A cheap DVD player in India costs Rs5000 = 12% monthly income. Which doesn't make a huge dent in one's salary. A cheap microwave again comes for Rs5000.
So, you're saying a person earning 22x India's per capita income should buy the cheapest item on the market? Actually, I got the 20% figure from my coworkers from India, based on stuff they _actually bought_ in 2002-2003 -- brands like Whirlpool, Samsung and LG. If it's gotten cheaper since, good for you.
If she's earning that much per annum chances are that her company has a decent medical insurance for her...if not then she can purchase a decent policy herself for hardly Rs.10000 per annum(2% of her annual salary).
You'll want to check exactly how much company provided medical insurance buys you, and how many exclusion clauses are there in that Rs 10k plan. Having medical insurance != getting access to decent healthcare.
Mod me down if u will but I feel that the Family backbone is much stronger than the peanuts that you guys call social security.
Heh, we have social security *and* soup kitchens:-p
Seriously, the family backbone is well and good (I do believe a strong supportive family is the best thing anyone can have) but supporting a grown child is not possible for many parents who've spent their nest-eggs educating/marrying off their child(ren).
Please have your facts and Maths straight before you India-bash.
Who says I'm bashing India? My point was that 10k a year in India is *nothing* like (say) 600k a year in the US, and more importantly, the 10k actually supports a sub-par lifestyle many Indians accept only because they haven't seen better. If you've a thin skin, ain't my problem.
I can't turn 10 grand into a maintainable lifestyle, they can. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that.
Actually, Indians can't either. The 11 grand a year the Wired article talked about (22 times India's per capita income) will get that lady in the article good food, a small apartment + car (both of which she's probably got to pay monthly instalments for, for the next 3-5 *years* and which will eat up at least 35% of her monthly salary). If her husband earns as much as she does, as is likely, they're a little more comfortable, and they'll be able to send their kids to a good school.
But - they can't travel abroad on vacation (plane tickets cost!). Buying a cheap DVD player will take up 20%-25% of her monthly income. Ditto for a microwave or fridge, or indeed any other gadget. She deals with electricity blackouts and water shortages at home. She better not get really sick because she wouldn't have enough money to pay for it, even with India's cheaper medical facilities. And yes, there's no social security, so if she ever loses a job, she'll have to fall back on family for a much more impoverished existence and hope they have enough extra to support her.
So yeah, I wouldn't say the educated, qualified, talented Indian -- the 10 grand a year type -- has a great quality of life. But yeah - compared to the life most of these people's parents had, this is heaven; so it's not surprising that they don't see anything wrong with the kind of life they're leading.
On a more serious note, you will not find it surprising to see a few shoddily written resumes or documentation from some really brilliant people.
Ahem. Excuse me, I would. After two years of reviewing CVs and interviewing, my two bits would be: there's a strong correlation between writing skills and communication/code skills. I'm not looking for Hemingway, but the "lol omg this php sh*t is so c001 i wt my pants" brigade won't do either. I wouldn't trust folk who can't organize a string of words into a *reasonably* correct sentence with my code. Sorry.
I currently work with an Eastern European team. English is a *third* language for most of its members. Their English ain't perfect, but even they write better than some crap I've had to see.
Btw, in case you think I'm biased, I've worked with Indian teams where some members were educated in state schools, in Hindi and Tamil. They managed to write technical English just fine (sure, they wouldn't get a BA from Yale, but neither would they write any of the "i m interested" crap Spolsky talks about).
Bad writing has a lot more to do with laziness and an inability to learn to use the tools available for the job (Based on.DOCs I've seen, I assume 75% of Indian software developers and HR dweebs don't know how to right-align paragraphs -- they keep hitting Space until the right edge lines up) than an actual problem in grasping English.
And yeah, with that "Indians 0wnz0r the world" attitude, I'll be cheering when the Chinese eat your lunch. Despite, I might add, being of Indian origin myself.
