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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 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...
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.
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.
I often think its becuase of the "first to market" deal. Like Amazon for ecomerce or Ebay for auctions or Yahoo for portals. Redhat has been around for a while (one of the firsts) and they do a pretty decent job of marketing themselves.
BTW, I am aware that Redhat does not eq linux and Linux was around before Redhat
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
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
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
Said the AC:
Yes,
First you discuss,
Then you form a standards group,
then you make the standard.
Other than being "Captain Obvious", the AC is correct. You need to get all of the cats into the same corral before you can herd them along.
At least they're attacking the root problem - a useable, patent free, open standard document format, rather than a de facto standard format that's closed, proprietary and difficult to reverse engineer.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous