I know loading the file isn't just parsing the XML. Loading a binary file isn't just loading data either, the point is that the overhead of parsing XML relative to parsing binary data cannot be any larger than the total cost of parsing the XML. Hence, for a huge office file, the overhead of XML vs some binary format is going to be no more than 1 second on the load time; and that's if you had to read all the data before displaying or editing anything, which you clearly don't.
And as you point out, that's via Expat as it was a few years ago. Expat is now 12MB/sec/GHz, and XML Screamer gets within 20-40% of the speed of simply sucking in all the characters raw. So for your 100MB bloated file from hell example, you're looking at a parse time of 4.3 seconds for XML on a 1GHz machine, vs 2.6 seconds raw data slurping. So, switching from XML to binary might save you 1.65 seconds.
So I still say that trying to speed up file load by switching from XML to some other format is a classic example of premature optimization. You'll get way more speed boost by optimizing other parts of the load process; XML is not the problem.
You may find it hard to believe, but a lot of people really don't understand how credit cards work. If you think otherwise, you should watch the PBS Frontline documentary on the Secret History of the Credit Card. It was amazing to see seemingly intelligent people saying that they keep a balance on their credit cards even though they have cash in the bank.
I heard a girl in the mall telling a friend that her mom had advised her to shift balance from her regular credit card to a store card. There are people who believe that making the payment suggested on the credit card bill will reduce their debt, and don't understand why it never seems to go down.
I don't think it's reasonable that the credit card companies are allowed to incent bad behavior, and then turn around and blame the victims. The new Citi Simpliciti card is the most recent example--a card that lets you skip minimum payments as long as you spend more money. How evil is that? It's basically designed to get people further into debt than they can afford.
WINE is what lets me run Linux on my work computer. I can run the one legacy application I really need, and use native Linux applications for everything else. If WINE didn't exist, I'd be stuck on XP.
They're saying a binary file, with a header and fixed data structures, are alot easier to read & parse than an XML file, which consists of structures of variable length, needs to be interpreted, etc etc etc. This is a problem with XML.
Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.
Plus, think about the OS platform as a whole. Microsoft need to have an XML reader in the OS, for things like web feeds, web page parsing, and so on. If they're smart, they'll throw a bunch of engineers at that XML parser and optimize the hell out of it. With OpenDocument, they can use that highly optimized parser for their office documents too.
But no, they seem to be saying that it's better to write, maintain and optimize a second parser just for Office documents. Well, I don't buy it.
The main reason I don't is that XML parsing is damn fast. I took a copy of Ulysses in HTML, and parsed the entire thing. It takes about 1 second per MB, and that's for an XML parser written in one of the slower purely interpreted languages. A C language parser like Expat is about 50-100x faster (based on other people's benchmarks). So for a bloated presentation file, we're talking about maybe 1 second of parsing. That's simply not a performance bottleneck.
However, the people that own the rights to that MP3 do feel that it is being stolen, and we really should be giving more respect to their point of view as well.
I feel that you owe me $200. You really should be giving more respect to my point of view.
Hey, it's just as valid an opinion as the idea that copying an MP3 means it is "stolen".
Developers deliberatly giving people software, then making them "upgrade" to a premium version if they want to export their mail, documents, photos, or anything else should be shot on site!
Software will either use a common file format (XML, Berkeley DB, a SQL back end, whatever), or it will use a proprietary file format.
If the software uses a standard format, all you have to do is document what it is. This is the approach Apple takes.
If it's a proprietary format, then if the software is competently designed, there will have to be some documentation of what the format is, somewhere. So all you need to do is make that documentation available. Examples: GIF, Digital Research GEM file formats, TIFF.
The third option is that almost always, you'll have some code which can conveniently be turned into an API at very little cost. Example: Lotus Notes.
So generally the only time it costs significant money to allow data export is if the software is hacked together by code monkeys.
It's certainly possible to work your way out of poverty. However, there are plenty of situations where the odds are clearly stacked against you. Credit is one of the big ones. There's a whole industry built around giving poor people credit cards with 0% interest, letting them spend an amount they'll never be able to repay, catching them out with the terms and conditions, then jacking up the interest rate and sucking money from them every month for the rest of their lives. And it's observably the case that people who don't need loans get them thrown their way; while people who need loans desperately, get jack.
