There is nothing to prevent your custom apps from spreading that data over multiple different.PST files and then displaying it as if it were one database.
I have been using Outlook for over a decade. I synchronize the data between a desktop and a laptop as well as hotsync it to a Palm Pilot (Sony Clie NR70v). I have only had one or two times when the database got corrupted. I just restored from the copy that was on my laptop and was on my way.
I think this is a great thing as I have no intention of giving up Outlook any time soon but I am about to give up on the Palm OS platform and move on to Android. Unless Chapura comes out with an Android version of Keysuite, I will likely have to create my own apps for Android and was concerned about figuring out the Outlook.PST format. Now I can get it straight from the horse's mouth. Sure, I know MS isn't always completely forthcoming. Duh. But it is better than relying on hacking my way through from scratch.
I see I am not in disagreement with anyone as to the additional clutter that this will likely add to our search results. It seems that Google continuously piles more straw on the metaphorical haystack, leaving the few needles of information I seek buried ever deeper. The thing is that all those pieces of straw really have strings attached in the form of metadata. Google knows - or should know - where all the pages they index come from. They should be able to relatively easily categorize those sites as manufacturer's sites, shopping sites, news sites, magazine sites, truly educational sites, blogs, forums, etc. But it seems Google cuts all those strings when they pile the indexed pages into the haystack leaving me to sort through them manually. Isn't that what we invented computers for? If they would simply leave the strings attached and allow users to "pull them" then we could simply choose not to receive results from shopping sites or whatever. As it is, looking for a manufacturer's specifications on something can be maddening because of all the shopping sites that come up instead. (Remember, one does not always know the URL to a manufacturer's web site.)
In effect, I wish Google would institute a system wherein we could check off or uncheck which types of sites we would like to receive search results from.
P.S. What the heck is wrong with this text edit box. The text cursor only shows up when I hover the mouse over some portions of the text in this box. When I hover over other portions the regular pointer cursor is displayed. If I click when that pointer is displayed it does not place the cursor into that location in the text. Instead it selects the box within the HTML and typing does not go into the box (the box does not have focus). This is a real pain. The code on Slashdot is getting worse with every revision. Geez, it even prevents me from selecting text in some locations even if I have already started the selection drag. This is insane! Please bring back the old editor.
Though I believe you are correct for the Acela train on the East Coast, I also believe the Anonymous Coward has a point. While train travel is not currently as difficult as they say, it could easily get that way. While a new long-distance, high-speed rail system would create lots of jobs, I feel that a disproportionate portion of the money spent would go to environmental studies, and lawyers rather than actual construction. this will be a natural result of the limitations imposed by keeping the vehicle on the ground the entire trip. A continuous line from one city to the next must be certified, rebuilt, or newly created for that train to run on. However, many places that the train runs right past will not have access to it, just like a plane. Therefore, it seems the dollars would be better spent by simply increasing airline capacity. Airline capacity, once increased, is very flexible. That extra capacity can be used to service more flights to and from anywhere, rather than just the one or two cities that a train goes to.
All in all, it seems a long-distance, high-speed train is more of a boondoggle than anything else. It appears to be new and innovative, so it gets more attention, but in the end it just wastes more money than actually goes into the regular community economy. I am sure I sound like a terrible cynic here, but it seems as if the plan was devised to put even more money into the pockets of the wealthy rather than anything else.
Personally, I see it as nothing more than another ploy on Microsoft's part. Sure, only 64-bit machines will get the logo. But there will still be plenty of 32-bit machines sold with Windows 7 without the logo. Maybe not by the major players, but nevertheless... In addition, people who have spent a great deal on a machine and software that is only 32-bit, and may not work in a 64-bit environment aren't necessarily going to run out and upgrade all their hardware and software.
So, when all the bugs start cropping up, Microsoft can claim it is not their problem. They can claim it is because people are using un-certified hardware.
you can read the plain language version that's passed out of committee. That's the version that matters, that's the version that the members of Congress read, and that's the version that's controlling. The version of the bill that's translated is the legislation that is passed on. If that does not match up with the intent from the committee, then it is corrected to match the plain language version.
Could you please give a reference to this information. I would like to be able to use this to explain why there are so many quotes about "not reading the bill" going around lately. However, just saying. "Someone on Slashdot who calls themselves 'Trickster' said it." is not going to cut it.
Sure work is stressful. But it sounds as if you may be rationalizing a bit yourself.
