It's a killer: 40% on all profits (over a small limit - something like £5000) gained from shares or stock trading, or even if someone gives you the money out of the goodness of their heart. Not nice.
DBAB (now BT Alex Brown) were the nicest bunch of people I've ever dealt with over the phone. I honestly expected to be treated like a "newbie" to stock trading - and believe me I am - and asked some awfully naive questions... but they were all answered with patience and respect. I for one am very glad that VA chose Alex Brown, rather than the less fun experience I heard was had in Red Hat's share program.
Now if only my govt didn't want to take 40% back off me:-/
I think the decision was made simply because throwing all the resources at the browser would have yielded simply too many people working on the core technology, and an impossible to manage project. This way they've split the teams up into sensible chunks working on seperate things. Throwing the other people at the browser/renderer wouldn't really have helped things IMHO.
(I kind of agree though from a user POV, but I know from management experience that they're doing the right thing).
Rather than moderate you down (just overrated IMHO - I don't want to take away your karma!) I thought I'd respond to you.
I think XML isn't what you're looking for.
XML is pure and simple an interchange format. It is designed for interoperability. I can be certain that an XML file that complies to my DTD does exactly what I say it does. I can be sure that I support all the character sets necessary. I can be sure that someone can author XML files in Windows, Unix or VMS, and still have them work. I can be sure that I can send someone my XML file and have them be able to read it and construe some sort of comprehension of the format.
XML is not the be-all-end-all file format. It's not small. It's not pretty. It's not fast. But it is a standard that provides some nice features for developers. The key feature is standard tools. It wouldn't have mattered if the standard was some binary format - so long as all developers had access to these first class free tools that all work alike across platforms. I think that's still an achievement.
I personally think you're ranting a bit, and not experienced the ease with which it is to develop cross platform tools using XML for data interchange. Try it - you might like it. And if you don't, switch back to CORBA with all the nasties in there, or COM or some other supposedly "cross platform" method of data interchange. And write your own parsers for your own mini-format. There's More Than One Way To Do It (tm).
Even better was the approach the Amiga took. It had standardised on a single library to parse all command lines, and allowed you to always know how to get at least the list of arguments to a particular command. It told you the names of parameters, whether they were mandatory or optional, the type of a parameter (e.g. number, filename, etc) and so on. Made life very easy for command line users.
Sadly I think there's too many tools out there that you just couldn't change now - even if you tried. Take perl for example. I'm willing to bet you wouldn't get -v to be changed from "brief version" to "verbose" because it has no meaning in perl.
I personally don't want an rm command to be undoable. Ever. If I'm using what I consider a secure OS, I need to consider deletes also secure. That means remove, and wipe over with \0's. Think of the security consequences of your sysadmin being able to access those "for your eyes only" documents that you decided to delete for safety, only to be undeleted...
IIRC NT actually takes this approach too.
As far as disk recovery tools go - that's what fsck does. It just comes with the OS - we don't consider this a tool that you should have to purchase separately.
Yes, even considering that it only applies to large companies.
If this charge is for companies delivering WAP web content, then consider that the WAP side of their business is currently very small, and web delivery already isn't bringing in revenue. Try convincing your pointy haired boss to spend an extra $20k on handheld delivery and he's not going to like it.
On the other hand I don't see how they can charge against users of the technology (people hosting web sites), as well as integrators of the technology (people building the wap delivery software). I'm not sure what the precedent of that model is. Although I'm sure the cost will pass down the line.
Download expat. Download the C++ bindings for it. It supports any XML format you want to write code for, has full (and correct) namespaces support, and is very much free software.
If that doesn't bake yer noodles, download rxp which also does validation against a dtd.
Really, work on providing XPath and XSL support for expat - the community will thank you _much_ more for it.
You're nit-picking. The whole point of democracy is power to the people. If that's not the case then something is wrong. Case in point: if it weren't the case the US would still have black slavery.
The other thing is, and this has been bugging me for a while, is that regardless of wheter or not MS did something immoral that harmed the industry yada yada yada....there is a fine line of what is illegal. They walked that line. DOJ says they crossed it. Who knows. But we can't, as educated people, simply assume their guilty of breaking the law simply because what they did offends us personally.
This may or may not be what you're saying, but if it's not the general educated public that decides what is and isn't law, then something is horribly wrong with the judicial system.
That may indeed be true. However it's an attempt to change the past based on the present. The case was brought about around Windows 95, not 98 as Microsoft would love you to believe.
So maybe they mended their ways? Big deal. Only after they had achieved what they wanted to achieve (killing Netscape).
Mind if I ask why you're doing this? XML parsers are off-the-shelf free commodity tools now.
