Slashdot Mirror

Several Slashdot readers share a blog post: There are two kinds of client applications: The first kind has a "refresh" or "reload" button to make sure your app's in sync with its server's view of the world. The second kind is broken. Of late, I have to deal regularly with several apps, notably including an emailer and car-sharing service, that lack such a button. I can imagine why -- a customer focused product manager said "Steve Jobs taught us that fewer controls are better and we should just take care of making sure we're in sync with the cloud. So lose the button. Except, it doesn't work. Apparently nobody in the world is smart enough to arrange flawlessly reliable hands-off client/cloud synchronization. There are times when you just know that what you're seeing on the screen is wrong and if the stupid app would just assume everything it knows is wrong and ask for a brain transplant from its server, things would be OK.

An anonymous reader writes with news that the IETF has adopted a policy of designing new protocols taking into account the need to mitigate pervasive monitoring of all traffic. From the article: "...RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for 'Best Common Practice'); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people's use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This monitoring is an attack and designers of Internet protocols must work to mitigate it."

jfruh writes: "The current state of the world of software is going in two radically different directions. On the one hand, server-side software is maturing, with wide consensus on tools and techniques that can be used across platforms. On the other hand, client-side programming is an increasingly fragmented mess, with the need to build apps for the Web and for multiple PC and mobile platforms, all natively. But of course, the server and client sides have to work together to deliver what people actually want."

Hugh Pickens writes "Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes in Fortune Magazine that Apple and Google have two very different strategies in the competition shaping up in 2011 between Android and iPhone. According to the conventional wisdom as espoused by Don Dodge, a Developer Advocate at Google, both Apple and Google will win because they are playing different games. Android will win the market share battle, but Apple will generate bigger profits. 'Apple goes for the high end of the market where they can charge high prices and enjoy great profit margins. Apple has been successful with this strategy multiple times, and will do it again with iPhone,' writes Dodge adding that Google's strategy with Android is to generate revenue streams from mobile search and advertising. Another Google employee, Tim Bray, sees things differently and says he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone and if this time next year, dirt-cheap iPhones were competing against Androids that push the user-experience lever farther than Apple. 'There's nothing fundamental in Android that would get in the way of a industrial-design and user-experience rock-star team, whether at Google or one of the handset makers, testing the hypothesis that these things are central to Apple's success.'"

The Flash platform has been taking body blows lately. First Apple, then Scribd, publicly abandon it; now ARM's marketing VP is blaming a delay in ARM smartbooks on the continuing unsuitability of Flash for the subnotebook market. But how ready is HTML5 to take over from Flash? Tim Bray offers a cautionary appraisal of the not-yet-a-standard's state of grace. While Flash may be on the way out (or so legions of its detractors hope), it is still important in many corners of the Web. Here a branding expert demonstrates that the sites of 10 out of 10 leading worldwide brands don't display on the iPad — because they're coded in Flash, of course.

XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: 'It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.

Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."

itwbennett writes "'To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn't support JRuby, but we also didn't have any evidence that they would,' said Charles Nutter, explaining why Sun's entire 3-member JRuby team will be leaving the company to work for application hosting company Engine Yard. Nutter called getting hired by Sun about two-and-a-half years ago and being given the chance to work full time on JRuby a 'dream come true.' And said that the decision to leave Sun came down to making sure 'JRuby will get to the next level.'"

lazyguyuk writes "Tim Bray posts a lengthy blog on the birth of XML, formalized as 1.0 in Feb 1998. 'XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It's really long. The title was originally Good Luck and Internet Plumbing but the filename was "XML-People" and I decided I liked that better. I never got around to publishing it, so why not now?'"