Perhaps the employees at the NSF need to get out more. Perhaps they really just need to get laid. However, that is all something you do outside of work. When someone is paying you to work, you work. You don't surf porn or eBay or Facebook. You work. If the employer intentionally gives you lots of leeway and playtime in order to foster creativity - as does Google - then fine, take advantage of that. Otherwise, if you don't like the amount of break time you get at your job, especially if you are highly skilled, then look for another job. Don't surf porn. Especially when you work for a government agency. That is just stupid.
I have been waiting for someone to start putting 2-D bar-codes on silver-halide film. If you use heavy duty film with a nice thick silver-halide layer and don't try to micro-size the bar-code blocs too much then it should last for hundreds of years. Sure it is a bit bulky and doesn't look uber high-tech but it works. Plus, it is possible to include a text description and a black and white picture of what the work is supposed to look like right on the film for easy cataloging and sorting without using any technology at all. It is the best of both worlds.
I said "if." There are some circumstances where people do have the right to control what is done with their image. My point is that the same rules should apply to games as apply to print and other media.
I know people here in Slashdot like to think that everyone else's information is just dying to be free (usually so they can then use it to make some money). However, there are limits, and the world of technology is not some separate universe where normal laws do not apply. If someone has the right to control and profit from their own image in a mass-produced, for-profit, magazine, poster, or other publication then the same should apply to games. If someone produced only one copy of a "game" as an art installation that would be different. But games are distributed en-mass specifically to make a profit. Claiming that Party B has a right to steal the intellectual property of Party A (likeness, description, history, etc.) just because Party B is using it in some electronic form is disingenuous.
Anyone who chooses to argue with me should first consider how they would feel if they had spent years building a career in some celebrity-or-image-based industry only to have someone else come along and use their image to make a profit, thus denying them income that they had worked years to earn.
Why can't the courts in these cases set up third-party intermediaries to receive the information that the plaintiffs are asking for (such as someone's personally-identifying information) and then have all communications go through that intermediary? This is just the same as e-mails from Craig's List users going through Craig's List instead of directly between the users. It could even be a system where no human ever sees the information. Instead it could be encrypted such that no one would ever be able to dig it out. Then the plaintiff could contact the individual and they could carry on a conversation and straighten things out, without the individual's individual dentifying information ever being disclosed.
Perhaps what we need is a government sponsored but publicly run (and open-source developed) central system to provide this service. It would have to be open ource so that anyone could check to make sure that the system didn't have any back doors.
Without a system like this, then the technique used by this bank technique could become a powerful tool to do an end-run around privacy laws. If I want to find out the personal information about someone, or even shut down their e-mail accounts or all of their internet access, all I have to do is claim to have accidentally sent them private information about someone else. Heck, I could just make up bogus info and send it to the individual. Who would know, because that info would be kept sealed "for the privacy of the people in the list."
Who wants to bet the the primary use of this device will be for stalking. All someone has to do is stash it in or under someone's car and they can be stalked from home via Google.
This may be similar to what happened to Palm. There were so many supposedly Palm compatible devices - all of them slightly different - that it became difficult for developers to keep up.
Of course the biggest reason that developers aren't flocking to Android is that consumers aren't flocking to Android phones. Development isn't a religion. People do it to earn a living, especially all those developers who jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. The people who bought iPhones were obviously people who had money to spend and wanted everyone to know it. It stands to reason that that consumer mentality would translate to their software purchases as well. Because Android came out quite some time after iPhone, now the only developers left are the "religious" developers, those who choose a platform base on principles instead of money alone.
I regularly read Dr. Vahdat's blog. I first got interested in it after reading his paper on Epidemic Routing which can be found in his list of publications here.
If you read his blog post you will see that he accomplishes his goal by creating a hierarchical tree of MAC addresses instead of a simple table. He also states that a large part of the proliferation of MAC addresses in these systems is due to virtual machines. Therefore everyone's nightmares of cabling hell are relatively moot.
Though I haven't contacted him yet, it seems that this solution would require reassigning new MAC addresses such that they can be organized hierarchically as we are accustomed to doing with IP addresses. If this is the case then it seems one would have two choices:
Take great care not to use any MAC addresses that are already in use. One would probably need to purchase/register entire blocks of MAC addresses just as a manufacturer of network adapters must do. Or...
Keep this entire network system separate from any other network system via IP routing and NAT so that the MAC addresses from one network never conflict with the MAC addresses of any other network.
Now, I am not an expert in the details of switches, routing, or NAT so I may have gotten some of the details wrong. But you get the idea.
the Authors Guild has posted an aggressive explanation of who it thinks should do that: no one. Not a single author in the world, it argues, stands to benefit from removing himself or herself from the class.
