Who would make such standards? Surely Microsoft could give it a stab, and then extend it beyond usefulness. Maybe some of the existing standards are good enough, or could be extended (vCard, vCal, etc.).
As other posters hinted already, there is SyncML. As for the vCard XML representation, it was devised by someone who didn't understand what XML attributes are for. These "special marker" elements inside other elements used to make some of us pull our hair out.
I'm also glad IBM is smart enough to roll out their own servers rather than use that godawful jabberd that jabber.org provides.
Yeah, but I'd be glad to see you helping to make the jabberd server less godawful, as some people I know doing it right now. They certainly need your invaluable expertise and will to perfection.
These Hi-Speed Media bastards made me edit my.procmailrc one more time. After I short-circuited them to their uplink ISP's abuse address, I haven't heard from them anymore.
There apparently was a series of grave mistakes which unsurprisingly have added up, i.e. an operator working with certain systems switched off, the single emergency phone line that got blocked. The ill-fated Russian pilots probably believed that negligence like this is possible at home, but not in the land of famous banks and watches...
The picture is definitely more nuanced than you paint here. The current president and the government is not something you can't speak against, quite the contrary, the critique is abound. Neither was Yeltsin, BTW, as numerous scandals and bad press on him proved at the time. In fact, he deliberately defended freedom of press, considering it one of his main achievements. Putin seems to follow suit, despite some misguided attempts to weed out unwanted media tycoons; these actions resulted in more backfire than they were worth to bear. And, something new for this hapless country, they do listen. They take steps to save face at least, and sometimes much more! Returning to the subject line, i say FINALLY, the public opinion works. Sure, there is still a ton of issues to address, but we see some progress, and there is determination to go further. If these authorities won't do it, there will be others who will want to, I'm certain.
The current anti-extremist draft, questionable as it is, reacts to the recent spread of violent nationalist/racist outbreaks. Have you seen ugly skinhead youth yelling out "CountryX is for CountryXians"? There is a bunch of editions, printed and online, who urge those poor uneducated bastards to beat the crap out of anyone who is "non-Russian". No thanks. This has to be stopped. Chechnya is enough to feel guilty and take slaps for.
Semi-humorous disclaimer: I have no ties to the state structures, even the less I'm a paid agent of "the corrupt and brutal KGB regime". Please save your trolling for more uninformed audience.
The camera slides among rows of shiny boxen of a cool color (cobalt blue, silver, or shiny black) with penguin logos etched on them. Vague images of source code scroll rapidly on the background (variant: projected on the room walls if there are any). Voice/text: Open-source software. The real National Security.
Now I dislike MS as much as the next man, but let's not blame them for all virus emails.
Most (but not all) email virus/worms are Javascript, Visual Basic or.EXE files that are sent by email. Clueless users double click on these because they are...well...clueless, and think that they are games/pictures/nudey photos of Kournikova, whatever. This activates them, and allows the worm to read the address book and either use Outlook or its own SMTP routine to send itself to all the people in the address book.
Now for some contrast: Email users under Linux may be just as clueless, but they must explicitly set execution permissions on anything received from the net in order to run it. God forbid auto-running complicated apps for viewing, with the ability to execute scripts -- this will be the dawn of a Linux virus era.
MS put the "double click" functionality in to make people's lives easier, and on the whole, they have.
Add to this other "convenient" practices like hiding crucial meta-information from the user's eyesight. I'm talking about file extensions -- yes, Windows is that dumb in deciding over what can be done with a file.
All that it takes to stop viruses like Klez is for the mail administrator to block attachments with.exe,.js and.vbs extensions (plus some other little tricks)
Protection of an inherently insecure system with strict border checks is ineffective. Any breach on the border (another file extension to abuse, previously considered safe?.wav? WinAmp vulnerability? Scripts in a text/plain content "intelligently" treated as HTML due to HTML-like tags?), hoopla, your whole system is on its knees.
