afford them. Lots of nice suits, but there were no affordable toolkits and parsers to be had. - and don't mention DSSSL !
Now XML is everywhere. There's a deployed and working client-side XSLT engine on nearly every desktop (if not web browser) and the cost of building XML apps is peanuts.
If SGML was such a resounding and widespread success, then where is it all ?
I know barely enough about Fibre Channel to know that I need some pretty soon, and that it's going to cost me plenty.
So, how does this gadget work ? Is it possible that it can really do so, or is it just a piece of unreliable wet string that you'll curse forever ? If these people can do it so cheaply, why are the real boxes so expensive ?
Owing to the IP scam, I'm unlikely to ever buy anything from Spamonic, so this is now just idle (but serious) curiosity.
It all depends on the quality and real value of the training.
In one aspect, this is a reasonable requirement to make of an employee when there's an investment in their training. Seems fair enough.
The practice though is different. Poor quality and worthless courses are used solely as a lock-in by unscrupulous companies. This is very common in the industry, and if they try and do it to you, leave now ! They're bastards to work for, so go somewhere better.
IT training is also _very_ cheap. A one week course is seen as a major investment. Come off it ! Pilots, doctors and even nurses and welders have expensive training, but not IT people.
Three IR LED beacons, mounted on the gateposts. Each one bleeped a simple ID code (TV remote chipset, with a button permanently down).
On the two 'bots, were scanner heads. These were dead simple, a stepper to rotate it and a pair of IR detectors and lenses as a simple 1-axis discriminator. By stopping, then scanning the head around a bit, the bot could take a bearing on each of the beacons. Some triangulation and it then had a position fix. Crude, inefficient, lots of software, but the hardware was cheap & easy.
Control was a couple of nested state machines.
One beacon had few bits of data link in the code as well; just a simple "Wander around the garden", "Come home now", "'Bot A get into the kennel" code.
"Home" was a kennel in the conservatory, with the coded beacon mounted directly above the door. When "homing", they just did a home on the beacon until they were nearby to it. To get them through the kennel's bot-flap there was a buried wire inductive guide. Each bot 'was called through in turn, at which point it homed as close as possible to the beacon, until it picked up the wire field and then line-followed that through the flap. Indoors there were actually two separate wires, so the 'bots could park side-by-side and charge up.
The 'bots themselves were just little diamond chassis, with a single powered wheel each side and a castor at each end. In the middle was a plantpot (that being the function of the whole malarkey).
Battery life was OK, as they didn't move much. They weren't mobile 'bots, so much as randomly re-positioning on an intermittent basis.
Stuff they should have had:
Better traction in mud. We had to limit their "range" to a tiny part of the available garden, as they got bogged down near the edges.
Garden edge detection, with a buried inductive wire. After all, they already had the on-board detectors
A 'bot -> base signalling channel for "Call me home, my battery is getting flat"
Dallas Semiconductor's TINI board is cool for this sort of thing.
Speed-wise, machine optimized code won't overtake Very Smart Geeks
True, but that's if you're having VSG(in Assembler) write your code. What do you do if the code is written by physicists who aren't expert coders ?
PS - To the spelling pillock. Get a life. Yes, I'm a Brit, and I spell things with an "ess" not a "zed" because I don't still use a 17th century spelling that we abandoned to you colonials centuries ago.
when you're running calculations which would take ASCI Red a couple weeks.
I used to write that sort of thing, and I used Algol and Fortran, not assembler.
The Very Smart Geeks who had written the Fortran's code generator knew far more about optimising assembler than I ever would. Speed-wise, machine optimised code overtook hand-crafted some decades ago.
The idea of embedded glue as a composite repair mechanism has been around since the '60s (Courtaulds, UK, in reference to some early carbon fibre laminates, back when the UK had an aerospace industry).
The tricky aspect is that most cure mechanisms also involve a volume change. Get it right and you glue the crack shut. Get it wrong and you've driven a wedge in to make it bigger.
Of course in your meteorite shield, the macroscopic strength (structural) is less important than the microscopic scale (impact resistance), so the idea could still work well.
