I raised this issue at Andrew Layman's talk on.NET at XML DevCon 2000 in New York last week.
Microsoft gave this lovely humorous video presentation of a "Jetsons"-like world where all this chap had to do to get medical service was connect to his insurance company and approve their access to his medical records, and then approve access to the doctor for the same. All done using XML of course;-)
Sadly the privacy implications of this are incredibly far reaching, and being almost totally avoided in favour of rapidly building this ubiquitous system. My suggestion to Andrew Layman was to go out and read Simson Garfinkel's book "Death of Privacy...". I sincerely hope he does, and many other people do, because otherwise we're going to end up in this situation of people getting bogus records or transferring records to people hacking into the network (you approved the record to be transfered to who you thought was your insurance company, but it was in fact joe bloe hacker). And we'll get my Grandma approving her own labotomy because she didn't know which button to press. Lets all celebrate this joyous new technology!
Yes its just a syntax. But its an accessible syntax.
What does this mean? It means developer freedom. It means that even if MS decides that they're going to customise SOAP and make their own proprietary SOAP based format (which they've almost done already with their enveloping format), there's not a damn thing they can do to stop me using Perl's XML::Parser to create an MSSOAP service or client. And it won't be hard like sniffing network packets to try and reverse engineer samba. I'll just look at the structure and bam! Instant reverse engineering.
Why should this matter? Because there are still a lot of Win boxes out there, and if my Unix skills allow me to interoperate with those boxes then all the better.
And XML is slow. Big deal - this is MS talking about integrating it, not Linus. So we get our nice zippy Linux boxes talking away to slow, bogged down in XML parsing, Windows boxes. Sounds pretty good to me actually!
I think MS are way off the mark here, for what its worth. XML is a great interchange format (slashdot.xml is much better than the old ultramode text format, for example), and its pretty darn useful for doing web and other documentation work (content/design separation and all that), but as a low level network service or IIOP replacement? No thanks, Bill.
1. Physically reading a storage file is not the problem. Making sense out of the streams in the file much more so...
This is true, although many people and projects have done a fairly good job - I wasn't trying to say that the format is totally freely available, more of a "What is this question doing here except trying to flame Microsoft?".
2. The Word 97 *was* on the MSDN CDs. Microsoft has pulled it about two years ago. (So much for keeping hundreds of old MSDN CDs around...)
I wasn't aware it had dropped off. But then a lot of information has dropped off the MSDN CD's in favour of a link to www.microsoft.com. I'm willing to bet the Word 97 format is still on there somewhere.
3. The Word 2000 additions have never been documented in public.
I'm of the understanding that there weren't any (or at least very few). From what I heard, the additions were a few minor features, certainly nothing that would cause interoperability issues. But then what I've heard could be wrong...
4. The MSDN documentation is vague and sometimes plain wrong.
As is the GNU documentation, and sometimes the Perl documentation (actually its a lot better lately) and... well I could go on. Developers hate documenting internals. I don't blame the microsofties for that. Documenting things is boring. I'd rather add an animated paperclip;-)
I don't know why this myth continues to propogate:
.DOC is an OLE Document
OLE Document parsers are available for most platforms. Theres even one for Perl
The.DOC format is documented on the MSDN CD's - where else would you expect this documentation to appear?
So no reverse engineering is needed. Just follow the spec
What truth remains is that the doc format changes from release to release of MS Word. So developers have to track these changes. The format is also a large and complex format, so its remained fairly niche in the open source world.
Re:Sorry, but I don't see that this is very useful
on
Berlin 0.2.0 Released
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· Score: 2
Please don't put MS Windows in there. Windows has been pixel-independant from way back as far as I've known (back to the 3.0 days) and maybe even further. Yes, you can still use pixel alignment, but non-pixel based measurements are built into the GUI.
Pick an ad server company that uses Akamai to distribute content. Akamai automatically sends content from a server close to the host requesting the ad. I only know about valueclick who do that - but I'm sure others will too.
