Slashdot Mirror

rleyton writes "Prospect Magazine has an interesting (albeit high level) article about the entire free software movement. Good quotes, but the most interesting is the end questions that might provoke a bit of debate. "

Alan Shutko writes "Simson Garfinkel has a great article on Salon which explains the relative merits and disadvantages of cable modems and DSL. This should quiet the cable/DSL wars seen occasionally. " Very good overview of the difference between cable and DSL, cutting through the hype of the various companies.

Kathleen Ellis, editor of the Privacy News Portal, has written an excellent feature about how The President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption (PECSENC) has recommended dropping almost all export controls on strong crypto, and why it is unlikely that this group's recommendations will be acted on in any meaningful way. (More below)

White House Subcommittee Endorses Crypto Reform.
Will Someone Please Listen?
By Kathleen Ellis

Another shot was fired in one of the longest-lasting and most contentious battles regarding Internet policy last Wednesday, when a White House advisory subcommittee announced it has recommended that the Clinton Administration all but reverse its restrictive stance on the export of encryption products.

The President's Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption (PECSENC) was formed earlier this year by the White House to provide guidance in the U.S. Government's development of encryption policy, which has been the subject of heated debate. As many Slashdot readers already know, the government has insisted for years that liberalizing encryption export could cause serious problems for national security by giving terrorists and criminals access to the technology. Of course, net activists and industry folk assert that the right to privacy supercedes the wishes of any bureaucrat, and that terrorists and criminals can just as easily get their crypto from any other country that does not restrict cryptographic exports.

Critics of the Administration's policy had expected to gain little support through the subcommittee's recommendations. William Crowell, the subcommittee's chairman, is currently President and CEO of Cylink Corporation, an internet security firm, but previously served as Deputy Director for the National Security Agency. Several committee members also had ties to law enforcement or other government agencies; Stewart Baker, an attorney with the Washington-based Steptoe & Johnson, is former general counsel to the NSA and is a vocal opponent of loosening restrictions on encryption. Steve Walker is former president of Trusted Information Systems (now owned by Network Associates), a leading producer of key escrowed encryption products, which the FBI has lobbied to make mandatory even for domestic use.

Despite these ties, however, the subcommittee cited a need for the U.S. government to "recognize market realities" and reverse its course on encryption policy. Among its recommendations:

- License-Free Zones: Recognizing that the European Union is planning to drop all cryptographic export rules between member countries, the US should likewise identify a list of countries which do not pose any major terrorist threat, and allow encryption export (hardware and software products) without a license.

- On-Line Merchants: On-line merchants based in other countries will be added to the list of business types permitted to have encryption products exported to them from the US. Banks and a limited number of other financial institutions currently enjoy this license exception.

- Mass-market hardware and software: Mass-market products which utilize up to 128-bit key length triple DES will enjoy license exception. "The US government should recognize the difficulty of controlling mass-market products once they are allowed to be exported to even limited sectors".

The subcommittee also suggests eliminating cumbersome reporting requirements for manufacturers of encryption products, as well as removal of source code, cryptographic Application Programming Interfaces and devices such as encrypting routers from the list of restricted technologies.

So cypherpunks across the nation will soon be free to export their code at will? Subcommittee chairman William Crowell is hesitant to say yes. "The Administration will have its own ideas about which of these recommendations are implementable. Vice President Gore has said that the administration would consider additional liberalization over what they announced last year, so it was important to get these recommendations to the table while they were thinking about it". He expects that the administration will make further changes to its export policy based on the recommendations sometime in September.

There are other signs of change on the horizon regarding the government's attitude toward encryption. The successor to the current Data Encryption Standard algorithm, which will be used by the U.S. Government for a multitude of purposes, will be chosen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology with the next few months. Four out of the five Advanced Encryption Standard finalists were developed, at least in part, by cryptographers based overseas or holding foreign citizenships. The fact that such decisions could be made by NIST requires the acknowledgement, at least on some level, that good encryption can be produced in countries not affected by U.S. export law, and hence, can be made available around the world.

