Um, maybe because XML is an OPEN standard versus a proprietary closed format that only one company truely understands?
Customer demand is what drove MS to implement XML. Unfortunately for customers, MS chooses to SCREW them instead with a token gesture.
From the article (which you must not have read):
"The whole point, however, is to empower users by giving them direct access to an open file format so that they can mine, re-use and re-purpose information any way they can think of. Plus, the standardization of the file formats and related XML transformation technologies means that powerful machines can be constructed to service advanced content management and collaboration needs without having to beg the application vendor for permission or future enhancements."
By not FULLY supporting XML, it pretty much limits your use to import / export as opposed to full interaction / collaboration, integration, etc.
BTW, if you need to repair your partition, please do so. If you mean to say FUCK, then do so.
That's the BEST we could hope for? Huh? Maybe I misunderstand your entire post, but XML does a GREAT job of handling formatting data. AbiWord's native file format is XML. If MS did a proper job of supporting XML, then you could take a third party XML to Postscript converter and the output should look the same as if you printed it nativly from Word.
Anyway, when this topic came up about a year ago when XML support was announced, I mentioned that MS would Never support XML completly in it's office products as it would kill MS's stranglehold on office suites. Many disagreed. Some things never change.
Spammers ALREADY spread the load over thousands of open relays. Perhaps you were unware of this (this is why filtering based on open relays is not very effective.) New proxies and relays pop up every day. History is telling me that the same thing will happen with any new system. Can you say with 100% certainty that it will not?
Hash cash (and things like it) would also put a Major dent into perfectly valid things like mailing lists and customer notifications (the non-spam kind.) The "solution" is for everyone to be 100% on the ball, white listing everyone they communicate with, etc. The Reality is that most people using the internet are really fucking stupid when it comes to technology and won't be able to grasp the concepts of how the system works. Hence it will put an undue burden on legitimate uses, and caused much grief for the majority of users on the internet. The backlash would be amazing.
In a perfect world, hash cash would be a great solution, but we do not live in a perfect world. Bottom line is that I share your desire for a new system that would solve the spam problem, but from a business, technical, and social standpoint I know that would fail.
You really don't understand the scope of the problem. Hell, just the political shit alone will take a couple years. EVERYONE has to have their input, they will haggle over the details, etc. For existing standards, even minor changes take years to agree on and implement, and you need Many years of backwards compatability. This is the REALITY of business and government.
What you and I wish for and would like are very different from the real world. I share your desire for a new system that would eliminate spam, but the realities of the world tell me that it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Email is EVERYWHERE, and it's embedded all over the place in PDA's, phones, custom business software, etc, even my PRINTER supports it. Desire to do a new standard has nothing to do with the ABILITY to actually develop and deploy it everywhere and THAT's what will determine the time line.
Then there is the question of what happens when (not "if") spammers figure out a way around the new system....
If spam is already illegal, then why isn't the government going after these criminals? The number of cases where the government hsa actually prosecuted a spammer can probably be counted on one hand, and it's usually because of FRAUD, not the fact that it was SPAM. We only have ONE federal law that can POSSIBLY be used against spam, and that's the junk-fax law. Unfortunatly, it has not held up in court when used in exactly this way. So please, point me to the FEDERAL law that bans spam....
Most of the abused open proxies and relays that are being abused are in other countries, while the spammer and the company / person that hired the spammer is right here in the good-ole USA. SO how are you going to go after these ISP's that have TIME AFTER TIME refused to do anything about it (assuming that they even speak english in the first place...) Anti-spammers have gone after providers of open relays for YEARS yet the problem is increasing, not decreasing.
It's like you are going after the government that provides the roads that the drunk driver drives on when he kills your kid rather than the drunk driver himself. This makes no sense.
The bottom line (and you have not addressed this) is that filtering MASKS the problem. It does NOTHING to solve it. I use filters myself - it's not that filters are bad, it's that they don't solve the problem.
