He used legitimate access to HIS files to access files belonging to other Acxiom clients, on a server multiple clients used to upload data (the staging area to leave files to be pulled through the firewall by Acxiom). The news report says he cracked the other client's passwords.
What were they thinking when they set up that server? No client should be able to see any other client - it should look like they have the server to themselves.
The individual in police custody is a former employee of one of Acxiom's clients and that the information was stolen while the person had legitimate access to Acxiom servers. ``They used that access to hack into the passwords of other clients,'' she said.
This was not a hacker as such, it was a dishonest employee with legitimate reason to access their data, and a poorly configured system that did not separate the client data into separate, firewalled rooms. If Acxiom had taken the rudimentary precaution of access control to servres by user groups, that "hacker" would never have been able to see the other client names, servers or anything.
Arrgh - I've been bitten by the parody bug. My apologies to Dire Straits, and it's not my fault.
Money for Nothing
Now look at them SCO-yo's that's not the way to do it They say we're infringing on their IP. It ain't workin' the way they try to do it They're getting nowhere, lawsuits ain't free. No it ain't workin', not the way they do it Lemme tell ya them guys are dumb They gots a lawsuit from them RedHat people And a 'nuther from that IBM.
You gotta buy their UNIX license Or else they gonna sue you guys They gotta keep that FUD stream flowing They gotta keep that stock price high.
See little Darl with the options and delusions He's got no braincells under his hair That little Darl wants his own jet airplane Little Darl wants to be a millionaire
You gotta buy their UNIX license Or else they gonna sue you guys They gotta keep the FUD stream flowing They gotta keep that stock price high.
I shoulda learned to play the market I shoulda learned to pump and dump Look at them, they got all those profits Man I could have some fun Darl's up there in Utah making lawyer noises Bangin' out lawsuits like a chimpanzee It ain't workin' the way they try to do it They're getting nowhere, lawsuits ain't free.
See this article in which they deny everything and tell us to STFU and pay up.
"We view IBM's counterclaim filing today as an effort to distract attention from its flawed Linux business model. It repeats the same unsubstantiated allegations made in Red Hat's filing earlier this week. "... and they keep saying it ain't so.
Had they simply decided to just sue IBM, chances are somewhat good that IBM would have settled the lawsuit,
Absolutely not. SCO accused IBM of not taking proper care of TRADE SECRETS... and IBM makes billions in IT services because they have a reputation for respecting the trade secrets and privileged information they encounter in the course of that business. Any settlement, even for a token dollar, would be seen as admission that they didn't take proper care of trade secrets.
Compared to what loss of reputation would cost, the legal fees in the SCO suit are not even peanuts.
"Is it illegal to buy short on a stock that you know is going to be hurt by your own upcoming announcement?"
Yes. I was working on a sooper-sekret project in the electronics industry, one that would torpedo some competing products. Everyone on the project was SPECIFICALLY prohibited from trading in our own or the competition's stock... the exception being the normal stock share bonuses could be acquired or held. If you needed to sell stock to pay unforseen expenses, that was OK but had to be cleared throuhg legla. They gave us a detailed handout on what was and was not legal to do: leaking info in the neighborhood bar was illegal. Telling your wife/lover/granny so they can sell short is also illegal.
the same applies to anyone working on a merger or takeover - before the announcement you have to be careful what you buy or sell.
Here are the instructions to the sales force... basically saying continue on course, SCO's ass is grass and the mower has IBM engraved on the blades.
Of EXTREME interest is the "IBM is seeking... an injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights, and to cease further infringement of IBM's patents." part. An injunction would shut down SCO's sales of any of the identified infringing software.
From the EU prress release: "An overwhelming majority of customers responding to this market enquiry highlighted that Microsoft's non-disclosure of interface information - necessary for competing servers to properly "talk" with Windows PCs and servers - did indeed artificially alter their choice in favour of Microsoft's server products. This behaviour is detrimental to competition on the merits."
And if they do disclose the interface information, the competition will flatten them.
"the more Linux players SCO can get involved with litigation, the happier they will be - if they can drag out the proceedings"
But they can't... look at page 23 of the complaint, under request for relief: RedHat is going for a permanent injunction preventing SCO and anyone ever associated with it from ever insinuating that SCO has any IP in Redhat's Linux. That kind of request gets court time quickly. SCO can prove that their allegations are true, or must STFU forevermore.
