Look up at this [slashdot.org]. Putting information in XML makes the first baby step of reverse engineering easier, nothing else.
I think calling it a baby step is an exaggeration.
It's far far easier parsing XML documents with tags vs. some binary format. Without XML, you have no idea, whatsoever, of the size of the fields of data you are dealing with.
For the purposes of reverse engineering, it's the roughly the difference between having source code and a binary executable.
Some people have experimented with Source Code obfuscators, sometimes called Shrouds, but have found that these are always reverse engineered rather quickly due to the availability of Source Code parsing tools. While binary executables are sometimes reverse engineered, I would hardly characterize the difference as being just baby steps away.
In any case, it will be very difficult for MS to justify purposeful obfuscation of the XML. If they do this, it will give competitors more ammunition that MS talks open but really is lock-in.
There are already really good tools that will diff XML docs for you. A fairly junior programmer, working alone, with those tools, could discover the meaning and data types of all the tags with a little exploration.
If MS does come out with XML documents, they will be reverse engineered really quickly, I'd bet. The binary Word formats, by comparison, often take quite a while to reverse engineer and there're often problems with the conversions.
This is NOT Flamebait, you head-buried-in-the-sand Democratic Moderators.
Go ahead, mod me down, that's what the +1 is for, getting past the biases of the Moderator pool, IMO.
When will people wake up and see that it's the Democrats that have been, for years, working in the interests of big business. Sure, the Republicans do it to, but you at least everybody expects it from them.
The '80s were supposed to be the decade of the mega-merger, but the Clinton Administration made Reagan look like Nader on this score.
During the Clinton Administration:
The largest bank/insurance merge in history, illegal at the time it was executed, but ignored by the Justice Department to give them time to change the law - The Citibank/Travelers merger.
HUGE Petrochemical mergers - Exxon/Mobile, BP/Amoco, Shell/Texaco US marketing and refining. Probably the three largest such mergers in history.
Unprecedented media mergers, Disney/ABC, CBS/Viacom, AOL/TW, others. The rapid shrink of local media choice, growth of ClearChannel, Newspaper consolidations, etc.
The Enron, Worldcom, Tyco shenanigans mostly took place on Clinton's watch. All of these companies were huge contributors to Democratic (and Republican, to be fair) campaigns.
People need to wake up. The Democrats are not out for the 'little guy' any more than the Republicans.
Canadians wish to be able to use US medicial facilities to have procedures performed when Canadian ones are full.
I was told that this provision of the Insurance plans paid for US care whenever the Canadian care was wait-listed and was considered a benefit above the standard Canadian coverage.
Would I want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system? Not on your life.
Apparently, a lot of Canadians don't agree with you. Oh, they say they do, if you ask them, but they also insist on getting Medical Insurance that covers procedures performed at Hospitals in the US if there's a waiting list for the same services in Canada.
It was some years ago, but I recall that some public employees in the Vancouver area actually negotiated that into their contracts at one point, even covering retirees. I believe you'll find it's a common Medical Insurance benefit for public employees in places in Canada where US medical care is conveniently available.
Oh, wait a minute, you said you wouldn't want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system. I guess that's right, many Canadians want to raise taxes and have both the US-system and the Canadian system.
The fact that many of these employees who insist on having US-style care are public employees speaks volumes, I think.
Actually, it's an open question. Nobody knows if Chess is a draw with best play on the part of both players, a win for White or a win for Black (! White makes the first weakness).
I know it is, I just don't understand the rationale.
I've always thought that this was just begging for problems. I don't understand the upside. Seems like whitespace is presentation, which should be handled by Formatting Objects or something.
We on/. already know what Palladium is all about.
What needs to happen is for the mass media to cover this story. If Lucky Green pulls this off, the mass media (Disney/ABC, AOL/TW, Fox, NBC/GE), will be all over this story, revealing how this technology is all about screwing the consumer in favor of the IP moguls.
Networks have the quirky property of making information readily available, easy to manipulate, and trivial to duplicate. Try to say the same about WordStar, typewriters, and pens.
Sure, get things on the network that make sense to put on the network. Most stuff done with pen and typewriter today doesn't classify as something that must be shared.