OK, this one really bugs me. Learn where spaces go in relation to other punctuation. Attention, the entire population of India: whenever you have a comma, there is always exactly one space and it's always after the comma and never before it. Thank you.
No kidding. It's amazing, how many crappy resumes are written in a country that uses English as its associate and primary business language. I blame it on the volumes game Indian services companies play -- anyone with half a cerebrum can apply for a job and there are idiot HR who'll recruit them, so there's no freaking incentive to write better.
Did you know that one of the tenets of Hinduism forbids eating of anything where the plants are killed?
Most plants try to spread as far as possible, and plants that made themselves attractive enough for humans to eat (whatever: fruits, leaves, buds, or the whole shebang) won a bonanza - they gained lots of two-legged "friends" who had a _very_ vested interest in ensuring they reproduced.
'Killing' plants like carrots by eating them is a non-sequitur: if man didn't uproot and eat them, a few inches of winter snow would (I think) kill them just as effectively.
Btw, you forgot to mention - in many Hindu cultures, *widows* were/are forbidden onions, garlic, and spices - not out of concern for plants, but to enforce a life of piety.
At least get your facts right: the last "Paki-India" clash resulted when Pakistani soldiers crossed the Line of Control and entered Kargil. After a month long battle on the some of the world's highest slopes, they were driven out.
I actually wish there will be no other major war ever. But looking at over 4000 years hundreds of human history one is bound to see a certain trend:-(
Nothing personal, but it is this sort of snivelling that makes me despise the antiwar brigade. You guys hold hands and sing songs, and then proceed to support oh-the-poor-little-dictator being set upon by big bad America.
Your defense of Pakistan overlooks:
- Pakistani soldiers entered Indian territory and started the 47 war - Pakistani soldiers started the 65 war. - Pakistani brutality triggered the Bangladesh call for help in 71 - China incursed into Indian territory in 61.
This is not to say India is squeaky clean. She fucked up bad in Sri Lanka. She should never have been there.
I'm gonna take a wild-ass guess and guess that you are from West Europe, because the kind of wooly-headed thinking that you show comes from the comfort and complacency that you get from not having been threatened in two generations.
I'm not an American, but I support the war on terror because I know how dangerous Islamofascists are**, and I know they have the money and fanaticism to do things that'll make you qualm.
And if you think the nations of Europe are exempt, look at France -- the country with the maximum Muslims in Europe. The head-scarves are a harbinger of things to come.
The worst part is, he was right:-( Indian movies suck. Very high on melodrama, and very little originality in plot.
I guess when you have millions of poverty-stricken, not-very-well-educated Indians going to the theater, large doses of escapist fantasy doesn't hurts.
> The information is so important that they want to hide it in fluff, eh?
No, it was shown of at the PDC, where a presentation (believe it or not) makes sense. If you want to actually get your hands on Monad, get the Longhorn DVD and then get Monad from betaplace.
> Similarly, if monad is supposed to be a shell scripting language it too should be avoided
That was actually a "recollection" of what MONAD scripts look like. Note that Monad scripts can actually be written in pretty much any.NET language, such as C# or JScript.
Look at this slide 8 of this presentation, for an example of how to write something like a CommandLet like ps in monad.
Check out Monad, the OO extendable command shell for Longhorn. Quite interesting.
Btw, on 2000 and XP (maybe 9x too), you can assign a shortcut to the command prompt, say Ctrl+Alt+S, so hitting that will get you a command prompt quickly. And enabling autocomplete to and QuickEdit and Insert modes on cmd.exe adds a lot to productivity too.
Why? Because the AIDS vaccines won't help you when the Earth becomes so crowded and unlivable that you have water riots because of the way Asia has f*cked up her groundwater.
Because all the bountiful GM crops won't help you when there is carnage in Europe as Africa's and Asia's hordes invade those greying lands (look up Europe's population dynamics if you can, also look up how well her minorities are integrated - case in point Paris' sensitive districts).
