The FBI is one thing, but the author of the article seems concerned about other governmental agencies, like state and local governments, schools, utilities, etc. If your principal wanted to know if he had any terrorists at his school the ISPs would tell him to go take a hike.
That, and if I was an ISP I would feel right at home telling the FBI, "sorry, I'm not required to give you that information. But if you come back with a warrant, we'll be happy to help you." What recourse does the FBI have? Oh no, AOL are terrorists! Give me a break.
Yes, this is one step closer to a police state than we were, but snitching is still voluntary. I wouldn't start polishing my tinfoil hat just yet.
Re:Are you scared shitless?
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The post-September 11 USA Patriot Act, which is now law, created a narrow "emergency exception" to this rule. Pursuant to this exception, ISPs are allowed to share the contents of an e-mail or electronic communication with law enforcement agencies if the "provider reasonably believes that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of the information without delay."
(Emphasis mine)
Apparently prior to 9/11 ISPs were prohibited from giving away that information without a warrant. Now they are allowed to, but apparently not compelled to. This is an important distinction. Would an ISP violate customer faith and give out this information in situations that really don't warrant it? I doubt it. I doubt they'd give away anything without a warrant, allowed or not, simply because it costs money to store that all that crap and then look it up.
Exactly. The only way to do something more easily or more efficiently is to restrict your scope. If you know something about a particular operation, or if you can make a few assumptions about it, your life because much easier. Take sorting, for example. Comparison sorts run (at best) in Omega(n log n) time. However, if you know the maximum range of numbers k in a set of length n, and k is much smaller than n, you can use a counting sort and do it in Theta(n) time. But what happens if you put a k+1 number in there? Well, all hell breaks loose.
Another example: Java provides a pretty nifty mail API that you can use to create any kind of E-mail you can dream up in 20 lines of code or so. But you only ever want to send E-mail with a text/plain bodypart and a few attachments. So you make a class that does just that, and save yourself 15 lines of code every time you send mail. But suppose you want to send HTML E-mail, or you want to do something crazy with embedded bodyparts? Well it's not in the scope, so it's back to the old way.
In order to abstract you have to reduce your scope somehow, and you have to ensure that certain parameters are within your scope (which adds overhead). And sometimes there's just nothing you can do about that overhead (like in TCP). And occasionally (if you abstract too much) you limit your scope to the point where your code can't be re-used.
And as you abstract you tend to pile up a list of dependencies. Every library you abstract from needs to be included in addition to your library (assuming you use DLLs). So yes, there are maintenance and versioning headaches involved.
Bottom line: non-trivial abstraction saves time up front, but costs later, mostly in the maintenance phase. There's probably some fixed kharmic limit to how much can be simplified beyond which any effort spent simply in displaces the problem.
I started with Rurouni Kenshin, Kodomo no Omocha (great series), Ranma 1/2, and Tenchi Muyo OAV. I haven't yet found anything my girlfriend can tolerate other than a rare episode of Love Hina.
I will break her or die trying.
Which reminds me (I don't know why)...I forgot about Full Metal Panic. Great show. Doesn't really fit into any category (kind of mecha I guess, but it's got romantic and high school themes).
I don't really know where to put these in relation to other anime, but I'd also recommend:
Trigun - Kind of like Slayers meets Cowbody Bebop
Saber Marionette J - I don't know how to describe it really, but Megumi Hayashabara does the voice of the main heroine, Lime (she plays Haruka in Love Hina)
All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku - Another one for Megumi fans (this one reminded me of Urusei Yatsura if you like that one)
My Dear Marie - 3 episode OAV, similar to Hand-Maid May
Witch Hunter Robin - A "goth" Cowboy Bebop I guess
Serial Experiment Lain - If you like Neon Genesis Evangelion you'll probably like this one
I saw on a video in Astronomy that every 11 years or so sun spots stop appearing on the Sun for a while and every 22 years or so portions of the Earth experience a major drought. They've gone back and compared tree rings from core samples of ancient trees and old records of sunspots for the last few hundred years or so and seen direct correlations.
And if the magnetic field of the Sun does indeed flip every 11 years as I saw in another post, that could be the cause. My astronomy teacher thinks that the polarity of the planets' magnetic fields is directly influenced by the Sun. Maybe the field on the Earth is directly affected by the flip on the Sun, such that the field gets weaker and weaker until it finally flips itself, then gets stronger to its peak, and finally repeats the process in the other direction.