Nice mention... WARNING though - the AxKit web site is horribly down today due to a complete internals overhaul of AxKit. Unfortunately the box is both the AxKit devel box, the AxKit web server and my personal workstation... Expect it back online later today.
I seriously hope this is a trend that will spread. The cost of internet connections in non-American countries is insane because of this factor (that most US citizens don't/didn't even know about). Of course it's not the only factor, take for example the crazy profits of our own British Telecom - their profiteering and monopolising makes sure that my internet costs remain at over £360 a month for a 64k link.
A lot of people buy these application servers without first thinking through whether or not they need one. For example, plain ordinary products like mod_perl and Java servlets provide an awful lot of the features of an application server. You have to remember that most of these app servers are just toolkits in which to build your application. And most of them are slow or badly designed. I have a fair bit of experience with Web Objects, Mediasurface and Broadvision, and none of them work particularly well. In fact they provide a whole lump of features without any real forethought about design, or the end user actually building complex applications.
Seriously consider whether you truly need an application server before forking out the money.
I worked for a while at [large television company] where they were reaching the end of developing a large content management system in Web Objects. Sadly, while providing all these enterprise functions they forgot one simple mantra: Make it work, and make it work fast. The project was DOG slow, and the editors remained using FTP and plain HTML right until the time I left.
In short: don't use WO, you can have much shorter development timescales with free products and they actually work.
Tne answer is so that web developers can run 2 copies of mozilla at the same time with different preferences. One might view it with a different font DPI, or with Javascript turned off.
Quite useful, actually, especially on a controlled environment where you can't create a new logon for development purposes.
I use Courier IMAP and Qmail. Qmail provides the POP3 support (for migration), and Courier IMAP does all the external authentication bits you'd need, including IMAP over SSL. I've found Courier IMAP to be extremely stable and fast and works well with my setup (heterogenious environment with pine, Outlook and NS Communicator clients). Currently imapd + couriertcpd are using just over a Meg of RAM.
However, as others have mentioned, it sounds like you're also looking for groupware features. In that case you may be interested in the non-free HP OpenMail, which provides MS exchange server emulation, for things like shared folders, Calendaring and all the other Outlook things.
This is something I think the free software community should be working on - Exchange server interoperability. I hear the Gnome project is working on it with their PIM, but it doesn't sound to me like they're attacking the right angle.
Funny yes, but people seem to be missing the fundamental reason why this happened.
It has nothing to do with MS letting people run attachments without saving them first.
This is all about mapping extensions to applications.
This is a broken idea - totally. For starters it is quite simply dangerous, as the mappings happen everywhere. And installing an application might setup random mappings. But add onto that the fact that its used to associate scripts with their executor, much like the shebang line, only worse - the file needs no execute privileges. If you like, every mapped file extension automatically sets execute privileges. It is this functionality that is broken - not the mail client. And this has been in existance since DOS days, IIRC. So removing or fixing this "feature" is next to impossible.
Re: The problem with Euro E-Commerce
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 3
The telecom monopoly BT justifies it by making massive profits for its shareholders (profits are in excess of £1m a minute or something ridiculous like that).
The other telecoms operators (UUNet, NTL, etc) decide that it would be real nice to make a similar profit, rather than providing cheap internet access, and so charge similarly.
Re:Things you learn in Business School...
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 2
There will still be plenty of healthy Internet companies, though, once people figure out exactly how to create a profitable e-commerce company. (Has it been done yet?)</i> <p> Yes. Amazon.com's book sales have been profitable for nearly a year now. It's only by pushing into new market segments that they keep from making a profit overall. It's often said that Amazon could turn a profit tomorrow if they focussed on book sales alone.
Re: The problem with Euro E-Commerce
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 3
Is cost. Pure and simple.