So, I just finished reading the patent. Now, I am not a patent lawyer (or any other kind of lawyer), however, I don't think any use of standard XML is in danger from this patent. The patent essentially describes a method that is the exact antithesis of XML. The method described in the patent strips out all metacodes (tags, formatting codes, etc.) from a document and stores them separately. It then creates a separate map of where those codes were applied within the document. The patent isn't explicit in describing exactly how that map would be structured but they do allude to using character count or some other direct mapping method to indicate exactly where within the content the separate structure and formatting instructions should be applied. In this method, absolutely no structure is retained within the document. They aren't specific about this, but it could be construed that even paragraph marks are not to be included within the content itself as they could be considered formatting or structure rather than content.
This is in stark contrast to how XML works in that the structure of the document is marked up directly within the document. Yes, the patent in question mentions SGML and gives an example of SGML content. But in that example, the method strips out the tags from the SGML content and stores them separately. This is not the same as a CSS stylesheet referring to a specific element within an XML document. In that case, the XML document still retains its structure as tags within the document itself. Only the instructions on how to format the document is separate from the document. The document still retains all of its structural metacodes.
To be clear, the method described in the patent does not pertain to the use of XML files themselves. The patent merely uses an SGML file as an example of the type of file that could be converted to the "new" format described within the patent.
What is unclear to me is whether the patent absolutely requires that all metacodes be stripped out of the original document when being converted to this "new" format. Although I could imagine a way to simply take an existing document (with it's current metacodes included) and adding a supplemental formatting/structure map that provides additional information about how to format that original document, it seems to me that the patent only makes claims about using their method with documents wherein the content is entirely devoid of any metacodes whatsoever. Perhaps this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding I may have about patent law. If all major claims have to be violated or if any one claim can be violated in order to be considered infringing on the patent.
While I do not know exactly how Microsoft's "Custom XML" works, it seems that it would have to work by storing the actual address (or index) of the location within the original document where the "Custom XML" should be applied, if it were to be considered infringing on this patent at all. If "Custom XML" works by referencing existing structural metacodes embedded within the original document then that would be no different from any other use of XML or CSS or XSLT. Perhaps only a Texas judge could possibly be confused about the distinctions.
Another thing I have to say about this patent is that it talks a lot about a means to do this and a means to do that but doesn't actually specify the means to do anything other than strip out the metacodes and store them separately. Hell, a high-school programming student could have told you that. You work through the document and store one part in one file and the other part in another file. The algorithms listed in the patent simply use character count to indicate where the codes are supposed to have an effect. Again, basic programming 101. How this patent is non-obvious in any way completely eludes me. Some may say that the basic "idea" of storing metacodes separately from the content was likely unique back in 1994. I beg to differ. Wh
It's funny how here on Slashdot if someone doesn't agree with you they automatically assume that you haven't read the fine article.
Yes, I did read the article and the response from the Burning Man people. However, my point still stands. It doesn't matter how much Burning Man explains to people what they can and cannot do, it doesn't matter what the history of the enforcement is or how honorable the Burning Man enforcers are personally. If there is a possibility of the policy being misused (by the nature of it being vague) then there is a very high likelihood of it eventually being misused. All they have to do to remove concerns about this possible misuse is to change the wording of the provision. It is that simple. Refusing to do so is telling as far as I am concerned.
Yes, copyright law is strong, but so is contract law. It is possible to build a very high penalty into a contract that is equivalent to DMCA fines (excepting jail time). Enforcement of a contract can produce the same expediency as far as getting images removed from public display if the contract is written strongly enough. There is no need to claim ownership of someone else's property to then force them to do what you want with it. I feel it sets a bad precedent. I don't like many provisions of the DMCA and I certainly don't like using it as a magic-big-stick to wield power over people.
How would you like it if the government claimed copyright over everything they did, then used the DMCA to issue takedown notices against everyone who wrote about what they didn't like about what the government did? What if the government claimed copyright over all military actions and issued takedown notices against everyone who published pictures of the war or described how the war was going? It seems one can make all kinds of onerous censorship seem perfectly reasonable if one simply claims copyright on something that does not belong to them in the first place. (Yes, I am using the slippery slope argument. That is because I really believe it applies here. Just because the argument has been misused in the past is no reason to consider it permanently invalid for all arguments.)
Besides, the claim of copyright is included within a contract. Therefore, the DMCA power in this context is actually no stronger than the original contract. Just because the courts are nearly always ready to jump on that DMCA bandwagon is no reason for an organization such as Burning Man - who claims to embrace counter culture - to jump on that bandwagon with them. To do so speaks volumes about their true nature and intentions.
the bottom line is that if you don't trust the Burning Man enforcement team, you don't have to come.
