I can really understand concern about this change -- there are already reporters such as Andrew Leonard over on Salon (who has been a good friend to open source) who believe that at least the appearance of editorial independence has been permanently compromised. But I can understand some other things as well. Slashdot has always basically been the web site that Rob and Jeff and friends have kept going with bailing wire and Perl for similarly minded crazies. As one of those crazies, I have always tried to be a little grateful to the guys for letting the rest of us come in and play too. It is very easy for the average slashdotter (many of whom are students) to urge: "Don't touch that Evil Money -- stay pure and poor, just like the good old days!!!" I know no better way to kill something that to try to prevent it from changing. Some of the most pathetic "sights" on the net are those whining that USENET, or GOPHER or whatever is just not what it was and is being "ruined" by all the changes that the newbies bring (I have lived through the imminent death of USENET about three times now) that we need to ACT NOW! to "save" it. Anything you can save by keeping it fron changing is only good for taxidermy. Slashdot (along with the grits, MEEPTs, firsts, and Natalie Portman) continues to evolve, and the bridge crew here has to evolve as well and make the best lives for themselves that they can -- and that is what we are talking about here. Jeff and Rob and so forth risked their own resources and time to get this thing started, and it is up to them and their buisiness partners to work things out the best they can. So cut them (just a little) slack, OK? And at the end of the day, the future of Slashdot is not really up to them, it it up to us. If Slashdot ceases to be independent, we'll know fast enough -- things generally aren't that subtle. The slash tarball is available, there are more than one or two Perl hackers around and we haven't run out of bandwith or IP addresses yet. If it is time to move on, we will find somewhere to go, or build it ourselves, in good open source fashion. Just like many of us moved from USENET to here.
I may not like the way that the MPAA is handling this, and I would *really* like to see a DVD player on Linux. However that does not blind me to the realities of the situation. It is time to stop whining, calling the judge a fool or worse, and offering repetitive amateur legal arguments and get to work changing the situation. We need to realistically assess:
the current situation
what we want to accomplish -- our goal
what we can, and will do to accomplish that goal.
The Current Situation
The judge is not clueless, and the lawyers from DVD CAA are not liars -- In this case we (the open source community) simply blew it by not figuring out how to deploy the resources to defend ourselves.
Brief credentials statement: I Am Not A Lawyer, Nor Do I Play One On Television; but I was a courts/copshop reporter for several years in the 1980's and have the general knowledge of copyright/IP that a journalist and a programmer picks up.
Read the transcript of the hearing, then the decision. The defendants and their lawyers were given nearly a week's notice of the hearing and arrived badly organized and with little if any evidence. As Judge Levin noted (by my count) eight different times in his decision, defendants presented no evidence to back up their arguments, while the plaintiffs (DVD CAA) had lots, including, IIRC, the transcripts of discussions here on Slashdot. The defense was just not ready to do the job. Two thirds of the legal staff there was from EFF in one form or another, but from the transcript it looks like they had not been able to spend a lot of time on the specific case ahead of time -- Judge Levin found (for good reason in some cases) a number of their arguments irrelevant to what he had to decide.
In reaching the decision, Judge Levin pointed out real weak points in the defence case. The core problem is the "reverse engineering" argument that gets used around here a lot. Here's the relevant portion of the opinion:
b. Reverse Engineering Exception Defendants claim also to fall under Section 1201(f) of the statute, which provides that, notwithstanding Section 1201(a)(2)-
"a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs . . . to the extent that any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.''
They contend that DeCSS is necessary to achieve interoperability between computers running on the Linux system and DVDs and that this exception therefore is satisfied. This contention fails for three reasons.
First, defendants have offered no evidence to support this assertion.
Second, even assuming that DeCSS runs under Linux, it concededly runs under Windows---a far more widely used operating system---as well. It therefore cannot reasonably be said that DeCSS was developed "for the sole purpose'' of achieving interoperability between Linux and DVDs.
Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies. In consequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply.
Pretty devastating, legally. They really didn't present any evidence to support their arguments, but the defendants lawyers did apparently admit that DeCSS worked on Windows as well (is this true?) so is not exclusive to Linux (so much for it being just for playing DVDs on Linux), and the reverse engineering exemption is explicitly not applicable here.
Our Goals
Do we want to get a Linux DVD player, or do we want to get rid of or modify the new copyright law? These are two different goals, with two different sets of actions to carry them out. As others have pointed out, if all we want is Linux DVD, then it is probably only a matter of money -- sombody call Larry at VALinux.