To run a large scale web site here costs a fortune. I run a tiny site behind a 64k leased line link, and it costs a fortune for the facilities I have, in comparison to my American business colleagues (*). I can't even begin to think what it must cost to have 2 redundant T1's (actually I can, and the cost is anywhere between frightening to unbearable).
(*) I pay £3600 (+17.5% tax) a year for 64Kb. My manager pays something like $40 a month for 1.5Mb down and 512Kb upstream.
Finally someone who understands the issues enough to stand up to this "It's possible on Linux too" BS.
This is all about execution based on file extension. This simply wouldn't happen on this scale in Linux. Sure you could write some sort of cool Linux executable that showed some cool jumping frogs that also offloaded a virus payload, but the user would first have to save it to disk, set the execute bit(s) and run it. Then in order for this virus to spread it would have to read people's address book - on Windows this is just a MAPI call, but on Linux you have to check for pine, mutt, kmail, balsa, communicator, LDAP, etc address books. The scale of this problem for replication means that it would just never happen. It would spread to a few hundred people maximum before people would stop and say "what's going on", fire off a post to some bulletin board, and stop the virus in its tracks.
Thats not to say that it will remain this way on Linux - chances are we might all unify to one email application with a standard interface (CORBA) to access the address book. But you still have to overcome the "save, set +x bit, run" problem which just isn't going to go away soon.
The only mailing lists I'm on that have near instant response time are running ezmlm with qmail (including some large lists like the mod_perl list and the perl5-porters list). I can't recommend this setup enough, I use it for a very low traffic mailing list for AxKit, but besides the low traffic, administration, albeit by command line utilities, is a breeze (there are web admin tools available, and admin by email is possible too).
Every other list I'm on, run on a variety of setups (the most common appears to be sendmail + majordomo), has really poor latency of around a couple of hours. For a daily email that might not be so bad, except to realise that the latency transfers directly into list delivery speed.
There's not much more to say about it. Try it - I never regret it.
Here's my home setup... I use qmail, courier-imap, procmail and pine. My todo list is just another directory in imap. If I need to add a new todo I send a mail to matt-todo. procmail filters that to my todo list. If I need to access my email from around the world, I can using secure IMAP.
Really, I see nothing that Outlook offers WRT todo lists here. There's that silly "Journal" but I don't think many people use that. The only cool thing is the automatic calendaring - the ability to have meeting rooms also be Exchange users, and check people's availability (including the meeting room's) instantly with a graph of when might be possible if not now, is just cool, and vital for growing businesses. Walking across the office and asking people if they're free just gets messy if one person isn't - this truly makes life easier (whether or not it's an innovation - I don't know - I'm guessing Lotus Notes or someone else already had this feature prior to Outlook).
First of all, you need to do some research about what Apache does and doesn't cache.
Second, mod_mmap doesn't put anything in the HEAD request, so if they were to take this simple and adequate route to caching, you wouldn't have a clue about it. mod_mmap is totally transparent to you, the user. It's not totally transparent to the sysadmins (one of it's weaknesses, IMHO) but then if you're only serving up 60 images, that shouldn't be a big deal.
Finally though, I really think people make too big a deal about serving images off a separate server. Let's look at the bigger picture: Slashdot serves around a million page views a day. That's averaging out throughout the day at a whopping 11 requests/sec on page views. Now given that we've seen benchmarks of apache serving static content at 2000+ req/sec, I think it's probably not even breaking a sweat serving those images.
What slashdot really needs to do (and I know pudge knows this too) is get away from Apache::Registry. That and do some serious code cleanups, and maybe even try this app on Oracle. That's where you'll see real differences, IMHO.
Anyway, I suppose they say every little helps, so how about it Pudge? Is mod_mmap doing it's thang in there?
Slashdot Mirror
Zee-Key gave a talk about their product at XML DevCon. I think its probably what you're after. www.zkey.com.
I raised this issue at Andrew Layman's talk on .NET at XML DevCon 2000 in New York last week.
