You're forgetting, OpenOffice didn't conform to ODF either (in fact, it still doesn't). Microsoft hasn't released a product post-standard yet, so that's quite a strawman.
Also, the world would be better off by Microsoft standardizing the binary formats, because most competitors have already reverse engineered most of those formats and support already around 90% of their features
The binary formats are obsolete. XML formats are needed for todays search indexing oriented archival systems, which still need to archive those billions of documents. Lots of Microsofts customers have been screaming for a more index friendly way to convert old documents for years. Their approach was to "xml-ify" the binary documents so that none of the data changed, just the mechanism used to store and access it.
Conversion to ODF requires not just conversion, but translation. And translation always loses data, something that about half a dozen federal laws prohibit (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc..). For example, if you ahve a document that depends on the faulty leap-year calculations of lotus notes, then translation alters the dates. That's a no-no in archival, as well as regulatory areas.
In effect, the XML-ization was required by Microsoft's customers anyways, so why not kill 2 birds with one stone and just make the XML format the standard, instead of standardizing the binary formats then have this non-standard XML version on top of it. This, by the way, appears to be the reason that Durusau endorses OOXML standardization, because he sees there is a legitimate benefite for it, though he obviously would probably prefers ODF for new documents.
Actually, I recall reading that the head of the board of directors of OASIS was a Microsoft employee during the time that ODF was standardized there.
Yes, and?
Microsoft could have participated from the start, they would if they were interested in interoperability.
It really wasn't going anywhere until Sun joined and donated the Openoffice format. Why would Microsoft participate in a group that appeared to be spinning it's wheels? Sun saw OASIS as a vehicle to unite Microsoft's competitors against them, and it's been surprisingly successful. Microsoft's participation in it would have killed that idea, and ODF would have likely deteriorated into a bubbling mass of sludge IMO. None of Microsofts competitors would have seen any reason to continue working on it if they didn't have a tactical advantage.
The claims that SUN ruled the ODF TC is also false, since SUN has only 3 of the 10 members that decide on it.
Now. IBM didn't join until after (or very close to the time) it was finished and ratified. During the development, Sun had the most employees working on it (7 at one time IIRC), had it's employees in the chair, and bullied those that didn't go along with it's demands.
Gary Edwards was part of that phony Open Document Foundation, ODF, which ended up saying that ODF was not suitable
There's a reason for that. Gary Edwards was one of the founding members of the ODF TC. He worked very hard to make comaptibility with Office a reality, but Sun blocked him at every move, which is why he eventually threw his hands up and said it wasn't suitable. Gary was a shining example of what happened when you crossed Sun and tried to get them to do anything that wasn't directly supported by Openoffice.
Now, i'm certain there is 2 sides to this story, but the fact remains, they railroaded him out of the ODF TC, and then set about tarnishing his reputation (though I think he certaily helped with that with all his whining on various forums). Gary Edwards had a great reputation with the ODF community up until they crossed Sun. Suddenly Sun tries to retroactivally paint him as a phony, and people such as yourself seem to have fallen for it. His negativity against the ODF was because of the way Sun ran the TC.
Frankly, that's not how an "Open" process is supposed to work. And it's indicitive of the kind of tricks Sun pulls, and why Microsoft saw right through it.
also don't know what Microsoft would "require" to be added to ODF. I hope they don't
Well, I appologize for implying you were sheeple;)
You seem relatively informed and objective, despite your bias. A few points of clarification. The EU didn't fine Microsoft for "abusing their monopoly", but rather for failing to follow their orders in a timely manner. The EU gave them a ridiculous timeframe to create documents that are far more complex than a "simple" document format. It was no surprise that the documents Microsoft could come up with on the EU's timetable were insufficient.
In a way, the EU's requirements are analagous to the OOXML situation.
Part of the problem here is a difference of opinion in what a "standard" should be. Many open source advocates believe that a standard should be an elegant forward looking solution designed for the future, giving up compatibility for purity. In that stance, they have somewhat of an argument for ODF, even though ODF has many warts of its own and is largely based on a 1:1 mapping of Open/StarOffice features.