However, one prominent activist is still skeptical about the potential effect this announcement may actually have on U.S. policy. "This doesn't change policy, this is just yet another group that has come forward and said 'the U.S. policy is abysmal, it needs to be scrapped'" says David Banisar, Deputy Director of Privacy International, and co-author of "The Electronic Privacy Papers". "Many distinguished groups in the past have made similar recommendations...the Clinton Administration has thus far rejected any attempts to dramatically reform export control laws".

Banisar likened the potential influence of the PECSENC recommendations to those of a report published by the National Research Council in 1996. Much more conservative than the PECSENC subcommittee's suggestions, "Cryptography's Role In Securing the Information Society" was written by a committee comprised of government officials, representatives from the computing industry, and academics. The NRC committee's recommendation that 56-bit DES encryption took two years for the Bureau of Export Administration to implement, and many of the other valuable points in the report have never been implemented. The NRC report suggested that U.S. policy should take into account the "nonconfidentiality uses" encryption has to offer. U.S. policy still does not support the use of encryption for the purposes of authentication, which the committee identified as an "important crime-fighting measure". Indeed, one would think that the F.B.I. and the Department of Commerce would hasten to encourage the use of such technologies.

Banisar also expressed concerns about the provisions favoring online merchants. "The e-commerce exports have already been promised to online merchants...they will get what they want, which helps the Clinton Administration divide and conquer their opposition". Banisar stated that civil libertarians lost a powerful lobbying ally when banks were granted the same licensing exemptions now promised to entrepreneurs online. "When a wealthier group gets what they want, they stop fighting, and the everyday users get screwed."

It also seems that the recommendations do not go far enough to help the people who need encryption technology most. Barbara Simons is President of the Association for Computing Machinery and one of the members of the PECSENC committee. "It appears that the recommendations don't address the needs of people working for human rights in countries with repressive regimes," she says.

The human rights issue is a valid one within the debate on U.S. encryption policy. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Cryptography, Scientific Freedom, and Human Rights program trains human rights workers to use encryption technology in countries like Guatemala and China, where oppressive governments have a way of making insurrectionists disappear. A letter from AAAS to the House or Representatives Committee on International relations states that "human rights activists are killed, tortured, disappeared and jailed for trying to expose horrendous abuses...[they] use encryption to protect themselves, the victims and eyewitnesses they are interviewing, and human rights colleagues around the world when they communicate sensitive information on grave abuses of human rights".

It would be wise and compassionate for the Clinton Administration to authorize a new class of license exceptions for human rights workers travelling into countries that don't fall under the "favored nations" exemptions for encryption exports. If national security were really a concern in these cases, they could add strict guidelines describing who the software could legally be distributed to within those countries. Unfortunately, PECSENC seems to have overlooked this important issue.

Despite these shortcomings, there are some definite gains to be made by following PECSENC's recommendations. Net activists will be keeping their fingers crossed when the White House reviews them next month. Progress has been far too slow in coming, and if there's ever been a time for our government to start making some positive decisions, this certainly is it.

Talin has written one of the more interesting pieces that I've seen in a while, piercing the bubble of idyllic life that many people, and giving insight into what is, for all intents and purposes an industry. His synopsis: "I've been in the computer games industry since about 1983...I've come to the conclusion that the industry has gradually, imperceptibly, transformed from a cozy industry full of creative freedom and fun into a rather unpleasant place to work." Click below for more.

My name is Talin, and I've been in the computer games industry since about 1983. I've had a lot of fun, as well as a few "hits". I'm best known for the 1986 Amiga game "The Faery Tale Adventure", for which I still get occasional fan mail. I've worked on about a dozen projects all told, the most recent being a massively multiplayer game for SegaSoft's HEAT network.

I'm always amused be people's reactions when I tell them that I work in the computer games industry. "Computer games!" they say, "Gee, that must be fun!" At such times I usually pause, thinking "How do I break it to them?"

I've been in the industry a long time (since around 1983), and I've watched carefully the changing nature of the business. I remember the busts and booms, the changing platforms, the rise and fall of many companies. And I've come to the conclusion that the industry has gradually, imperceptibly, transformed from a cozy industry full of creative freedom and fun into a rather unpleasant place to work.

