Posts by Nick Gibbins

"one-way hyperlinks are what make the web possible (this is the concept of "worse is better")"

I disagree; what makes the Web possible is links that are allowed to break, an orthogonal issue to bidirectionality (or indeed to the first class/embedded link dichotomy).

There have been systems which have had first class links (stored and manipulated separately from the documents they link) which have tried to enforce link integrity. Nelson claimed to be able to do it in Xanadu, but was never able to explain exactly how[1]. Hyper-G - the Great White Also-Ran of the hypertext world - tried to enforce link integrity using something that with modern eyes looks rather like a distributed hash table. Interesting, but fundamentally not as scalable as Not Giving A Damn like the Web does. No doubt, if it were reinvented now, it would use something blockchain-shaped.

On the other hand, there have been systems with first class (and bidirectional) links that didn't care about link integrity - Microcosm being one such.

TimBL's decision to have the Web use embedded unidirectional links that would be allowed to break was, in retrospect, a sensible decision - but it's the breaking bit that mattered, not the embedded/unidirectional bit.

[1] source: I directly asked him about this twenty years ago when I was doing my PhD on matters related to distributed hypermedia systems

Re: For more details....

And the unused perspex block ended up being used as the raw material for a sculpture commemorating the Silver Jubilee in 1977 that was installed by St Katharine's Dock.

https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/crystal-crown

Re: Wouldn't have happened in my day

Pfft. Youngster. When I was a Warwick student (94 graduate), there was a single room of Windows PCs in the basement of CSV. Unless you had access to the small number of Sun workstations, you read your email the same way as almost everyone else: on a VT220 (or on an ADM3e if you were in DCS).

Re: Inclusion in free software

That's fine for *users* of free software/open source software, but not much of an option for developers of same.

(this is why I raised a formal objection at an earlier stage of the process - given the provisions regarding reverse engineering in the DMCA, EME presents a risk to open source developers and security researchers)

I believe that the Traveline bus stop data (on which presumably Google Maps have based their data) comes from NaPTAN (the National Public Transport Access Node dataset - http://www.dft.gov.uk/naptan/ ), so that should be kosher. Can you give some concrete examples of these fictitious stops? I'm not saying that they don't exist (or, uh, don't not exist), but I'd be curious to see where they are (or rather, aren't).

Possibly - the closest contender that I've seen was Hyper-G (later commercialised as Hyperwave). It was a distributed open hypermedia system* with protocol-level support for link integrity. Would it have scaled as fast or as far as the Web? Probably not.

* Open hypermedia means that links are stored separately from documents, rather than being embedded in document markup

** No 404 errors! Ever!

Re: Dot Matrix Printers

Obligatory link to Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers:

http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/en/intro.html

Re: yes

Threads was set in Sheffield. The War Game was set in Kent.

Regarding civil defence, there *was* some preparation in the early 1950s, but the initial enthusiasm had declined by the end of the decade; the last month of my father's National Service were spent on a CD training course that (from his recollection) was mostly about rescuing people from buildings that had collapsed post-attack. The CD Corps itself was wound up by the Wilson government in 1968.

Re: modern day "jobs for the boys"

ODI is a continuation of work that began under the Labour government; at Southampton, we've been working with the Cabinet Office on open public sector information since 2006, if not earlier. Much of the work planned for ODI had previously been planned for the ill-fated Web Science Institute. WSI had been promised funding to the tune of £30M by the Labour government ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/22/semantic_web_tbl/ ), but that was withdrawn by the incoming coalition ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/25/farewell_institute_of_web_science/ ).

Does that count as "friendship and support to the regime"?

Re: Absurd

Damned straight. We've just had the first quarter's readings for the water meter that was installed before Christmas. The result: our family of four uses around 150 litres per day *in total*, and that's with a newborn in cloth nappies.

It's legit - I first saw this video a decade ago. It's very well-known in HCI circles.

You misunderstand academic publishing

It's an ACM paper (or rather, SIGMOD is an ACM conference). The ACM doesn't publish academic papers for the love of it, but as a source of revenue to support the organisation. At my institution, we subscribe to the ACM Digital Library (£££, but still less than subscribing to something like Elsevier's Science Direct).

Like it or not, the majority of the peer-reviewed academic literature is not free to access. Yes, open access journals and author/institutional self-archiving are making some inroads, but it's still completely acceptable for an article on the Reg to be linking to the *canonical* version of an academic paper.

Touching cloth

Some of us use nappies that are both reusable *and* biodegradable on our children. We even buy nappies second-hand.

Cloth nappies were good enough for me when I was a kid, and they're good enough for my kids.

Don't mistake the politician's blurb for the research that's being funded

The principal investigator on the grant (David Payne) has a world-leading track record in photonics, having been behind the development of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier">erbium-doped fibre amplifier</a> (look at the references at the bottom of that Wikipedia article). Without optical amplifiers, undersea cables would be more expensive and less reliable, so his contribution to the basic technology that underpins the global telecommunications network (including the Internet) is substantial.

Call this a squandering of taxpayers' money if you want, but this is the sort of investment in basic R&D that's essential to the future economic wellbeing of the UK.

(declaration: I'm a lecturer in the same department as Payne, but not one of his direct colleagues)

Familiar shape

This doesn't just resemble the X-20 Dynasoar - see also the European Hermes spaceplane and the Russian Kliper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_%28spaceplane%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kliper

Not quite

The first stage of the Soyuz-U (and most other rockets derived from the R-7) consists of four strap-on boosters (each with a single RD-107 engine) around the second stage core (with a single RD-108 engine). The RD-107 and RD-108 engines have four fixed combustion chambers apiece, but are considered to be single engines because they each have a single pair of turbopumps feeding RP-1 and liquid oxygen to the combustion chambers. In addition, the RD-107 has two gimballed verniers, while the RD-108 has four.

So, depending on how you count it, a Soyuz-U either has five engines firing at launch, or thirty-two thrust chambers.