> Emacs also has a very nice auto-save
If you mean that feature that leaves lots of #filename# files laying around in my directories, I could live without it myself, especially as the # plays havoc with some shells.
For that matter, the.suffix~ way of labelling backup files is a bit of a pain on web sites: if, for example, you edit a php file in situ, you end up with a php~ file online, which doesn't normally get picked up by Apache, and is thus world readable, complete with any passwords and so on.
But whenever I get too critical, I have a quick look at vi, and my love for emacs returns:-)
He is of course right that you don't have to save your work when using a pencil. But, on the other hand, the eraser on the other end of the pencil won't wipe out 100 pages of work in half a second by accident either. Personally, I am very happy to take responsibility for losing my data, and eternally grateful that emacs has a 'revert buffer' option!
More generally, why does not exactly like a real desktop equal bad? It's an analogy, right? Does he want files to start curling up at the edges after a couple of years too?
Am I the only person who thinks that counting bugs, all bugs, any bugs, is a bit meaningless? I mean, 1,000 bugs like 'left margin on submit buttons is 1 px too narrow on some displays' worry me less than 1 bug like 'all your credit card details will be posted on 500 weblogs around the world'. What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale, where a 'light breeze' bug could almost be called an endearing quirk, and a 'hurricane' bug is likely to trash your hard disc...
Only if you consider following someone else's spec to the letter without having any say in the spec to constitute freedom: sounds more to me like 'free to recite someone else's speech ':-)
> Adobe publishes the PDF spec, but it's not an "open" spec
Right. And surely the same will have to be true of Xdocs for it to be a real competitor to PDF? If third parties don't produce drivers that write in the new format, I can't see how Xdocs gives MS any more leverage than they already have with.doc,.xls and so on.
It doesn't matter how many programs they include it with, if it doesn't do the job that PDF does, it won't replace PDF. People might well abandon a non-MS standard in order to use a MS standard that appears to do the same job (Real vs AVI, for example), but they aren't going to abandon a standard that does the job to use one that doesn't. Even MS users are not that dense:-)
I don't think so. Word is pretty ubiquitous, Wordpad will produce Word-compatible files, but I don't see many Word files posted on professional web sites, compared with PDF files.
Apart from the intrinsic merits of the two formats, one reason might be that Adobe provides server-side software for churning out PDF on various platforms, including Linux. If Xdocs doesn't have a un*x-compatible server program, it isn't going to appear on db-driven Apache-hosted sites much.
I'd like to see the article. I know a lot more about ps than pdf...
ps is a real programming language, and a stack-based one at that, so the potential for bizarre and obscure is much higher than with, say, rtf or html.
On the other hand, the potential for elegant is much higher too. If you write subroutines to display your graphical elements, rather than doing all the processing server side, you get very small and fast files: one of my programs produces manufacturing plans that take up around 4k per page.
...surely the issue is not whether or not it's Microsoft, but whether or not the technology actually works.
IMHO, postscript/PDF is one of the most ingenious formats around. It is extremely portable, handles fonts, vector graphics and (perhaps to a lesser extent) bitmaps wonderfully, and, if used sensible, can be extremely compact. And just about every typsetting machine on the planet uses it.
So for Microsoft to win this one, they are going to need to produce a pretty innovative product, for which the precedents are not good...
I only skimmed the report, but I'm not sure it was a software problem per se.
I had lunch with a fairly senior engineer from Aerospatiale shortly after the Ariane 5 explosion, and his version of events, which is consistent with but not explicit in what I skimmed, is that because the software and hardware had worked flawlessly for any number of Ariane 4 flights, they did the sensible thing and didn't change a thing for Ariane 5.
The disaster occurred because the Ariane 5 is faster and/or had more sensors, therefore threw more data at the processor, and, eventually, a sensor queue overflowed and the system reset itself to launch altitude, the result of which was to make the rocket attempt the equivalent of a handbrake turn.