And all the vaccines on Earth won't help you when we've sucked our homeworld dry of minerals.
And all your bleeding-heart piety will not help us when an asteroid decides to change course, or the sun decides to clear its throat a little.
> $10 for ISS, or $10 for a hungry child?
Eggs, Basket. All I'm trying to say is that your goals are laudable, but it is not a question of either/or. We must do both.
A lot of us felt quite outraged about Tom Bombadil being cut off from FOTR, and the entire fiasco of Arwen and the river. This was at a time when PJ was an unknown quantity, and many feared that he'd screw up the movies.
But somehow, despite the cuts and the departures from the books, the first two movies worked very well. So I'm going to keep my scepticism in check until I actually see the third.
And remember that the medium you are currently using was designed by such a committee of tenured bureaucrats in 1989
Comparing the origin of the www (one physicist at CERN with a few collaborators, hardly my definition of bureaucrats) to the committees the OSI spawned to form their 7 layers is an abomination.
And yes, the W3C is a committee too, and they didn't "design" the web! All they've ever done is rubber-stamp stuff done by other people. This was Netscape's work on HTML back then (hello, BLINK!), and IBM/BEA/Microsoft's work on GXA now.
This is not to say committees have never created anything useful (someone pointed out 802.11b, I don't know enough about that to know how much work the committee really did) but I'll say this -- accusations of trolling notwithstanding, the last thing the software industry needs is consumer-electronics/telecom style government mandated standards.
WVG is not duping SVG in one key respect, see my other comment in this thread.
Who nees open standards and peer review, when there's a monopolist we can all follow like sheep
Fallacy of Prejudicial Language. I'm tempted to reply with "Who needs the ability to actually read up on the draft WVG spec and see if it _really_ is the same as SVG, when we can all wallow in groupthink and sing along to the church of Ignucius", but that'd be hitting below the belt;-)
And the MS Word XML schemas are known to be incomplete.
Considering that my hand-created files validate against the XSDs provided, I'll ask you to tell me how they're `incomplete'.
I'm all for market forces chosing the best standard, which is why I am against large companies using their dominance of the software market to lock customers in to a propriety method of data exchange.
Flash isn't a public standard either. It is certainly documented, though. So will WVG by the time it's finished. SVG *is* a public standard, and various Open Source GUIs are using it.
So, I look at the market and I see: - a proprietary, entrenched documented de-facto standard (Flash) pushed by a big-ass company. - a public, up-and-coming standard (SVG) pushed by groups whose overall market share is minuscule but promises to rise because it is Free - a proprietary, forming protocol pushed by a bigger ass company
I don't see what's to be afraid of, if I were Macromedia: if WVG takes off, their Flash creator would spit out WVG in addition to Flash. Ditto Adobe's vector design tools -- and both companies would make money either way (and remember, right now, both Adobe and Macromedia make money on the tools) because Microsoft's design tools suck.
In fact, with WVG, the market *demand* for design tools will go up, resulting in a windfall for both companies. Visual Studio 2005 will have some design tools for animation, but it'll be strictly windows-movie-maker-caliber, and any serious dev team will have to hire graphic designers into the team or learn a significant amount of Macromedia Director.
Now, if I was a GNOME fan, I wouldn't be worried either -- after all, SVG delivers at least 99%+ of WVG's functionality.
In short, you're whining and you know it:)
Btw, here's the one-paragraph-explanation of why WVG was chosen over SVG, as understood by me from dev presentations: WVG's DOM is designed to easily represented using a common format using both declarative (e.g. XAML) and procedural/OO (e.g. C#, VB) models. It was not a question of not using SVG, but rather that SVG was not suited for the design goals the Avalon team had -- i.e., a unified programming model for creating GUIs on the web and on the desktop.
http://www.get-the-protocols.com/. Considering that you can get the SMB and NTLM protocols here, (and considering the Office schemas were released as public standards) I wouldn't be surprised if Sparkle/WVG is available either here or through a standards agency when it's ready.
