Re:I don't understand...
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Like a lot of things, XML is popular because it's popular. Parsing is done with libraries, so programmers don't have to see or care how much overhead is involved, and it's well-known and well-understood, so it's easy to find people who are familiar with it. Every programmer and his dog knows the basics. It's easy to cobble up some in a text editor for testing purposes. You can hand it off to some guy in a completely separate division without worrying that he's going to find it particularly confusing. And you can work with it in pretty much any modern programming language without having to worry about the messy details. It's the path of least resistance. It may not be good, but it's frequently good enough, and that's usually the bottom line.
I mean, yeah, when I was a kid, we all worked in hand-optimized C and assembler, and tried to pack useful information into each bit of storage, but systems were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive back then. These days, I write perl or python scripts that spit out forty bytes of XML to encode a single boolean flag, and it doesn't even faze me. Welcome to the 21st century.:)
Creating a handful of accounts based on roles is still a big win over creating a separate account for each and every service you might need. Having five accounts is more trouble than one, but a lot less than having fifty. So, basically, you can dial up the level of consolidation/complication you need.
A lot of people like to keep their work and personal lives separate, so, at a bare minimum, a lot of people will want at least two sign-ons.
In addition to the excellent rebuttal offered by Tony Hoyle, I have to point out this flawed logic here:
If its Open Source [...] if any retribution if said security is broken, who's accountable? With 99% of all popular FLOSS, you can find out who's accountable by checking the public revision control, to see exactly who wrote those broken "80 lines of code." With proprietary code, you usually can't even find out what, exactly, is broken, let alone how and which lines of code are responsible. This makes FLOSS a Big Win for security apps.
In those rare cases where there isn't a public repository, it's usually because the code is a one-man operation, so again, assigning blame is pretty easy.
In the case of FLOSS binary packages, you can also start by checking the key used to sign the package; that will tell you not who's responsible, but who has volunteered to accept blame, which is not a bad place to start. Once you've got that, you can also optionally go on to check the source repository if you want to assign some more appropriate and/or specific blame.
With most proprietary software, you can't even necessarily guarantee that what you installed came from the vendor you thought it did.
And of course, with FLOSS, if you can find the problem (and it's hard to fix a problem you can't find, no matter whether the code is open or closed), you can arrange to have it fixed on the systems under your control without waiting for the vendors to get their act together to package up and publish a fixed replacement. This may be more work than it's worth for a lot of ordinary apps, but for security apps, it can be an absolutely vital feature. And for non-FLOSS (or at least, for non-source-available systems), it's not even an option.
Huh? What are you on about? Have you even read tCatB? How is the Linux project (Raymond's canonical bazaar) becoming more like the GNU project (Raymond's canonical cathedral)? And what does capital/corporate funding have to do with any of that?
Who is decrying what? That's the part I really don't understand. You seem to have this delusion that Free/Libre software is anti-corporate, which has never been even remotely true. Why would libertarians decry corporate sponsorship? And how on earth did you come to the obviously-misguided conclusion that it's the developers seeking sponsorship, rather than the actual situation, where it's the corporations (and governments) using Linux that are anxious to sustain its development. Most popular free software projects that I know of have more capital than they know what to do with, donated unasked by corporations that rely on the software and aren't sure of any other way to try to ensure that the projects continue.
That's right. There are no download tools that could possibly exist besides a browser. Before browsers were created, nobody ever downloaded anything. Furthermore, there's no way that an OEM could possibly bundle their choice of browser with a system. If it isn't created by MS, it can't possibly be installed on a Windows system.
I thought the story was that the efforts to promote ODF and "suppress" OOXML were sponsored and led by Sun in order to boost sales of Staroffice. Now it's supposed to be IBM? Can't MS make up their minds who their real enemies are? (Hint: anyone with a stake or interest in a free market for software and IT services. Or, more generally, anyone in favor of free markets.)