If this were a desktop debate you might have a point. Alternatives to OEM desktops exist--I could build a desktop PC with no operating system and install Linux without paying $99 for a pre-installed version of Windows. Better yet, I could take the $99 I save and buy support from RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al.
However, with a laptop there is no alternative. I can't buy commodity laptop parts and slap one together. I'm forced to buy an OEM product, which means I'm forced to buy Windows. This is unnacceptable, especially if I plan on purchasing a Linux distribution as well. It's unnecessary added expense.
The Microsoft EULA of course offers a refund, but this can only be gotten through the OEMs, who haven't been cooperative in the past. In fact, there are a few class action lawsuits over this very fact.
It would be nice, instead, if more OEMs offered pre-installed and supported versions of Linux, which would save me all that trouble. It would be even nicer if they could sell both types of systems, or even dual booting systems, without fear of sanctions from Microsoft. Right now the OEM market is dog-eat-dog, and these companies can't afford to piss off Redmond.
That is what I am upset about, and that is why it is dissappointing to me when a new system ships as Windows-only, particuluarly if that system happens to be a laptop.
Re:Attack an algorithm that matters!
on
ECCp-109 Solved
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is that standard O-notation or something different? O(2^64) = O(k) = kO(1) = constant time, which would be kind of strange for encryption. 2^64 instruction cycles (or whatever) wouldn't be all that heavy on typical hardware. Regular O-notation would be O(2^n), where n=64, 63, and 54, respectively.
I know that the X-ray telescopes they have floating out there are of the grazing incidence variety, meaning the mirrors reflect X-rays/gamma rays at small angles, in stages, so that they lose some of their energy and don't burrow into the sensors. Kind of like skipping a bullet over a lake. At too high an angle of incidence you break the surface, but if your angle is small enough it will skip indefinitely. My take on the subject is that we don't have any materials heavy/stable enough to reflect high energy radiation.
The detractors mentioned here are IBM and Microsoft, who sell DB2 and MS SQL Server, respectively. Asking them what they think of MySQL is like going to a BMW dealership and asking them what they think of the Suzuki Swift. Some people want a safe, reliable name brand, others are satisfied with an A-to-B machine. Each has its good points, but no one's going to recommend the competition.
Does this have anything to do with spectrograph analysis? According to Kirchoff, you can detect the bright emission signatures of various chemical components from the radiation of low-density gasses at high temperatures, or the aborbtion lines of low density gases at low temperatures, but there's a few problems here:
1) Water is a liquid, which when heated to high temperatures produces a conituous spectrum
2) They are using radio telescopes, not visible light telescopes
They mentioned passing through the infrared emissions of nearby stars...I wonder if that would cause some kind of absorbtion pattern. I'd be really interested in learning how all of this maser business works.
The code in question is already released...somewhere...under the GPL. I was under the impression that linking to GPL libraries with closed-source software was okay, provided the source for the libraries was available.
You're assuming that they will re-write (or, for the cynical, try to obfuscate) the portions in violation instead of linking to the GPL'd libraries and releasing the source for those, which I think is a much more likely scenario.
Why now? To stay in business, that's why. As good as it is, SuSE is still struggling, and they're the most dominant member of the consortium. With the recent moves made by Caldera/SCO Group and TurboLinux it should be obvious that they're having trouble as well. I'm sure they would have held off if they could--Hell, they probably would have been happy to go their separate ways--but that's just not feasible given RedHat's current market share and the state of the economy.
I recently attented API training class offered by one of our vendors. It was a 3-day class taught jointly by a customer representative and one of the engineers. The first day ran smoothly; the representative managed to make the class personal and comfortable, and he seemed at home with the slides and printed material. He deferred most of the questions to the engineer, who clumsily spat out biased answers and misinformation. The rep had to leave on some personal errand on the second day, and the class dissolved into a programming exercise reminiscient of a 10th grade BASIC class, wherein the engineer spent all of his time hopping from desk to desk trying to get things to compile on an IDE none of us was familiar with. The agenda and printed materials went right out the window. We learned no new material that day.
The rep stayed at a pretty high level, but it was useful background and it was organized. Between him and the engineer I learned quite a bit. I a figured out a few things myself while I was fighting code on the second day, but not as much as I would have had there been some semblance of order. I much prefered the rational, methodical training offered by the rep and the printed materials to the chaotic, hands-on approach of the agitated engineer.