There are bazillions of email clients, some legacy with no source. People still will use these clients for various reasons. Since "hash cash" or something like it is used, they will gateway through another server that adds the "hash cash". Just like there are hundreds of thousands of open relays and proxies now, there will be hundreds of thousands of "hash cash" proxies for spammers to exploit.
Just as there is no real incentive to close todays open relays and proxies (and for every one closed it seems like 3 new ones pop up) many apathetic admins will not care that their CPU cycles are used by a spammer.
So there you go, Billions spent on a new system that spammers find a way around anyway. Back to square one.
In order to really make a dent in the problem, you need to remove the benefit of spam. Right now, it's increased sales. If instead it turns into jail time....
Is your spam problem GONE or is it simply hidden from view? You and your ISP have alreay paid the cost of that spam. The cost to you seems minimal, but to a large ISP it is HUGE. When your ISP raises it's rates due to the volume of spam that you do not see yet still receive, will you still be happy with your filter as "The Solution" to spam?
Don't get me wrong, I have been filtering spam for years. Filters can minimize the impact of the spam problem, but they do nothing to solve it.
So you wouldn't support legislation to limit it KNOWING that it's only going to get worse? At the rate it's increasing, we don't have 5 years. We probably only have ONE before email is completely useless. With legislation, we can at least bankrupt spammers, and possibly even get them put in jail.
... And exactly how do you handle spam while you invent this new protocol? Consider that it will take at LEAST 5 years to design, develop, and adopt a new technology. Shit, the amount of legacy systems is HUGE! Even my freaking PRINTER supports it.
Citing "Freedom of speach", the first ammendment, etc, there still seems to be an ignorant crowd that thinks that we shouldn't have any legal means to curb spam. They still think technology can solve a social problem. As ISPs put increasingly invasive filters on email servers, legit email gets lost. When 99% of all email is spam, will you STILL think it's ok? When ISP's raise your internet fees due to spam, will you still defend its legality? When you are on the road paying $.50 / minute downloading spam for half an hour, even though your local filter blocks it from your view will you still be happy?
There are people who want to re-invent the email protocol to solve the problem. Yeah, doing something technological can help the FUTURE, but what are we going to do for the 5 years it takes to develop, implement, and deploy this new technology?
Actually, the articles you list actually PROVE my statement. Thanks!
If Apple was NOT anal about the firewire name, they would simply let ANYONE who wanted to implement 1394 use the name. Instead, it still must be licensed. What they did is pass the baton to the 1394 people to do the licensing.
Problem is, this was too late. USB2.0 already gained mindshare and a strong foothold. In Wintel land, firewire is all but dead. VERY few manufacturers include it, and generally only on home models to connect with cameras. In the corporate space, it's USB 2.0. (with about the only exception being Sony with a vested camera interest.)
Oh yeah, keep in mind that VCR manufacturers are too freaking cheap to add a simple battery to even high-end SVHS models so you keep having to set the clock when power is lost for as little as 3 seconds. Instead, they think of ways to try and get time off the networks - trouble is that this doesn't work if you have a cable box. Sigh.
Any sane manufacturer is not going to add a $33 part to a $70 VCR. This is completely the wrong application. Frankly, VCR's already have a decent enough CPU to web enable them for much less money than this part - like $3 for a single chip ethernet interface.
Think of a webcam or something where you take that part, this, and bingo, webcam, front-door intercom, etc. Considering the price of similar items on the market, this still seems very expensive for lower-end applications.
At $33 each in quantity, I don't think we are going to see them in toasters anytime soon.
As far as embedded systems goes, this is an order of magnitude or so too expensive. Manufacturers pinch pennies on even larger items like TV's, as each dollar increase in cost translates into something like $5 to the consumer, and potentially millions to the bottom line.
Frankly, this technology isn't even appropriate anyway. For something more in line with the applications you are thinking about, look here where the technology is already imbedded in millions of consumer devices.