Action If you want to change the law, learn and use the tools that are needed to do the job.
Join EFF and contribute, generously;
make sure your friends and family understand this issue -- dont rant, just answer their questions simply -- (we could use a good advocacy HOWTO on this);
put the CAFE sticker on your web site;
without making an enemy, let your boss and the suits know about this issue, and how it could harm your business (for example, see the Motley Fool article on this);
Join EFF and contribute generously;
learn how to lobby -- its not that hard and we are the real experts in this area;
Join EFF . . . etc.
Groups of people get the law changed all the time -- but it takes attention to detail, advanced social skills, persistence, and some money. We can do it if we really want to.
I just finished Robert Buderi's The Invention that Changed the World and I will nominate the British invention of the cavity magnetron around the start of WWII and the MIT Radiation Lab's work on microwave radar. Why?
It was one of the main (in some people's opinion, the main) war-winning technologies of WWII. Providing critical early warning, air and sea navigation, gunlaying, bombing guidance and bomb fusing capabilities, the Allies having effective S and X band radars was a critical edge. One adage in '45 was "the a-bomb ended the war, but radar won it." The disclosure of Ultra/Enigma modifies that IMHO, but it still was of critical importance, especially early on and in the u-boat war.
Wartime radar researchers, using all that surplus equipment, largely invented radio/radar astronomy after the war.
Searching for a practical amplifier for shorter and shorter microwave wavelengths, the maser was developed, and from that the laser. (And from that, the CD player . . . )
Investigating silicon/crystal rectifier technology that was critical to wartime radar, a team at Bell Labs developed the transistor, and from that, solid state electronics.
The role that codebreaking had in early computer development has gotten a lot of (deserved) attention lately, but the creation of the computer industry is due in large part to the combination of early computers, radar, and early networks in SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment), the first large US cold war early warning system. (The Computer Museum in Boston has a SAGE display, IIRC.) One example: the modem was (allegedly) first created to move radar information over early network lines to computers.
Can you imagine the modern air travel system without radar. And if you could, would you want to? (Air travel is too much like Quake with a carry on bag now, as it is.)
The Radiation Lab at MIT was a major model (along with Los Alamos and Bell Labs) for the modern research organization, and it, or its former staff members were critical in the history of such organizations as Lincoln Laboratories, MITRE, Raytheon, BBN, Digital and many other organizations.
And last, but not least, it gave us the microwave oven . . .
As I see from your linked page, you are an attorney (specializing in free speech issues in CA no less!) so I happily defer to you on these issues. I wonder though, do we know if these materials were sealed or not? Cryptome says on the page that the filings were given to them anonymously -- they were not acquired from a specific public source. Also, are such filings, especially in a IP case, as a rule, fully in the public domain before a final disposition in the case?
IANAL (sigh) but there are two important points that I think everyone should consider.
1) It doesen't look (to me) like this is legally "public" yet. The cryptome page says that the document is based on hardcopy from an anonymous source. Normally (if I remember from my time as a cop beat reporter way back when) all the documents in a civil case only become public at the end of the trial, if there is one, and still may not be completely released then.
This is important as the argument that the judge is somewhat buying from DVD CAA so far is that, while the code has already been posted a lot of places, the information came from an illegitimate source that should have known better, and was posted by persons who should have known that this was not public information. If this is an otherwise confidential court document, posting it does not defeat trade secret protection for DVD any more than any other posting has.
If this is actually a confidential court document, whoever released it doesn't just have DVD CAA to worry about, they should be consulting a lawyer on what the civil contempt rules are in California.
Just a couple of pseudorandom notes from our own experience (we have some major apps going on line now) --
On performance, I really matters what kind of parser you use. There are two standard parser interfaces:
SAX (an event driven interface) and
DOM, the good old document object model that is tree based.
Both XSL (XSLT + XSL FO) and DOM look at an XML document as a tree to be manipulated appropriately, while SAX treats the document as a stream of tags to be managed by handlers. DOM is powerful, subtle, and (in many cases) slow. If you build an application around a DOM centered parser (and most are), you may have performance issues. YMMV, as always. SAX is not as powerful, you have to code more, but it is faster. More than one project in the B2B area that started with a DOM parser is looking now at SAX. There is nothing wrong with DOM based parsers and we use them a lot - but watch out for performance.