Computer game developers work in an industry where 90% of the profit is made from 10% of the products. Or to put it another way, 90% of the products simply die in the marketplace. Sometimes this is because the products themselves are dreck; There certainly is a lot of poorly designed, poorly debugged, formulaic, or simply content free products out there. In other cases, good products wither on the vine because they are inadequately marketed, or because they can't get through all of the noise and fluff that's clogging up the distribution chain.

When the games industry started, distributors were begging for product, but now you have to bribe Fry's or CompUSA a couple of hundred thousand to get your product placed somewhere where customers will actually see it.

And this doesn't even include the large number of products that never make it to market. In some cases, a publisher or development company runs out of money before it can finish a game, or is eaten by a larger company which immediately develops a case of indigestion and dies. (This has happened to my own projects twice.)

Having been involved in a number of large, multi-million dollar projects that never got released, or were pathetically marketed, I sometimes wonder whether the computer games industry isn't perhaps a net loss to the Gross National Product. I'm not even talking about the amount of lost productivity from people playing games (which I don't consider "lost"). Rather, what I mean is that it sometimes seems like more investment money is actually wasted developing and marketing failed games than is made in profits from successful ones.

Most of my industry colleagues that I've talked to about this have expressed similar feelings. One person said that the games industry is "a transfer of funds from the rich to the lucky". In my opinion, one would be foolish to invest in a game company.

Perhaps it's different in the big game publishers, where they crank out the same formulaic sports action game or first-person shooter over and over again. But in the smaller companies where I've spent my career, the vast majority of projects either never make it to market, or completely tank once they get there.

The economic realities of developing games induces what I call "The Lottery Mentality". Lotteries are based on the idea that we tend not to be able to think very rationally about small differences in probability. The California State Lottery has been called, for example, "a tax on people who can't do math". In the games industry, this takes the form of lying to ourselves about the potential chances of creating a "hit" game. We all know that our game has only a small chance of becoming a "hit" and thereby making a profit, yet we fool ourselves into thinking: "Yes, but MY game is going to be the ONE". As one producer put it: "You don't think anyone _intentionally_ tries to make a mediocre game?" (Well, there are some in fact who do, but that's beside the point.) But the fact is that your game is almost certainly going to be mediocre, in sales if not in quality, whether you like it or not.

The lottery mentality is what keeps investors pumping large amounts of money into the sinkhole of games development. After all, it's a very exciting, fast-paced, high-tech and "cool" sinkhole. It's "the wave of the future". I've watched how games get funded, and it's usually less a matter of the technical feasibility and artistic merits of the game, than it is the personal charm of the CEO of the development company. To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville: "What a fragile thing is human reason."

I should point out that my argument only applies to games written for computers, not game consoles. The economics of the console market are very different, primarily because the console manufacturers maintain a strict editorial control over what games can be published. As a result, the distribution chain for console-based software is far more consistent in quality. On the other hand, there's far less opportunity for innovation in the console market, and this is only partly explained by the strong 'parental' influence of the console manufacturers. Because consoles don't have keyboards, console games are extremely limited in the kinds of social interaction that they can support, which means that console-based games tend to be focused around kicking, jumping, hitting, running, and other brute force physical activities. This in turn limits the console market to a fairly narrow demographic, one that isn't interested in complex social interaction. Similarly, because consoles don't have hard drives, they are limited to games which are mostly "stateless", meaning that the player can only affect a small number of selected variables in the game environment.

Failed products and harsh economics aren't the only reason why the games industry has become a miserable place.

Part of the reason why I fled from Hollywood in the early 80's was because I realized that Hollywood, with it's creativity-stifling unions, bureaucratized studios, and disreputable agents, was not the way to a happy life. Not everyone gets to be a Spielberg or a Lucas, and in fact the vast majority of workers toil away at one narrowly-defined job with no creative freedom whatsoever. The few truly inspired creators, the ones with the really unique ideas, are targets for exploitation and fraud. When I realized, a few years ago, that the whole "Siliwood" thing was a bust, and that Hollywood was not going to take over, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Now I find the games industry is becoming more and more like Hollywood itself, where each person has his or her little job compartment or specialty, and must never stray outside of it for fear of stepping on someone's territory. "I don't understand," says the manager, "I thought you said you wanted a position as a programmer. Now you're telling me you want a position as an artist?" Even when they know and accept you as a multi-talented, multi-skilled person, they still have trouble figuring out ways to apply your skills in anything but a single narrowly-defined capacity.