WordStar data could be put on a network, with a little ingenuity. How much would it cost for the Navy to come up with some kind of export/import program and format for WordStar so they could index and mine those documents? A tiny fraction of the $6.9 Billion would cover that.
Do you really think this Navy project is going to obviate pens? Is there really a point to making sure the envelope or the odd label they type today with a typewriter be sharable on the network? If people are doing memos on typewriters, by all means, update them with something better. Note that something better may not be the latest WYSIWYG word processor. A form-based editor for generating standard memos might go a long way toward really standardizing their document formats, making sure they are indexable and keyword searchable, and require a tiny fraction of the training and support costs.
Paperless offices haven't exactly been a stellar success. I don't want to see the Navy replacing proven solutions, like pens, with tablet computers and hope that this really makes people more effective. I'd be much more interested in seeing them focus on the problem areas of incompatibility, like the guys who use two computer systems, rather than build some grand unified Enterprise of the future.
The following has been attributed to Dennis Ritchie and Bill Joy, but I seem to remember it being Rob Pike. When someone pointed out that X fills a much needed void:
"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck. --- Rob Pike, on X"
Also, Dennis Ritchie was said to have been heard saying:
"Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right."
I think the point is not to develop web applications with Mozilla, but more generally to use the plugin architecture and the customizability of Mozilla to develop generalized local applications.
An example of this kind of thing would be Komodo, an IDE for Perl/Python/Tcl/ development.
I seem to recall that some use MSIE as a component architecture to develop generalized applications in much the same way, but I can't think of any examples of this right now.
...but now Usenet has become all but unusable anyway...
I agree with the others. Usenet is still vital. A lot of cool people still venture into Usenet, like Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, John McCarthy and Brad Templeton. Here's a clue on useful Usenetting these days: groups.google.com - let's you zero in on lots of fascinating stuff.
But I would be sorry to see AOL go out of business, they're a real bellwether of the industry, and if they're gone it won't be a good sign for the markets.
Markets aren't static. Clearance, even of the very large, can be a healthy thing. This would be great news for all the small ISPs out there that seem to provide such good service at low prices but find it hard to compete with AOLs marketing muscle. Earthlink and others probably wouldn't mind it, either.
You're right about one thing, I went back and read the article on-line (no URL, it's available to WSJ on-line subscribers) and it didn't say that Starbuck's is losing market share. It appears they are gaining market share, but that the overall market is also growing.
They did point out the small entrepeneur who has been very successful opening his coffee shops right next to new Starbuck's. Is that guy exercising predatory marketing practices?
Look, it's not like there's a monopoly situation here. As long as the market is growing and the little guys are thriving, what's the problem?
...and smothers local coffee houses with sheer marketing pressure.
Uhhh, actually, this is wrong.
There was an article in the WSJ a few weeks back about how Starbuck's, while growing wildly, is actually losing market share to local coffee houses.
A lot of locals complain about the competition, but their sales are way up for the most part.
A few coffee houses go under when a Starbuck's springs up, but it may not be related. It turns out that there's always been a large turnover rate in coffee houses, a lot of them close down every year for decades. Coffee house closings are actually down.
It appears that the introduction of Starbuck's just increases the market for good coffee.
ObSlashdotObservation: Wouldn't it be nice if MS could view their competition the same way, not as enemies that have to be eliminated at any cost, but rather as part of a healthy market that allows everyone to prosper?
But that's how it's always worked, in every technological industry. Universities do the basic, theoretical research (paid for by industry sponsorship or government grants, which is the same thing indirectly) then commercial entities are formed to make the theories into something practical.
To my way of thinking, Universities should provide free software when it's supported by Government grants in that the public paid for it. And, no, I don't buy that government support is the same as industry grants. If that were the case, we should close the libraries since there are plenty of fine book stores available. After all, Government support is the same as Industry grant and we can't expect the book stores to support their "competition" through their taxes now, can we?
Government support is the same as Industry grant when Industry runs the Government. I don't think we're there yet, but with people thinking like you, I suspect we're not far from it.
So, which is it, do these risk-takers in industry provide all the innovation, or is it done in Universities as you are saying now?
