In a free market you are correct. That is why the big corps have used the government to try and lock US consumers out of the global markets. DVD region encoding, over-blown FDA restrictions, ridiculous IP laws, and many other government restrictions have closed many markets to the US consumer.
Corporations charge one price in the US and another over-seas because they know that they can prevent the US consumer from buying at the lower price. They want open markets when they are shoping for labor, but closed markets when they sell to consumers. And they are getting both.
1) The really dangerous patents (say, required to interop with Microsoft software) may be vulnerable to court-ordered licensing in terms useable by the competition as per anti-trust law. (Again, IANAL).
The part about "usable by the competition" doesn't seem likely to me. At best they will be forced to license it for a "reasonable fee" or even for free. But even a free-as-in-beer license would make it incompatable with the GPL as we have seen with Sender-ID.
2) Although the theoretical danger of software patents partially revolves around the fact that nearly every software patent will be obsolete long before it expires, this actually serves to kill encumbered technology (such as GIF) because people are realizing that they don't want to be tied to dead-end technology. Look at the popularity of GIF today compared to PNG. Compare to where everyone was when Unisys decided to pursue their patent rights. This is a case in point regarding how patent encumbrance kills encumbered technology.
I still see about as many GIFs as PNGs, but even if that were not the case, its a bad analogy. In that case the standards are interchangable. What about SMB, or Sender-ID, or various XML dialects to be used by MS office. These are places where it will be hard to roll-your-own in a market dominated by Microsoft.
3) Patents are *expensive* to enforce. After a few such suits and the fact that in the end they won't get much in the way of damages, companies will decide that suing open source projects over patents is simply not worth it and will go away.
Expensive is a relative term. To Microsoft, expensive means letting FOSS errode their revenue. They can and will spend whatever it takes to keep that from happening. It doesn't matter if Microsoft remains the dominent player it is today, or if tomorrow they start to go down in flames. Either way they will pull every legal (or illegal) trick available to them. A force the size of Microsoft will never go quietly.
Well at least you have proven that there are zealots on both sides of this debate. There is no logical connection between the popularity of Windows and the security of Linux.
I don't claim that Linux doesn't have security issues, but there is absolutely no evidence that they are on the same scale as in windows. Apache hosts many more sites than IIS, but has nowhere near the security history that IE does. There are many quantifiable reasons why Linux is more secure for most applications.
For one, it is much easier to isolate components by running them as different users, or in root jails. Windows doesn't even come close to doing that right. Just try to use a Windows box without full admin rights. Many apps break, and some just wont run. With Linux such problems are easy to correct, in Windows it is almost impossible.
Linux mail clients will not automatically detach an executable file and run it for you. The reason for this is that the developers had security in mind from the start. MS developed its existing product line with only market-share in mind. How else could you explain the wide open holes in Office macros.
In order to gain market share MS threw in every feature they could think of, without any concern for security. This played well with joe six-pack and joe ceo, while the competent techies looked on thinking "WTF are they doing?" Now MS wants to whine that they are being picked on because they are so big.
Another problem with Windows is that the monolithic design will always result in more flaws, and that exploits will have more of an impact when discovered. In a single vendor world this will always be the case. It is too tempting to take shortcuts when you control the kernel, the windowing system, the office suite, and most of the other applications. FOSS on the other hand has clean interfaces between components because the nature of distributed development demands it. This results in less complex code/data paths, which results in better security.
Yes, it is true that complex software will probably always have bugs. (At least until we have a major shift in development languages and tools.) But MS ignored security for too long. The issues in Windows go way beyond any particular buffer overflow. The design itself breeds flaws and allows those flaws to have much deeper impact than they should.
BTW: My understanding is that the firefox vulnerability from the article was an extension of a flaw in Windows, and that IE had the same problem. People running Firefox on Linux had no issue.
I think the parent's point is that there is a difference between open/closed and free/comercial. A gratis project can be either open or closed source. A comercial project can also be either open or closed.
You are both correct, but talking past each-other. It is in fact hard to market a commercial product under the GPL because you risk competing with a gratis fork of your own work. But the QT license doesn't care about gratis/commercial, only libre/closed.
But without using fingerprints you can still say "I am Tinidril". Fingerprints once stolen are no better or worse than the name, except that they are more unique. The identification phase just tells helps to determine what data will be authenticated against.