Fast Track was intended as a way to give existing and de-facto standards more interoperability. The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format. It's merely a different implementation of the legacy binary documents. In that respect, it's effectively a de-facto standard that fits well with ISO Fast Track's intended purpose.
Most people that complain about OOXML are doing so from the ODF perspective, when in reality OOXML has a different purpose from ODF, though they have a large amount of overlap.
I agree with you that Microsoft could have standardized on ODF with extensions, however there were politics at work that were not entirely (or maybe even mostly) Microsoft's fault. Sun ruled over the ODF TC with an iron fist, and there was never a serious offer for Microsoft to join ODF. Sun would have never allowed the extensions Microsoft needed (as evidenced by the fallout with Gary Edwards and his attempt to get the necessary extensions included in ODF). And without the ODF TC blessing, Microsoft would be accused of trying to "embrace, extend, extinguish" it.
Microsoft chose to go another way, I think largely because they saw ODF for what it was, posturing by MS's competitors in an attempt to marginalize them. If Sun had truly been open to Microsoft's requirements for a file format, things may have turned out differently.
Make no mistake, Sun, Oasis, IBM, etc... are just as guilty in this kerfluffle as Microsoft.
I've followed this fairly closely and am EXTREMELY ANGRY at the crap MS has pulled trying to force this through!
Actually, what you've been following are biased opinions by people who have a financial stake in OOXML failing. It's no surprise that you're angry, that's what they want you to be. That's not say there aren't problems, but in general what you are angry about is complete fiction created by people who are desperate to make people believe the way you do.
Perhaps you should step back and try to read some comments from objective members (and i'm not talking about Microsoft). Patrick Durusau is one such person, but you refuse to accept (or even believe) what he says because your opinion has already been tainted by the bias.
My guess is that you're talking about a Mac Server with Ruby on Rails, which despite being a hot buzzword and so much talk about it, really has very few experienced developers out there.
Most platforms are fully capable of dealing with average loads. If the solution is working fine, perfoming well, and just needs maintenance... then I'd suggest that maybe you just need to change your hiring practices. Maybe you really don't need someone with 3 years of experience in the technology. Maybe what you really need is someone with enough experience overall that he can learn or pickup the technology quickly and apply his experience in other technologies to that technology?
On the other hand, training someone in a technology that is in short supply is a sure bet that they'll go somewhere else that will pay them more as soon as they have the requisite experience.
You really need to do a Cost/Benefit analysis. How much will it cost you to convert your platform to something else? How much benefit will that give you?
I assume you're referring to the lack of customizability of the top part of the UI. This wasn't an arbitrary decision, it was designed this way to reduce the risk of phishing attacks which typically create windows that look like a valid interface. The old customizable interface made it WAY too easy for fishers to grab data from unsuspecting users.
I'm sorry, Linus. But that argument makes no sense.
The GPL is a distribution license. NdisWrappers doesn't distribute any binary code that isn't licensed under the GPL, and the code is available. It's up to the end user to use their own binary drivers, and such use isn't covered under the GPLv2.
I see nothing that prohibits the distribution of NdisWrappers based on the GPLv2, regardless of what that code does when it executes on the users machine.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there have only been 3 non-critical security flaws found in IIS in the last 5 years, while Apache has had how many?
There's actually a pretty good reason for that. The sevice pack is not a typical service pack. It's a patch. It patches existing files, rather than replacing them. It can take upwards of an hour because it has to verify that all files are patchable before it begins the process, then it backs up your files, does transactioning so that if something goes wrong it can rollback and not leave a semi-functioning installation.. all that is very intensive, particularly because VS2005 is several Gigabytes in size for everything.
They could have made it a lot faster, but it wouldn't have been as robust in failure conditions.
Since I got to this discussion late, I was hoping someone would bring up this point. I'm glad you did.
Yes, it's absolutely true that the Federal government does not assess property taxes. However, one could make an argument that giving away software is like giving someone property or services, which IS taxable under law. Technically, the person receiving the gift has to pay taxes on it.
Of course one could argue that any percentage of free is 0, but what if the government valued software on it's commercial value. That is, how much would the x number of hours spent developing the software cost if you commissioned it to be done, or how much would it sell for if this were a commercial program.