ATL COM is built entirely on templates (for better or worse, although their primary objective was reduced code size for ActiveX components- templates where largely responsible for this).
Wrong. Their primary objective was automated generation of boilerplate code for COM objects. For this, I consider templates rather good.
"DLL" can pretty much be extended to "dynamic libraries", and STL reflects the general failure of C++ in this respect. C++ was simply designed without the notion that some parts of a program can be reused in the binary form. This resulted in the ABI hell and bloat problems. The strict mapping of source code to binary code, identifier names to linker symbol names, that was essential for C, has been eroded in C++, and no viable remedy has been established as of yet.
Unfortunately, STL's use of templates and inlines can inflate the size of your code in exchange for raw speed.
At times it's not even "in exchange", considering degraded locality of code for instruction caches.
I read a few days back about generics, a proposed extension for Java that resembles C++ templates, but only to an extent. I'd say the extension is very elegant, if one accepts the idea of the single-rooted object hierarchy.
Re:Nicely understated
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 1
As we all remember from college, most protocols are layered, which allows encrypted bits to be layered inside routing / security bits, but an XML document can't be layered (it can't contain other XML documents).
As all the current college students know, XML Namespaces allow layering or otherwise blending of various XML applications. For example, some solutions can pass XML-RPC or SOAP payloads in Jabber messages, thus building on top of the Jabber message passing, presence and authentication framework.
Given the relative ease with which one can put Ruby and Python bindings on C++, C++ makes a better choice for a "low level" language to work in tandem with python or ruby.
Until there is the C++ ABI standard agreed upon and most compilers (actually, g++ alone would be enough) implement it, I won't touch any extension.so's built of C++.
For example, it's much easier to write a matrix library in C++ than it is to do the same in C
Java trades compile time optimisations, performance and static type safety for simplicity.
Also for just-in-time dynamic optimizations, memory management safety, "run-anywhere" (well, declared at least) and standardized distribution/deployment form.
Matz (the Ruby guy) said in response to "why another language", that if someone found Ruby useful, that was a good enough reason for him. I think this is a good philosophy.
I, personally, believe that the future belongs to dynamic P-code languages such as Ruby and Python. They have clean "native" interfaces, so if you want full speed, you get to the C API and hack away. Or, if you're willing to trade some more performance for the benefits of Java, use Jython.
So, are you claiming that it's not possible to write good, modular code in C++, or that C++ has not stood the test of time? If the former, then how come it's the language of choice for so much large-scale development?
It's definitely not the language of choice among open-source developers, especially when shared libraries are concerned (e.g. GNOME is a large-scale project composed of small cozy things that, surprise, work with each other). For an example of the reverse, consider Sablotron vs. libxslt. The former is built using all C++ whiz-bang features one can get and weighs a ton, and the latter is in plain old C using GObject for OO features. After a continuous PITA with Sablotron, the PHP team decides to ditch it in favor of libxslt. Moral: never let students, who are itching to apply the recent killer techniques to everything they can reach, to design real stuff.
Your prejudice and/or ignorance are showing. The very point of templates is that they allow you to separate concerns. This is true from the simple generic containers and algorithms found in the C++ library through to the state-of-the-art research into expression templates, policy classes, etc.
Fine, but why all this have to be jammed in one language with pointers and dumb C-style compilation? This generic stuff involves a lot of declarations that need to be instantiated somewhere. For simple inlined things like, say, the iterator-based copy algorithm it is probably OK (except, I can write a for loop myself, damit!). With all of the declarative power, the implementation matters are specified too vaguely for a grown-up C compiler. I guess this is the reason why Gabber (a neat Jabber client built over GTK--, using a lot of std template stuff) compiles a file per minute and the executable is 3.5 times larger than galeon-bin.
Face it, C++ is a big ugly trade-off. And it works like any trade-off does: well for things that it was established for (huge monolithic apps with time-constrained development cycles), but sucks for anything that does not fit in the frame.
