HTML is based on SGML, not XML. XHTML is HTML in XML notation.
No, HTML is not and never has been an SGML markup. I have been using it since 1992.
HTML was originally based on an angle bracket scheme that was SGML like but not described in a formal DTD. The first time a DTD was introduced was in HTML 2.0 but the spec requires la processing that is incompatible with SGML.
XHTML is a subset of HTML, not a successor. All XHTML documents are HTML but not vice-versa.
HTML is not a general purpose document format, it is optimized for online layout. It does not have the features you would want in a spreadsheet or database.
None of todays formats is what you would want to have as your ideal document format.
Companies were using AJaX long before Google was. Other than that, your statement still stands - just subtract a few years from your statement and it's all gravy. You might also want to turn a blind eye to who created the XMLHttpRequest in the first place - the Microsoft Exchange team.
Other companies were doing AJaX, but the realization after Google was that AJaX applications could actually work without being completely flaky. It is very similar to the NCSA effect on the Web. There were 15 or so Web browsers before Mosaic. I was working on one myself. But Mosaic was the first one that worked out of the box without any tweaks at a time when most OSS took a day of bug fixes to get it to compile.
If you continue to have to submit resumes in "Microsoft Word Format," there is no way that anyone else can get a toehold in the market. There is also no way that in 30 years we're going to be able to read the documents that we generate today.
On the contrary, if resumes are required in OOXML format there will no longer be a requirement to reverse-engineer the Word format in order to achieve that. Since every word processor has to be compatible with Word in any case to be marketable the job of producing a compliant open source implementation has become rather easier.
As for ECMA, it has always been a joke. They were a joke when they accepted Netscape's original JavaScript proposal without any changes. Netscape chose ECMA because they wanted a forum they could just ram something through without any opportunity for comment from any other party. It only took another six years before usable implementations started to turn up in browsers. Early on the <object> tag was known as the 'crash my browser' tag. The specification was at least as baddly written as the code. But the modern Javascript specs are starting to look pretty good.
The reason that Google has been able to make so much out of AJAX and previous companies have not is not because nobody saw the potential before, its because the JavaScript implementations could not possibly have supported modern apps without crashing. Try connecting to GMail with an early version of Netscape and you will either see it turn off the JavaScript or crash.
People are completely missing the point of standards work here. You only get from a standards process what you achieve along the way. Its like a university degree, the certificate is probably the least useful output.
ODF and OOXML are both examples of an obsolete way of document preparation. They are both embedded in the internal data structures of ten to twenty year old systems. I would take an entirely different approach to producing a modern office suite. I would not cobble it together from components.
Neither format allows you to create an equation in math notation and use it in the spreadsheet.
This whole argument is like arguing whether gas or oil is better to fire a power station. They are both legacy technologies.
I don't have a problem with what the Virgin guy says because in the UK there is a competitive market and as you point out you do have a choice. In most of the world, 'network neutrality' is not an issue at all. There will be budget ISPs that try to work a business model where the content providers subsidize the cost of distribution. Again, nothing wrong with that, if I am distributing a movie to a customer who only pays for a 1mb/s connection, seems fair enough for me to be able to pay a dollar to temporarily boost the connection speed to 10mb/s and make a sale I otherwise could not have (passing the cost on to my customer).
The problem is in the US market where there is no competition in the local loop and the cable companies have a long history of behaving badly - as the shareholders of Adelphia know only too well. The consumer does not have effective choice and the Bush administration has consistently backed the interests of corporations above all. Cable companies do not rank quite as highly as oil companies but they come close. Attempts to introduce local competition that were introduced under the Clinton administration were terminated.
I think that the real risk in the US is actually that the cable companies and telcos will overplay their hand and there will be a backlash of sharp and savage proportions that will end up being a long term liability. The US legislative system suffers from an overhigh gain. Then the result will be used to 'prove' how regulation is always undesirable and so on.
Part of the problem here is measurement. We don't have good statistics to tell us whether the ISPs are in fact delivering the service they promise. Is Verizon DSL any better than Comcast here in Medford? Which is consistently faster, which has higher outages? I really don't know because nobody has two connections to try against each other.
The point is not whether companies can get higher bandwidth by paying more. What has people angry is the idea that their cable provider might deny them the full bandwidth that they paid for when they connect to certain content providers or use VOIP.
Galileo wasn't persecuted because he said the Earth orbited the Sun. Galileo was persecuted because he wrote treatises slandering the reigning Pope. He was punished for his politics, not his science.
That is certainly a claim that the Catholic church has been making under the current pope. But the previous pope acknowledged that the church was responsible for the persecution of Galileo and made an apology.
According to wikipedia "Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre"
There is in fact a school of Catholic inquisition denial that is every bit as duplicitous and motivated as the holocaust deniers. According to the inquisition deniers the church had no part in or responsibility for the torture or the executions which are 'exaggerated'. Compare this with the holocaust deniers early strategy of first denying that Hitler was involved and downplaying the extent of the holocaust.
Given the clear political motivation behind these revisionist claims we must consider them rather carefully.
I found the original article somewhat interesting as it stated that the rulling was absolutely final with no chance of appeal. Which as anyone would know is not the case as there is always the option of an appeal to the Supreme court.
In ordinary cases this would not be very likely to succeed, but the SCOTUS has already accepted an appeal on a similar patent issue. And it is very likely that this will be decided in a maner that would affect this case.