But that's just it. Federal law says that the US Government cannot claim copyright on anything it creates (though it can acquire copyright). In other words, all government works are in the public domain by law. What that means is that the government cannot GPL anything, because *EVERYONE* has to have the right to use it for any purpose they desire, including distribution without source, deriving other works from it, etc..
Therefore, the only way the government could do what you suggest is if the code were donated to the public domain, in which case it's not owned by anyone, therefore it's not property anyways.
Look, that's what WMI, WShell, PowerShell, etc.. are for, people like you. People like 90% of the rest of the people, however, like the point and click.
Did you even read my message? Who said anything about CLI and scripting utilities on your own desktop?
I said, there are a boatload of *GUI* utilities that you can manage the server remotely from the desktop. The point being, while the server itself may not have a GUI, the GUI tools are still there, just used remotely.
Most people seem to miss the fact that it's not JUST a CLI, there are also a whole boatload of client GUI utilities that go with it, that you run on your workstation to manage the server. That's something that Linux has been largely missing (not counting stuff like Webmin, which isn't quite the same thing or remote X)
For example, for a Server Core Active Directory Role, you can administer it from the standard AD Users and Computers applet from any client.
Silverlight solves a number of Flash's shortcomings.
1) It's XML based, making it more indexible than flash's binary format. 2) It allows more than just one language to program it (flash requires actionscript only) 3) It is based on XAML, which is also used by WPF which allows code and XML to be shared between web and desktop applications easily 4) Because it's XML it's more easily converted to other forms (HTML, for instance, via XSLT) 5) Microsoft thought they could do it better
You do realize that Silverlight works on Firefox too, and Opera and Safari. It will also work on Firefox, Konqueror, etc... on Linux too via moonlight.
Access in 20 years is not guaranteed. Silverlight is proprietary. Micorosoft have made it accessible to other operating systems but ongoing accessibility is absolutely dependent on the whim of Microsoft maintaining the availability and leaving the format untouched.
The flaw in your argument is that it doesn't matter. The content we're talking about is content taken from existing physical books. If Silverlight went away, the books would still be there, and can be converted to any other format. In fact, it's likely that information is available in everything from plain text to lossless graphics already.
What we're talking about is a convenient presentation format for the material, and that presentation format can change over time.
What is the justification for putting that semantic meaning into a variable name, instead of incorporating it into class definitions?
Hungarian is not so necessary in this day of extensive IDE support, but back when it was invented it was useful because simply looking at a variable name did not give you any idea of what type it was, requiring you to frequently jump around in code you were maintaining.
Let's say you open up some code to fix a bug. You see a variable named "windows_coords". What is it? A RECT structure? A CRect class? An array of ints? An array of floats or doubles? Something the programmer wrote himself? You have to go look at it's definition (which usually involes greping the code) which completely throws off your train of thought.
Nowadays, you just have to hover your mouse over the name it most IDE's will tell you, which makes hungarian a bit vestigular.
Bad idea. People will just go throught and click 5 for 1000 pictures in a row just to get the reduced discount. What's more, This marginalizes people without photos or who (for one reason or another) photograph poorly.
What would be more interesting os to see the the pictures that another person thought were "hot" or "not". Then you'd know if you were their physical "type". Or, maybe you could see whether a guy or girl is solely interested in "hotties" or not.
On of my pet peeves about dating sites is that many of them try to totally ignore sex, pretending that everyone is just looking to get married. Then again, sites that allow sexual intentions tend to be filled with spammers and bots.
As I said, their implementations are very different, but they accomplish mostly the same goals. Sure, SOM has inheritance and runtime dispatch, but COM can simulate inheritance with aggregation. The only limitaiton is that you can't superclass in COM (as I said, subclassing can be simulated with aggregation).
You're confusing features, with purpose. They have the same purpose, they just go about it with different feature sets.
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You're forgetting, OpenOffice didn't conform to ODF either (in fact, it still doesn't). Microsoft hasn't released a product post-standard yet, so that's quite a strawman.
