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OSNews on the LinuxWorld Exhibition Floor
Expo writes "OSNews reports on the second day of the LinuxWorld Expo. Highlights of the article is CodeWeaver's CrossOver Photoshop effort and the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with _all_ the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format. NewsForge also has a report."
But what about GAMES??? When are they going to have GAMES at one of these linux expos???
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
If GNU/linux/Open Source can be a part in setting the standards instead of just following them it would be awesome. Then linux could be the developers platform that set the industry instead of just playing tag along with windows.
To get backing for this it needs support from all other than Microsoft to be able to pressure them into supporting it. A web standard for documents would be nice instead of plain txt or vendor locked Microsoft and Adobe format. Adobe has its place too but its not a real standard, and its not free.
HTTP/1.1 400
You hit it on the head. XML is a way of thinking.
Would you rather go to your boss and say, "Let's take a look at replacing MS Office with Open Office. They've started using a standard file format, so multiple vendors applications can read and interact with those files without any issues. This standard is available for Microsoft to implement also."
OR
"Let's take a look at replacing MS Office with Open Office. They've started using an XML-compliant file format, so multiple vendors applications can read and interact with those files without any issues. This standard is available for Microsoft to implement also, who is not yet using XML."
The Boss's brain stops at 'XML', and says "I know that word, everybody is moving in that direction*".
*all the guys on the golf course are talking about it - so they must already be using it.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I did read the article. They had the technologies listed, but they didn't tell whether or not people were openly mocking the poor saps who were supposed to man the booths.
Why would you sign up for something like this?
"Ok..we need two people to go to a linux convention"
"You're kidding, right?"
"Nope"
"We better get combat pay"
"Damn straight"
"Ok, let's go"
Just another peak into my perverse mind.
JoeLinux
How do you make a cat go "woof" ? Soak it in gasoline and throw a match at it.
We are currently doing a doc filter for data mining at my company, and being able to use a generic XML parser would be fantastic. Currently, we are dealing with .doc, .pdf, .html, etc. etc. what a pain in the arse!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
read the freaking article:
Just a few meters away, Microsoft's booth was packed. Lots of people, were looking at the three products Microsoft was presenting there: WebMatrix, a 1.3 MB free ASP.NET IDE, WindowsCE with its shared source code and Windows Services for Unix 3.0. Everything was normal and smooth at their booth, lots of people interested or simply curious.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I really think CodeWeaver has a great place in the open source community. They are creating proprietary code, but in doing so, they are giving many windows users the option to switch to linux, by making available their favorite apps. Just because they offer a proprietary solutions, doesn't mean they aren't supporting the open source community.
I think I just wet my pants...
From the post: the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with _all_ the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format.
From the article: some Gobe people were there, and they were all discussing the idea of creating a new, XML-based, common format
Isn't there a difference between 'discussing the idea' of creating a new format and actually doing it?
the booth that "was packed all the time, was Red Hat's. These guys are big. They ran the whole show at LinuxWorld. You go to Sun, they use Red Hat. You go to Google, they use Red Hat. You go to some other booths and products, and they still use Red Hat."
I ran RedHat for many years, it is still running on my Alpha UDB because I am just too damn lazy to wait for Debian to install on that lowly machine. Why is there such a buzz around RedHat as far as their distribution goes?
I know that they do A LOT for the community but I just don't see their distribution as being the cleanest and safest of all.
Any ideas on why they would be such a popular choice? Is it just their physical popularity or is there something else I am missing?
Right now I am sitting in the press room typeing this and all I can say is LinuxWorld has evolved in many ways. At first glance most of my friends were somewhat dissapointed and the considerable drop of booths and people attending. But big buissness that have in the last past few years showed up in full force even the 3v1l Micro$haft. This signifys the continueing trend of how Linux and LinuxWorld Expo has turned from a kinda Comic Book convention atmosphere where you know everyone into a serious suit affair.