There has been a lot of argument this year over whether or not to use XSL to style XML documents. I think the jury is still out on this -- at least as far as pure display style is concerned. (There are a lot of CSS loyalists out there as well.) But XSLT as a transformation language for XML is a real winner. One of the reasons is simple but profound -- XSLT is XML and is parseable and transformable just like any other XML document. You can create a stylesheet by using another specialized XSLT sheet to transform an XML or XSL document into the stylesheet you want. This can be very powerful, but difficult to debug.
Finally, I am surprised that nobody on this site has mentioned the expat (stream based) parser by James Clark that is an almost standard part of the modules for Perl5. I am learning Perl using the ActiveState port on NT and am having a whale (camel?) of a time, and the expat parser is clean and fast and fun.
Oh, and one final note -- while there are some really useful books on XML, I suggest you keep to the basic reference type (Neil Bradley's The XML Companion is next to me on my desk right now, and there is a second edition out) and use the net as your basic resource, especially lists like XML-DEV. Things are moving way to fast.
There has been a lot of speculation (naturally) that this announcement is a reaction to the reports yesterday that the plaintiffs in the antitrust case want to split up Microsoft. I think that's unlikely as actions like this usually take time to work out (there can be legal issues). In fact, I think that this has probably been in the cards for some time, and has been scheduled for right after the 2000 rollover.
Ballmer has been the heir apparent for some time as the designated hardass that can (they hope) keep Microsoft moving ahead of its problems. Gates is now at that age (like many of us) where the day to day business stuff that was once so exciting is a bore. He has a family, a house on Lake Washington about the size of Rhode Island, and enough money (no matter what happens) that will allow him to do what he wants as long as he wants. All he needs to do now is find something that interests him. What is there left for him to do in business? Build the richest company in the world? Become the richest man in the world? Talk about been there, done that . . .
Gates is now looking to create a different kind of legacy for himself. As far as the lawsuit or splitup is concerned, a move like this is an upraised middle finger. If they really thought a splitup was going to happen, they (Gates, Ballmer, etc.) would either both move into division management to prepare, while leaving someone with more legal/financial backgroud to manage the details of the split with the DOJ and Wall Street. Microsoft knows it has to settle to survive, and Gates has put his chief junkyard dog in charge to handle the negotiations and aftermath -- he's the bad guy who will have to take all the actions to comply along with all the blame.
As the Salon story may mention, the JATO Impala urban legend is the all time most popular (and most submitted) Darwin Award story. There is a great, if long, story here by someone who claims to have started the story. I have rarely laughed so hard.
My all time favorite Stupidity Award (non-fatal) nomination was one that happenend near here in Ceres, CA in the early 90's. Custodians at a elementary school there caught a gopher that had been causing problems. (No, now that you ask, none of them looked like Bill Murray.) Their problem was what to do to get rid of it.
You see they didn't want to stand around whacking it with shovels while the kids watched. So, being the mental giants they were, they put the animal in a bucket, and took it to a storage room. There they decided to gas/freeze it to death using a spray for freezing chewing gum on sidewalks so it can be chipped off. They closed the metal door behind them and started spraying into the bucket. Unfortunately they also decided to do something else (in the interests of sound time management, of course) they couldn't do in front of the kids.
They lit up some cigarettes.
Well, that got a response. If they had bothered to read the labels, they would have known that the propellant (good name in this case) in the spray cans was quite flammable. Maybe propane. The resulting detonation blew the door completely off its hinges, and put the custodians in the hospital for a day.
Oh, and the gopher? According to the Modesto Bee, witnesses stated that the animal not only survivied the incident, but was last seen crossing the road in front of the school, trying to get away at a high rate of speed. Smart move.
Actually, there's no problem. In the case of Canadian addresses, we would use the Canadian address format and put your post code in the right place. In fact, if one wanted to shell out some bucks, one could install a database of Canadian postal codes and addresses that would confirm if your code was correct.
Those of us who hacked Mac in the early days (remember the "phonebook" version of "Inside Macintosh"?) know how the Apple guidelines acutally made our job easier. You didn't screw around trying to be unneccessarily snazzy, you worked out what your user needed to know and do, and designed accordingly based on the guidelines.
But who is to bell the cat now? Apple could influence developers in the use of UI in ways that even IBM or Microsoft were not and have not been able to do. I'm not sure that there is yet an equivalent organization for Linux. I'm not sure that we need a set of UI guidelines passed from Mount Sinai or Cupertino or Redmond -- we need some kind of community institution or organization to work in the open source manner to help the entire community evolve UI and usability guidelines, and to evaluate voluntary compliance. If we as the open source commmunity could make that work, I think it would preferable, but not only for philosophical grounds. Open source is not only software produced in a manner that I like, I use open source software when I can because it is usually better and more stable software.
