Re:Why is XML so popular
on
The Future of XML
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· Score: 3, Informative
its parsing and expansion is very easily stored and visualized as a tree
Why not store it as a tree in a format computers can parse efficiently? Invent binary format with parent and child offsets and binary tags for the names and values. It's smaller in memory and faster. Better basically. You don't need to parse them if machines are going to read them. And decent human programmers can read them with a debugger or from a hexdump in a file, or write a tool to dump them as a human friendly ASCII during development.
So parsing in general is actually quite easy.
You end up doing a bunch of string operations. Those aren't quick. Most likely you drag in some library written by a Computer Science damaged 'engineer' who doesn't understand assembler or how to read a hexdump and so it will be a lot less efficient than that.
It seems to me to be a slight improvement on ini files, csv and the like. But parsing it is hideously inefficient compared to a binary format. It's bloated too, so it takes more time to send it over the net or save it to disk. I've seen some XML schema that are aggressively hard to read too. And yet it's become something that every new technology, protocol or applications needs to namecheck.
I think it would be relaxing to have a huge aquarium full of cancer fish in your office. Plus if you were the CEO you'd explain their lifecycle to employees who'd screwed up in some way as your hot secretary scooped out the old misshapen dying ones and replaced them with new healthy looking ones.
Best thing is if you order 100 of them it would cost $1643, which means you're paying $1600 for postage. I could see if it was a one off fee to encourage you to buy in volume, even though it seems legally questionable to describe it as a postage fee in that case.
Whenever you see security people saying things like this do the following thought experiment.
HE MAN goes to helpfulmirror.com to download security software. But unbeknownst to HE MAN, SKELETOR actually runs helpfulmirror.com and hosts backdoored versions of the software.
You may need to adapt it, but always think "Am I talking to a helpful stranger or am I talking to SKELETOR pretending to be a helpful stranger"
If you run Windows you can use the EFS for that stuff. It's a feature of NTFS that supports encryption on a per file or per directory basis. So you could encrypt your documents directory. Then anything you save there will be encrypted and decrypted on the fly. So it would stop someone using a boot CD to get at them. Best of all if someone resets your password the decryption key is invalidated since it is hashed with your password.
DriveLock looks like just a policy based device filter that stops Windows from using certain devices. No, it uses the ATA security commands to lock the drive
There were two referenda in Ireland. One was about banning abortion. It passed, and abortion was made illegal. The other was about stopping pregnant women from travelling to England to have an abortion. That also failed and they were free to travel. Now arguably the two positions are not consistent. But I can see the logic behind them - personally I'm in favour of abortion, but I can imagine other situation where I would want to ban something but not close all the loopholes because that would violate some deeper, overriding principle of civil liberties. But the most important point is that the demos in a democracy doesn't have to be consistent. Now if you're a democratic politician you basically don't want to annoy the majority on any issue and that means you can't be consistent either.
Now some politicians are incredibly consistent, but I suspect that you really don't want them in power. In a sense all sufficiently complex ideology must also be incomplete I guess.
Dude! We should so get Ron Paul to do this if he's elected. I like the idea of Paulcare consisting of a bill to abolish the FDA and legalize all drugs for over the counter purchase. And come to think of it, make them freely importable too. And make it legal for anyone to practice medicine.
Actually it would probably work quite well after a transition period where a load of people died. Medical costs would drop drastically too.
1) Go to McDonalds 2) Ask for a Whopper. 3) Nag them until they call the Big Mac a whopper. 4) Tip off Burger King about trademark infringement and any libel from the staff. 5) Split the lawsuit proceeds.
That's true, but there are lots of stories of doctors who fail to treat known conditions, which is the 95% case. I've actually had doctors open up a big book, look up the symptoms and find something like "Most likely it's this, check for this unlikely case". Which they did. But it seems like if they don't bother do this and prescribe the wrong thing and someone dies, then that's clearly negligence.
But I wouldn't expect them to be able to cure the 5% of bizarre stuff that no one understands and no one has documented a cure for.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/
We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis.
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its parsing and expansion is very easily stored and visualized as a tree
Why not store it as a tree in a format computers can parse efficiently? Invent binary format with parent and child offsets and binary tags for the names and values. It's smaller in memory and faster. Better basically. You don't need to parse them if machines are going to read them. And decent human programmers can read them with a debugger or from a hexdump in a file, or write a tool to dump them as a human friendly ASCII during development.
So parsing in general is actually quite easy.
You end up doing a bunch of string operations. Those aren't quick. Most likely you drag in some library written by a Computer Science damaged 'engineer' who doesn't understand assembler or how to read a hexdump and so it will be a lot less efficient than that.
Tu quoque is a fallacy.
It seems to me to be a slight improvement on ini files, csv and the like. But parsing it is hideously inefficient compared to a binary format. It's bloated too, so it takes more time to send it over the net or save it to disk. I've seen some XML schema that are aggressively hard to read too. And yet it's become something that every new technology, protocol or applications needs to namecheck.