Competition is good for markets, but RMS wasn't competing, he was safe in his academic position, insulated from the risks of the market. All he was doing was destroying Symbolics - in doing so, he created no value.
Total baloney. Read, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
RMS created a lot of that software, even after Symbolics and LMI were formed, and offered value to BOTH companies. He felt it only fair that they kick back by providing their changes back to him. When one of the companies balked at the arrangement, he proceeded to produce all of the Symbolics changes on his own without looking at the Symbolics source code and work with LMI in integrating that into their shared base. It seems to me that it was Symbolics who were destroying the value equation here by not sharing their changes and facilitating common advancement.
Sure, competition is good for markets, but cooperation can be better for advancement in some areas.
The solution is for the Free Software world to stop thinking in terms of free versions of commercial products, and start looking for solutions to problems that are too exotic or novel for the commercial world. New interfaces for example, and entirely new applications.
So, should the Apache folks just stop working and cede the market to iPlanet and MS? Should people stop donating their time to work on Perl and Python and let Activestate do that for the "market". Should the PostgreSQL and MySQL people stop work now that we have Oracle and Sybase?
Why should people suddenly stop working on code they themselves need and use and start only looking into far out research projects? I guess you would argue that no value is created by Apache, Perl, MySQL and the like and that these things just needlessly distract from the commercial marketplace?
Web Servers and Web Browsers were all initially free software. I guess you'd argue that those teams should stop working as soon as the commercial "innovators" move in, huh?
Actually, I think you'll find a lot of free software does extend into exotic areas, like advanced clustering, new OS models, P2P, new languages (Icon, ML, Mercury, most Schemes are all free software), AI. Of course, it doesn't take long before commercial interests start to work in these same areas if they show promise. I guess your take would be that the free software community should back off at that point.
A good test would be: if it wasn't free, would anyone buy it? An awful lot of Free software fails that test. If MS Office and Star Office were the same price, which would be better?
Why is that a better test? Since when is value not related to price? There are some areas that Free Software has not competed well with commercial offerings, like UI, documentation and support. Why should Free Software give up it's advantage in price?
OK, let's compare MS Office and Star Office at the same price. Free. Oh wait, MS Office could never exist at that price, so it's not a realistic comparison. Why is it any more a realistic comparison to raise the price of free software?
Well that is the structural problem of Open Source, and it goes all the way back to when RMS worked at MIT, and spent years reverse engineering Symbolics products and giving the code away to their competition.
Well, RMS' view was that both Symbolics and LMI were benefitting heavily from his own (and others) work at the MIT Lab. He felt it only fair that the MIT Lab should have access to their changes. To facilitate this, he had to make sure that both companies had access to any changes made so as to make any further changes they made applicable to the current source base.
All the innovation and risk-taking happens in the commercial world, yet the Open Source movement damages the commercial world by making it more and more difficult for them to afford to create new products. It's not a sustainable situation.
Funny how your first sentence provides a counter example to your thesis. All the innovation that went into to the LMI and Symbolics development initially was done in the public-domain free-software world of the MIT AI Lab. Then, the commercial entities sprang up to take advantage of this when it was shown to have value.
It also ignores the history that the FSF's first product was Emacs, which was initially developed in the free-software world. Another example of where the innovation was done in the Free Software world and commercial entities sprung up to take advantage of that development, btw. Gosling Emacs was a commercial clone of the Emacs that was developed at MIT.
Anyway... BitKeeper, Photoshop, CDE and Unix are innovative? Seems to me that each borrowed very heavily from other products before them, yet you don't complain about how they reengineered known solutions making it more difficult for those who went before them. In the case of BitKeeper, the most widely known predeccesors were, in fact, free software solutions.
What you are describing is competition. Whether from free software or from commercial software, that's all it is. Funny, I thought competition was good for markets. It clears out bad products in favor of others that have more favorable attributes, be it features or price.
If it's not sustainable, as you claim, what is the solution? Extend copyrights even further, more software patents? What? Seems like the commercial world, with it's software patents, DMCA, copyright extensions, batteries of lawyers and marketroids have all the competitive advantages already. If they can't win with the legal system on their side, then perhaps there is something seriously wrong with their model.
