Slashdot Mirror

Sure, Google is evil for making a change and then bullshitting the public about not being able to change it back.

At the same time, Matthew Lush only has himself to blame for being part of the Google ecosystem. He's being a sharecropper, don't do that. Buy your own domain name; embed the video and don't just rely on Google. Money talks and this was going to happen sooner or later. And this will happen thousands more times, always to the little guy. Meanwhile, this essay by Tim Bray remains as relevant as ever.

The language have changed, but the lesson remains. If you rely on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple. What they give, they can take away. That doesn't mean to not use them, but it does mean going in with your eyes wide open that their business model is not always in your own personal interest. That you are indeed a sharecropper. And that if it's really that important for you, take some damn personal responsibility and have a backup plan.

"La la la I'm not listening"

That is you when you claim Android isn't Linux.

"Building on the contributions of the open-source Linux community and more than 300 hardware, software, and carrier partners, Android has rapidly become the fastest-growing mobile OS." http://developer.android.com/about/index.html

"Android consists of a kernel based on Linux kernel version 2.6 and, from Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich onwards, version 3.x" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Linux

Pull your head out of Ballmers ass and read this http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/11/14/What-Android-Is

In my distro I can rollback drivers and any app with a simple button click at least one version, sometimes 4-5 versions back if I need it. Try that with Windows.

You keep repeating crap that no one else experiences, maybe it is just you? You will feel better if you come to terms with your low IQ, seriously.

Apparently not. Even Tim Bray had to solve logic puzzles (and failed one):

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google

This reminds me of a blog post by Hani Suleiman from 2008. Today, that post looks like a prophecy, first Tim Bray actually went to Google and now McNeally admits that "you gotta take care about your shareholders". A real pity that Hani stopped posting.

Understanding that the entire toolchain and widespread adoption is the most important part of getting it. We all (at least, if we were there for it) know how Java happened - the short version is that Sun positioned it as an alternative to the MS Borganism that many companies were rightly afraid of back then.

I still think Java pretty much sucks. But it has the tools, and perhaps more importantly, a huge number of able bodied code monkeys who can write it.

Enter Oracle. The entire strategy that they've pursued forever is not much different than what Microsoft tried - build or buy essential parts of the stack, and then march up and down it to dominate your category, then extract as much rent as possible. It works better in the enterprise space and is bloodier because there are fewer players. (Microsoft's ecology was too varied with too many players to really dominate like Oracle can.)

So, Oracle's strategy is obvious. They own Java, and thus indirectly can manipulate the terms of output of thousands of developers. They don't care about people liking them, and inertia means they can extract rent for a long time (Even if a second Sun/Java moment happened - say, Parrot v. Java, ramp-up for Parrot to fill the niches, get solid, debugged libraries for everything, get widely deployed, and get thousands of developers up to speed takes how long?)

They don't give a shit about Apache, or developer goodwill. The for-profit players like IBM have different strategies, but keep in mind that their goals are profit maximization, too.

So there are some potentially interesting strategic plays to be made between the various players, but anyone with a bit of experience with the business side of the industry has seen this show before.

"but does it have USB?"

Through a dongle, apparently - and annoyingly.

"Can I install an operating system of my choosing?"

It has been rooted already, so in principle yes. Somebody would need to actually port the OS to the device of course.

"Does it run nmap and aircrack-ng? "

You can build and run console apps on a normal Android device - it's linux after all.

"Can I conveniently SSH into an 8 core SMP server with Maple and MATLAB when I need a little extra oomph?"

Just download an ssh client and off you go. No X forwarding though, as it doesn't run X.

"How usable is the onscreen keyboard?"

Tim Bray has been using one for a few days: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/09/10/Galaxy-Tab-in-my-Pocket

He really likes the keyboard. He also seems to find the battery life to be rather better than those quoted seven hours would imply.

Tim Bray wrote about this situation years ago: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace (and I think I heard the "sharecropping" term used from earlier, too). Essentially, when developers work on a platform owned by someone else, you are fully at their mercy.

I've never actually had a "smart" or otherwise fancy phone before, so this is by far the nicest I've owned.