I agree. Statements like that are somewhat shortsighted. Buf it you read between the lines you see, "I don't really know or care what the conflict over there is about, because it doesn't really concern me unless oil prices get out of hand," which is a typical American viewpoint. Granted, there are plenty of reasons for us to be over there, some of them justified and some of them not, but your average American doesn't give a shit. They want cheap gas and a sense of security, which is what they get by objectifying the conflict in the middle east.
Apparently she's more concerned with domestic policy, which, in my opinion, is what the legislative branch needs to concern itself with.
I had an ASUS GeForce2 MX with a DVD decoder and TV out. Only I couldn't use the DVD decoder because it caused a hard freeze. And I couldn't use the TV out because it blue screened. And I couldn't use the packaged drivers at all because they left artifacts on the screen.
So I used the XP bundled drivers. They worked, but they were slow and didn't support TV out or hardware DVD decoding.
On the other hand, I now have a Radeon 8500 that worked swell right out of the box. My iBook has a Radeon Mobility 7500 and hasn't given me the first problem.
It's all relative, and probably has a lot to do with your particular hardware and software configurations. I'm not saying Radeon is better than GeForce; I'm saying that just because it wasn't the right solution for you doesn't mean it isn't the right solution for someone else.
Then again, if you get poor support, or worse, no support (like with *cough*ASUS*cough*), then that's another story. But if they give you your money back and their blessings on buying a new card, you can't really hold it against them.
Correct. Unfortunately 90% of my DivX files (anime fansubs mostly) are encoded using VBR audio. VLC eliminates the need to run the DivX validator on each and every file.
It would be nice if they were encoded properly, or if QuickTime would support VBR audio, but VLC gives me that plus full-screen at no extra cost.
My iBook was actually the cheapest notebook available with all of the features I wanted. iBook: $1,800. Closest x86 alternative (Sony Vaio): $2300. And considering all of the features, the iMacs are very fairly priced.
Bear in mind that there are other things beside CPU speed, especially with laptops. I wanted a 32MB Radeon 7500, when most x86 laptops have 8MB GeForce2 MXs or ATI Rages. I also wanted to be able to plug the thing into any TV without a converter. My iBook does that with a $19 connector; the x86 ones I looked at need a $100 VGA-to-TV converter.
If you're stuck on meaningless numbers (like, oh, I dunno, clock speed) then sure, it looks like a raw deal. But when you look at it from a feature and usability standpoint Apple computers blow away the competition.
I just checked their page. The latest version fixes this bug, so you can run at Millions of Colors if you want to. I'm not sure what kind of impact this will have on speed (positive? negative? none?) but I at least appreciate the opportunity to run at whatever settings I want.
DivX support on OSX is bad - if you use QuickTime. VideoLAN Client plays my DivX files perfectly on my 700MHz iBook. There is a small compatibility glitch if you have QuickTime 6 installed, but setting your display to Thousands of Colors instead of Millions of Colors fixes it. It's free, it's fast, and it lets you watch movies in full screen without the QuickTime tax.
Apple doesn't seem that interested in getting DivX to work well in QuickTime. Instead, they're pushing their own MPEG4 format. VLC is definitely the way to go.
Out of expedience we deployed everything in the root context, so this would be great if it prevented downtime. Then again, if it still resulted in downtime for the specified context we wouldn't see any benefit at all. Right now we have to deploy in maintenance windows so that we can bounce Tomcat safely. Would that tool alleviate this problem?
XML allows you to define your own document format standards and embed those standards into your documents, for on-the-fly validation during parsing. DTDs can be distributed to your vendors, and they can draft documents according to that DTD, and be assured some level of compatibility with your software.
2) Heirarchal Storage of Data
This may not be that important to a lot of people, but it offers the ability to categorize data in common groupings with duplication of meta data. It's great for, say, directory structures and whatnot. Sure, there's LDAP, but that's an interface standard. This is a storage standard.
3) Readability
There's a whole debate over how readable XML is, given the prevalance of markup, but I would argue that the heirarchal outlines are much more intuitive than a flat file format. Well-designed DTDs and well-named tags help reduce the interference of markup.
4) Conciseness
XML wouldn't be good for, say, a network layer protocol, but as an interface between applications and users it is fairly small for what it does. Sure there's "overhead" and "bloat", but who wants to visually parse run-together character strings or hexadecimal encoded bytes?
5) Standardization
XML has to make a lot of concessions because it is designed to be universal. It's a standard. Yes, not all applications make use of all the features it offers. They don't have to. But those features are available so more applications can make use of it. It's widely used, it's open, and it works.
XML is good at what it's designed for. The standardized office document formats are a great place for it, as it offers the user *some* readability outside of an application framework while preserving special markup. Ever try reading a.DOC file in WordPad? Yech.