"indemnification to Linux users"... USERS do not need indemnification in trade secret or copyright infringement cases because USERS are not liable for damages.
In the case of a trade secret - the only person they can go after is the person/company who had a contractural obligation to keep the secret. And once a trade secret is made public knowledge... it's out of the closet! You can't stuff it back into the "SECRET" folder. If the trade secret recipe for Coca-Cola were published accidentally or by a disgruntled employee they couldn't prevent Timmy from producing "Timmy's Terrific Cola" with it. They could sue the person who revealed it, but they can't sue Timmy for using it. And if someone independently develops something identical ot your trade secret, you can't sue them and you can't get licensing fees.
In the case of copyright infringement, the law provides for recovery of damages from the person who actually does the infringing: the person who submitted the code would be the infringer, the distributor or project who accepted the code in good faith as original work would not be infringing. However, the owner of the copyright has a legal obligation to minimize the damages caused by infringement - as soon as they notice it, they have to notify any publishers of the supposedly infringing material EXACTLY what is infringing, and show their own copyrighted material as proof of the infringement. SCO has been claiming all sorts of "IP violations" on the part of Linux developers and distributors. If they want to claim copyright infringement, they have to show exactly what they are talking about. They knew about it for months before they mentioned it, by theoir own admission... so they have not fulfilled their obligations under the law.
In the one copyright case I was involved in, the infringer had to retrieve and destroy all copies of the infringing material that were still under their control: all drafts, their printing plates and proof copies, and finished goods from their warehouses, distributor's warehouses, and unsold stock at the retailers. I don't know if it was legally not required, but it would have been ludicrous or impossible to track down and retrieve the stuff that was already sold - they still had to pay us damages for it.
In another I have only heard about, a novelist heavily adapted an out of print (author dead) but still under copyright novel. The owners of the copyright (the author's kids) recognized the ripoff, promptly contacted the publisher, who looked at the two works, said "Oh @!$~$!!!" and whooooosh... that book was off the shelves, the infringer had to pay back the advance, and all royalties from copies already sold went to the copyright holders. It's impossible to prevent plagiarism, so the law makes a fast "oops!" possible.
Red Hat filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court of Delaware. The seven-count suit seeks, among other things, a declaratory judgment that Red Hat has not violated SCO's copyrights or trade secrets, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said at a news conference here on Monday.
This is a SEPARATE issue from the "Open Source Now Fund". I havne't found a copy of the filing, but making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements about your competitors is a serious buiness law violation.
... or the penguin's beak. Both of them are ideal to introduce the idea of OSS to a Windows-only environment, because editing photos and writing and printing are basic needs. Throw in Mozilla and you have the typical home user covered.
Case history: I was working a short-term writing contract in a Windows-only company. The job would require editing photos, so I asked them to install the GIMP for me, pointing out that it was freely usable and the equivalent proprietary program would be about $600. I also asked them to install Open Office so I could use it for labelling photos and making drawings. The only question they asked was whether things would be in standard file formats. I think they had been burned before by proprietary formats.
Several weeks went by, and one of the assembly workers mentioned he just bought a PC for his kids, but software was REALLY expensive. I offered to give him a CD with GIMP and OO and Mozilla (and NetHack!)... explained it's not only free but legal, and he could give copies away or install it anywhere he wants to. Within a week, a couple of others asked me if they can have "that free software", or if I knew of free software to do ___. Viral marketing was starting to infect the company.
The mechanical engineer whose office I was working in took a GIMP/OO CD, then asked about OSS engineering software to use in his engineering classes. I told him that most of the good stuff was written for Linux. He was curious, installed the distro I gave him (probably Mandrake) one weekend, and came back with one question - "what about my data?" I showed him that OO could read EXCEL and Word files... his next statement was "So what the hell do I need Windows for?" I pointed out that his major drafting software was going to release a Linux version, and that he could ask for that upgrade instead fo the Windows one, so soon he could be totally free of Windows at work and at home.