Several readers have written in about the death threats and threats of sexual harm that have been directed at tech blogger Kathy Sierra. She is the author of a number of books about Java and a popular speaker at conferences. She has now stopped blogging and cancelled her appearance at eTech. She names the names of four prominent bloggers who are backers of two sites on which the threats were posted. Others in the blogosphere like Robert Scoble and Tim Bray have posted publicly in support of Sierra. Scoble in particular emphasizes the streak of misogyny that is still all too evident in the tech world. The Washington Post is also grappling with the issue of vile comment posts that flirt with illegality. One commenter on Bray's post summed it up: "The Internet used to be a university. Then it became a shopping mall. But now, it's a war zone."

tbray writes "This is your friendly local Sun corporate drone reporting that we're going to be building and optimizing and DTrace-ing and shipping and supporting the AMP part of LAMP (details here). I think that basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp."

tbray writes "This is your friendly local Sun corporate drone reporting that we're going to be building and optimizing and DTrace-ing and shipping and supporting the AMP part of LAMP (details here). I think that basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp."

twofish writes to tell us that Sun's Tim Bray (co-editor of XML and the XML namespace specifications) has posted a blog entry suggesting RELAX NG be used instead of the W3C XML Schema. From the blog: "W3C XML Schemas (XSD) suck. They are hard to read, hard to write, hard to understand, have interoperability problems, and are unable to describe lots of things you want to do all the time in XML. Schemas based on Relax NG, also known as ISO Standard 19757, are easy to write, easy to read, are backed by a rigorous formalism for interoperability, and can describe immensely more different XML constructs."

pate writes "Sun has thrown some corporate weight behind Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages by hiring the two main JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Charles posted about jruby stepping into Sun on his blog, and Thomas posted his take too. Tim Bray, who started the ball rolling posted about the JRuby Love."

tbray writes "The strongest push-back against Massachusetts' effort to institute open, non-proprietary document formats has come from the accessibility community, who claim that Open-Source desktop software lags behind Windows; and thus that a transition to Open Document will amount to discrimination against the blind and those with other disabilities. This is serious stuff. Peter Korn, who's an Accessibility Architect at Sun, has written a massive piece that provides a general introduction to the subject, a discussion of how Open Source is doing on the the accessibility front (things could be worse, but they could be a lot better), and finally, a detailed look at the (interesting) history and (uncertain) future of these issues in Massachusetts. Anyone in Open Source who thinks they can ignore accessibility issues is probably wrong. Getting any younger? Eyes as good as they used to be? This is everybody's issue."

tbray writes "It may not be a Halloween Document, but one of the lobby groups in the thick of the Massachusetts office-doc standardization fray passed me 'The Other Side's Talking Points', so I've published (and slightly deconstructed) them with a barnyard-animal picture." From the article: "The direction toward interoperability using XML data standards is clearly a good one. However, limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others. The proposed approach and process for use of XML data is quite open to multiple standards, yet the proposed standard for documents is quite narrow, preferential, and may not enable optimal use of the data-centric standards."

richardtallent writes "Tim Bray caught that the United States Copyright Office's upcoming copyright pre-registration web application apparently only works with Internet Explorer, and they are seeking written comments from anyone who might have a problem being forced to use IE. Slashdotters, start your snail-mail."

tbray writes "The hardware guys are getting ready to toss this big hairy package over the wall: CMT (Chip Multi Threading) and TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Think about a chip that isn't that fast but runs 32 threads in hardware. This year, more threads next year. How do you make your code run fast? Anyhow, I was just at a high-level Sun meeting about this stuff, and we don't know the answers, but I pulled together some of the questions."

tbray writes "The hardware guys are getting ready to toss this big hairy package over the wall: CMT (Chip Multi Threading) and TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Think about a chip that isn't that fast but runs 32 threads in hardware. This year, more threads next year. How do you make your code run fast? Anyhow, I was just at a high-level Sun meeting about this stuff, and we don't know the answers, but I pulled together some of the questions."

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

Tim writes "Tim Bray and Microsoft's Joe Marini are doing a back-and forth on Open Source. Tim serves (open everything), Joe returns (secret-source is good business) and Tim volleys (the closed-source niche is shrinking)."

Tim writes "Tim Bray and Microsoft's Joe Marini are doing a back-and forth on Open Source. Tim serves (open everything), Joe returns (secret-source is good business) and Tim volleys (the closed-source niche is shrinking)."