I would also like to point out that Slackware has been around longer than Debian By a couple of months. Both projects started in '93. Of course, since Slackware was basically just a simple fork of the existing SLS system (which in turn was not much more than a bootstrap tool added to the existing Sunsite archives, which is what I used), it was able to make its first release almost immediately, while the far-more ambitious Debian project took quite a bit longer to reach something they were willing to call "1.x". (Although the 0.9x stuff was pretty solid in my experience.)
While your point that different tools serve different purposes is a good one, I've broken too many Slackware systems over the years to have any desire to return to using it for anything that doesn't absolutely demand it. Perhaps if I worked on embedded systems, it might seem like an attractive option, but I tend to think that I'd prefer something more like Gentoo or FreeBSD in a case like that. Simplicity can be a virtue, but sometimes, too much simplicity can actually make things harder. And that's been my experience with Slackware. Heck, if I just wanted simplicity, I could switch to FreeDOS. Now that's a simple system!:)
Some of us have to support legacy MS systems, even if we don't use such systems for our own desktops.
If I'm in the office, I can use the remote desktop protocol to log into one of our Winboxes, and get to ms.com that way, but that's kind of silly, and it won't work at all if I'm at home or on the road, where I have no direct access to Windows at all. (While we still have some windows boxes in the office, none of them are outward-facing--we're not that foolish.)
Basically, this change benefits no one and causes at least minor harm to some. Another brilliant MS move.
I'm sorry, but "in a new way" means its not an existing standard, de-facto or otherwise. It doesn't matter if it maps to similar structures--png and gif both map to bits on a screen, but they're very different standards. And this is completely different from the.doc standard, even if it's structurally similar internally (an implementation detail that you and I will never see).
And no, this doesn't document their de-facto standards. In fact, they've just deprecated the backwards-compatibility section because it didn't document anything. Leaving us with a redundant, pointless psuedo-standard whose only possible advantage (that I can see) is those deprecated add-on bits. The rest of it is simply incompatible-with-existing-standards for incompatibilities sake, as far as I can see.
What's more, standardization locks microsofts hands to a great degree in what they can do. You mean the way that the POSIX standard locked MS in? When was the last time one of their systems was certified to comply with POSIX? And yet, somehow, they continue to sell their systems to governments which at one time insisted on POSIX-compliance.
What I don't understand is why so many people are so violently against standardizing the already defacto standard format? I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but that's not what's being proposed here. OOXML != MS.DOC. Even if the two are structurally related somehow, this does absolutely nothing to document their existing format. If I have a binary.doc file and a complete copy of the OOXML spec, I've got nothing. The file is still in an impenetrable binary format; OOXML doesn't tell me anything about how to read it.
We already have an open standard for word-processor documents and spreadsheets (ODF). What advantage to anyone (except MS) is there in adding another? Backwards-compatibility is an obvious red herring. Tying MS's hands could be done just as well with ODF. Do you have any actual technical reasons that OOXML is better (or even just not-worse) as a standard than ODF? Ignoring the fact that MS wants to kill ODF, and will struggle to avoid supporting ODF for as long as they can? Is there something OOXML can do that ODF can't? As far as I can see, a document format simply needs to specify how data goes on a page; as long as the right text goes in the right place in the right size, there should be no problem, Why do we need two standards to accomplish this?
Is this all just because ODF doesn't specify that documents should change randomly whenever you select a different printer?:)
Anyway, I'll give you partial credit for the ties-MS's-hands theory. I seriously doubt that MS will feel their hands are tied, but I suppose it's possible, even if unlikely. Aside from that, I'm still not seeing any technical reasons to support OOXML as an ISO standard. But I am happy to be having an actual dialog. Got any more?
The office suite with 90% marketshare is moving to a documented, text-based format. And you can see NO technical good in it at all? That's not the issue here. I've argued myself that this is a surprisingly good thing in the past. The question here, though, is not, why is it good that MS is moving to a somewhat more open (or at least less opaque) format. The question is, why should this format be given ISO's blessing?
