Now my clients' computers can be compromised even faster because this language/protocol is "light weight".
Are you suggesting that XML is more secure because the average skiddie can't be bothered to type all that bloated markup? You might be right, actually...
Last time I checked OSS had made far less innovative contributions to the world of computing than anyone else.
Then don't talk about things you know nothing about. It used to be ALL open source and that's where basically every part of the industry started from the Internet to the idea of having operating systems.
One fact, according to Interpol, is that the amount of material confiscated with each offender is greater now than it was before the internet and before computers.
But the number of children being abused does not seem to be increasing. This is observations from police, social services, and hospitals. But you may be right.
I had check as you type on my Atari before MS did it. It beeped instead of underlining but the effect was the same. Indeed, it was better because it was so annoying that I made sure I learnt the correct spelling. I think I had it on my BBC too.
However, if the government does nothing then the 1800's and the rail-barons is what you get. The government has to step in at some point; the market is inherently unstable because it is made up of people with finite lives (which means a lack of long-term vision) and always has been. the trick is to have a light enough touch without being ineffectual.
Plus, of course, the idea that market forces put MS where they are today is utterly wrong. They made their position on the back of IBM's success. They never would have beaten DR or Apple if market forces had played a part. Same with IE.
Start menu. Well, if you call a menu at the bottom of the screen instead of the top "innovation".
Mouse wheel? Okay, I'll give you that one, although I'm sure they just bought it off someone else (or bought someone else).
Control panels were in use years before MS made their slightly odd contribution. Apple did them, Xerox did them (along with everything else in Windows). Atari did them Commodore did them. etc.
yeah pretty much anything KDE or Gnome has is there because it was copied from Microsoft.
Yes. Those projects are trying to imitate MS so that users can move across easily. That's why they suck.
Another politically motivated mindless drone who is blinded by his nationalistic envy.
There are lots of places worse than America to live, but lots of better ones too.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't live in England now, and I'm not from England.
I don't know the name of the man I'm thinking of, but he began with a simple ferry boat operation which he ran for a year or more for free back in the 1800s.
I think you're thinking of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He bought a ferry operation for a hundred bucks (I think this was the start of the Staten Island Ferry Co) and later went into railroads, all the while engaging in massive fraud and immoral behaviour to enrich himself. But I don't know, off the top of my head, if he did the old "zero fare" routine.
Last time I checked MS hadn't made any innovative contributions to the world of computing. So at least part of the argument is just wrong.
As to the pricing thing, well. Where I lived in England (really England, not meaning "any part of Britain"), Stagecoach (a bus company) rolled into town and set their prices at zero until all the other bus companies went out of business. Then they stuck their prices up to something slightly less than the old prices.
Sure, prices were lower but in getting there all competition had been destroyed and Stagecoach is no longer (especially since they got control of the trains too) under any pressure to ensure quality. So they don't.
It's the same with Microsoft: after they crap all over a market to kill all the competition they simply sit around and look for new ways to screw the trapped clients. Sure, the prices are lower, but quality is non-existant and customer service is some sort of joke.
IE is a good example: until Firefox came along it had basically been left to rot. It still doesn't actually manage CSS level 1 or 2 to anything like a decent level, or display PNGs correctly. Sure, browers are bloody cheap (free) but if you'd been waiting for MS to innovate you'd have been dead and buried before it happened.
This reminds me of the case where Tiffany tried to sue eBay because of the huge numbers of fake Tiffany lamps on eBay. They said that they had to have two full-time members of staff trawling eBay to catch them. What they didn't seem to grasp was that they only needed two full-time members of staff to catch them. Before eBay they wouldn't have caught 1% of them.
Likewise, a psychologist friend of mine was pointing out recently that the Internet has made it easier than ever before to catch child molesters without making any significent increase in the numbers of them. In other words: the Internet is the single greatest anti-child-molestation system ever invented.
But that's not such an interesting story and needs a little tiny bit of lateral thought, so it's not going to be in the mainstream press any day soon.
it has a speed, but think about it: This planet is hurtling through space at breakneck speeds. Now add the speed of light from my laser to the speed the Earth is moving, and voila! You have a speed faster than the speed of light
I don't have to think about it, Einstein already did it for me: the speed of light does not "add" to other speeds. Time warps instead. That's (very very basically) what the Theory of Relativity is all about.
And can create PDF? Without grinding a PIII/800 to its knees?
I've been using pdf as my standard exchange format from Linux to Windows (and my own main format for "internal" use) since my P100. What god forsaken program are you using to make your PDFs?
General tip: save as Postscript and then run ps2pdf (part of Ghostscriot) on the result. There are other ways to the same result but that one will get you a PDF of nearly anything you can see on a Linux system, even output from your browser. And it'll do it quickly.
If you're using TeX or *shudder* LaTeX you can have graphics, thumbnails, crossreferences, hyperlinks and all the other paraphernalia of modern PDF. Scribus does even more pre-press stuff, I'm told.
but you just don't have the grammatical skills to pull it off.
