That quote is a friggin joke. There is absolutely no way Microsoft loses any substantial profit from piracy, especially considering that their customer base consists mostly of corporate users(not big on piracy in general) and people buying new machines(OS pre-installed).
The only people who pirate their software are students(who can usually get a copy for $15 from the school bookstore...) and losers living in their mom's basement.
Mozilla is not "dying". Mozilla is a lot of things, the GUI for the Mozilla Web Browser is being replaced by Phoenix. That's hardly dying.
Galeon, a Gecko based browser (ie. a UI for Gecko) was (mostly) rewritten when switching to GTK2. That's not "dying", is it?
Gecko is the most important part of Mozilla, and it's doing just fine. The Mozilla UI is being replaced, and the Mozilla suite is being, optionally, separated into separate apps.
This is not dying, this is moving forward. This is not fixing bugs by rewriting, this is nothing more than replacing a UI with a better one, not even close to the same thing.
People, please just RTFA, or at least one of the better summarizations posted so far. The parent poster is just being an idiot.
No, this isn't "disposing of the...", nor is it the "death of Mozilla"...
Phoenix will become the Mozilla browser, Thunderbird will become the mail program. More effort will be made to optimize and clean up Gecko, the mozilla rendering engine, the most important part of the whole Mozilla project.
The big change is that they are focusing on separate applications, instead of one large, everything and the kitchen sink application suite.
Has anyone else seen absolutely abysmal network performance with the finder?
We have several folders on our main webserver that contain several thousand files and folders, and OS X always craps out trying to browse through it. This doesn't happen with local files.
This includes some save dialogs, such as Photoshop's, making OS X very difficult to use on our network. We resorted to making symlinks, based on the first letter of the directory names, into separate folders. eg. `folder2/b' would contain symlinks to everything in `folder' starting with `b'...
Note, this is not a network problem, it is strictly with finder. Using the command line to view the files is not noticably slower than the local filesystem.
Another poster pointed out that this can be done in windows by first highlighting the image, but I'm assuming he's doing this in windows. What I'd like to know is, is this even possible in Linux/X11?
You are so full of shit. You think most of the people here couldn't get "Microsoft" for free?
In fact, I'd bet most have free, or nearly free, copies of everything Microsoft produces, either pirated or cheap $15 copies from university stores.
Money has almost nothing to do with it. Free copies of GNU/Linux distros are nice, but I'd bet top dollar most GNU/Linux users have paid full price for a distro at least once.
You criticize Americans as a whole, then go on and say one technology should be used over another, without even talking about the technical merits of each one, and in fact, actually ignoring the apparent technical merits of CDMA.
Personally, I don't give a rats ass either way, it's fucking phones for Christ's sake. I say build whatever would be best for the Iraqi people, screw everything else, because it's the right thing to do. But assholes from both sides of the pond will lobby for what they personally want.
Furthermore, unilateral my ass! America + Great Britain + 40 other countries != unilateral. I could go on and criticize you Europeans as a whole, but I won't stoop down to your level.
I loved e16, and it was my favorite WM for quite some time. My only big gripe with e16 is the fact that window cycling and focus handling sucks. I need window cycling such as in Metacity, ie. more graphical clues as to what's going on, otherwise I just have trouble with it. And the focus switching in e16 is just terrible, eg. when you close a dialog window the focus doesn't properly get switched back to the parent window.
Other than that, e16 is pretty damn good. I _love_ the icon box. That is the best damn feature of e16, IMO. I've been waiting 2 years for something like that to appear as a standalone app for any WM, or for Gnome or KDE to add something like that.
Had I known it would never come, I would have done it myself. Now I'm not sure what to do...
A year or two ago a company got seriously slapped around for doing exactly this. I don't remember the details, but the company was severely damaged because of it.
I am a pragmatist, to a degree. The world is not black and white, people have to deal with/put up with people that are Bad(TM), etc. That means shaking hands with the occasional despotic dictator. Wake up, every leader on the planet has had to do this.
