You clearly are a security professional, as you skipped all the actual initial steps, probably because you're so used to them:)
The FIRST thing to do is learn the mechanics of the system(s) you are protecting. There are a lot of "generic" classes of threats out there, some relevant to certain systems, some to all. Before you can begin trying to protect against them, however, you need to completely understand:
1. If/how they affect the systems you're protecting. 2. What about your system makes the threat especially dangerous or nominal. 3. What mechanisms your system has to wall off such threats, if any.
You can't truly secure a system you don't inside and out, no matter how much security "theory" you know, so the FIRST step is making sure you understand the technology at your disposal, even before you try to understand what threatens to compromise it.
Most people put punctuation into a sentence for a reason, so it seemed reasonable to infer that you did as well.
Maybe, but if you didn't understand the sentence, why did you just go running off with your own random interpretation? It wouldn't even be that bad, except your interpretation completely ignores the context of the sentence (wherein the entire thing is clearly subjected to the non-election in terms of popular vote versus the official election in terms of electoral vote) and claims that I made specific statements that I didn't make.
Hell, even if you'd made an interpretation that merely missed the context it wouldn't be so bad, but you didn't even do that, you made an interpretation using input that didn't even exist.
I inferred it from your quotes around the word "elected".
And since nowhere in the post does it say anything that supports you conclusion, I infer from this discussion that you have a bad habit of negatively reading into things so that you can start arguments.
And I never mentioned the 2000 election.
And I did. In relation to the text you were using for you inferences. So, I suppose I will further infer that your reading comprehension wasn't up to snuff for this thread either.
And that's the last morsel I'll toss to this troll.
Yea, yea. You made a specific claim against me that you can't back up now that you're being challenged and I'm the troll, right, sure, gotcha.
Congratulations, you're a blubbering zealot. By immediately leaping to a hysterical appeal to emotion, you have completely discredited anything you have to say on the issue in the future in my eyes.
I'm sorry, did I say there IS a state religion, or did I say that there are people trying to create one? Which one is it, because it seems like maybe you're confusing the two in a rather weak attempt to discredit me.
Again, I ask you, where did I indicate anybody cheated? I want you to quote, word for word, the exact text that indicates that I claimed anybody cheated, rigged, coerced, or any other illegitimate activity in relation to the 2000 election.
You (apparently) have no idea how stuff like that undercuts your argument.
Just out of curiosity, does inventing make-believe charges against a person undercut an argument, or is that acceptable fare on Slashdot? I'm sure I could invent some amusing charges about you in relation to the source of your current genetic makeup, if that's legitimate debate practice around here.
Why can't there just be a normal, sane country somewhere full of responsible, intelligent people?
The United States is overrun by zealotous lunatics making up lies about science and trying to force a state religion. Europe is smarter, but it's not nearly as free. Now Australia is the same. And the Asian countries are still fairly xenophobic and don't want people coming in and taking away jobs and resources.
Somebody should start a country somewhere where the average citizen isn't, you know, a dumbass.
That was kind of a half-hearted troll attempt, friend, but I respect that you tried (p.s.: I'm not a psycholiberal, so the whole "blood and guts patriot" thing doesn't actually bother me any).
<politics type="conversation" location="internet"> Fanatical Bushtard: loffle prove it numbnuttzorz!111oneeleventyoneone
Liberal and/or Moderate and/or anybody still grounded in reality: [Intelligent, meaningful rejoinder]
Fanatical Bushtard: ErrrrErrrrhurrrrrdurrr NUH UH FUCK YOU FAGGOT!!!1111 <politics>
Yea, yea. Blah blah. Go felate Karl Rove some more you overstuffed NASCAR inbred. Bush could be standing in front of you biting off the heads off small children and you'd still get down on your knees and grovel like you were looking at God Himself.
You asked, I answered, you're clearly a child who should be doing his homework, so get back to work. I'd like to think that not everyone from your generation is such an imbecile, otherwise I'm going to starve in my old age.
The president of the United States has exercised the power to secretly arrest and detain American citizens without charge, access to a lawyer, or due process rights.
That's ONE. Never mind the torture, spying, and the fact that the president was elected against the will of the people in 2000. You only asked for one.
I'm so sick of mindless ignorant fuckheads...