What kind of technologist bought his first smartphone a little over a year ago? And declares his very first one, The Best! It makes me question his methodology for making decisions, at the very least.

Do you ever read smartphone related websites like Boy Genius Report, for example? These people live and breath smartphones, and actually carry and use the devices they review and blog about. There are numerous people that are infinitely more qualified on smartphones than Tim Bray will ever be.

I'm sure Tim is a fine fellow otherwise, and would make an excellent neighbor, who if he borrowed your rake, would return it promptly in good condition.

Tim Bray bought his *first* smartphone in December 2008 and declared it the best he's ever owned:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/...

Maybe if he had tried 3 or 4 other phones and then settled on Android, his opinion would have weight.
This guy had never owned a "fancy phone" until 15 months ago and now he's an expert? Seriously Google, is this the best you can do?

This is not a work-related "convenient opinion" of his. He's been critical of Apple's walled-garden approach to development for years, and an Android advocate since he got an Android phone in 2008 (see http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Diary for his chronicles using and programming it).

Waiting for similar hardware to become available for other languages.

I think Tim Bray is on the right track with his widefinder idea.

See Widefinder 1 and Widefinder 2 for details.

This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.

It was all in vain, of course -- caches and copies will beat redactions every time. Here's one copy:

Us and Them

Interesting stuff!

Sorry to say this, but Microsoft will own you. They may well destroy your career and attack members of your family:

I was sitting on the XML Working Group and co-editing the spec, on a pro bono basis as an indie consultant. Netscape hired me to represent their interests, and when I announced this, controversy ensued. Which is a nice way of saying that Microsoft went berserk; tried unsuccessfully to get me fired as co-editor, and then launched a vicious, deeply personal extended attack in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there.

Only take Microsoft on if you don't care about your family, they will get personal, and everything they do is legal, as the state generally agrees with them. See the Mass. ODF affair for example, they've also been allowed to attack charities and bribe officials. Frankly, it seems their strong-arm tactics mean most legislators are scared of Microsoft.

Good luck. You'll need it.

Well some people seem to think so and so do others and some gave awards for shilling.

But clearly I must apologize as I don't know what I am talking about, nor does any other Slashdot reader. I don't know why we say these things, must be a geek thing. We are all liars and cowards, like you said. Must be why we disagree about Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows with you.

I'm sorry and I apologize, it was a botched joke.

The undisclosed areas of OOXML are so numerous that to fill in the undisclosed areas of OOXML you end up reverse engineering Microsoft Office. We're little further along than we were before this so-called standardisation. Only now OOXML gets to pretend to be documented despite the numerous problems that remain in OOXML. There is a world of difference in the scope of problems here... a distinction between what can be solved in maintenance and what are problems that are so numerous and mean the standard is unfit for any implementation. Read Tim Bray's new comments on OOXML

If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.

Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989_reference_docs.zip

This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).

And this document contradicts this another BRM document: http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0989.pdf because the first says that the .DOC file replaces ECMA responses 18 and 43 but the "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" document says that it replaces ECMA responses 18, 43, 76 and 690 !

ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.

This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.

Congratulations to the countries that had *balls* and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:

• New Zealand ( dissaproved )
• Brasil ( dissaproved )
• India ( dissaproved )
• China ( dissaproved )
• South Africa ( dissaproved )
• Canada ( dissaproved )
• Venezuela ( dissaproved )
• Ecuador ( dissaproved )
• Iran ( dissaproved )
• Italy ( abstained )
• Spain ( abstained )
• Belgium ( abstained )
• Netherlands ( abstained but only Microsoft opposed the disapproval )
• France ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Malaysia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Australia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure, government opposed OOXML )
• Kenya ( abstained )

And congratulations Microsoft, your friendly little countries supposedly experts in XML document description languages ;-) ( now ISO P-members ), who joined ISO JTC1 just to cast an unconditional-yes-votes payed off:

• Jamaica
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Kazakhstan
• Lebanon
• Azerbaijan
• Cote-d'Ivore
• Pakistan

If you want to see how bad was this process handled, see one of its awfuls deliverables.