If the Bush administration really does use tortue, I would certainly disapprove of that, to a degree, depending on the type of torture, what was at stake, etc. I would certainly torture someone myself if millions of lives were at stake, and that was the only avenue I had to persue.
From what I understand, drugs are far more effective than torture for extracting information.
I would not, however, grind people up with plastic shredders and rape women simply for disagreeing with my rule, or for any reason at all for that matter.
In short, wake up and smell the napalm, Bush != Saddam. Bush == Any Other Leader of a Democratic Country. If you believe otherwise, you are VERY naive.
This war will destroy Saddam's regime. A free(er) Iraq will be created. There will be less suffering. That is why I support this war, not because I am a Bush "supporter". I didn't vote for him, and I probably wouldn't if the election were tomorrow.
War is hell. What many people don't understand is that peace can be hell too. Attempted peaceful diplomacy has left at least 500,000 dead in Iraq in 10 years, give war a chance.
jailing thousands of innocent Muslim people as suspected terrorists
Jailed, not tortured. Due process will prevail. I don't agree with this, however, but it's not as bad as you are pretending.
blowing up cars full of "suspects" (including an American citizen)
Your point? Killing enemies who would otherwise kill you is the norm in EVERY country.
and torturing Al Queda members that they've caught?
1. What kind of torture? 2. You know this, HOW?
Saddam is guilty of far, far, far worse than anything you are trying to present as worse than it actually is, even if it is as bad as you see to think.
How about grinding people up in plastic shredders? Raping women, hanging by their hair, with their husbands being forced to watch? How about killing peoples' families to keep them in line? And this done to people who have done nothing other than disagree with Saddam's regime.
No, they are simply not comparable, not by any stretch of the imagination.
1. burning oil is bad for the enviornment. very, very, very bad. the U.S. takes shit for the Exxon Valdez, but that was nothing compared to the burning oil fields of the first Gulf war.
2. oil is/will be the Iraqi peoples' bread n` butter.
3. Why the fuck should we let Saddam's regime successfully institue a scorched earth policy?
4. burning oil fields creates lots of smoke, enough smoke to cause confusion on a battlefield, enough smoke to kill people, etc.
Furthermore, the U.S. won't get any of that oil unless the new government chooses to sell it to us. The U.S. isn't going to "unilaterally" install a new government in Iraq. It will be a process with all the civilized nations of the world.
Speaking of "unilateral", this action is definately not unilateral, despite what the French, German, and Russian governments would have you believe. The U.S. has the support of over 40 other nations, including England. You want to see unilateral action, look up what France has done militarily in Africa this century. France can hold its own in setting up puppet governments. What we have these days is a case of the pot calling the U.S. black, and a bunch of blind people who won't even Google to find out what France, Germany and Russia's ulterior motives are.
I'll lay them out for you...
France: France has illegally been doing business with Iraq, against the U.N. sanctions, for years now.
Russia: Russia, with it's pathetic GDP, is owed roughly 8 billion dollars by Iraq, and has also illegally done business with Iraq against U.N. sanctions.
Germany: Germany gets a lot of cheap oil from Iraq through the food for oil program.
So, in short, if they just let them burn the oil fields, ignorant dicks like yourself would be complaining about the harm to the enviornment, taking away the Iraqi peoples' natural resources, etc.
FWIW, I support this war solely for giving the Iraqi people a chance to create a prosperous country, and so Iraqi refugees can go back to their own country, as they wish to do.
What's your problem man? Not everyone who runs Linux is a nerd in his mom's basement, lots of people do real work on Linux...
If you're not interested in running Linux on PPC hardware, fine, but don't be a dick about other people doing so.... Jeez...