Communication and data exchange protocols ought to be open standards by law, damnit!
Don't you really mean -- there should be one protocol for everything, decided by the diktat of law, read tenured bureaucrats?
We've gone down that route before, with CDE, SGML, X.509 and the 7-layer OSI model. Thanks, but I'll take a Microsoft standard, which at least is answerable to market forces; over stuff published by unimaginative committees anyday.
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ...
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News at a Glance
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.
I don't mean to denigrate images as a means of communication -- after all, we do have paintings, sculpture -- objects that speak when words fail us.
However, as a way of disseminating news, images suck. What do you make of this image? Is this a guy inspecting a bunch of tanks? Or this? Is this some kind of pervy kiddie porn?
Actually both these pictures are classics, communicating outrage, shock and sorrow -- but they wouldn't if words didn't accompany them and provide context.
Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming
GUI IDEs make extensive use of text. Perhaps I'm biased towards text because I'm a programmer, but I'd like you to make me a make-like tool using only visual manipulation. IMO, GUIs are useful for tasks involving spatial orientation, but the power of text to communicate complex instructions cannot be beat.
Re:50 thumbs on a page is too few ...
on
News at a Glance
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics
I don't. Pictorials alphabets are the equivalent of complex instruction sets, and besides pictures mean different things as you move across cultures. Letters carry less cultural inertia, and are "lighter" -- you can do a lot with only a few alphabets.
It isn't a coincidence that the spare, 26-letter, nearly-unaccented Latin script that English uses is the most popular script is so popular and recognizable -- from street signs in India to the official script of Indonesia (and several other countries).
we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles
We already do. The 'pics' are a low-overhead, universally understood set of building-blocks called alphabets. And while I am no Chinese expert, considering the number of "simplifications" and "rationalizations" that have happened in ideographic languages like Mandarin or Japanese, plus the fact that you only need to know ~6000 ideograms to read a newspaper, I would guess they feel the same way.
Windows just like DOS is a Operating System OS. That's all it should do.
Not true. DOS did not provide pre-emptive multitasking, IPC, a VM, etc. Or to put it another way, you can take (say) the OpenSSL code and compile it on Windows, provided you have Perl and a C compiler. You couldn't do that with DOS.
What is an "operating system OS" anyway? The problem is, you seem to set your expectations of an Operating System by the Unix of the 90s (or 80s for all I know): a command shell, maybe a GUI with standard widgets: that's it. (I'm sure there were curmudgeons in the 80s who thought X was an abomination, too:). Hate to say this, but you're beginning to sound like a luddite to me.
These days, with 180gig hard disks, I sure as hell don't mind if Windows workstations ship with WMP*. And frankly, when my choices are Quicktime (which sucks on Windows) and RealPlayer (ack!), Windows Media Player starts to look pretty good.
* A better question is: can I uninstall WMP/disable WMP on a server? If I run a Windows File Server, I can imagine getting cheesed off because I have to apply IE/OE/WMP patches every other week.
Provide a platform to run ANY program you wish to run on it
Um, and you can't do this on Windows? If you wish, you can install RealPlayer (which comes on those ubiquitous AOL CDs, I think) and even set it as your default media player!
IE6 with the correct DOCTYPE does the CSS1 box model fine. It even has a decent CSS1 implementation (as a quick cross-test across Firebird 0.7, IE6 SP1 and Opera 7 confirms). I agree with you on CSS2 and CSS3.
And Office-generated XML-- well, not sure exactly what you meant, but it validates fine and is quite nicely free of proprietary extensions. The only sucky bit is that the $110 mom-and-pop version of Office 2003 does not support creating or mapping XML to arbitary schemas.
Slashdot Mirror
A cheap DVD player in India costs Rs5000 = 12% monthly income. Which doesn't make a huge dent in one's salary. A cheap microwave again comes for Rs5000.