;-)
Microsoft gave this lovely humorous video presentation of a "Jetsons"-like world where all this chap had to do to get medical service was connect to his insurance company and approve their access to his medical records, and then approve access to the doctor for the same. All done using XML of course
Sadly the privacy implications of this are incredibly far reaching, and being almost totally avoided in favour of rapidly building this ubiquitous system. My suggestion to Andrew Layman was to go out and read Simson Garfinkel's book "Death of Privacy...". I sincerely hope he does, and many other people do, because otherwise we're going to end up in this situation of people getting bogus records or transferring records to people hacking into the network (you approved the record to be transfered to who you thought was your insurance company, but it was in fact joe bloe hacker). And we'll get my Grandma approving her own labotomy because she didn't know which button to press. Lets all celebrate this joyous new technology!
People are missing the point about XML.
Yes its just a syntax. But its an accessible syntax.
What does this mean? It means developer freedom. It means that even if MS decides that they're going to customise SOAP and make their own proprietary SOAP based format (which they've almost done already with their enveloping format), there's not a damn thing they can do to stop me using Perl's XML::Parser to create an MSSOAP service or client. And it won't be hard like sniffing network packets to try and reverse engineer samba. I'll just look at the structure and bam! Instant reverse engineering.
Why should this matter? Because there are still a lot of Win boxes out there, and if my Unix skills allow me to interoperate with those boxes then all the better.
And XML is slow. Big deal - this is MS talking about integrating it, not Linus. So we get our nice zippy Linux boxes talking away to slow, bogged down in XML parsing, Windows boxes. Sounds pretty good to me actually!
I think MS are way off the mark here, for what its worth. XML is a great interchange format (slashdot.xml is much better than the old ultramode text format, for example), and its pretty darn useful for doing web and other documentation work (content/design separation and all that), but as a low level network service or IIOP replacement? No thanks, Bill.
This is true, although many people and projects have done a fairly good job - I wasn't trying to say that the format is totally freely available, more of a "What is this question doing here except trying to flame Microsoft?".
2. The Word 97 *was* on the MSDN CDs. Microsoft has pulled it about two years ago. (So much for keeping hundreds of old MSDN CDs around ...)
I wasn't aware it had dropped off. But then a lot of information has dropped off the MSDN CD's in favour of a link to www.microsoft.com. I'm willing to bet the Word 97 format is still on there somewhere.
3. The Word 2000 additions have never been documented in public.
I'm of the understanding that there weren't any (or at least very few). From what I heard, the additions were a few minor features, certainly nothing that would cause interoperability issues. But then what I've heard could be wrong...
4. The MSDN documentation is vague and sometimes plain wrong.
As is the GNU documentation, and sometimes the Perl documentation (actually its a lot better lately) and... well I could go on. Developers hate documenting internals. I don't blame the microsofties for that. Documenting things is boring. I'd rather add an animated paperclip ;-)
- .DOC is an OLE Document
- OLE Document parsers are available for most platforms. Theres even one for Perl
- The
.DOC format is documented on the MSDN CD's - where else would you expect this documentation to appear? - So no reverse engineering is needed. Just follow the spec
What truth remains is that the doc format changes from release to release of MS Word. So developers have to track these changes. The format is also a large and complex format, so its remained fairly niche in the open source world.Please don't put MS Windows in there. Windows has been pixel-independant from way back as far as I've known (back to the 3.0 days) and maybe even further. Yes, you can still use pixel alignment, but non-pixel based measurements are built into the GUI.
Pick an ad server company that uses Akamai to distribute content. Akamai automatically sends content from a server close to the host requesting the ad. I only know about valueclick who do that - but I'm sure others will too.
http://perl.apache.org/guide/performa nce.html
Subject says it all...
Nice mention... WARNING though - the AxKit web site is horribly down today due to a complete internals overhaul of AxKit. Unfortunately the box is both the AxKit devel box, the AxKit web server and my personal workstation... Expect it back online later today.