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI is one thing, but the author of the article seems concerned about other governmental agencies, like state and local governments, schools, utilities, etc. If your principal wanted to know if he had any terrorists at his school the ISPs would tell him to go take a hike.
That, and if I was an ISP I would feel right at home telling the FBI, "sorry, I'm not required to give you that information. But if you come back with a warrant, we'll be happy to help you." What recourse does the FBI have? Oh no, AOL are terrorists! Give me a break.
Yes, this is one step closer to a police state than we were, but snitching is still voluntary. I wouldn't start polishing my tinfoil hat just yet.
(Emphasis mine)
Apparently prior to 9/11 ISPs were prohibited from giving away that information without a warrant. Now they are allowed to, but apparently not compelled to. This is an important distinction. Would an ISP violate customer faith and give out this information in situations that really don't warrant it? I doubt it. I doubt they'd give away anything without a warrant, allowed or not, simply because it costs money to store that all that crap and then look it up.
Exactly. The only way to do something more easily or more efficiently is to restrict your scope. If you know something about a particular operation, or if you can make a few assumptions about it, your life because much easier. Take sorting, for example. Comparison sorts run (at best) in Omega(n log n) time. However, if you know the maximum range of numbers k in a set of length n, and k is much smaller than n, you can use a counting sort and do it in Theta(n) time. But what happens if you put a k+1 number in there? Well, all hell breaks loose.
Another example: Java provides a pretty nifty mail API that you can use to create any kind of E-mail you can dream up in 20 lines of code or so. But you only ever want to send E-mail with a text/plain bodypart and a few attachments. So you make a class that does just that, and save yourself 15 lines of code every time you send mail. But suppose you want to send HTML E-mail, or you want to do something crazy with embedded bodyparts? Well it's not in the scope, so it's back to the old way.
In order to abstract you have to reduce your scope somehow, and you have to ensure that certain parameters are within your scope (which adds overhead). And sometimes there's just nothing you can do about that overhead (like in TCP). And occasionally (if you abstract too much) you limit your scope to the point where your code can't be re-used.
And as you abstract you tend to pile up a list of dependencies. Every library you abstract from needs to be included in addition to your library (assuming you use DLLs). So yes, there are maintenance and versioning headaches involved.
Bottom line: non-trivial abstraction saves time up front, but costs later, mostly in the maintenance phase. There's probably some fixed kharmic limit to how much can be simplified beyond which any effort spent simply in displaces the problem.
I started with Rurouni Kenshin, Kodomo no Omocha (great series), Ranma 1/2, and Tenchi Muyo OAV. I haven't yet found anything my girlfriend can tolerate other than a rare episode of Love Hina.
I will break her or die trying.
Which reminds me (I don't know why)...I forgot about Full Metal Panic. Great show. Doesn't really fit into any category (kind of mecha I guess, but it's got romantic and high school themes).
I don't really know where to put these in relation to other anime, but I'd also recommend:
Trigun - Kind of like Slayers meets Cowbody Bebop
Saber Marionette J - I don't know how to describe it really, but Megumi Hayashabara does the voice of the main heroine, Lime (she plays Haruka in Love Hina)
All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku - Another one for Megumi fans (this one reminded me of Urusei Yatsura if you like that one)
My Dear Marie - 3 episode OAV, similar to Hand-Maid May
Witch Hunter Robin - A "goth" Cowboy Bebop I guess
Serial Experiment Lain - If you like Neon Genesis Evangelion you'll probably like this one
I saw on a video in Astronomy that every 11 years or so sun spots stop appearing on the Sun for a while and every 22 years or so portions of the Earth experience a major drought. They've gone back and compared tree rings from core samples of ancient trees and old records of sunspots for the last few hundred years or so and seen direct correlations.
And if the magnetic field of the Sun does indeed flip every 11 years as I saw in another post, that could be the cause. My astronomy teacher thinks that the polarity of the planets' magnetic fields is directly influenced by the Sun. Maybe the field on the Earth is directly affected by the flip on the Sun, such that the field gets weaker and weaker until it finally flips itself, then gets stronger to its peak, and finally repeats the process in the other direction.
My astronomy teacher says that with the phase of the moon (nearly full) light pollution is almost irrelevant :T
If this were a desktop debate you might have a point. Alternatives to OEM desktops exist--I could build a desktop PC with no operating system and install Linux without paying $99 for a pre-installed version of Windows. Better yet, I could take the $99 I save and buy support from RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et al.