:-p
So, you're saying a person earning 22x India's per capita income should buy the cheapest item on the market? Actually, I got the 20% figure from my coworkers from India, based on stuff they _actually bought_ in 2002-2003 -- brands like Whirlpool, Samsung and LG. If it's gotten cheaper since, good for you.
If she's earning that much per annum chances are that her company has a decent medical insurance for her...if not then she can purchase a decent policy herself for hardly Rs.10000 per annum(2% of her annual salary).
You'll want to check exactly how much company provided medical insurance buys you, and how many exclusion clauses are there in that Rs 10k plan. Having medical insurance != getting access to decent healthcare.
Mod me down if u will but I feel that the Family backbone is much stronger than the peanuts that you guys call social security.
Heh, we have social security *and* soup kitchens
Seriously, the family backbone is well and good (I do believe a strong supportive family is the best thing anyone can have) but supporting a grown child is not possible for many parents who've spent their nest-eggs educating/marrying off their child(ren).
Please have your facts and Maths straight before you India-bash.
Who says I'm bashing India? My point was that 10k a year in India is *nothing* like (say) 600k a year in the US, and more importantly, the 10k actually supports a sub-par lifestyle many Indians accept only because they haven't seen better. If you've a thin skin, ain't my problem.
I can't turn 10 grand into a maintainable lifestyle, they can. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that.
Actually, Indians can't either. The 11 grand a year the Wired article talked about (22 times India's per capita income) will get that lady in the article good food, a small apartment + car (both of which she's probably got to pay monthly instalments for, for the next 3-5 *years* and which will eat up at least 35% of her monthly salary). If her husband earns as much as she does, as is likely, they're a little more comfortable, and they'll be able to send their kids to a good school.
But - they can't travel abroad on vacation (plane tickets cost!). Buying a cheap DVD player will take up 20%-25% of her monthly income. Ditto for a microwave or fridge, or indeed any other gadget. She deals with electricity blackouts and water shortages at home. She better not get really sick because she wouldn't have enough money to pay for it, even with India's cheaper medical facilities. And yes, there's no social security, so if she ever loses a job, she'll have to fall back on family for a much more impoverished existence and hope they have enough extra to support her.
So yeah, I wouldn't say the educated, qualified, talented Indian -- the 10 grand a year type -- has a great quality of life. But yeah - compared to the life most of these people's parents had, this is heaven; so it's not surprising that they don't see anything wrong with the kind of life they're leading.
On a more serious note, you will not find it surprising to see a few shoddily written resumes or documentation from some really brilliant people.
.DOCs I've seen, I assume 75% of Indian software developers and HR dweebs don't know how to right-align paragraphs -- they keep hitting Space until the right edge lines up) than an actual problem in grasping English.
Ahem. Excuse me, I would. After two years of reviewing CVs and interviewing, my two bits would be: there's a strong correlation between writing skills and communication/code skills. I'm not looking for Hemingway, but the "lol omg this php sh*t is so c001 i wt my pants" brigade won't do either. I wouldn't trust folk who can't organize a string of words into a *reasonably* correct sentence with my code. Sorry.
I currently work with an Eastern European team. English is a *third* language for most of its members. Their English ain't perfect, but even they write better than some crap I've had to see.
Btw, in case you think I'm biased, I've worked with Indian teams where some members were educated in state schools, in Hindi and Tamil. They managed to write technical English just fine (sure, they wouldn't get a BA from Yale, but neither would they write any of the "i m interested" crap Spolsky talks about).
Bad writing has a lot more to do with laziness and an inability to learn to use the tools available for the job (Based on
And yeah, with that "Indians 0wnz0r the world" attitude, I'll be cheering when the Chinese eat your lunch. Despite, I might add, being of Indian origin myself.
Did you know that one of the tenets of Hinduism forbids eating of anything where the plants are killed?
Most plants try to spread as far as possible, and plants that made themselves attractive enough for humans to eat (whatever: fruits, leaves, buds, or the whole shebang) won a bonanza - they gained lots of two-legged "friends" who had a _very_ vested interest in ensuring they reproduced.