If there are 7 Tinidrils, and I give you my name and password, you will have to check 7 places to see if my password matches any of them. If there are 7000 Tinidrils you will have to check 7000 places. But if I give you my fingerprint, then that really tells you who it is that I am claiming to be. My claim might not be valid, (Thats what authentication is all about.) but now it is very specific.
Stealing my fingerprints so that you can clam to be me wont do you any good without the password, but it can still help to streamline the identification/authentication process.
Your missing the point. Identification is different than Authentication. Identification is saying "I am Bob." Authentication is saying "And here is my driver's license to prove it."
Biometrics work for identification because, for instance, there may be 100 people on your network named bob, 20 named bob smith, and 3 named bob q smith. This is a big problem for large unmanaged collections of identities like many PGP key repositories.
Two penguins walked into a bar. The third one ducked.
----------------------- Whats black and white and red all over? Tux after smashing that anoying butterfly.
----------------------- Tux had to take his car for engine repair. The mechanic told him to leave his car with him for about two hours to find out whats wrong.
So Tux went across the street to a grocery store and climbed into a freezer to eat vanilla ice cream. When the two hours was up the he went back to the garage to find out what happened to his car.
When the he entered the garage, the mechanic looked at him and said, "Looks like you blew a seal."
Actually, an ipv6 address would be more like this.
ffab:3a53:5af1:201b:78de:fb8c:2897:192f
However the standard allows for replacing any single string of zeros with::, and most IPs will have a long string of zeros. So with that an IPv6 address might look like this.
This is not at all a fair charactorization. Many mainline denominations believe that birth-control is wrong, but not on the same level as abortion which is treated as murder. I have never once heard a Christian claim that birth-control is baby-killing.
I'm sure there are a few out there on the fringes, but what group of people doesn't have that problem? Your really not going to get a good understanding of Christian teaching from a Monty Python song.
There is some grey area in some forms of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. In many ways that is closer to abortion than birth-control.
BTW: In general, the "Jesus-freaks" term came from a movement in the 60s and 70s that was largely fundamentalist. This is painting with a broad brush, but I don't think fundamentalists have a problem with birth-control.
Re:Questions to the Slashdot owners
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What you are proposing wont work. Only the original linked file (or implied index.?) will be cached. In order for the bulk of the content to be cached, the site owner would have to change all internal links to point to freecache.
The working solution would be for the slashdot editors to give a site owner a heads-up so that they can prepare for the flood.
The point is that if your "detailed procedure" leaves out one insignificant detail, you can get slammed. Yeah, the obvious answer is, "Don't leave out any details" but that is much easier said than done. And again, this does nothing for that process you use that is so simple that it never occured to you to patent.
Also, using a patent as a defence is no better than proving prior art.
Yes patents can be used as a direct legal defence against more recent patents, but in reality thats not how it works. Most often they are used to force cross-licensing, or form a stalemate with an aggressive competitor.
A good example of this is that Tivo and Replay TV have cross-licensed most of their patents. Neither could market a decent player without using technology that the other has a patent on. Either one could probably have prevailed on prior-art, but that would have just voided the patents and let more competitors into the market.
It's not that simple. Microsoft probably wont wall themselves off completely from OSS. They will just put themselves in a position where they can pick and choose what will interoperate.
For example, they will certainly not break window's ability to browse the web, that would be suicide. OTOH they will likely lock OSS from reading DRM "enabled" office documents. They may even convince some big websites to not allow access from "untrusted" browsers. In each case they will only allow a level of compatability that will make Windows appear to be the most feature-full OS.
With all the fallout from internal memos being leaked to the Internet, or worms flooding internal networks because users turn off automatic-update, companies are going to jump all over the idea of completely locking-down their employees workstations. The customization that is such a great aspect if Linux will be seen as a liability for many companies.
It appears that you are the one lacking insight. No two patents are going to be EXACTLY alike. (No matter how broken the patent process is.)
The point of a defensive patent isn't to nulify another companies patent. Prior art can do that. A defensive patent is to protect the ideas that you don't have clear patents on. (Perhaps you thought the idea was too obvious to bother with.)
You may even think you have a valid patent, but someone can find a new way to apply an earlier vague patent. It's almost imposible to properly patent every single inovative technique you use, so defensive patents give you the ability to threaten retailiation against competing companies that want to start a patent war.