Open the document "Response_DE-0028_dates_v9.doc" in this zip

http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/09891.pdf

This is one of the changes frenetically accepted in BRM, regarding treatments of dates in OOXML. See the salad of colors trying to explain the modifications. And this is a fix ( BRM ) of a fix ( one of ECMA 1027 proposed fixes ) of a NB comment of a draft text ( original ECMA submission ).

ECMA and Microsoft have not provided a decent final text with all this changes applied. In the BRM they frenetically changed Scope, Conformance , Schemas , and lot of normative text. Microsoft is now rushing to get a final text in less than one month, to comply with ISO normative.

This is how ISO delivers IT international standards, mandating fundamental changes to drafts, leaving national bodies with the only alternative to cast a political vote leaving aside the technical content of the specification.

Congratulations to the countries that have balls and didn't agree with this way of deliver standards to people:

• New Zealand ( dissaproved )
• Brasil ( dissaproved )
• India ( dissaproved )
• China ( dissaproved )
• South Africa ( dissaproved )
• Canada ( dissaproved )
• Venezuela ( dissaproved )
• Ecuador ( dissaproved )
• Iran ( dissaproved )
• Italy ( abstained )
• Spain ( abstained )
• Belgium ( abstained )
• Netherlands ( abstained but only Microsoft opposed the disapproval )
• France ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Malaysia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Australia ( abstained due to heavy Microsoft pressure )
• Kenya ( abstained )

• Jamaica
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Kazakhstan
• Lebanon
• Azerbaijan
• Cote-d'Ivore
• Pakistan

It's easy to blame the National Bodies for voting the way they did (and sometimes they deserve that blame) but the ISO ran the Fast Track process and could have stopped it earlier. They continued on, and received funding from their vendor.

I mean just read this pleasant ISO review of the meeting that participants describe as a sham and disgusting process abuse. The ISO are in denial that there's any abuse going on.

We need to keep telling people the real story here. They can't be allowed to forget this. Their reputation is in the drain, but they must be held accountable.

Expulsion of Ecma ... Tim Bray writes, "This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen. Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters. My opinion of ECMA was already very negative; this hasn't improved it, and if ISO doesn't figure out away to detach this toxic leech, this kind of abuse is going to happen again and again."

Extracted from http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/03/02/On-OOXML:

"Standards Process Abuse: Microsoft decided, rather than working to produce a harmonized standard by enhancing ODF to add MS-Office-specific features, to re-invent the world from scratch. This seems wrong.

ECMA, which claims to be a serious standards organization, blessed the process of generating a XML dump of the internal data format and publishing it in six thousand poorly-edited pages, in well under a year. This seems wrong.

ISO allowed ECMA to submit this on their fast-track process with breathtaking obliviousness to the existence of other standards and lack of concern for harmonization. This seems wrong.

ISO allowed the draft to be substantially edited and enhanced after the initial ballot. This seems wrong.

It tried to repair the damage by stuffing 120 people in a room in Geneva for five days to address a thousand changes to the spec. This seems wrong."

You are wrong. I've been reading both sides of the story from the start, both pro-ODF (Rob Weir, Updegrove, Sutor, Groklaw, and OOXML [which is indeed quite extremist]) and Microsoft's side as well (Brian Jones, Jason Matusow, and the [sarcasm]"independent"[/sarcasm] consultants Rick Jelliffe, Miguel de Icaza and Patrick Durusau, which have clearly been biased from the start). From viewing what both sides have to say, I can filter out what seems to be exagerated or even a lie, and I can say that I have firm basis for my opinions.

I agree that my bias would be against Microsoft from the start, but that is not unbased either. That is based on a history of Microsoft abusing their monopoly. It's undeniable, EU fined them for US$ 1.3 billion last month for it. I still resent having to use the lower-quality Internet Explorer because Microsoft clearly used their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive Netscape out of the market. That said, even without my predisposition against Microsoft, the facts on this case are very clear to indicate foul play from them.