My point is that not everyone will be fully aware of the policy and will, therefore, attend without realizing that their rights may be abridged in the future. Additionally, if the Burning Man enforcement team only ever intends to enforce the rules a certain way then they need to put that into the "contract" they create between themselves and the attendees. They can specifically say, "This provision will only be applied in cases where the published photographs invade another attendee's privacy or are used for commercial gain at the expense of the Burning Man community." To claim that these are the only conditions where the provision is enforced but refuse to put them in writing is very disingenuous indeed. It doesn't matter how long of a history they have of not enforcing the provision. Leaving it as stated leaves open the possibility that they may, in the future, choose to enforce it however they see fit. Even honest organizations with honest people are sometimes sold to others who are not so honest.
Finally, why do they need to claim copyright on the images? All they have to do is claim that a contract has been violated and sue based on that.
If you have a rule written in a way that allows for broad range of interpretation, yet you claim that you only enforce within a narrow range, then it is incumbent on you to rewrite the rule to only cover that narrow range. Otherwise that rule or law can be selectively enforced or more harshly enforced later.
Never trust a vague or partially enforced rule or law. They are quite often used against the citizenry or "community" later.
If you can use steganography to completely hide encrypted data on your hard drive and you can use a program that runs from a thumbdrive and doesn't need to be installed, then your problem is solved. Hell, you could just use a large capacity thumbdrive or flash memory card to store all your incriminating stuff and hide it where no one will find it. Hell, SD cards are so small and have so much capacity that you could loose several terabytes in the cushions of your sofa. Micro SD cards will fit in one of those hollowed out quarters.
Anyone who is dumb enough to store incriminating data on their primary hard drive frikkin' deserves to be caught.
I agree that Word and other word processors are not as useful as they used to be in an age where many documents are not necessarily printed out. However, that does not mean that nothing will ever be printed again. I also agree that a Wiki is a great way to store business intelligence however, MediaWiki does not have a very easy to use editor. Other wiki servers offer much better editors. I also agree with many posters in Slashdot and ARS that without the ability to easily embed things like spreadsheets into wiki pages then we will still need word processors to generate the documents the way we really want them to look and then post those as.PDF files.
But why is everyone just sitting around whining about how his idea won't work instead of getting together and figuring out a way to make it work. HTML and CSS provide a great way to display a document with almost all of the features people usually want. The problem is that editing the documents - and the styles used within them - is still more difficult than it should be for regular people. Word allows a user to easily create, name, and update styles. CSS not so much. Users have to learn arcane concepts such as CSS Selectors, inheritance, etc. Why can't someone write a "document editor" that simply saves it's files as HTML with CSS styles? Not a web-site-design-tool for professional web developers, but just a document editor that works kind of like a word processor for regular people. These could be available as stand alone programs or as plug-ins for browsers.
Has anyone ever seen a web page with an active embedded spreadsheet? They may exist but I haven't seen one. Why not? Because they aren't readily and easily available. Why hasn't someone taken some existing standard for spreadsheet data like ODF (or even - heaven forbid - Open Office XML) and created a standardized way to embed that into a web page. Then others could create standalone or browser-plug-in-based spreadsheet editors to work with that standardized spreadsheet data format. Users should be able to open and edit that embedded spreadsheet just as easily as they can edit a table in some wiki sites. In fact it should be even easier.
And wiki software designers really need to get off their duffs as well. I am an experienced network manager. I have been working with computers since 1976 and posting online in various forms since the 300 baud bulletin board days. But I don't ever post anything on WikiPedia. Why? Because I don't want to have to learn yet another stupid formatting system (that is about three levels of jury rigging deep) instead of some formatting system I already know and is an industry wide standard. Users really need editors that will edit a wiki page just as if it were a word processing document, or at least a regular web page. The user should be able to embed whatever they want into the page and the software should handle the difficult formatting. There should be templates that can be easily called up (rather than downloaded and copied and pasted and modified to fit in this wiki and hacked and rehacked until they work) so that users will get the look the want (or a corporate standard look) without much effort at all. I am sure some higher end wiki servers have some of these features but they must be locked up in proprietary systems or protected by some kind of patents because I haven't seen them in use out in the real world. How hard can it be for the community to settle on some standards for these things so that developers can get started working on various FOSS and commercial applications to make use of the standards. I mean really! People have been bitching about this for years now.
And before anyone jumps in and asks me why I am not fixing all this myself... It is because I am already working on saving the world in my own way. See www.demml.org and www.ideationizing.com. But someone, somewhere must have some spare time to solve some of the major issues
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing to prevent your custom apps from spreading that data over multiple different .PST files and then displaying it as if it were one database.
I have been using Outlook for over a decade. I synchronize the data between a desktop and a laptop as well as hotsync it to a Palm Pilot (Sony Clie NR70v). I have only had one or two times when the database got corrupted. I just restored from the copy that was on my laptop and was on my way.
I think this is a great thing as I have no intention of giving up Outlook any time soon but I am about to give up on the Palm OS platform and move on to Android. Unless Chapura comes out with an Android version of Keysuite, I will likely have to create my own apps for Android and was concerned about figuring out the Outlook .PST format. Now I can get it straight from the horse's mouth. Sure, I know MS isn't always completely forthcoming. Duh. But it is better than relying on hacking my way through from scratch.
I see I am not in disagreement with anyone as to the additional clutter that this will likely add to our search results. It seems that Google continuously piles more straw on the metaphorical haystack, leaving the few needles of information I seek buried ever deeper. The thing is that all those pieces of straw really have strings attached in the form of metadata. Google knows - or should know - where all the pages they index come from. They should be able to relatively easily categorize those sites as manufacturer's sites, shopping sites, news sites, magazine sites, truly educational sites, blogs, forums, etc. But it seems Google cuts all those strings when they pile the indexed pages into the haystack leaving me to sort through them manually. Isn't that what we invented computers for? If they would simply leave the strings attached and allow users to "pull them" then we could simply choose not to receive results from shopping sites or whatever. As it is, looking for a manufacturer's specifications on something can be maddening because of all the shopping sites that come up instead. (Remember, one does not always know the URL to a manufacturer's web site.)
In effect, I wish Google would institute a system wherein we could check off or uncheck which types of sites we would like to receive search results from.
P.S. What the heck is wrong with this text edit box. The text cursor only shows up when I hover the mouse over some portions of the text in this box. When I hover over other portions the regular pointer cursor is displayed. If I click when that pointer is displayed it does not place the cursor into that location in the text. Instead it selects the box within the HTML and typing does not go into the box (the box does not have focus). This is a real pain. The code on Slashdot is getting worse with every revision. Geez, it even prevents me from selecting text in some locations even if I have already started the selection drag. This is insane! Please bring back the old editor.
No, Microsoft wouldn't lie about statistics.... Would they?
Though I believe you are correct for the Acela train on the East Coast, I also believe the Anonymous Coward has a point. While train travel is not currently as difficult as they say, it could easily get that way. While a new long-distance, high-speed rail system would create lots of jobs, I feel that a disproportionate portion of the money spent would go to environmental studies, and lawyers rather than actual construction. this will be a natural result of the limitations imposed by keeping the vehicle on the ground the entire trip. A continuous line from one city to the next must be certified, rebuilt, or newly created for that train to run on. However, many places that the train runs right past will not have access to it, just like a plane. Therefore, it seems the dollars would be better spent by simply increasing airline capacity. Airline capacity, once increased, is very flexible. That extra capacity can be used to service more flights to and from anywhere, rather than just the one or two cities that a train goes to.
All in all, it seems a long-distance, high-speed train is more of a boondoggle than anything else. It appears to be new and innovative, so it gets more attention, but in the end it just wastes more money than actually goes into the regular community economy. I am sure I sound like a terrible cynic here, but it seems as if the plan was devised to put even more money into the pockets of the wealthy rather than anything else.
Personally, I see it as nothing more than another ploy on Microsoft's part. Sure, only 64-bit machines will get the logo. But there will still be plenty of 32-bit machines sold with Windows 7 without the logo. Maybe not by the major players, but nevertheless... In addition, people who have spent a great deal on a machine and software that is only 32-bit, and may not work in a 64-bit environment aren't necessarily going to run out and upgrade all their hardware and software.
So, when all the bugs start cropping up, Microsoft can claim it is not their problem. They can claim it is because people are using un-certified hardware.
Could you please give a reference to this information. I would like to be able to use this to explain why there are so many quotes about "not reading the bill" going around lately. However, just saying. "Someone on Slashdot who calls themselves 'Trickster' said it." is not going to cut it.
Thanks
Sure work is stressful. But it sounds as if you may be rationalizing a bit yourself.