All of this is just another reason why the current patent law is so badly screwed up. Although I do belive that patents CAN be good, I think we would be better off with no patent system than the current one.
As true as that may be, the discussion was on prothon, not python.
In python you can't use spaces to make text line up in a sub-expression. This limitation was put in to prevent the problem we are talking about. However, prothon did away with the limitation, and thus the problem re-surfaced.
I still think that invisible chars should have no meaning in software design, but I concede that Python handles it better than Prothon would.
Thats not entirely true. If a line starts with a space, that will generate an error. But the language description explicitly says that spaces are allowed after the first tab. If a human can't see the difference, neither should the compiler.
I don't think the gradparent was expressing an unwillingness to learn somthing new. I think that the unwillingness was to use a tool with such a huge flaw. Diferentiations in invisible characters should never be a critical part of any programing language.
I understand why the author chose to do it, but the approach is just plain wrong. If a programmer were to insert spaces instead of a tab, it could create a bug that would be invisible to the eye, and very hard to find.
I think it has to do with the popularity of LAMP. ( Linux Apache MySql Perl/Python/Php/Prothon? ) Any new high-level language that wants to be taken seriously by the open-source comunity has to start with a P.
BSD and Postgres are dying, because a serious OS has to start with an 'L' and a serious database has to start with an 'M'.
just like windows update, a simple software patch has the potential to hose an entire system!
Of course any patch has that potential, but by experience has been that this is much more of a problem with MS than with Linux.
OSS software tends to divide functionality into smaller discrete units with better defined functional requirements than with closed source. I think its a combination of the fact that OSS tends to be more academic than closed source, and that OSS projects would be dificult to build in a community model if the code were organized in a giant knot.
I assume you mean "pissing off giants", not "pissing of giants". Although the picture of Daryl drenched in urine like he was being cleaned with a firehose is surely entertaining.;)
The difference is that XML-handling libraries all handle this automagically
How is that different? I could write a library to parse a CSV in about 10 minutes. Oh wait that is different. How long does it take to write a decent XML library? How many lines create how many bugs?
I think your points are fair, and not knowing anything about "MARC Records" I can't really comment on how XML would work for it.
I believe that there are good aplications for XML, but my reaction to it comes from the fact that people try to apply it in all sorts of places where it doesn't belong. (Like in a network protocol to validate emails) Bad programing bothers me because it makes bad programs that I may be forced to use at work. If this takes hold I will end up involved in tracking down email problems, and instead of being able to use a simple split command to break down the data I'll have to deal with mountains of useless tags.
My favorite mis-application of XML was made by Cisco for a network load-balancing device. They built an XML interface for bringing servers in and out of rotation, and it was the only way to automate the process. It never worked right, and even there own tools could never do the job reliably. I don't know how many hours I spent pulling my hair out on that one. A high-school kid should have been able to write that interface in 10 minutes, but using XML it was a nightmare.
We're probably closer in our thinking than our posts let on. I still don't see a single problem that XML solves for structured data, but for documents it has no equal. In the real world I'm sure there are all sorts of places where the line between structured data and document data is blury.
That is a well reasoned arguement, but I in turn have to slightly disagree with you.
Really there are two different cases that we are talking about, storing data and transmiting data between applications.
In the first case, a relational database has much more structure than XML, can be indexed and searched much faster, and is easier to mutate.
In the second case, even with XML, both sides need to agree on what version of the data-structure is being used. I would suggest that it is very dangerous for the recipient to "read through", and I assume ignore data in the structure, unless the sender knows it is happening. And if the sender knows the data will be ignored, why send it?
XML doesn't solve any of these problems any better than a comma delimited list. It just hides them, which invites programmer error.
The right way to handle mutating data structures over the network is to have both sides negotiate what version of the standard they will speak. In the worst cases, programmers think that XML has solved the versioning problem, and then fail to include a versioning negotiation in the connection process. XML hid the problem, and now they don't think they need to solve it.
XML is great for DocBook or HTML type data, but for structured data it...
SMTP is a great example of a well written protocol that has been able to mutate over time without breaking existing functionality. IMAP is a better example because it allows making multiple requests while waiting for responses, but both make it clear to me that XML does nothing but add overhead.