The third to convert, although very cautiously, was the bean counter who doubled as sysadmin (very good admin, far from clueless). I had already saved him $600 with the GIMP, and the OSS for WIn CD was getting rave reviews on the factory floor, so he trusted that I knew what I was talking about. They desperately need manufacturing control and CRM software. It's extremely expensive, seldom works the way a business needs it to work, and getting it customized is more expensive if you can get them to do it at all. I suggested he look at the Compiere project as the least painful way to introduce it. It has a web-based server interface and is aimed at small businesses. It does require an $1800 Oracle run-time license, but that and the cost of customizing is way less than the cost of a proprietary system and the hardware to run it on. He could use an old PC to install Linux/Apache and test it out for free - I gave him Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix. The last I heard, they had hired someone to install and customize Compiere for them. Everyone will be using browsers and their existing systems (Win 95/98/2K) to access it, but it's one Linux server in the door.
The key to my success was not talking vaguely about the virtues of open source operating systems... it was handing over an OSS solution to the person's current problem.
After a web team meeting, in which I explain for the gazillionth time that web pages using tiny pale blue text on a pale grey background might please the aesthetes in marketing for its but that readable text, like used by our competition, would do more for actual sales... I'm all for designer torture.
"is there any plan to try to enforce the guidelines"
Any site by an organization or company that serves the general public should comply. It's a no-brainer... why would you deliberately create websites that only some of the visitors can use? How many potential customers do you want to turn away at the door, after spending a lot of effort to get them to the site with search engines and ads... it might work for a trendy nightclub, but it's a suicidal tactic for a web-based business.
I'f Timmy's Terrific Toe Jam Sculpture site doesn't want to comply, that's Timmy's right. However, Timmy will probably not get much traffic.
"Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?" Also, anyone can be temporarily or intermittently disabled - just ask anyone with carpal tunnel sydrome, a broken wrist, or broken contacts. I would like to see designers have to do usability testing with something attached to their chairs that delivered shocks if they couldn't find it fast enough, and then give them a variety of browsers and corrective lenses and other handicaps to simulate what their users go through. But I'm a sadist.
The most important visitors your site will have are BLIND. They are the search site robot, and the indexing software. A well-build page with CSS and good structure will be higher in the results than the same information presented on a page with no structural elements and just the "appearance" tags like FONT. I've tested this repeatedly over the years, and it still works.
"Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, and then secondarily apply styles to those structures? Are there such structures for every style, and are they defined independently of the styles?"
GOOD writers are well aware of the structure of information, how structure affects comprehension, and how proper use of structure can make writing easier. If the writer does her job, the readers don't notice a thing except that they can find the information they want easily. HTML was well on its way to being a nice structural language for the web when some damned fools decided that they wanted to have control over the appearance and stuck in all the appearance tags. If they had continued the SGML tradition and adopted CSS, we'de be far better off.
A point for any web developer to consider... a page creator's use of HTML influences search engine rankings. Feed the search robot a properly structured document that uses the tags the way they were intended (H1 instead of FONT=+5), heirarchical structure, etc., and the page will show up better than a page with identical content that uses FONT and other just-for-looks tricks and has no structure under the hood. One of my sidelines is remodelling web sites to improve their search engine listings, and doing nothing more than using structured HTML can move them up in the ranks.
"All the versions of Office 2003 will have support for what we call Native XML. Native means a native file format of Office. In this case we have SpreadsheetML within Excel and a new one for Word, WordML. Both of these formats save files as XML."... "We didn't create WordML to be an interoperable format." Microsoft Office Product Manager Simon Marks.
XML is supposed to be interoperable
Microsoft has taken the stance that small companies aren't likely to make use of custom-defined schemas because an IT staff skilled in XML and familiar with the XSD specification is needed to write one... I will admit that schemas are a PITA to define and write, but there are industry-specific schemas already out there, and the tools to make writing them easier are there too. Microsoft's concern for the small business is just an excuse to sell crippleware and licence upgrades.
Let me start by saying that Microsoft has been promising "native XML" since 1997 when it was scheduled to appear in the next version of Office.
With its integrated set of servers, services, and programs, the Microsoft Office System provides developers with the tools... if you don't buy the end-to-end solution, you have only an office suite that writes an XML document to their defaults. Looking at their default XML, and comparing it to the default XML out of OpenOffice, I shudder at the thought of having to parse it. As usual, they have taken a perfectly coherent system and bolloxed it up. The schemas they refer to are AFAIK, binary blobs that only their software can read, not the usual XML ASCII schema such as used by OpenOffice.