Michael Keaton would be a horrible Batman, but I think he surprised people. He played it with a dark subtlety fitting to Frank Miller's vision.
Now, he didn't have the chisled features of comic book hero, but who does? Maybe Val Kilmer, who wasn't nearly as good, in my opinion.
I also think that Keanu Reeves' bad reputation as an actor is not really deserved. He doesn't show great range, but he does have a certain presence and magnetism. Reminds me of Clark Gable.
The least Apple could have done would be to use a better microkernel...
You are all over the place here. First, the problem was that they were focussing too much on developing the kernel and ignoring GUI standards and development, but now you want them to spend more on developing a "better" microkernel.
If Win2k with SP3 is not HIPAA compliant (and I stress the if because no one has made a statement either way, yet) what can non-compliant Medical IT departments do?
First off, if you're storing the medical records on individual workstations instead of a centralized database, you're a moron.
The records would exist in transit on individual workstations and the workstations would need authenticated access to the DB, so MS's access of that workstation could conceivably compromise a centralized database. Also, I would expect that this EULA provision would eventually extend to MS's server Operating Systems. Better to be prepared.
Seond, if you let your servers auto-update and apply patches from *ANY* vendor without doing your own testing and verification of those patches before hand, you're an idiot.
But that's what you are agreeing to when you click through the EULA for this patch. So, installing this patch makes you an idiot. Fair enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I think calling it a baby step is an exaggeration.
It's far far easier parsing XML documents with tags vs. some binary format. Without XML, you have no idea, whatsoever, of the size of the fields of data you are dealing with.
For the purposes of reverse engineering, it's the roughly the difference between having source code and a binary executable.
Some people have experimented with Source Code obfuscators, sometimes called Shrouds, but have found that these are always reverse engineered rather quickly due to the availability of Source Code parsing tools. While binary executables are sometimes reverse engineered, I would hardly characterize the difference as being just baby steps away.
In any case, it will be very difficult for MS to justify purposeful obfuscation of the XML. If they do this, it will give competitors more ammunition that MS talks open but really is lock-in.
There are already really good tools that will diff XML docs for you. A fairly junior programmer, working alone, with those tools, could discover the meaning and data types of all the tags with a little exploration.
If MS does come out with XML documents, they will be reverse engineered really quickly, I'd bet. The binary Word formats, by comparison, often take quite a while to reverse engineer and there're often problems with the conversions.
Go ahead, mod me down, that's what the +1 is for, getting past the biases of the Moderator pool, IMO.
When will people wake up and see that it's the Democrats that have been, for years, working in the interests of big business. Sure, the Republicans do it to, but you at least everybody expects it from them.
The '80s were supposed to be the decade of the mega-merger, but the Clinton Administration made Reagan look like Nader on this score.
During the Clinton Administration:
People need to wake up. The Democrats are not out for the 'little guy' any more than the Republicans.
I was told that this provision of the Insurance plans paid for US care whenever the Canadian care was wait-listed and was considered a benefit above the standard Canadian coverage.
I could be misinformed, I suppose.
Apparently, a lot of Canadians don't agree with you. Oh, they say they do, if you ask them, but they also insist on getting Medical Insurance that covers procedures performed at Hospitals in the US if there's a waiting list for the same services in Canada.
It was some years ago, but I recall that some public employees in the Vancouver area actually negotiated that into their contracts at one point, even covering retirees. I believe you'll find it's a common Medical Insurance benefit for public employees in places in Canada where US medical care is conveniently available.
Oh, wait a minute, you said you wouldn't want to lower taxes and go to a for-profit US-style system. I guess that's right, many Canadians want to raise taxes and have both the US-system and the Canadian system.
The fact that many of these employees who insist on having US-style care are public employees speaks volumes, I think.
Actually, it's an open question. Nobody knows if Chess is a draw with best play on the part of both players, a win for White or a win for Black (! White makes the first weakness).
He thought he was lost so he resigned. Had he more time, he might have been able to work out the draw.
I know it is, I just don't understand the rationale.
I've always thought that this was just begging for problems. I don't understand the upside. Seems like whitespace is presentation, which should be handled by Formatting Objects or something.