Tim writes "Tim Bray and Microsoft's Joe Marini are doing a back-and forth on Open Source. Tim serves (open everything), Joe returns (secret-source is good business) and Tim volleys (the closed-source niche is shrinking)."

Manuzhai writes "Tim Bray, of XML co-invention fame, is writing about software patents and Open Source software today. While he deprecates the 'business-method' patents like one-click ordering, he thinks some (Open) source code could tell the truth about a patent application: 'In fact, in an ideal world, I'd rewrite the law to allow software patents but require a working Open-Source implementation as a condition of getting one.'"

Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "

Emil Brink writes "According to this entry in XML spec co-author Tim Bray's excellent blog, the European Commission has formally asked Sun to make the XML file format used in OpenOffice.org into a true ISO standard. Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office. "

An anonymous reader writes "In an almost philosophical essay replete with references to everyone from Larry Lessig and Tim Bray to to Professor Yochai Benkler, Sun Micrososystems evangelist Simon Phipps explores the metaphor of subscription (well, of course it's not just a metaphor any more from Sun's point of view) as the way that companies will make money off of deploying open source solutions. His distinction between OS developer and OS deployer is useful, but the crux is his contention that, with a "system" such as Sun has put together like the JDS, 'You don't buy the software from Sun - instead you subscribe to the editorial outlook.' It's an alluring analogy - Sun as the editor-in-chief of a 'publication' (JDS) with readers who may or may not choose to subscribe. Worth reading."

tbray writes "Dave Edmondson wanted to play MP3's in his car; his solution was perhaps a bit over the top. But then, why wouldn't you want an E450 in your trunk? Check the pix."

tbray writes "They just had this huge OSS conference in Brazil. One good write-up by Simon Phipps is here. And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together."

An anonymous reader writes "Tim Bray who's known for XML and has been /.'ed once or twice for that kind of stuff, actually seems to be a search geek and has been writing this endless series of essays on search technology since summer. He says he's finished now - it's like a textbook on searching."

mmoncur writes "Tim Bray just put up an article called Another Whack at Spam that has been getting some attention. It just looks like a variation of the old pay to send idea to me."

An anonymous reader writes "Tim Bray, best known as an XML Heavy, has an entertaining rant about why you should be developing for *n*x, OSS, or (especially) the Web. Because if you're on a proprietary platform, you're a "sharecropper"."

Dare Obasanjo writes with a link to his article "A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML" on xml.net. It starts off "In recent times the landscape of APIs and techniques for processing XML has been in the process of reinventing itself as developers and API designers learn from their experiences and some past mistakes. APIs such as DOM and SAX which used to be the bread and butter of XML APIs are giving way to new models of examining and processing XML. However although some of these techniques have become widespread amongst developers who primarily work with XML they are still unknown to the general body of developers. Nothing highlights this better than a recent article by Tim Bray one of the co-inventors of XML entitled XML is too Hard for Programmers and the subsequent responses on Slashdot." Read the entire article to learn more about the state of the XML art. Added in the missing link.

Richard Eriksson writes "Recalling the earlier discussion on why XML sucks for programmers, Tim Bray clarifies his stance on his co-creation, XML, and gets back on his pulpit to declare that XML Doesn't Suck. He writes: 'Let's look at some of XML's chief virtues, then I'll address some of the XML-sucks arguments, in the same spirit that Sammy Sosa addresses a fastball.'"

orangerobot writes "A new article on XML.com summarizes some of the response from the XML-DEV mailing list to Tim Bray's recent comments about his frustrations with XML. The overall feedback is mixed but several parsing packages are mentioned that satisfy some of Bray's complaints about the difficulty of using DOM and SAX-based APIs. The packages include Pyxie, XML::Filter::Dispatcher and XML::Essex."

orangerobot writes "Tim Bray, one of the co-authors of the original XML 1.0 specification has a new entry on his website explaining why he's been feeling unsatisified lately with XML and says his last experience writing code for handling XML was 'irritating, time-consuming, and error-prone.' XML has always a divided response among the technical community. The anti-XML community has several sites stating their positions."