If this is anything near right, you could reasonably argue that it was a hardware problem, ie if the processor had kept up with the rocket the software would have performed perfectly. OK, not trapping buffer overflows is a naughty no-no, but, offhand, I can't think of an obvious way of making this system fail gracefully (throw away every second piece of data until the queue goes down? Apply the brakes?...)
In Europe, the 35-hour week is just great for blurring this distinction. We have officials checking corporate office car parks to make sure that programmers do not do more than the allotted number of hours. So, of course, everyone loads their unfinished programs onto their new laptops, donated by the company, and takes them home to do another 20 hours' work. One day the officials will think of checking IP addresses too, but it won't be any time soon...
Wouldn't getting rid of 'natural' greenhouse gases on Venus be just as environmentally destructive as producing them on Earth? Can't we stick to messing up one planet at a time?
So, instead of dragging our feet, why aren't we coming up with a better DRM solution?
Er, aren't we losing the plot here? Why do we want to continually implement a better version of whatever MS has produced (or, in this case, not produced)? Why do I want XP-style buttons in KDE3? Why do I want open-source Palladium? If MS brought out the ultimate system to drive Linux off the Internet, I have a horrible feeling that slashdot would set up a working group to do it more efficiently:-)
Surely there are (at least) two issues here?
1: Ignorant sys admin people are a menace whatever OS they use
2: Some systems are inherently more secure than others
Of course the increasing popularity of Linux is going to mean that more newbies do more dumb things (or, in this case, don't do smart things). But some systems encourage this more than others, and some systems make fixing the problem easier than others. I can't help thinking that the *nix user model, for example, generally limits the damage more effectively than some other systems.
The third of my two points is that commercial systems tend to get shipped with everything turned on, because it reduces calls to support, whereas Linux has traditionally been shipped with everything turned off. In other words, if you don't know what you are doing, you can't get the web server to work in the first place, so it's hard to create a security hole...
Slashdot Mirror
"No-one claimed to be from Idaho, North Dakota, or Wyoming" (p14). Well, would you?
So has anyone actually read the article before posting, and, if so, what are they on?
> Emacs also has a very nice auto-save .suffix~ way of labelling backup files is a bit of a pain on web sites: if, for example, you edit a php file in situ, you end up with a php~ file online, which doesn't normally get picked up by Apache, and is thus world readable, complete with any passwords and so on. :-)
If you mean that feature that leaves lots of #filename# files laying around in my directories, I could live without it myself, especially as the # plays havoc with some shells.
For that matter, the
But whenever I get too critical, I have a quick look at vi, and my love for emacs returns
He is of course right that you don't have to save your work when using a pencil. But, on the other hand, the eraser on the other end of the pencil won't wipe out 100 pages of work in half a second by accident either. Personally, I am very happy to take responsibility for losing my data, and eternally grateful that emacs has a 'revert buffer' option!
More generally, why does not exactly like a real desktop equal bad? It's an analogy, right? Does he want files to start curling up at the edges after a couple of years too?
In that case, the obvious question is 'how are the 200k-odd bugs distributed on that scale'?
Am I the only person who thinks that counting bugs, all bugs, any bugs, is a bit meaningless? I mean, 1,000 bugs like 'left margin on submit buttons is 1 px too narrow on some displays' worry me less than 1 bug like 'all your credit card details will be posted on 500 weblogs around the world'. What we need here is the bug equivalent of the Beaufort Wind Scale, where a 'light breeze' bug could almost be called an endearing quirk, and a 'hurricane' bug is likely to trash your hard disc...
Only if you consider following someone else's spec to the letter without having any say in the spec to constitute freedom: sounds more to me like 'free to recite someone else's speech ' :-)
> PDF is a file format, not an application
Fair enough
> Adobe publishes the PDF spec, but it's not an "open" spec
Right. And surely the same will have to be true of Xdocs for it to be a real competitor to PDF? If third parties don't produce drivers that write in the new format, I can't see how Xdocs gives MS any more leverage than they already have with .doc, .xls and so on.