Spend your time working with those tools (XML4C, expat, rxp to name a few) to create higher level tools. Don't re-implement an XML parser - I can guarantee you it will be full of obscure bugs where you didn't understand the spec, didn't understand how to cope with character encodings, or just did something wrong. This stuff, despite the XML spec suggesting that a graduate could write a parser in a matter of weeks, is hard, and experienced people (such as James Clark) have put out excellent products for all to use under non-restrictive licences. Theres even an LGPL parser already out there called libxml (ships with gnome).
If you don't believe you'll create a broken parser, see the recent XML conformance tests on XML.com.
I'd also love to see you move from a non-working XML parser to something supporting XSL "in the near future". I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the XPath spec has some tough little nuts to crack (I know - I'm cracking them right now) and then implementing XSLT from an 80-odd page spec - wow - good luck to you!
(I'm not trying to poo-poo your project, but so many people start working on stuff that's already being worked on in the open-source community that it's just wasted effort).
Mozilla just flew over you and posted this comment. I have it flying quite happily for hours at a time here. Has great HTML support, great Javascript/DHTML support, full Java support. It's lacking a few things that can't be put in (like some plugins and SSL), but overall it's looking pretty darn fine. And the widgets (gtk) are a whole lot nicer than Communicator's too.:)
I just submitted this to slash, but I doubt it'll get posted as a main article...
Mozilla is now unoffically dogfood status according to the latest status report. The evaluation of whether it's dogfood or not is if at least 50% of mozilla.org are using mozilla for at least 50% of their browsing time. After that, bugs start getting fixed faster as people are really using the product (and pressuring their peers to make it better).
For those that haven't tried a nightly build - do so. It's incredibly unintrusive (just installs in your $HOME directory - and can be deleted just as easily), real stable, and is great as an every day browser.
Would it be better if 10,000 Microsoft Temps and Contractors stood up and walked away?
Frankly, yes. It would be far more effective. And far more honest.
As for:
[when] a company is hiring on temp and contract employees to do the jobs of those who are in permanent roles, and the company is not offering those temps and contractors the option to become permanent employees -- it is a matter for the labour boards and legal system to handle.
I just don't get it. If temps aren't hired to do the jobs permies are hired to do - what are they hired for?
I can look back at one of my first jobs: I worked my arse off, 14 and 16 hour days creating a product that is the European equivalent of what Seibel Systems produce - and with a market to prove it. And there are guys there about to make a killing with stock options. Me, I left - I didn't want to work those hours for the equivalent of minimum wage (as a Manager too). Instead I'll make my own fortune my way. And I'm not in the least bit bitter. This is an open market, and I have free will. I'm now earning more, treated better, working less, and living better. Thanks to me. Not thanks to a lawyer who saw a way to sue mega-corporation #1 out of mega-bucks.
If you think companies are honest, or that the law will keep them that way, you haven't known many.
I make no appologies for this statement: I hope people in my country (England) never resort to whining and whinging about their employee situation and resort to sueing the way Americans do.
It is unbelievable to me that you can say you wonder (assumedly with regret) about what sort of royalties you missed out on when you left a company that abused you. I can't believe people are looking at things that way - what is wrong with America?
If people can't wake up to their current job situation, whether they are being abused, used, misused, overworked, etc, then that's their problem. Not a judges, not the companies (although if people start leaving one team in droves the company should look at its managers). You earn more as a temporary or contract worker. That's your benefit - your compensation package. Period. Looking back in retrospect and saying the company abused you for years is just plain wrong. You left. You got something better. Don't look back in anger.
The job market is a strange place. Companies do employ these tactics of re-hiring people at lower wages, re-hiring as temps, etc. So what. If you don't like it - leave. If you're really worth something you'll get other work. Don't start bitching and moaning to a lawyer.
The US has turned into a place where if you don't like your current situation you sue, rather than trying to change that situation. Sadly it looks like the rest of the world is trying to emulate this.
I'm also a contractor, also glad of it, and would never dream of sueing for benefits. My wife temps during the summer hols (a student), she gets paid more for being a temp - I imagine thats the same everywhere, she wouldn't dream of sueing for benefits either.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a killer: 40% on all profits (over a small limit - something like £5000) gained from shares or stock trading, or even if someone gives you the money out of the goodness of their heart. Not nice.
Fine. Pick nits. I was quoting Tim Bray. I know what XML is and isn't.
DBAB (now BT Alex Brown) were the nicest bunch of people I've ever dealt with over the phone. I honestly expected to be treated like a "newbie" to stock trading - and believe me I am - and asked some awfully naive questions... but they were all answered with patience and respect. I for one am very glad that VA chose Alex Brown, rather than the less fun experience I heard was had in Red Hat's share program.
:-/
Now if only my govt didn't want to take 40% back off me
View->Sidebar
Also, regarding crashes - make sure you deleted your old registry and install directory.
I think the decision was made simply because throwing all the resources at the browser would have yielded simply too many people working on the core technology, and an impossible to manage project. This way they've split the teams up into sensible chunks working on seperate things. Throwing the other people at the browser/renderer wouldn't really have helped things IMHO.
(I kind of agree though from a user POV, but I know from management experience that they're doing the right thing).
Rather than moderate you down (just overrated IMHO - I don't want to take away your karma!) I thought I'd respond to you.
I think XML isn't what you're looking for.
XML is pure and simple an interchange format. It is designed for interoperability. I can be certain that an XML file that complies to my DTD does exactly what I say it does. I can be sure that I support all the character sets necessary. I can be sure that someone can author XML files in Windows, Unix or VMS, and still have them work. I can be sure that I can send someone my XML file and have them be able to read it and construe some sort of comprehension of the format.
XML is not the be-all-end-all file format. It's not small. It's not pretty. It's not fast. But it is a standard that provides some nice features for developers. The key feature is standard tools. It wouldn't have mattered if the standard was some binary format - so long as all developers had access to these first class free tools that all work alike across platforms. I think that's still an achievement.
I personally think you're ranting a bit, and not experienced the ease with which it is to develop cross platform tools using XML for data interchange. Try it - you might like it. And if you don't, switch back to CORBA with all the nasties in there, or COM or some other supposedly "cross platform" method of data interchange. And write your own parsers for your own mini-format. There's More Than One Way To Do It (tm).
Even better was the approach the Amiga took. It had standardised on a single library to parse all command lines, and allowed you to always know how to get at least the list of arguments to a particular command. It told you the names of parameters, whether they were mandatory or optional, the type of a parameter (e.g. number, filename, etc) and so on. Made life very easy for command line users.
Sadly I think there's too many tools out there that you just couldn't change now - even if you tried. Take perl for example. I'm willing to bet you wouldn't get -v to be changed from "brief version" to "verbose" because it has no meaning in perl.
I personally don't want an rm command to be undoable. Ever. If I'm using what I consider a secure OS, I need to consider deletes also secure. That means remove, and wipe over with \0's. Think of the security consequences of your sysadmin being able to access those "for your eyes only" documents that you decided to delete for safety, only to be undeleted...
IIRC NT actually takes this approach too.
As far as disk recovery tools go - that's what fsck does. It just comes with the OS - we don't consider this a tool that you should have to purchase separately.
Yes, even considering that it only applies to large companies.
If this charge is for companies delivering WAP web content, then consider that the WAP side of their business is currently very small, and web delivery already isn't bringing in revenue. Try convincing your pointy haired boss to spend an extra $20k on handheld delivery and he's not going to like it.
On the other hand I don't see how they can charge against users of the technology (people hosting web sites), as well as integrators of the technology (people building the wap delivery software). I'm not sure what the precedent of that model is. Although I'm sure the cost will pass down the line.
Well apparently your karma just went up because of your bogus post. ;-)
/TABLE tag (which is what the user was talking about) is required. See the spec.
/TR and /TD tags are part of the HTML spec. They are optional. See the spec.
:)
Netscape does NOT do it WRONG.
The
The
Now you should get moderated out of existance
Woohooo! :)
:)
Moderate me down, I have karma to spare
Download expat. Download the C++ bindings for it. It supports any XML format you want to write code for, has full (and correct) namespaces support, and is very much free software.
If that doesn't bake yer noodles, download rxp which also does validation against a dtd.
Really, work on providing XPath and XSL support for expat - the community will thank you _much_ more for it.
You're nit-picking. The whole point of democracy is power to the people. If that's not the case then something is wrong. Case in point: if it weren't the case the US would still have black slavery.
The other thing is, and this has been bugging me for a while, is that regardless of wheter or not MS did something immoral that harmed the industry yada yada yada....there is a fine line of what is illegal. They walked that line. DOJ says they crossed it. Who knows. But we can't, as educated people, simply assume their guilty of breaking the law simply because what they did offends us personally.
This may or may not be what you're saying, but if it's not the general educated public that decides what is and isn't law, then something is horribly wrong with the judicial system.
1. Windows 98 Is a Single, Integrated Product.
That may indeed be true. However it's an attempt to change the past based on the present. The case was brought about around Windows 95, not 98 as Microsoft would love you to believe.
So maybe they mended their ways? Big deal. Only after they had achieved what they wanted to achieve (killing Netscape).
Mind if I ask why you're doing this? XML parsers are off-the-shelf free commodity tools now.