MS made the decision to move to XML years ago. That's over and done with. I'm a little surprised and pleased that they carried through with it, but it's still in the past. The result looks ugly and maldesigned in my opinion, but at least it's a translucent format, if not truly transparent. It is a major step up from their previous opaque formats. But the question is, why should this ugly first-pass hack of theirs be given the blessing of ISO when there's already a comparable ISO format which MS completely ignored? (Not to mention all the other relevant ISO standards which they should have incorporated, but decided instead to ignore in favor of re-inventing more wheels.)
MS has done fine with de-facto standards in the past. They've taken over most of the software market using de-facto standards in the vast majority of cases. Why does this awkward, stumbling step in the right direction need to be a de-jure standard rather than just another MS de-facto standard? Who benefits from that? (Besides MS, of course.)
I think what you mean is that you've done a lot of reading and listening to those that have a political or financial stake in the outcome of the OOXML standardization. Yeah, that's pretty much what he said.
Has it ever occured to you that listening to people like Rob Weir or Andy Updegrove might only give you part of the story? I think that's why he asked for the other side of the story. And yet, all he gets is a snarky response suggesting that he's only listening to one side of the story. He said, "I like to give opposing views a chance - since I may be the one wrong." As someone who feels the same way, I'd love to hear some arguments from the other side. But when a direct request for arguments from the other side is met with a sarcastic, "you're only listening to one side", one gets the feeling that there really is no other side to argue.
And yes, I saw the one brief one where it was suggested that MS moving to a more open XML-based format is, in itself, a good thing; a point I had already thought of and definitely agree with. But that has nothing to do with making 00XML an ISO standard. If MS wants to become more open, they don't need ISO's blessing to do so. What possible arguments could there be for granting this incompatible-with-existing-standards not-yet-a-standard the blessings of ISO? (Besides, of course, the obvious "MS can make more money that way" one.) Inquiring minds want to know. Inquiring minds don't want to be told, "you're not inquiring," because that's obviously BS! And only reinforces our suspicions that there is no more to know.
You must not have looked very hard--I recently went to Best Buy's website (I know, I know, but I just wanted to see if someplace that mainstream had anything), and not only did they have players with acknowledged Ogg Vorbis support, but it was one of the choices on their "let us help you pick the right player for your needs" agent.
Ok, the very cheapest players didn't have Vorbis support, but there were some reasonably cheap ones that did (basically, the Samsungs). Much cheaper, at any rate, than the 200 euro Cowons that some else mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Once I knew the model I wanted, I was able to pick one up for about $75 US. For a 2GB player, I don't think that's bad at all.
Of course, if $75 is outside of your "'budget' price range", then yeah, maybe you're screwed, but for most people, I don't think that's a price they'd consider outrageous.
I've personally been using Speakeasy for years. They seem to be much more honest in their dealings, allow you to run a server, and don't (apparently) block or degrade certain protocols, although their TOS still contain some "excessive usage" weasel words IIRC. The only problem is that it's DSL (and not even cheap DSL), so the bandwidth to price ratio isn't nearly what you'd get from Cable [...] The bandwidth-to-price ratio isn't nearly what Cable promises. I believe it's pretty competitive with what Cable actually offers, though. Then again, if Comcast keeps going the way they're going, I think avian carriers may start to be competitive!:)
Always a classic, but if you're going to quote the good MC, the least you could do is link to him as well. (And obviously, you know how to link since you linked to Wikipedia.)
Darl and co. simply assumed that everybody is as corrupt as they are, and that IBM would roll over because they had something to hide. The only word to describe this is stupid. Not as stupid as it might appear at first glance. The last big tech company that Darl and co. had adversarial dealings with was MS. Remember that SCO, back when they were known as Caldera, ended up with ownership of DR-DOS and its associated lawsuit for a while. When you're dealing with a company like MS, I'm sure the threat of discovery is a threat. The notion that SCO might leak some of what they turned up in the DR-DOS discovery probably had more than a little to do with why MS ended up settling. I'm sure that's why SCO kept asking IBM for more and more and more discovery; they hadn't found anything blackmail-worthy, but were convinced that it was there to be found, somewhere.