It doesn't matter how many programs they include it with, if it doesn't do the job that PDF does, it won't replace PDF. People might well abandon a non-MS standard in order to use a MS standard that appears to do the same job (Real vs AVI, for example), but they aren't going to abandon a standard that does the job to use one that doesn't. Even MS users are not that dense :-)
Is PDF 'free' in the free beer sense? Surely we are comparing one commercial product with another here.
I don't think so. Word is pretty ubiquitous, Wordpad will produce Word-compatible files, but I don't see many Word files posted on professional web sites, compared with PDF files.
Apart from the intrinsic merits of the two formats, one reason might be that Adobe provides server-side software for churning out PDF on various platforms, including Linux. If Xdocs doesn't have a un*x-compatible server program, it isn't going to appear on db-driven Apache-hosted sites much.
I'd like to see the article. I know a lot more about ps than pdf...
ps is a real programming language, and a stack-based one at that, so the potential for bizarre and obscure is much higher than with, say, rtf or html.
On the other hand, the potential for elegant is much higher too. If you write subroutines to display your graphical elements, rather than doing all the processing server side, you get very small and fast files: one of my programs produces manufacturing plans that take up around 4k per page.
...surely the issue is not whether or not it's Microsoft, but whether or not the technology actually works.
IMHO, postscript/PDF is one of the most ingenious formats around. It is extremely portable, handles fonts, vector graphics and (perhaps to a lesser extent) bitmaps wonderfully, and, if used sensible, can be extremely compact. And just about every typsetting machine on the planet uses it.
So for Microsoft to win this one, they are going to need to produce a pretty innovative product, for which the precedents are not good...
I only skimmed the report, but I'm not sure it was a software problem per se.
I had lunch with a fairly senior engineer from Aerospatiale shortly after the Ariane 5 explosion, and his version of events, which is consistent with but not explicit in what I skimmed, is that because the software and hardware had worked flawlessly for any number of Ariane 4 flights, they did the sensible thing and didn't change a thing for Ariane 5.
The disaster occurred because the Ariane 5 is faster and/or had more sensors, therefore threw more data at the processor, and, eventually, a sensor queue overflowed and the system reset itself to launch altitude, the result of which was to make the rocket attempt the equivalent of a handbrake turn.
If this is anything near right, you could reasonably argue that it was a hardware problem, ie if the processor had kept up with the rocket the software would have performed perfectly. OK, not trapping buffer overflows is a naughty no-no, but, offhand, I can't think of an obvious way of making this system fail gracefully (throw away every second piece of data until the queue goes down? Apply the brakes? ...)
In Europe, the 35-hour week is just great for blurring this distinction. We have officials checking corporate office car parks to make sure that programmers do not do more than the allotted number of hours. So, of course, everyone loads their unfinished programs onto their new laptops, donated by the company, and takes them home to do another 20 hours' work. One day the officials will think of checking IP addresses too, but it won't be any time soon...
Wouldn't getting rid of 'natural' greenhouse gases on Venus be just as environmentally destructive as producing them on Earth? Can't we stick to messing up one planet at a time?
So, instead of dragging our feet, why aren't we coming up with a better DRM solution?
Er, aren't we losing the plot here? Why do we want to continually implement a better version of whatever MS has produced (or, in this case, not produced)? Why do I want XP-style buttons in KDE3? Why do I want open-source Palladium? If MS brought out the ultimate system to drive Linux off the Internet, I have a horrible feeling that slashdot would set up a working group to do it more efficiently :-)
Surely there are (at least) two issues here? 1: Ignorant sys admin people are a menace whatever OS they use 2: Some systems are inherently more secure than others Of course the increasing popularity of Linux is going to mean that more newbies do more dumb things (or, in this case, don't do smart things). But some systems encourage this more than others, and some systems make fixing the problem easier than others. I can't help thinking that the *nix user model, for example, generally limits the damage more effectively than some other systems. The third of my two points is that commercial systems tend to get shipped with everything turned on, because it reduces calls to support, whereas Linux has traditionally been shipped with everything turned off. In other words, if you don't know what you are doing, you can't get the web server to work in the first place, so it's hard to create a security hole...