Books also depend on technology. You can't read them if it's dark, or if it's raining. Assuming that civilisation hasn't collapsed completely, is it easier for me to give you a copy of a book by beaming it Palm-to-Palm, or by photocopying a paper version ? Will a quality-made computing device outlive a cheap paperback on corrosive paper ?
The digital longevity issue is a good one. I can (and do) read 40 year old data sets, but I often can't read a 5 year old one. The reasons behind most of these happenings is that >20 years ago we defined data formats by doing just that; defining a format as fields, groups, rows etc. Ten years ago we instead would choose "WordPerfect" format -- devolving the format definition to an application vendor. Now it's these application-based formats that are the ones being lost (mainly), not those where the format was explicitly noted.
Fortunately, the future looks brighter. XML is a good start, but the increasing usage of schema-based formats with simple and commonplace syntaxes can free us entirely from application dependency. Who cares if the last XML parser is lost ? The XML syntax spec is shorter than a French holiday phrasebook, and we can just re-write one from scratch. Schema languages are increasingly self-describing and semantically powerful, so we can re-interpret our data by reading them.
Will paper die out ? Well, I still covet first editions in nice bindings, solely because of the aesthetics. Taking a lesser version of that, one-use paper will always be more cute & cuddly than that impersonal info-gadget, so I certainly wouldn't hold my breath waiting for paper to vanish.
The real difference though is one that this article skated right over. Paper is one-use with pre-packaged content, e-Books are on-line and live. The difference between "The History of..." and "What's Happening to..., Right This Minute" is a very big difference. It's not so big for Tolstoy. It's not even very big for Steven King. But it's enormous for a medical textbook.
Like the rest of you web-dev geeks, I must read through the whole of the W3C site every few weeks, what with checking the odd snippet ten times a day. Usually it's because of my failing memory, but often it's because some small part was revised last week and I need the current version. Now can you imagine how you'd work with that on static paper ? It's cases like that that will push the e-Book, not some chapter-by-chapter "stop if you don't like it" licensing deal on a new novel.
Stalin died in '53. The Berlin Wall didn't go up for nearly another decade, let along get torn down. It's a bit early to be predicting the Death Of Microsoft, no matter how much wishful thinking is behind it.
Slashdot Mirror
Occam's Razor demands
Occam never "demands" anything. It might suggest, but it's never a definitive proof of any falsehood, no matter how complicated and superfluous it appears. Sometimes things really are just gratuitously complex.
If God exists, and God was a prime creator, then even this doesn't contradict Darwin (or even most modern views of evolutionary theory) -- simply because the existence question is a matter of faith, and there's just no rational debate with a belief-based system. God's mechanism of creation might well have been evolution, evolution might be an ongoing process in a post-Fall world -- the Bible is simply silent on this.
Most churches with any sense accept this, and have stopped trying to regard evolution as a threat -- there's space for both. Only the trailer-park end of religion, that particularly American institution of money-grubbing televangelists with the sexual temperance of an Arkansas President, still needs to argue against it on a regular basis. Still, it makes for good foam-flecked ranting, and no-one ever lost money underestimating the public (and Barnum had never even seen a cable TV audience).
--
All your base pairs belong to us
Much the same as "Dianetic$", the "$cience of Mental Health".
If you're afraid of something, and you can't defeat it, then steal its labels and pretend to be it.
Works well for politicians in a two-party system too.
On matters of evolution, there can only be one truly reliable source:
DEVO
I find it easier to understand why one would spy for the US than the USSR. The US _loves_ spies -- maybe it's too many Bond films, but there's a cultural perception that spies are secretly heroic and motivated by a sense of higher moral purpose. After they finally escape and defect, they're feted as either heroes or merely fascinating and rewarded with well-paid lecture tours. In England, they even sprung the clearly guilty George Blake from prison, because some Guardian-reading liberals felt sorry for him.
In the East, spying is evil disloyalty whoever does it, and a "loyal" spy is regarded as barely any better than an enemy agent. There's a Russian phrase for it that translates as "Not Quite Dead Yet", meaning that even the most loyal and decorated of their own agents is only one step away from political disfavour, imprisonment and purging. Any sensible Worker would merely keep their head down and ignore the whole immoral process.