Perhaps the employees at the NSF need to get out more. Perhaps they really just need to get laid. However, that is all something you do outside of work. When someone is paying you to work, you work. You don't surf porn or eBay or Facebook. You work. If the employer intentionally gives you lots of leeway and playtime in order to foster creativity - as does Google - then fine, take advantage of that. Otherwise, if you don't like the amount of break time you get at your job, especially if you are highly skilled, then look for another job. Don't surf porn. Especially when you work for a government agency. That is just stupid.
People will rationalize anything.
I have been waiting for someone to start putting 2-D bar-codes on silver-halide film. If you use heavy duty film with a nice thick silver-halide layer and don't try to micro-size the bar-code blocs too much then it should last for hundreds of years. Sure it is a bit bulky and doesn't look uber high-tech but it works. Plus, it is possible to include a text description and a black and white picture of what the work is supposed to look like right on the film for easy cataloging and sorting without using any technology at all. It is the best of both worlds.
I said "if." There are some circumstances where people do have the right to control what is done with their image. My point is that the same rules should apply to games as apply to print and other media.
I know people here in Slashdot like to think that everyone else's information is just dying to be free (usually so they can then use it to make some money). However, there are limits, and the world of technology is not some separate universe where normal laws do not apply. If someone has the right to control and profit from their own image in a mass-produced, for-profit, magazine, poster, or other publication then the same should apply to games. If someone produced only one copy of a "game" as an art installation that would be different. But games are distributed en-mass specifically to make a profit. Claiming that Party B has a right to steal the intellectual property of Party A (likeness, description, history, etc.) just because Party B is using it in some electronic form is disingenuous.
Anyone who chooses to argue with me should first consider how they would feel if they had spent years building a career in some celebrity-or-image-based industry only to have someone else come along and use their image to make a profit, thus denying them income that they had worked years to earn.
Why can't the courts in these cases set up third-party intermediaries to receive the information that the plaintiffs are asking for (such as someone's personally-identifying information) and then have all communications go through that intermediary? This is just the same as e-mails from Craig's List users going through Craig's List instead of directly between the users. It could even be a system where no human ever sees the information. Instead it could be encrypted such that no one would ever be able to dig it out. Then the plaintiff could contact the individual and they could carry on a conversation and straighten things out, without the individual's individual dentifying information ever being disclosed.
Perhaps what we need is a government sponsored but publicly run (and open-source developed) central system to provide this service. It would have to be open ource so that anyone could check to make sure that the system didn't have any back doors.
Without a system like this, then the technique used by this bank technique could become a powerful tool to do an end-run around privacy laws. If I want to find out the personal information about someone, or even shut down their e-mail accounts or all of their internet access, all I have to do is claim to have accidentally sent them private information about someone else. Heck, I could just make up bogus info and send it to the individual. Who would know, because that info would be kept sealed "for the privacy of the people in the list."
Who wants to bet the the primary use of this device will be for stalking. All someone has to do is stash it in or under someone's car and they can be stalked from home via Google.
With Intellegent Epidemic Routing this could actually work as a viable - if time delayed - networking system.
P.S. What is up with the Slashdot comment form? The text box is only about 20 characters wide.
'nuf said.
This may be similar to what happened to Palm. There were so many supposedly Palm compatible devices - all of them slightly different - that it became difficult for developers to keep up.
Of course the biggest reason that developers aren't flocking to Android is that consumers aren't flocking to Android phones. Development isn't a religion. People do it to earn a living, especially all those developers who jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. The people who bought iPhones were obviously people who had money to spend and wanted everyone to know it. It stands to reason that that consumer mentality would translate to their software purchases as well. Because Android came out quite some time after iPhone, now the only developers left are the "religious" developers, those who choose a platform base on principles instead of money alone.
I regularly read Dr. Vahdat's blog. I first got interested in it after reading his paper on Epidemic Routing which can be found in his list of publications here.
If you read his blog post you will see that he accomplishes his goal by creating a hierarchical tree of MAC addresses instead of a simple table. He also states that a large part of the proliferation of MAC addresses in these systems is due to virtual machines. Therefore everyone's nightmares of cabling hell are relatively moot.
Though I haven't contacted him yet, it seems that this solution would require reassigning new MAC addresses such that they can be organized hierarchically as we are accustomed to doing with IP addresses. If this is the case then it seems one would have two choices:
Now, I am not an expert in the details of switches, routing, or NAT so I may have gotten some of the details wrong. But you get the idea.
Three Words: "Follow the money."