However, with a laptop there is no alternative. I can't buy commodity laptop parts and slap one together. I'm forced to buy an OEM product, which means I'm forced to buy Windows. This is unnacceptable, especially if I plan on purchasing a Linux distribution as well. It's unnecessary added expense.
The Microsoft EULA of course offers a refund, but this can only be gotten through the OEMs, who haven't been cooperative in the past. In fact, there are a few class action lawsuits over this very fact.
It would be nice, instead, if more OEMs offered pre-installed and supported versions of Linux, which would save me all that trouble. It would be even nicer if they could sell both types of systems, or even dual booting systems, without fear of sanctions from Microsoft. Right now the OEM market is dog-eat-dog, and these companies can't afford to piss off Redmond.
That is what I am upset about, and that is why it is dissappointing to me when a new system ships as Windows-only, particuluarly if that system happens to be a laptop.
Is that standard O-notation or something different? O(2^64) = O(k) = kO(1) = constant time, which would be kind of strange for encryption. 2^64 instruction cycles (or whatever) wouldn't be all that heavy on typical hardware. Regular O-notation would be O(2^n), where n=64, 63, and 54, respectively.
I know that the X-ray telescopes they have floating out there are of the grazing incidence variety, meaning the mirrors reflect X-rays/gamma rays at small angles, in stages, so that they lose some of their energy and don't burrow into the sensors. Kind of like skipping a bullet over a lake. At too high an angle of incidence you break the surface, but if your angle is small enough it will skip indefinitely. My take on the subject is that we don't have any materials heavy/stable enough to reflect high energy radiation.
The detractors mentioned here are IBM and Microsoft, who sell DB2 and MS SQL Server, respectively. Asking them what they think of MySQL is like going to a BMW dealership and asking them what they think of the Suzuki Swift. Some people want a safe, reliable name brand, others are satisfied with an A-to-B machine. Each has its good points, but no one's going to recommend the competition.
Does this have anything to do with spectrograph analysis? According to Kirchoff, you can detect the bright emission signatures of various chemical components from the radiation of low-density gasses at high temperatures, or the aborbtion lines of low density gases at low temperatures, but there's a few problems here:
1) Water is a liquid, which when heated to high temperatures produces a conituous spectrum
2) They are using radio telescopes, not visible light telescopes
They mentioned passing through the infrared emissions of nearby stars...I wonder if that would cause some kind of absorbtion pattern. I'd be really interested in learning how all of this maser business works.
The code in question is already released...somewhere...under the GPL. I was under the impression that linking to GPL libraries with closed-source software was okay, provided the source for the libraries was available.
You're assuming that they will re-write (or, for the cynical, try to obfuscate) the portions in violation instead of linking to the GPL'd libraries and releasing the source for those, which I think is a much more likely scenario.
Why now? To stay in business, that's why. As good as it is, SuSE is still struggling, and they're the most dominant member of the consortium. With the recent moves made by Caldera/SCO Group and TurboLinux it should be obvious that they're having trouble as well. I'm sure they would have held off if they could--Hell, they probably would have been happy to go their separate ways--but that's just not feasible given RedHat's current market share and the state of the economy.
I recently attented API training class offered by one of our vendors. It was a 3-day class taught jointly by a customer representative and one of the engineers. The first day ran smoothly; the representative managed to make the class personal and comfortable, and he seemed at home with the slides and printed material. He deferred most of the questions to the engineer, who clumsily spat out biased answers and misinformation. The rep had to leave on some personal errand on the second day, and the class dissolved into a programming exercise reminiscient of a 10th grade BASIC class, wherein the engineer spent all of his time hopping from desk to desk trying to get things to compile on an IDE none of us was familiar with. The agenda and printed materials went right out the window. We learned no new material that day.
The rep stayed at a pretty high level, but it was useful background and it was organized. Between him and the engineer I learned quite a bit. I a figured out a few things myself while I was fighting code on the second day, but not as much as I would have had there been some semblance of order. I much prefered the rational, methodical training offered by the rep and the printed materials to the chaotic, hands-on approach of the agitated engineer.
I agree. Statements like that are somewhat shortsighted. Buf it you read between the lines you see, "I don't really know or care what the conflict over there is about, because it doesn't really concern me unless oil prices get out of hand," which is a typical American viewpoint. Granted, there are plenty of reasons for us to be over there, some of them justified and some of them not, but your average American doesn't give a shit. They want cheap gas and a sense of security, which is what they get by objectifying the conflict in the middle east.