That's okay, I'm sick of people like you who can't have anything approaching a slightly intelligent conversation. Go back to your moonshine, Bubba, there's nothing for you here with the durned lerned librawl posters from mas-a-choose-ettes.
The president has claimed that he has the power to declare any living being, American citizen or not, an "enemy combatant". He has further claimed that enemy combatants are neither covered by United States civil law, nor the Geneva conventions, and he has exercised his power to secretly detain them, without charge, indefinitely. Once detained, he has denied these people rights to an attorney, the right to a trial, and even the right to see the evidence against them.
It wasn't until the court stepped in and slapped him down that some of this changed.
At which point it was quickly made clear that the judiciary is the tool of evil leftist terrorists. This has resulted in people ranging from terrorist right wingers to elected lawmakers calling for the judiciary to be either outright collapsed, or made a pawn subject to the whims of the Congress (in fact, right wing terrorists even publicly called for the Supreme Court justices to be assassinated). This call has been furthered in relation to preventing them from exercising the power to rule on cases involving discrimination against gays, and in relation to cases such as Terri Schiavo's where it was determined that there was no grounds for the government to interfere in the legal rights of Mr. Schiavo.
Furthermore, please note that George W. Bush is yet another individual "elected" to the presidency against the will of the people.
On top of all that, Mr. Bush has authorized the NSA to go ahead and secretly wiretap, with no public access to information, anybody he deems requires wiretapping. Mr. Bush requires no justification, as there's nobody to stop him.
But, don't worry. I'm sure that's not really that bad, and that it's just a matter of things being "blown out of proportion".
This is slashdot. The article usually has nothing to do with the title. In fact, on Slashdot, you might as well not read the title, much less come to any conclusions based on it, because 90% of the time it's sensationlist garbage that's merely attempting to get click-throughs to the comments so OSTG can churn out more ad placement.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I was in the midst of a seasoned television executive. Please, do enlighten us by telling us which network or cable channel you currently work for and how many years of service you've put in running it as a successful business operation. Then, you can more clearly explain what metrics you've used to determine exactly why these other channels are making a mistake by not following the course of action that you're reccommending.
Perhaps you should actually reply to my actual comment instead of being a condescending prick.
Perhaps you shouldn't act like the world should be run according to your personal tastes and accept that not everybody enjoys the same shows you do. Oh, boo hoo. They cancelled a show that you liked because not enough other people did. Get over it.
It almost seems like nerdy clique shows don't generally rake in a large enough share of the ad revenue for their time slots and get cancelled because more people will sit down and watch a fat woman screaming about GAHGOYLES than a "witty" starship captain and his zany adventures.
It almost seems like tv execs are trying to make money rather than pander to you personally.
Slashdot makes money through ad impressions. They're not here to uphold high journalistic standards and create intelligent, competent discussion threads, they're here to make money by getting as many goobers to click on a story as they can. In fact, they never claimed the former, not even before they were purchased and started focusing on the latter.
To that end, all that matters here is that the word "Microsoft" paired with a controversial claim is right in the headline. They're betting you'll click through and up their ad revenue.
Guess what? They were right.
That said, I have nothing relevant to the article to post, because the article wasn't really relevant to anything...
The point isn't to inform you that early adopters experience more bugs than people who buy stable technology, it's to question whether or not faster turn-a-around times are increasing the bug incidences of modern adopters over adopters from 10 or 20 years ago.
Maybe they do need to state the obvious, since you couldn't pick it up on your own...
Coop Charr hunting in pre (where she probably still is if she's too weak to fight charr) is vastly over-rated. I used to take my L8/9 warrior into the north with other people, but it's too much grind because of the split XP. On the other hand, I can usually only off seven or eight charr plus one of the bosses on my own before the charr are grouped up in bunches to think to penetrate, which necessitates constantly going back to ascalon and having someone reopen the gate so the land resets.
Really, it's not good for XP, just for higher level items than you can get elsewhere in pre.
It's not going to work. People don't know how to use warnings in the physical world properly. Look at warnings provided on the road. How many people ignore Yield signs and try to merge right into oncoming vehicles? How many people just blow right through a blinking yellow without thinking? How many people just blow out of parking lots or driveways? How many people actually look to see if a train is coming before they cross tracks with a warning light and bar?