But any journalist who was familiar with patent law issues would know about this which means that this 'article' amounts to nothing more than stenographic press release journalism. They received a press release from Tivo and printed it without checking anything. So all we are seeing here is the Tivo side of the story and they are not exactly a very credible source.
Tivo's financial situation is not exactly impressive. They cannot afford to refuse to license the technology.
It's not a competition, this has nothing to do with Open Source, it's about a file format being implementable or not and about being realistic.
Oh come on, and I suppose you think the invasion of Iraq is all about spreading democracy and that O.J. Simpson went to the hotel room to find information on the real killers.
Since when has there been such a desperate concern that the first version of a document format specification might have some technical issues?
I don't object to people wanting to put the squeeze on Microsoft here, they are big boys, they can take it. Business ain't beanbag. But please spare us the desperate moral indignation and don't try to concern troll the rest of us.
Considerable poltiical influence was brought to bear too. Bill Gates campaigned in Denmark, where he is a friend of the Prime Minister. Sarkozy himself intervened on Microsoft's behalf in France.
So? If I was a member of a national standards body and the Minister, Prime Minister or President called me up I would take it pretty seriously because they have a democratic mandate and I don't.
This is the flip side of trying to use the ISO process to legitimize ODF and delegitimize OOXML. The reason for this campaign was from start to finish to attempt to force governments to use ODF in place of OOXML and thus force the use of Open Office. Turns out that the governments don't really want the slashcrew making their IT purchasing decisions.
The Groklaw article did state that there is a 2-month period for appeals to be filed.
Yes, but who has standing to file an appeal here? TFA says ISO national bodies. That would be a pretty difficult challenge to mount.
As with the Netscape use of the justice dept to go after Microsoft, I remain very unimpressed by companies that attempt to win commercial battles by involving government. Netscape did not help the anti-trust case against Microsoft, on the contrary, they caused the DoJ to abandon a strong case (on the pricing issue) into a weak one. Netscape's tactics against Spyglass were every bit as aggressive and anti-competitive as those they accused Microsoft of. Netscape was never a good player in the standards world either, they wanted absolute control of the Web. Their idea of standards participation was to fax a proposed 'standard' to W3C hours before they released the product.
The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.
Don't most opinion polls show that most US journalists vote Democrat?
The agenda is set by a handful of 'elite' journalists earning five million a year plus. Of these, Chris Mathews and Tim Russert loudly trumpet that they were Democrats in their youth, but this is somewhat misleading. The two founders of the neo-con movement, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were Trotskyites in their youth. Russert was a fellow neo-con and was on Moynihans staff as a foreign policy adviser during his neo-con phase before the Senator decided the neo-cons were dangerous. Mathews was a Goldwater supporter before he was a Democrat.
With the exception of Keith Olberman who has essentially changed the political leaning of MSNBC single handedly, there are absolutely no left leaning voices on the cable news outlets. But there are plenty of conservative pundits. And what is significant is that a right leaning pundit like a Carlson or a Beck can survive dreadful ratings for years while a liberal such as Donahue gets canceled after a few months despite improving on the ratings he was given and having higher ratings than the conservative commentators that replaced him.
What is meant by 'liberal bias' is that the mainstream media is liberal on social issues. Discrimination against gays is considered equivalent to racism, etc. etc.
But the US media was entirely in the tank for the Bush administration push for the Iraq war. Any journalist who asked even moderately skeptical questions of the administration risked being fired. Even pointing out the idiocy of the rhetoric was enough to get Bill Maher fired.
The voting habits of provincial reporters is not very relevant, its the consistent bias of the national journalists who set the agenda that is relevant.
I think we need a standard for Slashdot dupe elimination. Admittedly the first story purported to be a leak but so is this, surely this is at most an update to the previous story?
Isn't a standard supposed to mean that there is a STANDARD way of doing things?
Nope, it means that there are clear criteria for describing compliance. ISO standards don't have to be complete and don't have to work. Take X.500, people are still arguing over that one.
Nor does an ISO standard need to be unique in its field. ISO has standards for metric thread bolts and for two Imperial units, the AF series and Whitworth. Whitworth is strictly speaking a British standard, but it managed to make it to ISO7 for pipe threads.
Point of information here, when I submitted the story I did not use the term 'propaganda'. Zonk seems to think it makes for a snappier title but it is also wrong. The issue here is not that the GOP is peddling propaganda, its using public money and in particular using the military to do this that is the problem.
Politicizing the military is a real problem in a democratic society. During the 1930s through 70s a whole succession of army generals and colonels decided that they could do a better job than the democratic governments of their countries. Thats how Hitler tried to come to power the first time (the beer hall putsch) and how Franco came to power.
The people who complain about the 'liberal media' seem to believe that anything that does not toe the GOP party line as Hanity, Limbaugh etc. do must be biased.
The establishment media in the US is all biased towards the right. Every Sunday the network news shows feature talk show guest lists where Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one. And when a Democrat does appear, Lieberman is far more likely to appear than Ted Kennedy. Not one of the panels reviewing the first five years of Bush's war in Iraq had a commentator who had been publicly opposed to the war at the start. That is a pretty clear pro-GOP bias. One would expect that a Kos or a Josh Marshall would have earned a slot or Juan Cole who actually can claim to be an expert on the politics of the region. Instead we saw the same myopic pundits who were dead wrong at the start of the war and have learned nothing since.