'Killing' plants like carrots by eating them is a non-sequitur: if man didn't uproot and eat them, a few inches of winter snow would (I think) kill them just as effectively.
Btw, you forgot to mention - in many Hindu cultures, *widows* were/are forbidden onions, garlic, and spices - not out of concern for plants, but to enforce a life of piety.
> had no idea about that one, what exactly did you guys do there?
Tried to be peacekeepers. Kinda like Somalia/US or Ivory Coast/France.
At least get your facts right: the last "Paki-India" clash resulted when Pakistani soldiers crossed the Line of Control and entered Kargil. After a month long battle on the some of the world's highest slopes, they were driven out.
:-(
I actually wish there will be no other major war ever. But looking at over 4000 years hundreds of human history one is bound to see a certain trend
Nothing personal, but it is this sort of snivelling that makes me despise the antiwar brigade. You guys hold hands and sing songs, and then proceed to support oh-the-poor-little-dictator being set upon by big bad America.
Your defense of Pakistan overlooks:
- Pakistani soldiers entered Indian territory and started the 47 war
- Pakistani soldiers started the 65 war.
- Pakistani brutality triggered the Bangladesh call for help in 71
- China incursed into Indian territory in 61.
This is not to say India is squeaky clean. She fucked up bad in Sri Lanka. She should never have been there.
I'm gonna take a wild-ass guess and guess that you are from West Europe, because the kind of wooly-headed thinking that you show comes from the comfort and complacency that you get from not having been threatened in two generations.
I'm not an American, but I support the war on terror because I know how dangerous Islamofascists are**, and I know they have the money and fanaticism to do things that'll make you qualm.
And if you think the nations of Europe are exempt, look at France -- the country with the maximum Muslims in Europe. The head-scarves are a harbinger of things to come.
** I'll write this up in my journal sometime.
The worst part is, he was right :-( Indian movies suck. Very high on melodrama, and very little originality in plot.
I guess when you have millions of poverty-stricken, not-very-well-educated Indians going to the theater, large doses of escapist fantasy doesn't hurts.
> The information is so important that they want to hide it in fluff, eh?
No, it was shown of at the PDC, where a presentation (believe it or not) makes sense. If you want to actually get your hands on Monad, get the Longhorn DVD and then get Monad from betaplace.
> Similarly, if monad is supposed to be a shell scripting language it too should be avoided
.NET language, such as C# or JScript.
That was actually a "recollection" of what MONAD scripts look like. Note that Monad scripts can actually be written in pretty much any
Look at this slide 8 of this presentation, for an example of how to write something like a CommandLet like ps in monad.
Check out Monad, the OO extendable command shell for Longhorn. Quite interesting.
Btw, on 2000 and XP (maybe 9x too), you can assign a shortcut to the command prompt, say Ctrl+Alt+S, so hitting that will get you a command prompt quickly. And enabling autocomplete to and QuickEdit and Insert modes on cmd.exe adds a lot to productivity too.
Why? Because the AIDS vaccines won't help you when the Earth becomes so crowded and unlivable that you have water riots because of the way Asia has f*cked up her groundwater.
Because all the bountiful GM crops won't help you when there is carnage in Europe as Africa's and Asia's hordes invade those greying lands (look up Europe's population dynamics if you can, also look up how well her minorities are integrated - case in point Paris' sensitive districts).
And all the vaccines on Earth won't help you when we've sucked our homeworld dry of minerals.
And all your bleeding-heart piety will not help us when an asteroid decides to change course, or the sun decides to clear its throat a little.
> $10 for ISS, or $10 for a hungry child?
Eggs, Basket. All I'm trying to say is that your goals are laudable, but it is not a question of either/or. We must do both.
With cynics like you, who needs enemies? The manipulations behind making a good thing happen do not negate the goodness of the thing itself.
And anything that increases our chances of going to space *is* a good act.
