If you hire him, then you and he must be signing a contract specifying rights, responsibilities and obligations. Thus, if you deny him his paycheck, then you are violating the contract - you are not stealing anything. Furthermore, file sharers and music labels (usually) don't sign contracts indicating rights and obligations between the parties involved in a music transaction (unlike when hiring someone), so you analogy doesn't apply.
Just some food for thought.:-)
Interesting Insight from Tim Bray + a question
on
Office 2003 and XML
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· Score: 1
I'm not fond of Microsoft (indeed, some people consider me a 'basher'), but I don't think the majority of Slashdot's reaction has been rational in this case. For instance, some quick googling brought up the following comment by Tim Bray; he is one of the authors of XML, by the way.;-)
> Does anyone know or have ideas about what XML enabled Office 11 actually > means?
I got an extended (hours-long) demo of Word & Excel & XDocs from JeanPa and a product manager whose name I don't have handy, two or three months ago, so things may have changed but here's what I saw:
Both Word & this new XDocs thing can edit arbitrary XML docs per the constraints of any old XSD schema. No DTD supprt. There are some of the usual XML editor goodies such as suggesting what elements can go here and picking attributes. They have pretty cool facilities for GUIfied schema customization. Neither of them can help much with mixed content, which has always separated the men from the boys in the *ML editing sweepstakes.
I'm not sure that either of them are really being positioned as general-purpose XML content creation facilities up against Arbortext & Altova & Corel. I'm not sure that market is big enough to interest MS anyhow. XDocs is (strictly my opinion) an attempt to build a desktop application constructor at a level that is a bit more declarative and open than VB, but richer & more interactive than a Web browser. I'm not really convinced yet - I think MS would agree there's still quite a bit of product management to do - but it does seem to be a pretty clever piece of software. I'm pretty sure it's safe to interpret the advent of XDocs as MSFT's declaration that they're not going to do anything with XForms.
What actually turns my crank is that you can save word docs as XML and they have their own "WordML" tag set that gets generated. I took a close look at this and it's pretty interesting. Very verbose - every word on the page gets its own markup. Suppose you have the word "foo" in bold with single-underline, the WordML looks something like:
When you get something like a Word table or floating text box the markup gets really severely dense and ugly, but I didn't see anything that seemed egregiously wrong, it's not pretending to do anything more than capture all the semantics that Word carries around inside, which are correspondingly severely dense and ugly. And HTML tables get pretty hideous too.
Why did I like this? I didn't see anything that I couldn't pick apart straightforwardly with Perl, and if someone asked me to write a script to pull all the paragraphs out of a Word doc that contain the word "foo" in bold, well you could do that. Which seems pretty important to me.
The idea is that you can have a Word document with all that formatting and then you can mix that up pretty freely with your own schema stuff, and have validation, then you can save it as Word (your markup plus Word's) or as pure XML (discards Word's markup, leaving just yours). The old Corel WPerfect SGML editor used to be able to do this too. [snip]
I think it would be interesting to take a look at an example WordML document. Unfortunately, I don't have - nor to I plan to get - the beta for Office 2003. Would anybody like to post an example document of what Word 2003 presents?
Thanks! I was a little confused about what this was: I thought that the e164 scheme was like some type of url or urn that the browser could resolve. I think I understand now.:-)
Good G*D, that web site - where the article is - is beutiful! That's a really nice change from the dull and/or ugly 90% of the web.
(Yes, I know this is off-topic. But I'm really impressed!:-)
Some interesting observations....
on
U.S. Endorses ENUM
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· Score: 3, Funny
First of all, is this going to allow me to type "T.T.A.L.L.A.C.0.0.8.1.e164.arpa" when I want to go to the "1-800-CALL-ATT" or would I have to use the actual numbers?
Secondly, how long until we get:
Just type T.T.A.L.L.A.C.0.0.8.1.e164.arpa to save up to 44% on long-distance internet browsing!
Finally, why is this addressing scheme named after Arpanet (*.arpa)? Isn't that a bit out-of-date?
The present invention correlates web page files (HTML, SHTML, DHTML, or CGI files) with subject areas (such as sports, news, entertainment, restaurant, shopping, computing, business, health, family, travel and weather)...
Isn' t this what search engines such as Yahoo! have been doing since at least before 1996???
> Now's the time to complain if you > want to be heard.