You can be pretty certain that something similar will happen when they have panels discussing the sub-prime meltdown. Krugman, Atrios have been predicting that it would occur for years now.
Sources in the EU says that approval of OOXML as an ISO standard may break a WTO agreement regarding technical barriers to trade, which says that overlapping standards should be avoided.
No, EURAS is not part of the EU, it just happens to be a non-profit based in Europe. It is not a sanctioned government body and its opinions have no formal influence.
The idea that overlapping standards must be avoided due to a WTO agreement is illogical since the WTO is a part of the UN and has a defined scope as a UN member body while ISO is a non-governmental international organization in its own right. The WTO cannot set policy for ISO, nor is it likely to try. WTO treaties are binding on governments that accept them as binding. ISO is not a government and is not a party to any WTO treaty.
The phrase 'should be avoided' means exactly what it says, no more. It is an unenforceable provision. To make the provision enfoceable the language would have to be 'must not' or 'shall not'. Attempting to draw such an inference calls into question the credibility of the person making it as a 'standards expert'.
We have no end of overlapping standards. some of this is bad, most of it is good. C 'overlaps' with Fortran. XML overlaps with SGML. While SGML advocates like to pretend that XML is a derrivative work, it certainly is not from the standards point of view. The original goal of XML was to produce a markup scheme that was sufficiently compatible with SGML to allow HTML to be interoperable with both. XML is to SGML as Java is to C++.
In this case both document formats are based on 1980s application software technology. They are still rooted in a world where the primary purpose of word processing is to develop documents to be printed on paper and computers are too limited to run more than one application at a time.
And the fact that the "document" exactly matches the default spacing, kerning, and margins of Microsoft Word. Not a decades old typewriter and formatting habits of the time.
This was hashed out at considerable length. The particular font in question is designed to exactly match the output of a particular IBM typewriter. So just as PacMan arcade is exactly the same on Windows as the legacy version, so are documents produced in that font.
And don't forget that the original claim being made by the 'forensic expert' was that no typewriters were capable of proportional spacing at the time. A claim that has been subsequently disproved by the fact that other memos from the office are proportionaly spaced.
Whoever produced the letter had anticipated that someone would check similar memos produced from that particular office and produced something similar. Amateur forensics were not the reason that the claims had to be retracted, the provenance of the memo was.
One can imagine that if CBS had been as unscrupulous as their critics asserted that they would have procured a proportional spacing typewriter of the relevant vintage and demonstrated that the forensic case was bogus. The exposure of the forensic case would then have tainted attempts to raise the far stronger provenance issue and we might never have discovered that it came from an entirely dubious source.
Incidentaly, the provenance issue is a good reason to blame Rather for the scandal rather than CBS. A journalist is not meant to be a forensic expert and could hardly be faulted had the problem been with the forensic evidence. But a journalist is meant to know about sources and accepting Killian as an anonymous source in this particular case was simply inexcusable. Anyone who knew about the story knew that the provenance of the document would be highly questionable if Killian was revealled as the source.
Yes - I'd have a problem. The role of the government and the military is to serve and protect us as the people who pay for them both.
I have a real problem with the idea that the military is simply an arm of the governing party spin machine. I also have a big problem with the idea that the blogosphere can be managed with Rovian spin techniques. The evidence shows otherwise.
Blogswarms are a real phenomena. If only they were as accurate in their targets as the paper assumes. The paper is rather too willing to accept the mythology of the blogosphere - particularly the view from the right.
In fact the blogs got the Rathergate incident right but for the wrong reasons. If you have a hot document that mysteriously appears the big question to ask is provenance, not forensics. There is absolutely no forensic test on earth that can ever prove a document to be genuine, all forensics can do is to prove a document is false. The fact is that the document produced matches others from the general's office on microfiche, same font, same superscript TH character. The forensics were not the reason CBS retracted the document, it was the fact that the source was utterly lacking in credibility on this particular issue. He had been peddling the same story for years. If such a source produces documents they have to back them with provenance.
If you can be right for the wrong reason you can also be plain wrong. The problem with the blogosphere is that it can at times have an even stronger herd instinct than the establishment media.
Try to manage the blogosphere with lies as the report suggests and the chances are that it is going to backfire in a major way. Once you have the blogs assuming that everything you say is untrue and you can never redeem your position.
Disinformation can backfire in a major way. The biggest case of this happening is the collapse of the USSR which can be traced directly to a black operation the KGB set up in Afghanistan. At the time the country was a Soviet satellite but the KGB was somewhat worried about the cult of personality that Amin was building round himself. So they started spreading black propaganda suggesting he was in the pay of the CIA to undermine him. A year later another set of KGB agents picked up this story. Moscow became worried and started a series of moves that ended up with the leaders of both communist party factions dead and the Soviets occupying the country. This in turn was the final straw that brought down the USSR. The communist system would probably have fallen anyway, but the collapse of the former Russian empire was not inevitable.
I was thinking about this the other day. Why does the iPhone "succeed"? It is essentially a rehash of a Treo. Sure, it has a nicer interface, but is that it?
I have the palm version of the Treo. It is complete shite.
Form factor first, it is heavy and the antenna sticks out. The stylus fell out of the pocket long ago and they charge Apple prices for a replacement - $20 for three pointy sticks. I am now on my third replacement in two years. Some people I know have been through six.
The browser is crud. It does not have a cache so you have to reload every page even if you only just navigated there. The javascript is buggy.