Actually, they already make these, but they are top / bottom drawers. Spendy.
As for the rack system, check out any commercial dishwasher system. Side benefit is that they will do an entire load of dishes in under a minute. Power and water hungry though...
I'm not sure why USB2 external drives are so popular as USB is not nearly as approperiate for disk drives as Firewire is
... Cause it's not apple, mainly. MS made a big push for USB2. Pushed Hard on computer manufacturers to NOT implement firewire on the motherboard. Intel who also happens to make so many of the chipsets also had a vested interest in USB. Apple STILL (while dropping the license fee requirement) is anal about the Firewire NAME.
It's a pitty as firewire has several advantages over USB2. When I went out looking for an external hard drive to use with laptops / desktops, I found one that did USB1, USB2, AND firewire. Instead of buying a USB2 PCMCIA adaptor however, I bought firewire so I can use my DV cameras on more than one system.
Ahh. He want's to "provide" disks to unwashed masses? And he has HOW many machines? So he is going to sit there and duplicate HUNDREDS of floppies? With the time it takes to manually duplicate a 10 disk set (assuming the copies go 100% error free which is impossible these days considering that even brand fucking new disks fail 50% of the time) you could pop open the box, netboot and image the hard drive with a small distro. Seriously. I'm not making this up. I assume that he is going to at least do a LITTLE testing to make sure the machines even work, which means that he's got to power them up at least once, maybe run a diagnostic on them, format the hard disk, etc. Might as well get the image on the hard drive while you are at it.
In theory, you have a point. Sigh. The old Amiga. Yeah, had one of those too. One of the first in fact that I got back in October '85 when they were just released.
The problem we have today is that modern versions of software are much larger than they used to be. Of course applications today do a fair amount more than their counterparts of yesterday too - they are easier to use, look better, integrate with other things, are more modular, etc.
Take GTK (or QT) for example. Old X apps would manually draw buttons with a simple frame with text inside, or use very simple black and white icons. Modern apps use PNG, Jpg, XPM, or one of 15 different file formats for icons. The widget code is orders of magnitude larger than it used to me. Now lets add integration for Gnome, KDE, or Both. Ugg.
For an example of what I'm talking about, compare something like X-fig to Visio. (Personally, I like X-fig, but my wife would find it Very hard to use compared to Visio.) Any idiot can pick up visio quickly and within an hour be drawing some useful stuff. It looks great and has a lot of capability. It's also massive taking up around 100M on the hard disk. Xfig I think installed with around 4M. XFig is UGLY though. It uses those old text and black and white icons I was talking about. Many things are non-intuitive. The learning curve is about 5 - 10 times that of visio. Note that even xfig has grown dramatically being many times bigger today than it was 15 years ago.
As Linux matures and becomes more user-friendly, it's gonna get big.
So yeah, the poster can probably take something like Small Linux, then spend about 6 months adding things like hardware autodetection back in.
Ahh. I must have been thinking WFW3.11 which because of a lame version of networking was more disks than plain 3.1. You needed a separate disk for TCP/IP.
Yeah, I used to pull drives too, but I HATE pulling drives out of sucky machines. Sometimes you need to rip the whole thing apart to get to the screws... And those BASTARD cables that are too short, that you can't hardly hook up again because there isn't enough room between the power supply and the drive rack to get your hand in, and Damn, cut my hand AGAIN on a sharp piece of metal!
After about the 300th machine you get REALLY tired of that and look for a better way.:-)
On the serious side, DOS was something like 3 floppies, and Windows was something like 11 if I'm remembering right (it's been years...) Not to mention that you had ZERO apps. Then install a browser, word processor, etc. Lots more than 3 - 7 floppies.
Way back when, I had a boot floppy that ran the FTP Software (company name, not file transfer protocol) IP stack that I used to install DOS / Windows from an AIX box that had the floppy images. Worked pretty well. This was back in the early 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, maybe because XML is an OPEN standard versus a proprietary closed format that only one company truely understands?