I should also mention that the games industry has little respect for experience. What the games industry runs on is youthful energy. It loves to exploit 19 year old programmers who work 10-12 hours a day, get paid less than the standard wage for programmers in other industries, and don't know squat about software engineering principles. There are very few 40-year-old game programmers; I'm one of few who hasn't been "burnt out" by the murderous pace. But more and more I feel like I don't "fit in". I find myself less and less interested in doing the same games over and over again, targeted at an audience of 14-year old males who have been programmed by evolution to enjoy the thrill of combat and the hunt. Quake and Unreal are _great_ games from a design and technical standpoint, but frankly they bore me. (In case you are wondering, my two favorite games are Might and Magic II, and Civilization II).

Despite the fact that the games industry has aged tremendously in both it's bureaucratic structure and the sophistication of the technology, the software engineering practices it uses are still juvenile. It amazes me to find managers who have copies of classic works like Rapid Development_, _Writing Solid Code_, and _Peopleware_ on their bookshelves, yet somehow fail to actually apply the principles in those books. The culture of the industry is simply too strong, and trying to take the time to do things right (so that it saves time later) is like slogging through mud. The whole process by which games are budgeted and scheduled, for example, is something that I find amazing that anyone could take seriously.

Anybody who's studied software engineering knows that a schedule which underestimates the time needed to develop a project actually makes the project take _longer_. Countless case studies have shown this to be true. Yet we insist on shipping projects "by Christmas season" so that programmers are forced to waste their time, trying to "hurry up" to meet an arbitrary deadline. We continue to throw budgets and schedules together quickly, so that we can have them ready for a meeting with the publisher, without ever consulting the people who will actually work on the project (most of whom haven't been hired yet.)

The result is completely predictable: programmers that are under extreme stress who in turn create code full of bugs and defects. Project that end up a year later than they were scheduled. Isn't it interesting that some of the most successful game companies have adopted a "it will be done when it's done" policy?

Part of the problem is that our industry labors under the illusion that it is "like Hollywood". Film producers are usually able to turn out a film on time and within budgetary limits. But there's a difference -- film producers don't have to re-invent the camera each time they do a production. There are no "stable" technologies in the computer games industry, and the average useful life of a game "engine" is about two years.

The games industry is primarily an engineering industry, which means that what we do is solve problems. But solving problems, especially highly complex ones, knows no timetable. No one can predict how long it will take to invent a particular thing, because every invention is an accident, albeit a fortuitous one. The best you can do is increase the probability of such an accident occuring, a process which I have dubbed "accident husbandry."

Despite the fact that constant invention is critical to the industry, game companies still refuse, as far as I can tell, to fund any kind of research. Instead, each new game is itself a "research prototype", full of risks and unknowns. You might as well write "and here a miracle occurs" right on the PERT chart and be done with it.

Job stability is another thing that is lacking in the computer games field. It seems to be a common practice in small development companies to lay off the entire development team upon completion of a project. Usually this is because a small development company can only afford to pay salaries while a project is actually being funded by an outside source. It takes a long time to negotiate such a contract, and often the previous product finishes before the negotiations are complete. As a result, the development company has no choice but to unburden itself of workers who aren't producing any revenue. As a result of this high turnover rate, development companies are unable to maintain a solid body of institutional knowledge. Worse, it inclucates a sense of futility in the engineering staff. As one worker put it: "If you ship, you'll be fired." Don't get me wrong. I still like games. But the games industry isn't games.

