While Andy questions the motives and actions of the RIAA, he basks in pride at his son's steadfast resolve.
"He has stood up to the schoolyard bullies that are pulling this and he's said, 'You are not going to make me say something that's not true,'" Andy said.
Sorry, dad, he didn't stand up to the schoolyard bully. Instead, he said "I'll give you all my money if you don't hit me", and it worked. This is the wrong approach. I know it's intimidating for a 19-year-old college student to be threatened by a powerful industry, but he gave in and gave them all his money. That will simply encourage the bully further, it will not help the problem.
ChewPlastic.com is asking for donations to help recover the $12,000 settlement. As of June 6, the site has collected more than $1,700.
Yeah, great. Why don't I just make that check out to the RIAA? Seriously. Tell us ahead of time next if this happens again and we'll get together a legal defense fund for him. That way the money goes to an attorney, not the RIAA.
I'm sorry to be such a jerk, but IMNSHO a settlement of this type is usually seen as a de facto confession of guilt. I understand why someone would want to back down when threatened by the RIAA, but please don't call him "brave" for doing it.
Not only are they in violation of the GPL, they are literally costing SCO BILLIONS OF DOLLARS by violating SCO's copyrights, patents, or some contract with IBM by releasing a Linux based product! Quick, someone alert McBride!
Hrm... even if she's right and it's not some strange conincidence, is there old BSD code in Linux? That should be checkable.
Which is likely why SCO won't show everybody. Imagine the egg on their face when developers from around the world step forward to claim their code.... and it's not SCO's code.
The first approach takes too simplistic a view of the type of software that governments use. Much of the it is customized for specific tasks such as processing drivers' licenses, and the market for providers of such software is presumably small. If software vendors release their software as open source, they may find that cash-strapped governments in other states gladly help themselves to it for free, so the vendor may get only one paying contract instead of fifty. Therefore, it's quite possible that governments won't be able to find companies willing to provide them with open source software, and then what alternative do they have?
I just covered this recently in an op-ed piece in the business journal. Let me make this simple: governments do not exist to provide business opportunities to software developers. Reread that until it makes sense.
We (collectively "the people") shouldn't have to pay twice for a piece of software. The open source world needs to come up with solutions to boring problems, like drivers' license registration. If a particular company doesn't want to be a part of that, then so be it.
As someone who is marginally involved with TNDFN, and personally working hard to kill this legislation, I think it's in order to mention what did help our cause.
First, plenty of face time with the legislators. Second, we were present and seated together every time the bill was brought up in a committee (after we learned about it). There were 10 of us present each time. Most other issues had nobody there who cared, so we got attention. This thing would have died weeks ago had we been there; it should have never gotten to this point.
This was difficult. I spent literally 40+ hours on "capitol hill" (it really is a hill here in TN) sitting in boring meetings, talking to representatives and senators, their aids, battling evil lobbyists, etc. This cost me money, cost my company money (my parking costs were nearly $100 over the last few weeks), and cost me a lot of time. It was worth it.
Mainly, pay attention to the bills that are being pushed in your state, and go fight them in every way that you can if they're stupid. Send a simple piece of paper to all relevant representatives and senators, with simple bullets that can be skimmed in 10 seconds or less (whole sheet). Anything helps, but don't email a stupid form letter.
We'll be talking more about this in the coming months, but the one thing to take away from this is that we need to band together and make it clear to slimy lobbyists and the elected representatives who listen to them that the tech industry is a bee hive that they don't want to mess with. We are huge ($600B annually in the US) and it's time we use our clout.
The war isn't over, but we won a major battle. I cannot wait to see the head shill with his tail between his legs. I hope he's in town on Tuesday.
At the rate our rights are getting bought out by the corporations (who although are legal entities, aren't even voting citizens, damnit) freedom of religion is probably all we'll have left - and that's if we're lucky.
Ask a Muslim about his freedom of religion in this country.
I'd imagine an overhaul to "cell proof" all commercial planes would cost the already struggling air industry more than they can handle.
I don't care. Why is it that a crowd like this which is so interested in computer security not see the security of planes in the same light as the security of computers?
