I think the author is missing the point. It's not about presentation separated from content that is the issue, it's about whether people can use other applications to read and write word files.
At present, it is an unknown format with lots of binary stuff which means that you can't easily make your own, except by trial and error writing documents and seeing what it does.
As long as the XML has things like type of tags that make the document make sense, then it seems to me like a good thing.
My fear is that we get a whole load of nice tags, and a 2198yhwqffoiasdfbdfa that hides it away from us.
As long as it is easy to use XML, I can read it, write it and stylesheet it.
I'm personally not too worried about smart vs. dumb terminals. I used to run internal email, word processing, spreadsheets, and COBOL programming from a VT100 connected to a DEC VAX 11/785. OK, it wasn't WYSIWIG, but it did what I wanted it to do.
And I never had a disc crash, file corruptions or lost files. I'd go back to 'simpler' working any day of the week, if it weren't for people wanting specifications in Word format.
I don't know about 'cycles' - this has been the first time that people tried "client/server" with the PC, and for many large organisations, it has been a disaster. Tech support and networks costs have sky rocketed due to missing DLLs or whatever. Software rollout costs are huge.
To me, the beauty of web based or Java based systems is that they give the best of both worlds - centralised data management and software control coupled with distributed UI and graphics. Also, it's less for me to worry about as a user. I consume a service, close the window and don't have to worry about it until next time. It's not filling up my hard drive, and I know I can get it almost anywhere in the world from any computer.
I'll bet he's starving on the 90% he has left.
If someone on the breadline gives 10%, he will starve, because he doesn't have money left to sustain himself. A millionaire still has 900,000, which is over 800,000 than what he needs to live on.
I don't agree. Look at the spec of the machine, and it looked red hot.
Technically, it beat the PS2, but everyone wants a PS2.
Where MS succeed is where they build on what they have. Office sold because of Windows, SQL Server because of Windows, Project because of Office etc..etc... People made a connection of symbiosis between applications and OS.
This is a different beast. It's not connected to Windows, so stands alone.
Know what "natural flavours" often are? They're flavours developed on a petri dish. Someone in the know told me - I'd assumed before that it they hulled strawberries and all that.
At present, it is more lucrative for companies to push a piece of software out the door and sell upgrades than to spend extra time developing secure software
Because it's the only way to make money in the off-the-shelf PC market. No-one but reasonable sized businesses is prepared to pay an annual license fee for software, so instead of stability and security, we get features, features, features (even when products have more features than 99.99% of their users use).
I use to work on mainframes, the features of the OS/DB software changed little year on year. BUT the stability did improve year on year.
Nothing wrong with being elitist, or purist about food.
The big conglomorates have so abused food, that sometimes when I serve food to people, they look puzzled (like home made mayo).
I agree 100% about coffee and chocolate. Three products where I spend good money (and probably totally spend the same, as a bar of Green and Blacks organic choc lasts me a long time, as I only need a little to get a good rush).
I mostly buy premium ice cream, but have made my own. There's a great book called Ices by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (I think the same book is called Frozen Desserts: The Definitive Guide to Making Ice Creams, Ices, Sorbets, Gelati, and Other Frozen Delights in the US). You need very few ingredients, and it's wonderful. Machines cost about £40 in the UK, don't know US prices.
As for beer, in the UK it's funny. Beer like Budweiser (the US stuff, not to be confused with an excellent Czech beer) is marketed and sold as a premium beer. You can buy locally produced ale for a much lower price, which tastes wonderful.
BTW I'm trying to develop a portal to do with excellent food on the web, a bit like slashdot but for food and drink. It will mostly be UK based, when I get some time.
Why don't scientists do something useful like cure AIDS, or solve poverty or work out how to make toast fall so it isn't jam side down.
This is just one of these "food shortcut" things. Like the cans of coffee that heat up when you open them. What's wrong with finding a cafe?
I personally have a one-cup cafetiere, buy "gourmet" and make it with filtered water. That's so I don't have to drink chemical instant shit at work.
And I like it the way it is... bitter. I'll add milk myself, thanks.
I was written off for years for being a COBOL programmer. As soon as I got some Windows work, I became more and more in demand. I simply applied my old Mainframe COBOL TP thinking to things like ASP, and my printer control commands to ASP.
The thing that frightens me and many people in our 30s is the pace of change, and how it is not allowing programmers to mature properly. Every year, there is something new for programmers to learn, whether a new OS, a new version of VB/Java/whatever, XML etc etc. And how much code is being ditched every so often? I know companies with 20+year old COBOL subroutines. Will VB6 code run in VB.NET unchanged?
In mainframe days, you learnt COBOL, your TP system (say CICS), your database (say DB2) and your OS. And you could virtually stick with them for 10+ years without any new learning. Programmers could just focus on business requirements.
Eminem?
Maybe you should listen to some 80s rap like Public Enemy, Mantronix or Schooly D. Knock the stuffing out of Eminem, who is just a corporate creation, designed to be a rap version of Marilyn Manson.
I'd love to get Mantronix's "Music Madness", an album that got into the NME Top 50 for 1985. It was briefly released on CD.