Also, these solutions are only available in the "professional" version of Office, which means some versions of Office 2003 are more equal than others. Any other version "can be saved in a native XML file format which can be manipulated and searched using any program that can process industry standard XML"... but you are stuck using their idea of XML, which as you can see from the link provided by the first reply, is not exactly easy to follow.
"The Microsoft(R) Office System enhances XML support in the 2003 versions of the Office applications and introduces new applications, which put XML in the hands of the information worker and enable businesses to reap the full benefit and promise of this revolutionary technology..... Some of the XML capabilities in this document are only available in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003... Like Word 2003, Excel 2003 can act as a smart client for XML Web services....
Needless to say, those "XML web services" are not really XML, they are Microsoft server extensions, working off proprietary Microsoft DLLs, working with the Rich XML produced by Microsoft's proprietary software.
New with the Microsoft Office System, InfoPath 2003 uses a forms metaphor to capture information according to a customer-defined XML schema.... InfoPath solutions that send data from the desktop environment to backend systems via XML Web services. With the XML Web Services being totally Microsoft. InfoPath is also totally Microsoftian, totally proprietary, and with its ability to reach into the desktop and web server and alter data and install programs, a security nightmare. Think Active X on steroids.
The current design of Web forms doesn't separate the purpose from the presentation of a form. XForms, in contrast, are comprised of separate sections that describe what the form does, and how the form looks.... These form controls are directly usable inside XHTML and other XML documents, like SVG.
You might not appreciate this, but decoupling data, logic and presentation is a good thing for us all. If I can have a form control that pulls the applicable bits out of an OpenOffice (also XML) file and displays it appropriately for the web or the PDA, or sends it to a database that needs is... I'm one happy dataslinger.
The ability to do this sort of thing is what Microsoft has been touting as the next best thing coming soon to an expensive proprietary desktop near you as soon as they get a handle on that security stuff. But from what I have seen of the Microsoftian version of XML (totally bastardized by the Beast of Redmond), and what little I have done with Java IDEs... this will be much easier and cleaner to implement.
Even the graphs make my ears hurt!
on
Is Louder Better?
·
· Score: 1
Looking at his graphs, they have pumped up the quiet parts so much that there is no variation in dynamics... there are no dynamic lows to make the peaks stand out, and it would be a totally revolting CD to listen to, kinda like chatting up my deaf uncle who yelled all through dinner. The enlarged graph of Vapor Trails is badly distorted, when you consider that it's supposed to be analog music and not a compressed data feed.
And for this we buy expensive speakers? Why bother?
Good thinking, and I regret the lack of mod points to bestow on you.
When ways to bypass IT's policies start springing up like mushrooms, it is a clear sign that the corporation's infrastructure rules have become so inflexible that they are getting in the way of getting real work done. Usually this means that the PHBs have been sold a bill of goods by someone, and didn't take the time to check with the people who actually make money for the corporation what they need.
Slashdot Mirror
What were they thinking when they set up that server? No client should be able to see any other client - it should look like they have the server to themselves.
The individual in police custody is a former employee of one of Acxiom's clients and that the information was stolen while the person had legitimate access to Acxiom servers. ``They used that access to hack into the passwords of other clients,'' she said.
This was not a hacker as such, it was a dishonest employee with legitimate reason to access their data, and a poorly configured system that did not separate the client data into separate, firewalled rooms. If Acxiom had taken the rudimentary precaution of access control to servres by user groups, that "hacker" would never have been able to see the other client names, servers or anything.
Arrgh - I've been bitten by the parody bug. My apologies to Dire Straits, and it's not my fault.
Money for Nothing
Now look at them SCO-yo's that's not the way to do it
They say we're infringing on their IP.
It ain't workin' the way they try to do it
They're getting nowhere, lawsuits ain't free.
No it ain't workin', not the way they do it
Lemme tell ya them guys are dumb
They gots a lawsuit from them RedHat people
And a 'nuther from that IBM.
You gotta buy their UNIX license
Or else they gonna sue you guys
They gotta keep that FUD stream flowing
They gotta keep that stock price high.
See little Darl with the options and delusions
He's got no braincells under his hair
That little Darl wants his own jet airplane
Little Darl wants to be a millionaire
You gotta buy their UNIX license
Or else they gonna sue you guys
They gotta keep the FUD stream flowing
They gotta keep that stock price high.