The bluetooth implementation is poor, there is no WiFi. The command set is illogical, half the time you press the place call button to dial a number, but not always, sometimes that is cancel.
Unlike the iPhone it is at least unlocked. But the downside is that if you do put a third part app on it the chronic unreliability is likely to get worse.
The iPhone is the only phone on the market today with a web browser that does not completely suck. The fact that it is a really nice Web browser is kinda superfluous.
People have a limited number of issues they can to attend to at once. If people are attending to memory leaks they are much less likely to get everything else right.
Memory leaks will eventually kill any program if it runs long enough. My experience is that people still make goofs when they use profiling tools.
If we are going to play 'people should learn' then why not use assembler or better machine code like real programmers do?
The GC point is very simple. My experience is that less than 5% of C++ programmers can write code that does not have memory leaks and buffer overruns. So even though I can write code that I memory leak free, I typically have to rewrite other people's code written in C or at the very least spend time working out if they have a clue or not. With Java I can at least know that they will not deplete resources.
And anyone who is saying 'learn to use the leak detection tool', testing programs for correctness is a total lose. You can never test every state of anything but the simplest programs. A good GC will guarantee that there are no memory leaks without needing to test. Better code safety and better performance as well, memory leaks are the most common cause of performance problems that I see.
The key advice any C++ expert is "restrict yourself to a specific subset of C++".
Yes, that subset is called C.
Seriously, at this point it is time to call a halt to C++ education. Treat it like COBOL, Fortran or any other legacy language that still has demand for programmers but is long since past utility. It is a good idea for students to understand that they have to keep current with programming languages and not expect to be employed as a programmer if they can only code in one. But that does not mean we should start by teaching an obsolete language.
You don't need to tech kids to write in C++ for them to learn how bad an idea lack of GC is. Just give them some existing code and tell them to chase buffer overruns and memory leaks.
I would not code in any language that does not have a garbage collection feature, period. When I coded C in the 90s I wrote my own garbage collector using macros and some extensions to the memory allocation routines. More importantly I would not allow anyone else to write code without GC because none of them were capable of doing it right.
Second, do not use the null terminated string handling. This was one of the key coding requirements that Tim Berners-Lee set out in libwww. All string catenation was checked. It is one of the reasons libwww was so widely used, it was buffer-overun error proof.
I would certainly specify C for use in a low level O/S platform project, but not C++. I think the language is Algol 68 to Algol 60, worse than the original.
Above that point I would use either C#, Java or objective C. From an education point of view they are interchangeable.
C# is at least as fast as equivalent C++ code. The code generator used is identical. You can switch in your own GC if you choose.
Creative turning to shit seems to correlate with the disappearence of it's competition.
I would think it correlates more with the fact that most motherboards come with built in sound these days and plenty come with built in 5.1 sound.
I have no idea what protocol that my desktop talks to the amplifier over the optical hookup. I am pretty sure that absolutely nothing good would result from using Dolby Digital, which is after all a compression algorithm over raw samples.
I could have installed an upgraded sound card when I bought the machine, but what would be the point? I would rather have the PCI slot available.
Having a separate processor for handling graphics makes perfect sense. Having one for sound seems useless at this stage. Games do not use the waveform generators on the sound cards to produce noise the way they did when I was in the games industry 25 years ago. Today we use sampled sounds created offline. All you need to present those is a RAM buffer that spews bits to the port at a rate set by a clock thats reasonably accurate.
The only problem with distributing the modded drivers here is that Creative appears to claim that they use copyright code from their drivers.
If there is no copyright violation then the correct legal response to Creative is 'sit on it and spin'. The users bought hardware. Third parties have the right to extend the use of that hardware in any way they choose so long as they are not distributing copyright or patent infringing code.
Copyright is not intended to give hardware manufacturers a monopoly on accessories for a device. Attempts to use it for that purpose have failed. We might well get to the point soon where this is applied to patents.
It isn't Kerberos or Java again, they were disputes over use of an extension mechanism. Nobody can expect to control innovation through control of a standard.
The best comparison would be S/MIME vs PGP. If you look at deployed base there is absolutely no question that S/MIME wins. We have over a billion email clients with embedded S/MIME support. But both are IETF standards and I was present when Burt Kaliski pitched handing S/MIME to Jeff Schiller, the Security area. Jeff was at the time probably the biggest PGP supporter, he was one of the main people who made the MIT distribution of PGP happen.
The popular perception is that the S/MIME and PGP camps are both at each other's throats. This is not the case at all. Neither product is exactly a deployment success in that virtually no email is secured with either. Jon Callas, CTO of PGP and I both worked on DKIM together. PGP Inc. makes an excellent S/MIME product. The perception that there is a division only hurts both standards. In my book I advocate that email clients implement at least PGP encryption so we can move forward to an interoperable message level confidentiality solution. There is not a big technical or even a market reason to do this, but there is a major political reason as PGP dominates in mindshare. We are going to make very sure that we do not have a similar schism when we move to the next generation technologies.
ODF vs OOXML is a very similar problem. The deployed base of applications is simply too great to make convergence on a single standard practical for this generation. It is only going to become practical when the market moves to the next generation.
The Microsoft Java namespace was entirely justified, Microsoft had bought into Java thinking that they could use it as their next generation programming language across the board. The only way to do that was to allow access to Windows APIs. Sun thought that Java was more than a programming language, it was a replacement platform that they had absolute control over and would sue anyone who tried to implement different ideas. The way I looked at it was 'OK Sun, you have an idea whose time might have come, but why should you get to control the entire future of the computing business on the basis of one idea'.