Some of the arguments from the ODF side seem to be a little over to me. For instance, the argument that Microsoft's promise not to sue is not enough, I never bought that. Microsoft would never try to suit anyone for interoperability, specially with the EU over them as much as they are. Another point was the importance given to the outcome of the votes on the BRM, and to the fact that O members could vote. I think that's not really that important, even if the outcome of the votes was different, the text would be no better or no worse, I don't think the quality of the text is the problem to start with. The standard is unnecessary from the start, and it shouldn't have gotten so far to start with. The only problem in that case was the decision to use a ballot instead of discussing and reaching consensus for every resolution, which was, of course, impossible. That should, in turn, trigger the alarm that fast track was not an appropriate choice, and that should have stopped the process then.

On the other side, most of the arguments from the Microsoft side are pure marketing. "OOXML is a superb standard" and "Everyone was heard" make me laugh particularly hard. The arguments for the need of OOXML are completely flawed, and Microsoft's speech on their openness and will for interoperability are only the new version of the vendor lock-in on times when the EU is watching them closely. It's the less worse they can do for their business to assure other products will have a fidelity level below theirs when they're forced to interoperate, if you have to disclose, you make sure you disclose something so huge, so complex, so tied to other proprietary technologies, that nobody will be able to implement it, at least not before you extend to implementation on the next version and push it for fast tracking after the product is out, making sure your competitors are always busy catching up, and always one step behind.

Anyway, if you want to read the most balanced opinion on OOXML you should read what Tim Bray has to say.

Besides, it's always easier to critique someone else's work than create something novel yourself.

I'd call both sparklines and the data-ink ratio pretty good and novel innovations.

You can't credit the man with "creating" information design as a discipline, but he's done a great deal to evangelize it, and you certainly have to give him plenty of credit for its currently elevated profile.

Tufte is not just some crank. Intelligent, useful, compelling information display is what he's all about. You don't have to agree with him, but his thoughts are usually worth weighing.

I don't think you have to submit code when you submit a patent, just a description and some diagrams, maybe some equations. Search for some software patents on Google Patent Search, I don't think you are you going to patents with hundreds, thousands of lines of code, though I could be wrong...

Here's one description of patenting software:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/15/ SWPatents

Bullshit.

New words come and go. Get used to it. The 'blogosphere' is a reasonable term for an extension of the web that's grown around new syndication media formats. It's used by quite a lot of intelligent people.

Are we going to suggest Jon Udell is a know-nothing, even though he's had very successful runs at BYTE and Infoworld? How about Tim Bray? Mark Pilgrim?
The folks at BoingBoing?

I remember back around 1995 when people thought the "Web" was a ridiculous word, because it really was all about the Internet, the Web was just a popular fad soon to be supplanted by other & better applications.

Over the last two years the vast majority of them have lost their jobs due to outsourcing after their companies moved to Linux from UNIX.

Here, let me correct that:

Over the last two years the vast majority of [people that I claim that I've gotten emails from] have lost their jobs due to outsourcing after their companies moved to Linux from UNIX.

Linux exists in an environment where there is broad collaboration, but no effort to validate the collaborators so the opportunity for traditional, old style, data breach is immeasurable.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, who uses Linux will be impacted by the license.

I could say that then, and I can say that now without any concern for my safety.... According to The Register, there is actually some kind of a strike team that comes after me every time I say something positive on Microsoft or negative on Linux...

Um, I can't find anything about that... is there a link in the original article? I certainly haven't heard anything that implies he has anything to worry about in terms of physical safety. Can anyone produce anything to back that up, as he implies?

If you think a Microsoft product sucks you can say that to great detail without having to be afraid of your job...

No, you can't.

Yup, just a bunch of trolling to gather page hits.

It isn't really a 'wild rumor'. It is more of a 'prototype'. See:

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp

Via:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/10/17/ In-A-Box

I have no idea if Google is using these, building their own, not using anything like them, etc, but there they are.

Strange that an article celebrating XML's anniversary would neglect to mention XML's creator. I wonder if the fact he works for a competitor has anything to do with it...

No, for the class libraries, it's gonna be GPL + classpath exception. Read here, for example.

instead of speculating? Here's Tim Bray's blog post about hiring them here and a follow up here.

from Tim's blog:

Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about.