FWIW, I'm getting a laptop to replace my workstation at the office, and I am considering getting a Mac laptop and running Linux on it, not because I want to "dink around with package installation, X configuration, and hardware compatibility issues", but to do work on. Why? Because Linux is my *nix development platform of choice, and Apple makes the best laptops around from what I can tell.
I've "dinked around" with OS X a bunch, and personally, I don't think it's all it's hyped up to be. Sure, it's great, but nothing to jizz over. For a *nix, I prefer Linux or FreeBSD.
And I simply don't believe you on that one. Any reasonable binary format will have some kind of internal structure (like an index of pointers) that will allow accessing the data without parsing the entire document.
No no NO! You are not thinking! I have looked at a couple XML document formats, and many of them use multiple files, zipped up into one file. This could easily contain some type of index, and I would bet many do. This would allow a program to only parse the pieces of the document it needs, after looking it up in the index file. This is quite simple and easy to implement.
Is this going to be slower than a _well designed_ binary format? Of course. But the key here is "well designed". Most simply aren't... And it's not going to be slower enough to be a problem, especially considering that there are high performance libraries for unzipping files on the fly and many XML parsers that are very well optimized.
Again, parsing XML is a CPU-intensive task, thereby making it useless for anything which requires moving a large amount of data. It comes down to having to parse the entire tree to get at any tiny piece of data. (exactly as the author of the original article suggests)
I agree. XML does not lend itself well for handling the job of a database. XML is great for documents, configuration data more complex than key/value pairs, etc.
I think you are overstating the CPU-intensity of parsing XML. A good parser will handle pretty large documents before it starts to get slow. I have seen plenty of programs that handle fairly large(>10MB) documents as well or faster than comparable binary formats.
But I do think that people who talk about XML databases, etc. are smoking some good crack:)
I have written many programs utilizing LibXML, for parsing XML files over several megs, all which run several times in under a second. For fun I tested LibXML with much larger XML files and it performed quite well.
Your `xmldiff' example is ludicrous. It is most definately not 5000 times slower, xmldiff is obviously doing something extroardinarily stupid. Furthermore, diff is simply reading the files simultaneously byte by byte and comparing them, xmldiff has to do much more processing because it's comparing XML, not the raw data. That's like comparing diff to a C++ compiler.
Galeon handles it's own bookmarks file in the blink of an eye.
XML does not take so much more processing time than parsing any equally complex text data.
XML isn't meant to replace RDBMs, RDBMs aren't meant to replace flat text lists, etc. Comparing different tools for doing the wrong job is just ridiculously silly.
It strives to excel at too many things at once, and becomes inefficient and complex as a result.
I agree with this, to an extent. If you don't like/need all the fluff, don't use it. XML is only as complicated and inefficient as you want it to be.
XML tries to eliminate the step of writing parsers for data, although writing parsers has never been a significant part of application development to begin with.
It's not just about writing parsers for a single program. What happens when you have several programs that read the same type of file? What if said file-type is somewhat complex. XML keeps things simpler and easier for these cases.
Its rigidity instead forces you to waste time taking the output of the parser (a complex tree) and putting it into meaningful form.
What on earth are you talking about? YOU define the format of your XML data. If it doesn't need to be complicated, don't complicate it!
XML document tree traversal = 10000x more complex than getting column data out of a ResultSet...
Again, what? Keep the XML simple, and it will be just as easy.
Unfortunately it is also a billion times slower to parse XML than it is to perform a medium compexity database query.
Then XML isn't the proper solution for your problem. Just because some dipshit tries to force XML to do things it isn't optimized for doesn't make XML any less useful.
*snip* the rest of your comments comparing XML to
relational databases.
XML files are not high performance databases... Use the right tool for the job, and you will be much happier.
It sounds to me like XML isn't your problem. Your problem is the "genius" at your company that needs to be beat over the head with a clue stick. If I were you, I'd be sure to beat him hard.
I don't understand why so many people complain about XML so much. It's really quite useful for storing arbitrary data. We have several hundred thousand text-based documents where I work, and it has been a total nightmare, until I converted the whole thing(well, I'm not done yet...) to XML.
