I'm a senior developer and I've worked with "open standards" and many systems which implement these standards. I've always been somewhat amused by the endless bitchings about one vendor or another not following a standard (as intepreted by someone else).
A standard is just a specification.
Every developer knows when handed a specification, once implemented, the resulting application is unlikely to behave exactly the same as another app developed by another developer who was handed the same specification.
No matter how small, there's always going to be some margin of deviation.
The fact of the matter a "standard" only works when the same binaries or at least source code are used. This is why Flash and Silverlight work, its why WebKit is pretty much the only way html will ever work.
I think software systems are just like highlander, in a world where everything is interconnected and seamless, there can really only be one.
I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.
Fox news is obviously biased. People see it for what it is. The biggest threats to democracy are not obvious ones.
The path to tyranny is one which involves the elimination of jobs for ordinary working people whilst at the same time handing over more control and power to those who control the game. For would be dictators journalists are of course #1 on their hit list.
To quote Goethe, "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free". This whole thread of discussion, cheering on the downfall of the traditional journalistic business model is a graphic display of that sort of stupidity.
In the case of news.google.com, I actually think Rupert has a point.
What I don't think you get, is that news.google.com does significantly more than link to sites. I believe in this case rather than supplying supplemental, they are in fact offering an alternative to the front page of every major news corporation's web site, making them a direct competitor to a news corporation. I would also bet google's news page in terms of hits is scoring very well against most equivalent pages Rupert pays to produce. The only difference between news.google.com and the home page of most news web sites, is that google didn't pay for their content. I think Rupert is entitled to be mildly pissed in a situation, where he is being beaten by a competitor, who is using content he owns to compete against him.
I don't know about you, but when I use news.google.com, I rarely click on any of the links, I skim the headlines, read the blurbs and more often than not just close the page without going further unless there is an article which really grabs my eye.
Whilst Google may be driving traffic to their articles, they are stealing traffic from their front page. Haven't you ever watched Superman? The front page is the most important!
Without news.google.com, you would go to an equivalent page... www.nytimes.com www.smh.com.au etc.
Personally I think in the case of investigative news journalism, paid content is a good thing, we want content that is worth paying for. The biggest danger to democracy I believe is the news feed, mindless aggregators which do not review, check or scrutinize news stories. The demise of investigative journalism is a threat to our freedoms.
I believe the right thing for google to do would be to pay for aggregated content, just as every other news corp does with an equivalent page. That way there'll be dosh going round to pay journalists, who can call bullshit on propaganda.
Do you understand Microsoft actually helped Mono be created?
Do you know that the.NET CLI has been submitted and passed as a ECMA standard ?
Mono is very clearly a fully ligitimate, independent implementation of the open.NET 1.0 CLI standard. Microsoft can't change this standard its already out there. They can submit a new standard as they did for.NET 2.0.
There's simply no logic to anything you're saying. It's pure stupidity/FUD.
Mono is a independent open source project. Microsoft has no real control over this code.
*IF* Microsoft tried to hijack or close down Mono, it would need to do so through the courts, when was the last time Microsoft won a case like that?
I think if Microsoft ever tried to do such a thing, the Mono community would simply do the same thing that Microsoft did to Sun's Java platform (the true origins of C#). When Sun tried to dictate control over their platform Microsoft simply stopped shipping the JVM on their OS and soon after started shipping the.NET runtime. The Mono crew would simply do the same, by simply forking and become something that is not.NET compliant,
This is simply sensless anti-MS zealotry. Applications written on Mono are no more of a risk than those written on any other platofrm
It makes perfect sense to me. Go to google switch off safe search, go to image search, a lot of pretty innocuous searches come up with stuff you probably dont want children seeing....
Yes this is article is total speculative horse shit.
In so many ways it would be totally impractical for Microsoft to attempt to do this.
As it's all XML based, anyone who knows anything about XML will know that they can quite easily support several different schemas and backwards compatibility.
My limited understanding of Azure is that it is closely related to Amazon's EC2 and S3 work. They are adopting many of the standards Amazon created for their platform, as are others currently developing cloud based computing services.
So basically Azure is only going to help move forward the standardisation process that will inevitably take place for cloud computing services.
Any standard with a hope in hell of achieving broad community support is going to require extremely good support for maintaining backwards compatibility with previous releases.
In short this guy is completely and utterly clueless.
OH NOOOOO !! Mac's might be susceptible to an exploit!! Surely this is impossible ?!
This sort of bravado and complacency that seems to be rife amongst the Mac community must be, for your average black hat, like waving a red flag to a bull.
Anyone with half a clue on the topic wouldn't base their opinions on books which are about 5 years out of date. It takes 2 years to research and write book and then usually another year to get it into print, if you buy it a year or two after it was published... there's your 5 years. You might as well go read Harry Potter because at the end of the day it's more about entertainment than insight.
Your best source of information on this topic is from your own IP logs and persons in the security business.
In any case there is a ton of evidence freely available on the net that both the Russian and Chinese goverments are actively involved in cyber warfare. There have been numerous incidents which have no other explanation. Like for example the attacks on Garry Kasparov's web site...
These were timed to co-incide with an order to move the site of a political rally, when people assembled at the wrong location he was arrested for having co-ordinated an illegal assembly, that was a clear case of state police co-ordinating with DOS attacks. It has also been established through IP logs that there was overlap between these attacks and the attacks made on Estonia.
With the Russian state controlling the media, the internet is absolutely essential for political opposition in Russia, same goes for China.
In a time of war there is no doubt these networks will be used to inflict financial and logistical chaos on countries.
So it is natural to presume European and US powers will or most probably already have a counter to this threat, which can really only be in kind.
In the 21st century governments will be recruiting black hats to create botnets both to shut down zombies machines actively participating in an active botnet and also to launch their own attacks. And of course these persons are going to be extremely highly skilled very well rewarded (both Russia and China have $$$ now).
I was saying the largest botnets with the greatest penetration today are state run/backed and are largely silent, not being used for fraud, blackmail or anything so basic, they are being held in reserve for when they are needed in an attack on a 21st century opponent.
No it is not the norm in terms of the numbers of botnets out there, but in terms of the number of compromised machines, it probably is the norm.
Books are always about the past, I've never bothered reading books about IT topics as they are always at least 2 years behind the bleeding edge.
What happened to Estonia was nothing more than a small scale exercise, Russia's capabilities extend well beyond that.
No doubt there is a sizeable percentage of hackers out there still in the world of yesterday but the best black hats today do NOT NEED to waste their time with extortion or banking scams, they are on the government payrolls, and they can spend 100% of their time ensuring that they are one step ahead of the white hats and that they have covered all the bases and that of course means hacking Mac OSX.
Today malware is a national security threat, its defence and an essential member of the arsenal of any 21st century war machine.
Today there is government backing behind state of the art malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. Todays black hats are guns for hire, owning vast botnets, often they are only loosely affiliated with government agencies.
The effectiveness of botnets is primarily measured by their ability to infiltrate and function WITHOUT doing any detectable harm. The vast percentage of compromised machines are dormant, and do NO HARM, they are only a very occasionally test fired to assess their operational status.
The primary purpose of botnets is NOT monetary, it is political. They are rarely used to directly make money.
Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...
Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.
The only defense mechanisms that work against todays malware are distributed ones, short of disconnecting themselves from the internet, individuals have no hope, you just simply won't suspect the mechanism that will be used to comprimise your machine.
This is something white hats are only just coming to grips with.
Todays hackers will be looking to gain deep penetration into aspiring OS platforms as early as they possibly can, to ensure they are in there from day one. Macs are easily popular enough to attract the interest of black hats, if you're on any machine directly or indirectly connected to the internet you should be worried about malware, Macs are definitely not immue.
I think you have a fundamental mis-understanding of the nature of malware today.
It may be comforting to you to think that malware is still made by idiots and targeted towards idiots.
Today there is government backing behind malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. I guarentee, even amongst the Slashdot crowd, there's a large percentage of comprimised machines, and these machines are all silently waiting ready to participate in botnet attacks at the nod of a shadey government head. Many owners of botnets are guns for hire, loosely affiliated with government agencies and use their network only very occasionally to sniff out the odd bank account to suppliment income they attain from government agencies.
Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...
I think its a safe bet a large number of governments have botnets at their disposal, and many would be suprised by the percentage of machines out there that have been comprimised.
Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.
The only defense mechanisms that work against malware today are distributed ones, individuals have no hope.
With Macs becoming popular people really should be worried about malware, it's a safe bet they have already been targeted and infiltrated. Thinking that only Windows gets targeted because it's users are foold and hackers hate Bill is really quite stupendously naive.
UML does not have a "have a monopoly on inept management".
Firstly, UML has nothing to do with management. UML is a development tool, not a management tool. Secondly there are plenty of badly managed companies out there with software development processes that don't include the use of UML.
Believe it or not, there are people out there who can and do use UML in a professional, timely, efficient and effective way.
A lot of people misuse C#, C++, Java, AND VB. Is that any reason for not using them?
UML doesn't have a monopoly on bad developers.
So what if you can invent your own notation and explain your own diagrams more easily? When you leave your place of work, who will understand your diagrams then? Can people read books or find content on the internet about the format of your diagrams?
I think it is you has a deep misunderstanding about this topic.
Let me guess you develop using Microsoft? You're an agile zealot? You've gullibly believed everything an MVP has ever said about UML/RUP/Rational (now owned by IBM), without a thought to the motivation behind the rhetoric? You spend all day in Resharper, lost, madly navigating round and refactoring overly complex and mostly useless architecture? Refactoring is the tool of choice for the lost and blind!
I've been using it since 1996 and have lots and lots of experience in it.
Your arguments are silly. UML is no good because people don't have the time to keep up with it?
Are you for real?
UML isn't about being a pedist. It's about communication. If you're going to be a pedist you don't need UML to do that, you can just get on slashdot and discredit things you know nothing about.
If you had any experience using UML you'd know, it's possible to teach someone from scratch enough UML in 20 mins for them to gain real value from it, and that value just keeps giving, it doesn't stop because some minor revision of the syntax got released.
UML is about describing systems architecture, sure you can describe systems architecture in ways other than UML, but without explanation, UML diagrams are going to be more easily understood than some notation you've cooked up on your own and it will be a hell of a lot easier to understand than source code.
UML is a tool and in the right hands it can be a very good one. Any tool can be mis-used, a good tradesman doesn't blame his tools.
They have had nothing good to say about UML ever since IBM bought it.
They use UML Class digrams for their notation in their entity diagrams. They use UML activity diagram notation for Workflow. But they don't ever call it UML.
An ODF plug-in for Office 2007 was started before Office 2007 was even released !!!
Look at the contributors... it was instigated by Microsoft, and developed by independent 3rd parties.
It's all open source so you or anyone else can inspect the code and see for yourself.
The ODF plugin for Office 2007 has been around for years whilst the whole ODF/OpenXml rant that has been going on slashdot.
Whilst Microsoft has been attempting to make its formats open, and moving to incorporate open formats such as ODF into its products. The "Open Source" movement has been moving to suppress all these efforts, whilst making excuses which are more politically than technically motivated for not incorporating Microsoft's OpenXML format into the "Open"Office product.
They release a new document format, they go through a standardisation process, to make the format open, during this process they make changes to the new format to improve the standard.
Then in the mean time they release support for ODF another open standard.
Hmmmm... Well I guess we really have no way of critizing them about non-compliance with standards....hmmmm I know!!! We'll critize them for not putting their customers through the pain of pushing a new document format for office twice in the space of 2 years. We'll call that mis-management!!
Microsoft will never get a positive article on slashdot, no matter what they do. I think it would be better for Slashdot as a reputable source of IT information to simply avoid publishing anything about Microsoft.
Whilst Microsoft has funded this project, it was not directly developed by microsoft, it has been developed by independent developers, as it is open source, anyone can inspect the code, including you.
There has been so much disinformation about the whole OOXML/ODF its really been quite impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a senior developer and I've worked with "open standards" and many systems which implement these standards. I've always been somewhat amused by the endless bitchings about one vendor or another not following a standard (as intepreted by someone else). A standard is just a specification. Every developer knows when handed a specification, once implemented, the resulting application is unlikely to behave exactly the same as another app developed by another developer who was handed the same specification. No matter how small, there's always going to be some margin of deviation. The fact of the matter a "standard" only works when the same binaries or at least source code are used. This is why Flash and Silverlight work, its why WebKit is pretty much the only way html will ever work. I think software systems are just like highlander, in a world where everything is interconnected and seamless, there can really only be one.
I said "millenia" not "millisecond"
> It's moving East, not South.
Hmmm.... *BRAIN STRAIN*.... ummm... wouldn't any direction from the north pole be south?