I mean, not to defend Darl and Ralph, but once you've seen what utter contempt a big company like MS has for the law, it's probably hard to imagine that other similar companies are any different. Unfortunately for SCO and The Plan, IBM has been around the block once or twice, and has had a huge target painted on their backs for much longer than MS has even existed. As a former monopolist themselves, they've learned from the mistakes the MS is still making, and from a few that MS has yet to make (but surely will). And one of the things they've learned (something that MS is unlikely to learn unless forced by a loss of their monopoly position) is that integrity is something that customers admire and respect and desire in a vendor. Even those customers who don't have the quality themselves tend to desire it in their vendors.
I can't think of a good car analogy, so I'm going to have to violate Slashdot tradition and go another way. It's like SCO managed to beat the tough-but-inexperienced playground bully, and then decided that meant they were tough enough to take on a recently-retired heavyweight boxing champion. Unfortunately, the champion has skills they never dreamed existed. Ok, yeah, it was stupid, but not as stupid as it might appear at first glance.
One of the things that really made GPLv2 approachable was it's directness and simplicity. Wow, you've got a funny notion of "directness and simplicity".
I've been listening to people complain about the length and complexity of the GPL for years! Frankly, I think once you've gone beyond the point where the average person can easily grasp it (which the GPLv2 was clearly beyond, IMO), there's little point in not going the rest of the way to do things right (which the GPLv3 mostly does, IMO). I particularly like the increased compatibility with other licenses. V3 may be longer, but it still seems pretty straightforward to me.
Bottom line: so many people misunderstand or misinterpret v2 on a regular basis that it's really hard for me to believe that v3 is going to make things noticeably worse. People are still going to be posting about how the GPL means you can't charge money and you're going to be forced to release all of your company's code. Dummies will remain dummies. And I think I grok both versions pretty well, so I really don't see a problem.
Of course, it may just be that I'm old enough to remember the huge controversies and flamewars about v2 when that was new. Kids today seem to accept it as standard and noncontroversial, but it was as despised and reviled in its day as v3 is now.
Why do they think all the additional complexity of the GPLv3 is needed? That's what the BSD folks have been asking about the GPLv2 for years. Personally, I don't see a lot of difference betwixt the two--they're both complex, but not so complex that I can't understand them. I don't think v3 is perfect, but I think it's a huge improvement, especially the optional-compatibility features. I'm not sure what you mean by "third-party developers", but I certainly get no headaches from v3. And hey, if you don't like it, don't use my code (or stick to the stuff I release under a BSD license). That's freedom for ya!:)
If by "handful", you mean "hundreds", then yes. That is to say, "hundreds" if and only if we limit ourselves to bands and musicians that are at least moderately successful. If we look at the number of bands that are at least trying to establish themselves this way, then we get into the multiple thousands. Currently 2,625 bands on the Internet Archive alone, which doesn't include Phish or Radiohead or Dave Matthews or the Allman Brothers or They Might Be Giants or Sonic Youth, but does include the Grateful Dead and Little Feat and the Smashing Pumpkins and the Decemberists and Tenacious D and Death Cab for Cutie and the Butthole Surfers.
There's quite a bit thriving on "piracy" in the US/UK as well. It may not be the mainstream model in such places, but it can be quite successful for those who give it a shot. Give-away-the-recordings-to-sell-the-shows works if your shows are interesting and varied enough to attract a regular audience. It's an obvious riff on the classic "give away the razor" scheme. Actually, I'm more surprised to hear about it working in a country where "GDP_per_capita some_limit" than the reverse.
No, his purpose is to make it so all software has its source code available for modification. Not all software, only software that is distributed. If it's not distributed, then the source code must be available unless you accidentally lost it or deleted it or something (and a license can't protect against programmer error/stupidity).