Customer demand is what drove MS to implement XML. Unfortunately for customers, MS chooses to SCREW them instead with a token gesture.
From the article (which you must not have read):
"The whole point, however, is to empower users by giving them direct access to an open file format so that they can mine, re-use and re-purpose information any way they can think of. Plus, the standardization of the file formats and related XML transformation technologies means that powerful machines can be constructed to service advanced content management and collaboration needs without having to beg the application vendor for permission or future enhancements."
By not FULLY supporting XML, it pretty much limits your use to import / export as opposed to full interaction / collaboration, integration, etc.
BTW, if you need to repair your partition, please do so. If you mean to say FUCK, then do so.
That's the BEST we could hope for? Huh? Maybe I misunderstand your entire post, but XML does a GREAT job of handling formatting data. AbiWord's native file format is XML. If MS did a proper job of supporting XML, then you could take a third party XML to Postscript converter and the output should look the same as if you printed it nativly from Word.
Anyway, when this topic came up about a year ago when XML support was announced, I mentioned that MS would Never support XML completly in it's office products as it would kill MS's stranglehold on office suites. Many disagreed. Some things never change.
Spammers ALREADY spread the load over thousands of open relays. Perhaps you were unware of this (this is why filtering based on open relays is not very effective.) New proxies and relays pop up every day. History is telling me that the same thing will happen with any new system. Can you say with 100% certainty that it will not?
Hash cash (and things like it) would also put a Major dent into perfectly valid things like mailing lists and customer notifications (the non-spam kind.) The "solution" is for everyone to be 100% on the ball, white listing everyone they communicate with, etc. The Reality is that most people using the internet are really fucking stupid when it comes to technology and won't be able to grasp the concepts of how the system works. Hence it will put an undue burden on legitimate uses, and caused much grief for the majority of users on the internet. The backlash would be amazing.
In a perfect world, hash cash would be a great solution, but we do not live in a perfect world. Bottom line is that I share your desire for a new system that would solve the spam problem, but from a business, technical, and social standpoint I know that would fail.
FYI, most filtering needs the body too. You still have not addressed the expense that the ISP has already incurred that WILL be passed down to you.
You really don't understand the scope of the problem. Hell, just the political shit alone will take a couple years. EVERYONE has to have their input, they will haggle over the details, etc. For existing standards, even minor changes take years to agree on and implement, and you need Many years of backwards compatability. This is the REALITY of business and government.
What you and I wish for and would like are very different from the real world. I share your desire for a new system that would eliminate spam, but the realities of the world tell me that it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Email is EVERYWHERE, and it's embedded all over the place in PDA's, phones, custom business software, etc, even my PRINTER supports it. Desire to do a new standard has nothing to do with the ABILITY to actually develop and deploy it everywhere and THAT's what will determine the time line.
Then there is the question of what happens when (not "if") spammers figure out a way around the new system....
If spam is already illegal, then why isn't the government going after these criminals? The number of cases where the government hsa actually prosecuted a spammer can probably be counted on one hand, and it's usually because of FRAUD, not the fact that it was SPAM. We only have ONE federal law that can POSSIBLY be used against spam, and that's the junk-fax law. Unfortunatly, it has not held up in court when used in exactly this way. So please, point me to the FEDERAL law that bans spam....
Most of the abused open proxies and relays that are being abused are in other countries, while the spammer and the company / person that hired the spammer is right here in the good-ole USA. SO how are you going to go after these ISP's that have TIME AFTER TIME refused to do anything about it (assuming that they even speak english in the first place...) Anti-spammers have gone after providers of open relays for YEARS yet the problem is increasing, not decreasing.
It's like you are going after the government that provides the roads that the drunk driver drives on when he kills your kid rather than the drunk driver himself. This makes no sense.
The bottom line (and you have not addressed this) is that filtering MASKS the problem. It does NOTHING to solve it. I use filters myself - it's not that filters are bad, it's that they don't solve the problem.