I seriously hope this is a trend that will spread. The cost of internet connections in non-American countries is insane because of this factor (that most US citizens don't/didn't even know about). Of course it's not the only factor, take for example the crazy profits of our own British Telecom - their profiteering and monopolising makes sure that my internet costs remain at over £360 a month for a 64k link.
A lot of people buy these application servers without first thinking through whether or not they need one. For example, plain ordinary products like mod_perl and Java servlets provide an awful lot of the features of an application server. You have to remember that most of these app servers are just toolkits in which to build your application. And most of them are slow or badly designed. I have a fair bit of experience with Web Objects, Mediasurface and Broadvision, and none of them work particularly well. In fact they provide a whole lump of features without any real forethought about design, or the end user actually building complex applications.
Seriously consider whether you truly need an application server before forking out the money.
Its performance also sucks rotten eggs.
I worked for a while at [large television company] where they were reaching the end of developing a large content management system in Web Objects. Sadly, while providing all these enterprise functions they forgot one simple mantra: Make it work, and make it work fast. The project was DOG slow, and the editors remained using FTP and plain HTML right until the time I left.
In short: don't use WO, you can have much shorter development timescales with free products and they actually work.
Tne answer is so that web developers can run 2 copies of mozilla at the same time with different preferences. One might view it with a different font DPI, or with Javascript turned off.
Quite useful, actually, especially on a controlled environment where you can't create a new logon for development purposes.
So I'll go ahead and do it...
I use Courier IMAP and Qmail. Qmail provides the POP3 support (for migration), and Courier IMAP does all the external authentication bits you'd need, including IMAP over SSL. I've found Courier IMAP to be extremely stable and fast and works well with my setup (heterogenious environment with pine, Outlook and NS Communicator clients). Currently imapd + couriertcpd are using just over a Meg of RAM.
However, as others have mentioned, it sounds like you're also looking for groupware features. In that case you may be interested in the non-free HP OpenMail, which provides MS exchange server emulation, for things like shared folders, Calendaring and all the other Outlook things.
This is something I think the free software community should be working on - Exchange server interoperability. I hear the Gnome project is working on it with their PIM, but it doesn't sound to me like they're attacking the right angle.
Funny yes, but people seem to be missing the fundamental reason why this happened.
It has nothing to do with MS letting people run attachments without saving them first.
This is all about mapping extensions to applications.
This is a broken idea - totally. For starters it is quite simply dangerous, as the mappings happen everywhere. And installing an application might setup random mappings. But add onto that the fact that its used to associate scripts with their executor, much like the shebang line, only worse - the file needs no execute privileges. If you like, every mapped file extension automatically sets execute privileges. It is this functionality that is broken - not the mail client. And this has been in existance since DOS days, IIRC. So removing or fixing this "feature" is next to impossible.
Good luck MS fans - it's a rocky road ahead.
Sorry I already debunked this virus when the details were posted to Linux Today. You can read my post at http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-05 -12-003-06-SC.
If you don't want to click the link, the summary is this virus is stopped by firewalls. It would be dead in the water in the modern internet.
Sorry I already debunked this virus when the details were posted to Linux Today. You can read my post at 0 5-12-003-06-SC</a>.
If you don't want to click the link, the summary is this virus is stopped by firewalls. It would be dead in the water in the modern internet.
The telecom monopoly BT justifies it by making massive profits for its shareholders (profits are in excess of £1m a minute or something ridiculous like that).
The other telecoms operators (UUNet, NTL, etc) decide that it would be real nice to make a similar profit, rather than providing cheap internet access, and so charge similarly.
There will still be plenty of healthy Internet companies, though, once people figure out exactly how to create a
profitable e-commerce company. (Has it been done yet?)</i>
<p>
Yes. Amazon.com's book sales have been profitable for nearly a year now. It's only by pushing into new market segments that they keep from making a profit overall. It's often said that Amazon could turn a profit tomorrow if they focussed on book sales alone.