Of course "available for modification" can be a complex situation when the "you" that has the code (and hasn't distributed it) is a large organization--but that's life in the large organization food chain!:)
Does the trick on my system. I also note that this is not a flaw in Realplayer! If it were, I would be vulnerable, but since it relies on ActiveX, which I don't have, I seem to have have litle to worry about. This is (Yet Another) ActiveX exploit. Yawn. Even the open source guys (and these days Realplayer is mostly open-source except for their one special codec) can't make a Windows-based system secure.
Caldera was formed by Ray Norda, founder and one-time CEO of Novell, and for many years, the public face of Novell, just as Billy is/was the public face of Microsoft and Larry Ellison is the public face of Oracle. However, Caldera was never directly connected to Novell. Norda had, IIRC, already retired from Novell at the time he founded Caldera, and the startup money came, IIRC, came from an umbrella foundation set up by Norda directly.
The biggest difference is that we know Darl is lying. He was hired as CEO of a Linux company, but claims he never heard of Linux till a couple of years later (after the company was renamed from Caldera to The SCO Group, which was after Darl was hired). He claims to have found millions of lines of illegally copied code, but when challenged to present this in court, he offered nothing, merely a handful of vague allegations about a couple hundred instances of "methods and procedures" (which aren't copyrightable). If Darl's actions were consistent with his claims to be acting out of principle, then you might have a minor point (although the principle of "mine, hands off!" is quite different from the principle of "everybody share and play nice"). But Darl's actions were clearly not motivated by principle; they were motivated by the possibility that this particular scam might have a big payout if they got lucky.
Darl's not a self-righteous asshole (although he likes to play one in front of reporters); he's an unprincipled liar and scammer, and as such, he gets no sympathy from me whatsoever. I don't want to Godwinize this thread, but there have been some pretty vile heads of state who have claimed to be acting out of principle, and I don't think it's appropriate to compare them to, say, Gandhi. Even though Gandhi was not above breaking the law.
Actually, that's the last thing we want. If SCO goes Chaper 7 (gets dismantled) before Novell gets a ruling against it, then they've won a partial victory. Even if they enter chapter 7, the fact that the IBM lawsuit has a potential $5 billion means that the bankruptcy trustee has to give serious consideration to the option of pursuing the case, because that $5B would go a long way towards paying off the outstanding creditors.
Furthermore, IBM is still entitled to a ruling on their Lantham Act (corporate libel) claims. It's not just about the money. If SCO goes chapter 7, IBM is unlikely to see a dime on any judgements they may win, but they can still win a ruling that it was libel. And that is, as you point out, really the point.
And finally, beyond that, there's still the possibility of piercing the corporate veil. So many of SCO's problems (like the Lantham Act claims) stem from the public posturing of individual executives that IBM may well have an excuse to pursue some of these individuals separately. We'll just have to see how it all plays out.
Depends on who's counting and where. One is sales - but another popular metric has been browser identification. Which is also misleading because of identification forging, which has been quite popular with non-IE browsers, due to the (large but shrinking) number of sites which insist on IE for no particular reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Like a lot of things, XML is popular because it's popular. Parsing is done with libraries, so programmers don't have to see or care how much overhead is involved, and it's well-known and well-understood, so it's easy to find people who are familiar with it. Every programmer and his dog knows the basics. It's easy to cobble up some in a text editor for testing purposes. You can hand it off to some guy in a completely separate division without worrying that he's going to find it particularly confusing. And you can work with it in pretty much any modern programming language without having to worry about the messy details. It's the path of least resistance. It may not be good, but it's frequently good enough, and that's usually the bottom line.
:)
I mean, yeah, when I was a kid, we all worked in hand-optimized C and assembler, and tried to pack useful information into each bit of storage, but systems were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive back then. These days, I write perl or python scripts that spit out forty bytes of XML to encode a single boolean flag, and it doesn't even faze me. Welcome to the 21st century.
Creating a handful of accounts based on roles is still a big win over creating a separate account for each and every service you might need. Having five accounts is more trouble than one, but a lot less than having fifty. So, basically, you can dial up the level of consolidation/complication you need.
A lot of people like to keep their work and personal lives separate, so, at a bare minimum, a lot of people will want at least two sign-ons.