So, I just finished reading the patent. Now, I am not a patent lawyer (or any other kind of lawyer), however, I don't think any use of standard XML is in danger from this patent. The patent essentially describes a method that is the exact antithesis of XML. The method described in the patent strips out all metacodes (tags, formatting codes, etc.) from a document and stores them separately. It then creates a separate map of where those codes were applied within the document. The patent isn't explicit in describing exactly how that map would be structured but they do allude to using character count or some other direct mapping method to indicate exactly where within the content the separate structure and formatting instructions should be applied. In this method, absolutely no structure is retained within the document. They aren't specific about this, but it could be construed that even paragraph marks are not to be included within the content itself as they could be considered formatting or structure rather than content.
This is in stark contrast to how XML works in that the structure of the document is marked up directly within the document. Yes, the patent in question mentions SGML and gives an example of SGML content. But in that example, the method strips out the tags from the SGML content and stores them separately. This is not the same as a CSS stylesheet referring to a specific element within an XML document. In that case, the XML document still retains its structure as tags within the document itself. Only the instructions on how to format the document is separate from the document. The document still retains all of its structural metacodes.
To be clear, the method described in the patent does not pertain to the use of XML files themselves. The patent merely uses an SGML file as an example of the type of file that could be converted to the "new" format described within the patent.
What is unclear to me is whether the patent absolutely requires that all metacodes be stripped out of the original document when being converted to this "new" format. Although I could imagine a way to simply take an existing document (with it's current metacodes included) and adding a supplemental formatting/structure map that provides additional information about how to format that original document, it seems to me that the patent only makes claims about using their method with documents wherein the content is entirely devoid of any metacodes whatsoever. Perhaps this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding I may have about patent law. If all major claims have to be violated or if any one claim can be violated in order to be considered infringing on the patent.
While I do not know exactly how Microsoft's "Custom XML" works, it seems that it would have to work by storing the actual address (or index) of the location within the original document where the "Custom XML" should be applied, if it were to be considered infringing on this patent at all. If "Custom XML" works by referencing existing structural metacodes embedded within the original document then that would be no different from any other use of XML or CSS or XSLT. Perhaps only a Texas judge could possibly be confused about the distinctions.
Another thing I have to say about this patent is that it talks a lot about a means to do this and a means to do that but doesn't actually specify the means to do anything other than strip out the metacodes and store them separately. Hell, a high-school programming student could have told you that. You work through the document and store one part in one file and the other part in another file. The algorithms listed in the patent simply use character count to indicate where the codes are supposed to have an effect. Again, basic programming 101. How this patent is non-obvious in any way completely eludes me. Some may say that the basic "idea" of storing metacodes separately from the content was likely unique back in 1994. I beg to differ. Wh
It's funny how here on Slashdot if someone doesn't agree with you they automatically assume that you haven't read the fine article.
Yes, I did read the article and the response from the Burning Man people. However, my point still stands. It doesn't matter how much Burning Man explains to people what they can and cannot do, it doesn't matter what the history of the enforcement is or how honorable the Burning Man enforcers are personally. If there is a possibility of the policy being misused (by the nature of it being vague) then there is a very high likelihood of it eventually being misused. All they have to do to remove concerns about this possible misuse is to change the wording of the provision. It is that simple. Refusing to do so is telling as far as I am concerned.
Yes, copyright law is strong, but so is contract law. It is possible to build a very high penalty into a contract that is equivalent to DMCA fines (excepting jail time). Enforcement of a contract can produce the same expediency as far as getting images removed from public display if the contract is written strongly enough. There is no need to claim ownership of someone else's property to then force them to do what you want with it. I feel it sets a bad precedent. I don't like many provisions of the DMCA and I certainly don't like using it as a magic-big-stick to wield power over people.
How would you like it if the government claimed copyright over everything they did, then used the DMCA to issue takedown notices against everyone who wrote about what they didn't like about what the government did? What if the government claimed copyright over all military actions and issued takedown notices against everyone who published pictures of the war or described how the war was going? It seems one can make all kinds of onerous censorship seem perfectly reasonable if one simply claims copyright on something that does not belong to them in the first place. (Yes, I am using the slippery slope argument. That is because I really believe it applies here. Just because the argument has been misused in the past is no reason to consider it permanently invalid for all arguments.)
Besides, the claim of copyright is included within a contract. Therefore, the DMCA power in this context is actually no stronger than the original contract. Just because the courts are nearly always ready to jump on that DMCA bandwagon is no reason for an organization such as Burning Man - who claims to embrace counter culture - to jump on that bandwagon with them. To do so speaks volumes about their true nature and intentions.