Also, the world would be better off by Microsoft standardizing the binary formats, because most competitors have already reverse engineered most of those formats and support already around 90% of their features
The binary formats are obsolete. XML formats are needed for todays search indexing oriented archival systems, which still need to archive those billions of documents. Lots of Microsofts customers have been screaming for a more index friendly way to convert old documents for years. Their approach was to "xml-ify" the binary documents so that none of the data changed, just the mechanism used to store and access it.
Conversion to ODF requires not just conversion, but translation. And translation always loses data, something that about half a dozen federal laws prohibit (HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc..). For example, if you ahve a document that depends on the faulty leap-year calculations of lotus notes, then translation alters the dates. That's a no-no in archival, as well as regulatory areas.
In effect, the XML-ization was required by Microsoft's customers anyways, so why not kill 2 birds with one stone and just make the XML format the standard, instead of standardizing the binary formats then have this non-standard XML version on top of it. This, by the way, appears to be the reason that Durusau endorses OOXML standardization, because he sees there is a legitimate benefite for it, though he obviously would probably prefers ODF for new documents.
Actually, I recall reading that the head of the board of directors of OASIS was a Microsoft employee during the time that ODF was standardized there.
Yes, and?
Microsoft could have participated from the start, they would if they were interested in interoperability.
It really wasn't going anywhere until Sun joined and donated the Openoffice format. Why would Microsoft participate in a group that appeared to be spinning it's wheels? Sun saw OASIS as a vehicle to unite Microsoft's competitors against them, and it's been surprisingly successful. Microsoft's participation in it would have killed that idea, and ODF would have likely deteriorated into a bubbling mass of sludge IMO. None of Microsofts competitors would have seen any reason to continue working on it if they didn't have a tactical advantage.
The claims that SUN ruled the ODF TC is also false, since SUN has only 3 of the 10 members that decide on it.
Now. IBM didn't join until after (or very close to the time) it was finished and ratified. During the development, Sun had the most employees working on it (7 at one time IIRC), had it's employees in the chair, and bullied those that didn't go along with it's demands.
Gary Edwards was part of that phony Open Document Foundation, ODF, which ended up saying that ODF was not suitable
There's a reason for that. Gary Edwards was one of the founding members of the ODF TC. He worked very hard to make comaptibility with Office a reality, but Sun blocked him at every move, which is why he eventually threw his hands up and said it wasn't suitable. Gary was a shining example of what happened when you crossed Sun and tried to get them to do anything that wasn't directly supported by Openoffice.
Now, i'm certain there is 2 sides to this story, but the fact remains, they railroaded him out of the ODF TC, and then set about tarnishing his reputation (though I think he certaily helped with that with all his whining on various forums). Gary Edwards had a great reputation with the ODF community up until they crossed Sun. Suddenly Sun tries to retroactivally paint him as a phony, and people such as yourself seem to have fallen for it. His negativity against the ODF was because of the way Sun ran the TC.
Frankly, that's not how an "Open" process is supposed to work. And it's indicitive of the kind of tricks Sun pulls, and why Microsoft saw right through it.
also don't know what Microsoft would "require" to be added to ODF. I hope they don't
Well, I appologize for implying you were sheeple ;)
You seem relatively informed and objective, despite your bias. A few points of clarification. The EU didn't fine Microsoft for "abusing their monopoly", but rather for failing to follow their orders in a timely manner. The EU gave them a ridiculous timeframe to create documents that are far more complex than a "simple" document format. It was no surprise that the documents Microsoft could come up with on the EU's timetable were insufficient.
In a way, the EU's requirements are analagous to the OOXML situation.
Part of the problem here is a difference of opinion in what a "standard" should be. Many open source advocates believe that a standard should be an elegant forward looking solution designed for the future, giving up compatibility for purity. In that stance, they have somewhat of an argument for ODF, even though ODF has many warts of its own and is largely based on a 1:1 mapping of Open/StarOffice features.
Fast Track was intended as a way to give existing and de-facto standards more interoperability. The part that most people are confused about is that OOXML is *NOT* a new format. It's merely a different implementation of the legacy binary documents. In that respect, it's effectively a de-facto standard that fits well with ISO Fast Track's intended purpose.