I'm not advocating that the sources of funding should simply dry up. But I wish that investors and project planners would be more careful. Firstly, because I'm ethically offended by the idea of wasting other people's money. And secondly, because I'm sick of spending a year of my life working on a beautiful project, only to watch it go down in flames (And yes, I admit that there were times when the fault was my own...but not most of the time.)

I think that we'd all be happier if fewer games were actually produced. In my opinion, the primary result of this would be a higher percentage of good games on the market. Of course, there wouldn't be quite as many jobs, but I can tell you that there are a lot of fun, exciting jobs out there that have nothing to do with the games industry. For example, I recently I took a job at an e-commerce company. Now, I have absolutely no interest in e-commerce per se. But I found to my surprise that there are a lot of things about this job that are really fun:

• I get to do real research, to tinker around with new concepts
• I'm living on "internet time": Product cycles are in weeks, not years
• My experience and knowledge are highly respected.
• People look to me for help and answers, not to grind away code in silence
• Schedules are reasonable and flexible
• I'm learning a lot of new technologies
• I'm getting a chance to do something different for a change.
• The gender balance is a lot closer to 50%
• They appreciate and exploit my multiple skills and game-designer sensibilities.
• I get to think about social issues as well as technical ones
• The people are excited and enthusiastic rather than feeling burnt out.
• The pay is better

Of course, I still have a lot of game ideas I want to do...I'm not going to follow the example of Chris Crawford, and say "Farewell forever, games industry!" This isn't the first time I've taken a break away from games to do other work (for example, in 1987 I wrote a professional music sequencer, Music-X.)

But these days I'm far less interested in broadcasting my own ideas and stories (the "Death From Above" content distribution model), than I am in empowering the end-users to be able to realize their own ideas and fantasies. If I chose to do another game, it would have to be on very specific terms: An R&D project up front to eliminate the major risks, solid commitment to sound engineering principles, a rational schedule (or better yet, no schedule at all), and a project premise that involved a high level of social consciousness. "Community is King" is my motto now.

Alternatively, I think I'd enjoy just develop games as a hobby, completely open-sourced, and make money some other way. I've found that being an amateur game creator is more emotionally rewarding than being a After all, I'm in this for the fun, and for the chance to express myself creatively. If I wasn't, I'd be selling insurance or something.

Talin (Talin@ACM.org)
www.sylvantech.com/~talin
www.hackertourist.com/talin

Amigan sent us a "Story on the CNN website how that in a world wide survey of programmers, American programmers are half as productive - based on Lines of Code generated!" Allright, I'm lazy, but in Perl thats ok. I find LOC a shoddy indicator of programmer laziness, but those numbers seem low- I mean, I probably wrote 15,000 lines of code last year, ran Slashdot, and was a full time student. I gotta put up a poll.

merrell I think Illiad has been reading Slashdot again: the latest user friendly cartoon almost looks like a conversation lifted from these pages. Wacky.

Muad was the first, but this story was submitted many times: CNN is reporting on the space station's LAN . Check out those specs- 10base2? WinNT? Win95? Outlook? At least the stations vitals are controlled by Thinkpads running Solaris.

Robert Flemming wrote in to say that KDE 1.1pre2 is out. I also noticed that GNOME has 0.99.3 RPMs available now if you're into that. LoCoPuff sent us a link to a CNN article about theWindows Refund that mentions Slashdot and quotes me (cough cough). Nate wrote in to say "Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" meet the Everything 2 code in The Oblique Strategies Garden. Indeterminacy=fun. " Robert Dale sent us a parody of Iggy Pop's Lust for Life called Lust For Linux (surprise) For todays Star Wars bits, Alan Shutko sent us a link to pictures of Official Star Wars Legos. And the todays flashback comes from The_Black_Macrame who sent a link to the complete errata list from the original Star Wars. It's an oldie, but a goodie. hangman got bored and decided to trash a DEC 2100 and post pictures. Check it out if you're into computer mutilation. An anonymous reader sent us a link to one image you don't want to see on an ATM. And lastly, jhack sent us a link to a nice little page on painting your mac black if you happen to think that blue color is a bit excessive. The final results are pretty sharp. Now stop reading quickies and go compile your 2.2 kernel.