Standards are not about establishing a monoculture. The idea is to standardize what we agree on so that we can then innovate in areas that provide useful choices, i.e. benefits, for the customer and not in areas where it only causes problems.
ODF is not going to be the canonical archive format in perpetuity. It is rooted in the world of paper documents for a start.
Well quite, the only place where there is a utility for the quad SLI config over dual is at the very upper end of the display size range - 1600x2560. And that only pushes the performance from 45 FPS to 65, which is more or less irrelevant since there is no monitor on the market today with that resolution that goes beyond 60Hz. Persistence of vision is only 30FPS or so in any case.
Now it might be the case that some games might have effects that are only visible with this type of ultra-extreme performance. Smoke, fire, atmospherics and such. That is certainly the case at the lower end of the performance scale, the screenshots you see on the box are all taken on big beast machines. You are not going to get that experience on lower end machines, certainly not at the highest resolutions.
We are certainly not talking about major differences here. Its the difference between a Jaguar and a Honda. Both are nice cars, but most people recognize that the Jaguar is nicer in many subtle ways and the not so subtle fact of having two to three times the horsepower.
Sure you can argue if it is 'worth it' to spend the extra money. Whether that is true for you depends in part on how much spare cash you have. Unless you start buying machines that require three phase power, even the most severe gadget habit is a whole lot cheaper than the cheapest boat. If I want to buy a gadget and fear disapproval from SWMBO, I buy some yatching mags to leave round the house and I am home free.
Where the argument is much less viable is at the lower end. The difference between a Jaguar and an upper end Honda are subtle, the differences between the Honda and an entry level Dodge are not.
Slashdot Mirror
No, HTML is not and never has been an SGML markup. I have been using it since 1992.
HTML was originally based on an angle bracket scheme that was SGML like but not described in a formal DTD. The first time a DTD was introduced was in HTML 2.0 but the spec requires la processing that is incompatible with SGML.
XHTML is a subset of HTML, not a successor. All XHTML documents are HTML but not vice-versa.
HTML is not a general purpose document format, it is optimized for online layout. It does not have the features you would want in a spreadsheet or database.
None of todays formats is what you would want to have as your ideal document format.
Other companies were doing AJaX, but the realization after Google was that AJaX applications could actually work without being completely flaky. It is very similar to the NCSA effect on the Web. There were 15 or so Web browsers before Mosaic. I was working on one myself. But Mosaic was the first one that worked out of the box without any tweaks at a time when most OSS took a day of bug fixes to get it to compile.
On the contrary, if resumes are required in OOXML format there will no longer be a requirement to reverse-engineer the Word format in order to achieve that. Since every word processor has to be compatible with Word in any case to be marketable the job of producing a compliant open source implementation has become rather easier.
As for ECMA, it has always been a joke. They were a joke when they accepted Netscape's original JavaScript proposal without any changes. Netscape chose ECMA because they wanted a forum they could just ram something through without any opportunity for comment from any other party. It only took another six years before usable implementations started to turn up in browsers. Early on the <object> tag was known as the 'crash my browser' tag. The specification was at least as baddly written as the code. But the modern Javascript specs are starting to look pretty good.
The reason that Google has been able to make so much out of AJAX and previous companies have not is not because nobody saw the potential before, its because the JavaScript implementations could not possibly have supported modern apps without crashing. Try connecting to GMail with an early version of Netscape and you will either see it turn off the JavaScript or crash.
People are completely missing the point of standards work here. You only get from a standards process what you achieve along the way. Its like a university degree, the certificate is probably the least useful output.
ODF and OOXML are both examples of an obsolete way of document preparation. They are both embedded in the internal data structures of ten to twenty year old systems. I would take an entirely different approach to producing a modern office suite. I would not cobble it together from components.
Neither format allows you to create an equation in math notation and use it in the spreadsheet.
This whole argument is like arguing whether gas or oil is better to fire a power station. They are both legacy technologies.
The problem is in the US market where there is no competition in the local loop and the cable companies have a long history of behaving badly - as the shareholders of Adelphia know only too well. The consumer does not have effective choice and the Bush administration has consistently backed the interests of corporations above all. Cable companies do not rank quite as highly as oil companies but they come close. Attempts to introduce local competition that were introduced under the Clinton administration were terminated.
I think that the real risk in the US is actually that the cable companies and telcos will overplay their hand and there will be a backlash of sharp and savage proportions that will end up being a long term liability. The US legislative system suffers from an overhigh gain. Then the result will be used to 'prove' how regulation is always undesirable and so on.
Part of the problem here is measurement. We don't have good statistics to tell us whether the ISPs are in fact delivering the service they promise. Is Verizon DSL any better than Comcast here in Medford? Which is consistently faster, which has higher outages? I really don't know because nobody has two connections to try against each other.
The point is not whether companies can get higher bandwidth by paying more. What has people angry is the idea that their cable provider might deny them the full bandwidth that they paid for when they connect to certain content providers or use VOIP.
That is certainly a claim that the Catholic church has been making under the current pope. But the previous pope acknowledged that the church was responsible for the persecution of Galileo and made an apology.