Of course, my own loyalty to the Communist International and the impending Dictatorship of the Proleteriat would outweigh any mere capitalist greed. We of Geeknatz have already destroyed faith in your stock market system with our hugely inflated boo.com's and lastminute.com's. Importing real Budweiser beer; beer that tastes of beer, not just malted rice, will destroy faith in your military-brewski complex. When your Mickey Mouse is out of copyright in 2004, we shall destroy your capitalist marketing system entirely.
All your brand belong to us !
Bluetooth has certainly taken surprisingly long to appear. I now have 802.11 devices I never expected to have, because I thought they'd go straight to Bluetooth. The Bluetooth kit that is out is also staggering expensive (a 200 quid DECT phone goes to 500 with Bluetooth).
The same thing happened with USB. Why did I buy my last scanner with a pain-in-the-ass SCSI interface, when I knew all along that I really wanted USB, but just couldn't get them yet ? In the end though, I'm now happily using it - maybe two years after I expected it to become pervasive.
USB wasn't a failure, and isn't a failure now. It does something useful, it's cheap, and it got there eventually.
So why has WAP been such an unmitigated disaster ? (and for the Americans reading this, it's yet another cellphone technology where Europe is far ahead of you).
IMHO, WAP failed because it wasn't adventurous enough. The tiny deck size limit was too rigidly fixed around a phone-sized display, just as PDAs were gaining radio links. Although WAP was capable (barely) of driving a Yellow-Pages interface, it ran out of steam for ordering pizza/
I'm still not sure about Bluetooth. I don't like it, because (like WAP) I see some huge limitations in how far they've pushed it. Making my phone headset talk to my fridge ? Yes, it will do that. Maybe (radio permitting) we'll all have Bluetooth phone headsets like Lt. Uhura in a couple of years.
The thing I'm really unsure of about Bluetooh are the discovery protocols. It's one thing to make my phone talk to my fridge, but what about all that useful stuff I'm already doing with my IR Palm and someone else's hardware ? How do you "beam" a business card between two Bluetooth PDAs if they've never been introduced before ? How do you stop everyone in radio range overhearing it too ? How can Bluetooth support a railway season ticket, so that I'm let through the barrier, but not the guy in front ? IMHO, the Bluetooth SDP is painfully weak on these areas - yet they're the areas of neo-Gibson tech that I want to be inventing (and buying) in the next few years.
LEDs (and laser diodes) keep getting better and better. Will we see IrDA making a comeback, on the back of more powerful optics, longer range, and a simple to understand line-of-sight discovery protocol ?
PS - And Bluetooth should fix their damned website if they want developers to adopt it. How can I judge the spec if it takes an hour to download it ?
Has anyone else noticed their HTML is well-formed since they started using XML?
HTML is generally well-formed anyway, because unless you're deliberately using the XHTML doctype, then there's no reason for it to conform to XML well-formedness anyway. Non-XML well-formedness isn't bad, it's just SGML and not XML.
I switched to authoring XHTML about 18 months ago and have never regretted it. Sometimes it just keeps the code neat, sometimes it's enormously useful (when I want to either read it or write it with XML tools) and it's always consistent with the rest of what I'm authoring.
Swapping HTML to XHTML is full of pitfalls though. You can't just fix up the structural well-formedness, there's a load of character set and entity issues to fix too, especially if you use a range of character sets or encodings. Running it through Tidy will warn you on many of these, but it doesn't fix them for you automatically.
BTW - Does Slashdot still ignore <br /> ?
(If that was on one line, then yes it does)
TBL said much the same thing.
any XML book that's any larger than a post-it note, to largely be filled with useless information on unrelated topics.
My "XML Book" is mainly double-sided prints of TR's from the W3C site in a ring-binder. It recently spilled over into a second 2" thick binder. I use all of this stuff on a regular basis - I also have most of it available as off-line webbage on my laptop.
Do you understand HTML tags
There's more to it than that. If you said SGML, then you might be closer to it.
Try this - Is a "naked ampersand" (i.e. not ) valid HTML ? Is it valid XML ? If anyone still reads Usenet, and the webmastering groups, then follow the recent thread in there on just this subject (where I had my butt spanked for getting it wrong). It's not as simple as you think, and it's not all the same as HTML.