So, is anybody interested in getting something like this going? What would it "look" like? What would its goals be?
I agree with you on over-broad trademark enforcement attempts. In fact I am starting to wonder if the entire idea of "defending" a trademark has just gone too far.
For those not familiar with this (and after the endless problems that trademark/domain names has caused, that should be a small group), a company can lose some or all of its rights to a registered trademark by not challenging every contrary use of the trademarked term enthusiastically enough. Some lawyers apparently think that the case law is vague enough to require these challenges in even the most dubious cases. This has resulted in lawyers hiring people to scan and surf the web looking for "uses" of their clients trademark that they can challenge with nasty letters threatening lawsuits.
As already reported on Slashdot, search engines are becoming less effective all the time. If trademark lawyers are let loose to challenge the output of any search engine, forget it -- they will never be worth anything again.
If WIPO et al want something to do, work out uniform limits on trademark coverage and the extent to which trademark holders must defend their rights.
It's really not that hard if you think it out. And those of us who have to ship overseas all the time generally have. The difficult part is often making sure that not only do we have the right address and format, but that we are properly interfacing with not only the express company, but its local subcontractors. (you don't think FedEx actualy delivers all over the world itself, did you?)
I think your summary of the problems is accurate -- with an exception. Of the e-commerce businesses I know (including some of the largest) many have lousy inventory systems that allow updating of the web site once a day. I had a recent experience with the largest e-commerce site (you guess) where the main listing showed it available for shipping "usually in 24 hours", the listing on my order said "will ship in 2-4 days" and the backorder email that I had already recieved from them told me that it would be 1-2 weeks before it would ship. I took a week and a half.
The backorder scenario you lay out also introduces a little legal problem. You can take an order without inventory, no problem. But you can't charge the credit card of the customer until you can actually ship the product -- or send notification by first class mail (a hassle -- its easier to just ship something).
I do believe that you are dead on about Andersen's motives -- it would match up with their actions in the past.
The idea of using marine systems is fine - but you might do better by checking the yellow pages (digital or tree-based) for companies that manufacture or sell equipment for food processing facilities. USDA-FSIS requires all equipment in the main processing areas in, for example, meat processinng plants to be completely washable, often using hot caustic solutions.
Four years ago I worked for a major poultry producer and one of my projects was putting in case scaling and labeling systems in the plants. Instead of the expensive PLC based systems that everyone else pitched to us, our vendor had developed PC LAN based systems that were faster, cheaper, and more flexible. The trick was to use cheap PCs inside moderately expensive stainless steel (or in some cases fiberglass) boxes. There are established standards and components for these systems (the namees of which I cannot remember this morning) and you can get a lot of the pieces off the shelf. The external connectors were MILSPEC Amphenol type, and the monitor (when we needed it) was inside the box and visible through a sealed plexiglas window. The boxes had thick rubber seals and big stainless steel clips to keep them closed. They were not too small, so the air could circulate some, and the environment these were kept in varied from 27 to 40 degrees F.
One of the neater components was the Dragon keyboard that was first developed for artillery control units - its a keyboard with a very thin sheet of flexible stainless steel over it which you press the keys through. Not something to code with all day . . .
Ebert also mentions Douglas Trumbull's Showscan process, which if I remember rightly is another faster (than 24fps) film system. As I remember, Trumbull was working from research that showed that just on the high side of 30fps is a perceptual threshold for human vision. Once you move past that threshold (as TV almost does) images often are percieved as being much clearer and more realistic. With a 48fps system you get that additional clarity, with the steadiness you get from the (alleged - I have not seen it yet) better film transport system and slight additional sharpness required of the higher "shutter" speeds required by the 48fps in some situations. There may be something here.
Our Roman Numerals vs Your Roman Numerals
on
News on Pentium IV
·
· Score: 1
I don't have the data for this handy, but it would be interesting to plot and extend trend lines to see when the roman numerals for Pentiums would pass the numbers for movie series like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Halloween.
Of course, there could be some crossover -- The Revenge of the Pentium, Pentium in Love, The English Pentium, The Pentium Redemption, Indiana Jones and the Holy Pentium, perhaps.