NetMeeting was useful in that it brought decent IM to a consumer grade OS (Windows 98), but I can recollect CUSeeMe around 1993.
Mod the man up -- he's hit the nail on the head.
The Two Towers was probably the most disappointing film I've seen in the last 10 years
Try seeing Terminator 3 and Gigli in quick succession... you'll feel _much_ better about The Two Towers.
A lot of us felt quite outraged about Tom Bombadil being cut off from FOTR, and the entire fiasco of Arwen and the river. This was at a time when PJ was an unknown quantity, and many feared that he'd screw up the movies.
But somehow, despite the cuts and the departures from the books, the first two movies worked very well. So I'm going to keep my scepticism in check until I actually see the third.
And remember that the medium you are currently using was designed by such a committee of tenured bureaucrats in 1989
Comparing the origin of the www (one physicist at CERN with a few collaborators, hardly my definition of bureaucrats) to the committees the OSI spawned to form their 7 layers is an abomination.
And yes, the W3C is a committee too, and they didn't "design" the web! All they've ever done is rubber-stamp stuff done by other people. This was Netscape's work on HTML back then (hello, BLINK!), and IBM/BEA/Microsoft's work on GXA now.
This is not to say committees have never created anything useful (someone pointed out 802.11b, I don't know enough about that to know how much work the committee really did) but I'll say this -- accusations of trolling notwithstanding, the last thing the software industry needs is consumer-electronics/telecom style government mandated standards.
WVG is not duping SVG in one key respect, see my other comment in this thread.
;-)
Who nees open standards and peer review, when there's a monopolist we can all follow like sheep
Fallacy of Prejudicial Language. I'm tempted to reply with "Who needs the ability to actually read up on the draft WVG spec and see if it _really_ is the same as SVG, when we can all wallow in groupthink and sing along to the church of Ignucius", but that'd be hitting below the belt
And the MS Word XML schemas are known to be incomplete.
:)
Considering that my hand-created files validate against the XSDs provided, I'll ask you to tell me how they're `incomplete'.
I'm all for market forces chosing the best standard, which is why I am against large companies using their dominance of the software market to lock customers in to a propriety method of data exchange.
Flash isn't a public standard either. It is certainly documented, though. So will WVG by the time it's finished. SVG *is* a public standard, and various Open Source GUIs are using it.
So, I look at the market and I see:
- a proprietary, entrenched documented de-facto standard (Flash) pushed by a big-ass company.
- a public, up-and-coming standard (SVG) pushed by groups whose overall market share is minuscule but promises to rise because it is Free
- a proprietary, forming protocol pushed by a bigger ass company
I don't see what's to be afraid of, if I were Macromedia: if WVG takes off, their Flash creator would spit out WVG in addition to Flash. Ditto Adobe's vector design tools -- and both companies would make money either way (and remember, right now, both Adobe and Macromedia make money on the tools) because Microsoft's design tools suck.
In fact, with WVG, the market *demand* for design tools will go up, resulting in a windfall for both companies. Visual Studio 2005 will have some design tools for animation, but it'll be strictly windows-movie-maker-caliber, and any serious dev team will have to hire graphic designers into the team or learn a significant amount of Macromedia Director.
Now, if I was a GNOME fan, I wouldn't be worried either -- after all, SVG delivers at least 99%+ of WVG's functionality.
In short, you're whining and you know it
Btw, here's the one-paragraph-explanation of why WVG was chosen over SVG, as understood by me from dev presentations: WVG's DOM is designed to easily represented using a common format using both declarative (e.g. XAML) and procedural/OO (e.g. C#, VB) models. It was not a question of not using SVG, but rather that SVG was not suited for the design goals the Avalon team had -- i.e., a unified programming model for creating GUIs on the web and on the desktop.
http://www.get-the-protocols.com/. Considering that you can get the SMB and NTLM protocols here, (and considering the Office schemas were released as public standards) I wouldn't be surprised if Sparkle/WVG is available either here or through a standards agency when it's ready.