Spend your time working with those tools (XML4C, expat, rxp to name a few) to create higher level tools. Don't re-implement an XML parser - I can guarantee you it will be full of obscure bugs where you didn't understand the spec, didn't understand how to cope with character encodings, or just did something wrong. This stuff, despite the XML spec suggesting that a graduate could write a parser in a matter of weeks, is hard, and experienced people (such as James Clark) have put out excellent products for all to use under non-restrictive licences. Theres even an LGPL parser already out there called libxml (ships with gnome).
If you don't believe you'll create a broken parser, see the recent XML conformance tests on XML.com.
I'd also love to see you move from a non-working XML parser to something supporting XSL "in the near future". I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the XPath spec has some tough little nuts to crack (I know - I'm cracking them right now) and then implementing XSLT from an 80-odd page spec - wow - good luck to you!
(I'm not trying to poo-poo your project, but so many people start working on stuff that's already being worked on in the open-source community that it's just wasted effort).
If someone wants that they can either use NNTP or develop it using the current mod_perl + HTML route - there's no need for XML there.
XML should be used where its appropriate. I'm unconvinced that client-side transformations are the right thing.
According to some so called "experts" on this mornings breakfast TV, the last few words are:
"Now Apply For A Job"...
Mozilla just flew over you and posted this comment. I have it flying quite happily for hours at a time here. Has great HTML support, great Javascript/DHTML support, full Java support. It's lacking a few things that can't be put in (like some plugins and SSL), but overall it's looking pretty darn fine. And the widgets (gtk) are a whole lot nicer than Communicator's too. :)
I just submitted this to slash, but I doubt it'll get posted as a main article...
Mozilla is now unoffically dogfood status according to the latest status report. The evaluation of whether it's dogfood or not is if at least 50% of mozilla.org are using mozilla for at least 50% of their browsing time. After that, bugs start getting fixed faster as people are really using the product (and pressuring their peers to make it better).
For those that haven't tried a nightly build - do so. It's incredibly unintrusive (just installs in your $HOME directory - and can be deleted just as easily), real stable, and is great as an every day browser.
MSFT: Down a few cents at opening :)
Would it be better if 10,000 Microsoft Temps and Contractors stood up and walked away?
Frankly, yes. It would be far more effective. And far more honest.
As for:
[when] a company is hiring on temp and contract employees to do the jobs of those who are in permanent roles, and the company is not offering those temps and contractors the option to become permanent employees -- it is a matter for the labour boards and legal system to handle.
I just don't get it. If temps aren't hired to do the jobs permies are hired to do - what are they hired for?
I can look back at one of my first jobs: I worked my arse off, 14 and 16 hour days creating a product that is the European equivalent of what Seibel Systems produce - and with a market to prove it. And there are guys there about to make a killing with stock options. Me, I left - I didn't want to work those hours for the equivalent of minimum wage (as a Manager too). Instead I'll make my own fortune my way. And I'm not in the least bit bitter. This is an open market, and I have free will. I'm now earning more, treated better, working less, and living better. Thanks to me. Not thanks to a lawyer who saw a way to sue mega-corporation #1 out of mega-bucks.
If you think companies are honest, or that the law will keep them that way, you haven't known many.
I make no appologies for this statement: I hope people in my country (England) never resort to whining and whinging about their employee situation and resort to sueing the way Americans do.
It is unbelievable to me that you can say you wonder (assumedly with regret) about what sort of royalties you missed out on when you left a company that abused you. I can't believe people are looking at things that way - what is wrong with America?
If people can't wake up to their current job situation, whether they are being abused, used, misused, overworked, etc, then that's their problem. Not a judges, not the companies (although if people start leaving one team in droves the company should look at its managers). You earn more as a temporary or contract worker. That's your benefit - your compensation package. Period. Looking back in retrospect and saying the company abused you for years is just plain wrong. You left. You got something better. Don't look back in anger.
I guess slash doesn't like pod.
:) Or maybe Rob could add a Pod translator :)
That should have been:
We do not get the short end of the stick.
[we] don't have to put up with the crap permies have to put up with.
... use their higher wage to pay for those benefits.
Sorry. I guess I'll stick to html in the future
The job market is a strange place. Companies do employ these tactics of re-hiring people at lower wages, re-hiring as temps, etc. So what. If you don't like it - leave. If you're really worth something you'll get other work. Don't start bitching and moaning to a lawyer.
The US has turned into a place where if you don't like your current situation you sue, rather than trying to change that situation. Sadly it looks like the rest of the world is trying to emulate this.
I'm also a contractor, also glad of it, and would never dream of sueing for benefits. My wife temps during the summer hols (a student), she gets paid more for being a temp - I imagine thats the same everywhere, she wouldn't dream of sueing for benefits either.