IANAL, but my understanding is that there is a very old rule in common law known as the parol evidence rule (parol being an old word for oral) which states that if there is any written evidence of the nature of a contract or agreement, that takes almost complete precedence over almost any oral evidence. If you sign a contract, it might not matter what someone said to you at the time, unless you can carfully document it with witnesses and show intent to mislead or defraud.
Were these classified? Damm straight they were, and some apparently still are. For many years, the Enigma machine(s) that we captured were most closely held (probably stored right next to the Lost Ark ) and both the British and American governments issued carefully crafted alternative explanations for the effect that ULTRA and MAGIC (the American breaking of high level Japanese rotor cyphers based on earlier versions of Enigma) had on the war. These were, and their current equivalents are, some of the "blacker" secrets around, today rating up with "special access" overhead imagery and SIOP-ESI war plans.
The documentary mentions this only in passing -- the allies used an in-line rotor encryption device for teletype messages (similar to the German Lorentz)called Type X (I have also seen it called typex or TYPEX) that the Germans did not have much luck with. For field use we had an ingenious all mechanical rotor machine that even printed out the cyper or plain text. And both sides used (and in fact still use) both paper and mechanical versions of the one-time pad.
The problem is really social, not legal. The legal US weights and measures definitions are metric, and have been for many years. Officialy, the foot is defined in centimeters. (In fact, there is an international foot and a US foot, that are very, very slightly different in length) This is mostly due to a variety of treaties on measurement, trade standards and the like that we are a party to.
The problem is that we have been able to choose as a society not to change to SI in everyday measurement, because we are not only a huge market, but the world's dominant market -- we can force producers in other countries to acccomodate our own crochets, like preferring gallons and feet and pounds. There is no political consensus at this point on legally forcing conversion of everyday measurement to be SI only, and there will not be until there is some sort of social or economic crisis that forces most Americans, or at least American business leaders, to want it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can really understand concern about this change -- there are already reporters such as Andrew Leonard over on Salon (who has been a good friend to open source) who believe that at least the appearance of editorial independence has been permanently compromised.
But I can understand some other things as well. Slashdot has always basically been the web site that Rob and Jeff and friends have kept going with bailing wire and Perl for similarly minded crazies. As one of those crazies, I have always tried to be a little grateful to the guys for letting the rest of us come in and play too.
It is very easy for the average slashdotter (many of whom are students) to urge: "Don't touch that Evil Money -- stay pure and poor, just like the good old days!!!" I know no better way to kill something that to try to prevent it from changing. Some of the most pathetic "sights" on the net are those whining that USENET, or GOPHER or whatever is just not what it was and is being "ruined" by all the changes that the newbies bring (I have lived through the imminent death of USENET about three times now) that we need to ACT NOW! to "save" it. Anything you can save by keeping it fron changing is only good for taxidermy.
Slashdot (along with the grits, MEEPTs, firsts, and Natalie Portman) continues to evolve, and the bridge crew here has to evolve as well and make the best lives for themselves that they can -- and that is what we are talking about here. Jeff and Rob and so forth risked their own resources and time to get this thing started, and it is up to them and their buisiness partners to work things out the best they can. So cut them (just a little) slack, OK?
And at the end of the day, the future of Slashdot is not really up to them, it it up to us. If Slashdot ceases to be independent, we'll know fast enough -- things generally aren't that subtle. The slash tarball is available, there are more than one or two Perl hackers around and we haven't run out of bandwith or IP addresses yet. If it is time to move on, we will find somewhere to go, or build it ourselves, in good open source fashion. Just like many of us moved from USENET to here.
The Current Situation
The judge is not clueless, and the lawyers from DVD CAA are not liars -- In this case we (the open source community) simply blew it by not figuring out how to deploy the resources to defend ourselves.
Brief credentials statement: I Am Not A Lawyer, Nor Do I Play One On Television; but I was a courts/copshop reporter for several years in the 1980's and have the general knowledge of copyright/IP that a journalist and a programmer picks up.
Read the transcript of the hearing, then the decision. The defendants and their lawyers were given nearly a week's notice of the hearing and arrived badly organized and with little if any evidence. As Judge Levin noted (by my count) eight different times in his decision, defendants presented no evidence to back up their arguments, while the plaintiffs (DVD CAA) had lots, including, IIRC, the transcripts of discussions here on Slashdot. The defense was just not ready to do the job. Two thirds of the legal staff there was from EFF in one form or another, but from the transcript it looks like they had not been able to spend a lot of time on the specific case ahead of time -- Judge Levin found (for good reason in some cases) a number of their arguments irrelevant to what he had to decide.