Communication and data exchange protocols ought to be open standards by law, damnit!
Don't you really mean -- there should be one protocol for everything, decided by the diktat of law, read tenured bureaucrats?
We've gone down that route before, with CDE, SGML, X.509 and the 7-layer OSI model. Thanks, but I'll take a Microsoft standard, which at least is answerable to market forces; over stuff published by unimaginative committees anyday.
My comment was in context of communication between people and other people, and encompasses more things than just instructional.
I don't mean to denigrate images as a means of communication -- after all, we do have paintings, sculpture -- objects that speak when words fail us.
However, as a way of disseminating news, images suck. What do you make of this image? Is this a guy inspecting a bunch of tanks? Or this? Is this some kind of pervy kiddie porn?
Actually both these pictures are classics, communicating outrage, shock and sorrow -- but they wouldn't if words didn't accompany them and provide context.
Also, letters communicate sparingly and that is why they are used in programming. But there are a lot of people who prefer the GUI IDE even for programming
GUI IDEs make extensive use of text. Perhaps I'm biased towards text because I'm a programmer, but I'd like you to make me a make-like tool using only visual manipulation. IMO, GUIs are useful for tasks involving spatial orientation, but the power of text to communicate complex instructions cannot be beat.
I do believe that we will some day move to a more pictorial language where the alphabets will be replaced by pics
I don't. Pictorials alphabets are the equivalent of complex instruction sets, and besides pictures mean different things as you move across cultures. Letters carry less cultural inertia, and are "lighter" -- you can do a lot with only a few alphabets.
It isn't a coincidence that the spare, 26-letter, nearly-unaccented Latin script that English uses is the most popular script is so popular and recognizable -- from street signs in India to the official script of Indonesia (and several other countries).
we will look at cluster of pics to grasp the articles
We already do. The 'pics' are a low-overhead, universally understood set of building-blocks called alphabets. And while I am no Chinese expert, considering the number of "simplifications" and "rationalizations" that have happened in ideographic languages like Mandarin or Japanese, plus the fact that you only need to know ~6000 ideograms to read a newspaper, I would guess they feel the same way.
Windows just like DOS is a Operating System OS. That's all it should do.
:). Hate to say this, but you're beginning to sound like a luddite to me.
Not true. DOS did not provide pre-emptive multitasking, IPC, a VM, etc. Or to put it another way, you can take (say) the OpenSSL code and compile it on Windows, provided you have Perl and a C compiler. You couldn't do that with DOS.
What is an "operating system OS" anyway? The problem is, you seem to set your expectations of an Operating System by the Unix of the 90s (or 80s for all I know): a command shell, maybe a GUI with standard widgets: that's it. (I'm sure there were curmudgeons in the 80s who thought X was an abomination, too
These days, with 180gig hard disks, I sure as hell don't mind if Windows workstations ship with WMP*. And frankly, when my choices are Quicktime (which sucks on Windows) and RealPlayer (ack!), Windows Media Player starts to look pretty good.
* A better question is: can I uninstall WMP/disable WMP on a server? If I run a Windows File Server, I can imagine getting cheesed off because I have to apply IE/OE/WMP patches every other week.
Provide a platform to run ANY program you wish to run on it
Um, and you can't do this on Windows? If you wish, you can install RealPlayer (which comes on those ubiquitous AOL CDs, I think) and even set it as your default media player!
> Can you say, "IE box model hacks"?
IE6 with the correct DOCTYPE does the CSS1 box model fine.
It even has a decent CSS1 implementation (as a quick cross-test across Firebird 0.7, IE6 SP1 and Opera 7 confirms). I agree with you on CSS2 and CSS3.
And Office-generated XML-- well, not sure exactly what you meant, but it validates fine and is quite nicely free of proprietary extensions. The only sucky bit is that the $110 mom-and-pop version of Office 2003 does not support creating or mapping XML to arbitary schemas.