I think it would be relaxing to have a huge aquarium full of cancer fish in your office. Plus if you were the CEO you'd explain their lifecycle to employees who'd screwed up in some way as your hot secretary scooped out the old misshapen dying ones and replaced them with new healthy looking ones.
He said MSNDAA
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/bb676724.aspx
College pays $499 a year and downloads whatever operating systems and development tools they want and installs them on as many PCs as they want.
I didn't say 'slightly nicer water'. I said 76.5% more badass
Is it me or is the juxtaposition of MS and DNA a bit chilling?
Tests show the water in Bioshock is 76.5% more badass in DX10 than DX9.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/dx10-part2_2.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U98bio91ygM
Best thing is if you order 100 of them it would cost $1643, which means you're paying $1600 for postage. I could see if it was a one off fee to encourage you to buy in volume, even though it seems legally questionable to describe it as a postage fee in that case.
Whenever you see security people saying things like this do the following thought experiment.
HE MAN goes to helpfulmirror.com to download security software. But unbeknownst to HE MAN, SKELETOR actually runs helpfulmirror.com and hosts backdoored versions of the software.
You may need to adapt it, but always think "Am I talking to a helpful stranger or am I talking to SKELETOR pretending to be a helpful stranger"
I find that statement awfully funny, as the download link then downloads it from to http://truecrypt.sourceforce.net/
Yeah but they add &password=opensesame to end of the URL to make it secure.
If you run Windows you can use the EFS for that stuff. It's a feature of NTFS that supports encryption on a per file or per directory basis. So you could encrypt your documents directory. Then anything you save there will be encrypted and decrypted on the fly. So it would stop someone using a boot CD to get at them. Best of all if someone resets your password the decryption key is invalidated since it is hashed with your password.
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/supportinformation/papers/na118a0598.pdf
No password, no read or write sector operations - it doesn't matter what OS you use. So it should stop a thief from accessing your data.
On the other hand the FBI can probably get the master password if they have a warrant
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/man_sues_compaq.html
Sounds good to me. The doctor should be charged with premeditated murder for profit and executed by firing squad too.
So with respect to firing squads you're pro choice rather than pro life?
You know, there's a good story about consistency and politics.
There were two referenda in Ireland. One was about banning abortion. It passed, and abortion was made illegal. The other was about stopping pregnant women from travelling to England to have an abortion. That also failed and they were free to travel. Now arguably the two positions are not consistent. But I can see the logic behind them - personally I'm in favour of abortion, but I can imagine other situation where I would want to ban something but not close all the loopholes because that would violate some deeper, overriding principle of civil liberties. But the most important point is that the demos in a democracy doesn't have to be consistent. Now if you're a democratic politician you basically don't want to annoy the majority on any issue and that means you can't be consistent either.
Now some politicians are incredibly consistent, but I suspect that you really don't want them in power. In a sense all sufficiently complex ideology must also be incomplete I guess.
With intravenous drug users, you could just mix the antiretrovirals in with their heroin.
Wow, thats right up there with putting the infected into concentration camps.
Actually Cuba did originally plan to confine people with HIV indefinitely, or at least until they died. I think the policy has changed now though.
Dude! We should so get Ron Paul to do this if he's elected. I like the idea of Paulcare consisting of a bill to abolish the FDA and legalize all drugs for over the counter purchase. And come to think of it, make them freely importable too. And make it legal for anyone to practice medicine.
Actually it would probably work quite well after a transition period where a load of people died. Medical costs would drop drastically too.
1) Go to McDonalds
2) Ask for a Whopper.
3) Nag them until they call the Big Mac a whopper.
4) Tip off Burger King about trademark infringement and any libel from the staff.
5) Split the lawsuit proceeds.
Important: DO NOT eat the 'whopper'.
That's true, but there are lots of stories of doctors who fail to treat known conditions, which is the 95% case. I've actually had doctors open up a big book, look up the symptoms and find something like "Most likely it's this, check for this unlikely case". Which they did. But it seems like if they don't bother do this and prescribe the wrong thing and someone dies, then that's clearly negligence.
But I wouldn't expect them to be able to cure the 5% of bizarre stuff that no one understands and no one has documented a cure for.
Quick link to some liberal nerd website where it claims Vista will be the downfall of the evil corporation and it is all because of DRM.
There's another report on the site which I thought was interesting
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qptimeframe=M&qpsp=106&qpmr=300&qpdt=1&qpcustomb=*2&qpcustomd=US&qprid=13&sample=2
So 'liberals' aren't opposed to big corporations and DRM per se. Macs actually have 12%+ market share in CA and NY.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis.
I think people are just miffed that Vista beats their favourite OS
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/08/01/09/market-share-2007-mac-os-gains-315-vista-grabs-1048
Windows XP - 76.91%
Windows Vista - 10.48%
Mac OS - 7.30%
Windows 2000 - 2.66%
Windows 98 - 0.70%
Linux - 0.63%