In reaching the decision, Judge Levin pointed out real weak points in the defence case. The core problem is the "reverse engineering" argument that gets used around here a lot. Here's the relevant portion of the opinion:
Pretty devastating, legally. They really didn't present any evidence to support their arguments, but the defendants lawyers did apparently admit that DeCSS worked on Windows as well (is this true?) so is not exclusive to Linux (so much for it being just for playing DVDs on Linux), and the reverse engineering exemption is explicitly not applicable here.
Our Goals
Do we want to get a Linux DVD player, or do we want to get rid of or modify the new copyright law? These are two different goals, with two different sets of actions to carry them out. As others have pointed out, if all we want is Linux DVD, then it is probably only a matter of money -- sombody call Larry at VALinux.
Action
If you want to change the law, learn and use the tools that are needed to do the job.
Groups of people get the law changed all the time -- but it takes attention to detail, advanced social skills, persistence, and some money. We can do it if we really want to.
As I see from your linked page, you are an attorney (specializing in free speech issues in CA no less!) so I happily defer to you on these issues. I wonder though, do we know if these materials were sealed or not? Cryptome says on the page that the filings were given to them anonymously -- they were not acquired from a specific public source. Also, are such filings, especially in a IP case, as a rule, fully in the public domain before a final disposition in the case?
1) It doesen't look (to me) like this is legally "public" yet. The cryptome page says that the document is based on hardcopy from an anonymous source. Normally (if I remember from my time as a cop beat reporter way back when) all the documents in a civil case only become public at the end of the trial, if there is one, and still may not be completely released then.
This is important as the argument that the judge is somewhat buying from DVD CAA so far is that, while the code has already been posted a lot of places, the information came from an illegitimate source that should have known better, and was posted by persons who should have known that this was not public information. If this is an otherwise confidential court document, posting it does not defeat trade secret protection for DVD any more than any other posting has.
If this is actually a confidential court document, whoever released it doesn't just have DVD CAA to worry about, they should be consulting a lawyer on what the civil contempt rules are in California.
2) FOIA is no help. The federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not apply here at all. "The federal FOIA does not, however, provide access to records held by state or local government agencies, or by private businesses or individuals." This is a civil filing in a state (California) court.
On performance, I really matters what kind of parser you use. There are two standard parser interfaces:
- SAX (an event driven interface) and
- DOM, the good old document object model that is tree based.
Both XSL (XSLT + XSL FO) and DOM look at an XML document as a tree to be manipulated appropriately, while SAX treats the document as a stream of tags to be managed by handlers. DOM is powerful, subtle, and (in many cases) slow. If you build an application around a DOM centered parser (and most are), you may have performance issues. YMMV, as always. SAX is not as powerful, you have to code more, but it is faster. More than one project in the B2B area that started with a DOM parser is looking now at SAX. There is nothing wrong with DOM based parsers and we use them a lot - but watch out for performance.There has been a lot of argument this year over whether or not to use XSL to style XML documents. I think the jury is still out on this -- at least as far as pure display style is concerned. (There are a lot of CSS loyalists out there as well.) But XSLT as a transformation language for XML is a real winner. One of the reasons is simple but profound -- XSLT is XML and is parseable and transformable just like any other XML document. You can create a stylesheet by using another specialized XSLT sheet to transform an XML or XSL document into the stylesheet you want. This can be very powerful, but difficult to debug.
Finally, I am surprised that nobody on this site has mentioned the expat (stream based) parser by James Clark that is an almost standard part of the modules for Perl5. I am learning Perl using the ActiveState port on NT and am having a whale (camel?) of a time, and the expat parser is clean and fast and fun.
Oh, and one final note -- while there are some really useful books on XML, I suggest you keep to the basic reference type (Neil Bradley's The XML Companion is next to me on my desk right now, and there is a second edition out) and use the net as your basic resource, especially lists like XML-DEV. Things are moving way to fast.
I can't beat these so far . . .
Ballmer has been the heir apparent for some time as the designated hardass that can (they hope) keep Microsoft moving ahead of its problems. Gates is now at that age (like many of us) where the day to day business stuff that was once so exciting is a bore. He has a family, a house on Lake Washington about the size of Rhode Island, and enough money (no matter what happens) that will allow him to do what he wants as long as he wants. All he needs to do now is find something that interests him. What is there left for him to do in business? Build the richest company in the world? Become the richest man in the world? Talk about been there, done that . . .
Gates is now looking to create a different kind of legacy for himself. As far as the lawsuit or splitup is concerned, a move like this is an upraised middle finger. If they really thought a splitup was going to happen, they (Gates, Ballmer, etc.) would either both move into division management to prepare, while leaving someone with more legal/financial backgroud to manage the details of the split with the DOJ and Wall Street. Microsoft knows it has to settle to survive, and Gates has put his chief junkyard dog in charge to handle the negotiations and aftermath -- he's the bad guy who will have to take all the actions to comply along with all the blame.
As the Salon story may mention, the JATO Impala urban legend is the all time most popular (and most submitted) Darwin Award story. There is a great, if long, story here by someone who claims to have started the story. I have rarely laughed so hard.
You see they didn't want to stand around whacking it with shovels while the kids watched. So, being the mental giants they were, they put the animal in a bucket, and took it to a storage room. There they decided to gas/freeze it to death using a spray for freezing chewing gum on sidewalks so it can be chipped off. They closed the metal door behind them and started spraying into the bucket. Unfortunately they also decided to do something else (in the interests of sound time management, of course) they couldn't do in front of the kids.
They lit up some cigarettes.
Well, that got a response. If they had bothered to read the labels, they would have known that the propellant (good name in this case) in the spray cans was quite flammable. Maybe propane. The resulting detonation blew the door completely off its hinges, and put the custodians in the hospital for a day.
Oh, and the gopher? According to the Modesto Bee, witnesses stated that the animal not only survivied the incident, but was last seen crossing the road in front of the school, trying to get away at a high rate of speed. Smart move.
Actually, there's no problem. In the case of Canadian addresses, we would use the Canadian address format and put your post code in the right place. In fact, if one wanted to shell out some bucks, one could install a database of Canadian postal codes and addresses that would confirm if your code was correct.
Those of us who hacked Mac in the early days (remember the "phonebook" version of "Inside Macintosh"?) know how the Apple guidelines acutally made our job easier. You didn't screw around trying to be unneccessarily snazzy, you worked out what your user needed to know and do, and designed accordingly based on the guidelines.
But who is to bell the cat now? Apple could influence developers in the use of UI in ways that even IBM or Microsoft were not and have not been able to do. I'm not sure that there is yet an equivalent organization for Linux. I'm not sure that we need a set of UI guidelines passed from Mount Sinai or Cupertino or Redmond -- we need some kind of community institution or organization to work in the open source manner to help the entire community evolve UI and usability guidelines, and to evaluate voluntary compliance. If we as the open source commmunity could make that work, I think it would preferable, but not only for philosophical grounds. Open source is not only software produced in a manner that I like, I use open source software when I can because it is usually better and more stable software.
So, is anybody interested in getting something like this going? What would it "look" like? What would its goals be?
I agree with you on over-broad trademark enforcement attempts. In fact I am starting to wonder if the entire idea of "defending" a trademark has just gone too far.
For those not familiar with this (and after the endless problems that trademark/domain names has caused, that should be a small group), a company can lose some or all of its rights to a registered trademark by not challenging every contrary use of the trademarked term enthusiastically enough. Some lawyers apparently think that the case law is vague enough to require these challenges in even the most dubious cases. This has resulted in lawyers hiring people to scan and surf the web looking for "uses" of their clients trademark that they can challenge with nasty letters threatening lawsuits.
As already reported on Slashdot, search engines are becoming less effective all the time. If trademark lawyers are let loose to challenge the output of any search engine, forget it -- they will never be worth anything again.
If WIPO et al want something to do, work out uniform limits on trademark coverage and the extent to which trademark holders must defend their rights.
Actually, some of us do it to make sure that we can properly format it for your country.
Let's see, you are in Iceland, right? so your format (as I look it up) is:
name line
address line(s)
delivery line (postal code + locality)
ICELAND
-- an example
Helgi Helgason
Laugavegi 312
IS-105 REYKJAVIK
ICELAND
It's really not that hard if you think it out. And those of us who have to ship overseas all the time generally have. The difficult part is often making sure that not only do we have the right address and format, but that we are properly interfacing with not only the express company, but its local subcontractors. (you don't think FedEx actualy delivers all over the world itself, did you?)
I think your summary of the problems is accurate -- with an exception. Of the e-commerce businesses I know (including some of the largest) many have lousy inventory systems that allow updating of the web site once a day. I had a recent experience with the largest e-commerce site (you guess) where the main listing showed it available for shipping "usually in 24 hours", the listing on my order said "will ship in 2-4 days" and the backorder email that I had already recieved from them told me that it would be 1-2 weeks before it would ship. I took a week and a half.