The documents are generally displayed as HTML on the web, but they're also read by a couple different programs for different purposes. When I first started here, it was mostly a mess of poorly hand-written HTML, but thankfully there were *only* about 20k documents at the time.
I was charged with the task of writing said programs to read these damn files. Unfortuneately, they weren't all marked up the same...
Now that we have XML and standard libraries for reading XML, it makes handling these documents a snap. Any program that needs to read them can simply have an XML parser plugged into it. The integrity of the documents themselves is maintained by the fact that they don't work if they're not properly marked up. So all these documents work, 100% all the time, and writing programs to read said documents is very simple and not prone to errors.
Yay for XML!:)
So, to sum up, XML is doing what it was meant to do, no less. Unfortuneately, it's also probably doing a bit more as well, XSL anyone? Yeck, why not just have a stand XML scripting language, why the need for the language to be valid XML itself?
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The only people who pirate their software are students(who can usually get a copy for $15 from the school bookstore...) and losers living in their mom's basement.
Just my 2 cents...
Galeon, a Gecko based browser (ie. a UI for Gecko) was (mostly) rewritten when switching to GTK2. That's not "dying", is it?
Gecko is the most important part of Mozilla, and it's doing just fine. The Mozilla UI is being replaced, and the Mozilla suite is being, optionally, separated into separate apps.
This is not dying, this is moving forward. This is not fixing bugs by rewriting, this is nothing more than replacing a UI with a better one, not even close to the same thing.
No, this isn't "disposing of the ...", nor is it the "death of Mozilla"...
Phoenix will become the Mozilla browser, Thunderbird will become the mail program. More effort will be made to optimize and clean up Gecko, the mozilla rendering engine, the most important part of the whole Mozilla project.
The big change is that they are focusing on separate applications, instead of one large, everything and the kitchen sink application suite.
We have several folders on our main webserver that contain several thousand files and folders, and OS X always craps out trying to browse through it. This doesn't happen with local files.
This includes some save dialogs, such as Photoshop's, making OS X very difficult to use on our network. We resorted to making symlinks, based on the first letter of the directory names, into separate folders. eg. `folder2/b' would contain symlinks to everything in `folder' starting with `b'...
Note, this is not a network problem, it is strictly with finder. Using the command line to view the files is not noticably slower than the local filesystem.
In fact, I'd bet most have free, or nearly free, copies of everything Microsoft produces, either pirated or cheap $15 copies from university stores.
Money has almost nothing to do with it. Free copies of GNU/Linux distros are nice, but I'd bet top dollar most GNU/Linux users have paid full price for a distro at least once.
I don't know about you, but I, and a lot of people I know, do NOT like to keep $500 worth of CDs in my car!
As more people start using mp3/ogg devices/computers as stereos, they will start to see the negative side of these new restrictions.
Personally, I don't give a rats ass either way, it's fucking phones for Christ's sake. I say build whatever would be best for the Iraqi people, screw everything else, because it's the right thing to do. But assholes from both sides of the pond will lobby for what they personally want.
Furthermore, unilateral my ass! America + Great Britain + 40 other countries != unilateral. I could go on and criticize you Europeans as a whole, but I won't stoop down to your level.
Other than that, e16 is pretty damn good. I _love_ the icon box. That is the best damn feature of e16, IMO. I've been waiting 2 years for something like that to appear as a standalone app for any WM, or for Gnome or KDE to add something like that.
Had I known it would never come, I would have done it myself. Now I'm not sure what to do...
Go eat shit, Twirlip.
Kinda ridiculous, no?
If the Bush administration really does use tortue, I would certainly disapprove of that, to a degree, depending on the type of torture, what was at stake, etc. I would certainly torture someone myself if millions of lives were at stake, and that was the only avenue I had to persue.