Their first album simply titled "The Album" was re-released on CD at a decent price. The moment I heard this, I got out there and bought it.
I'd even sign up for a 'back catalog' service, if say the price was 30c per song (in MP3 format). At the moment, the companies are making nothing out of this music. Would you sign-up for such a thing?
There's also some commercial considerations with Open Source software.
Lets say I write software for a living, and I'm writing some PHP classes which I use as part of a number of bespoke bits of software. I could try and protect the copyright, or I could put them under GNU.
Minus points of GNU...
1) I'd lose sales of my user/group security classes.
Plus points...
1) I'm not big enough to market it as a product, anyway, nor to protect it legally.
2) I'd be one of a number of 'known men' of it, and may get some support work for it.
3) If people are using it, they are probably finding any odd bugs in it, so helping my modules improve, which improves the bespoke work on top of that.
4) I may get other work in relation to PHP, being a known coder.
5) I would increase my community of contacts.
For small software houses (particularly one man bands, I think it can really make sense).
Really, what have they got to lose? Windows is already pirated like crazy, and they arguably have a better core system than any of their competitors anyway. Why not counter Linus Hype with a litte Dave Cutler?
For starters, have MS ever published the storage format for MS Word and MS Excel? As far as I understand, these are secret. If you knew exactly how to write a word document using your own code, you could therefore make a program that could write word document to compete with MS.
This invention is too late.
If you'd said to me 10 years ago that I could have this functionality, I'd have paid huge money for it. Stock quotes, weather, digital content. All in real time?
I can get this stuff almost anywhere now if I really want it. My WAP phone gives me some of this stuff. If I want it larger, my Palm will communicate with my phone via the IR port and get this stuff. Or for media type content, I can probably find a web cafe or just go without.
Also, does anyone seriously want to sit on a bus going home and download a movie trailer onto a tiny screen to watch? Get real.
It could of course be that software development tools have reached a sufficient level of maturity that people don't want anything more than VB5 or VB6.
I have this argument with some geeks - they say "ah, but it does better cross-language interoperability", to which I say "and what was COM then, and why aren't MS simply improving COM".
What can you not do to serve general business requirements with VB6 and SQL Server?
People should concentrate less on getting new tools, and more on how to use existing tools better for their purposes - and maybe spend more time on analysis and design.
Nice one. That's my friends, family and internet contacts all getting a "How about not buying a Lexmark" comment, as well as a number of consumer programs on TV.
And I hope Dell don't mind that my parents won't be buying a printer through them now (as they are made by Lexmark).
I could of course write to Dell suggesting that they will lose my 'favoured supplier' status until they stop selling Lexmarks.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you post a heavily formatted Word XML file? I'd love to see one.
I think the author is missing the point. It's not about presentation separated from content that is the issue, it's about whether people can use other applications to read and write word files.
At present, it is an unknown format with lots of binary stuff which means that you can't easily make your own, except by trial and error writing documents and seeing what it does.
As long as the XML has things like type of tags that make the document make sense, then it seems to me like a good thing.
My fear is that we get a whole load of nice tags, and a 2198yhwqffoiasdfbdfa that hides it away from us.
As long as it is easy to use XML, I can read it, write it and stylesheet it.
I'm personally not too worried about smart vs. dumb terminals. I used to run internal email, word processing, spreadsheets, and COBOL programming from a VT100 connected to a DEC VAX 11/785. OK, it wasn't WYSIWIG, but it did what I wanted it to do. And I never had a disc crash, file corruptions or lost files. I'd go back to 'simpler' working any day of the week, if it weren't for people wanting specifications in Word format. I don't know about 'cycles' - this has been the first time that people tried "client/server" with the PC, and for many large organisations, it has been a disaster. Tech support and networks costs have sky rocketed due to missing DLLs or whatever. Software rollout costs are huge. To me, the beauty of web based or Java based systems is that they give the best of both worlds - centralised data management and software control coupled with distributed UI and graphics. Also, it's less for me to worry about as a user. I consume a service, close the window and don't have to worry about it until next time. It's not filling up my hard drive, and I know I can get it almost anywhere in the world from any computer.
I'll bet he's starving on the 90% he has left. If someone on the breadline gives 10%, he will starve, because he doesn't have money left to sustain himself. A millionaire still has 900,000, which is over 800,000 than what he needs to live on.
Technically, it beat the PS2, but everyone wants a PS2.
Where MS succeed is where they build on what they have. Office sold because of Windows, SQL Server because of Windows, Project because of Office etc..etc... People made a connection of symbiosis between applications and OS.
This is a different beast. It's not connected to Windows, so stands alone.
Know what "natural flavours" often are? They're flavours developed on a petri dish. Someone in the know told me - I'd assumed before that it they hulled strawberries and all that.
Because it's the only way to make money in the off-the-shelf PC market. No-one but reasonable sized businesses is prepared to pay an annual license fee for software, so instead of stability and security, we get features, features, features (even when products have more features than 99.99% of their users use).
I use to work on mainframes, the features of the OS/DB software changed little year on year. BUT the stability did improve year on year.