If an exploit is found, a fix is issued and we go on. We don't go to the hacker crowd and say "Hey, we found this exploit, please don't use it for evil. Thanks." We fix it!
If it's the case that planes can be crashed by RF- and I don't believe this for even a minute given that they'd be dropping like flies were that the case- then we need to fix the problem instead of politely asking terrorists to not exploit the known weakness.
We need to first find out what reality is and proceed from there. What effect does a piece of equipment have on the plane? Cell phones, WiFi, whatever, we need to know instead of stupid speculation.
Everybody who has spent any time developing web pages has learnt that bad (and sometimes even good) html can crash browsers.
The funny thing is, though, "<input type crash>" isn't HTML. It looks kind of like HTML, but it *isn't*.
It's moronic that a simple text sequence can crash the browser, but if the title is going to be "HTML Rendering Crashes IE", then show me some actual HTML that will crash IE.
First, I don't believe, even for a minute, that a cell phone or laptop is going to cause a plane to crash. Bottom line is that people leave them all on the time, planes would be dropping like flies if this were the case.
It pisses me off that the government keeps pushing this bullshit idea. I was on a KLM flight last year and a guy was typing texts into his cell phone while we were on final descent into Manila, and we were seated right across from the flight attendant.
The poor woman really believed that the plane would crash; I had literally never seen someone that scared in my life. I calmed her down a *little* bit by explaining that the plane wouldn't crash because of a cell phone; otherwise the cabin equipment would be causing that problem already. While she digested that I got the guy to turn his phone off for her sake. It's silly to make people believe this stuff.
But there's another angle. Let's imagine that we do live in a fantasy world where cell phones and laptops make planes crash. The answer, and this should be obvious, has nothing to do with banning them on flights. Someone needs to fix the planes in that case, and certify that this is okay.
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like/., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
Probably my favorite quote that really needs an update: "Unix was no designed for the Mac." (page 18 of the PDF)
OK, F/OSS guy.. Give us some case studies on how you make a living with F/OSS. Show us some TOC and ROI numbers. I continue to make a VERY good living with VFP and it constantly remains interesting, never boring.
I don't think you get it. I made a VERY good living with VFP, too. I loved VFP, still do. It has a lot of great features, it's fast, great query optimization, handles large datasets well, etc. But it's a closed-source piece of commercial software.
My problem was that, as a consultant, the buck stops here when my company is doing custom programming. However, I ran into the occassional bug in VFP or Windows (sometimes it was difficult to determine which one) that I simply couldn't fix, and Microsoft didn't care. It'll be fixed in the next release. I heard that more often than I care to think about.
So to answer your question, (assuming TOC should be TCO), there's very little "I" in "ROI", so that's a no-brainer. I was already familiar with Unix systems, so using Linux or BSD was a no-brainer for me, obviously for others of you there may be training issues involved.
The way I make a living now is exactly how I made a living before: deliver applications to customers. It's just that the toolset has changed. Since there's nothing similar in capabilities to VFP in the F/OSS world, I typically just write web-based applications. That's cool, anyway, since I don't have to worry about installing on a bunch of PC's.
I can give you plenty of success stories with VFP, too, all from my own company. But at some point, the licensing issues and source-availability issues will bite you.
Anyway, frankly, do you think Microsoft will support VFP forever? Of course not. I'm not starting a "VFP is dying" argument, since I was laughing at people doing that 8 years ago. But there will come a day when they'll release the final version, bugs and all. And those bugs won't get fixed.
Until then, I say go ahead and run it under Wine on Linux. Quit worrying about the bullies at Redmond.
Holy crap! How much of this BS do you have to put up with before you answer the cluephone? I left the world of Microsoft programming 5 years ago because I was tired of the hassles like these. I can't imagine how much worse it's become since then. It's not worth it.
Another thing I have to wonder is why this guy decided to not do his demonstration based on a single phone call from Microsoft. Seriously, so what if it's really a EULA violation? What are they going to do to you? Anything that they could possibly do requires them convincing a judge that you did damage to them by breeching a contract. What damage could they show?