OH OH! Sis is touching me! Tell her to stop! Windows blows; Linus stinks and BSD is sCaRy! And I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!
Personally, I think you are being too paranoid, but....
You said that "George Orwell predicted nuclear and civil wars would bring on the hyseria to build his nightmare society." Are you refering to 1984? It's certainly possible that he mentioned nuclear weapons in his book. However, Orwell's last book, 1984, never refered to them at all (if my memory is correct). To me, the battles mentioned in the novel seemed more like those in WWI/WWII.
Would that be a flash fire??? Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.;-)
Why no Compact Flash /Microdrive MP3 Players?
on
New MP3 Portables
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't understand why there are no popular Compact Flash-based or microdrive-based mp3 players?
Wouldn't a microdrive-based player be a *lot* smaller, weigh less and use less power - and thus be more versatile - than most of the other players with a capacity on the order of a gigabyte (and who wants more than 1GB - that's a heck of a lot of mp3s)? If 1,073,741,824 bytes isn't enough, just upgrade by putting a bigger drive in. If a miniature spinning disk is too unreliable, then just put a flash-based memory unit it. You could even plug in wireless card and play from a network!
Slashdot Mirror
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You are the weakest link, goodbye.
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Only 30 Frames/Second? Bah! That's nuffin! My GeWizForce 3DFX 1000000 can do 100 Frames/Second at 20000x1500. Amateurs... ;-)
Not that I fully disagree with you, however....
:-)
If you hire him, then you and he must be signing a contract specifying rights, responsibilities and obligations. Thus, if you deny him his paycheck, then you are violating the contract - you are not stealing anything. Furthermore, file sharers and music labels (usually) don't sign contracts indicating rights and obligations between the parties involved in a music transaction (unlike when hiring someone), so you analogy doesn't apply.
Just some food for thought.
I'm not fond of Microsoft (indeed, some people consider me a 'basher'), but I don't think the majority of Slashdot's reaction has been rational in this case. For instance, some quick googling brought up the following comment by Tim Bray; he is one of the authors of XML, by the way. ;-)
I think it would be interesting to take a look at an example WordML document. Unfortunately, I don't have - nor to I plan to get - the beta for Office 2003. Would anybody like to post an example document of what Word 2003 presents?
Thanks! I was a little confused about what this was: I thought that the e164 scheme was like some type of url or urn that the browser could resolve. I think I understand now. :-)
Good G*D, that web site - where the article is - is beutiful! That's a really nice change from the dull and/or ugly 90% of the web.
:-)
(Yes, I know this is off-topic. But I'm really impressed!
First of all, is this going to allow me to type "T.T.A.L.L.A.C.0.0.8.1.e164.arpa" when I want to go to the "1-800-CALL-ATT" or would I have to use the actual numbers?
Secondly, how long until we get:
Just type T.T.A.L.L.A.C.0.0.8.1.e164.arpa to save up to 44% on long-distance internet browsing!
Finally, why is this addressing scheme named after Arpanet (*.arpa)? Isn't that a bit out-of-date?
About 6 million people can probably claim prior art.
Can't Al Gore claim prior art?
Isn' t this what search engines such as Yahoo! have been doing since at least before 1996???
Isn't NASA working on a robot, which can perform a remote EVA (since untethered ones are banned now).
> Now's the time to complain if you
> want to be heard.
OH OH! Sis is touching me! Tell her to stop! Windows blows; Linus stinks and BSD is sCaRy! And I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!
Personally, I think you are being too paranoid, but.... You said that "George Orwell predicted nuclear and civil wars would bring on the hyseria to build his nightmare society." Are you refering to 1984? It's certainly possible that he mentioned nuclear weapons in his book. However, Orwell's last book, 1984, never refered to them at all (if my memory is correct). To me, the battles mentioned in the novel seemed more like those in WWI/WWII.
Would that be a flash fire??? Sorry, couldn't resist the pun. ;-)
I don't understand why there are no popular Compact Flash-based or microdrive-based mp3 players?
Wouldn't a microdrive-based player be a *lot* smaller, weigh less and use less power - and thus be more versatile - than most of the other players with a capacity on the order of a gigabyte (and who wants more than 1GB - that's a heck of a lot of mp3s)? If 1,073,741,824 bytes isn't enough, just upgrade by putting a bigger drive in. If a miniature spinning disk is too unreliable, then just put a flash-based memory unit it. You could even plug in wireless card and play from a network!