The big conglomorates have so abused food, that sometimes when I serve food to people, they look puzzled (like home made mayo).
I agree 100% about coffee and chocolate. Three products where I spend good money (and probably totally spend the same, as a bar of Green and Blacks organic choc lasts me a long time, as I only need a little to get a good rush).
I mostly buy premium ice cream, but have made my own. There's a great book called Ices by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (I think the same book is called Frozen Desserts: The Definitive Guide to Making Ice Creams, Ices, Sorbets, Gelati, and Other Frozen Delights in the US). You need very few ingredients, and it's wonderful. Machines cost about £40 in the UK, don't know US prices.
As for beer, in the UK it's funny. Beer like Budweiser (the US stuff, not to be confused with an excellent Czech beer) is marketed and sold as a premium beer. You can buy locally produced ale for a much lower price, which tastes wonderful.
BTW I'm trying to develop a portal to do with excellent food on the web, a bit like slashdot but for food and drink. It will mostly be UK based, when I get some time.
Why don't scientists do something useful like cure AIDS, or solve poverty or work out how to make toast fall so it isn't jam side down. This is just one of these "food shortcut" things. Like the cans of coffee that heat up when you open them. What's wrong with finding a cafe? I personally have a one-cup cafetiere, buy "gourmet" and make it with filtered water. That's so I don't have to drink chemical instant shit at work. And I like it the way it is... bitter. I'll add milk myself, thanks.
I was written off for years for being a COBOL programmer. As soon as I got some Windows work, I became more and more in demand. I simply applied my old Mainframe COBOL TP thinking to things like ASP, and my printer control commands to ASP. The thing that frightens me and many people in our 30s is the pace of change, and how it is not allowing programmers to mature properly. Every year, there is something new for programmers to learn, whether a new OS, a new version of VB/Java/whatever, XML etc etc. And how much code is being ditched every so often? I know companies with 20+year old COBOL subroutines. Will VB6 code run in VB.NET unchanged? In mainframe days, you learnt COBOL, your TP system (say CICS), your database (say DB2) and your OS. And you could virtually stick with them for 10+ years without any new learning. Programmers could just focus on business requirements.
Eminem? Maybe you should listen to some 80s rap like Public Enemy, Mantronix or Schooly D. Knock the stuffing out of Eminem, who is just a corporate creation, designed to be a rap version of Marilyn Manson.
I'd love to get Mantronix's "Music Madness", an album that got into the NME Top 50 for 1985. It was briefly released on CD. Their first album simply titled "The Album" was re-released on CD at a decent price. The moment I heard this, I got out there and bought it. I'd even sign up for a 'back catalog' service, if say the price was 30c per song (in MP3 format). At the moment, the companies are making nothing out of this music. Would you sign-up for such a thing?
There's also some commercial considerations with Open Source software. Lets say I write software for a living, and I'm writing some PHP classes which I use as part of a number of bespoke bits of software. I could try and protect the copyright, or I could put them under GNU. Minus points of GNU... 1) I'd lose sales of my user/group security classes. Plus points... 1) I'm not big enough to market it as a product, anyway, nor to protect it legally. 2) I'd be one of a number of 'known men' of it, and may get some support work for it. 3) If people are using it, they are probably finding any odd bugs in it, so helping my modules improve, which improves the bespoke work on top of that. 4) I may get other work in relation to PHP, being a known coder. 5) I would increase my community of contacts. For small software houses (particularly one man bands, I think it can really make sense).
Really, what have they got to lose? Windows is already pirated like crazy, and they arguably have a better core system than any of their competitors anyway. Why not counter Linus Hype with a litte Dave Cutler? For starters, have MS ever published the storage format for MS Word and MS Excel? As far as I understand, these are secret. If you knew exactly how to write a word document using your own code, you could therefore make a program that could write word document to compete with MS.
This invention is too late. If you'd said to me 10 years ago that I could have this functionality, I'd have paid huge money for it. Stock quotes, weather, digital content. All in real time? I can get this stuff almost anywhere now if I really want it. My WAP phone gives me some of this stuff. If I want it larger, my Palm will communicate with my phone via the IR port and get this stuff. Or for media type content, I can probably find a web cafe or just go without. Also, does anyone seriously want to sit on a bus going home and download a movie trailer onto a tiny screen to watch? Get real.
It could of course be that software development tools have reached a sufficient level of maturity that people don't want anything more than VB5 or VB6. I have this argument with some geeks - they say "ah, but it does better cross-language interoperability", to which I say "and what was COM then, and why aren't MS simply improving COM". What can you not do to serve general business requirements with VB6 and SQL Server? People should concentrate less on getting new tools, and more on how to use existing tools better for their purposes - and maybe spend more time on analysis and design.
Nice one. That's my friends, family and internet contacts all getting a "How about not buying a Lexmark" comment, as well as a number of consumer programs on TV. And I hope Dell don't mind that my parents won't be buying a printer through them now (as they are made by Lexmark). I could of course write to Dell suggesting that they will lose my 'favoured supplier' status until they stop selling Lexmarks.