Aaaah... This is one of these unfunny geeky jokes that I'm not quite geeky enough to get.
OK OK I fell for it... jokes on me.
I feel like such a jock now?
This article covers it...
http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2009/02/is_the_earths_magnetic_field_a.php
I've heard it from several sources though, they have geological proof that the earths magnetic field has been periodically flipping and reversing its polarity, and that it does this at periodic intervals, and that we are in fact due for a flip any millenia now.
Fox news is obviously biased. People see it for what it is. The biggest threats to democracy are not obvious ones.
The path to tyranny is one which involves the elimination of jobs for ordinary working people whilst at the same time handing over more control and power to those who control the game. For would be dictators journalists are of course #1 on their hit list.
To quote Goethe, "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free". This whole thread of discussion, cheering on the downfall of the traditional journalistic business model is a graphic display of that sort of stupidity.
In the case of news.google.com, I actually think Rupert has a point. What I don't think you get, is that news.google.com does significantly more than link to sites. I believe in this case rather than supplying supplemental, they are in fact offering an alternative to the front page of every major news corporation's web site, making them a direct competitor to a news corporation. I would also bet google's news page in terms of hits is scoring very well against most equivalent pages Rupert pays to produce. The only difference between news.google.com and the home page of most news web sites, is that google didn't pay for their content. I think Rupert is entitled to be mildly pissed in a situation, where he is being beaten by a competitor, who is using content he owns to compete against him. I don't know about you, but when I use news.google.com, I rarely click on any of the links, I skim the headlines, read the blurbs and more often than not just close the page without going further unless there is an article which really grabs my eye. Whilst Google may be driving traffic to their articles, they are stealing traffic from their front page. Haven't you ever watched Superman? The front page is the most important! Without news.google.com, you would go to an equivalent page... www.nytimes.com www.smh.com.au etc. Personally I think in the case of investigative news journalism, paid content is a good thing, we want content that is worth paying for. The biggest danger to democracy I believe is the news feed, mindless aggregators which do not review, check or scrutinize news stories. The demise of investigative journalism is a threat to our freedoms. I believe the right thing for google to do would be to pay for aggregated content, just as every other news corp does with an equivalent page. That way there'll be dosh going round to pay journalists, who can call bullshit on propaganda.
Do you understand Microsoft actually helped Mono be created?
Do you know that the .NET CLI has been submitted and passed as a ECMA standard ?
Mono is very clearly a fully ligitimate, independent implementation of the open .NET 1.0 CLI standard. Microsoft can't change this standard its already out there. They can submit a new standard as they did for .NET 2.0.
There's simply no logic to anything you're saying. It's pure stupidity/FUD.
What a crock.
Mono is a independent open source project. Microsoft has no real control over this code.
*IF* Microsoft tried to hijack or close down Mono, it would need to do so through the courts, when was the last time Microsoft won a case like that?
I think if Microsoft ever tried to do such a thing, the Mono community would simply do the same thing that Microsoft did to Sun's Java platform (the true origins of C#). When Sun tried to dictate control over their platform Microsoft simply stopped shipping the JVM on their OS and soon after started shipping the .NET runtime. The Mono crew would simply do the same, by simply forking and become something that is not .NET compliant,
This is simply sensless anti-MS zealotry. Applications written on Mono are no more of a risk than those written on any other platofrm
It makes perfect sense to me. Go to google switch off safe search, go to image search, a lot of pretty innocuous searches come up with stuff you probably dont want children seeing....
e.g...
;P
http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=cream&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=
http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=yummy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=
http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=pussy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=
http://images.google.com.au/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=doggy&btnG=Search+Images&aq=f&oq=
I rest my case. I mean lets get real here, what sort of job would they be doing to let kids access that stuff?
I think any software product like this would be totally ineffectual without search engine integration.
Yes this is article is total speculative horse shit. In so many ways it would be totally impractical for Microsoft to attempt to do this. As it's all XML based, anyone who knows anything about XML will know that they can quite easily support several different schemas and backwards compatibility. My limited understanding of Azure is that it is closely related to Amazon's EC2 and S3 work. They are adopting many of the standards Amazon created for their platform, as are others currently developing cloud based computing services. So basically Azure is only going to help move forward the standardisation process that will inevitably take place for cloud computing services. Any standard with a hope in hell of achieving broad community support is going to require extremely good support for maintaining backwards compatibility with previous releases. In short this guy is completely and utterly clueless.