Dean Chouinard writes "For inspiration I occasionally peruse the web pages of Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson. I recently found a pointer to the following classic paper by Ken Thompson. Other interesting papers are listed under the classics directory as well."

Dean Chouinard writes "For inspiration I occasionally peruse the web pages of Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson. I recently found a pointer to the following classic paper by Ken Thompson. Other interesting papers are listed under the classics directory as well."

Muad asks "I was looking into buying a SPARC or alpha box to run Linux on it.... I guess there should be some sites reselling older hardware on the net. Can you guys point me out some? I did not ask about SGIs because I think those are very likely to be overpriced anyways. Feel free to coreect me!"

AMK writes "An Open Source Books campaign has been started, which aims to fight the recent extension of US copyrights to 95 years after the author's death, instead of 75. This doesn't benefit the authors, who are dead, after all, but does damage efforts like Project Gutenberg. See this Wired story for more information, and add the "Open Source Books" icon to your Web page. "

Richard Leyton writes "Computergram (Published by Computerwire) today reports that Sun is working on a strategy to enable it to move Solaris to the open source model *without* stepping on the toes of the Linux Community. Corporate quote reads: "Linux is good for Solaris, but Linux is not a corporate community". They don't want their intentions being misunderstood. Problems exist with royalty and various agreements it's made, but is actively looking for issues that would prevent it going open source. Sun is already making various Solaris APIs compatible with Linux, and is working out how to market the initiative and what image it's looking at presenting. " This site requires a subscription. Anyone have an accessible story?

A.M. Kuchling has sent a review of Jeffrey D. Ullman's book Elements of ML Programming. The book is fairly technical in nature, so if you are interested in learning more-well, you know the drill. Elements of ML Programming author Jeffrey D. Ullman pages publisher Prentice Hall rating 8 reviewer A.M. Kuchling ISBN summary A quite technical (but not boring) book that covers functional programming in ML.

This slim book is a fine introduction to the ML programming language, and is worth reading by anyone interested in learning about functional programming. It starts off by teaching you about simple expressions and ML's basic data types, covers writing recursive functions to perform common tasks, and by the end is discussing data structures and information hiding. There are lots of examples and exercises, which you can try out by downloading the SML/NJ implementation. Ullman's writing style is simple and clear, so it's not difficult to understand, and I really enjoyed reading it (sadly a rarity with technical books these days).

ML is mostly a functional language, though it supports some degree of imperative programming, and is an elegant system worth attention. The language has some novel features; my favorite is its automatic type inference. A friend of mine once observed that many programming bugs stem from type mismatches, and points out that because of ML's strict type inference and checking, once you get an ML program to compile successfully it often produces correct results. (Getting to the point of compiling correctly, however...) For example, look at the following interaction with the SML/NJ interpreter:

- fun sumlist( nil ) = 0
= | sumlist( x::xs ) = x + sumlist(xs);
val sumlist = fn : int list -> int

ML is smart enough to figure out that the resulting sumlistfunction takes a list of integers as input ('int list') and returns an integer ('-> int'). It can therefore report an error if you attempt to pass it a list of real numbers:

- sumlist( [1,2,3] );
val it = 6 : int
- sumlist( [1.0,4.0,2.0] );
stdIn:31.1-31.25 Error: operator and operand don't agree [tycon mismatch]
operator domain: int list
operand: real list
in expression:
sumlist (1.0 :: 4.0 :: 2.0 :: nil)

Even though it may be unlikely that you'll write a large program in ML or get a job through your ML knowledge, that should matter to market-driven drones. Hackers should read this book because it demonstrates a style of programming which will twist your thinking around, and benefit your programming in more conventional languages.

But this book over here.

