I also meant to add my favourite quote from the patent:
"For example, an Internet user's ability to access information using that medium is significantly reduced if the user lacks understanding of how to use Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to traverse (i.e., navigate) web pages."
I think I stopped reading shortly after that point, it would have hurt too much to continue.
Interesting that you mention "force"; doesn't seem to me that Fedora Women forces women to be involved with Fedora.
As for "why encourage", maybe you'd like to start to explain why Google's Summer of Code had zero women applicants, whereas Gnome's Women's Summer Outreach Programme had a great number of applicants, when the two programmes were basically the same.
Claiming women's "natural inclination" or interest is to not participate in free software projects is about as sexist a viewpoint as you can possibly achieve.
I agree about key authentication, in general. But - it doesn't play well with, eg., sudo.
If you have users who are setup to use sudo (for example, to update a website area, or something), they cannot use their keys to authenticate themselves to sudo. At least, if there is a way, I'm blissfully ignorant and would love to hear about it;)
Obviously, Microsoft have sensed that there are a fair number of people in the community who think that the BSD license is the only truly "free" license, and that with the new GPLv3 and the added protections, they think they can split the community. A house divided unto itself, etc. etc.
Funnily enough, I know a couple of the authors do these kind of transformations all the time - your ad hominem argument just doesn't cut it.
The use of an external manifest to resolve links was criticised because it's harder to get at the data. With xlink, everything is right there in the tag - with the MS system, you have to take the ID, open up the manifest, find the tag with matching ID and then get the data off that. It's more complex for no good reason.
The mixed content model is a valid point. Look at the examples of the non-mixed model: they're more verbose, and it requires more effort to generate. The mixed model is the least-effort model, yet - contrary to what you say - is not "ambiguous"; it's as exact as the non-mixed model.
If you keep the things that are supposed to be human readable as the text within nodes, and move the rest (formatting instructions etc) into attributes, your XML will be much more readable after some simple processing to remove the nodes.
Interestingly, this is exactly one of the "technical flaws" that GrokLaw claims to have found in OpenXML.
No, that's not what the article says. OpenXML will not mix node and text siblings; that's nothing to do with whether or not you put data in as text nodes or node attributes.
Well, off the top of my head, here are a few things that XML can do that JSON/etc. cannot do:
be obvious about what character set they are encoded in;
be written in multiple languages at the same time, without a priori knowledge of which sections are written in which language;
include tags/attributes from multiple DTDs within the one document via namespaces;
You cannot solve any of those problems in JSON or YAML in such a way that any other JSON or YAML app can understand without making changes to those apps. XML can do all of those things and more, and it's useful: e.g., embedding SVG into an XHTML document.
Well, I would agree with you about XSLT - but that's an XML technology, you realise? XSLT is actually one of the handy tools which you have access to. As an example, I was able to convert a large number of documents from HTML to OpenDocument using XSLT, and I would have had to write my own parsers etc. if the files on both sides weren't XML.
XML is handy because there's a lot of wheel reinvention that you just don't need to do. Also, it's not just a way of structuring data - comparison to JSON or YAML isn't really well-founded, they're not feature equivalent.
Although ODF is a bit nicer standard from a human point of view, and builds on existing standards, I hope OpenXML isn't accepted simply because having two standards doing the exact same thing is nonsense. They're much more similar than they are different at many levels.
ECMA are welcome to OpenXML, I don't think ISO should accept it.
The AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/) have a limited amount of money that they are able to use to fund Free Software projects. Some preference is given to UK-based projects, and to those projects which contribute something unique to the community, but all are welcome to apply for money.
We're not talking megabucks, but certainly enough to fund certain tasks/milestones.
.... but I can't. Training doesn't seem to be in demand. I've never been asked for it, few other companies I know have ever been asked for it. There's an organisation in the UK who are funded to give training in free software to local small businesses, and have a good marketing budget. They get interest in mono, PHP, that kind of thing. OpenOffice.org training they can't even give away.
And his remarks about OOo Base are a bit off. It's a buggy application, and unsuitable for "real" work. Believe me, I've tried. It's impossible to use the forms without resorting to macros (you can't even make a button on a form open a different form when it's clicked without writing a custom macro), and it has no equivalent to Access's switchboard. Sure, the reports, forms, etc. may all be there, but without a switchboard you only have Base's bizarre UI which no end-user will ever get.
It sickens me that OOo doesn't seem to excite people. I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
Yeah, of course, because once we make Nike or whoever pay the extra couple of dollars for a fair minimum wage in those countries, and decent working conditions where people can work real hours and not get sick, all those jobs will definitely disappear.
Of course Nike is the cause. Every single company using sweatshops and every single consumer that purchases items made in a sweatshop is the "cause".
Just because others do it, doesn't mean that it's right. But your logic already allows you to equate human lives with lumps of coal, so I doubt very much that your moral compass will wiggle at all when you think about this.
So... you're in favour of slavery too? Or you would be, if it was still around and everyone had slaves? After all, if everyone has slaves, it's not your personal responsbility, right?
The artificiality of a temperature read from a pure substance is nothing really compared to the inaccuracy and value-fudging the Farenheit scale needed to get those "landmarks" in place.
Well, supposedly they have, but I don't really see it.
There are few UI improvements I can think of that Vista will bring. I suspect GNOME already has better search, a more consistent UI, etc. Probably, Vista has better admin UI, but there's not much else that springs to mind.
Microsoft wasted a lot of time re-spinning onto the W2k3 codebase after they chucked their WinXP-based work, remember.
Re:It's a moving target
on
Gnome 2.14 Review
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think that's partly true, but I think the free software desktop evolves faster. If you think about how much was new in WinXP, it wasn't much, and that was out in 2001/2002(?). So, the current W32 desktop is pretty old in computer terms. If you think how far GNOME has come in that time, it's a huge leap.
If they maintain the current pace, sure Vista might be superficially nicer when it comes out. In a couple of releases or so GNOME will have caught up in the areas Vista is ahead, but there won't be a new W32 UI to catch up where GNOME is ahead.
I think the current GNOME pace is about right. There aren't huge advances each release, but each release does bring stuff worth having.
If they're sending out dev kits, they have to make the source available to the developers. It doesn't count as internal distribution, and they cannot use an NDA to prevent the developers getting or redistributing the source.
All that said, the source is unlikely to be redistributed I would think, and even if it were, I doubt it would be terribly interesting - another CPU arch, maybe a couple of drivers. Nothing earth-shattering.
There are a few people pointing out other "open" file formats. OpenDocument is part of that heritage, though:
- it invents very little. The container format (jar) is well known, XML is well known, it builds on HTML for semantic structure, it uses other standards (XLink, XForms, SVG, etc.) where it makes sense to. It is, in effect, a "common subset" of standards which are all useful in creating documents (e.g., HTML is great, but you can't store images easily in an HTML file [tho obviously, yes, it is possible...]). This is in stark contrast to, e.g., MS XML.
- it has been well-designed from the start to actually improve the current state of the art, not replicate it. E.g., the metadata system is good and getting better.
- unlike text/html, competing implementations are actually interoperable: vendors are working through OASIS, which has standardised it from the start, and are making sure things work. HTML standards came a little late in the game, and there are still text/html pages out there which my poor Firefox can't handle.
There are a ton of reasons why OpenDocument isn't just "another format", but actually a significant step forward.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I stopped reading shortly after that point, it would have hurt too much to continue.
We were talking about this on a UK ml the other day; there are a number of Moodle people worried about this.
It's a patent so bad it looks like the EPO won't grant it. Which is really saying something.
Uh; way to miss the point
The question wasn't why SoC got zero responses. The question was why SoC got zero, when GNOME WSO got plenty.
Eg., it's a comparison, not a comment about Google.
Interesting that you mention "force"; doesn't seem to me that Fedora Women forces women to be involved with Fedora.
As for "why encourage", maybe you'd like to start to explain why Google's Summer of Code had zero women applicants, whereas Gnome's Women's Summer Outreach Programme had a great number of applicants, when the two programmes were basically the same.
Claiming women's "natural inclination" or interest is to not participate in free software projects is about as sexist a viewpoint as you can possibly achieve.
I agree about key authentication, in general. But - it doesn't play well with, eg., sudo.
;)
If you have users who are setup to use sudo (for example, to update a website area, or something), they cannot use their keys to authenticate themselves to sudo. At least, if there is a way, I'm blissfully ignorant and would love to hear about it
I get my lawyers to do it; they're my writting machines.
Obviously, Microsoft have sensed that there are a fair number of people in the community who think that the BSD license is the only truly "free" license, and that with the new GPLv3 and the added protections, they think they can split the community. A house divided unto itself, etc. etc.
It's actually likely they're slightly faster for spreadsheets. For example:
* they use single-letter tag names, for the most part, to reduce parsing time
* they remove all strings and put them in a look-up table
I'm not sure how much difference these things actually make in practice, but there's probably a little speed there.
What's not fair is to compare OOo to Microsoft Office, and determine the speed of OpenDocument versus OXML based on that...
That's a different project.
Fellowship != Foundation.
Funnily enough, I know a couple of the authors do these kind of transformations all the time - your ad hominem argument just doesn't cut it.
The use of an external manifest to resolve links was criticised because it's harder to get at the data. With xlink, everything is right there in the tag - with the MS system, you have to take the ID, open up the manifest, find the tag with matching ID and then get the data off that. It's more complex for no good reason.
The mixed content model is a valid point. Look at the examples of the non-mixed model: they're more verbose, and it requires more effort to generate. The mixed model is the least-effort model, yet - contrary to what you say - is not "ambiguous"; it's as exact as the non-mixed model.
That's exactly the point - all XML readers support these basic things, it's not format specific.
No, that's not what the article says. OpenXML will not mix node and text siblings; that's nothing to do with whether or not you put data in as text nodes or node attributes.
Well, off the top of my head, here are a few things that XML can do that JSON/etc. cannot do:
You cannot solve any of those problems in JSON or YAML in such a way that any other JSON or YAML app can understand without making changes to those apps. XML can do all of those things and more, and it's useful: e.g., embedding SVG into an XHTML document.
Well, I would agree with you about XSLT - but that's an XML technology, you realise? XSLT is actually one of the handy tools which you have access to. As an example, I was able to convert a large number of documents from HTML to OpenDocument using XSLT, and I would have had to write my own parsers etc. if the files on both sides weren't XML.
XML is handy because there's a lot of wheel reinvention that you just don't need to do. Also, it's not just a way of structuring data - comparison to JSON or YAML isn't really well-founded, they're not feature equivalent.
Although ODF is a bit nicer standard from a human point of view, and builds on existing standards, I hope OpenXML isn't accepted simply because having two standards doing the exact same thing is nonsense. They're much more similar than they are different at many levels.
ECMA are welcome to OpenXML, I don't think ISO should accept it.
The AFFS (http://www.affs.org.uk/) have a limited amount of money that they are able to use to fund Free Software projects. Some preference is given to UK-based projects, and to those projects which contribute something unique to the community, but all are welcome to apply for money.
We're not talking megabucks, but certainly enough to fund certain tasks/milestones.
.... but I can't. Training doesn't seem to be in demand. I've never been asked for it, few other companies I know have ever been asked for it. There's an organisation in the UK who are funded to give training in free software to local small businesses, and have a good marketing budget. They get interest in mono, PHP, that kind of thing. OpenOffice.org training they can't even give away.
And his remarks about OOo Base are a bit off. It's a buggy application, and unsuitable for "real" work. Believe me, I've tried. It's impossible to use the forms without resorting to macros (you can't even make a button on a form open a different form when it's clicked without writing a custom macro), and it has no equivalent to Access's switchboard. Sure, the reports, forms, etc. may all be there, but without a switchboard you only have Base's bizarre UI which no end-user will ever get.
It sickens me that OOo doesn't seem to excite people. I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
Yeah, of course, because once we make Nike or whoever pay the extra couple of dollars for a fair minimum wage in those countries, and decent working conditions where people can work real hours and not get sick, all those jobs will definitely disappear.
Of course Nike is the cause. Every single company using sweatshops and every single consumer that purchases items made in a sweatshop is the "cause".
Just because others do it, doesn't mean that it's right. But your logic already allows you to equate human lives with lumps of coal, so I doubt very much that your moral compass will wiggle at all when you think about this.
Wow.
So... you're in favour of slavery too? Or you would be, if it was still around and everyone had slaves? After all, if everyone has slaves, it's not your personal responsbility, right?
The artificiality of a temperature read from a pure substance is nothing really compared to the inaccuracy and value-fudging the Farenheit scale needed to get those "landmarks" in place.
Well, supposedly they have, but I don't really see it.
There are few UI improvements I can think of that Vista will bring. I suspect GNOME already has better search, a more consistent UI, etc. Probably, Vista has better admin UI, but there's not much else that springs to mind.
Microsoft wasted a lot of time re-spinning onto the W2k3 codebase after they chucked their WinXP-based work, remember.
I think that's partly true, but I think the free software desktop evolves faster. If you think about how much was new in WinXP, it wasn't much, and that was out in 2001/2002(?). So, the current W32 desktop is pretty old in computer terms. If you think how far GNOME has come in that time, it's a huge leap.
If they maintain the current pace, sure Vista might be superficially nicer when it comes out. In a couple of releases or so GNOME will have caught up in the areas Vista is ahead, but there won't be a new W32 UI to catch up where GNOME is ahead.
I think the current GNOME pace is about right. There aren't huge advances each release, but each release does bring stuff worth having.
If they're sending out dev kits, they have to make the source available to the developers. It doesn't count as internal distribution, and they cannot use an NDA to prevent the developers getting or redistributing the source.
All that said, the source is unlikely to be redistributed I would think, and even if it were, I doubt it would be terribly interesting - another CPU arch, maybe a couple of drivers. Nothing earth-shattering.
There are a few people pointing out other "open" file formats. OpenDocument is part of that heritage, though:
- it invents very little. The container format (jar) is well known, XML is well known, it builds on HTML for semantic structure, it uses other standards (XLink, XForms, SVG, etc.) where it makes sense to. It is, in effect, a "common subset" of standards which are all useful in creating documents (e.g., HTML is great, but you can't store images easily in an HTML file [tho obviously, yes, it is possible...]). This is in stark contrast to, e.g., MS XML.
- it has been well-designed from the start to actually improve the current state of the art, not replicate it. E.g., the metadata system is good and getting better.
- unlike text/html, competing implementations are actually interoperable: vendors are working through OASIS, which has standardised it from the start, and are making sure things work. HTML standards came a little late in the game, and there are still text/html pages out there which my poor Firefox can't handle.
There are a ton of reasons why OpenDocument isn't just "another format", but actually a significant step forward.