Yes, I have worked with real data. Why is it that so many people on slashdot assume that if someone disagrees with them that they must be ignorant?
By moving from comma-delimited to XML you don't solve the problem, you just move it. What happens if someone includes text in a record that just happens to close your field? I know there are answers to that, but they are not very different from those with comma separated lists.
BTW: To my knowledge Microsoft is the only developer brain-dead enough to try and solve the comma-in-a-field problem with quotes around the entry. But then again they are the ones who are trying to use XML for everything now, so I guess it fits.
The correct way to do it is escape them with slashes, which is way less complicated than you make it sound.
Thats it! Any other escape sequences would just be for added human readability, and would be needed in XML for the same purpose.
Your comments really underscore my problem with XML. It claims to fix many problems, but in fact it just makes them more opaque. (Much like OOP, but thats another matter.)
At least you stayed away from the idiotic notion that I always hear about XML providing a standard format for structuring data. In reality it is no more standard than plain text. Which of these is correct?
IMHO: XML is excelent in a DocBook like implementation where the data will not fit into a clean record structure, but for all other implementations that I have seen it is snakeoil. It's more dificult for humans, more dificult for machines, and claims to fix a lot of problems that it just sweeps under the rug.
BTW: I manage a data retention system (not a relational database) that stores about 50GB/day and has to be kept on local storage for a full month. The data is replicated between two remote locations and backed up daily. If I had to move the data from comma-delimited to XML, our costs would more than double for bandwidth, storage, and labor (switching tapes). That doesn't even include the extra processing that would need to be done to reference the data. I'm not sure my boss would call that "a few bytes".
Um, Yes. New patches are still being released for 2.0 and 2.2. Of course by this time it is rare that new vulerabilities are found. Can Microsoft say the same for 95?
Slashdot Mirror
In a free market you are correct. That is why the big corps have used the government to try and lock US consumers out of the global markets. DVD region encoding, over-blown FDA restrictions, ridiculous IP laws, and many other government restrictions have closed many markets to the US consumer.
Corporations charge one price in the US and another over-seas because they know that they can prevent the US consumer from buying at the lower price. They want open markets when they are shoping for labor, but closed markets when they sell to consumers. And they are getting both.
The part about "usable by the competition" doesn't seem likely to me. At best they will be forced to license it for a "reasonable fee" or even for free. But even a free-as-in-beer license would make it incompatable with the GPL as we have seen with Sender-ID.
2) Although the theoretical danger of software patents partially revolves around the fact that nearly every software patent will be obsolete long before it expires, this actually serves to kill encumbered technology (such as GIF) because people are realizing that they don't want to be tied to dead-end technology. Look at the popularity of GIF today compared to PNG. Compare to where everyone was when Unisys decided to pursue their patent rights. This is a case in point regarding how patent encumbrance kills encumbered technology.
I still see about as many GIFs as PNGs, but even if that were not the case, its a bad analogy. In that case the standards are interchangable. What about SMB, or Sender-ID, or various XML dialects to be used by MS office. These are places where it will be hard to roll-your-own in a market dominated by Microsoft.
3) Patents are *expensive* to enforce. After a few such suits and the fact that in the end they won't get much in the way of damages, companies will decide that suing open source projects over patents is simply not worth it and will go away.
Expensive is a relative term. To Microsoft, expensive means letting FOSS errode their revenue. They can and will spend whatever it takes to keep that from happening. It doesn't matter if Microsoft remains the dominent player it is today, or if tomorrow they start to go down in flames. Either way they will pull every legal (or illegal) trick available to them. A force the size of Microsoft will never go quietly.
Well at least you have proven that there are zealots on both sides of this debate. There is no logical connection between the popularity of Windows and the security of Linux.
I don't claim that Linux doesn't have security issues, but there is absolutely no evidence that they are on the same scale as in windows. Apache hosts many more sites than IIS, but has nowhere near the security history that IE does. There are many quantifiable reasons why Linux is more secure for most applications.
For one, it is much easier to isolate components by running them as different users, or in root jails. Windows doesn't even come close to doing that right. Just try to use a Windows box without full admin rights. Many apps break, and some just wont run. With Linux such problems are easy to correct, in Windows it is almost impossible.
