You have pointed out that there are a few, legacy, parts of the specification that aren't defined. What we have for XML is several thousand pages of detailed specifications, compared to close to nothing before. How is that not better?
Soon enough M$ reps will be FUDing it up with the same old noise they've always made about "partial" implementations. All day long, you can hear them say that Open Office is not up to snuff because it does not "properly" translate all of those crusty old formats. Their new XML will be much the same, so it's no better.
If they get an ISO stamp, it will be worse because they can claim some kind of reputability and "openness" that they don't deserve.
Fast tracking only shows how much push they have and gives them more time to try again if it gets shot down. Reviewers should be respected, given the time they ask for and listened to when they finally form opinions.
What do you mean "as poorly defined"? With the binary formats there was basically no documentation: now we have detailed vendor-supplied documentation of virtually the entire XML format.
As you will note if you follow the previously supplied link, MSOfficeXML references the results of their old binary cruft without further definitions, which is no better than nothing at all.
If they really cared, they would reveal what they already know and quit keeping those old secrets. They don't and all their efforts are just so much PR, aka a big lie. You were lied to before and you are being lied to again.
I'd rather have a published standard for microsoft interoperation via XML file formats then the old.doc &.xsl files.
This too seems to be the M$ party line - the magic of XML is better than their old secret formats. It's bogus, of course, because their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats. If M$ was interested in interoperability, they would use ODF and make a converter using their knowledge of their crusty old standards. It's an impossible task because their old "standards" were contradictory to begin with. At the end of the day, the old formats are doomed to well deserved neglect, and there's no reason M$ could not just publish everything about them and let their former users translate things for themselves.
There's so much double talk around this issue, it's not even funny.
There are all sorts of ISO standards that people refuse to use in their current form.
The article linked to that M$ party line statement, and it's pathetic on two levels. The first is that it's a sorry excuse to push a new bad standard. The second is that it's admission that Microsoft Office XML is a bad standard.
The parade of backlash to their bullying is heartening. The tactics are, as usual, backfiring on them. "Microsoft, just say no." sounds like a nice slogan.
worlds stupidest user with passwords like 'password':-)
That's a joke, but some people really think that way. Blaming "stupid users" makes them feel more secure or helps them pass the buck for choosing systems with poor security. When you think about it, it's not very funny.
Passive encryption might be a step in the right direction, but I won't trust it as long as the software doing has owners and secrets kept from users. They can point to specs and tell me what they are doing, but that does not mean they are doing that. The owners can break in at will, the keys can be padded with zeros and finally, the owners can make mistakes.
It, like Groklaw, must all be part of a Scientology-level conspiracy by IBM to discredit them and make them look bad.
Scientologists are harmless paragons of PR wisdom next to this clumsy attempt by M$ to "compete" with free software.
Microsoft paid these jokers to do as they did and probably directed their actions. SCO deserves contempt, M$ deserves your hatred and the same kind of treatment.
It was easy enough to hack off and replace SCO, eliminating Windoze is not much more difficult and brings much greater rewards. I've been M$ free for five years, you can do it too. The further you get away from it, the better off you are and the more you wonder how you ever got things done before.
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault.
You're one of those "TV is the devil" fuckwits, aren't you.[sic]
No, I'm one of those, "Don't expose me to blood, guts and sex without me knowing about it," fuckwits. All forms of advertisements that do those things are evil. The observed and cited consequences of those exposures is a matter of debate.
My "problem" with debian packages is not to find them (apt-cache makes quite a good job on it) but comparing "competing" packages, and I don't know about any resource on Debian on this.
Ultimately, you are the only person who can judge which application is right for you. Others may and do write their opinion about various packages but those are no substitute for your own experience. Googling narrows things down, but you the best resources are really your peers who are doing the same things or your own trials.
Take graphing, for example. There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to make graphs of your data and each one has it's niche. gnuplot is easy to script, so you can make hundreds of graphs with little effort. grace can do the same, and has a nice xmgrace interface if you want. Spreadsheets are good for small sets of data you want to manipulate a little. Kalgebra is coming and kmplot works already for ordinary math. kst is specialized for power functions. fityk is specialized for xray spectrums and peak finding and it has it's own scripting language. The list goes on and and on in an overwhelming embarrassment of riches.