The highlights from linux world for me? Getting a pic of 17 Microsoft Employes all holding up a bumpersticker that said "You shouldnt Buy software from ex convicts". Besides that the allways insperational Linux Bowl/ or by its proper name the Golden Penguin Bowl when my Friend Arthur Ulfelt(? last name allways screws me up) got picked to be on the sides. And unfortunatly again one of my friends were on the looseing team since last year I got my friend Jesse Crocker to go up on one of the sides he lost forgetting that Trinity was in room 303 and he missed the 20 people makeing signs that said it with there fingers. Oh well. Arthurs shigning moment was when he said as the answer "Food" to the questoin is C6H1206 food or poisen =)
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
It's not a matter of what's available, it's a matter of what people like. I think the GIMP is great, and sure whomps Photoshop. But... people like Photoshop, and people don't want anything else but Photoshop. It's nolstagia, and that's what keeps people going back to the well of Adobe -- the same goes for M$ with their Office suite (though OO and SO are available and do great) and Intuit with Quicken and Quickbooks.
Karma whorin' since 1999
You don't consider them running their free online mail service on FreeBSD for years "taking *nix seriously"? ;-)
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
Unlike GIMP, Photoshop actually supports CMYK, Pantone, and 16-bit/channel images. The entire pre-press industry depends on these features.
The only app for Linux that's competitive in this space is GIMP. According to GIMP's web site, supporting CMYK will "require a complete rewrite" of the painting engine and will not be available until GIMP 2.0 which some speculate will never come to fruition.
There are entire industries blocking on Linux having the capabilities that Photoshop provides. This is a great step in the right direction, even if it's just a stop-gap until GIMP 2.0 is available.
CMYK is a color model in which all colors are described as a mixture of these four process colors. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents. Because such printing uses inks of these four basic colors, it is often called four-color printing.
In contrast, display devices generally use a different color model called RGB, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. One of the most difficult aspects of desktop publishing in color is color matching -- properly converting the RGB colors into CMYK colors so that what gets printed looks the same as what appears on the monitor.
Photoshop does this rather well.
ou no longer have to write parsers if you don't want to.
That's not true for all applications. XML in itself is only useful for data that is suitable for sequential scanning and complete storage in RAM. To access the data in a random form, you need to build and maintain a binary index. To access data too large to conveniently fit in RAM, you need to have an external index and to be able to deal with partial XML data. XML can be bridged to a database but it is not a database.
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
I stubled over to the show a couple times in the last few days - only a couple blocks from the office here. All the geeks in the office agreed that it was deeply deeply lame. 'Bout the best thing to come of the show was the elastic badge holder thingy.
The floor seems empty, the booths seems thin, and the coolest thing I think I saw was this handheld voice rec translator - and it was running Windows.
And - RedHat seems like a bunch of revolutionaries compared to the other exhibitors. They actualy use the words Open Source.
Way downhill from last year (where's Ximian and the cool jungle booth?)
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
Commenting on the Athlon, the article starts out with:
"running at 1800 MHz (2200+) with the AthlonXP CPUs already maxed out in both speed and heat"
The 2400+ and 2600+ Athlon will very likely be released on the 21st of THIS month. And they are supposed to be running much cooler. AMD found a glitch in the Athlons that was responsible for a good deal of the chips heat.
1) DTDs
.DOC file in WordPad? Yech.
XML allows you to define your own document format standards and embed those standards into your documents, for on-the-fly validation during parsing. DTDs can be distributed to your vendors, and they can draft documents according to that DTD, and be assured some level of compatibility with your software.
2) Heirarchal Storage of Data
This may not be that important to a lot of people, but it offers the ability to categorize data in common groupings with duplication of meta data. It's great for, say, directory structures and whatnot. Sure, there's LDAP, but that's an interface standard. This is a storage standard.
3) Readability
There's a whole debate over how readable XML is, given the prevalance of markup, but I would argue that the heirarchal outlines are much more intuitive than a flat file format. Well-designed DTDs and well-named tags help reduce the interference of markup.
4) Conciseness
XML wouldn't be good for, say, a network layer protocol, but as an interface between applications and users it is fairly small for what it does. Sure there's "overhead" and "bloat", but who wants to visually parse run-together character strings or hexadecimal encoded bytes?
5) Standardization
XML has to make a lot of concessions because it is designed to be universal. It's a standard. Yes, not all applications make use of all the features it offers. They don't have to. But those features are available so more applications can make use of it. It's widely used, it's open, and it works.
XML is good at what it's designed for. The standardized office document formats are a great place for it, as it offers the user *some* readability outside of an application framework while preserving special markup. Ever try reading a
Everyone knows that parents new computer so their kids can play the latest games.
Thats why new computers come with Windows installed.
Fish! LipHo
XML is more than hype. It's a god send for many of us.
Try writing a parser for any widely used file format. Go ahead I dare you, DOC, RTF, anyone. Just the parser, so the end result is a syntax tree in memory. See how long it takes to get anything useful. Don't stop there think of revisions of the format. Languages, are we going to have one solid C library and thats it? Aren't we going to support Ruby and Phython? Think of the API to get other programs to use your in-memory parse tree. How are you going to do that? Another API?
XML makes this trivial. with libxml or any of the other popular XML libraries, no *real* coding is involved, just supply the DTD. And plus XML libraries are everywhere. DOM is documented and understood by programmers who may not have encountered your format before, shortening the learning curve for use of your product
With an XML file format *any* of those libraries can be used to edit the format. No more sending mouse clicks to Microsoft word to do simple doc conversions or other hacks. Just write a *very* short PERL script that would parse this file. Also because XML is becoming the parser language of choice, there is a good chance that suitable XML libraries are available for your platform/langauge or installed already.
The idea to use XML is most likely from coders who have had to deal with these parser issues for years. I doubt it was handed down my OpenOffice "management".
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
come to think about it...why XML for word processors? It'd be a perfect world if they can just agree on a set of shared TeX scripts and macros, and use TeX as the default format!!
we already have standards. MS already doesn't follow them. What's the point of pushing for something either a) MS won't adopt b/c they don't have to, or more likely b) will adopt but will change to suit their needs?
XML does not solve the format change problem. Adding new features to an XML-based word processor would necessarily involve changing the schema. Old applications could well be confused by the new data. They might be able to create a parse tree in memory, but on a semantic level they would not be able to understand what the parse tree meant.
It's definitely not as easy as just ignoring new data, as you suggest. Suppose the new feature is footnotes within footnotes. Throwing away all the nested footnotes when the data are processed by an old application is not the right way to go. And you can't just blindly preserve the unknown information either, since transforms done to the rest of the data (e.g., changing the font universally to Garamond) also may need to be applied to the unknown data. Or they may not. If you don't understand the data you don't know whether they need to be done or not, and you may not understand the right way to do the transform.
Some of these problems can be addressed in part, but they require significant extra infrastructure to do so, and complicate everyday data processing tasks. That is, a format flexible enough to solve most of these problems would be quite hard to deal with on an ongoing basis, due to the need to constantly make decisions based on variant data types and informational attributes. There is no magic bullet for the format change problem.
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
They've started using an XML-compliant file format, so multiple vendors applications can read and interact with those files without any issues.
Yup...just like HTML - until things like Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime and all these other plugins get embedded into it.
Hopefully XML can remain pure and more useful than HTML has become.
And I don't even blame MS for this one - they may have added some things here and there, but even if you just follow the standards for HTML and CSS, half the crap only works on IE.
It's more than just parsing, when you work with XML you work both with a totally flexible data storage system and at the same time you work with a data storage system with a common well defined basic structure. The advantage of this? Portability, with a common base structure you can exchange data between applications based on XML data storage with veyr much ease as long as theyr use is similar, and some dissimillar applications would be able to share data too whereas before it was a tedious and long task to archieve so.
That is the real beauty of XML, portability from one source to another. Wich is also helped and aided by it being both an Open standard and a Human readable way of storing data.
"Here's a clue for you, buddy: if an article goes on for two straight
paragraphs about "32-bit applications" and "64-bit processors," it's got
the "geeky details." In spades.
I don't want the geeky details, and I certainly don't need them to see that
there was nothing that a REAL computer user would be REMOTELY interested
in presented at this convention."
I guess you're one of the happy readers of "Runs better, faster" type of
logos, maybe you should read some children web site, there is that kind of
readings you'd wish. Hope you're not expecting that mostly linux geek site
will go on your level.
Or on the other hand, it would be useful some kid, user, geek preference
in your info.
"And who are these other people? Oh, right, EVERYBODY. That sounds like
a standard to me"
But, doesn't it bother you that less and less people confirms to that EVERYBODY?
"Eazel sure did well.... (cough)"
WHat has Eazel to do with documents compatibility
"I can still run all my old DOS programs in Windows XP. But, hey, if I
ever find one that I can't run, that's the price of progress. I'd much rather
lose the occasional 20 year old program (why would I want to run software
from 1982?) than be stuck with some ridiculous OS that requires me to "recompile
my kernel" every hour."