From what I understand, drugs are far more effective than torture for extracting information.
I would not, however, grind people up with plastic shredders and rape women simply for disagreeing with my rule, or for any reason at all for that matter.
In short, wake up and smell the napalm, Bush != Saddam. Bush == Any Other Leader of a Democratic Country. If you believe otherwise, you are VERY naive.
This war will destroy Saddam's regime. A free(er) Iraq will be created. There will be less suffering. That is why I support this war, not because I am a Bush "supporter". I didn't vote for him, and I probably wouldn't if the election were tomorrow.
War is hell. What many people don't understand is that peace can be hell too. Attempted peaceful diplomacy has left at least 500,000 dead in Iraq in 10 years, give war a chance.
Jailed, not tortured. Due process will prevail. I don't agree with this, however, but it's not as bad as you are pretending.
blowing up cars full of "suspects" (including an American citizen)
Your point? Killing enemies who would otherwise kill you is the norm in EVERY country.
and torturing Al Queda members that they've caught?
1. What kind of torture? 2. You know this, HOW?
Saddam is guilty of far, far, far worse than anything you are trying to present as worse than it actually is, even if it is as bad as you see to think.
How about grinding people up in plastic shredders? Raping women, hanging by their hair, with their husbands being forced to watch? How about killing peoples' families to keep them in line? And this done to people who have done nothing other than disagree with Saddam's regime.
No, they are simply not comparable, not by any stretch of the imagination.
The hypocrisy of these countries obviously really pisses people off.
There ya go!
1. burning oil is bad for the enviornment. very, very, very bad. the U.S. takes shit for the Exxon Valdez, but that was nothing compared to the burning oil fields of the first Gulf war.
2. oil is/will be the Iraqi peoples' bread n` butter.
3. Why the fuck should we let Saddam's regime successfully institue a scorched earth policy?
4. burning oil fields creates lots of smoke, enough smoke to cause confusion on a battlefield, enough smoke to kill people, etc.
Furthermore, the U.S. won't get any of that oil unless the new government chooses to sell it to us. The U.S. isn't going to "unilaterally" install a new government in Iraq. It will be a process with all the civilized nations of the world.
Speaking of "unilateral", this action is definately not unilateral, despite what the French, German, and Russian governments would have you believe. The U.S. has the support of over 40 other nations, including England. You want to see unilateral action, look up what France has done militarily in Africa this century. France can hold its own in setting up puppet governments. What we have these days is a case of the pot calling the U.S. black, and a bunch of blind people who won't even Google to find out what France, Germany and Russia's ulterior motives are.
I'll lay them out for you...
France: France has illegally been doing business with Iraq, against the U.N. sanctions, for years now.
Russia: Russia, with it's pathetic GDP, is owed roughly 8 billion dollars by Iraq, and has also illegally done business with Iraq against U.N. sanctions.
Germany: Germany gets a lot of cheap oil from Iraq through the food for oil program.
So, in short, if they just let them burn the oil fields, ignorant dicks like yourself would be complaining about the harm to the enviornment, taking away the Iraqi peoples' natural resources, etc.
FWIW, I support this war solely for giving the Iraqi people a chance to create a prosperous country, and so Iraqi refugees can go back to their own country, as they wish to do.
Why the hell not? It won't hurt anybody if you make a copy of one. Oh wait...
If you're not interested in running Linux on PPC hardware, fine, but don't be a dick about other people doing so.... Jeez...
FWIW, I'm getting a laptop to replace my workstation at the office, and I am considering getting a Mac laptop and running Linux on it, not because I want to "dink around with package installation, X configuration, and hardware compatibility issues", but to do work on. Why? Because Linux is my *nix development platform of choice, and Apple makes the best laptops around from what I can tell.
I've "dinked around" with OS X a bunch, and personally, I don't think it's all it's hyped up to be. Sure, it's great, but nothing to jizz over. For a *nix, I prefer Linux or FreeBSD.