I shoulda learned to play the market
I shoulda learned to pump and dump
Look at them, they got all those profits
Man I could have some fun
Darl's up there in Utah making lawyer noises
Bangin' out lawsuits like a chimpanzee
It ain't workin' the way they try to do it
They're getting nowhere, lawsuits ain't free.
"We view IBM's counterclaim filing today as an effort to distract attention from its flawed Linux business model. It repeats the same unsubstantiated allegations made in Red Hat's filing earlier this week. " ... and they keep saying it ain't so.
Had they simply decided to just sue IBM, chances are somewhat good that IBM would have settled the lawsuit,
Absolutely not. SCO accused IBM of not taking proper care of TRADE SECRETS ... and IBM makes billions in IT services because they have a reputation for respecting the trade secrets and privileged information they encounter in the course of that business. Any settlement, even for a token dollar, would be seen as admission that they didn't take proper care of trade secrets.
Compared to what loss of reputation would cost, the legal fees in the SCO suit are not even peanuts.
Yes. I was working on a sooper-sekret project in the electronics industry, one that would torpedo some competing products. Everyone on the project was SPECIFICALLY prohibited from trading in our own or the competition's stock ... the exception being the normal stock share bonuses could be acquired or held. If you needed to sell stock to pay unforseen expenses, that was OK but had to be cleared throuhg legla. They gave us a detailed handout on what was and was not legal to do: leaking info in the neighborhood bar was illegal. Telling your wife/lover/granny so they can sell short is also illegal.
the same applies to anyone working on a merger or takeover - before the announcement you have to be careful what you buy or sell.
Did trading get suspended, was everyone trading in SCO stock to shell-shocked to hit the "sell" button, or what?
Of EXTREME interest is the "IBM is seeking ... an injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights, and to cease further infringement of IBM's patents." part. An injunction would shut down SCO's sales of any of the identified infringing software.
"An overwhelming majority of customers responding to this market enquiry highlighted that Microsoft's non-disclosure of interface information - necessary for competing servers to properly "talk" with Windows PCs and servers - did indeed artificially alter their choice in favour of Microsoft's server products. This behaviour is detrimental to competition on the merits."
And if they do disclose the interface information, the competition will flatten them.
But they can't ... look at page 23 of the complaint, under request for relief: RedHat is going for a permanent injunction preventing SCO and anyone ever associated with it from ever insinuating that SCO has any IP in Redhat's Linux. That kind of request gets court time quickly. SCO can prove that their allegations are true, or must STFU forevermore.
Favorable tax laws and easy to file paperwork.
"indemnification to Linux users" ... USERS do not need indemnification in trade secret or copyright infringement cases because USERS are not liable for damages.
In the case of a trade secret - the only person they can go after is the person/company who had a contractural obligation to keep the secret. And once a trade secret is made public knowledge ... it's out of the closet! You can't stuff it back into the "SECRET" folder. If the trade secret recipe for Coca-Cola were published accidentally or by a disgruntled employee they couldn't prevent Timmy from producing "Timmy's Terrific Cola" with it. They could sue the person who revealed it, but they can't sue Timmy for using it. And if someone independently develops something identical ot your trade secret, you can't sue them and you can't get licensing fees.
In the case of copyright infringement, the law provides for recovery of damages from the person who actually does the infringing: the person who submitted the code would be the infringer, the distributor or project who accepted the code in good faith as original work would not be infringing. However, the owner of the copyright has a legal obligation to minimize the damages caused by infringement - as soon as they notice it, they have to notify any publishers of the supposedly infringing material EXACTLY what is infringing, and show their own copyrighted material as proof of the infringement. SCO has been claiming all sorts of "IP violations" on the part of Linux developers and distributors. If they want to claim copyright infringement, they have to show exactly what they are talking about. They knew about it for months before they mentioned it, by theoir own admission ... so they have not fulfilled their obligations under the law.
In the one copyright case I was involved in, the infringer had to retrieve and destroy all copies of the infringing material that were still under their control: all drafts, their printing plates and proof copies, and finished goods from their warehouses, distributor's warehouses, and unsold stock at the retailers. I don't know if it was legally not required, but it would have been ludicrous or impossible to track down and retrieve the stuff that was already sold - they still had to pay us damages for it.