What will their new role be at Sun? First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.

Will they work on JRuby full time? Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.

Will JRuby be "owned" by Sun? No. JRuby has existed for a long time as a project; it has its own culture, community, license, and codebase, and there are no plans for significant changes.

He answers more questions on his blog.

instead of speculating? Here's Tim Bray's blog post about hiring them here and a follow up here.

from Tim's blog:

Why is Sun hiring JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo? First, they are excellent developers. Technologies like Ruby are getting intense interest from the developer community, and Sun is interested in anything that developers care about.

What will their new role be at Sun? First, they have to get JRuby to 1.0 and make sure that the major applications are running smoothly and are performant.

Will they work on JRuby full time? Yes, but they also have a mandate to think about developer tools. Right now, developers who use dynamic languages like Python and Ruby are poorly served, compared to what Java developers have.

Will JRuby be "owned" by Sun? No. JRuby has existed for a long time as a project; it has its own culture, community, license, and codebase, and there are no plans for significant changes.

He answers more questions on his blog.

It wouldn't appear that way:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/07/ JRuby-guys

(see the question about sun owning jruby)

This is offtopic grousing, but I submitted a Slashdot story that was rejected that I think is pretty important, namely that it is now official that Sun hires two of the main open source JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work fulltime on Ruby for the JVM, and generally improve tools support for dynamic languages.

This might get a lot of people worried ("Get your stinking Java out of my Ruby!" "Get your stinking Ruby out of my Java!", but I think this will benefit both languages, and especially the JVM as a platform.

The other guy is an ass in a hat who likes to suck up to his management.

No contest.

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

I've already seen several comments saying that this is no big deal, obviously thinking that these people only 'recently' switched to Macs. But that isn't the case.
Mark Pilgrim has been a Mac user since 1983. Cory Doctorow since 1984. These people have lived and breathed Macs - and they're now giving up on them, and not just for a whim, but in very well-thought out and carefully explained reasons. You might not agree with them, but at the least do them to justice of reading and considering their thoughts and not dismissing them out of hand.
(And for example Tim Bray is another long-standing Mac using visionary who's recognized that open data is more important than all the very good reasons why staying with a Mac is the easier choice.)

Who has the copyright of the applications?

Oh yeah, baby. Jeff Hunter with an almost empty rack. Wait..

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/02/26/ IMG_3381.png/

A bit off-topic? I found some recent readings about the future of processing technology, and developments in software to exploit this, to be quite interesting.

Man, I gotta go find out why multithreading is so hard. Gotta try and get back into it someday and have a play around, get to truly understand it. I've only played with "Intro to Threads" type programs in Java, so there should be plenty for me to learn, when I get there...

In the mean time, there's a lot of things to look at for someone lazy like me. If I'm not gonna do them, I can read about them first. My favourite starting points have got to be (many Lisp related): Bill Clementson's blog. Erlisp (because I don't know Erlang itself, so Lispy Erlang would be a good way to understand the concepts I feel). Short explanation here. There's Erlang itself, but don't forget all the others: MapReduce, Termite (quite simple & beautiful code) and cl-muproc (all on the second link above).

Once (is it if or when?) single processors riding on Moore's Law stop working, is there no escape from concurrent programming? Looks like Erlang (currently being "borged" into Lisp, yay) is where the action is gonna be if massively multithreaded architecture turns out to be the winner for parallel/concurrency/distributed computing.

Read the blog post. The author specifically specifies the GPLv3, and not just "the GPL." The blog title is "Thinking About GPL3..." and he links to a copy of the GPLv3 draft. (Which actually says "THIS IS A DRAFT" right on it, don't know why he linked a copy and not the GPLv3 site, but...)

So, yes - he's talking about using the GPLv3 as opposed to the current GPL.

Which is silly, because the GPLv3 is still in draft form. It's not released. Speculation about how to apply the GPLv3 would make sense, talking about actually releasing something under it is rather early. Unless he intentional means to say "we have no plans on releasing an open source version of Solaris until 2007."