No no NO! You are not thinking! I have looked at a couple XML document formats, and many of them use multiple files, zipped up into one file. This could easily contain some type of index, and I would bet many do. This would allow a program to only parse the pieces of the document it needs, after looking it up in the index file. This is quite simple and easy to implement.
Is this going to be slower than a _well designed_ binary format? Of course. But the key here is "well designed". Most simply aren't... And it's not going to be slower enough to be a problem, especially considering that there are high performance libraries for unzipping files on the fly and many XML parsers that are very well optimized.
I agree. XML does not lend itself well for handling the job of a database. XML is great for documents, configuration data more complex than key/value pairs, etc.
I think you are overstating the CPU-intensity of parsing XML. A good parser will handle pretty large documents before it starts to get slow. I have seen plenty of programs that handle fairly large(>10MB) documents as well or faster than comparable binary formats.
But I do think that people who talk about XML databases, etc. are smoking some good crack :)
Your `xmldiff' example is ludicrous. It is most definately not 5000 times slower, xmldiff is obviously doing something extroardinarily stupid. Furthermore, diff is simply reading the files simultaneously byte by byte and comparing them, xmldiff has to do much more processing because it's comparing XML, not the raw data. That's like comparing diff to a C++ compiler.
Galeon handles it's own bookmarks file in the blink of an eye.
XML does not take so much more processing time than parsing any equally complex text data.
XML isn't meant to replace RDBMs, RDBMs aren't meant to replace flat text lists, etc. Comparing different tools for doing the wrong job is just ridiculously silly.
Use the right friggin tool for the job... jeez...
XML could be greatly simplified without losing any of its power other than human readability
But that is PART of the intent. I think XML would lose a lot of it's utility without human readability.
I agree with this, to an extent. If you don't like/need all the fluff, don't use it. XML is only as complicated and inefficient as you want it to be.
XML tries to eliminate the step of writing parsers for data, although writing parsers has never been a significant part of application development to begin with.
It's not just about writing parsers for a single program. What happens when you have several programs that read the same type of file? What if said file-type is somewhat complex. XML keeps things simpler and easier for these cases.
Its rigidity instead forces you to waste time taking the output of the parser (a complex tree) and putting it into meaningful form.
What on earth are you talking about? YOU define the format of your XML data. If it doesn't need to be complicated, don't complicate it!
XML document tree traversal = 10000x more complex than getting column data out of a ResultSet...
Again, what? Keep the XML simple, and it will be just as easy.
Unfortunately it is also a billion times slower to parse XML than it is to perform a medium compexity database query.
Then XML isn't the proper solution for your problem. Just because some dipshit tries to force XML to do things it isn't optimized for doesn't make XML any less useful.
*snip* the rest of your comments comparing XML to relational databases.
XML files are not high performance databases... Use the right tool for the job, and you will be much happier.
It sounds to me like XML isn't your problem. Your problem is the "genius" at your company that needs to be beat over the head with a clue stick. If I were you, I'd be sure to beat him hard.
The documents are generally displayed as HTML on the web, but they're also read by a couple different programs for different purposes. When I first started here, it was mostly a mess of poorly hand-written HTML, but thankfully there were *only* about 20k documents at the time.
I was charged with the task of writing said programs to read these damn files. Unfortuneately, they weren't all marked up the same...
Now that we have XML and standard libraries for reading XML, it makes handling these documents a snap. Any program that needs to read them can simply have an XML parser plugged into it. The integrity of the documents themselves is maintained by the fact that they don't work if they're not properly marked up. So all these documents work, 100% all the time, and writing programs to read said documents is very simple and not prone to errors.
Yay for XML! :)
So, to sum up, XML is doing what it was meant to do, no less. Unfortuneately, it's also probably doing a bit more as well, XSL anyone? Yeck, why not just have a stand XML scripting language, why the need for the language to be valid XML itself?