According to wikipedia "Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre"
There is in fact a school of Catholic inquisition denial that is every bit as duplicitous and motivated as the holocaust deniers. According to the inquisition deniers the church had no part in or responsibility for the torture or the executions which are 'exaggerated'. Compare this with the holocaust deniers early strategy of first denying that Hitler was involved and downplaying the extent of the holocaust.
Given the clear political motivation behind these revisionist claims we must consider them rather carefully.
In ordinary cases this would not be very likely to succeed, but the SCOTUS has already accepted an appeal on a similar patent issue. And it is very likely that this will be decided in a maner that would affect this case.
But any journalist who was familiar with patent law issues would know about this which means that this 'article' amounts to nothing more than stenographic press release journalism. They received a press release from Tivo and printed it without checking anything. So all we are seeing here is the Tivo side of the story and they are not exactly a very credible source.
Tivo's financial situation is not exactly impressive. They cannot afford to refuse to license the technology.
Oh come on, and I suppose you think the invasion of Iraq is all about spreading democracy and that O.J. Simpson went to the hotel room to find information on the real killers.
Since when has there been such a desperate concern that the first version of a document format specification might have some technical issues?
I don't object to people wanting to put the squeeze on Microsoft here, they are big boys, they can take it. Business ain't beanbag. But please spare us the desperate moral indignation and don't try to concern troll the rest of us.
So? If I was a member of a national standards body and the Minister, Prime Minister or President called me up I would take it pretty seriously because they have a democratic mandate and I don't.
This is the flip side of trying to use the ISO process to legitimize ODF and delegitimize OOXML. The reason for this campaign was from start to finish to attempt to force governments to use ODF in place of OOXML and thus force the use of Open Office. Turns out that the governments don't really want the slashcrew making their IT purchasing decisions.
Yes, but who has standing to file an appeal here? TFA says ISO national bodies. That would be a pretty difficult challenge to mount.
As with the Netscape use of the justice dept to go after Microsoft, I remain very unimpressed by companies that attempt to win commercial battles by involving government. Netscape did not help the anti-trust case against Microsoft, on the contrary, they caused the DoJ to abandon a strong case (on the pricing issue) into a weak one. Netscape's tactics against Spyglass were every bit as aggressive and anti-competitive as those they accused Microsoft of. Netscape was never a good player in the standards world either, they wanted absolute control of the Web. Their idea of standards participation was to fax a proposed 'standard' to W3C hours before they released the product.
The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.
The agenda is set by a handful of 'elite' journalists earning five million a year plus. Of these, Chris Mathews and Tim Russert loudly trumpet that they were Democrats in their youth, but this is somewhat misleading. The two founders of the neo-con movement, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were Trotskyites in their youth. Russert was a fellow neo-con and was on Moynihans staff as a foreign policy adviser during his neo-con phase before the Senator decided the neo-cons were dangerous. Mathews was a Goldwater supporter before he was a Democrat.
With the exception of Keith Olberman who has essentially changed the political leaning of MSNBC single handedly, there are absolutely no left leaning voices on the cable news outlets. But there are plenty of conservative pundits. And what is significant is that a right leaning pundit like a Carlson or a Beck can survive dreadful ratings for years while a liberal such as Donahue gets canceled after a few months despite improving on the ratings he was given and having higher ratings than the conservative commentators that replaced him.
What is meant by 'liberal bias' is that the mainstream media is liberal on social issues. Discrimination against gays is considered equivalent to racism, etc. etc.
But the US media was entirely in the tank for the Bush administration push for the Iraq war. Any journalist who asked even moderately skeptical questions of the administration risked being fired. Even pointing out the idiocy of the rhetoric was enough to get Bill Maher fired.
The voting habits of provincial reporters is not very relevant, its the consistent bias of the national journalists who set the agenda that is relevant.
I think we need a standard for Slashdot dupe elimination. Admittedly the first story purported to be a leak but so is this, surely this is at most an update to the previous story?
Nope, it means that there are clear criteria for describing compliance. ISO standards don't have to be complete and don't have to work. Take X.500, people are still arguing over that one.
Nor does an ISO standard need to be unique in its field. ISO has standards for metric thread bolts and for two Imperial units, the AF series and Whitworth. Whitworth is strictly speaking a British standard, but it managed to make it to ISO7 for pipe threads.
Politicizing the military is a real problem in a democratic society. During the 1930s through 70s a whole succession of army generals and colonels decided that they could do a better job than the democratic governments of their countries. Thats how Hitler tried to come to power the first time (the beer hall putsch) and how Franco came to power.
The people who complain about the 'liberal media' seem to believe that anything that does not toe the GOP party line as Hanity, Limbaugh etc. do must be biased.
The establishment media in the US is all biased towards the right. Every Sunday the network news shows feature talk show guest lists where Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one. And when a Democrat does appear, Lieberman is far more likely to appear than Ted Kennedy. Not one of the panels reviewing the first five years of Bush's war in Iraq had a commentator who had been publicly opposed to the war at the start. That is a pretty clear pro-GOP bias. One would expect that a Kos or a Josh Marshall would have earned a slot or Juan Cole who actually can claim to be an expert on the politics of the region. Instead we saw the same myopic pundits who were dead wrong at the start of the war and have learned nothing since.
You can be pretty certain that something similar will happen when they have panels discussing the sub-prime meltdown. Krugman, Atrios have been predicting that it would occur for years now.
No, EURAS is not part of the EU, it just happens to be a non-profit based in Europe. It is not a sanctioned government body and its opinions have no formal influence.