In those rare cases where there isn't a public repository, it's usually because the code is a one-man operation, so again, assigning blame is pretty easy.
In the case of FLOSS binary packages, you can also start by checking the key used to sign the package; that will tell you not who's responsible, but who has volunteered to accept blame, which is not a bad place to start. Once you've got that, you can also optionally go on to check the source repository if you want to assign some more appropriate and/or specific blame.
With most proprietary software, you can't even necessarily guarantee that what you installed came from the vendor you thought it did.
And of course, with FLOSS, if you can find the problem (and it's hard to fix a problem you can't find, no matter whether the code is open or closed), you can arrange to have it fixed on the systems under your control without waiting for the vendors to get their act together to package up and publish a fixed replacement. This may be more work than it's worth for a lot of ordinary apps, but for security apps, it can be an absolutely vital feature. And for non-FLOSS (or at least, for non-source-available systems), it's not even an option.
Huh? What are you on about? Have you even read tCatB? How is the Linux project (Raymond's canonical bazaar) becoming more like the GNU project (Raymond's canonical cathedral)? And what does capital/corporate funding have to do with any of that?
Who is decrying what? That's the part I really don't understand. You seem to have this delusion that Free/Libre software is anti-corporate, which has never been even remotely true. Why would libertarians decry corporate sponsorship? And how on earth did you come to the obviously-misguided conclusion that it's the developers seeking sponsorship, rather than the actual situation, where it's the corporations (and governments) using Linux that are anxious to sustain its development. Most popular free software projects that I know of have more capital than they know what to do with, donated unasked by corporations that rely on the software and aren't sure of any other way to try to ensure that the projects continue.
That's right. There are no download tools that could possibly exist besides a browser. Before browsers were created, nobody ever downloaded anything. Furthermore, there's no way that an OEM could possibly bundle their choice of browser with a system. If it isn't created by MS, it can't possibly be installed on a Windows system.
I thought the story was that the efforts to promote ODF and "suppress" OOXML were sponsored and led by Sun in order to boost sales of Staroffice. Now it's supposed to be IBM? Can't MS make up their minds who their real enemies are? (Hint: anyone with a stake or interest in a free market for software and IT services. Or, more generally, anyone in favor of free markets.)
While your point that different tools serve different purposes is a good one, I've broken too many Slackware systems over the years to have any desire to return to using it for anything that doesn't absolutely demand it. Perhaps if I worked on embedded systems, it might seem like an attractive option, but I tend to think that I'd prefer something more like Gentoo or FreeBSD in a case like that. Simplicity can be a virtue, but sometimes, too much simplicity can actually make things harder. And that's been my experience with Slackware. Heck, if I just wanted simplicity, I could switch to FreeDOS. Now that's a simple system!
Some of us have to support legacy MS systems, even if we don't use such systems for our own desktops.
If I'm in the office, I can use the remote desktop protocol to log into one of our Winboxes, and get to ms.com that way, but that's kind of silly, and it won't work at all if I'm at home or on the road, where I have no direct access to Windows at all. (While we still have some windows boxes in the office, none of them are outward-facing--we're not that foolish.)
Basically, this change benefits no one and causes at least minor harm to some. Another brilliant MS move.
And no, this doesn't document their de-facto standards. In fact, they've just deprecated the backwards-compatibility section because it didn't document anything. Leaving us with a redundant, pointless psuedo-standard whose only possible advantage (that I can see) is those deprecated add-on bits. The rest of it is simply incompatible-with-existing-standards for incompatibilities sake, as far as I can see. What's more, standardization locks microsofts hands to a great degree in what they can do. You mean the way that the POSIX standard locked MS in? When was the last time one of their systems was certified to comply with POSIX? And yet, somehow, they continue to sell their systems to governments which at one time insisted on POSIX-compliance. What I don't understand is why so many people are so violently against standardizing the already defacto standard format? I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but that's not what's being proposed here. OOXML != MS.DOC. Even if the two are structurally related somehow, this does absolutely nothing to document their existing format. If I have a binary
We already have an open standard for word-processor documents and spreadsheets (ODF). What advantage to anyone (except MS) is there in adding another? Backwards-compatibility is an obvious red herring. Tying MS's hands could be done just as well with ODF. Do you have any actual technical reasons that OOXML is better (or even just not-worse) as a standard than ODF? Ignoring the fact that MS wants to kill ODF, and will struggle to avoid supporting ODF for as long as they can? Is there something OOXML can do that ODF can't? As far as I can see, a document format simply needs to specify how data goes on a page; as long as the right text goes in the right place in the right size, there should be no problem, Why do we need two standards to accomplish this?