... And let me show you how this will fail.
There are bazillions of email clients, some legacy with no source. People still will use these clients for various reasons. Since "hash cash" or something like it is used, they will gateway through another server that adds the "hash cash". Just like there are hundreds of thousands of open relays and proxies now, there will be hundreds of thousands of "hash cash" proxies for spammers to exploit.
Just as there is no real incentive to close todays open relays and proxies (and for every one closed it seems like 3 new ones pop up) many apathetic admins will not care that their CPU cycles are used by a spammer.
So there you go, Billions spent on a new system that spammers find a way around anyway. Back to square one.
In order to really make a dent in the problem, you need to remove the benefit of spam. Right now, it's increased sales. If instead it turns into jail time....
Is your spam problem GONE or is it simply hidden from view? You and your ISP have alreay paid the cost of that spam. The cost to you seems minimal, but to a large ISP it is HUGE. When your ISP raises it's rates due to the volume of spam that you do not see yet still receive, will you still be happy with your filter as "The Solution" to spam?
Don't get me wrong, I have been filtering spam for years. Filters can minimize the impact of the spam problem, but they do nothing to solve it.
So you wouldn't support legislation to limit it KNOWING that it's only going to get worse? At the rate it's increasing, we don't have 5 years. We probably only have ONE before email is completely useless. With legislation, we can at least bankrupt spammers, and possibly even get them put in jail.
... And exactly how do you handle spam while you invent this new protocol? Consider that it will take at LEAST 5 years to design, develop, and adopt a new technology. Shit, the amount of legacy systems is HUGE! Even my freaking PRINTER supports it.
Well, it's really quite simple. They do a Bayesian filter based on Your posts. :-) :-)
Citing "Freedom of speach", the first ammendment, etc, there still seems to be an ignorant crowd that thinks that we shouldn't have any legal means to curb spam. They still think technology can solve a social problem. As ISPs put increasingly invasive filters on email servers, legit email gets lost. When 99% of all email is spam, will you STILL think it's ok? When ISP's raise your internet fees due to spam, will you still defend its legality? When you are on the road paying $.50 / minute downloading spam for half an hour, even though your local filter blocks it from your view will you still be happy?
There are people who want to re-invent the email protocol to solve the problem. Yeah, doing something technological can help the FUTURE, but what are we going to do for the 5 years it takes to develop, implement, and deploy this new technology?
Think about it.
Actually, the articles you list actually PROVE my statement. Thanks!
If Apple was NOT anal about the firewire name, they would simply let ANYONE who wanted to implement 1394 use the name. Instead, it still must be licensed. What they did is pass the baton to the 1394 people to do the licensing.
Problem is, this was too late. USB2.0 already gained mindshare and a strong foothold. In Wintel land, firewire is all but dead. VERY few manufacturers include it, and generally only on home models to connect with cameras. In the corporate space, it's USB 2.0. (with about the only exception being Sony with a vested camera interest.)
Hey, I don't like it either, but it's reality.
Oh yeah, keep in mind that VCR manufacturers are too freaking cheap to add a simple battery to even high-end SVHS models so you keep having to set the clock when power is lost for as little as 3 seconds. Instead, they think of ways to try and get time off the networks - trouble is that this doesn't work if you have a cable box. Sigh.
Any sane manufacturer is not going to add a $33 part to a $70 VCR. This is completely the wrong application. Frankly, VCR's already have a decent enough CPU
to web enable them for much less money than this part - like $3 for a single chip ethernet interface.
Think of a webcam or something where you take that part, this, and bingo, webcam, front-door intercom, etc. Considering the price of similar items on the market, this still seems very expensive for lower-end applications.
At $33 each in quantity, I don't think we are going to see them in toasters anytime soon.