It's a matter of risk/reward that's inherent in human nature. If 99 times out of a hundred you approach a crossing with a light and bar there's no train coming when there's no lights, you're going to get used to that. Of course, that one time you come along and the lights are broken, you're going to die, but that's the risk/reward. You're taking the 1% chance that you'll get killed by an unannounced train and comparing it to the fact that you'll have to do the extra work of slowing down, looking and speeding back up for nothing 99% of the time.
People just don't take serious warnings seriously unless there's a very good chance that they could be harmed by not following them. It doesn't matter how serious the consequences if they occur too infrequently to stay fresh in one's mind.
Actually, a lot of the time a browser hole isn't required at all. Users are actually still downloading applications that are just applications that function in a malicious way, with full rights actively given by the user to use the system resources for ill.
After all, once an OS is running something bound to a port, how is it supposed to know whether or not you're an idiot who just installed a keylogger or trojan, or a competent user running some sort of legitimate server software? It can only warn you so much before there's just nothing else that can patch the hole, except maybe some tape over your head.
At this point, browsers warn people, operating systems warn people, firewalls warn people and virus scanners worm people, and they still just have to run that trojan software for whatever pointless whizz-bang effect it adds to their mouse cursor or emails.
Well, RDBMSes don't need it, because they store data that doesn't need it. Not all data fits neatly into relational form. Please provide an example of data that can't be cleanly set into the relational model. And, yes, most people's data needs to be ordered. I very, very rarely work with data in an unordered manner.
Not of itself, but it has the ability to. So does every other application on the planet. There's nothing you couldn't write in a schema that you couldn't write in C, Perl, PHP, or anything else. The point is that there is only the ability to start from nothing and define your own restrictions, there is no actual enforcement inherent in an XML file. Relational systems, however, follow mathematical functions that guarantee certain inherent enforcement provided only that the data is properly defined and the correct arguments are given to those functions.
In other words, the relational model is the implementation and your db design is the specification you use for your instance of that implementation. The schema is merely the specification for the implementation, and there is no actual implementation inherent in it, you still need to apply it to something else, generally an application of some sort. The relational model guarantees certain enforcements suggested by your design. The schema merely suggests enforcements and relies on some other non-standard thing to apply them (for example, a web browser).
This can apply equally to data stored in relational form. If it's just tossed in with no concern for its meaning, it's not in a relational form.
You can have a table that consists of nothing more than, say, a timestamp and big text field. So long as you've defined everything properly, this is a relational set of data, it's just a very small set. Now, if your big text field contains all sorts of differing data types, then you don't have a relational model set up, so it's your own fault that you don't reap the benefits of that model.
To get the benefits you need to define how the data is divided into meaningful columns to get the benefit. Same with XML - unless you define the meaning and relationships of tags you don't get the benefit.
But there is no benefit. You make up whatever tag you want and then toss anything you want into it. You can say that it's only numeric data, but unless you build a schema that doesn't mean anything, and building a schema is not significantly different than just programming an application to manage your data for you (plus, you still need an actual application to enforce the schema's rules anyway). Plus, the schema is merely your design model, you still aren't actually enforcing it until you apply it, in combination with your XML, to an actual application.
One of the primary design considerations of XML was to avoid loss of data because applications go out of date.
But, again, that's a reference to data description not data storage. GIF formats provide a description, but filesystems provide the storage for the GIF files. XML formats provide a description of the data, but you must still choose some other mechanism to manage that data, whether it be a DBMS, filesystem, or something else.
This is a huge step forward from old formats that did indeed require specific software (and specific versions of that software) to intepret a file format, and my experience is that surprisingly few developers realise it.
I don't really buy it. Huge data stores in archaic, convoluted formats are difficult to manage when they're in transition, yes, but I really don't buy the argument that XML is a universal solution to the problem. Even if you use XML, you still have to have both ends of the transaction agree on the meaning of the XML, and when you're talking about, for example, two different companies merging, that entails sitting down and merging the two formats via a schema, which isn't really that much different from deciding on your own data format sinc
XML does not store data. I defy you to present me with a chunk of XML that will actually defines some sort of executable behavior that results in me retrieving a piece of data.
This would be opposed to you giving me a chunk of XML data, wrapped around other data, which describes the wrapped data, which is what XML does, since XML doesn't "store data". Since XML is stored data.
You're right, there's no competition, because XML doesn't do data storage, which is what a database does in addition to doing data description.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean "no"? We said the same thing, you just spelled out the individual topics where I clumped everything together under "mechanics".