My point is that not everyone will be fully aware of the policy and will, therefore, attend without realizing that their rights may be abridged in the future. Additionally, if the Burning Man enforcement team only ever intends to enforce the rules a certain way then they need to put that into the "contract" they create between themselves and the attendees. They can specifically say, "This provision will only be applied in cases where the published photographs invade another attendee's privacy or are used for commercial gain at the expense of the Burning Man community." To claim that these are the only conditions where the provision is enforced but refuse to put them in writing is very disingenuous indeed. It doesn't matter how long of a history they have of not enforcing the provision. Leaving it as stated leaves open the possibility that they may, in the future, choose to enforce it however they see fit. Even honest organizations with honest people are sometimes sold to others who are not so honest.
Finally, why do they need to claim copyright on the images? All they have to do is claim that a contract has been violated and sue based on that.
If you have a rule written in a way that allows for broad range of interpretation, yet you claim that you only enforce within a narrow range, then it is incumbent on you to rewrite the rule to only cover that narrow range. Otherwise that rule or law can be selectively enforced or more harshly enforced later.
Never trust a vague or partially enforced rule or law. They are quite often used against the citizenry or "community" later.
If you can use steganography to completely hide encrypted data on your hard drive and you can use a program that runs from a thumbdrive and doesn't need to be installed, then your problem is solved. Hell, you could just use a large capacity thumbdrive or flash memory card to store all your incriminating stuff and hide it where no one will find it. Hell, SD cards are so small and have so much capacity that you could loose several terabytes in the cushions of your sofa. Micro SD cards will fit in one of those hollowed out quarters.
Anyone who is dumb enough to store incriminating data on their primary hard drive frikkin' deserves to be caught.
I agree that Word and other word processors are not as useful as they used to be in an age where many documents are not necessarily printed out. However, that does not mean that nothing will ever be printed again. I also agree that a Wiki is a great way to store business intelligence however, MediaWiki does not have a very easy to use editor. Other wiki servers offer much better editors. I also agree with many posters in Slashdot and ARS that without the ability to easily embed things like spreadsheets into wiki pages then we will still need word processors to generate the documents the way we really want them to look and then post those as .PDF files.
But why is everyone just sitting around whining about how his idea won't work instead of getting together and figuring out a way to make it work. HTML and CSS provide a great way to display a document with almost all of the features people usually want. The problem is that editing the documents - and the styles used within them - is still more difficult than it should be for regular people. Word allows a user to easily create, name, and update styles. CSS not so much. Users have to learn arcane concepts such as CSS Selectors, inheritance, etc. Why can't someone write a "document editor" that simply saves it's files as HTML with CSS styles? Not a web-site-design-tool for professional web developers, but just a document editor that works kind of like a word processor for regular people. These could be available as stand alone programs or as plug-ins for browsers.
Has anyone ever seen a web page with an active embedded spreadsheet? They may exist but I haven't seen one. Why not? Because they aren't readily and easily available. Why hasn't someone taken some existing standard for spreadsheet data like ODF (or even - heaven forbid - Open Office XML) and created a standardized way to embed that into a web page. Then others could create standalone or browser-plug-in-based spreadsheet editors to work with that standardized spreadsheet data format. Users should be able to open and edit that embedded spreadsheet just as easily as they can edit a table in some wiki sites. In fact it should be even easier.
And wiki software designers really need to get off their duffs as well. I am an experienced network manager. I have been working with computers since 1976 and posting online in various forms since the 300 baud bulletin board days. But I don't ever post anything on WikiPedia. Why? Because I don't want to have to learn yet another stupid formatting system (that is about three levels of jury rigging deep) instead of some formatting system I already know and is an industry wide standard. Users really need editors that will edit a wiki page just as if it were a word processing document, or at least a regular web page. The user should be able to embed whatever they want into the page and the software should handle the difficult formatting. There should be templates that can be easily called up (rather than downloaded and copied and pasted and modified to fit in this wiki and hacked and rehacked until they work) so that users will get the look the want (or a corporate standard look) without much effort at all. I am sure some higher end wiki servers have some of these features but they must be locked up in proprietary systems or protected by some kind of patents because I haven't seen them in use out in the real world. How hard can it be for the community to settle on some standards for these things so that developers can get started working on various FOSS and commercial applications to make use of the standards. I mean really! People have been bitching about this for years now.
And before anyone jumps in and asks me why I am not fixing all this myself... It is because I am already working on saving the world in my own way. See www.demml.org and www.ideationizing.com. But someone, somewhere must have some spare time to solve some of the major issues
Of course! What was I thinking?