The article links to the wrong URL for MSN's experimental RSS reader. The right URL is http://www.start.com/myw3b/ and it works just fine in Firefox as well as IE.
If you are interested in the developments of the RSS reader you can check out some of the blogs by the folks working on the reader such as Steve Rider and Sanaz Ahari.
I was pretty glued to my local news channel on 9/11 (here in New York). Is anyone actually going to sit there and tell me in all seriousness that their primary source of news and info on 9/11 was somebody's blog?
Actually mine was Slashdot and Slashdot is a blog. I don't watch TV and I get most of my news online. Slashdot happened to be the only news-ish website that wasn't buckling under the weight of the traffic on 9/11.
Considering that Microsoft has had MapPoint and TerraServer long before Google Maps was even a glint in Google's eye, I wonder how exactly MSN is being a copycat.
I guess this is just typical Slashdot pro-Google cheerleading.
I was just talking to some coworkers about how much power Walmart has in the retail world yesterday and one of them pointed out that a recent Fast Company article points out that Walmart is partially responsible for the low rate of US inflation. The entire article is a very eye opening look at the effect of Walmart on local US and the global economy. Many claim it was the catalyst for the rush to offshoring manufacturing in past years.
The notion of "From Each According To His Abilities, To Each According To His Needs" which is the core of Karl Marx's philosophy is also the core of Open Source ideals. Those of us who can code give away our code so that everyone who needs software can benefit.
The fact that the Cold War happened and 'communism' became a dirty word in the U.S. and other western nations doesn't make Open Source any less about ensuring that everyone can enjoy the fruits of the labor of the most talented without the necessity of enriching the producers of the software or discrimination against those that would not be able to afford software if it was proprietary and commercial.
The argument of the Supreme Court is that your name doesn't incriminate you unless there are extenuating circumstances so asking you to identify yourself doesn't violate your 5th ammendment rights.
And they hold zillions which they do enforce. You should read up on IBM and Software Patents sometime. A number of software companies could learn a thing or two about monetizing their intellectual property from IBM [if that was their thing].
If you go to the TIMES table of contents thats posted on the "Memory Hole" page, you will see why the article is not online. Since it deals with a popular subject, TIMES moved it to their paid content... so the free version is no longer available. Go HERE and read the top line
How does your explanation account for the fact the article is not listed in the table of contents?
"We're hoping that people's weight won't vary so quickly," he said. "But it is something we'll have to deal with."
This will be tough to handle in the US which is the home of fad diets. Also what happens if you have roommates that are roughly the same weight as you?
Now that MS has dropped the ball on the XML Office front,
I'm curious, how did Microsoft drop the ball with respect to other XML-based Office suites? The linked article points to a report that the ability to import user-defined XML formats into a form that can be understood by the primary Office products is an Enterprise feature. However loading or saving documents using a default XML format is in the base versions of Office and in fact was in the last version of Office given that Excel had a documented XML Spreadsheet Format.
Is anybody out there writing Perl/Java/whatever programs to take advantage of StarOffice XML?
the point of WYSIWYG is that what I see on the screen is what I print, but it also means that what I see is what other people will see as well,
Unless everyone in the world has the same printer I can't see how both goals are not contradictory. You are trying to have your cake and eat it too which is an all too common position by users of software.
You can spout about how despicable DRM as long as you want but the fact is that PHBs would love to have software that made leaks such as those that end up on InternalMemos.com less likely.
Apart from being 'funny', honestly why would Alan Cox need any degree or certification? He can go to any Linux development company and put his resume on the table:
All of Alan Cox's credentials as a kernel hacker can get him is a job as a coder (software developer, senior developer, development lead, etc). In some places it may be enough to get him a job as a software architect depending on the kind of company he tries to get work at.
However if Alan wants to break into upper management or start his own company then all his l337 kernel hacking skills aren't worth a hill of beans compared to the knowledge he could get from an MBA and the doors it opens.
Funnily enough, I was just thinking about going back to school for an MBA in a year or two but wondered if it would be a bad idea for a person so interested in technical pursuits. But if Alan Cox can do it I don't see why I can't.
This current ploy by SCO sounds like it doesn't hold any water. On the other hand, there is one part of the GPL that I am unsure how well would stand up to quick witted lawyerisms in a court of law. The section
You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program
seems too open to interpretation from my layman's perspective. I'm actually quite surprised that no one's ever gone to court over exactly what it means to say their application is based on another application with regards to what the GPL has to say. If a project with 1000 source files, totalling a million lines of code uses some GPL code in one of the routines that performs some utility function, is the application based on the GPL program? According to armchair lawyers on Slashdot the answer is YES, however would a judge and jury see it the same way?
A Matrix Reloaded Review To Get You Hyped Up
on
Harry Potter with Guns
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· Score: 1, Informative
It seems history, even short term history repeats itself. This was tried in the past by the BSD license and was taken out because it is way too onerous. The problems with requiring such credit are well enumerated by the Free Software Foundation in the essay entitled "The BSD License Problem".
On the surface, it sounds like a good idea until you consider what it means to give prominent credit to all the major people who are involved with a piece of software. The larger a project is the larger the number of active participants. More importantly when a project gets large enough it acquires dependencies that provide significant functionality which also are as deserving of credit as the original application developers.
For example I built a news aggregator that is an now a source code available project on GotDotNet that has 70 developers signed up with about a dozen having been active in one shape or the other. There are also dependencies on three external libraries that also provide significant functionality. If this was a commercial product exactly how feasible would it be for me to give prominence to everyone who provided significant value to the application? What metric would I use?
For those who think it's a legitimate story because it's posted on Yahoo!, remember it's a Weekly World News story. Y'know like the crazy magazines in the MiB movie. Here's a selection from this week's headlines:
XPP which has evolved into Common API for XML Pull Parsing . I don't believe there is a standard pull-based API for XML parsing in the Java world yet although there is JSR 173.
Tim Bray's Original Post Was Off Base
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
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· Score: 4, Informative
The main thesis of Tim Bray's original post was that he didn't like having to choose between either storing all his data in memory (i.e. DOM) or using a callbacks(i.e. SAX) when processing XML. The problem with this kind of thinking is that although it may have been true two or three years ago that the only way to process XML was via DOM or SAX this is no longer the case.
There are more classes of APIs supported on multiple platforms for processing XML such as pull-based APIs and cursor based APIs which are represented by the System.Xml.XmlReader and System.Xml.XPath.XPathNavigator in the.NET Framework. Similar APIs exist in the Java world as well as Python from what I've heard. This is besides the current push in somequarters for programming languages that natively process XML (i.e. intrinsicly understand an XML datamodel or datatype).
Tim Bray's original problem was that he doesn't have a pull-based API for XML parsing in Perl. I pointed out in my kuro5hin diary how the pseudo code he showed as being his ideal for processing XML already exists in C# and.NET Framework. This article on XML.com points to other people who also point out that such pull-based APIs for processing XML are available on other platforms and languages as well.
My question was modded to 5 in the thread asking for interview questions and it seems to be very relevant when discussing claims like one piece of code is more or less buggy than another. Since Slashdot refused to ask him the question can someone with an inside track answer the following question?
I assume some of this information may be "company secrets" but I'm very interested in learning what metrics are used to determine which source code is "buggier" than others. Is this something as simple as running lint + "gcc -Wall -ansi -pedantic" then piping the output to "wc -l" ?
Are there checks for use of unsafe functions like gets and the str* family of functions in C? Are there more complex data flow analysis algorithms at play here like those in the used in Stanford's Meta-level compilation techniques?
Inquiring minds want to know. A pronouncement like OS foo has more/less bugs than OS bar is meaningless without a definition of what having more/less bugs means.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are interested in the developments of the RSS reader you can check out some of the blogs by the folks working on the reader such as Steve Rider and Sanaz Ahari.
Disclaimer: I work at MSNActually mine was Slashdot and Slashdot is a blog. I don't watch TV and I get most of my news online. Slashdot happened to be the only news-ish website that wasn't buckling under the weight of the traffic on 9/11.
There is an interview with the Virtual Earth team on Microsoft's Channel 9 website.
I guess this is just typical Slashdot pro-Google cheerleading.
Disclaimer: I work at MSN.
Actually the 3 Pillars of Longhorn were Presentation (Avalon), Data (WinFS) and Communication (Indigo).
Walmart is so powerful it's scary.
The notion of "From Each According To His Abilities, To Each According To His Needs" which is the core of Karl Marx's philosophy is also the core of Open Source ideals. Those of us who can code give away our code so that everyone who needs software can benefit.
The fact that the Cold War happened and 'communism' became a dirty word in the U.S. and other western nations doesn't make Open Source any less about ensuring that everyone can enjoy the fruits of the labor of the most talented without the necessity of enriching the producers of the software or discrimination against those that would not be able to afford software if it was proprietary and commercial.
The argument of the Supreme Court is that your name doesn't incriminate you unless there are extenuating circumstances so asking you to identify yourself doesn't violate your 5th ammendment rights.
And they hold zillions which they do enforce. You should read up on IBM and Software Patents sometime. A number of software companies could learn a thing or two about monetizing their intellectual property from IBM [if that was their thing].
GO HERE
Sounds like a cool idea though...
Not me but I am writing C# apps that make use of Excel's XML format. I wrote about using XSLT on the Excel XMLSS format in my blog a few months ago when I had to update date values in certain columns. I also posted the XSLT stylesheet.
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.
Disclaimer: I work on the XML team at Microsoft but not directly with Microsoft Office.
InternalMemos.com
You can spout about how despicable DRM as long as you want but the fact is that PHBs would love to have software that made leaks such as those that end up on InternalMemos.com less likely.
Apart from being 'funny', honestly why would Alan Cox need any degree or certification? He can go to any Linux development company and put his resume on the table:
All of Alan Cox's credentials as a kernel hacker can get him is a job as a coder (software developer, senior developer, development lead, etc). In some places it may be enough to get him a job as a software architect depending on the kind of company he tries to get work at.
However if Alan wants to break into upper management or start his own company then all his l337 kernel hacking skills aren't worth a hill of beans compared to the knowledge he could get from an MBA and the doors it opens.
Funnily enough, I was just thinking about going back to school for an MBA in a year or two but wondered if it would be a bad idea for a person so interested in technical pursuits. But if Alan Cox can do it I don't see why I can't.
Thanks for the inspiration Alan.
Excerpt from Aint-It-Cool-news:
"MATRIX: KINGDOM OF ASS-KICKING is like if all of Anthrax's albums formed into a hot chick who had to fuck you ten times a day or she gets pee-cancer."
It seems history, even short term history repeats itself. This was tried in the past by the BSD license and was taken out because it is way too onerous. The problems with requiring such credit are well enumerated by the Free Software Foundation in the essay entitled "The BSD License Problem".
On the surface, it sounds like a good idea until you consider what it means to give prominent credit to all the major people who are involved with a piece of software. The larger a project is the larger the number of active participants. More importantly when a project gets large enough it acquires dependencies that provide significant functionality which also are as deserving of credit as the original application developers.
For example I built a news aggregator that is an now a source code available project on GotDotNet that has 70 developers signed up with about a dozen having been active in one shape or the other. There are also dependencies on three external libraries that also provide significant functionality. If this was a commercial product exactly how feasible would it be for me to give prominence to everyone who provided significant value to the application? What metric would I use?
XPP which has evolved into Common API for XML Pull Parsing . I don't believe there is a standard pull-based API for XML parsing in the Java world yet although there is JSR 173.
The main thesis of Tim Bray's original post was that he didn't like having to choose between either storing all his data in memory (i.e. DOM) or using a callbacks(i.e. SAX) when processing XML. The problem with this kind of thinking is that although it may have been true two or three years ago that the only way to process XML was via DOM or SAX this is no longer the case.
.NET Framework. Similar APIs exist in the Java world as well as Python from what I've heard. This is besides the current push in some quarters for programming languages that natively process XML (i.e. intrinsicly understand an XML datamodel or datatype).
.NET Framework. This article on XML.com points to other people who also point out that such pull-based APIs for processing XML are available on other platforms and languages as well.
There are more classes of APIs supported on multiple platforms for processing XML such as pull-based APIs and cursor based APIs which are represented by the System.Xml.XmlReader and System.Xml.XPath.XPathNavigator in the
Tim Bray's original problem was that he doesn't have a pull-based API for XML parsing in Perl. I pointed out in my kuro5hin diary how the pseudo code he showed as being his ideal for processing XML already exists in C# and