Re: [Bug-gne]Distributed design

[hooker]

> GNE is a author-controlled document archival, linking and retrieval
system 
> that is worldwide, anonymous, self-replicating, self-indexing, and 
> http-based.

Good definition, and far better than the throw-away word "encyclopedia"
which it clearly isn't.

> How long does it take to get really good at Perl? 6 mo?  1 year? 3 years?

Dunno. It took me a day to be able to write useful scripts purely from the
Camel book, and less than a month to write pretty good ones. DB interfacing
is a bit harder because the issues are rarely perl-specific. Schema design
is vital - get it too wrong and no amount of programming in any language
will help !  I've been using Perl for 5-6 years now, and steer clear of
overly complex regexps (for example) 'cos of the problems other people find
supporting code which uses them.  After all, GNE code *must* be friendly
for both user and supporter.

> TEI is meant to encode things that are on paper, yes. What is the element 
> tag for "insert video here" in TEI?
> 
> As far as the web browser, that's an idea. I could write it in VB6 and
have 
> it use MSXML3 to get the data to/from the web... (said I could, not
would)
> 
> The OS? Aren't there enough out there already?
> 
> Redesign the world. Well, when NASA wants to launch a new orbiter to
Mars, 
> they go back to the drawing-board, they don't get off-the-shelf parts...

Yup, and look at the cost of doing that.  Even NASA would prefer to reuse
hardware (the "smaller cheaper" discoverer programme was intended to
achieve this) if they could.

Paul