If you're not going to answer the cluephone, at least grow some nuts and stand up to Microsoft.
I'd recommend that you join us in the world of F/OSS, it's much nicer over here. Given that FoxPro developers are already a good, strong community that sticks together well, it's a very easy and natural transition.
A person could kick some serious ass on the paint ball field with one of these. It's like a mortar launcher, or shotgun, depending on use. Load it up with 100 paintballs and wipe out the other team. Get one huge paintball, well, you get the picture.
I don't get it. My only job working for someone else was at a state university where our salaries were public information. Everybody knew everybody else's salaries. It was incredibly handy when it came time to negotiate raises.
Re:May as well be the first to say it
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.
I can't believe this was modded up to 5. Give me a break, people. You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.
On the other hand, AOL is receiving a billion spams per day. They have had to install filtering software to get it down to that level. On top of that, they can honestly come up with a dollar figure of what spam costs them in terms of extra mail servers to handle the load. Think about it: if half their traffic is spam, then the cost of half their mail servers plus the cost of the spam filtering is a real number for them, likely many millions per year.
The worst part is that while AOL has to pay, the spammers don't. AOL CD's, on the other hand, cost money to create and money to mail. There is no comparison between that and spam.
You might think AOL sucks, but I applaud their efforts to fight spam.
And one other thing: fighting spam has nothing to do with "free speech" for two reasons. First, the first amendment of the constitution does not enumerate your rights; it instead is a list of restrictions on the government, specifically Congress although case law has made it clear that those restrictions apply to all branches of government at all levels. AOL isn't the government, nor is any other ISP. Free speech arguments, therefore, cannot apply to AOL.
Second, it's a property rights issue. While I may have "freedom of speech", I don't have the right to spray paint my message of freedom on the side of your house. You can sue someone who does that; it has nothing to do with free speech. Spam is similar to that message. Although each spam is a very small dot of paint, they add up when you're getting, oh, say 1 billion each day.
Microsoft will still be leveraging file format compatibility for at least another Office release.
Here we go again. "If Microsoft would just use an open format like XML then anyone could read the documents with any program and the world would be a better place."
XML is a format for creating data formats. It is not a data format. The fact that a particular format is XML compliant says nothing for its readability, it simply means that it can be parsed into a document tree by an XML parser. That doesn't mean that anybody can determine what the tree represents, only that it can be created. My favorite analogy: "If Microsoft would just start using 8-bit bytes, then anybody could read their file formats."
Microsoft has made it clear that the dollar value of secret file formats isn't lost on them. They will continue to use secret file formats, even if they're XML-based, until someone makes them stop. At the same time, they'll be able to harvest the stupidity of PHB's who will claim that Microsoft file formats are open because they're XML. It's surprising how many people on Slashdot foolishly believe the same.
We removed the body, then welded a small frame for the steering column, and used duct tape to attach the speedometer. We welded on a battery holder, and I screwed the voltage regulator, an on/off switch, and a start button to another plate. The gas tank was simply a two gallon plastic tank that we ran the hose into. (not recommended) The last mod was welding the seat to the bottom of the unibody, we didn't bother to add a back, a fact which made driving it a bit more difficult.
Anyway, it's the same idea as this article. My friend and I were going to build a really fast go-kart, and we actually started welding one together. We had an engine, but when we started to buy parts to finish it out, we realized that it was going to cost another few hundred dollars. I decided that it was worthless, since we could buy an old Beetle for less and just remove the extraneous parts.
I personally topped the speedometer out (85MPH) with this configuration, the wind was difficult to deal with since I had no seat back. The acceleration was great, with the extra weight gone it was incredible. Dumb as hell, but incredible. Funny thing was, when my friend and I finished, his father admitted that he'd done the same thing 20 years earlier.
"You know, millions of people are starving across the world right now. I could go for a cheeseburger myself."