Apparently she's more concerned with domestic policy, which, in my opinion, is what the legislative branch needs to concern itself with.
I had an ASUS GeForce2 MX with a DVD decoder and TV out. Only I couldn't use the DVD decoder because it caused a hard freeze. And I couldn't use the TV out because it blue screened. And I couldn't use the packaged drivers at all because they left artifacts on the screen.
So I used the XP bundled drivers. They worked, but they were slow and didn't support TV out or hardware DVD decoding.
On the other hand, I now have a Radeon 8500 that worked swell right out of the box. My iBook has a Radeon Mobility 7500 and hasn't given me the first problem.
It's all relative, and probably has a lot to do with your particular hardware and software configurations. I'm not saying Radeon is better than GeForce; I'm saying that just because it wasn't the right solution for you doesn't mean it isn't the right solution for someone else.
Then again, if you get poor support, or worse, no support (like with *cough*ASUS*cough*), then that's another story. But if they give you your money back and their blessings on buying a new card, you can't really hold it against them.
Correct. Unfortunately 90% of my DivX files (anime fansubs mostly) are encoded using VBR audio. VLC eliminates the need to run the DivX validator on each and every file.
It would be nice if they were encoded properly, or if QuickTime would support VBR audio, but VLC gives me that plus full-screen at no extra cost.
My iBook was actually the cheapest notebook available with all of the features I wanted. iBook: $1,800. Closest x86 alternative (Sony Vaio): $2300. And considering all of the features, the iMacs are very fairly priced.
Bear in mind that there are other things beside CPU speed, especially with laptops. I wanted a 32MB Radeon 7500, when most x86 laptops have 8MB GeForce2 MXs or ATI Rages. I also wanted to be able to plug the thing into any TV without a converter. My iBook does that with a $19 connector; the x86 ones I looked at need a $100 VGA-to-TV converter.
If you're stuck on meaningless numbers (like, oh, I dunno, clock speed) then sure, it looks like a raw deal. But when you look at it from a feature and usability standpoint Apple computers blow away the competition.
I just checked their page. The latest version fixes this bug, so you can run at Millions of Colors if you want to. I'm not sure what kind of impact this will have on speed (positive? negative? none?) but I at least appreciate the opportunity to run at whatever settings I want.
DivX support on OSX is bad - if you use QuickTime. VideoLAN Client plays my DivX files perfectly on my 700MHz iBook. There is a small compatibility glitch if you have QuickTime 6 installed, but setting your display to Thousands of Colors instead of Millions of Colors fixes it. It's free, it's fast, and it lets you watch movies in full screen without the QuickTime tax.
Apple doesn't seem that interested in getting DivX to work well in QuickTime. Instead, they're pushing their own MPEG4 format. VLC is definitely the way to go.
Out of expedience we deployed everything in the root context, so this would be great if it prevented downtime. Then again, if it still resulted in downtime for the specified context we wouldn't see any benefit at all. Right now we have to deploy in maintenance windows so that we can bounce Tomcat safely. Would that tool alleviate this problem?
Last I heard the courts were debating whether or not "Windows" was even trademarkable, and Microsoft just kinda backed off after that.
1) DTDs
.DOC file in WordPad? Yech.
XML allows you to define your own document format standards and embed those standards into your documents, for on-the-fly validation during parsing. DTDs can be distributed to your vendors, and they can draft documents according to that DTD, and be assured some level of compatibility with your software.
2) Heirarchal Storage of Data
This may not be that important to a lot of people, but it offers the ability to categorize data in common groupings with duplication of meta data. It's great for, say, directory structures and whatnot. Sure, there's LDAP, but that's an interface standard. This is a storage standard.
3) Readability
There's a whole debate over how readable XML is, given the prevalance of markup, but I would argue that the heirarchal outlines are much more intuitive than a flat file format. Well-designed DTDs and well-named tags help reduce the interference of markup.
4) Conciseness
XML wouldn't be good for, say, a network layer protocol, but as an interface between applications and users it is fairly small for what it does. Sure there's "overhead" and "bloat", but who wants to visually parse run-together character strings or hexadecimal encoded bytes?
5) Standardization
XML has to make a lot of concessions because it is designed to be universal. It's a standard. Yes, not all applications make use of all the features it offers. They don't have to. But those features are available so more applications can make use of it. It's widely used, it's open, and it works.
XML is good at what it's designed for. The standardized office document formats are a great place for it, as it offers the user *some* readability outside of an application framework while preserving special markup. Ever try reading a