Table of Contents

1. A Perspective on ML and SML/NJ
2. Getting Started in ML
3. Defining Functions
4. Input and Output
5. More About Functions
6. Defining Your Own Types
7. More About ML Data Structures
8. Encapsulation and the ML Module System
9. Summary of the ML Standard Basis

My own literary-review Santa Claus A.M. Kuchling has sent in a review of Sean McGarth's book XML by Example. A book designed not for technical specifications, but for covering the issues arising in XML-like it's applicability in e-commerce, for example. For more information, and if you want to learn more, click below. XML By Example author Sean McGrath pages publisher Prentice Hall rating 6 reviewer A.M. Kuchling ISBN summary A good overview of XML and the surrounding landscape of Document Type The Scenario

Subtitled "Building E-commerce Applications", this is a fairly high-level look at XML, concentrating on financial and commercial application areas. The first chapter explains the basic ideas and history underlying XML, followed by three chapters about potential XML applications and their benefits, and some quick looks at emerging standards such as XSL (XML Style Language) and XLL (eXtensible Link Language). The middle sections have the most technical content: chapter 5 describes the basic syntax of XML, and chapter 11 revisits the syntax in more detail. Chapters 6 through 9 implement some simple applications using different languages such as JavaScript, Java, and Python, and chapter 10 discusses writing little scripts to make one-time searches and modifications to XML files. This is followed by chapters on the then-current drafts of XLL, XSL, and DOM. The final section returns to the high-level overview of the first section, and rounds out the book with a brief chapter on mixing SGML and XML, and 3 more chapters on various E-commerce initiatives.

What's Bad?

I suspect this book may not be low-level enough for some (most?) Slashdot readers -- it spends relatively little space on technical details. Most of the pages are devoted to general descriptions of different DTDs; for complete information about the topics covered, you'll still have to read the relevant recommendations or working drafts. Time is also cruel to XML books; the XSL coverage has been made outdated by massive changes to the current XSL working draft. The book is also marred by poor copy-editing and typography, a fault disappointingly common in Prentice Hall's XML series; I would expect better from the publisher.

What's Good?

The technical explanations that are given, particularly the two chapters on XML syntax, are as good as any I've seen. McGrath definitely has the qualifications you want from a computer book author; he founded Digitome, an SGML/XML consulting company, and has written other articles and books about SGML and XML.

For a long time, if someone asked me "What should I read to learn about the potential applications for XML?", I would recommend the XML issue of O'Reilly's W3 Journal, even though it was quite outdated. I will now begin recommending XML By Example as a more recent overview, slanted toward financial and commercial applications.

So What's In It For Me?

XML by Example would be a good book to give to a boss, or for anyone who want a wide overview of the ongoing activities and standards related to XML. But be aware that XML By Example doesn't dive into low-level details much; programmers might be happier just sitting down and reading the various W3C specifications and working drafts.

Buy this book over here.

Table of Contents

1. XML - An Executive Summary
2. XML in Action
3. The Commercial Benefits of XML
4. Gaining Competitive Advantage with XML
5. Just Enough Details
6. Using XML with Internet Explorer 4
7. Database Publishing with XML
8. Web Automation with WIDL (Web Interface Definition Language)
9. Push Publishing with CDF (Channel Definition Format)
10. Developing XML Utility Programs
11. The XML Standard
12. XML Hypertext Linking with XLL
13. XML Formatting with XSL
14. The Unicode Standard
15. The Document Object Model
16. Raiding the SGML Larder
17. OFX - Open Financial Exchange
18. XML/EDI - XML and Electronic Data Interchange
19. Open Trading Protocol

Talin and I have been corrosponding recently, and one of the subjects that came up was debilitating hand and wrist injuries in geek friends and people we know. In fact, for those you who follow science fiction/fact at all, author David Brin has been suffering from these problems quite recently. One of the major issues is the different types of problems, and misdiagnosis. We know how dependent we are on our hands-how many people do you know with problems? Do you worry about this? Any helpful hints for others? Click below for the letter from David. Starting in April, I underwent severe pain and disability in both hands, initially caused by excess typing. After some delay, I saw a neurologist who tested both median nerves and thereupon eliminated classic Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS). Followup tests ruled out rheumatoid arthritis, lyme disease, and tendonitis. I finally got to see a rheumatologist, who had better insights than the neurologist and concluded I had RSD -- Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy-a syndrome that is still not well characterized, but seems to involve persistent harmonic misfiring of a major nerve in the arm, often triggered by an injury... but RSD can linger a long time after the initial injury is gone.. Sometimes this neurological disorder is treated by injecting anesthetics injected in the neck. This proved unnecessary in my case. (RSD web sites proved nearly useless, since they were mostly written by aggrieved sufferers of extreme cases, and the symptoms they described were so severe that I initially figured the syndrome had nothing to do with me.)