Apple fan boys, gotta love em....
This guy and the poster....
GASP... Even a Mac could be at risk....
OH NOOOOO !! Mac's might be susceptible to an exploit!! Surely this is impossible ?!
This sort of bravado and complacency that seems to be rife amongst the Mac community must be, for your average black hat, like waving a red flag to a bull.
Anyone with half a clue on the topic wouldn't base their opinions on books which are about 5 years out of date. It takes 2 years to research and write book and then usually another year to get it into print, if you buy it a year or two after it was published... there's your 5 years. You might as well go read Harry Potter because at the end of the day it's more about entertainment than insight.
Your best source of information on this topic is from your own IP logs and persons in the security business.
In any case there is a ton of evidence freely available on the net that both the Russian and Chinese goverments are actively involved in cyber warfare. There have been numerous incidents which have no other explanation. Like for example the attacks on Garry Kasparov's web site...
http://www.theotherrussia.org/2007/05/30/other-russia-websites-under-attack/
These were timed to co-incide with an order to move the site of a political rally, when people assembled at the wrong location he was arrested for having co-ordinated an illegal assembly, that was a clear case of state police co-ordinating with DOS attacks. It has also been established through IP logs that there was overlap between these attacks and the attacks made on Estonia.
With the Russian state controlling the media, the internet is absolutely essential for political opposition in Russia, same goes for China.
In a time of war there is no doubt these networks will be used to inflict financial and logistical chaos on countries.
So it is natural to presume European and US powers will or most probably already have a counter to this threat, which can really only be in kind.
In the 21st century governments will be recruiting black hats to create botnets both to shut down zombies machines actively participating in an active botnet and also to launch their own attacks. And of course these persons are going to be extremely highly skilled very well rewarded (both Russia and China have $$$ now).
I was saying the largest botnets with the greatest penetration today are state run/backed and are largely silent, not being used for fraud, blackmail or anything so basic, they are being held in reserve for when they are needed in an attack on a 21st century opponent.
No it is not the norm in terms of the numbers of botnets out there, but in terms of the number of compromised machines, it probably is the norm.
You have no idea what i'm talking about. Try reading the article i linked to.
Books are always about the past, I've never bothered reading books about IT topics as they are always at least 2 years behind the bleeding edge.
What happened to Estonia was nothing more than a small scale exercise, Russia's capabilities extend well beyond that.
No doubt there is a sizeable percentage of hackers out there still in the world of yesterday but the best black hats today do NOT NEED to waste their time with extortion or banking scams, they are on the government payrolls, and they can spend 100% of their time ensuring that they are one step ahead of the white hats and that they have covered all the bases and that of course means hacking Mac OSX.
Today malware is a national security threat, its defence and an essential member of the arsenal of any 21st century war machine.
You're almost right, but not quite.
Today there is government backing behind state of the art malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. Todays black hats are guns for hire, owning vast botnets, often they are only loosely affiliated with government agencies.
The effectiveness of botnets is primarily measured by their ability to infiltrate and function WITHOUT doing any detectable harm. The vast percentage of compromised machines are dormant, and do NO HARM, they are only a very occasionally test fired to assess their operational status.
The primary purpose of botnets is NOT monetary, it is political. They are rarely used to directly make money.
Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia [guardian.co.uk]
Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.
The only defense mechanisms that work against todays malware are distributed ones, short of disconnecting themselves from the internet, individuals have no hope, you just simply won't suspect the mechanism that will be used to comprimise your machine.
This is something white hats are only just coming to grips with.
Todays hackers will be looking to gain deep penetration into aspiring OS platforms as early as they possibly can, to ensure they are in there from day one. Macs are easily popular enough to attract the interest of black hats, if you're on any machine directly or indirectly connected to the internet you should be worried about malware, Macs are definitely not immue.
I think you have a fundamental mis-understanding of the nature of malware today.
It may be comforting to you to think that malware is still made by idiots and targeted towards idiots.
Today there is government backing behind malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. I guarentee, even amongst the Slashdot crowd, there's a large percentage of comprimised machines, and these machines are all silently waiting ready to participate in botnet attacks at the nod of a shadey government head. Many owners of botnets are guns for hire, loosely affiliated with government agencies and use their network only very occasionally to sniff out the odd bank account to suppliment income they attain from government agencies.
Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia
I think its a safe bet a large number of governments have botnets at their disposal, and many would be suprised by the percentage of machines out there that have been comprimised.
Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.
The only defense mechanisms that work against malware today are distributed ones, individuals have no hope.
With Macs becoming popular people really should be worried about malware, it's a safe bet they have already been targeted and infiltrated. Thinking that only Windows gets targeted because it's users are foold and hackers hate Bill is really quite stupendously naive.
UML does not have a "have a monopoly on inept management". Firstly, UML has nothing to do with management. UML is a development tool, not a management tool. Secondly there are plenty of badly managed companies out there with software development processes that don't include the use of UML. Believe it or not, there are people out there who can and do use UML in a professional, timely, efficient and effective way.
A lot of people misuse C#, C++, Java, AND VB. Is that any reason for not using them?
UML doesn't have a monopoly on bad developers.
So what if you can invent your own notation and explain your own diagrams more easily? When you leave your place of work, who will understand your diagrams then? Can people read books or find content on the internet about the format of your diagrams?
I think it is you has a deep misunderstanding about this topic.
Let me guess you develop using Microsoft? You're an agile zealot? You've gullibly believed everything an MVP has ever said about UML/RUP/Rational (now owned by IBM), without a thought to the motivation behind the rhetoric? You spend all day in Resharper, lost, madly navigating round and refactoring overly complex and mostly useless architecture? Refactoring is the tool of choice for the lost and blind!
You can hoist that where the sun don't shine.
I've been using it since 1996 and have lots and lots of experience in it.
Your arguments are silly. UML is no good because people don't have the time to keep up with it?
Are you for real?
UML isn't about being a pedist. It's about communication. If you're going to be a pedist you don't need UML to do that, you can just get on slashdot and discredit things you know nothing about.
If you had any experience using UML you'd know, it's possible to teach someone from scratch enough UML in 20 mins for them to gain real value from it, and that value just keeps giving, it doesn't stop because some minor revision of the syntax got released.
UML is about describing systems architecture, sure you can describe systems architecture in ways other than UML, but without explanation, UML diagrams are going to be more easily understood than some notation you've cooked up on your own and it will be a hell of a lot easier to understand than source code.
UML is a tool and in the right hands it can be a very good one. Any tool can be mis-used, a good tradesman doesn't blame his tools.
UML is dead because Microsoft said so.
They have had nothing good to say about UML ever since IBM bought it.
They use UML Class digrams for their notation in their entity diagrams. They use UML activity diagram notation for Workflow. But they don't ever call it UML.
So you don't actually know anything about UML do you?
Your comment is so stupid. Ranting on about how Microsoft and ODF.
/OpenXml rant that has been going on slashdot.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
An ODF plug-in for Office 2007 was started before Office 2007 was even released !!!
Look at the contributors... it was instigated by Microsoft, and developed by independent 3rd parties.
It's all open source so you or anyone else can inspect the code and see for yourself.
The ODF plugin for Office 2007 has been around for years whilst the whole ODF
Whilst Microsoft has been attempting to make its formats open, and moving to incorporate open formats such as ODF into its products. The "Open Source" movement has been moving to suppress all these efforts, whilst making excuses which are more politically than technically motivated for not incorporating Microsoft's OpenXML format into the "Open"Office product.
Jaw dropping ignorance and hypocrisy.
Wow how do we critize Microsoft about this.....
They release a new document format, they go through a standardisation process, to make the format open, during this process they make changes to the new format to improve the standard.
Then in the mean time they release support for ODF another open standard.
Hmmmm... Well I guess we really have no way of critizing them about non-compliance with standards....hmmmm
I know!!! We'll critize them for not putting their customers through the pain of pushing a new document format for office twice in the space of 2 years. We'll call that mis-management!!
Microsoft will never get a positive article on slashdot, no matter what they do. I think it would be better for Slashdot as a reputable source of IT information to simply avoid publishing anything about Microsoft.
This isn't new. The plugin has been available from....
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/
for quite some time...
Note the contributors...
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/#contributors
Whilst Microsoft has funded this project, it was not directly developed by microsoft, it has been developed by independent developers, as it is open source, anyone can inspect the code, including you.
There has been so much disinformation about the whole OOXML/ODF its really been quite impressive.