You clearly are a security professional, as you skipped all the actual initial steps, probably because you're so used to them :)
The FIRST thing to do is learn the mechanics of the system(s) you are protecting. There are a lot of "generic" classes of threats out there, some relevant to certain systems, some to all. Before you can begin trying to protect against them, however, you need to completely understand:
1. If/how they affect the systems you're protecting.
2. What about your system makes the threat especially dangerous or nominal.
3. What mechanisms your system has to wall off such threats, if any.
You can't truly secure a system you don't inside and out, no matter how much security "theory" you know, so the FIRST step is making sure you understand the technology at your disposal, even before you try to understand what threatens to compromise it.
Most people put punctuation into a sentence for a reason, so it seemed reasonable to infer that you did as well.
Maybe, but if you didn't understand the sentence, why did you just go running off with your own random interpretation? It wouldn't even be that bad, except your interpretation completely ignores the context of the sentence (wherein the entire thing is clearly subjected to the non-election in terms of popular vote versus the official election in terms of electoral vote) and claims that I made specific statements that I didn't make.
Hell, even if you'd made an interpretation that merely missed the context it wouldn't be so bad, but you didn't even do that, you made an interpretation using input that didn't even exist.
I inferred it from your quotes around the word "elected".
And since nowhere in the post does it say anything that supports you conclusion, I infer from this discussion that you have a bad habit of negatively reading into things so that you can start arguments.
And I never mentioned the 2000 election.
And I did. In relation to the text you were using for you inferences. So, I suppose I will further infer that your reading comprehension wasn't up to snuff for this thread either.
And that's the last morsel I'll toss to this troll.
Yea, yea. You made a specific claim against me that you can't back up now that you're being challenged and I'm the troll, right, sure, gotcha.
I'm wasting my day off for this crap.
Congratulations, you're a blubbering zealot. By immediately leaping to a hysterical appeal to emotion, you have completely discredited anything you have to say on the issue in the future in my eyes.
That'll help the ol' cause, good job.
I'm sorry, did I say there IS a state religion, or did I say that there are people trying to create one? Which one is it, because it seems like maybe you're confusing the two in a rather weak attempt to discredit me.
Again, I ask you, where did I indicate anybody cheated? I want you to quote, word for word, the exact text that indicates that I claimed anybody cheated, rigged, coerced, or any other illegitimate activity in relation to the 2000 election.
You (apparently) have no idea how stuff like that undercuts your argument.
Just out of curiosity, does inventing make-believe charges against a person undercut an argument, or is that acceptable fare on Slashdot? I'm sure I could invent some amusing charges about you in relation to the source of your current genetic makeup, if that's legitimate debate practice around here.
Why can't there just be a normal, sane country somewhere full of responsible, intelligent people?
The United States is overrun by zealotous lunatics making up lies about science and trying to force a state religion. Europe is smarter, but it's not nearly as free. Now Australia is the same. And the Asian countries are still fairly xenophobic and don't want people coming in and taking away jobs and resources.
Somebody should start a country somewhere where the average citizen isn't, you know, a dumbass.
Quick! Find anywhere in my post where I said anybody cheated at anything!
I have a witty response for sale, it seems like you could probably use one.
That was kind of a half-hearted troll attempt, friend, but I respect that you tried (p.s.: I'm not a psycholiberal, so the whole "blood and guts patriot" thing doesn't actually bother me any).
Yea, yea. Blah blah. Go felate Karl Rove some more you overstuffed NASCAR inbred. Bush could be standing in front of you biting off the heads off small children and you'd still get down on your knees and grovel like you were looking at God Himself.
You asked, I answered, you're clearly a child who should be doing his homework, so get back to work. I'd like to think that not everyone from your generation is such an imbecile, otherwise I'm going to starve in my old age.
The president of the United States has exercised the power to secretly arrest and detain American citizens without charge, access to a lawyer, or due process rights.
That's ONE. Never mind the torture, spying, and the fact that the president was elected against the will of the people in 2000. You only asked for one.
I'm so sick of mindless ignorant fuckheads...
That's okay, I'm sick of people like you who can't have anything approaching a slightly intelligent conversation. Go back to your moonshine, Bubba, there's nothing for you here with the durned lerned librawl posters from mas-a-choose-ettes.