Well, I typed "latter" instead of "former", if that's what you mean, yes.
Just what kind of point are you trying to make? Pick one:
*List of stupid suggestions snipped*
The point was: for a fraction of the cost you could by a console, indeed all the consoles, and have the money left over for a stack of games. Why would anyone want to spend their money on a machine which will be effectively unsupported in a year's time for five or more times the price of a console with a lifespan of four years?
Give me a fricking break.
If you hadn't spent all that money on a PC you could have bought your own break.
This is where the consoles always end up a year or so after their launch:
As do PCs. It's just a constant upgrade treadmill.
. On paper it sounds up to it, but as another poster has said, so did the PS2 before launch...
And it was, and is. For the price of a PS2 you simply can't get a PC that will play games as well (at all, in fact). The money saved can go on actually buying games for it. The PC has a lot of things going for it, games isn't one of them.
Intel gains very little by giving software and ideas away;
Other than increasing the market for their product, you mean? Last time I looked Intel was primarily a hardware company. Effectively, they do in fact only make money by servicing the software, in the form of selling hardware to support it. What use would it be for Intel to sell software (ie, drivers) for which there is no hardware? None. What use would it be for them to give away software and sell the hardware? Lots.
In particular, being able to validate an XML file against a DTD is pretty sweet for finding typos or other weird errors.
That's fair enough, but that's IT. And that's only because you have a DTD. If you'd had a BNF definition, or any formal definition, you could have done that without having to bloat your SOURCE document with all the human-readable, inhumanly-editable, XML chuff. And that chuff goes into EVERY source document.
I'e used GIS files which had less than 50% data to XML formatting in them and when you're looking at gigs of data that's a criminal waste of space and time.
Specifically, when you are sharing very loosely structured data (structures with lots of optional fields, arbitrary field counts, etc.) between vastly dispate systems
BNF parser, anyone? A formal bit of documentaion (which you have to do to make an XML schema anyway)? How does XML help?
Another good example is (obviously) XHTML
XHTML is the classic example. It adds nothing to HTML 4.01 except the fact that the W3C validator now complains that it doesn't understand what document format an HTML tag indicates! What use is the XHTML spec that makes it better than the HTML spec?
XML has become useful, but entirely because it has been taken up by so many people that it has an ecosystem. I just can't, and didn't at the time it came out, see any reason to take it up in the first place.
Every problem looks like it needs a factor of ten bloat.
As with all XML applications I find myself asking "what problem does this solve?" and find the answer is "one in the creator's head".
I've never understood what the point of XML is. Beyond the purpose of documenting any file format, that is, because that seems to be all it does. And it does it very very badly.
In any case, most Americans (myself included) would rather we forget about the nineteenth century, and its legacy of colonialism, imperialism, unrestrained capitalism and generally dismal oppression coupled with prudish public morals and private excesses.
But that's exactly the 21st century America "most" Americans have just voted for!
Given that every time I talk to anyone else in IT the conversation comes round to "Why is google SO bad now?", I can't see it being worth 32K just to be annoyed by it.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suggesting that XML is more secure because the average skiddie can't be bothered to type all that bloated markup? You might be right, actually...
TWW
Then don't talk about things you know nothing about. It used to be ALL open source and that's where basically every part of the industry started from the Internet to the idea of having operating systems.
TWW
I think it would have been worse, but yes, the government was involved too. I was overstating my case so that I'd fit in.
TWW
Nobody even mentioned Linux.
umm, can you say 20 year old unix rip-off?
You clearly never had to use Unix 20 years ago.
TWW
But the number of children being abused does not seem to be increasing. This is observations from police, social services, and hospitals. But you may be right.
TWW
TWW
Plus, of course, the idea that market forces put MS where they are today is utterly wrong. They made their position on the back of IBM's success. They never would have beaten DR or Apple if market forces had played a part. Same with IE.
TWW
Start menu. Well, if you call a menu at the bottom of the screen instead of the top "innovation".
Mouse wheel? Okay, I'll give you that one, although I'm sure they just bought it off someone else (or bought someone else).
Control panels were in use years before MS made their slightly odd contribution. Apple did them, Xerox did them (along with everything else in Windows). Atari did them Commodore did them. etc.
yeah pretty much anything KDE or Gnome has is there because it was copied from Microsoft.
Yes. Those projects are trying to imitate MS so that users can move across easily. That's why they suck.
Another politically motivated mindless drone who is blinded by his nationalistic envy.
There are lots of places worse than America to live, but lots of better ones too.
If it makes you feel any better, I don't live in England now, and I'm not from England.
TWW
I think you're thinking of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He bought a ferry operation for a hundred bucks (I think this was the start of the Staten Island Ferry Co) and later went into railroads, all the while engaging in massive fraud and immoral behaviour to enrich himself. But I don't know, off the top of my head, if he did the old "zero fare" routine.