The old adage, "When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," still applies but now you have a bewildering choice of hammers and every other imaginable tool. The Debian repositories are amazing that way. When you want a hammer, you get a choice of slightly different hammers to chose from. Any will do the job, but an experienced user will know which is just right for their work. The nice thing is that it only cost you a little time to find out.
The implication is that it's a far more widespread problem than it is.
I don't know why anyone would think a problem would be common in a monoculture OS, do you?
You're right about it not being widespread. Vista's not selling. How's that for FUD?
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault. It has nothing to do with the thing taking six years to get here and sucking on arrival. You know, people having done just fine without it for the better part of a decade thinking they don't need a DRM downgrade. No, it's just the wingnuts keeping the man down.
Just plain old advertising could be said to make people "buy things against their will", if it tips the balance from "slightly inclined to not purchase" to "slightly inclined to purchase".
The purpose of advertising is to build brand awareness. You can't buy what you don't know and when you do buy, you are inclined to purchase those things that are familiar. Advertising attempts to create a relationship of trust where none exists and to undo existing trust.
Subliminals attempt to make the message stick, by plying on your deepest emotions. Typical subjects include sex and death. The contents, if seen consciously, are shocking. The greater the shock value, the greater the impact. Perversely enough, the more shocking the image is, the harder your mind works to hide it from you. The images can be drawn from porn, war and crime photos. Alcohol advertisers are notorious for using AA nightmare images to feed on your self destructive tendencies. With computer art work, the advertiser has tremendous power to place these images in a seemless way.
The consequence of these methods is to inflict everyone all of the supposed effects of exposure to violence and porn. Most people with cable TV are walking around with post traumatic stress syndrome and don't know it. If there's any truth to porn exposure creating promiscuity, objectification of the opposite sex and demand for porn, that too has happened. Road rage, divorce, hook-ups, and many other social disorders are a direct consequence of this unethical form of advertising.
People fighing porn and violence directly are aiming at the wrong targets. Video games, movies and porn are private and voluntary. The public still has a choice and can still avoid things they don't like. Subliminal advertising is public and forced.
The shameful thing is that people who make these advertisements know what they are doing better than anyone else. They do the studdies and they know just what pushes your buttons.
Connecticut has one of the busiest spaceports in the world! It's like the hub of the solar system. Their space prowess is matched only by their power over the internet.
"Free software" is not a development model. It's a category of copyright licensing regimes...
I'd hate to limit my thoughts about freedom to licensing. The software's license is a way to know if the software is free or not, that's true. There is more to it than that, including development model. If I make a program free and it's useful to others, I might get help with it. Free software is founded on philosophical and moral principles. Licenses simply express those principles.
It really shows you've never done any systems administration or anything, considering you seem to think testing is "useless". Do you seriously think F/OSS is completely perfect and magically heals itself if things go wrong?
The testing, of course, is required. It's the patch that's useless. It should be obvious by now that patching will never fix Windows security problems. The whole exercise is a waste of time and that may be intentional.
There's no magic to free software working right. When people co-operate and share code, they are less likely to break each other's work. They can also be tested by the distributor before they are released, so that users can install with much greater confidence.
The argument that "Linux is the kernel" is very weak in my opinion because how useful is JUST a kernel?... It is a clever sleight of hand that advocates use when convenient.... See what I mean? You can't make the argument that "Linux is more secure than Windows"
I see your strawman and call it BS again. What advocate are you talking about? Most are not confused by the issue like M$ would want them to be. Enderle does not make sense because he's confused, debating the specifics of his confusion is a waste of time.
Outside of the present idiotic article few people say things like, "Linux is more or less this than Windoze." When you want to look at security studies, you do what Honeynet did and monitor a big bunch of computers set up on a network. In that case you notice that various versions of Windoze has a half life of four minutes out of the box and Red Hat takes about a month to get nailed. Specific set ups, specific results and personal experience usually matches. From that and code auditing studies and many other specific metrics, you could then argue that free software will always be of higher quality than non free software. By describing a development and distribution model, you can argue that free software inherently protects the user's privacy and rights. Someone like Enderle is so confused they can't get past semantics to see the underlying truth in the world.
The reason Linux has been abstracted into a concept is so it doesn't have to compete on merit. It can be anything, in concept, it needs to be to win a deal.
He then goes on to treat Linux as a concept for the rest of the article, which is so stupid it's not worth reading.
Linux is a kernel. Free Software is a concept. Both can be talked about intelligently. Linux can be compared to other kernels. Free software can be compared to other development models. The rest of his "arguments" are just as big a waste of time.
As someone else pointed out, this is the guy the NYT quit quoting. Now I know why.
A good admin doesn't need to do any of that because the patches worked without a hitch.
Tell me what a good admin can do to make sure M$ does not break someone else's program. Even if M$ were not malicious, they can't know what other non free companies have done on any given computer and will break things with changes.
A good admin will also keep up with the ever changing tools M$ and others throw out, and this causes even more wasted time. I've seen ambitious young admins spending months of weekends reading four inch thick books on things like Visual Studio, knowing.NET is just around the two year away corner.
Ah, the sad life of a Windoze admin. So busy testing endless and useless security patches that they never have time to look at anything else. It's almost like M$ planned it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yarr girl, better you surface to get a proper fix!
You have pointed out that there are a few, legacy, parts of the specification that aren't defined. What we have for XML is several thousand pages of detailed specifications, compared to close to nothing before. How is that not better?
Soon enough M$ reps will be FUDing it up with the same old noise they've always made about "partial" implementations. All day long, you can hear them say that Open Office is not up to snuff because it does not "properly" translate all of those crusty old formats. Their new XML will be much the same, so it's no better.
If they get an ISO stamp, it will be worse because they can claim some kind of reputability and "openness" that they don't deserve.
Fast tracking only shows how much push they have and gives them more time to try again if it gets shot down. Reviewers should be respected, given the time they ask for and listened to when they finally form opinions.
What do you mean "as poorly defined"? With the binary formats there was basically no documentation: now we have detailed vendor-supplied documentation of virtually the entire XML format.
As you will note if you follow the previously supplied link, MSOfficeXML references the results of their old binary cruft without further definitions, which is no better than nothing at all.
If they really cared, they would reveal what they already know and quit keeping those old secrets. They don't and all their efforts are just so much PR, aka a big lie. You were lied to before and you are being lied to again.
Guess we all know what she got for Christmas.
A copy of Vista? Ha ha, that will motivate her.
An AC, trying to annoy, asks:
Do you express yourself that way in everyday interaction with other people? I'm actually curious.
Only 2/3 of those statements is mine, but yes I do express myself this way in real life. Most people think it's fun to be around, thank you.
I'd rather have a published standard for microsoft interoperation via XML file formats then the old .doc & .xsl files.
This too seems to be the M$ party line - the magic of XML is better than their old secret formats. It's bogus, of course, because their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats. If M$ was interested in interoperability, they would use ODF and make a converter using their knowledge of their crusty old standards. It's an impossible task because their old "standards" were contradictory to begin with. At the end of the day, the old formats are doomed to well deserved neglect, and there's no reason M$ could not just publish everything about them and let their former users translate things for themselves.
There's so much double talk around this issue, it's not even funny.
There are all sorts of ISO standards that people refuse to use in their current form.
The article linked to that M$ party line statement, and it's pathetic on two levels. The first is that it's a sorry excuse to push a new bad standard. The second is that it's admission that Microsoft Office XML is a bad standard.
The parade of backlash to their bullying is heartening. The tactics are, as usual, backfiring on them. "Microsoft, just say no." sounds like a nice slogan.
Oh yes, "Groklaw SMASH!"
Indeed, but shit is always easy to smash.
worlds stupidest user with passwords like 'password' :-)
That's a joke, but some people really think that way. Blaming "stupid users" makes them feel more secure or helps them pass the buck for choosing systems with poor security. When you think about it, it's not very funny.
Passive encryption might be a step in the right direction, but I won't trust it as long as the software doing has owners and secrets kept from users. They can point to specs and tell me what they are doing, but that does not mean they are doing that. The owners can break in at will, the keys can be padded with zeros and finally, the owners can make mistakes.
It, like Groklaw, must all be part of a Scientology-level conspiracy by IBM to discredit them and make them look bad.
Scientologists are harmless paragons of PR wisdom next to this clumsy attempt by M$ to "compete" with free software.
Microsoft paid these jokers to do as they did and probably directed their actions. SCO deserves contempt, M$ deserves your hatred and the same kind of treatment.
It was easy enough to hack off and replace SCO, eliminating Windoze is not much more difficult and brings much greater rewards. I've been M$ free for five years, you can do it too. The further you get away from it, the better off you are and the more you wonder how you ever got things done before.
I said:
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault.
and SCO agreed!. How pathetic.
You're one of those "TV is the devil" fuckwits, aren't you.[sic]
No, I'm one of those, "Don't expose me to blood, guts and sex without me knowing about it," fuckwits. All forms of advertisements that do those things are evil. The observed and cited consequences of those exposures is a matter of debate.
Bollocks. ... fuckwits ... fuck-all ... idiot ... bizarre prudery.
Nice. Do you work for Microsoft or do you curse to make yourself feel big?
My "problem" with debian packages is not to find them (apt-cache makes quite a good job on it) but comparing "competing" packages, and I don't know about any resource on Debian on this.
Ultimately, you are the only person who can judge which application is right for you. Others may and do write their opinion about various packages but those are no substitute for your own experience. Googling narrows things down, but you the best resources are really your peers who are doing the same things or your own trials.
Take graphing, for example. There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to make graphs of your data and each one has it's niche. gnuplot is easy to script, so you can make hundreds of graphs with little effort. grace can do the same, and has a nice xmgrace interface if you want. Spreadsheets are good for small sets of data you want to manipulate a little. Kalgebra is coming and kmplot works already for ordinary math. kst is specialized for power functions. fityk is specialized for xray spectrums and peak finding and it has it's own scripting language. The list goes on and and on in an overwhelming embarrassment of riches.
The old adage, "When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," still applies but now you have a bewildering choice of hammers and every other imaginable tool. The Debian repositories are amazing that way. When you want a hammer, you get a choice of slightly different hammers to chose from. Any will do the job, but an experienced user will know which is just right for their work. The nice thing is that it only cost you a little time to find out.
The implication is that it's a far more widespread problem than it is.
I don't know why anyone would think a problem would be common in a monoculture OS, do you?
You're right about it not being widespread. Vista's not selling. How's that for FUD?
There's a massive conspiracy to not purchase Vista! It's kind of like the one I launched against SCO, the infamous Distributed Lack of Purchasing (DLoP) attack. It's all the FUDster's fault. It has nothing to do with the thing taking six years to get here and sucking on arrival. You know, people having done just fine without it for the better part of a decade thinking they don't need a DRM downgrade. No, it's just the wingnuts keeping the man down.
Zombie has new life too. These issues will never go away, will they?
Just plain old advertising could be said to make people "buy things against their will", if it tips the balance from "slightly inclined to not purchase" to "slightly inclined to purchase".
The purpose of advertising is to build brand awareness. You can't buy what you don't know and when you do buy, you are inclined to purchase those things that are familiar. Advertising attempts to create a relationship of trust where none exists and to undo existing trust.
Subliminals attempt to make the message stick, by plying on your deepest emotions. Typical subjects include sex and death. The contents, if seen consciously, are shocking. The greater the shock value, the greater the impact. Perversely enough, the more shocking the image is, the harder your mind works to hide it from you. The images can be drawn from porn, war and crime photos. Alcohol advertisers are notorious for using AA nightmare images to feed on your self destructive tendencies. With computer art work, the advertiser has tremendous power to place these images in a seemless way.
The consequence of these methods is to inflict everyone all of the supposed effects of exposure to violence and porn. Most people with cable TV are walking around with post traumatic stress syndrome and don't know it. If there's any truth to porn exposure creating promiscuity, objectification of the opposite sex and demand for porn, that too has happened. Road rage, divorce, hook-ups, and many other social disorders are a direct consequence of this unethical form of advertising.
People fighing porn and violence directly are aiming at the wrong targets. Video games, movies and porn are private and voluntary. The public still has a choice and can still avoid things they don't like. Subliminal advertising is public and forced.
The shameful thing is that people who make these advertisements know what they are doing better than anyone else. They do the studdies and they know just what pushes your buttons.
A Debian or Yellow Dog installer?
Connecticut has one of the busiest spaceports in the world! It's like the hub of the solar system. Their space prowess is matched only by their power over the internet.
Quoth the W:
All of this was brought upon us in a single day -- and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.
That's funny, I thought TIA was ordered a year before 9/11/2001.
"Free software" is not a development model. It's a category of copyright licensing regimes...
I'd hate to limit my thoughts about freedom to licensing. The software's license is a way to know if the software is free or not, that's true. There is more to it than that, including development model. If I make a program free and it's useful to others, I might get help with it. Free software is founded on philosophical and moral principles. Licenses simply express those principles.
One of my biggest fans misses the point again:
It really shows you've never done any systems administration or anything, considering you seem to think testing is "useless". Do you seriously think F/OSS is completely perfect and magically heals itself if things go wrong?
The testing, of course, is required. It's the patch that's useless. It should be obvious by now that patching will never fix Windows security problems. The whole exercise is a waste of time and that may be intentional.
There's no magic to free software working right. When people co-operate and share code, they are less likely to break each other's work. They can also be tested by the distributor before they are released, so that users can install with much greater confidence.
The argument that "Linux is the kernel" is very weak in my opinion because how useful is JUST a kernel? ... It is a clever sleight of hand that advocates use when convenient. ... See what I mean? You can't make the argument that "Linux is more secure than Windows"
I see your strawman and call it BS again. What advocate are you talking about? Most are not confused by the issue like M$ would want them to be. Enderle does not make sense because he's confused, debating the specifics of his confusion is a waste of time.
Outside of the present idiotic article few people say things like, "Linux is more or less this than Windoze." When you want to look at security studies, you do what Honeynet did and monitor a big bunch of computers set up on a network. In that case you notice that various versions of Windoze has a half life of four minutes out of the box and Red Hat takes about a month to get nailed. Specific set ups, specific results and personal experience usually matches. From that and code auditing studies and many other specific metrics, you could then argue that free software will always be of higher quality than non free software. By describing a development and distribution model, you can argue that free software inherently protects the user's privacy and rights. Someone like Enderle is so confused they can't get past semantics to see the underlying truth in the world.
Yes, this is wacky:
The reason Linux has been abstracted into a concept is so it doesn't have to compete on merit. It can be anything, in concept, it needs to be to win a deal.
He then goes on to treat Linux as a concept for the rest of the article, which is so stupid it's not worth reading.
Linux is a kernel. Free Software is a concept. Both can be talked about intelligently. Linux can be compared to other kernels. Free software can be compared to other development models. The rest of his "arguments" are just as big a waste of time.
As someone else pointed out, this is the guy the NYT quit quoting. Now I know why.
A good admin doesn't need to do any of that because the patches worked without a hitch.
Tell me what a good admin can do to make sure M$ does not break someone else's program. Even if M$ were not malicious, they can't know what other non free companies have done on any given computer and will break things with changes.
A good admin will also keep up with the ever changing tools M$ and others throw out, and this causes even more wasted time. I've seen ambitious young admins spending months of weekends reading four inch thick books on things like Visual Studio, knowing .NET is just around the two year away corner.
Ah, the sad life of a Windoze admin. So busy testing endless and useless security patches that they never have time to look at anything else. It's almost like M$ planned it that way.