Most people that complain about OOXML are doing so from the ODF perspective, when in reality OOXML has a different purpose from ODF, though they have a large amount of overlap.
I agree with you that Microsoft could have standardized on ODF with extensions, however there were politics at work that were not entirely (or maybe even mostly) Microsoft's fault. Sun ruled over the ODF TC with an iron fist, and there was never a serious offer for Microsoft to join ODF. Sun would have never allowed the extensions Microsoft needed (as evidenced by the fallout with Gary Edwards and his attempt to get the necessary extensions included in ODF). And without the ODF TC blessing, Microsoft would be accused of trying to "embrace, extend, extinguish" it.
Microsoft chose to go another way, I think largely because they saw ODF for what it was, posturing by MS's competitors in an attempt to marginalize them. If Sun had truly been open to Microsoft's requirements for a file format, things may have turned out differently.
Make no mistake, Sun, Oasis, IBM, etc... are just as guilty in this kerfluffle as Microsoft.
I've followed this fairly closely and am EXTREMELY ANGRY at the crap MS has pulled trying to force this through!
Actually, what you've been following are biased opinions by people who have a financial stake in OOXML failing. It's no surprise that you're angry, that's what they want you to be. That's not say there aren't problems, but in general what you are angry about is complete fiction created by people who are desperate to make people believe the way you do.
Perhaps you should step back and try to read some comments from objective members (and i'm not talking about Microsoft). Patrick Durusau is one such person, but you refuse to accept (or even believe) what he says because your opinion has already been tainted by the bias.
My guess is that you're talking about a Mac Server with Ruby on Rails, which despite being a hot buzzword and so much talk about it, really has very few experienced developers out there.
Most platforms are fully capable of dealing with average loads. If the solution is working fine, perfoming well, and just needs maintenance... then I'd suggest that maybe you just need to change your hiring practices. Maybe you really don't need someone with 3 years of experience in the technology. Maybe what you really need is someone with enough experience overall that he can learn or pickup the technology quickly and apply his experience in other technologies to that technology?
On the other hand, training someone in a technology that is in short supply is a sure bet that they'll go somewhere else that will pay them more as soon as they have the requisite experience.
You really need to do a Cost/Benefit analysis. How much will it cost you to convert your platform to something else? How much benefit will that give you?
I assume you're referring to the lack of customizability of the top part of the UI. This wasn't an arbitrary decision, it was designed this way to reduce the risk of phishing attacks which typically create windows that look like a valid interface. The old customizable interface made it WAY too easy for fishers to grab data from unsuspecting users.
I'm sorry, Linus. But that argument makes no sense.
The GPL is a distribution license. NdisWrappers doesn't distribute any binary code that isn't licensed under the GPL, and the code is available. It's up to the end user to use their own binary drivers, and such use isn't covered under the GPLv2.
I see nothing that prohibits the distribution of NdisWrappers based on the GPLv2, regardless of what that code does when it executes on the users machine.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there have only been 3 non-critical security flaws found in IIS in the last 5 years, while Apache has had how many?
There's actually a pretty good reason for that. The sevice pack is not a typical service pack. It's a patch. It patches existing files, rather than replacing them. It can take upwards of an hour because it has to verify that all files are patchable before it begins the process, then it backs up your files, does transactioning so that if something goes wrong it can rollback and not leave a semi-functioning installation.. all that is very intensive, particularly because VS2005 is several Gigabytes in size for everything.
They could have made it a lot faster, but it wouldn't have been as robust in failure conditions.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html
While it goes into details about a lot of other stuff, there's the explanation of Vista's (apparent) slow disk performance.
Since I got to this discussion late, I was hoping someone would bring up this point. I'm glad you did.
Yes, it's absolutely true that the Federal government does not assess property taxes. However, one could make an argument that giving away software is like giving someone property or services, which IS taxable under law. Technically, the person receiving the gift has to pay taxes on it.
Of course one could argue that any percentage of free is 0, but what if the government valued software on it's commercial value. That is, how much would the x number of hours spent developing the software cost if you commissioned it to be done, or how much would it sell for if this were a commercial program.