As far as embedded systems goes, this is an order of magnitude or so too expensive. Manufacturers pinch pennies on even larger items like TV's, as each dollar increase in cost translates into something like $5 to the consumer, and potentially millions to the bottom line.
Frankly, this technology isn't even appropriate anyway. For something more in line with the applications you are thinking about, look here where the technology is already imbedded in millions of consumer devices.
Actually, they already make these, but they are top / bottom drawers. Spendy.
As for the rack system, check out any commercial dishwasher system. Side benefit is that they will do an entire load of dishes in under a minute. Power and water hungry though...
Not all Benetton chicks are hot though...
That's just nasty...
It's a pitty as firewire has several advantages over USB2. When I went out looking for an external hard drive to use with laptops / desktops, I found one that did USB1, USB2, AND firewire. Instead of buying a USB2 PCMCIA adaptor however, I bought firewire so I can use my DV cameras on more than one system.
Did anyone else's mind go to the gutter...
:-)
No, just yours.
Ahh. He want's to "provide" disks to unwashed masses? And he has HOW many machines? So he is going to sit there and duplicate HUNDREDS of floppies? With the time it takes to manually duplicate a 10 disk set (assuming the copies go 100% error free which is impossible these days considering that even brand fucking new disks fail 50% of the time) you could pop open the box, netboot and image the hard drive with a small distro. Seriously. I'm not making this up. I assume that he is going to at least do a LITTLE testing to make sure the machines even work, which means that he's got to power them up at least once, maybe run a diagnostic on them, format the hard disk, etc. Might as well get the image on the hard drive while you are at it.
In theory, you have a point. Sigh. The old Amiga. Yeah, had one of those too. One of the first in fact that I got back in October '85 when they were just released.
The problem we have today is that modern versions of software are much larger than they used to be. Of course applications today do a fair amount more than their counterparts of yesterday too - they are easier to use, look better, integrate with other things, are more modular, etc.
Take GTK (or QT) for example. Old X apps would manually draw buttons with a simple frame with text inside, or use very simple black and white icons. Modern apps use PNG, Jpg, XPM, or one of 15 different file formats for icons. The widget code is orders of magnitude larger than it used to me. Now lets add integration for Gnome, KDE, or Both. Ugg.
For an example of what I'm talking about, compare something like X-fig to Visio. (Personally, I like X-fig, but my wife would find it Very hard to use compared to Visio.) Any idiot can pick up visio quickly and within an hour be drawing some useful stuff. It looks great and has a lot of capability. It's also massive taking up around 100M on the hard disk. Xfig I think installed with around 4M. XFig is UGLY though. It uses those old text and black and white icons I was talking about. Many things are non-intuitive. The learning curve is about 5 - 10 times that of visio. Note that even xfig has grown dramatically being many times bigger today than it was 15 years ago.
As Linux matures and becomes more user-friendly, it's gonna get big.
So yeah, the poster can probably take something like Small Linux, then spend about 6 months adding things like hardware autodetection back in.
Ahh. I must have been thinking WFW3.11 which because of a lame version of networking was more disks than plain 3.1. You needed a separate disk for TCP/IP.
Yeah, I used to pull drives too, but I HATE pulling drives out of sucky machines. Sometimes you need to rip the whole thing apart to get to the screws... And those BASTARD cables that are too short, that you can't hardly hook up again because there isn't enough room between the power supply and the drive rack to get your hand in, and Damn, cut my hand AGAIN on a sharp piece of metal!
:-)
After about the 300th machine you get REALLY tired of that and look for a better way.
Heh! that's funny...
On the serious side, DOS was something like 3 floppies, and Windows was something like 11 if I'm remembering right (it's been years...) Not to mention that you had ZERO apps. Then install a browser, word processor, etc. Lots more than 3 - 7 floppies.
Way back when, I had a boot floppy that ran the FTP Software (company name, not file transfer protocol) IP stack that I used to install DOS / Windows from an AIX box that had the floppy images. Worked pretty well. This was back in the early 90's.