The president has claimed that he has the power to declare any living being, American citizen or not, an "enemy combatant". He has further claimed that enemy combatants are neither covered by United States civil law, nor the Geneva conventions, and he has exercised his power to secretly detain them, without charge, indefinitely. Once detained, he has denied these people rights to an attorney, the right to a trial, and even the right to see the evidence against them.
It wasn't until the court stepped in and slapped him down that some of this changed.
At which point it was quickly made clear that the judiciary is the tool of evil leftist terrorists. This has resulted in people ranging from terrorist right wingers to elected lawmakers calling for the judiciary to be either outright collapsed, or made a pawn subject to the whims of the Congress (in fact, right wing terrorists even publicly called for the Supreme Court justices to be assassinated). This call has been furthered in relation to preventing them from exercising the power to rule on cases involving discrimination against gays, and in relation to cases such as Terri Schiavo's where it was determined that there was no grounds for the government to interfere in the legal rights of Mr. Schiavo.
Furthermore, please note that George W. Bush is yet another individual "elected" to the presidency against the will of the people.
On top of all that, Mr. Bush has authorized the NSA to go ahead and secretly wiretap, with no public access to information, anybody he deems requires wiretapping. Mr. Bush requires no justification, as there's nobody to stop him.
But, don't worry. I'm sure that's not really that bad, and that it's just a matter of things being "blown out of proportion".
This is slashdot. The article usually has nothing to do with the title. In fact, on Slashdot, you might as well not read the title, much less come to any conclusions based on it, because 90% of the time it's sensationlist garbage that's merely attempting to get click-throughs to the comments so OSTG can churn out more ad placement.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I was in the midst of a seasoned television executive. Please, do enlighten us by telling us which network or cable channel you currently work for and how many years of service you've put in running it as a successful business operation. Then, you can more clearly explain what metrics you've used to determine exactly why these other channels are making a mistake by not following the course of action that you're reccommending.
Perhaps you should actually reply to my actual comment instead of being a condescending prick.
Perhaps you shouldn't act like the world should be run according to your personal tastes and accept that not everybody enjoys the same shows you do. Oh, boo hoo. They cancelled a show that you liked because not enough other people did. Get over it.
It almost seems like nerdy clique shows don't generally rake in a large enough share of the ad revenue for their time slots and get cancelled because more people will sit down and watch a fat woman screaming about GAHGOYLES than a "witty" starship captain and his zany adventures.
It almost seems like tv execs are trying to make money rather than pander to you personally.
What an unfair world we live in.
Slashdot makes money through ad impressions. They're not here to uphold high journalistic standards and create intelligent, competent discussion threads, they're here to make money by getting as many goobers to click on a story as they can. In fact, they never claimed the former, not even before they were purchased and started focusing on the latter.
To that end, all that matters here is that the word "Microsoft" paired with a controversial claim is right in the headline. They're betting you'll click through and up their ad revenue.
Guess what? They were right.
That said, I have nothing relevant to the article to post, because the article wasn't really relevant to anything...
The point isn't to inform you that early adopters experience more bugs than people who buy stable technology, it's to question whether or not faster turn-a-around times are increasing the bug incidences of modern adopters over adopters from 10 or 20 years ago.
Maybe they do need to state the obvious, since you couldn't pick it up on your own...
I dunno, he seems about as qualified as all the other accountants I've dealt with.
Coop Charr hunting in pre (where she probably still is if she's too weak to fight charr) is vastly over-rated. I used to take my L8/9 warrior into the north with other people, but it's too much grind because of the split XP. On the other hand, I can usually only off seven or eight charr plus one of the bosses on my own before the charr are grouped up in bunches to think to penetrate, which necessitates constantly going back to ascalon and having someone reopen the gate so the land resets.
Really, it's not good for XP, just for higher level items than you can get elsewhere in pre.
It's not going to work. People don't know how to use warnings in the physical world properly. Look at warnings provided on the road. How many people ignore Yield signs and try to merge right into oncoming vehicles? How many people just blow right through a blinking yellow without thinking? How many people just blow out of parking lots or driveways? How many people actually look to see if a train is coming before they cross tracks with a warning light and bar?