There is a growing descrepancy between the rich and the poor in this country, but it is NOT because the poor are getting poorer. The poor are not any more poor than they were in the 1930's, the 1940's or the 1950's.
No, but there are more families officially in poverty now than there were at any time in the 1970s, and a higher percentage of families are in poverty too.
Basic HTML. Only HTML. Done in Notepad. including the <FONT> tag and all its options.
i.e. they're being taught stuff that's already obsolete. They're probably also taught stuff like <font face=...> that was only ever a deprecated hack added in HTML 4. Sad.
The issue here is not about editorial decisions about including particular articles, it is about decisions about removing sites from the aggregator based on review of their content.
That's still an editorial decision about what is or isn't news, and it's clear to me that Google is making some pretty questionable decisions on that front.
For example, the Bisexual Resource Center news page was turned down for inclusion in Google News. Why? It looks clearly like news and not comment to me, and it has a pagerank of 7 so it's not as if it's some obscure blog. They include sites with lower pagerank, like pinknews.co.uk which has a pagerank of 4, so frankly the decision is highly questionable.
I actually think Sony's comment was a bit more "negative" since they referred to the Wii as a "second console." Personally, I still think you are going to get a great deal of budget minded gamers who will purchase the Wii as a "first" or "only" console and wait for the prices of the PS3 and 360 to drop to more reasonable levels.
I think that's Sony's fear, and it's quite justified.
The GameCube was my second console after the PS2. I bought many more games for PS2 than for GameCube. However, I'm not touching PS3 until the price drops significantly; so if Nintendo's Wii comes in at $250 or less, as people seem to expect, it's going to be very tempting to make that my new primary console while I wait for PS3 to drop in price. Of course, in the mean time I'll be buying Wii games, and not PS3 games...
Peter Moore has shown off his Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto 4 tattoos when announcing the games. Both tattoos are quite real as shown in a GearLive interview.
Wow. It's one thing to drink the Redmond Kool-Aid, but to get tattooed to show your devotion to evil? That's just sad.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be what you're discussion, but it's not what I'm discussing.
I think OOo's file format is horrible, but it's not the fact that it's XML that I object to.
The problem is, clustering and padding have significant overhead. There's a reason why FAT isn't a high performance file system.
I know loading the file isn't just parsing the XML. Loading a binary file isn't just loading data either, the point is that the overhead of parsing XML relative to parsing binary data cannot be any larger than the total cost of parsing the XML. Hence, for a huge office file, the overhead of XML vs some binary format is going to be no more than 1 second on the load time; and that's if you had to read all the data before displaying or editing anything, which you clearly don't.
And as you point out, that's via Expat as it was a few years ago. Expat is now 12MB/sec/GHz, and XML Screamer gets within 20-40% of the speed of simply sucking in all the characters raw. So for your 100MB bloated file from hell example, you're looking at a parse time of 4.3 seconds for XML on a 1GHz machine, vs 2.6 seconds raw data slurping. So, switching from XML to binary might save you 1.65 seconds.
So I still say that trying to speed up file load by switching from XML to some other format is a classic example of premature optimization. You'll get way more speed boost by optimizing other parts of the load process; XML is not the problem.
You may find it hard to believe, but a lot of people really don't understand how credit cards work. If you think otherwise, you should watch the PBS Frontline documentary on the Secret History of the Credit Card. It was amazing to see seemingly intelligent people saying that they keep a balance on their credit cards even though they have cash in the bank.
I heard a girl in the mall telling a friend that her mom had advised her to shift balance from her regular credit card to a store card. There are people who believe that making the payment suggested on the credit card bill will reduce their debt, and don't understand why it never seems to go down.
I don't think it's reasonable that the credit card companies are allowed to incent bad behavior, and then turn around and blame the victims. The new Citi Simpliciti card is the most recent example--a card that lets you skip minimum payments as long as you spend more money. How evil is that? It's basically designed to get people further into debt than they can afford.