But that's just it. Federal law says that the US Government cannot claim copyright on anything it creates (though it can acquire copyright). In other words, all government works are in the public domain by law. What that means is that the government cannot GPL anything, because *EVERYONE* has to have the right to use it for any purpose they desire, including distribution without source, deriving other works from it, etc..
Therefore, the only way the government could do what you suggest is if the code were donated to the public domain, in which case it's not owned by anyone, therefore it's not property anyways.
Look, that's what WMI, WShell, PowerShell, etc.. are for, people like you. People like 90% of the rest of the people, however, like the point and click.
Uhh.. what?
Did you even read my message? Who said anything about CLI and scripting utilities on your own desktop?
I said, there are a boatload of *GUI* utilities that you can manage the server remotely from the desktop. The point being, while the server itself may not have a GUI, the GUI tools are still there, just used remotely.
Most people seem to miss the fact that it's not JUST a CLI, there are also a whole boatload of client GUI utilities that go with it, that you run on your workstation to manage the server. That's something that Linux has been largely missing (not counting stuff like Webmin, which isn't quite the same thing or remote X)
For example, for a Server Core Active Directory Role, you can administer it from the standard AD Users and Computers applet from any client.
Silverlight solves a number of Flash's shortcomings.
1) It's XML based, making it more indexible than flash's binary format.
2) It allows more than just one language to program it (flash requires actionscript only)
3) It is based on XAML, which is also used by WPF which allows code and XML to be shared between web and desktop applications easily
4) Because it's XML it's more easily converted to other forms (HTML, for instance, via XSLT)
5) Microsoft thought they could do it better
You do realize that Silverlight works on Firefox too, and Opera and Safari. It will also work on Firefox, Konqueror, etc... on Linux too via moonlight.
Ummm.. that's an urban myth, based entirely on one article which listed "anonymous sources". Some stuff just doesn't seem to die.
Please, explain which open standard provides the same functionality as silverlight or flash.
There are none.
Access in 20 years is not guaranteed. Silverlight is proprietary. Micorosoft have made it accessible to other operating systems but ongoing accessibility is absolutely dependent on the whim of Microsoft maintaining the availability and leaving the format untouched.
The flaw in your argument is that it doesn't matter. The content we're talking about is content taken from existing physical books. If Silverlight went away, the books would still be there, and can be converted to any other format. In fact, it's likely that information is available in everything from plain text to lossless graphics already.
What we're talking about is a convenient presentation format for the material, and that presentation format can change over time.
Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted.
Don't give them any ideas...
That too.
What is the justification for putting that semantic meaning into a variable name, instead of incorporating it into class definitions?
Hungarian is not so necessary in this day of extensive IDE support, but back when it was invented it was useful because simply looking at a variable name did not give you any idea of what type it was, requiring you to frequently jump around in code you were maintaining.
Let's say you open up some code to fix a bug. You see a variable named "windows_coords". What is it? A RECT structure? A CRect class? An array of ints? An array of floats or doubles? Something the programmer wrote himself? You have to go look at it's definition (which usually involes greping the code) which completely throws off your train of thought.
Nowadays, you just have to hover your mouse over the name it most IDE's will tell you, which makes hungarian a bit vestigular.
Bad idea. People will just go throught and click 5 for 1000 pictures in a row just to get the reduced discount. What's more, This marginalizes people without photos or who (for one reason or another) photograph poorly.
What would be more interesting os to see the the pictures that another person thought were "hot" or "not". Then you'd know if you were their physical "type". Or, maybe you could see whether a guy or girl is solely interested in "hotties" or not.
On of my pet peeves about dating sites is that many of them try to totally ignore sex, pretending that everyone is just looking to get married. Then again, sites that allow sexual intentions tend to be filled with spammers and bots.
As I said, their implementations are very different, but they accomplish mostly the same goals. Sure, SOM has inheritance and runtime dispatch, but COM can simulate inheritance with aggregation. The only limitaiton is that you can't superclass in COM (as I said, subclassing can be simulated with aggregation).
You're confusing features, with purpose. They have the same purpose, they just go about it with different feature sets.