The backorder scenario you lay out also introduces a little legal problem. You can take an order without inventory, no problem. But you can't charge the credit card of the customer until you can actually ship the product -- or send notification by first class mail (a hassle -- its easier to just ship something).
I do believe that you are dead on about Andersen's motives -- it would match up with their actions in the past.
The idea of using marine systems is fine - but you might do better by checking the yellow pages (digital or tree-based) for companies that manufacture or sell equipment for food processing facilities. USDA-FSIS requires all equipment in the main processing areas in, for example, meat processinng plants to be completely washable, often using hot caustic solutions.
Four years ago I worked for a major poultry producer and one of my projects was putting in case scaling and labeling systems in the plants. Instead of the expensive PLC based systems that everyone else pitched to us, our vendor had developed PC LAN based systems that were faster, cheaper, and more flexible. The trick was to use cheap PCs inside moderately expensive stainless steel (or in some cases fiberglass) boxes. There are established standards and components for these systems (the namees of which I cannot remember this morning) and you can get a lot of the pieces off the shelf. The external connectors were MILSPEC Amphenol type, and the monitor (when we needed it) was inside the box and visible through a sealed plexiglas window. The boxes had thick rubber seals and big stainless steel clips to keep them closed. They were not too small, so the air could circulate some, and the environment these were kept in varied from 27 to 40 degrees F.
One of the neater components was the Dragon keyboard that was first developed for artillery control units - its a keyboard with a very thin sheet of flexible stainless steel over it which you press the keys through. Not something to code with all day . . .
Ebert also mentions Douglas Trumbull's Showscan process, which if I remember rightly is another faster (than 24fps) film system. As I remember, Trumbull was working from research that showed that just on the high side of 30fps is a perceptual threshold for human vision. Once you move past that threshold (as TV almost does) images often are percieved as being much clearer and more realistic. With a 48fps system you get that additional clarity, with the steadiness you get from the (alleged - I have not seen it yet) better film transport system and slight additional sharpness required of the higher "shutter" speeds required by the 48fps in some situations. There may be something here.
I don't have the data for this handy, but it would be interesting to plot and extend trend lines to see when the roman numerals for Pentiums would pass the numbers for movie series like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Halloween.
Of course, there could be some crossover -- The Revenge of the Pentium, Pentium in Love, The English Pentium, The Pentium Redemption, Indiana Jones and the Holy Pentium, perhaps.
IANAL, but my understanding is that there is a very old rule in common law known as the parol evidence rule (parol being an old word for oral) which states that if there is any written evidence of the nature of a contract or agreement, that takes almost complete precedence over almost any oral evidence. If you sign a contract, it might not matter what someone said to you at the time, unless you can carfully document it with witnesses and show intent to mislead or defraud.
Its a really, really good troll, much better than average and worth flames from everyone, naturally.
Were these classified? Damm straight they were, and some apparently still are. For many years, the Enigma machine(s) that we captured were most closely held (probably stored right next to the Lost Ark ) and both the British and American governments issued carefully crafted alternative explanations for the effect that ULTRA and MAGIC (the American breaking of high level Japanese rotor cyphers based on earlier versions of Enigma) had on the war. These were, and their current equivalents are, some of the "blacker" secrets around, today rating up with "special access" overhead imagery and SIOP-ESI war plans.
The documentary mentions this only in passing -- the allies used an in-line rotor encryption device for teletype messages (similar to the German Lorentz)called Type X (I have also seen it called typex or TYPEX) that the Germans did not have much luck with. For field use we had an ingenious all mechanical rotor machine that even printed out the cyper or plain text. And both sides used (and in fact still use) both paper and mechanical versions of the one-time pad.
Actually this is not a typo, just a listing of another PBS cooking show . . . you know, Breast of Loch Ness Monster in a wine and garlic sauce . . .
Actually, November was the ninth month -- many centuries ago when the year started in March . . .
The problem is that we have been able to choose as a society not to change to SI in everyday measurement, because we are not only a huge market, but the world's dominant market -- we can force producers in other countries to acccomodate our own crochets, like preferring gallons and feet and pounds. There is no political consensus at this point on legally forcing conversion of everyday measurement to be SI only, and there will not be until there is some sort of social or economic crisis that forces most Americans, or at least American business leaders, to want it.