While I'm sure Jay was joking, the point made pertains quite well to global warming as well. I personally use the term "climate change" instead of warming, because in fact some areas will become colder. Conversely, the area that I'm from in Indiana has become significantly warmer during my lifetime, to the point that one or two small snows per winter is normal (contrasted to weeks of snow when I was younger).
People don't understand that one really cold winter or one really hot summer don't really mean anything one way or another, we're talking about long-term trends.
I'm not terribly concerned about climate change, though. Historically, there have been many tremendous changes in the past, before humans could have possibly had anything to do with it.
Re:REPEAT AFTER ME: XML IS NOT A FILE FORMAT
on
Office 2003 and XML
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· Score: 1
Because there exist tools that know how to parse XML already and XML is industry defined, not MS proprietary.
You don't get it. There are tools available to read in standard binary files (like fread), it doesn't mean that you know the format. There are general parsers for XML-based formats, but that doesn't help unless you actually know the format. You have to know the format to be able to do anything with it, XML doesn't make any difference.
It's back up, but all the text has been replaced with squiggly lines.
Re:REPEAT AFTER ME: XML IS NOT A FILE FORMAT
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
I think what they are trying to say is... If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format (that happens to be XML compliant) then other 3rd party non-MS apps could open and manipulate them.
Sorry, doesn't make sense. If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format, then other 3rd part non-MS apps could open and manipuluate them. Why would an XML-based format make any difference in that case?
Slashdot Mirror
While Andy questions the motives and actions of the RIAA, he basks in pride at his son's steadfast resolve.
"He has stood up to the schoolyard bullies that are pulling this and he's said, 'You are not going to make me say something that's not true,'" Andy said.
Sorry, dad, he didn't stand up to the schoolyard bully. Instead, he said "I'll give you all my money if you don't hit me", and it worked. This is the wrong approach. I know it's intimidating for a 19-year-old college student to be threatened by a powerful industry, but he gave in and gave them all his money. That will simply encourage the bully further, it will not help the problem.
ChewPlastic.com is asking for donations to help recover the $12,000 settlement. As of June 6, the site has collected more than $1,700.
Yeah, great. Why don't I just make that check out to the RIAA? Seriously. Tell us ahead of time next if this happens again and we'll get together a legal defense fund for him. That way the money goes to an attorney, not the RIAA.
I'm sorry to be such a jerk, but IMNSHO a settlement of this type is usually seen as a de facto confession of guilt. I understand why someone would want to back down when threatened by the RIAA, but please don't call him "brave" for doing it.
Karma to burn, damn the torpedos...
Michael
Not only are they in violation of the GPL, they are literally costing SCO BILLIONS OF DOLLARS by violating SCO's copyrights, patents, or some contract with IBM by releasing a Linux based product! Quick, someone alert McBride!
Just wrap your entire house in alunimum foil.
Good idea! Bonus is there's no need to wear the tinfoil hat while inside...
Hrm... even if she's right and it's not some strange conincidence, is there old BSD code in Linux? That should be checkable.
Which is likely why SCO won't show everybody. Imagine the egg on their face when developers from around the world step forward to claim their code.... and it's not SCO's code.
Michael
My spam traffic will probably drop in half with those bozos off the internet. Good riddance!
Michael
The first approach takes too simplistic a view of the type of software that governments use. Much of the it is customized for specific tasks such as processing drivers' licenses, and the market for providers of such software is presumably small. If software vendors release their software as open source, they may find that cash-strapped governments in other states gladly help themselves to it for free, so the vendor may get only one paying contract instead of fifty. Therefore, it's quite possible that governments won't be able to find companies willing to provide them with open source software, and then what alternative do they have?
I just covered this recently in an op-ed piece in the business journal. Let me make this simple: governments do not exist to provide business opportunities to software developers. Reread that until it makes sense.
We (collectively "the people") shouldn't have to pay twice for a piece of software. The open source world needs to come up with solutions to boring problems, like drivers' license registration. If a particular company doesn't want to be a part of that, then so be it.
Michael
As someone who is marginally involved with TNDFN, and personally working hard to kill this legislation, I think it's in order to mention what did help our cause.
First, plenty of face time with the legislators. Second, we were present and seated together every time the bill was brought up in a committee (after we learned about it). There were 10 of us present each time. Most other issues had nobody there who cared, so we got attention. This thing would have died weeks ago had we been there; it should have never gotten to this point.
This was difficult. I spent literally 40+ hours on "capitol hill" (it really is a hill here in TN) sitting in boring meetings, talking to representatives and senators, their aids, battling evil lobbyists, etc. This cost me money, cost my company money (my parking costs were nearly $100 over the last few weeks), and cost me a lot of time. It was worth it.
Mainly, pay attention to the bills that are being pushed in your state, and go fight them in every way that you can if they're stupid. Send a simple piece of paper to all relevant representatives and senators, with simple bullets that can be skimmed in 10 seconds or less (whole sheet). Anything helps, but don't email a stupid form letter.
We'll be talking more about this in the coming months, but the one thing to take away from this is that we need to band together and make it clear to slimy lobbyists and the elected representatives who listen to them that the tech industry is a bee hive that they don't want to mess with. We are huge ($600B annually in the US) and it's time we use our clout.
The war isn't over, but we won a major battle. I cannot wait to see the head shill with his tail between his legs. I hope he's in town on Tuesday.
Michael
Is it too early in the morning or does this article not make sense? I have never seen an 18 cent piece in circulation n the US...
I'm waiting to see if Taco screws it up in the dup tomorrow, too...
MDC
At the rate our rights are getting bought out by the corporations (who although are legal entities, aren't even voting citizens, damnit) freedom of religion is probably all we'll have left - and that's if we're lucky.
Ask a Muslim about his freedom of religion in this country.
I'd imagine an overhaul to "cell proof" all commercial planes would cost the already struggling air industry more than they can handle.
I don't care. Why is it that a crowd like this which is so interested in computer security not see the security of planes in the same light as the security of computers?
If an exploit is found, a fix is issued and we go on. We don't go to the hacker crowd and say "Hey, we found this exploit, please don't use it for evil. Thanks." We fix it!
If it's the case that planes can be crashed by RF- and I don't believe this for even a minute given that they'd be dropping like flies were that the case- then we need to fix the problem instead of politely asking terrorists to not exploit the known weakness.
We need to first find out what reality is and proceed from there. What effect does a piece of equipment have on the plane? Cell phones, WiFi, whatever, we need to know instead of stupid speculation.
Michael
``We are now importing more spam from the United States,'' he joked. ``We are actually learning what American culture is through spam.''
Hopefully you know that it's not an entirely accurate view of American culture...
Everybody who has spent any time developing web pages has learnt that bad (and sometimes even good) html can crash browsers.
The funny thing is, though, "<input type crash>" isn't HTML. It looks kind of like HTML, but it *isn't*.
It's moronic that a simple text sequence can crash the browser, but if the title is going to be "HTML Rendering Crashes IE", then show me some actual HTML that will crash IE.
Michael
First, I don't believe, even for a minute, that a cell phone or laptop is going to cause a plane to crash. Bottom line is that people leave them all on the time, planes would be dropping like flies if this were the case.
It pisses me off that the government keeps pushing this bullshit idea. I was on a KLM flight last year and a guy was typing texts into his cell phone while we were on final descent into Manila, and we were seated right across from the flight attendant.
The poor woman really believed that the plane would crash; I had literally never seen someone that scared in my life. I calmed her down a *little* bit by explaining that the plane wouldn't crash because of a cell phone; otherwise the cabin equipment would be causing that problem already. While she digested that I got the guy to turn his phone off for her sake. It's silly to make people believe this stuff.
But there's another angle. Let's imagine that we do live in a fantasy world where cell phones and laptops make planes crash. The answer, and this should be obvious, has nothing to do with banning them on flights. Someone needs to fix the planes in that case, and certify that this is okay.
It's an exploit, we need to issue a bug fix.
Michael
I actually have it in paperback form, and it comes with a Unix barfbag. A lot of the points made in the book are still quite valid, but a lot of them are things that have been fixed in the last 10 years. When placed at the appropriate time, you have to realize that it does a decent job of describing the worst parts of Unix from the views of VMS users, among others. Like /., it makes no pretense of being a balanced view.