Exactly. The reason why C++ sucks so badly is precisely because it is "a flexible programming language that can handle everything from high-level abstraction to bit-twiddling, all unified within the same language".
Preaching on in the software-development-is-an-evolution style: life itself teaches us that the systems that stand the test of time are usually composed of clearly separated simple components or layers, each fit for its own set of tasks. An overly complex intermingled system has lesser chances to change in order to match new challenges, where a layered/componentized system simply tosses aside parts that became unusable and picks up new, better ones. Or uses both kinds if there's still a need.
Fortunately, we have good tools that do each his own thing well and delimit responsibilities nicely. Whenever you need low-level twiddling, write functions in C, hooked up to your high-level application platform. Whenever you want to avoid writing boilerplate code, use an automated generator, e.g. an IDL compiler or a wizard from your favourite IDE, then fill in the blanks -- or edit it down to tiniest bits, if you so desire. C++ borgs all this into an incomprehensible heap of techniques that conceal stuff from the programmer's eye, and no compiler vendor has ever implemented these in clean and uniform manner. If you want clear implementation independance, portability or compactness, you have to restrict the used feature set and jump through hoops nearly as much as you have to do with C. Java is much much better at this, because it doesn't go into stuff where C reigns.
And no, don't tell me about how templates are good. I'd better learn how to reuse code with reasonable type abstraction and thus improve locality than let identical template instantiations infest my libraries.
Jabber, as I see it, comes from the other end of the KISS scale. So, the appropriate outcome would be wide adoption among hordes of enthusiasts, not insanely expensive set-top "messaging servers" that require insanely expensive admin spetsnaz.
More vital question is, whether the IMPP protocol suite, which is being churned out by IETF, can supplant Jabber-based communications. Judging by the committee's pace, they are going to be too late to become the de-facto.
Slashdot Mirror
He's good at the Berlin endgame, huh?
Too bad the Russians couldn't say the same in World War 2...
Why, they got to set a flag over Reichstag and all. That was actually a draw, too.
I'm imaging it's like the /. community except all the posts will be s/microsoft/linux
And, accordingly, the reverse?
Then, their pet peeve would be GNU/Microsoft.
it's a wonderful system, and one that carries forward the true unix tradition, something that UNIX lost long ago.
Dare I say PAM?
Pretty much every Linux distribution uses it these days.
No wonder they couldn't spell it right (twice), falling victims to Freudian slips.
Who would make such standards? Surely Microsoft could give it a stab, and then extend it beyond usefulness. Maybe some of the existing standards are good enough, or could be extended (vCard, vCal, etc.).
As other posters hinted already, there is SyncML.
As for the vCard XML representation, it was devised by someone who didn't understand what XML attributes are for. These "special marker" elements inside other elements used to make some of us pull our hair out.
I'm also glad IBM is smart enough to roll out their own servers rather than use that godawful jabberd that jabber.org provides.
Yeah, but I'd be glad to see you helping to make the jabberd server less godawful, as some people I know doing it right now. They certainly need your invaluable expertise and will to perfection.
The sf-like site for jabber apps is as dead as a doornail as far as offering files or getting at CVS.
Jabberstudio is far from it. Subscribe to their CVS commits notification list and see for yourself.
These Hi-Speed Media bastards made me edit my .procmailrc one more time. After I short-circuited them to their uplink ISP's abuse address, I haven't heard from them anymore.
It already exists.
There apparently was a series of grave mistakes which unsurprisingly have added up, i.e. an operator working with certain systems switched off, the single emergency phone line that got blocked. The ill-fated Russian pilots probably believed that negligence like this is possible at home, but not in the land of
famous banks and watches...
Hello, this is a Russian resident speaking.
The picture is definitely more nuanced than you paint here. The current president and the government is not something you can't speak against, quite the contrary, the critique is abound. Neither was Yeltsin, BTW, as numerous scandals and bad press on him proved at the time. In fact, he deliberately defended freedom of press, considering it one of his main achievements. Putin seems to follow suit, despite some misguided attempts to weed out unwanted media tycoons; these actions resulted in more backfire than they were worth to bear. And, something new for this hapless country, they do listen. They take steps to save face at least, and sometimes much more! Returning to the subject line, i say FINALLY, the public opinion works. Sure, there is still a ton of issues to address, but we see some progress, and there is determination to go further. If these authorities won't do it, there will be others who will want to, I'm certain.
The current anti-extremist draft, questionable as it is, reacts to the recent spread of violent nationalist/racist outbreaks. Have you seen ugly skinhead youth yelling out "CountryX is for CountryXians"? There is a bunch of editions, printed and online, who urge those poor uneducated bastards to beat the crap out of anyone who is "non-Russian". No thanks. This has to be stopped. Chechnya is enough to feel guilty and take slaps for.
Semi-humorous disclaimer: I have no ties to the state structures, even the less I'm a paid agent of "the corrupt and brutal KGB regime". Please save your trolling for more uninformed audience.
The camera slides among rows of shiny boxen of a cool color (cobalt blue, silver, or shiny black) with penguin logos etched on them. Vague images of source code scroll rapidly on the background (variant: projected on the room walls if there are any).
Voice/text: Open-source software. The real National Security.
Now for some contrast: Email users under Linux may be just as clueless, but they must explicitly set execution permissions on anything received from the net in order to run it. God forbid auto-running complicated apps for viewing, with the ability to execute scripts -- this will be the dawn of a Linux virus era.
Add to this other "convenient" practices like hiding crucial meta-information from the user's eyesight. I'm talking about file extensions -- yes, Windows is that dumb in deciding over what can be done with a file.
Protection of an inherently insecure system with strict border checks is ineffective. Any breach on the border (another file extension to abuse, previously considered safe?
ATL COM is built entirely on templates (for better or worse, although their primary objective was reduced code size for ActiveX components- templates where largely responsible for this).
Wrong. Their primary objective was automated generation of boilerplate code for COM objects.
For this, I consider templates rather good.
After I sawed off my legs, I still make it fine with crutches and prosthetics.
"DLL" can pretty much be extended to "dynamic libraries", and STL reflects the general failure of C++ in this respect. C++ was simply designed without the notion that some parts of a program can be reused in the binary form. This resulted in the ABI hell and bloat problems. The strict mapping of source code to binary code, identifier names to linker symbol names, that was essential for C, has been eroded in C++, and no viable remedy has been established as of yet.
Unfortunately, STL's use of templates and inlines can inflate the size of your code in exchange for raw speed.
At times it's not even "in exchange", considering degraded locality of code for instruction caches.
I read a few days back about generics, a proposed extension for Java that resembles C++ templates, but only to an extent. I'd say the extension is very elegant, if one accepts the idea of the single-rooted object hierarchy.
As we all remember from college, most protocols are layered, which allows encrypted bits to be layered inside routing / security bits, but an XML document can't be layered (it can't contain other XML documents).
As all the current college students know, XML Namespaces allow layering or otherwise blending of various XML applications. For example, some solutions can pass XML-RPC or SOAP payloads in Jabber messages, thus building on top of the Jabber message passing, presence and authentication framework.
Given the relative ease with which one can put Ruby and Python bindings on C++, C++ makes a better choice for a "low level" language to work in tandem with python or ruby.
.so's built of C++.
Until there is the C++ ABI standard agreed upon and most compilers (actually, g++ alone would be enough) implement it, I won't touch any extension
For example, it's much easier to write a matrix library in C++ than it is to do the same in C
Ironically, we've already got NumPy.
Granted, C++ is not going away anytime soon, I myself program in it for a living, but it's not a magic bullet either.
Java trades compile time optimisations, performance and static type safety for simplicity.
Also for just-in-time dynamic optimizations, memory management safety, "run-anywhere" (well, declared at least) and standardized distribution/deployment form.
Matz (the Ruby guy) said in response to "why another language", that if someone found Ruby useful, that was a good enough reason for him. I think this is a good philosophy.
I, personally, believe that the future belongs to dynamic P-code languages such as Ruby and Python. They have clean "native" interfaces, so if you want full speed, you get to the C API and hack away. Or, if you're willing to trade some more performance for the benefits of Java, use Jython.
It's definitely not the language of choice among open-source developers, especially when shared libraries are concerned (e.g. GNOME is a large-scale project composed of small cozy things that, surprise, work with each other). For an example of the reverse, consider Sablotron vs. libxslt.
The former is built using all C++ whiz-bang features one can get and weighs a ton, and the latter is in plain old C using GObject for OO features. After a continuous PITA with Sablotron, the PHP team decides to ditch it in favor of libxslt. Moral: never let students, who are itching to apply the recent killer techniques to everything they can reach, to design real stuff.
Fine, but why all this have to be jammed in one language with pointers and dumb C-style compilation? This generic stuff involves a lot of declarations that need to be instantiated somewhere. For simple inlined things like, say, the iterator-based copy algorithm it is probably OK (except, I can write a for loop myself, damit!). With all of the declarative power, the implementation matters are specified too vaguely for a grown-up C compiler. I guess this is the reason why Gabber (a neat Jabber client built over GTK--, using a lot of std template stuff) compiles a file per minute and the executable is 3.5 times larger than galeon-bin.
Face it, C++ is a big ugly trade-off. And it works like any trade-off does: well for things that it was established for (huge monolithic apps with time-constrained development cycles), but sucks for anything that does not fit in the frame.
Exactly. The reason why C++ sucks so badly is precisely because it is "a flexible programming language that can handle everything from high-level abstraction to bit-twiddling, all unified within the same language".
Preaching on in the software-development-is-an-evolution style: life itself teaches us that the systems that stand the test of time are usually composed of clearly separated simple components or layers, each fit for its own set of tasks. An overly complex intermingled system has lesser chances to change in order to match new challenges, where a layered/componentized system simply tosses aside parts that became unusable and picks up new, better ones. Or uses both kinds if there's still a need.
Fortunately, we have good tools that do each his own thing well and delimit responsibilities nicely. Whenever you need low-level twiddling, write functions in C, hooked up to your high-level application platform. Whenever you want to avoid writing boilerplate code, use an automated generator, e.g. an IDL compiler or a wizard from your favourite IDE, then fill in the blanks -- or edit it down to tiniest bits, if you so desire. C++ borgs all this into an incomprehensible heap of techniques that conceal stuff from the programmer's eye, and no compiler vendor has ever implemented these in clean and uniform manner. If you want
clear implementation independance, portability or compactness, you have to restrict the used feature set and jump through hoops nearly as much as you have to do with C. Java is much much better at this, because it doesn't go into stuff where C reigns.
And no, don't tell me about how templates are good. I'd better learn how to reuse code with reasonable type abstraction and thus improve locality than let identical template instantiations infest my libraries.
If the GXP 120 series proves to be unstable, who is going to replace my HDD in the next 6 months?
I need to replace my faulty 2 year old Hitachi monitor, too. No end to troubles?
Does this mean Jabber is "worse is better?"
See for yourself.
Jabber, as I see it, comes from the other end of the KISS scale. So, the appropriate outcome would be wide adoption among hordes of enthusiasts, not insanely expensive set-top "messaging servers" that require insanely expensive admin spetsnaz.
More vital question is, whether the IMPP protocol suite, which is being churned out by IETF, can supplant Jabber-based communications. Judging by the committee's pace, they are going to be too late to become the de-facto.