ASN and XML (and that includes SGML) address different ends of the same problem, although they do overlap hugely.
ASN is a "wire protocol", and that's all it is. It takes some pretty low-level data typing concepts and describes a serialization for them. It's a very good serialization, and it's robust against a whole range of platform variables, but they just never lift their heads out of the trenches to look over the parapet.
SGML / XML are pretty low level too, but they're a whole level above ASN. Read the XML Infoset TR -- Can you imagine ASN describing that level of abstraction ? SGML (but not so much XML) let you deal with a bunch of structural issues by use of a DTD -- again, ASN would be left far behind.
In a world of terrible computer books, and XML books being notably worse than usual, this one is at the lower end of the scale.
The RDF chapter misses the point completely, and given how stable (OK, moribund) the RDF spec was for a long time, it doesn't even have the usual excuses of a fast-changing field.
Don't buy any books on XML alone. They're all pretty uninspred. Go to xml101.com or somewhere for a tutorial instead. Download the Microsoft XML SDK - even if you're using a non-MS dev platform, it's a damn good desktop DOM & XSLT reference (although you'll need a Windows box to read it).
The only book worth reading is Michael Kay's XSLT book from Wrox. You need to know XML pretty well beforehand, but it's a good XSLT tutorial and a decent reference.
At work, we've used DOM-like trees with SGML for years
You're lucky then, and you're definitely the exception.
I went shopping for SGML solutions in '97, and I couldn't afford them. Lots of nice suits, but there were no affordable toolkits and parsers to be had. - and don't mention DSSSL !
Now XML is everywhere. There's a deployed and working client-side XSLT engine on nearly every desktop (if not web browser) and the cost of building XML apps is peanuts.
If SGML was such a resounding and widespread success, then where is it all ?
Good fiction, by one of Russia's best contemporary writers, and maybe the "real" story about Soviet space exploration.
Omon Ra, by Victor Pellevin
I know barely enough about Fibre Channel to know that I need some pretty soon, and that it's going to cost me plenty.
So, how does this gadget work ? Is it possible that it can really do so, or is it just a piece of unreliable wet string that you'll curse forever ? If these people can do it so cheaply, why are the real boxes so expensive ?
Owing to the IP scam, I'm unlikely to ever buy anything from Spamonic, so this is now just idle (but serious) curiosity.
I need a shedload of this stuff, RSN.
Cinonic just fell right off my supplier list for that stunt. 8-(
It all depends on the quality and real value of the training.
In one aspect, this is a reasonable requirement to make of an employee when there's an investment in their training. Seems fair enough.
The practice though is different. Poor quality and worthless courses are used solely as a lock-in by unscrupulous companies. This is very common in the industry, and if they try and do it to you, leave now ! They're bastards to work for, so go somewhere better.
IT training is also _very_ cheap. A one week course is seen as a major investment. Come off it ! Pilots, doctors and even nurses and welders have expensive training, but not IT people.
Three IR LED beacons, mounted on the gateposts. Each one bleeped a simple ID code (TV remote chipset, with a button permanently down).
On the two 'bots, were scanner heads. These were dead simple, a stepper to rotate it and a pair of IR detectors and lenses as a simple 1-axis discriminator. By stopping, then scanning the head around a bit, the bot could take a bearing on each of the beacons. Some triangulation and it then had a position fix. Crude, inefficient, lots of software, but the hardware was cheap & easy.
Control was a couple of nested state machines.
One beacon had few bits of data link in the code as well; just a simple "Wander around the garden", "Come home now", "'Bot A get into the kennel" code.
"Home" was a kennel in the conservatory, with the coded beacon mounted directly above the door. When "homing", they just did a home on the beacon until they were nearby to it. To get them through the kennel's bot-flap there was a buried wire inductive guide. Each bot 'was called through in turn, at which point it homed as close as possible to the beacon, until it picked up the wire field and then line-followed that through the flap. Indoors there were actually two separate wires, so the 'bots could park side-by-side and charge up.