Is this all just because ODF doesn't specify that documents should change randomly whenever you select a different printer?
Anyway, I'll give you partial credit for the ties-MS's-hands theory. I seriously doubt that MS will feel their hands are tied, but I suppose it's possible, even if unlikely. Aside from that, I'm still not seeing any technical reasons to support OOXML as an ISO standard. But I am happy to be having an actual dialog. Got any more?
MS made the decision to move to XML years ago. That's over and done with. I'm a little surprised and pleased that they carried through with it, but it's still in the past. The result looks ugly and maldesigned in my opinion, but at least it's a translucent format, if not truly transparent. It is a major step up from their previous opaque formats. But the question is, why should this ugly first-pass hack of theirs be given the blessing of ISO when there's already a comparable ISO format which MS completely ignored? (Not to mention all the other relevant ISO standards which they should have incorporated, but decided instead to ignore in favor of re-inventing more wheels.)
MS has done fine with de-facto standards in the past. They've taken over most of the software market using de-facto standards in the vast majority of cases. Why does this awkward, stumbling step in the right direction need to be a de-jure standard rather than just another MS de-facto standard? Who benefits from that? (Besides MS, of course.)
And yes, I saw the one brief one where it was suggested that MS moving to a more open XML-based format is, in itself, a good thing; a point I had already thought of and definitely agree with. But that has nothing to do with making 00XML an ISO standard. If MS wants to become more open, they don't need ISO's blessing to do so. What possible arguments could there be for granting this incompatible-with-existing-standards not-yet-a-standard the blessings of ISO? (Besides, of course, the obvious "MS can make more money that way" one.) Inquiring minds want to know. Inquiring minds don't want to be told, "you're not inquiring," because that's obviously BS! And only reinforces our suspicions that there is no more to know.
You must not have looked very hard--I recently went to Best Buy's website (I know, I know, but I just wanted to see if someplace that mainstream had anything), and not only did they have players with acknowledged Ogg Vorbis support, but it was one of the choices on their "let us help you pick the right player for your needs" agent.
Ok, the very cheapest players didn't have Vorbis support, but there were some reasonably cheap ones that did (basically, the Samsungs). Much cheaper, at any rate, than the 200 euro Cowons that some else mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Once I knew the model I wanted, I was able to pick one up for about $75 US. For a 2GB player, I don't think that's bad at all.
Of course, if $75 is outside of your "'budget' price range", then yeah, maybe you're screwed, but for most people, I don't think that's a price they'd consider outrageous.
Always a classic, but if you're going to quote the good MC, the least you could do is link to him as well. (And obviously, you know how to link since you linked to Wikipedia.)
http://www.mchawking.com/
I mean, not to defend Darl and Ralph, but once you've seen what utter contempt a big company like MS has for the law, it's probably hard to imagine that other similar companies are any different. Unfortunately for SCO and The Plan, IBM has been around the block once or twice, and has had a huge target painted on their backs for much longer than MS has even existed. As a former monopolist themselves, they've learned from the mistakes the MS is still making, and from a few that MS has yet to make (but surely will). And one of the things they've learned (something that MS is unlikely to learn unless forced by a loss of their monopoly position) is that integrity is something that customers admire and respect and desire in a vendor. Even those customers who don't have the quality themselves tend to desire it in their vendors.