It's a matter of risk/reward that's inherent in human nature. If 99 times out of a hundred you approach a crossing with a light and bar there's no train coming when there's no lights, you're going to get used to that. Of course, that one time you come along and the lights are broken, you're going to die, but that's the risk/reward. You're taking the 1% chance that you'll get killed by an unannounced train and comparing it to the fact that you'll have to do the extra work of slowing down, looking and speeding back up for nothing 99% of the time.
People just don't take serious warnings seriously unless there's a very good chance that they could be harmed by not following them. It doesn't matter how serious the consequences if they occur too infrequently to stay fresh in one's mind.
Actually, a lot of the time a browser hole isn't required at all. Users are actually still downloading applications that are just applications that function in a malicious way, with full rights actively given by the user to use the system resources for ill.
After all, once an OS is running something bound to a port, how is it supposed to know whether or not you're an idiot who just installed a keylogger or trojan, or a competent user running some sort of legitimate server software? It can only warn you so much before there's just nothing else that can patch the hole, except maybe some tape over your head.
At this point, browsers warn people, operating systems warn people, firewalls warn people and virus scanners worm people, and they still just have to run that trojan software for whatever pointless whizz-bang effect it adds to their mouse cursor or emails.
Well, RDBMSes don't need it, because they store data that doesn't need it. Not all data fits neatly into relational form.
Please provide an example of data that can't be cleanly set into the relational model. And, yes, most people's data needs to be ordered. I very, very rarely work with data in an unordered manner.
Not of itself, but it has the ability to.
So does every other application on the planet. There's nothing you couldn't write in a schema that you couldn't write in C, Perl, PHP, or anything else. The point is that there is only the ability to start from nothing and define your own restrictions, there is no actual enforcement inherent in an XML file. Relational systems, however, follow mathematical functions that guarantee certain inherent enforcement provided only that the data is properly defined and the correct arguments are given to those functions.
In other words, the relational model is the implementation and your db design is the specification you use for your instance of that implementation. The schema is merely the specification for the implementation, and there is no actual implementation inherent in it, you still need to apply it to something else, generally an application of some sort. The relational model guarantees certain enforcements suggested by your design. The schema merely suggests enforcements and relies on some other non-standard thing to apply them (for example, a web browser).
This can apply equally to data stored in relational form.
If it's just tossed in with no concern for its meaning, it's not in a relational form.
You can have a table that consists of nothing more than, say, a timestamp and big text field.
So long as you've defined everything properly, this is a relational set of data, it's just a very small set. Now, if your big text field contains all sorts of differing data types, then you don't have a relational model set up, so it's your own fault that you don't reap the benefits of that model.
To get the benefits you need to define how the data is divided into meaningful columns to get the benefit. Same with XML - unless you define the meaning and relationships of tags you don't get the benefit.
But there is no benefit. You make up whatever tag you want and then toss anything you want into it. You can say that it's only numeric data, but unless you build a schema that doesn't mean anything, and building a schema is not significantly different than just programming an application to manage your data for you (plus, you still need an actual application to enforce the schema's rules anyway). Plus, the schema is merely your design model, you still aren't actually enforcing it until you apply it, in combination with your XML, to an actual application.
One of the primary design considerations of XML was to avoid loss of data because applications go out of date.
But, again, that's a reference to data description not data storage. GIF formats provide a description, but filesystems provide the storage for the GIF files. XML formats provide a description of the data, but you must still choose some other mechanism to manage that data, whether it be a DBMS, filesystem, or something else.
This is a huge step forward from old formats that did indeed require specific software (and specific versions of that software) to intepret a file format, and my experience is that surprisingly few developers realise it.
I don't really buy it. Huge data stores in archaic, convoluted formats are difficult to manage when they're in transition, yes, but I really don't buy the argument that XML is a universal solution to the problem. Even if you use XML, you still have to have both ends of the transaction agree on the meaning of the XML, and when you're talking about, for example, two different companies merging, that entails sitting down and merging the two formats via a schema, which isn't really that much different from deciding on your own data format sinc
XML does not store data. I defy you to present me with a chunk of XML that will actually defines some sort of executable behavior that results in me retrieving a piece of data.
This would be opposed to you giving me a chunk of XML data, wrapped around other data, which describes the wrapped data, which is what XML does, since XML doesn't "store data". Since XML is stored data.
You're right, there's no competition, because XML doesn't do data storage, which is what a database does in addition to doing data description.