Uh, wait a minute...
Sure, get things on the network that make sense to put on the network. Most stuff done with pen and typewriter today doesn't classify as something that must be shared.
WordStar data could be put on a network, with a little ingenuity. How much would it cost for the Navy to come up with some kind of export/import program and format for WordStar so they could index and mine those documents? A tiny fraction of the $6.9 Billion would cover that.
Do you really think this Navy project is going to obviate pens? Is there really a point to making sure the envelope or the odd label they type today with a typewriter be sharable on the network? If people are doing memos on typewriters, by all means, update them with something better. Note that something better may not be the latest WYSIWYG word processor. A form-based editor for generating standard memos might go a long way toward really standardizing their document formats, making sure they are indexable and keyword searchable, and require a tiny fraction of the training and support costs.
Paperless offices haven't exactly been a stellar success. I don't want to see the Navy replacing proven solutions, like pens, with tablet computers and hope that this really makes people more effective. I'd be much more interested in seeing them focus on the problem areas of incompatibility, like the guys who use two computer systems, rather than build some grand unified Enterprise of the future.
If it works fine, why put it on the network?
My bicycle works fine, but it's not good for satellite maintenance.
The following has been attributed to Dennis Ritchie and Bill Joy, but I seem to remember it being Rob Pike. When someone pointed out that X fills a much needed void:
"I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck. --- Rob Pike, on X"
Also, Dennis Ritchie was said to have been heard saying:
"Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be gone in two years. He was half right."
An example of this kind of thing would be Komodo, an IDE for Perl/Python/Tcl/ development.
I seem to recall that some use MSIE as a component architecture to develop generalized applications in much the same way, but I can't think of any examples of this right now.
I agree with the others. Usenet is still vital. A lot of cool people still venture into Usenet, like Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, John McCarthy and Brad Templeton. Here's a clue on useful Usenetting these days: groups.google.com - let's you zero in on lots of fascinating stuff.
Markets aren't static. Clearance, even of the very large, can be a healthy thing. This would be great news for all the small ISPs out there that seem to provide such good service at low prices but find it hard to compete with AOLs marketing muscle. Earthlink and others probably wouldn't mind it, either.
They did point out the small entrepeneur who has been very successful opening his coffee shops right next to new Starbuck's. Is that guy exercising predatory marketing practices?
Look, it's not like there's a monopoly situation here. As long as the market is growing and the little guys are thriving, what's the problem?
Uhhh, actually, this is wrong.
There was an article in the WSJ a few weeks back about how Starbuck's, while growing wildly, is actually losing market share to local coffee houses.
A lot of locals complain about the competition, but their sales are way up for the most part.
A few coffee houses go under when a Starbuck's springs up, but it may not be related. It turns out that there's always been a large turnover rate in coffee houses, a lot of them close down every year for decades. Coffee house closings are actually down.
It appears that the introduction of Starbuck's just increases the market for good coffee.
ObSlashdotObservation: Wouldn't it be nice if MS could view their competition the same way, not as enemies that have to be eliminated at any cost, but rather as part of a healthy market that allows everyone to prosper?
Heh. At first I was wondering what the Common Gateway Interface had to do with this.
Then I remembered.
To my way of thinking, Universities should provide free software when it's supported by Government grants in that the public paid for it. And, no, I don't buy that government support is the same as industry grants. If that were the case, we should close the libraries since there are plenty of fine book stores available. After all, Government support is the same as Industry grant and we can't expect the book stores to support their "competition" through their taxes now, can we?
Government support is the same as Industry grant when Industry runs the Government. I don't think we're there yet, but with people thinking like you, I suspect we're not far from it.
So, which is it, do these risk-takers in industry provide all the innovation, or is it done in Universities as you are saying now?
Total baloney. Read, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software RMS created a lot of that software, even after Symbolics and LMI were formed, and offered value to BOTH companies. He felt it only fair that they kick back by providing their changes back to him. When one of the companies balked at the arrangement, he proceeded to produce all of the Symbolics changes on his own without looking at the Symbolics source code and work with LMI in integrating that into their shared base. It seems to me that it was Symbolics who were destroying the value equation here by not sharing their changes and facilitating common advancement.