With diagnosis came rapid progress. An occupational therapist recommended vigorous exercises, notably different from those you would offer a CTS sufferer. I'd been babying my hand/arm, to let swelling reduce -- fine for CTS, but exactly WRONG for RSD! She told me to stretch, bend my wrists back and forth, plunge my hands in rice, carry progressively heavier objects.... The exercises were harsh but effective. I can now report the excruciating pain is gone. I've regained mobility in both hands. The right still gets occasional tremors but has regained most of its strength. I can even type, though haven't tested it with a full-tilt novel immersion.

I hope this is helpful.

Joy to you and yours.

db

Bruce Linley writes " This ACM article discusses the recent trend of industry groups lobbying government to outlaw technology and research that enables easy copying and distribution of material, beneficial though it may be, if it has even the potential of being applied to copyrighted works."

D. Richard Hipp writes "I just made my quarterly pilgramage to Don Knuth's web site where I descovered that he has coined a new word, "wyde", and is encouraging people to use it to mean a 16-bit quantity. He also advocates the use of "tetrabyte" and "octabyte" to mean 32-bit and 64-bit values. See his arguments for these new words here Opinions, anyone? "

Quetza writes "ACM has announced a partnership with the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library. Access to the 20,000 Computer Science research reports as well as the contents of the ACM Digital Library will be available from a single, free place. "

Charlie Bennett writes "Mike Burati at PubWeb, Inc. forwarded me a pointer to a story on Yahoo. A company named Sightsound.com holds a patent on the sale of music and video over the internet. the sale of music and video over the internet. "

This essay was written by Talin to address a lot of the UI issues that currently are shuffling through a lot of mailing lists. It's called "A Summary of Principles for User-Interface Design". And it may be a mouthful, but its definately worth a read if you write software that needs to be used by mortals.

Derrik Pates writes "I happened to have a look today at Dave Taylor(ddt@crack.com)'s plan, and I noticed this: "Conventional biz wisdom says you shouldn't announce this sorta thing, but I do so because of an annoying decency streak. So before he rumors start to fly, I should announce that Crack is in deep financial shit. We're not in debt and refuse to enter debt, but wejust ran out of cash and are not making payroll." Read the rest by fingering ddt@crack.com. I do hope that Golgotha gets made. It looks like a truly kick-ass game, and it'd be a shame for it to pass before it's even finished. "

Charles Bennett wrote us with this link. Essentially, one of the US Navy ships became unusable due to an NT system crash. NT was unable to divide by zero at one point, crashing everything, and making all remote consoles dead on the ship. Glad they weren't under fire.

Moe Elzubeir wrote in to tell us that the 4th issue of his C Scene E-Zine is now online. It's pretty cool if you're into this sort of thing (I know I am). Moe is also seeking folks to help make sure that this thing keep going. If you're interested, you should contact.

I've got a ton of these things building up, so here we go: Daniel Gould wrote in to tell us that Toshiba will be bundling Solaris with PCs. G. sent us a link to a salon article about trendy technology. A leather mouse? Yowsers. Don Rude wrote in to tell us about a Quake 2 Southpark Total Conversion. Kick ass. Many folks wrote in to tell us that Debian.org has recieved an excellent face lift to corrospond with the Debian 2.0 Beta Release. Lastly, Chris Frost wrote in to tell us that this weeks themes.org victim is tigert (possibly the most talented gimper out there).

Whizard was the first to inform us that Gimp 0.99.29 is at the usual places. Push that onto the stack of things to download this afternoon while I'm still at the office. I'm itchin' for 1.0- Can we have 'Merge Down' and usable paths please? *grin*.

Tanner Lovelace wrote in to tell us that Maryland has joined the small but growing number of states that are passing laws against spam. You can read the bill itself hereand why it happened here.