Linux mail clients will not automatically detach an executable file and run it for you. The reason for this is that the developers had security in mind from the start. MS developed its existing product line with only market-share in mind. How else could you explain the wide open holes in Office macros.
In order to gain market share MS threw in every feature they could think of, without any concern for security. This played well with joe six-pack and joe ceo, while the competent techies looked on thinking "WTF are they doing?" Now MS wants to whine that they are being picked on because they are so big.
Another problem with Windows is that the monolithic design will always result in more flaws, and that exploits will have more of an impact when discovered. In a single vendor world this will always be the case. It is too tempting to take shortcuts when you control the kernel, the windowing system, the office suite, and most of the other applications. FOSS on the other hand has clean interfaces between components because the nature of distributed development demands it. This results in less complex code/data paths, which results in better security.
Yes, it is true that complex software will probably always have bugs. (At least until we have a major shift in development languages and tools.) But MS ignored security for too long. The issues in Windows go way beyond any particular buffer overflow. The design itself breeds flaws and allows those flaws to have much deeper impact than they should.
BTW: My understanding is that the firefox vulnerability from the article was an extension of a flaw in Windows, and that IE had the same problem. People running Firefox on Linux had no issue.
I think the parent's point is that there is a difference between open/closed and free/comercial. A gratis project can be either open or closed source. A comercial project can also be either open or closed.
You are both correct, but talking past each-other. It is in fact hard to market a commercial product under the GPL because you risk competing with a gratis fork of your own work. But the QT license doesn't care about gratis/commercial, only libre/closed.
But without using fingerprints you can still say "I am Tinidril". Fingerprints once stolen are no better or worse than the name, except that they are more unique. The identification phase just tells helps to determine what data will be authenticated against. If there are 7 Tinidrils, and I give you my name and password, you will have to check 7 places to see if my password matches any of them. If there are 7000 Tinidrils you will have to check 7000 places. But if I give you my fingerprint, then that really tells you who it is that I am claiming to be. My claim might not be valid, (Thats what authentication is all about.) but now it is very specific. Stealing my fingerprints so that you can clam to be me wont do you any good without the password, but it can still help to streamline the identification/authentication process.
Your missing the point. Identification is different than Authentication. Identification is saying "I am Bob." Authentication is saying "And here is my driver's license to prove it."
Biometrics work for identification because, for instance, there may be 100 people on your network named bob, 20 named bob smith, and 3 named bob q smith. This is a big problem for large unmanaged collections of identities like many PGP key repositories.
Two penguins walked into a bar. The third one ducked.
-----------------------
Whats black and white and red all over? Tux after smashing that anoying butterfly.
-----------------------
Tux had to take his car for engine repair. The mechanic told him to leave his car with him for about two hours to find out whats wrong.
So Tux went across the street to a grocery store and climbed into a freezer to eat vanilla ice cream. When the two hours was up the he went back to the garage to find out what happened to his car.
When the he entered the garage, the mechanic looked at him and said, "Looks like you blew a seal."
Tux replied, "NO way, thats vanilla ice-cream!"
nospam (at) biped.us
Actually, an ipv6 address would be more like this.
::, and most IPs will have a long string of zeros. So with that an IPv6 address might look like this.
ffab:3a53:5af1:201b:78de:fb8c:2897:192f
However the standard allows for replacing any single string of zeros with
ffab:3a53:5af1::2f
This is not at all a fair charactorization. Many mainline denominations believe that birth-control is wrong, but not on the same level as abortion which is treated as murder. I have never once heard a Christian claim that birth-control is baby-killing.
I'm sure there are a few out there on the fringes, but what group of people doesn't have that problem? Your really not going to get a good understanding of Christian teaching from a Monty Python song.
There is some grey area in some forms of birth control that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. In many ways that is closer to abortion than birth-control.
BTW: In general, the "Jesus-freaks" term came from a movement in the 60s and 70s that was largely fundamentalist. This is painting with a broad brush, but I don't think fundamentalists have a problem with birth-control.
What you are proposing wont work. Only the original linked file (or implied index.?) will be cached. In order for the bulk of the content to be cached, the site owner would have to change all internal links to point to freecache.
The working solution would be for the slashdot editors to give a site owner a heads-up so that they can prepare for the flood.
