To ensure that all Yahoo! Groups members enjoy the same high-quality service, we will be deleting all of your attachments. Insert George Carlin
servicing the customerquote here. I once saw a sign at a bank on the outskirts of London:
For your convenience, we are now closed on Thursdays.
Semantics conjures up images of narrow-minded professorial types arguing the definition of words like ‘this.’
XML was going to add semantics to data so you could make smart searches, you could say, show me all the poems about red wheelbarrows, and boom, there you’d go.
These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
Silence is bad. Management cannot differentiate between someone who’s gone off the deep end and is over their head, someone who is malingering, someone who’s trying to solve an intractable problem, and someone who is making progress on a hard design issue.
One of the first questions one can ask about a naming mechanism is how many names one can expect to encounter. In order to answer this, it is necessary to know something about the expected maximum size of the internet. Currently, the internet is fairly small. It contains no more than 25 active networks, and no more than a few hundred hosts. This makes it possible to install tables which exhaustively list all of these elements. However, any implementation undertaken now should be based on an assumption of a much larger internet. The guidelines currently recommended are an upper limit of about 1,000 networks. If we imagine an average number of 25 hosts per net, this would suggest a maximum number of 25,000 hosts. It is quite unclear whether this host estimate is high or low, but even if it is off by several factors of two, the resulting number is still large enough to suggest that current table management strategies are unacceptable. Some fresh techniques will be required to deal with the internet of the future.
Everything stops somewhere.
It’s a little upsetting to stumble across a friend in a porn movie from the 80’s.
[I]n 10 or 20 years I hope I can go back and reread them with yet more beers, and remember, and feel like I had lived a life worth writing about.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim