For a while, I would agree with the above, but I'm seeing a lot of signs of life out of Sun lately. They really get open source software, and are making money off of it. Simon Phipps this week at Jazoon '08 noted they're making more money off OpenSolaris these past couple years than the past 8 years combined.
It's very easy to pick at a company's decisions -- but it's really hard to turn around a huge company with an entrenched culture; other UNIX players weren't pure plays and are so diversified that it's both easy to hide their own problems (how's HP-UX doing?) or to entice hardware purchases because of broader relationships & bundling (IBM is classic at this).
Sun still has a lot of runway ahead of it. $3B in cash. $13.8b in revenues a year, which is UP $2.8b from 2005. The recent quarter problems are concerning but in context were a 0.5% drop in revenue year-over-year. Yes, it's very bad that they're not very profitable, but let's put it in context -- their big losses were 5 years ago or more. Apple was in much, much worse shape in the mid 90's. Motorola just lost $2.1 billion in revenue from their mobile phone division.
Sun is drifting slowly towards death, but, as they say, the green mile is sometimes quite long.
Sometimes innovations are what's in front of your nose & doesn't require great feats of engineering.
"Just a fucking PC" was the innovation of the XBox. It made game development easier. It allowed console games to become more powerful.
Innovation is about how the market responds to a product. It's about bringing new ideas to market ("hey, let's make a PC palatable for non-techies that just want to play games") vs. ("let's build a game machine") rather than just invention (which is far riskier).
WIndows 3.1 was far from familiar with most PC users -- getting people to switch to a GUI at all was a big feat. Was it an engineering success on par with the first MacOS? Hell no. But that's not what innovation is always about -- it's how the market perceives and changes due to the product.
Similarly, Windows 95 was a huge change for 90% of the computing populace. Yes, it was Mac '88, but most people didn't know or care about that. It changed their world to become much more productive.
One might be able to apply "bland and familiar" to Office suites, but again it's just not true. Most office suites in the 80's were text-based DOS affairs. So Microsoft built theirs on the Macintosh. And, eventually took it to Windows. The competition took quite a while to catch up (WordPerfect 6 for Windows was damn buggy, but it got better, but then Corel screwed it & Quattro Pro up...)
The rise of the GUI in the PC world is largely due to Microsoft, and is largely why they still have a monopoly on that area (and Office productivity).
I think your advice works for certain programs, like Business or Commerce. Maybe Finance or Economics or Accounting... But in Engineering & CS type programs, I'm not so sure.
A large number of my friends in college (CS program) became grunt coders and are working their way up very slowly. I don't think they'll be introducing me to politicians any time soon. Some of my closer friends failed out or dropped out and are out of the industry completely. Some are still in academia.
In any case, my career social network did get seeded from college, but honestly I can point to only one college buddy that made a real difference, and it was mostly serendipitous... the rest of my college friends are just Facebook acquaintances. The real network I grew on my own work relationships.
Not a fact. You're spouting self-serving carcitured version of economic theory that isn't even applicable to analyzing a national labour market. Skilled immigration does not make wages fall.
For almost 70+ years, orthodox MACROeconomics suggests that wages are sticky downwards -- i.e. they don't tend to fall based on an increase of supply, and besides, if wages fall, aggregate demand falls, hurting everyone.
Anecdotally: - I'll note that I'm a TN-1 worker, not H1-B, though I can't apply for a green card without H1-B; it's a lottery every year.
- Most H1-B's I've known from Canada and India make at least six figures in the SF Bay Area 10 years ago (and as much or more today).
- The USCIS is notoriously thorough in making sure that temporary work immigrants are skilled (i.e. in the bureaucracy's eyes, verifiably credentialed). You have to fit in their conformed boxes, or you'll have a hell of a time working in the U.S. legally.
Apple is in a trademark dispute. It happens. It's part of the system. In a perfect world, you'd understand that, and wouldn't troll forums in a vain attempt to "stick it to the man"....
Many technical people want to cling to what they're comfortable with. To the crusties, the web is just "one app" among many non-web apps vs. the newer view that different apps are just different ways of working with "the web" of documents & data -- so why not have a platform? Likewise, calls to make plugins or multimedia become isolated or minimized, to see less richness & more leanness, etc. is often the opposite of what many people seem to want, which seems to be "make everything I do available on the web".
it's funny how the pattern of arguments never go away. higher-level languages were a toy through the 1970's and a bit into the 80s, assembly was the only way for Real Nerds to program.... through 1994, a GUI was a toy, Real Nerds used the command prompt.. and that argument still had cred through the late 90's.... Then the web came out and people wondered why Gopher or FTP wasn't good enough... then the Web added IMG tags with animated GIFs and JS and Flash and people wondered why most didn't just turn these off or use Lynx...
What's common about these argument is that the conservative forces typically have wound up losing, and it seems to be happening quicker (i.e. there's less inertia these days)...
Next, solve this problem we have with IP having a limited address space, let's call it IPv6....
HTML 5 is the attempt to make it better, and it will probably take 10 years. There's no alternative that has the right players supporting it (and HTML 5 barely has Microsoft supporting it as is). If an alternative rewrite did emerge, it would have to be 10x better and have major support that isn't just Microsoft (which rules out Silverlight).
I'd say that HTTP and URIs themselves are enough, XML-based RPC is something of an abomination.
But otherwise, I don't think it's inefficient or ugly if a major goal is global-scale interoperability. Which seems to be the best path to flexibility these days...
FWIW, Elastra (who I just started working for) does clustered MySQL and PostgreSQL via EC2, at pennies on the dollar (basically an uplift over Amazon's hourly EC2 costs). It automatically uses S3 to ensure persistence, along with a messaging backbone to detect down instances. We also built our own static dynamic DNS mapper to deal with the static IP issue;-) With the new zone feature, geographic failover is next....
The main goal is to enable flexibility in designing and configuring an infrastructure stack, by building-in a lot of the "rules" and dependency management "gotchas", and also providing markup languages to describe how new pieces of infrastructure fit in the cloud. The point is to make the "cloud" something a lot more automated than a traditional blade array or even virtualization, which is necessary for a public cloud like EC2 but even would be nice for a private cloud like your own Xen or VWware cluster...
A bunch of bad laws and incompetent judges later and they've lost the case though in defiance of all reason and common sense.
Who defines common sense? Common sense in the US legal and political system *is* the DMCA, and the trend is towards *more* IP protection before *less*. Years after we see Hollywood senators commit to Lessig's change congress (good luck), you might see the trend change.
When someone comes along to hurt you out of spite, you don't just cower and crawl away so they'll leave you alone, you stand up to them and you won't be stupid for doing it. That they lost when they stood up is to the eternal shame and humiliation of the whole system of 'justice' which has let down the BNetD team, and every person who thought that it could, just once, find correctly.
Spite had nothing to do with it. It was business. Amoralism = capitalism at its finest (and weakest). It's all about the money. The day economics is not deified in America is when you see "the right to reverse engineer" and freedom 0 have meaning to anyone in the mainstream.
It didn't make it onto that stupid list of 100 best films (give me a break). If you mean the AFI Top 100 list, it certainly did. Originally #22 in 1998, now #15 as of the 2007 edition.
This week's TWIT had a good discussion of this tradeoff.
There's an old saying -- open if you're losing, closed if you're winning. Apple will open this thing up more as competition increases. Until then, user experience will dominate.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Apple's reputation is built completely around a fantastic user experience.... so do they: a) allow developer freedom to create runaway apps that destroy that experience (OMG it's an iPhone Virus! Or something with backdoors to tape your phone conversations?) b) restrict developer freedom to preserve the user experience.
They'll obviously choose the latter; the market has not punished them for it on the iPod. The device *has to take phone calls* regardless of what app you're using, so it will unceremoniously quit that custom app at any time.
Also, this is the *first version of the SDK*. It's not set in stone. Certainly instant messenger applications will become important, and they'll find a way to allow them to run in the background (or they'll make one themselves).
As for VOIP over EDGE, the complaints are ridiculous -- the latency of EDGE would make conversation nearly impossible. We're talking 56k modem speeds with 1000-2000ms latency at times! When the iPhone goes 3G, perhaps.
The high end game industry lives in its own (un)reality.
How the hell is it Intel and the PC's manufacturer's fault for integrated graphics, when most PC's are for business use, where they, at best, play card games on. People won't pay for power they don't need.
The market for insanely fast, high-end games seems to have shrunk in favour of casual games, MMOs, and "gameplay" games. Instead of working on graphics engines, the hotspot for innovation seems to be game play and game experience. Examples abound: Wii Sports, Bio Shock, Mass Effect, World in Conflict, the endless stream of "war games" like Gears of War and Call of Duty, etc.
None of these games can be played with Integrated graphics; WoW will run max ~10-15 fps on X3100 Integrated graphics, and will probably degrade without aftermarket cooling. Almost all sales people at Best Buy or even at the Apple Store are very clear about what models are meant for games, and which ones aren't. Yet Tim claims that poor, blind, customers are being sold PC's that won't play games. I guess he's never heard of a "2 week return policy"?
I think Doom 3 killed the market -- after that experience, people don't want to buy the same old 10 year old game with new graphics and some minor gameplay improvements.
For example, if you improve the graphics (a bit) AND the gameplay AND change the setting or genre, you may have a winner... The current graphics champ, Crysis, has done fairly well, selling 1 million through the end of January, despite early reports that it was flunking as bad as UT3. Gears of War 2 is hotly anticipated and I bet will slam UT3's sales despite being on the same engine. I haven't heard what UT3's sales are, last I saw it was 1.2 million for PS3 + PC combined, which seems to indicate PC sales sucked.
Expensing business dinners is a pretty common business practice in technology companies -- even expensive dinners. I've expensed a $2000 dinner before (for 10 people, though).
Of course, it should have some kind of connection to business -- whether it's a celebratory dinner (usually paid for), or a sales dinner, or one to solicit doners, etc...
"Uniqueness" is a bit fuzzy. More precisely, a good often has higher value due to Excludability, which in the case of recording art is what DRM attempts via algorithm, and what copyright attempts via legislation.
But, overall, I find your argument to be almost sophist. It's obvious that concerts and performances are excludable. That doesn't mean that society shouldn't make available some forms of legislated exclusion for recorded works. I don't believe at all that the mainstream (or even many technically inclined folks) believe that intellectual works should be a public good, due to the free rider problem.
Yes, there are problems with current copyright trends (unlimited extensions), but copyright law is likely here to stay, even if it's less applicable to digital medium.
And, to be honest, I find it amazing that any company would want you in a management position given your attitude, poor reading comprehension, and poor communication skills.
Really, who gives two craps about thickness... it's all marketing from Apple. Who has honestly gone "Gee wizz, this laptop is just too darn THICK for my needs!"? Pretty much no-one...
How many people feel lust for a phone? Pretty much no one... until the iPhone.
How many people feel lust for a laptop? Pretty much no one... until they see something with sex appeal.
It's bizarre and somewhat telling about how many regular, non-technical people stop and ask about the iPhone if they someone use it. A similar effect is happening with the MacBook Air (zomg it's so thin! wow that's light! Look at how bright the screen is! Hey that SSD makes the apps snappy!)
The MacBook Air is the two-seater roadster of laptops -- a blast to drive, eye-catching, not overly practical, and sneer-inducing among those who want a larger, or faster, or more practical model.
Not saying it's universal, just saying that Apple seems to be tapping into a lust-factor that one hasn't seen with consumer electronics in some time, if ever.
CSV is a false sense of security. Unless you're using a battle-tested parser, many (lazy) programmers are killed by corner cases. ASN.1 is a beast to parse. Lisp S-Expressions are out of fashion -- I believe many are actively hostile to them, actually, as retaliation for having to (pretend to) learn it in school. (Sad but true) INI files -- I don't believe there are many multi-platform parsers.
The one I agree with: RFC-822 is a simple, multi-platform alternative. JSON probably too.
But XML doesn't solve that problem. I've found that the amount of code it takes to extract data from an arbitrary XML file even with an XML parser at hand is not significantly less than the amount of code it takes to parse and extract data from any other self-describing format.
The DOM shouldn't count! There are better parsers out there.
XML does solve the problem of having an interoperable and expressive markup language. It's being used a bit too violently, for sure, but that's because the industry is slow at figuring out the difference between syntactic and semantic interoperability.
Slashdot Mirror
You could use Amazon EC2 to do this today, with the caveat that some are blacklisting EC2 as mail forwarding servers due to spam.
Nick Negroponte is a stunning success. not.
Ted's many things, but stupid isn't one of them.
For a while, I would agree with the above, but I'm seeing a lot of signs of life out of Sun lately. They really get open source software, and are making money off of it. Simon Phipps this week at Jazoon '08 noted they're making more money off OpenSolaris these past couple years than the past 8 years combined.
It's very easy to pick at a company's decisions -- but it's really hard to turn around a huge company with an entrenched culture; other UNIX players weren't pure plays and are so diversified that it's both easy to hide their own problems (how's HP-UX doing?) or to entice hardware purchases because of broader relationships & bundling (IBM is classic at this).
Sun still has a lot of runway ahead of it. $3B in cash. $13.8b in revenues a year, which is UP $2.8b from 2005. The recent quarter problems are concerning but in context were a 0.5% drop in revenue year-over-year. Yes, it's very bad that they're not very profitable, but let's put it in context -- their big losses were 5 years ago or more. Apple was in much, much worse shape in the mid 90's. Motorola just lost $2.1 billion in revenue from their mobile phone division.
Sun is drifting slowly towards death, but, as they say, the green mile is sometimes quite long.
Sometimes innovations are what's in front of your nose & doesn't require great feats of engineering.
"Just a fucking PC" was the innovation of the XBox. It made game development easier. It allowed console games to become more powerful.
Innovation is about how the market responds to a product. It's about bringing new ideas to market ("hey, let's make a PC palatable for non-techies that just want to play games") vs. ("let's build a game machine") rather than just invention (which is far riskier).
Nope, that's pretty much B.S.
WIndows 3.1 was far from familiar with most PC users -- getting people to switch to a GUI at all was a big feat. Was it an engineering success on par with the first MacOS? Hell no. But that's not what innovation is always about -- it's how the market perceives and changes due to the product.
Similarly, Windows 95 was a huge change for 90% of the computing populace. Yes, it was Mac '88, but most people didn't know or care about that. It changed their world to become much more productive.
One might be able to apply "bland and familiar" to Office suites, but again it's just not true. Most office suites in the 80's were text-based DOS affairs. So Microsoft built theirs on the Macintosh. And, eventually took it to Windows. The competition took quite a while to catch up (WordPerfect 6 for Windows was damn buggy, but it got better, but then Corel screwed it & Quattro Pro up...)
The rise of the GUI in the PC world is largely due to Microsoft, and is largely why they still have a monopoly on that area (and Office productivity).
I think your advice works for certain programs, like Business or Commerce. Maybe Finance or Economics or Accounting... But in Engineering & CS type programs, I'm not so sure.
A large number of my friends in college (CS program) became grunt coders and are working their way up very slowly. I don't think they'll be introducing me to politicians any time soon. Some of my closer friends failed out or dropped out and are out of the industry completely. Some are still in academia.
In any case, my career social network did get seeded from college, but honestly I can point to only one college buddy that made a real difference, and it was mostly serendipitous... the rest of my college friends are just Facebook acquaintances. The real network I grew on my own work relationships.
Not a fact. You're spouting self-serving carcitured version of economic theory that isn't even applicable to analyzing a national labour market. Skilled immigration does not make wages fall.
For almost 70+ years, orthodox MACROeconomics suggests that wages are sticky downwards -- i.e. they don't tend to fall based on an increase of supply, and besides, if wages fall, aggregate demand falls, hurting everyone.
Anecdotally:
- I'll note that I'm a TN-1 worker, not H1-B, though I can't apply for a green card without H1-B; it's a lottery every year.
- Most H1-B's I've known from Canada and India make at least six figures in the SF Bay Area 10 years ago (and as much or more today).
- The USCIS is notoriously thorough in making sure that temporary work immigrants are skilled (i.e. in the bureaucracy's eyes, verifiably credentialed). You have to fit in their conformed boxes, or you'll have a hell of a time working in the U.S. legally.
IN a perfect world? Really.
Apple is in a trademark dispute. It happens. It's part of the system. In a perfect world, you'd understand that, and wouldn't troll forums in a vain attempt to "stick it to the man"....
Many technical people want to cling to what they're comfortable with. To the crusties, the web is just "one app" among many non-web apps vs. the newer view that different apps are just different ways of working with "the web" of documents & data -- so why not have a platform? Likewise, calls to make plugins or multimedia become isolated or minimized, to see less richness & more leanness, etc. is often the opposite of what many people seem to want, which seems to be "make everything I do available on the web".
it's funny how the pattern of arguments never go away. higher-level languages were a toy through the 1970's and a bit into the 80s, assembly was the only way for Real Nerds to program.... through 1994, a GUI was a toy, Real Nerds used the command prompt.. and that argument still had cred through the late 90's.... Then the web came out and people wondered why Gopher or FTP wasn't good enough... then the Web added IMG tags with animated GIFs and JS and Flash and people wondered why most didn't just turn these off or use Lynx...
What's common about these argument is that the conservative forces typically have wound up losing, and it seems to be happening quicker (i.e. there's less inertia these days)...
Next, solve this problem we have with IP having a limited address space, let's call it IPv6 ....
HTML 5 is the attempt to make it better, and it will probably take 10 years. There's no alternative that has the right players supporting it (and HTML 5 barely has Microsoft supporting it as is). If an alternative rewrite did emerge, it would have to be 10x better and have major support that isn't just Microsoft (which rules out Silverlight).
I'd say that HTTP and URIs themselves are enough, XML-based RPC is something of an abomination.
But otherwise, I don't think it's inefficient or ugly if a major goal is global-scale interoperability. Which seems to be the best path to flexibility these days...
FWIW, Elastra (who I just started working for) does clustered MySQL and PostgreSQL via EC2, at pennies on the dollar (basically an uplift over Amazon's hourly EC2 costs). It automatically uses S3 to ensure persistence, along with a messaging backbone to detect down instances. We also built our own static dynamic DNS mapper to deal with the static IP issue ;-) With the new zone feature, geographic failover is next....
The main goal is to enable flexibility in designing and configuring an infrastructure stack, by building-in a lot of the "rules" and dependency management "gotchas", and also providing markup languages to describe how new pieces of infrastructure fit in the cloud. The point is to make the "cloud" something a lot more automated than a traditional blade array or even virtualization, which is necessary for a public cloud like EC2 but even would be nice for a private cloud like your own Xen or VWware cluster...
A bunch of bad laws and incompetent judges later and they've lost the case though in defiance of all reason and common sense.
Who defines common sense? Common sense in the US legal and political system *is* the DMCA, and the trend is towards *more* IP protection before *less*. Years after we see Hollywood senators commit to Lessig's change congress (good luck), you might see the trend change.
When someone comes along to hurt you out of spite, you don't just cower and crawl away so they'll leave you alone, you stand up to them and you won't be stupid for doing it. That they lost when they stood up is to the eternal shame and humiliation of the whole system of 'justice' which has let down the BNetD team, and every person who thought that it could, just once, find correctly.
Spite had nothing to do with it. It was business. Amoralism = capitalism at its finest (and weakest). It's all about the money. The day economics is not deified in America is when you see "the right to reverse engineer" and freedom 0 have meaning to anyone in the mainstream.
roflmao
This week's TWIT had a good discussion of this tradeoff.
There's an old saying -- open if you're losing, closed if you're winning. Apple will open this thing up more as competition increases. Until then, user experience will dominate.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Apple's reputation is built completely around a fantastic user experience.... so do they:
a) allow developer freedom to create runaway apps that destroy that experience (OMG it's an iPhone Virus! Or something with backdoors to tape your phone conversations?)
b) restrict developer freedom to preserve the user experience.
They'll obviously choose the latter; the market has not punished them for it on the iPod. The device *has to take phone calls* regardless of what app you're using, so it will unceremoniously quit that custom app at any time.
Also, this is the *first version of the SDK*. It's not set in stone. Certainly instant messenger applications will become important, and they'll find a way to allow them to run in the background (or they'll make one themselves).
As for VOIP over EDGE, the complaints are ridiculous -- the latency of EDGE would make conversation nearly impossible. We're talking 56k modem speeds with 1000-2000ms latency at times! When the iPhone goes 3G, perhaps.
The high end game industry lives in its own (un)reality.
How the hell is it Intel and the PC's manufacturer's fault for integrated graphics, when most PC's are for business use, where they, at best, play card games on. People won't pay for power they don't need.
The market for insanely fast, high-end games seems to have shrunk in favour of casual games, MMOs, and "gameplay" games. Instead of working on graphics engines, the hotspot for innovation seems to be game play and game experience. Examples abound: Wii Sports, Bio Shock, Mass Effect, World in Conflict, the endless stream of "war games" like Gears of War and Call of Duty, etc.
None of these games can be played with Integrated graphics; WoW will run max ~10-15 fps on X3100 Integrated graphics, and will probably degrade without aftermarket cooling. Almost all sales people at Best Buy or even at the Apple Store are very clear about what models are meant for games, and which ones aren't. Yet Tim claims that poor, blind, customers are being sold PC's that won't play games. I guess he's never heard of a "2 week return policy"?
I think Doom 3 killed the market -- after that experience, people don't want to buy the same old 10 year old game with new graphics and some minor gameplay improvements.
For example, if you improve the graphics (a bit) AND the gameplay AND change the setting or genre, you may have a winner... The current graphics champ, Crysis, has done fairly well, selling 1 million through the end of January, despite early reports that it was flunking as bad as UT3. Gears of War 2 is hotly anticipated and I bet will slam UT3's sales despite being on the same engine. I haven't heard what UT3's sales are, last I saw it was 1.2 million for PS3 + PC combined, which seems to indicate PC sales sucked.
Expensing business dinners is a pretty common business practice in technology companies -- even expensive dinners. I've expensed a $2000 dinner before (for 10 people, though).
Of course, it should have some kind of connection to business -- whether it's a celebratory dinner (usually paid for), or a sales dinner, or one to solicit doners, etc...
"Uniqueness" is a bit fuzzy. More precisely, a good often has higher value due to Excludability, which in the case of recording art is what DRM attempts via algorithm, and what copyright attempts via legislation.
But, overall, I find your argument to be almost sophist. It's obvious that concerts and performances are excludable. That doesn't mean that society shouldn't make available some forms of legislated exclusion for recorded works. I don't believe at all that the mainstream (or even many technically inclined folks) believe that intellectual works should be a public good, due to the free rider problem.
Yes, there are problems with current copyright trends (unlimited extensions), but copyright law is likely here to stay, even if it's less applicable to digital medium.
And, to be honest, I find it amazing that any company would want you in a management position given your attitude, poor reading comprehension, and poor communication skills.
Describes most managers I've seen....
The people lining up around the block for the last year to buy the Nintendo Wii would like to disagree with you on that
My point was about non-technical people finding lust with things that usually only geeks loved.
I suppose video consoles might qualify, though it seems pretty geeky to line up around the block (says the guy that did so for WoW-TBC in Jan 07)...
RAZR was the first real example of this, yep. on the bright side, the iPhone is more than a pretty face.
Really, who gives two craps about thickness... it's all marketing from Apple. Who has honestly gone "Gee wizz, this laptop is just too darn THICK for my needs!"? Pretty much no-one...
How many people feel lust for a phone? Pretty much no one... until the iPhone.
How many people feel lust for a laptop? Pretty much no one... until they see something with sex appeal.
It's bizarre and somewhat telling about how many regular, non-technical people stop and ask about the iPhone if they someone use it. A similar effect is happening with the MacBook Air (zomg it's so thin! wow that's light! Look at how bright the screen is! Hey that SSD makes the apps snappy!)
The MacBook Air is the two-seater roadster of laptops -- a blast to drive, eye-catching, not overly practical, and sneer-inducing among those who want a larger, or faster, or more practical model.
Not saying it's universal, just saying that Apple seems to be tapping into a lust-factor that one hasn't seen with consumer electronics in some time, if ever.
My partial hope is that some non-XML syntax of RDF eventually catches on as a way to serialize data.
It's pretty simple in some ways, but capable of much sophistication.
CSV is a false sense of security. Unless you're using a battle-tested parser, many (lazy) programmers are killed by corner cases.
ASN.1 is a beast to parse.
Lisp S-Expressions are out of fashion -- I believe many are actively hostile to them, actually, as retaliation for having to (pretend to) learn it in school. (Sad but true)
INI files -- I don't believe there are many multi-platform parsers.
The one I agree with: RFC-822 is a simple, multi-platform alternative.
JSON probably too.
But XML doesn't solve that problem. I've found that the amount of code it takes to extract data from an arbitrary XML file even with an XML parser at hand is not significantly less than the amount of code it takes to parse and extract data from any other self-describing format.
The DOM shouldn't count! There are better parsers out there.
XML does solve the problem of having an interoperable and expressive markup language. It's being used a bit too violently, for sure, but that's because the industry is slow at figuring out the difference between syntactic and semantic interoperability.