????
Ok, I've bought my self notebook with XP PRO. There's only two windows apps
I'm using.
One goes way back into startings of my company. All my comapny papers are
inside. Guess what. It doesn't work under XP.
Second one is not so old it's a one year old program that I use to connect
to the bank (Same program that half of the country uses). Guess what, Doesn't
work under XP.
So, to hell with your progress. Here's why somebody would use a program like
that.
"And that's exactly why unix has been left behind -- along with the rest
of the 70's."
Considering maturity of your answers, 20 years before you were born
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Awww... what's the matter? Couldn't get linux installed like all your l33t friends? Made you feel stupid didn't it? You thought you knew a lot about computers and it turns out you just know a lot about Microsoft products.
Step off, lightweight.
First of all, with licensing 6.0, we see that the customers are pushing back. They're not blindly accepting anymore. An XML format would help MS keep Office marketshare by being able to import and export that format.
Secondly, XML is said to be 'human readable'. It's plain text. I'd say like EDI, which does have some garbage in it, but you can read the files themselves. If Microsoft were to try and 'extend' the XML format, it would first be sensationalized (probably producing bad PR), and then, if the standards body approves it, adopted (Assuming OO, and not MS is playing catchup at that point).
Not an issue.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
The mainstream success of Linux was inevitably going to be based on it being the best solution for a particular kind of job, and perhaps realizing that that quality comes as a result of Open Source licensing. To get the mainstream public to believe in the `ethics' of Free Software (that non-free software is immoral) was never realistically going to happen.
I always thought real techies used the best tool for the job. If Linux is that tool, and that's why the Linuxworld attendees are there, more power to them
Its a good thing that Linux now has more users than the developers. It means the developers were doing something right. Just like the Windows world, there will be seperate, smaller shows that will cater for developers - OSCon here we come. As a system admin and someone who often has to work out the best way to perform a given tak on Linux I like the fact that they're seperate - system admins have a different set of skills and desires than coders do.
Linux users march on city hall
So it appears this crazy cause to make software "free as in required by law" is not even popular among the open source faithful. Chalk one up for common sense!
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
> There is no magic bullet for the format change
> problem.
Sure there is. If both formats are open and processable by any language advanced enough to deal with the "character" data abstraction, scripts can be written in any language to translate from one format to the other. Lordy, you could even distribute these scripts as macros with a common interface, a practice invented by Dr. Paul E. Morphism in 1957. So users could be forwards-compatible with new formats without upgrading their client app, by downloading necessary translation modules.
Significant extrie architecture this is not.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
We need an open standard format that more than one project agrees on. This currently does not exist for wordprocessing and spreadsheets, unfortunately.
Eeek. Wrong.
Because a compatible format would not force-upgrade users.
Were you under the impression that all languages are translatable into each other? They're not. If version 1.2 allows a construct not present in version 1.1, then translation back and forth between the two formats leads to a loss of information. Again, consider the nested footnotes example.
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Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org
The problem at the moment is the huge number of incompatable office programs on Linux. This would mean they would all have at least one common format that they can stabily support.
Okay, I can agree with that. I would contend that you can map these higher constructs onto more primitive ones with loss of information (e.g., flatten the nested footnotes), and that this loss would be understood by users as the price of heterogeneity. But if loss is unacceptable, then true, XML wouldn't magically solve that.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
So instead of using an open format to create a spreadsheet, you use a perl module and create some .xls closed format file and then expect other non MS suites to open them perfectly, and when one of them doesn't perfectly open your perl-created closed-format excel you request to have them working right and to not focus in file format?
I'f I had the power I'd award your post the troll of the milenia award!
unfinished: (adj.)
That's not what the article said, the article merely states that there is an interest in doing that.
:-)
That's what they said. You probably forgot to configure the "Slashdot DTD" or Schema for preprocessing slashdot news
unfinished: (adj.)
No, you didn't. If you did, you wouldn't have asked, "Is this the convention that MS got a booth in?"
They had the technologies listed, but they didn't tell whether or not people were openly mocking the poor saps who were supposed to man the booths.
See? You still haven't read the article:
So sad... all that effort into trying to appear on-topic, and you still didn't manage to get first post. Better luck next time! But when you get caught, don't lie about having read the article.