In particular, the IBM 1401 (two of them actually) that you can see demonstrated at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View are transistor-based and were very successful computers.
> The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills.
Factually absolutely incorrect for Switzerland, and easy to verify. Swiss bank notes are and have been some of the most colorful (and pretty, I should say) around, and all have different sizes.
One of the interesting aspects of the Altair was that it was based on a bus called the S-100 bus. You would have a CPU card and a memory card at least, but everything else was optional. The serial board was separate, and strictly not absolutely necessary to play with the computer, since you could enter simple programs directly from the front panel.
I remember S-100 from when I was a kid. Never was hands-on with that hardware but there were all kinds of ads for cards in Byte magazine and others. Seemed like you could get a card for almost anything in S-100 protocol.
That's right. There are still S-100 enthusiasts who are maintaining and developing S-100 cards, see http://www.s100computers.com/ (does not seem to respond correctly to HTTPS right now).
True or not, be aware that "The Global Times is a daily tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, commenting on international issues from a Chinese nationalistic perspective." (Wikipedia)
This sounds like official Chinese propaganda. This was truer at some point, but things have started turning bad for China with the advent of Xi Jinping. 20-25 years ago, the country was hopeful, developing fast, opening up. Foreigners started moving there, seeing it as a new land of opportunity. Much of that is gone. The economy is in bad shape, youth unemployment is massive, the country is a dictatorship, nobody wants to move there (and China doesn't want you to anyway). I'll quote the Economist: "When Mr Xi took over in 2012, China was changing fast. The middle class was growing, private firms were booming and citizens were connecting on social media. A different leader might have seen these as opportunities. Mr Xi saw only threats."
Go to any top-N American University, pick a random STEM faculty and count the number of Chinese (nationality) post-grads, post-docs and faculty. Alternatively, look at the trajectory of science publications coming out of Chinese universities vs the US. Underestimating China's brain-trust is doing oneself a disservice.
I don't need to be convinced that China has lots of bright, hard-working individuals. I just want to point out that China faces immense challenges and that we should see beyond, and push back against, the propaganda. There is a massive asymmetry between China and democratic nations in this regards.
This is a fair assessment. However, I think there is propaganda or self-delusion in the west that leads some people to believe that free markets and/or democracy are preconditions for any number of desirable outcomes like creativity, economic success, product innovation, etc. That may have empirically been true against the Eastern Bloc/Soviet Union during the cold war, but is not obvious to me regarding China today. AFAICT, China has produced companies that can go to to toe with the best in the west - occasionally winning outright[1]. We can argue whether that's because of subsidies, espionage, innovation or fundamental research
> China will surpass USA from a GDP Point of view in 2035.
Don't be so sure, this has become much less clear. For example, in this article: "The Centre for Economics and Business Research, which in 2020 predicted that China would overtake the U.S. by 2028, revised the crossover point two years later, to 2036. This month, the British consultancy said it will not happen in the next 15 years."
I'm in germany and i'm pissed. I will not go on holiday in USA and thinking proactivly how to boycot USA.
And i'm not even a company. A company wants stability, predictability and not chaos every 4 years. And this president is in office for only a few month.
Whatever strategy companys currently try to do is either sitting it out or starting to adjust. The adjustments might not just go back when USA is more stable again.
There have been proposals a long time ago, including by Tim Bray, for an XML 2.0 that would remove some warts. But there was no appetite in the industry to move forward.
CSS selectors have spent the last few decades reinventing XPath. XPath introduced right from the beginning the notion of axes, which allow you to navigate down, up, preceding, following, etc. as makes sense. XPath also always had predicates, even in version 1.0. CSS just recently started supporting :has() and :is(), in particular. Eventually, CSS selectors will match XPath's query abilities, although with worse syntax.
The problem with CSS selectors (at least in scrapers) is also that they change relatively often, compared to (html) document structure, thats why XPath last longer.
But you are right, CSS selectors compared to 20 years old XPath are realy worse.
- XPath literally didn't exist when CSS selectors were introduced
- XPath's flexibility makes it a lot more challenging to implement efficiently, even more so when there are thousands of rules which need to be dynamically reevaluated at each document update
- XPath is lacking conveniences dedicated to HTML semantics, and handrolling them in xpath 1.0 was absolutely heinous (go try and implement a class predicate in xpath 1.0 without extensions)
> It's a mystery why we didn't simply reuse XPath for selectors... it's all in there!!
It's not really a mystery:
> CSS was first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie on 10 October 1994. [...] discussions on public mailing lists and inside World Wide Web Consortium resulted in the first W3C CSS Recommendation (CSS1) being released in 1996
Fair enough. By the way, the original CSS from 1996 featured only:
- the "descendant" combinator (whitespace)
- the "class" selector (".foo")
The 1998 CSS2 introduced "child", "following sibling", and attribute selectors. This state of things then remained unchanged forever (I see that Selectors Level 3 became a recommendation only in 2018?).
On the other hand, in 1999, XPath already specified all those basic ways to navigate the DOM, and CSS still doesn't have them all as of 2025.
XSLT will perform the transformations that you instruct it to do. It does not wipe out whitespace just on its own. Do you mean that you'd like facilities to nicely reindent the output?
> It does not wipe out whitespace just on its own.
Sounds nice but doesn't match my lived experience with both Chrome's built-in XSLT processor and `xsltproc`. (I was using XSLT 1.0, for legacy reasons, so maybe this is an XSLT 1.0 issue?)
> Do you mean that you'd like facilities to nicely reindent the output?
No, I do mean preserve whitespace (i.e., formatting), such as between elements and between attributes.
usually whitespace (in) significance is specified in the XML schema. so if you provide a schema and instruct the xslt engine to comply with the schema, do your issues persist?
You are confused. Look at Taiwan's present, not its long gone past. As I mentioned in another thread, during my last trip to Taiwan, I revisited the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, which features a museum where Chiang Kai-shek's life and rule are documented. The errors and brutality of his rule in particular are well-documented and preserved, officially accessible to all citizens and visitors. This is a wonderful example of transparency. You won't find anything like this in mainland China.
https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/ibm1401/