The idea that overlapping standards must be avoided due to a WTO agreement is illogical since the WTO is a part of the UN and has a defined scope as a UN member body while ISO is a non-governmental international organization in its own right. The WTO cannot set policy for ISO, nor is it likely to try. WTO treaties are binding on governments that accept them as binding. ISO is not a government and is not a party to any WTO treaty.
The phrase 'should be avoided' means exactly what it says, no more. It is an unenforceable provision. To make the provision enfoceable the language would have to be 'must not' or 'shall not'. Attempting to draw such an inference calls into question the credibility of the person making it as a 'standards expert'.
We have no end of overlapping standards. some of this is bad, most of it is good. C 'overlaps' with Fortran. XML overlaps with SGML. While SGML advocates like to pretend that XML is a derrivative work, it certainly is not from the standards point of view. The original goal of XML was to produce a markup scheme that was sufficiently compatible with SGML to allow HTML to be interoperable with both. XML is to SGML as Java is to C++.
In this case both document formats are based on 1980s application software technology. They are still rooted in a world where the primary purpose of word processing is to develop documents to be printed on paper and computers are too limited to run more than one application at a time.
This was hashed out at considerable length. The particular font in question is designed to exactly match the output of a particular IBM typewriter. So just as PacMan arcade is exactly the same on Windows as the legacy version, so are documents produced in that font.
And don't forget that the original claim being made by the 'forensic expert' was that no typewriters were capable of proportional spacing at the time. A claim that has been subsequently disproved by the fact that other memos from the office are proportionaly spaced.
Whoever produced the letter had anticipated that someone would check similar memos produced from that particular office and produced something similar. Amateur forensics were not the reason that the claims had to be retracted, the provenance of the memo was.
One can imagine that if CBS had been as unscrupulous as their critics asserted that they would have procured a proportional spacing typewriter of the relevant vintage and demonstrated that the forensic case was bogus. The exposure of the forensic case would then have tainted attempts to raise the far stronger provenance issue and we might never have discovered that it came from an entirely dubious source.
Incidentaly, the provenance issue is a good reason to blame Rather for the scandal rather than CBS. A journalist is not meant to be a forensic expert and could hardly be faulted had the problem been with the forensic evidence. But a journalist is meant to know about sources and accepting Killian as an anonymous source in this particular case was simply inexcusable. Anyone who knew about the story knew that the provenance of the document would be highly questionable if Killian was revealled as the source.
I have a real problem with the idea that the military is simply an arm of the governing party spin machine. I also have a big problem with the idea that the blogosphere can be managed with Rovian spin techniques. The evidence shows otherwise.
Blogswarms are a real phenomena. If only they were as accurate in their targets as the paper assumes. The paper is rather too willing to accept the mythology of the blogosphere - particularly the view from the right.
In fact the blogs got the Rathergate incident right but for the wrong reasons. If you have a hot document that mysteriously appears the big question to ask is provenance, not forensics. There is absolutely no forensic test on earth that can ever prove a document to be genuine, all forensics can do is to prove a document is false. The fact is that the document produced matches others from the general's office on microfiche, same font, same superscript TH character. The forensics were not the reason CBS retracted the document, it was the fact that the source was utterly lacking in credibility on this particular issue. He had been peddling the same story for years. If such a source produces documents they have to back them with provenance.
If you can be right for the wrong reason you can also be plain wrong. The problem with the blogosphere is that it can at times have an even stronger herd instinct than the establishment media.
Try to manage the blogosphere with lies as the report suggests and the chances are that it is going to backfire in a major way. Once you have the blogs assuming that everything you say is untrue and you can never redeem your position.
Disinformation can backfire in a major way. The biggest case of this happening is the collapse of the USSR which can be traced directly to a black operation the KGB set up in Afghanistan. At the time the country was a Soviet satellite but the KGB was somewhat worried about the cult of personality that Amin was building round himself. So they started spreading black propaganda suggesting he was in the pay of the CIA to undermine him. A year later another set of KGB agents picked up this story. Moscow became worried and started a series of moves that ended up with the leaders of both communist party factions dead and the Soviets occupying the country. This in turn was the final straw that brought down the USSR. The communist system would probably have fallen anyway, but the collapse of the former Russian empire was not inevitable.
I have the palm version of the Treo. It is complete shite.
Form factor first, it is heavy and the antenna sticks out. The stylus fell out of the pocket long ago and they charge Apple prices for a replacement - $20 for three pointy sticks. I am now on my third replacement in two years. Some people I know have been through six.
The browser is crud. It does not have a cache so you have to reload every page even if you only just navigated there. The javascript is buggy.
The bluetooth implementation is poor, there is no WiFi. The command set is illogical, half the time you press the place call button to dial a number, but not always, sometimes that is cancel.
Unlike the iPhone it is at least unlocked. But the downside is that if you do put a third part app on it the chronic unreliability is likely to get worse.
The iPhone is the only phone on the market today with a web browser that does not completely suck. The fact that it is a really nice Web browser is kinda superfluous.
Memory leaks will eventually kill any program if it runs long enough. My experience is that people still make goofs when they use profiling tools.
If we are going to play 'people should learn' then why not use assembler or better machine code like real programmers do?