The point is that if your "detailed procedure" leaves out one insignificant detail, you can get slammed. Yeah, the obvious answer is, "Don't leave out any details" but that is much easier said than done. And again, this does nothing for that process you use that is so simple that it never occured to you to patent.
Also, using a patent as a defence is no better than proving prior art.
Yes patents can be used as a direct legal defence against more recent patents, but in reality thats not how it works. Most often they are used to force cross-licensing, or form a stalemate with an aggressive competitor.
A good example of this is that Tivo and Replay TV have cross-licensed most of their patents. Neither could market a decent player without using technology that the other has a patent on. Either one could probably have prevailed on prior-art, but that would have just voided the patents and let more competitors into the market.
It's not that simple. Microsoft probably wont wall themselves off completely from OSS. They will just put themselves in a position where they can pick and choose what will interoperate.
For example, they will certainly not break window's ability to browse the web, that would be suicide. OTOH they will likely lock OSS from reading DRM "enabled" office documents. They may even convince some big websites to not allow access from "untrusted" browsers. In each case they will only allow a level of compatability that will make Windows appear to be the most feature-full OS.
With all the fallout from internal memos being leaked to the Internet, or worms flooding internal networks because users turn off automatic-update, companies are going to jump all over the idea of completely locking-down their employees workstations. The customization that is such a great aspect if Linux will be seen as a liability for many companies.
It appears that you are the one lacking insight. No two patents are going to be EXACTLY alike. (No matter how broken the patent process is.)
The point of a defensive patent isn't to nulify another companies patent. Prior art can do that. A defensive patent is to protect the ideas that you don't have clear patents on. (Perhaps you thought the idea was too obvious to bother with.)
You may even think you have a valid patent, but someone can find a new way to apply an earlier vague patent. It's almost imposible to properly patent every single inovative technique you use, so defensive patents give you the ability to threaten retailiation against competing companies that want to start a patent war.
All of this is just another reason why the current patent law is so badly screwed up. Although I do belive that patents CAN be good, I think we would be better off with no patent system than the current one.
As true as that may be, the discussion was on prothon, not python.
In python you can't use spaces to make text line up in a sub-expression. This limitation was put in to prevent the problem we are talking about. However, prothon did away with the limitation, and thus the problem re-surfaced.
I still think that invisible chars should have no meaning in software design, but I concede that Python handles it better than Prothon would.
Thats not entirely true. If a line starts with a space, that will generate an error. But the language description explicitly says that spaces are allowed after the first tab. If a human can't see the difference, neither should the compiler.
Aaaaaaggggggggg Noooooooo!
Now Microsoft will never die!
I don't think the gradparent was expressing an unwillingness to learn somthing new. I think that the unwillingness was to use a tool with such a huge flaw. Diferentiations in invisible characters should never be a critical part of any programing language.
I understand why the author chose to do it, but the approach is just plain wrong. If a programmer were to insert spaces instead of a tab, it could create a bug that would be invisible to the eye, and very hard to find.
I think it has to do with the popularity of LAMP. ( Linux Apache MySql Perl/Python/Php/Prothon? ) Any new high-level language that wants to be taken seriously by the open-source comunity has to start with a P.
:)
BSD and Postgres are dying, because a serious OS has to start with an 'L' and a serious database has to start with an 'M'.
Yes this was a joke. Please don't flame me.
Get ready for more, 'cause thats exactly what happens in the "real world" too.
just like windows update, a simple software patch has the potential to hose an entire system!
Of course any patch has that potential, but by experience has been that this is much more of a problem with MS than with Linux.
OSS software tends to divide functionality into smaller discrete units with better defined functional requirements than with closed source. I think its a combination of the fact that OSS tends to be more academic than closed source, and that OSS projects would be dificult to build in a community model if the code were organized in a giant knot.
I assume you mean "pissing off giants", not "pissing of giants". Although the picture of Daryl drenched in urine like he was being cleaned with a firehose is surely entertaining. ;)
The difference is that XML-handling libraries all handle this automagically
How is that different? I could write a library to parse a CSV in about 10 minutes. Oh wait that is different. How long does it take to write a decent XML library? How many lines create how many bugs?
I think your points are fair, and not knowing anything about "MARC Records" I can't really comment on how XML would work for it.