In another I have only heard about, a novelist heavily adapted an out of print (author dead) but still under copyright novel. The owners of the copyright (the author's kids) recognized the ripoff, promptly contacted the publisher, who looked at the two works, said "Oh @!$~$!!!" and whooooosh ... that book was off the shelves, the infringer had to pay back the advance, and all royalties from copies already sold went to the copyright holders. It's impossible to prevent plagiarism, so the law makes a fast "oops!" possible.
This is a SEPARATE issue from the "Open Source Now Fund". I havne't found a copy of the filing, but making unsubstantiated and untrue public statements about your competitors is a serious buiness law violation.
Case history: I was working a short-term writing contract in a Windows-only company. The job would require editing photos, so I asked them to install the GIMP for me, pointing out that it was freely usable and the equivalent proprietary program would be about $600. I also asked them to install Open Office so I could use it for labelling photos and making drawings. The only question they asked was whether things would be in standard file formats. I think they had been burned before by proprietary formats.
Several weeks went by, and one of the assembly workers mentioned he just bought a PC for his kids, but software was REALLY expensive. I offered to give him a CD with GIMP and OO and Mozilla (and NetHack!) ... explained it's not only free but legal, and he could give copies away or install it anywhere he wants to. Within a week, a couple of others asked me if they can have "that free software", or if I knew of free software to do ___. Viral marketing was starting to infect the company.
The mechanical engineer whose office I was working in took a GIMP/OO CD, then asked about OSS engineering software to use in his engineering classes. I told him that most of the good stuff was written for Linux. He was curious, installed the distro I gave him (probably Mandrake) one weekend, and came back with one question - "what about my data?" I showed him that OO could read EXCEL and Word files ... his next statement was "So what the hell do I need Windows for?" I pointed out that his major drafting software was going to release a Linux version, and that he could ask for that upgrade instead fo the Windows one, so soon he could be totally free of Windows at work and at home.
The third to convert, although very cautiously, was the bean counter who doubled as sysadmin (very good admin, far from clueless). I had already saved him $600 with the GIMP, and the OSS for WIn CD was getting rave reviews on the factory floor, so he trusted that I knew what I was talking about. They desperately need manufacturing control and CRM software. It's extremely expensive, seldom works the way a business needs it to work, and getting it customized is more expensive if you can get them to do it at all. I suggested he look at the Compiere project as the least painful way to introduce it. It has a web-based server interface and is aimed at small businesses. It does require an $1800 Oracle run-time license, but that and the cost of customizing is way less than the cost of a proprietary system and the hardware to run it on. He could use an old PC to install Linux/Apache and test it out for free - I gave him Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix. The last I heard, they had hired someone to install and customize Compiere for them. Everyone will be using browsers and their existing systems (Win 95/98/2K) to access it, but it's one Linux server in the door.
The key to my success was not talking vaguely about the virtues of open source operating systems ... it was handing over an OSS solution to the person's current problem.
After a web team meeting, in which I explain for the gazillionth time that web pages using tiny pale blue text on a pale grey background might please the aesthetes in marketing for its but that readable text, like used by our competition, would do more for actual sales ... I'm all for designer torture.
Any site by an organization or company that serves the general public should comply. It's a no-brainer ... why would you deliberately create websites that only some of the visitors can use? How many potential customers do you want to turn away at the door, after spending a lot of effort to get them to the site with search engines and ads ... it might work for a trendy nightclub, but it's a suicidal tactic for a web-based business.
I'f Timmy's Terrific Toe Jam Sculpture site doesn't want to comply, that's Timmy's right. However, Timmy will probably not get much traffic.
"Not every disabled person involved is a blind, deaf quadrapelegic. Some are just nearsighted folks who want to set the font size something above the Arial-submicroscopic-pt that eagle-eyed designers often use. Why not let them?" Also, anyone can be temporarily or intermittently disabled - just ask anyone with carpal tunnel sydrome, a broken wrist, or broken contacts. I would like to see designers have to do usability testing with something attached to their chairs that delivered shocks if they couldn't find it fast enough, and then give them a variety of browsers and corrective lenses and other handicaps to simulate what their users go through. But I'm a sadist.
The most important visitors your site will have are BLIND. They are the search site robot, and the indexing software. A well-build page with CSS and good structure will be higher in the results than the same information presented on a page with no structural elements and just the "appearance" tags like FONT. I've tested this repeatedly over the years, and it still works.