Revered? Irreverant is more his style. Authoritative? He's pretty authoritative on early versions on Excel and on running a small business and staying afloat. Interestingness (or lameness) is subjective and you are entitled to your opinion, but I dare say the reason the reason people link to him is because they do find him interesting.

And oh, about that 'lame blog entries' dig? A lot of people like blogs because they reveal a lot about the person. They sure make for more entertaining reading than PR pap, Unix man pages and the typical low S/N mailing list. Sure, you get angst-ridden teenagers, but you also get law professors, call girls, people who run their own small business, SGML and XML gurus. On message boards like Slashdot, though, you get dupes and the same old tired arguments about Open Source and Digital Freedoms and (bonus!) Slashdot commenters complaining about how lame other people are. Oh the irony.

Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck for some great insight.

Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers, which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.

Eric
HTTP header viewer

Indeed, see Tim Bray's comments on Why XML Doesn't Suck for some great insight.

Really, the problem many people have had with XML is that the tools aren't always up to par. But new ways of doing things come around to fix things, such as pull parsers, which simplifies XML parsing without having to resort to regular expression tricks like Tim Bray was talking about in XML Is Too Hard For Programmers.

Eric
HTTP header viewer

BTW, what's IMAO?

Bullcrap

All of RSS's 9 varieties are so similar they can easily be parsed by a single parser.

Atom has currently two varieties: 0.3 (widely used, though deprecated and denounced) and 1.0 (official IETF standard, but not very widely used yet). As with RSS's varieties, these are also not strictly compatible, though are easily parsed by the same code.

Both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 support HTML natively and support XHTML through extensions.

RSS 2.0 is extensible through namespaces just like RSS 1.0 and ATOM.

RSS 1.0 is based on RDF, making it IMHO more complicated than both Atom and RSS 2.0.

Atom is much better defined than RSS.

A good (though slightly biased) overview of the differences between Atom and RSS can be found here.

RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, Compared

Microsoft's inclusion of RSS into the newest version of Internet Explorer and reports that RSS will be in Longhorn's coming release appears to be the final nail in the coffin of the Atom specification. [...] Now that Atom's attempt at replacing RSS has fallen flat, the syndication arena will likely see significant innovation and progress.

I suppose that's the usual Microsoft view, which means that we can only have innovation once Microsoft has moved and picked a standard that's substantially inferior to the state of the art.

I mean, the differences between RSS and Atom aren't that big (they are both XML), but within those constraints, RSS still manages to get a bunch of things wrong relative to Atom (see here for a discussion).

RSS indeed dominates the feed scene, but Atom 1.0 has just been reviewed and approved by the Atompub Working Group (part of IETF, the same group that standardized HTTP, SMTP, and many other RFCs).

Thus, I wouldn't be so quick to claim RSS' victory. Tim Bray is a big supporter of Atom, and here is recent report titled RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 Compared. Over at Simpy (feel free to use demo/demo account if you don't have an account yet), I am happily supporting RSS and Atom (as well as RDF).

I believe Atom also has the "push" component, and not just "pull" that RSS has. That is, I believe Atom spec contains specification of Atom as a way for making requests to web services, while RSS, I think, only lets you publish the data passively, and have clients actively pull it.
I can't find good references to this now, but maybe somebody else can find them and reply to this thread.

You crack rock smoking monkey, only like .5% of the web denziens actually use some form of syndication. Most people havent the foggiest idea what RSS even is. So, MS puts RSS into IE: suddenly RSS is going to overrun atom? Somehow I think not.

IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery. But, decide for yourself.

I see no problem with the current duality. I do wish Atom were available more places, but I can still live with RSS where I need to.

Myren

Kids, Atom's not new. It's been developed by lots of smart folks.

Version 1.0 is new however. It's only been 'released' a couple of days ago, and still needs to go through some formalities before becoming an official standard.

That said, none of the parts that Firefox uses have 'changed' between 0.3 and 1.0 (that is, there's a new namespace, and a new required element, but I assume Firefox is liberal enough in what it accepts not to be troubled by this), so it should all just work out of the box.
Thunderbird might be another issue, what with renaming <modified> to <updated> and <issued> to <published>