My main gripe is that they confuse the Internet with Unix. So an entire chapter is devoted to Usenet. That was written before spam, I'm sure the author would be able to write even more vitriol in that category.
I'd love to see it updated, particularly given that so many of the gripes have been addressed and fixed in the world of FS/OSS.
Probably my favorite quote that really needs an update: "Unix was no designed for the Mac." (page 18 of the PDF)
Michael
OK, F/OSS guy.. Give us some case studies on how you make a living with F/OSS. Show us some TOC and ROI numbers. I continue to make a VERY good living with VFP and it constantly remains interesting, never boring.
I don't think you get it. I made a VERY good living with VFP, too. I loved VFP, still do. It has a lot of great features, it's fast, great query optimization, handles large datasets well, etc. But it's a closed-source piece of commercial software.
My problem was that, as a consultant, the buck stops here when my company is doing custom programming. However, I ran into the occassional bug in VFP or Windows (sometimes it was difficult to determine which one) that I simply couldn't fix, and Microsoft didn't care. It'll be fixed in the next release. I heard that more often than I care to think about.
So to answer your question, (assuming TOC should be TCO), there's very little "I" in "ROI", so that's a no-brainer. I was already familiar with Unix systems, so using Linux or BSD was a no-brainer for me, obviously for others of you there may be training issues involved.
The way I make a living now is exactly how I made a living before: deliver applications to customers. It's just that the toolset has changed. Since there's nothing similar in capabilities to VFP in the F/OSS world, I typically just write web-based applications. That's cool, anyway, since I don't have to worry about installing on a bunch of PC's.
I can give you plenty of success stories with VFP, too, all from my own company. But at some point, the licensing issues and source-availability issues will bite you.
Anyway, frankly, do you think Microsoft will support VFP forever? Of course not. I'm not starting a "VFP is dying" argument, since I was laughing at people doing that 8 years ago. But there will come a day when they'll release the final version, bugs and all. And those bugs won't get fixed.
Until then, I say go ahead and run it under Wine on Linux. Quit worrying about the bullies at Redmond.
Michael
Holy crap! How much of this BS do you have to put up with before you answer the cluephone? I left the world of Microsoft programming 5 years ago because I was tired of the hassles like these. I can't imagine how much worse it's become since then. It's not worth it.
Another thing I have to wonder is why this guy decided to not do his demonstration based on a single phone call from Microsoft. Seriously, so what if it's really a EULA violation? What are they going to do to you? Anything that they could possibly do requires them convincing a judge that you did damage to them by breeching a contract. What damage could they show?
If you're not going to answer the cluephone, at least grow some nuts and stand up to Microsoft.
I'd recommend that you join us in the world of F/OSS, it's much nicer over here. Given that FoxPro developers are already a good, strong community that sticks together well, it's a very easy and natural transition.
Michael
A person could kick some serious ass on the paint ball field with one of these. It's like a mortar launcher, or shotgun, depending on use. Load it up with 100 paintballs and wipe out the other team. Get one huge paintball, well, you get the picture.
I don't get it. My only job working for someone else was at a state university where our salaries were public information. Everybody knew everybody else's salaries. It was incredibly handy when it came time to negotiate raises.
I'm charged for trash pick-up which is where it goes.
I can't believe this was modded up to 5. Give me a break, people. You aren't paying extra for trash pickup to deal with the pound or two of junkmail that you get each week.
On the other hand, AOL is receiving a billion spams per day. They have had to install filtering software to get it down to that level. On top of that, they can honestly come up with a dollar figure of what spam costs them in terms of extra mail servers to handle the load. Think about it: if half their traffic is spam, then the cost of half their mail servers plus the cost of the spam filtering is a real number for them, likely many millions per year.
The worst part is that while AOL has to pay, the spammers don't. AOL CD's, on the other hand, cost money to create and money to mail. There is no comparison between that and spam.
You might think AOL sucks, but I applaud their efforts to fight spam.