Is cost. Pure and simple.
To run a large scale web site here costs a fortune. I run a tiny site behind a 64k leased line link, and it costs a fortune for the facilities I have, in comparison to my American business colleagues (*). I can't even begin to think what it must cost to have 2 redundant T1's (actually I can, and the cost is anywhere between frightening to unbearable).
(*) I pay £3600 (+17.5% tax) a year for 64Kb. My manager pays something like $40 a month for 1.5Mb down and 512Kb upstream.
This is all about execution based on file extension. This simply wouldn't happen on this scale in Linux. Sure you could write some sort of cool Linux executable that showed some cool jumping frogs that also offloaded a virus payload, but the user would first have to save it to disk, set the execute bit(s) and run it. Then in order for this virus to spread it would have to read people's address book - on Windows this is just a MAPI call, but on Linux you have to check for pine, mutt, kmail, balsa, communicator, LDAP, etc address books. The scale of this problem for replication means that it would just never happen. It would spread to a few hundred people maximum before people would stop and say "what's going on", fire off a post to some bulletin board, and stop the virus in its tracks.
Thats not to say that it will remain this way on Linux - chances are we might all unify to one email application with a standard interface (CORBA) to access the address book. But you still have to overcome the "save, set +x bit, run" problem which just isn't going to go away soon.
The only mailing lists I'm on that have near instant response time are running ezmlm with qmail (including some large lists like the mod_perl list and the perl5-porters list). I can't recommend this setup enough, I use it for a very low traffic mailing list for AxKit, but besides the low traffic, administration, albeit by command line utilities, is a breeze (there are web admin tools available, and admin by email is possible too).
Every other list I'm on, run on a variety of setups (the most common appears to be sendmail + majordomo), has really poor latency of around a couple of hours. For a daily email that might not be so bad, except to realise that the latency transfers directly into list delivery speed.
There's not much more to say about it. Try it - I never regret it.
So use pine for this too!
Here's my home setup... I use qmail, courier-imap, procmail and pine. My todo list is just another directory in imap. If I need to add a new todo I send a mail to matt-todo. procmail filters that to my todo list. If I need to access my email from around the world, I can using secure IMAP.
Really, I see nothing that Outlook offers WRT todo lists here. There's that silly "Journal" but I don't think many people use that. The only cool thing is the automatic calendaring - the ability to have meeting rooms also be Exchange users, and check people's availability (including the meeting room's) instantly with a graph of when might be possible if not now, is just cool, and vital for growing businesses. Walking across the office and asking people if they're free just gets messy if one person isn't - this truly makes life easier (whether or not it's an innovation - I don't know - I'm guessing Lotus Notes or someone else already had this feature prior to Outlook).
First of all, you need to do some research about what Apache does and doesn't cache.
Second, mod_mmap doesn't put anything in the HEAD request, so if they were to take this simple and adequate route to caching, you wouldn't have a clue about it. mod_mmap is totally transparent to you, the user. It's not totally transparent to the sysadmins (one of it's weaknesses, IMHO) but then if you're only serving up 60 images, that shouldn't be a big deal.
Finally though, I really think people make too big a deal about serving images off a separate server. Let's look at the bigger picture: Slashdot serves around a million page views a day. That's averaging out throughout the day at a whopping 11 requests/sec on page views. Now given that we've seen benchmarks of apache serving static content at 2000+ req/sec, I think it's probably not even breaking a sweat serving those images.
What slashdot really needs to do (and I know pudge knows this too) is get away from Apache::Registry. That and do some serious code cleanups, and maybe even try this app on Oracle. That's where you'll see real differences, IMHO.
Anyway, I suppose they say every little helps, so how about it Pudge? Is mod_mmap doing it's thang in there?