WINE is what lets me run Linux on my work computer. I can run the one legacy application I really need, and use native Linux applications for everything else. If WINE didn't exist, I'd be stuck on XP.
So I don't see WINE as destructive or silly.
Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.
Plus, think about the OS platform as a whole. Microsoft need to have an XML reader in the OS, for things like web feeds, web page parsing, and so on. If they're smart, they'll throw a bunch of engineers at that XML parser and optimize the hell out of it. With OpenDocument, they can use that highly optimized parser for their office documents too.
But no, they seem to be saying that it's better to write, maintain and optimize a second parser just for Office documents. Well, I don't buy it.
The main reason I don't is that XML parsing is damn fast. I took a copy of Ulysses in HTML, and parsed the entire thing. It takes about 1 second per MB, and that's for an XML parser written in one of the slower purely interpreted languages. A C language parser like Expat is about 50-100x faster (based on other people's benchmarks). So for a bloated presentation file, we're talking about maybe 1 second of parsing. That's simply not a performance bottleneck.
I feel that you owe me $200. You really should be giving more respect to my point of view.
Hey, it's just as valid an opinion as the idea that copying an MP3 means it is "stolen".
Haven't seen it mentioned yet, so:
Tog on Interface
Also, Computer Lib / Dream Machines by Ted Nelson has some valuable lessons in it.
Or off site, if they don't offer on site support.
Software will either use a common file format (XML, Berkeley DB, a SQL back end, whatever), or it will use a proprietary file format.
If the software uses a standard format, all you have to do is document what it is. This is the approach Apple takes.
If it's a proprietary format, then if the software is competently designed, there will have to be some documentation of what the format is, somewhere. So all you need to do is make that documentation available. Examples: GIF, Digital Research GEM file formats, TIFF.
The third option is that almost always, you'll have some code which can conveniently be turned into an API at very little cost. Example: Lotus Notes.
So generally the only time it costs significant money to allow data export is if the software is hacked together by code monkeys.
Wow... in an attempt to defend the software, you ended up making me want to have nothing to do with it or the people who like it. Good job!
No, but there are more families officially in poverty now than there were at any time in the 1970s, and a higher percentage of families are in poverty too.
Those liquid state laptops keep dripping on my pants.
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Oddworld: Abe's Exxodus
Klonoa 2
Viewtiful Joe
Alien Hominid
All available for PS2. (The first two are PS1 games, but run fine on PS2 and are well worth getting, my favorite platform games ever.)
i.e. they're being taught stuff that's already obsolete. They're probably also taught stuff like <font face=...> that was only ever a deprecated hack added in HTML 4. Sad.
Or Alienware, if you really want to pay out the ass.
That's still an editorial decision about what is or isn't news, and it's clear to me that Google is making some pretty questionable decisions on that front.
For example, the Bisexual Resource Center news page was turned down for inclusion in Google News. Why? It looks clearly like news and not comment to me, and it has a pagerank of 7 so it's not as if it's some obscure blog. They include sites with lower pagerank, like pinknews.co.uk which has a pagerank of 4, so frankly the decision is highly questionable.
I think that's Sony's fear, and it's quite justified.
The GameCube was my second console after the PS2. I bought many more games for PS2 than for GameCube. However, I'm not touching PS3 until the price drops significantly; so if Nintendo's Wii comes in at $250 or less, as people seem to expect, it's going to be very tempting to make that my new primary console while I wait for PS3 to drop in price. Of course, in the mean time I'll be buying Wii games, and not PS3 games...
Wow. It's one thing to drink the Redmond Kool-Aid, but to get tattooed to show your devotion to evil? That's just sad.
Yes, and when it makes final release I might look at the application.
Taxation without representation happens all the time. That boat set sail a long, long time ago.
Perhaps you missed that I talked about what it is, not what it may one day be.
When it produces XHTML + ECMAscript applications, I might be interested.
Dear troll, the DS Lite screen is better than that of the original DS. It's only the casing that's smaller.
No, it isn't. It's an open source platform for developing user friendly Flash applications.
So, how are we supposed to decide whether things which allegedly are done for security, actually improve security?