And one other thing: fighting spam has nothing to do with "free speech" for two reasons. First, the first amendment of the constitution does not enumerate your rights; it instead is a list of restrictions on the government, specifically Congress although case law has made it clear that those restrictions apply to all branches of government at all levels. AOL isn't the government, nor is any other ISP. Free speech arguments, therefore, cannot apply to AOL.
Second, it's a property rights issue. While I may have "freedom of speech", I don't have the right to spray paint my message of freedom on the side of your house. You can sue someone who does that; it has nothing to do with free speech. Spam is similar to that message. Although each spam is a very small dot of paint, they add up when you're getting, oh, say 1 billion each day.
Michael
Microsoft will still be leveraging file format compatibility for at least another Office release.
Here we go again. "If Microsoft would just use an open format like XML then anyone could read the documents with any program and the world would be a better place."
XML is a format for creating data formats. It is not a data format. The fact that a particular format is XML compliant says nothing for its readability, it simply means that it can be parsed into a document tree by an XML parser. That doesn't mean that anybody can determine what the tree represents, only that it can be created. My favorite analogy: "If Microsoft would just start using 8-bit bytes, then anybody could read their file formats."
Microsoft has made it clear that the dollar value of secret file formats isn't lost on them. They will continue to use secret file formats, even if they're XML-based, until someone makes them stop. At the same time, they'll be able to harvest the stupidity of PHB's who will claim that Microsoft file formats are open because they're XML. It's surprising how many people on Slashdot foolishly believe the same.
Michael
I did this about 10 years ago with an old VW Beetle that a friend and I bought for $250. Here's the only picture that I have of it:
http://www.michaelchaney.com/beetle/beetle.jpg
We removed the body, then welded a small frame for the steering column, and used duct tape to attach the speedometer. We welded on a battery holder, and I screwed the voltage regulator, an on/off switch, and a start button to another plate. The gas tank was simply a two gallon plastic tank that we ran the hose into. (not recommended) The last mod was welding the seat to the bottom of the unibody, we didn't bother to add a back, a fact which made driving it a bit more difficult.
Anyway, it's the same idea as this article. My friend and I were going to build a really fast go-kart, and we actually started welding one together. We had an engine, but when we started to buy parts to finish it out, we realized that it was going to cost another few hundred dollars. I decided that it was worthless, since we could buy an old Beetle for less and just remove the extraneous parts.
I personally topped the speedometer out (85MPH) with this configuration, the wind was difficult to deal with since I had no seat back. The acceleration was great, with the extra weight gone it was incredible. Dumb as hell, but incredible. Funny thing was, when my friend and I finished, his father admitted that he'd done the same thing 20 years earlier.
Michael
Reminds me of an old Jay Leno monologue joke:
"You know, millions of people are starving across the world right now. I could go for a cheeseburger myself."
While I'm sure Jay was joking, the point made pertains quite well to global warming as well. I personally use the term "climate change" instead of warming, because in fact some areas will become colder. Conversely, the area that I'm from in Indiana has become significantly warmer during my lifetime, to the point that one or two small snows per winter is normal (contrasted to weeks of snow when I was younger).
People don't understand that one really cold winter or one really hot summer don't really mean anything one way or another, we're talking about long-term trends.
I'm not terribly concerned about climate change, though. Historically, there have been many tremendous changes in the past, before humans could have possibly had anything to do with it.
Because there exist tools that know how to parse XML already and XML is industry defined, not MS proprietary.
You don't get it. There are tools available to read in standard binary files (like fread), it doesn't mean that you know the format. There are general parsers for XML-based formats, but that doesn't help unless you actually know the format. You have to know the format to be able to do anything with it, XML doesn't make any difference.
It's back up, but all the text has been replaced with squiggly lines.
I think what they are trying to say is... If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format (that happens to be XML compliant) then other 3rd party non-MS apps could open and manipulate them.
Sorry, doesn't make sense. If Microsoft had a standard, published, accessible format, then other 3rd part non-MS apps could open and manipuluate them. Why would an XML-based format make any difference in that case?