Sure, competition is good for markets, but cooperation can be better for advancement in some areas.
So, should the Apache folks just stop working and cede the market to iPlanet and MS? Should people stop donating their time to work on Perl and Python and let Activestate do that for the "market". Should the PostgreSQL and MySQL people stop work now that we have Oracle and Sybase?
Why should people suddenly stop working on code they themselves need and use and start only looking into far out research projects? I guess you would argue that no value is created by Apache, Perl, MySQL and the like and that these things just needlessly distract from the commercial marketplace?
Web Servers and Web Browsers were all initially free software. I guess you'd argue that those teams should stop working as soon as the commercial "innovators" move in, huh?
Actually, I think you'll find a lot of free software does extend into exotic areas, like advanced clustering, new OS models, P2P, new languages (Icon, ML, Mercury, most Schemes are all free software), AI. Of course, it doesn't take long before commercial interests start to work in these same areas if they show promise. I guess your take would be that the free software community should back off at that point.
Why is that a better test? Since when is value not related to price? There are some areas that Free Software has not competed well with commercial offerings, like UI, documentation and support. Why should Free Software give up it's advantage in price?
OK, let's compare MS Office and Star Office at the same price. Free. Oh wait, MS Office could never exist at that price, so it's not a realistic comparison. Why is it any more a realistic comparison to raise the price of free software?
Well, RMS' view was that both Symbolics and LMI were benefitting heavily from his own (and others) work at the MIT Lab. He felt it only fair that the MIT Lab should have access to their changes. To facilitate this, he had to make sure that both companies had access to any changes made so as to make any further changes they made applicable to the current source base.
Funny how your first sentence provides a counter example to your thesis. All the innovation that went into to the LMI and Symbolics development initially was done in the public-domain free-software world of the MIT AI Lab. Then, the commercial entities sprang up to take advantage of this when it was shown to have value.
It also ignores the history that the FSF's first product was Emacs, which was initially developed in the free-software world. Another example of where the innovation was done in the Free Software world and commercial entities sprung up to take advantage of that development, btw. Gosling Emacs was a commercial clone of the Emacs that was developed at MIT.
Anyway... BitKeeper, Photoshop, CDE and Unix are innovative? Seems to me that each borrowed very heavily from other products before them, yet you don't complain about how they reengineered known solutions making it more difficult for those who went before them. In the case of BitKeeper, the most widely known predeccesors were, in fact, free software solutions.
What you are describing is competition. Whether from free software or from commercial software, that's all it is. Funny, I thought competition was good for markets. It clears out bad products in favor of others that have more favorable attributes, be it features or price.
If it's not sustainable, as you claim, what is the solution? Extend copyrights even further, more software patents? What? Seems like the commercial world, with it's software patents, DMCA, copyright extensions, batteries of lawyers and marketroids have all the competitive advantages already. If they can't win with the legal system on their side, then perhaps there is something seriously wrong with their model.
Michael Keaton would be a horrible Batman, but I think he surprised people. He played it with a dark subtlety fitting to Frank Miller's vision.
Now, he didn't have the chisled features of comic book hero, but who does? Maybe Val Kilmer, who wasn't nearly as good, in my opinion.
I also think that Keanu Reeves' bad reputation as an actor is not really deserved. He doesn't show great range, but he does have a certain presence and magnetism. Reminds me of Clark Gable.
!!!
Darn! I thought I had invented that technique.
Just goes to show you...
You are all over the place here. First, the problem was that they were focussing too much on developing the kernel and ignoring GUI standards and development, but now you want them to spend more on developing a "better" microkernel.
I think you just want to complain.
Use Macs or Linux?
The records would exist in transit on individual workstations and the workstations would need authenticated access to the DB, so MS's access of that workstation could conceivably compromise a centralized database. Also, I would expect that this EULA provision would eventually extend to MS's server Operating Systems. Better to be prepared.
But that's what you are agreeing to when you click through the EULA for this patch. So, installing this patch makes you an idiot. Fair enough.
Are you saying that this particular story line was good for Space 1999 or did you like this one apart from the relative considerations?
This sounds like the storyline of a particularly bad Space 1999 episode.