GOOD writers are well aware of the structure of information, how structure affects comprehension, and how proper use of structure can make writing easier. If the writer does her job, the readers don't notice a thing except that they can find the information they want easily. HTML was well on its way to being a nice structural language for the web when some damned fools decided that they wanted to have control over the appearance and stuck in all the appearance tags. If they had continued the SGML tradition and adopted CSS, we'de be far better off.
A point for any web developer to consider ... a page creator's use of HTML influences search engine rankings. Feed the search robot a properly structured document that uses the tags the way they were intended (H1 instead of FONT=+5), heirarchical structure, etc., and the page will show up better than a page with identical content that uses FONT and other just-for-looks tricks and has no structure under the hood. One of my sidelines is remodelling web sites to improve their search engine listings, and doing nothing more than using structured HTML can move them up in the ranks.
XML is supposed to be interoperable
Microsoft has taken the stance that small companies aren't likely to make use of custom-defined schemas because an IT staff skilled in XML and familiar with the XSD specification is needed to write one ... I will admit that schemas are a PITA to define and write, but there are industry-specific schemas already out there, and the tools to make writing them easier are there too. Microsoft's concern for the small business is just an excuse to sell crippleware and licence upgrades.
http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/biztools/a rticle.php/2194131
With its integrated set of servers, services, and programs, the Microsoft Office System provides developers with the tools ... if you don't buy the end-to-end solution, you have only an office suite that writes an XML document to their defaults. Looking at their default XML, and comparing it to the default XML out of OpenOffice, I shudder at the thought of having to parse it. As usual, they have taken a perfectly coherent system and bolloxed it up. The schemas they refer to are AFAIK, binary blobs that only their software can read, not the usual XML ASCII schema such as used by OpenOffice.
Also, these solutions are only available in the "professional" version of Office, which means some versions of Office 2003 are more equal than others. Any other version "can be saved in a native XML file format which can be manipulated and searched using any program that can process industry standard XML" ... but you are stuck using their idea of XML, which as you can see from the link provided by the first reply, is not exactly easy to follow.
"The Microsoft(R) Office System enhances XML support in the 2003 versions of the Office applications and introduces new applications, which put XML in the hands of the information worker and enable businesses to reap the full benefit and promise of this revolutionary technology. .... Some of the XML capabilities in this document are only available in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 ... Like Word 2003, Excel 2003 can act as a smart client for XML Web services ....
Needless to say, those "XML web services" are not really XML, they are Microsoft server extensions, working off proprietary Microsoft DLLs, working with the Rich XML produced by Microsoft's proprietary software.
New with the Microsoft Office System, InfoPath 2003 uses a forms metaphor to capture information according to a customer-defined XML schema .... InfoPath solutions that send data from the desktop environment to backend systems via XML Web services. With the XML Web Services being totally Microsoft. InfoPath is also totally Microsoftian, totally proprietary, and with its ability to reach into the desktop and web server and alter data and install programs, a security nightmare. Think Active X on steroids.
You might not appreciate this, but decoupling data, logic and presentation is a good thing for us all. If I can have a form control that pulls the applicable bits out of an OpenOffice (also XML) file and displays it appropriately for the web or the PDA, or sends it to a database that needs is ... I'm one happy dataslinger.
The ability to do this sort of thing is what Microsoft has been touting as the next best thing coming soon to an expensive proprietary desktop near you as soon as they get a handle on that security stuff. But from what I have seen of the Microsoftian version of XML (totally bastardized by the Beast of Redmond), and what little I have done with Java IDEs ... this will be much easier and cleaner to implement.
Looking at his graphs, they have pumped up the quiet parts so much that there is no variation in dynamics ... there are no dynamic lows to make the peaks stand out, and it would be a totally revolting CD to listen to, kinda like chatting up my deaf uncle who yelled all through dinner. The enlarged graph of Vapor Trails is badly distorted, when you consider that it's supposed to be analog music and not a compressed data feed.
And for this we buy expensive speakers? Why bother?
When ways to bypass IT's policies start springing up like mushrooms, it is a clear sign that the corporation's infrastructure rules have become so inflexible that they are getting in the way of getting real work done. Usually this means that the PHBs have been sold a bill of goods by someone, and didn't take the time to check with the people who actually make money for the corporation what they need.