The 'bots themselves were just little diamond chassis, with a single powered wheel each side and a castor at each end. In the middle was a plantpot (that being the function of the whole malarkey).
Battery life was OK, as they didn't move much. They weren't mobile 'bots, so much as randomly re-positioning on an intermittent basis.
Stuff they should have had:
Dallas Semiconductor's TINI board is cool for this sort of thing.
Speed-wise, machine optimized code won't overtake Very Smart Geeks
True, but that's if you're having VSG(in Assembler) write your code. What do you do if the code is written by physicists who aren't expert coders ?
PS - To the spelling pillock. Get a life. Yes, I'm a Brit, and I spell things with an "ess" not a "zed" because I don't still use a 17th century spelling that we abandoned to you colonials centuries ago.
when you're running calculations which would take ASCI Red a couple weeks.
I used to write that sort of thing, and I used Algol and Fortran, not assembler.
The Very Smart Geeks who had written the Fortran's code generator knew far more about optimising assembler than I ever would. Speed-wise, machine optimised code overtook hand-crafted some decades ago.
No, Userland has a poor and bastardised example (and that was before the Nameless Slithering Horror that it 0.92)
RDF isn't RSS, and Userland's RSS doesn't have any RDF left in it at all.
The idea of embedded glue as a composite repair mechanism has been around since the '60s (Courtaulds, UK, in reference to some early carbon fibre laminates, back when the UK had an aerospace industry).
The tricky aspect is that most cure mechanisms also involve a volume change. Get it right and you glue the crack shut. Get it wrong and you've driven a wedge in to make it bigger.
Of course in your meteorite shield, the macroscopic strength (structural) is less important than the microscopic scale (impact resistance), so the idea could still work well.
Books also depend on technology. You can't read them if it's dark, or if it's raining. Assuming that civilisation hasn't collapsed completely, is it easier for me to give you a copy of a book by beaming it Palm-to-Palm, or by photocopying a paper version ? Will a quality-made computing device outlive a cheap paperback on corrosive paper ?
The digital longevity issue is a good one. I can (and do) read 40 year old data sets, but I often can't read a 5 year old one. The reasons behind most of these happenings is that >20 years ago we defined data formats by doing just that; defining a format as fields, groups, rows etc. Ten years ago we instead would choose "WordPerfect" format -- devolving the format definition to an application vendor. Now it's these application-based formats that are the ones being lost (mainly), not those where the format was explicitly noted.
Fortunately, the future looks brighter. XML is a good start, but the increasing usage of schema-based formats with simple and commonplace syntaxes can free us entirely from application dependency. Who cares if the last XML parser is lost ? The XML syntax spec is shorter than a French holiday phrasebook, and we can just re-write one from scratch. Schema languages are increasingly self-describing and semantically powerful, so we can re-interpret our data by reading them.
What do you think Li-ion batteries and Apple chargers are for ? 8-)
e-Books - going to be huge, no question about it.
Will paper die out ? Well, I still covet first editions in nice bindings, solely because of the aesthetics. Taking a lesser version of that, one-use paper will always be more cute & cuddly than that impersonal info-gadget, so I certainly wouldn't hold my breath waiting for paper to vanish.
The real difference though is one that this article skated right over. Paper is one-use with pre-packaged content, e-Books are on-line and live. The difference between "The History of..." and "What's Happening to..., Right This Minute" is a very big difference. It's not so big for Tolstoy. It's not even very big for Steven King. But it's enormous for a medical textbook.
Like the rest of you web-dev geeks, I must read through the whole of the W3C site every few weeks, what with checking the odd snippet ten times a day. Usually it's because of my failing memory, but often it's because some small part was revised last week and I need the current version. Now can you imagine how you'd work with that on static paper ? It's cases like that that will push the e-Book, not some chapter-by-chapter "stop if you don't like it" licensing deal on a new novel.
Yes, and sometimes "Windscale" is still just, "Leafy Hollow Sheep Illumination Centre"
"Microsoft was brought down"
Damn, I must have blinked and missed it !
Stalin died in '53. The Berlin Wall didn't go up for nearly another decade, let along get torn down. It's a bit early to be predicting the Death Of Microsoft, no matter how much wishful thinking is behind it.