TWW
As to the pricing thing, well. Where I lived in England (really England, not meaning "any part of Britain"), Stagecoach (a bus company) rolled into town and set their prices at zero until all the other bus companies went out of business. Then they stuck their prices up to something slightly less than the old prices.
Sure, prices were lower but in getting there all competition had been destroyed and Stagecoach is no longer (especially since they got control of the trains too) under any pressure to ensure quality. So they don't.
It's the same with Microsoft: after they crap all over a market to kill all the competition they simply sit around and look for new ways to screw the trapped clients. Sure, the prices are lower, but quality is non-existant and customer service is some sort of joke.
IE is a good example: until Firefox came along it had basically been left to rot. It still doesn't actually manage CSS level 1 or 2 to anything like a decent level, or display PNGs correctly. Sure, browers are bloody cheap (free) but if you'd been waiting for MS to innovate you'd have been dead and buried before it happened.
TWW
Likewise, a psychologist friend of mine was pointing out recently that the Internet has made it easier than ever before to catch child molesters without making any significent increase in the numbers of them. In other words: the Internet is the single greatest anti-child-molestation system ever invented.
But that's not such an interesting story and needs a little tiny bit of lateral thought, so it's not going to be in the mainstream press any day soon.
TWW
I don't have to think about it, Einstein already did it for me: the speed of light does not "add" to other speeds. Time warps instead. That's (very very basically) what the Theory of Relativity is all about.
TWW
I've been using pdf as my standard exchange format from Linux to Windows (and my own main format for "internal" use) since my P100. What god forsaken program are you using to make your PDFs?
General tip: save as Postscript and then run ps2pdf (part of Ghostscriot) on the result. There are other ways to the same result but that one will get you a PDF of nearly anything you can see on a Linux system, even output from your browser. And it'll do it quickly.
If you're using TeX or *shudder* LaTeX you can have graphics, thumbnails, crossreferences, hyperlinks and all the other paraphernalia of modern PDF. Scribus does even more pre-press stuff, I'm told.
TWW
Well, I typed "latter" instead of "former", if that's what you mean, yes.
Just what kind of point are you trying to make? Pick one:
*List of stupid suggestions snipped*
The point was: for a fraction of the cost you could by a console, indeed all the consoles, and have the money left over for a stack of games. Why would anyone want to spend their money on a machine which will be effectively unsupported in a year's time for five or more times the price of a console with a lifespan of four years?
Give me a fricking break.
If you hadn't spent all that money on a PC you could have bought your own break.
TWW
As do PCs. It's just a constant upgrade treadmill.
. On paper it sounds up to it, but as another poster has said, so did the PS2 before launch...
And it was, and is. For the price of a PS2 you simply can't get a PC that will play games as well (at all, in fact). The money saved can go on actually buying games for it. The PC has a lot of things going for it, games isn't one of them.
TWW
Secondly: anyone that buys a PC to play games on has more money than sense and is quickly parted from the latter.
TWW
Other than increasing the market for their product, you mean? Last time I looked Intel was primarily a hardware company. Effectively, they do in fact only make money by servicing the software, in the form of selling hardware to support it. What use would it be for Intel to sell software (ie, drivers) for which there is no hardware? None. What use would it be for them to give away software and sell the hardware? Lots.
TWW
Core idea of Forth, too. Great language but pretty well dead now.
TWW
SCO?
Joke, joke! *exit pursued by villagers with buring torches*
TWW
That's fair enough, but that's IT. And that's only because you have a DTD. If you'd had a BNF definition, or any formal definition, you could have done that without having to bloat your SOURCE document with all the human-readable, inhumanly-editable, XML chuff. And that chuff goes into EVERY source document.
I'e used GIS files which had less than 50% data to XML formatting in them and when you're looking at gigs of data that's a criminal waste of space and time.
TWW
BNF parser, anyone? A formal bit of documentaion (which you have to do to make an XML schema anyway)? How does XML help?
Another good example is (obviously) XHTML
XHTML is the classic example. It adds nothing to HTML 4.01 except the fact that the W3C validator now complains that it doesn't understand what document format an HTML tag indicates! What use is the XHTML spec that makes it better than the HTML spec?
XML has become useful, but entirely because it has been taken up by so many people that it has an ecosystem. I just can't, and didn't at the time it came out, see any reason to take it up in the first place.
TWW
Every problem looks like it needs a factor of ten bloat.
As with all XML applications I find myself asking "what problem does this solve?" and find the answer is "one in the creator's head".
I've never understood what the point of XML is. Beyond the purpose of documenting any file format, that is, because that seems to be all it does. And it does it very very badly.
TWW
But that's exactly the 21st century America "most" Americans have just voted for!
TWW
Boy, were you wrong!
TWW
Given that every time I talk to anyone else in IT the conversation comes round to "Why is google SO bad now?", I can't see it being worth 32K just to be annoyed by it.