I can't think of a good car analogy, so I'm going to have to violate Slashdot tradition and go another way. It's like SCO managed to beat the tough-but-inexperienced playground bully, and then decided that meant they were tough enough to take on a recently-retired heavyweight boxing champion. Unfortunately, the champion has skills they never dreamed existed. Ok, yeah, it was stupid, but not as stupid as it might appear at first glance.
Bottom line: so many people misunderstand or misinterpret v2 on a regular basis that it's really hard for me to believe that v3 is going to make things noticeably worse. People are still going to be posting about how the GPL means you can't charge money and you're going to be forced to release all of your company's code. Dummies will remain dummies. And I think I grok both versions pretty well, so I really don't see a problem.
Of course, it may just be that I'm old enough to remember the huge controversies and flamewars about v2 when that was new. Kids today seem to accept it as standard and noncontroversial, but it was as despised and reviled in its day as v3 is now.
If by "handful", you mean "hundreds", then yes. That is to say, "hundreds" if and only if we limit ourselves to bands and musicians that are at least moderately successful. If we look at the number of bands that are at least trying to establish themselves this way, then we get into the multiple thousands. Currently 2,625 bands on the Internet Archive alone, which doesn't include Phish or Radiohead or Dave Matthews or the Allman Brothers or They Might Be Giants or Sonic Youth, but does include the Grateful Dead and Little Feat and the Smashing Pumpkins and the Decemberists and Tenacious D and Death Cab for Cutie and the Butthole Surfers.
There's quite a bit thriving on "piracy" in the US/UK as well. It may not be the mainstream model in such places, but it can be quite successful for those who give it a shot. Give-away-the-recordings-to-sell-the-shows works if your shows are interesting and varied enough to attract a regular audience. It's an obvious riff on the classic "give away the razor" scheme. Actually, I'm more surprised to hear about it working in a country where "GDP_per_capita some_limit" than the reverse.
Of course "available for modification" can be a complex situation when the "you" that has the code (and hasn't distributed it) is a large organization--but that's life in the large organization food chain!
Caldera was formed by Ray Norda, founder and one-time CEO of Novell, and for many years, the public face of Novell, just as Billy is/was the public face of Microsoft and Larry Ellison is the public face of Oracle. However, Caldera was never directly connected to Novell. Norda had, IIRC, already retired from Novell at the time he founded Caldera, and the startup money came, IIRC, came from an umbrella foundation set up by Norda directly.
The biggest difference is that we know Darl is lying. He was hired as CEO of a Linux company, but claims he never heard of Linux till a couple of years later (after the company was renamed from Caldera to The SCO Group, which was after Darl was hired). He claims to have found millions of lines of illegally copied code, but when challenged to present this in court, he offered nothing, merely a handful of vague allegations about a couple hundred instances of "methods and procedures" (which aren't copyrightable). If Darl's actions were consistent with his claims to be acting out of principle, then you might have a minor point (although the principle of "mine, hands off!" is quite different from the principle of "everybody share and play nice"). But Darl's actions were clearly not motivated by principle; they were motivated by the possibility that this particular scam might have a big payout if they got lucky.
Darl's not a self-righteous asshole (although he likes to play one in front of reporters); he's an unprincipled liar and scammer, and as such, he gets no sympathy from me whatsoever. I don't want to Godwinize this thread, but there have been some pretty vile heads of state who have claimed to be acting out of principle, and I don't think it's appropriate to compare them to, say, Gandhi. Even though Gandhi was not above breaking the law.
Furthermore, IBM is still entitled to a ruling on their Lantham Act (corporate libel) claims. It's not just about the money. If SCO goes chapter 7, IBM is unlikely to see a dime on any judgements they may win, but they can still win a ruling that it was libel. And that is, as you point out, really the point.
And finally, beyond that, there's still the possibility of piercing the corporate veil. So many of SCO's problems (like the Lantham Act claims) stem from the public posturing of individual executives that IBM may well have an excuse to pursue some of these individuals separately. We'll just have to see how it all plays out.