And anyone who is saying 'learn to use the leak detection tool', testing programs for correctness is a total lose. You can never test every state of anything but the simplest programs. A good GC will guarantee that there are no memory leaks without needing to test. Better code safety and better performance as well, memory leaks are the most common cause of performance problems that I see.
Yes, that subset is called C.
Seriously, at this point it is time to call a halt to C++ education. Treat it like COBOL, Fortran or any other legacy language that still has demand for programmers but is long since past utility. It is a good idea for students to understand that they have to keep current with programming languages and not expect to be employed as a programmer if they can only code in one. But that does not mean we should start by teaching an obsolete language.
You don't need to tech kids to write in C++ for them to learn how bad an idea lack of GC is. Just give them some existing code and tell them to chase buffer overruns and memory leaks.
I would not code in any language that does not have a garbage collection feature, period. When I coded C in the 90s I wrote my own garbage collector using macros and some extensions to the memory allocation routines. More importantly I would not allow anyone else to write code without GC because none of them were capable of doing it right.
Second, do not use the null terminated string handling. This was one of the key coding requirements that Tim Berners-Lee set out in libwww. All string catenation was checked. It is one of the reasons libwww was so widely used, it was buffer-overun error proof.
I would certainly specify C for use in a low level O/S platform project, but not C++. I think the language is Algol 68 to Algol 60, worse than the original.
Above that point I would use either C#, Java or objective C. From an education point of view they are interchangeable.
C# is at least as fast as equivalent C++ code. The code generator used is identical. You can switch in your own GC if you choose.
I would think it correlates more with the fact that most motherboards come with built in sound these days and plenty come with built in 5.1 sound.
I have no idea what protocol that my desktop talks to the amplifier over the optical hookup. I am pretty sure that absolutely nothing good would result from using Dolby Digital, which is after all a compression algorithm over raw samples.
I could have installed an upgraded sound card when I bought the machine, but what would be the point? I would rather have the PCI slot available.
Having a separate processor for handling graphics makes perfect sense. Having one for sound seems useless at this stage. Games do not use the waveform generators on the sound cards to produce noise the way they did when I was in the games industry 25 years ago. Today we use sampled sounds created offline. All you need to present those is a RAM buffer that spews bits to the port at a rate set by a clock thats reasonably accurate.
If there is no copyright violation then the correct legal response to Creative is 'sit on it and spin'. The users bought hardware. Third parties have the right to extend the use of that hardware in any way they choose so long as they are not distributing copyright or patent infringing code.
Copyright is not intended to give hardware manufacturers a monopoly on accessories for a device. Attempts to use it for that purpose have failed. We might well get to the point soon where this is applied to patents.
The best comparison would be S/MIME vs PGP. If you look at deployed base there is absolutely no question that S/MIME wins. We have over a billion email clients with embedded S/MIME support. But both are IETF standards and I was present when Burt Kaliski pitched handing S/MIME to Jeff Schiller, the Security area. Jeff was at the time probably the biggest PGP supporter, he was one of the main people who made the MIT distribution of PGP happen.
The popular perception is that the S/MIME and PGP camps are both at each other's throats. This is not the case at all. Neither product is exactly a deployment success in that virtually no email is secured with either. Jon Callas, CTO of PGP and I both worked on DKIM together. PGP Inc. makes an excellent S/MIME product. The perception that there is a division only hurts both standards. In my book I advocate that email clients implement at least PGP encryption so we can move forward to an interoperable message level confidentiality solution. There is not a big technical or even a market reason to do this, but there is a major political reason as PGP dominates in mindshare. We are going to make very sure that we do not have a similar schism when we move to the next generation technologies.
ODF vs OOXML is a very similar problem. The deployed base of applications is simply too great to make convergence on a single standard practical for this generation. It is only going to become practical when the market moves to the next generation.
The Microsoft Java namespace was entirely justified, Microsoft had bought into Java thinking that they could use it as their next generation programming language across the board. The only way to do that was to allow access to Windows APIs. Sun thought that Java was more than a programming language, it was a replacement platform that they had absolute control over and would sue anyone who tried to implement different ideas. The way I looked at it was 'OK Sun, you have an idea whose time might have come, but why should you get to control the entire future of the computing business on the basis of one idea'.
Standards are not about establishing a monoculture. The idea is to standardize what we agree on so that we can then innovate in areas that provide useful choices, i.e. benefits, for the customer and not in areas where it only causes problems.
ODF is not going to be the canonical archive format in perpetuity. It is rooted in the world of paper documents for a start.
Now it might be the case that some games might have effects that are only visible with this type of ultra-extreme performance. Smoke, fire, atmospherics and such. That is certainly the case at the lower end of the performance scale, the screenshots you see on the box are all taken on big beast machines. You are not going to get that experience on lower end machines, certainly not at the highest resolutions.
We are certainly not talking about major differences here. Its the difference between a Jaguar and a Honda. Both are nice cars, but most people recognize that the Jaguar is nicer in many subtle ways and the not so subtle fact of having two to three times the horsepower.
Sure you can argue if it is 'worth it' to spend the extra money. Whether that is true for you depends in part on how much spare cash you have. Unless you start buying machines that require three phase power, even the most severe gadget habit is a whole lot cheaper than the cheapest boat. If I want to buy a gadget and fear disapproval from SWMBO, I buy some yatching mags to leave round the house and I am home free.
Where the argument is much less viable is at the lower end. The difference between a Jaguar and an upper end Honda are subtle, the differences between the Honda and an entry level Dodge are not.