I believe that there are good aplications for XML, but my reaction to it comes from the fact that people try to apply it in all sorts of places where it doesn't belong. (Like in a network protocol to validate emails) Bad programing bothers me because it makes bad programs that I may be forced to use at work. If this takes hold I will end up involved in tracking down email problems, and instead of being able to use a simple split command to break down the data I'll have to deal with mountains of useless tags.
My favorite mis-application of XML was made by Cisco for a network load-balancing device. They built an XML interface for bringing servers in and out of rotation, and it was the only way to automate the process. It never worked right, and even there own tools could never do the job reliably. I don't know how many hours I spent pulling my hair out on that one. A high-school kid should have been able to write that interface in 10 minutes, but using XML it was a nightmare.
We're probably closer in our thinking than our posts let on. I still don't see a single problem that XML solves for structured data, but for documents it has no equal. In the real world I'm sure there are all sorts of places where the line between structured data and document data is blury.
BTW: I love your "Lamejoke Generator".
That is a well reasoned arguement, but I in turn have to slightly disagree with you.
Really there are two different cases that we are talking about, storing data and transmiting data between applications.
In the first case, a relational database has much more structure than XML, can be indexed and searched much faster, and is easier to mutate.
In the second case, even with XML, both sides need to agree on what version of the data-structure is being used. I would suggest that it is very dangerous for the recipient to "read through", and I assume ignore data in the structure, unless the sender knows it is happening. And if the sender knows the data will be ignored, why send it?
XML doesn't solve any of these problems any better than a comma delimited list. It just hides them, which invites programmer error.
The right way to handle mutating data structures over the network is to have both sides negotiate what version of the standard they will speak. In the worst cases, programmers think that XML has solved the versioning problem, and then fail to include a versioning negotiation in the connection process. XML hid the problem, and now they don't think they need to solve it.
XML is great for DocBook or HTML type data, but for structured data it...
- Increases programmer overhead.
- Increases machine overhead.
- Increases network overhead.
- Hides potential issues.
- Invites programmer error.
SMTP is a great example of a well written protocol that has been able to mutate over time without breaking existing functionality. IMAP is a better example because it allows making multiple requests while waiting for responses, but both make it clear to me that XML does nothing but add overhead.
Yes, I have worked with real data. Why is it that so many people on slashdot assume that if someone disagrees with them that they must be ignorant?
By moving from comma-delimited to XML you don't solve the problem, you just move it. What happens if someone includes text in a record that just happens to close your field? I know there are answers to that, but they are not very different from those with comma separated lists.
BTW: To my knowledge Microsoft is the only developer brain-dead enough to try and solve the comma-in-a-field problem with quotes around the entry. But then again they are the ones who are trying to use XML for everything now, so I guess it fits.
The correct way to do it is escape them with slashes, which is way less complicated than you make it sound.
',' becomes '/,'
'/' becomes '//'
NEWLINE becomes '/n'
Thats it! Any other escape sequences would just be for added human readability, and would be needed in XML for the same purpose.
Your comments really underscore my problem with XML. It claims to fix many problems, but in fact it just makes them more opaque. (Much like OOP, but thats another matter.)
At least you stayed away from the idiotic notion that I always hear about XML providing a standard format for structuring data. In reality it is no more standard than plain text. Which of these is correct?
<LUSER><UID>12<UID><NAME>Biff</NAME></LUSER>
<LUSER UID="12"><NAME>Biff</NAME></LUSER&g t;
<LUSER UID="12"><NOMBRE>Biff</NOMBRE></LUSER>
And Isn't this easier to read?
LUSER,12,Biff
IMHO: XML is excelent in a DocBook like implementation where the data will not fit into a clean record structure, but for all other implementations that I have seen it is snakeoil. It's more dificult for humans, more dificult for machines, and claims to fix a lot of problems that it just sweeps under the rug.
BTW: I manage a data retention system (not a relational database) that stores about 50GB/day and has to be kept on local storage for a full month. The data is replicated between two remote locations and backed up daily. If I had to move the data from comma-delimited to XML, our costs would more than double for bandwidth, storage, and labor (switching tapes). That doesn't even include the extra processing that would need to be done to reference the data. I'm not sure my boss would call that "a few bytes".
Um, Yes. New patches are still being released for 2.0 and 2.2. Of course by this time it is rare that new vulerabilities are found. Can Microsoft say the same for 95?