gives the rest of the world more time to improve their competing products
That's the fundamental race.
Can Microsoft release Longhorn with best-in-class compatibility with all of their legacy technology before the rest of the world can reverse engineer the behavior and interfaces that MS uses now in its dominant technologies (Outlook/Exchange, Office.doc format, effective IE extensions to W3C standards, NTFS, etc.)
For many years, the largest and most significant competition to Microsoft has been itself - users content to use old versions of Microsoft software.
They have some power to retract support for old versions of their software (if you think the NT4 folks don't want to upgrade, just wait till the W2K people are told that they need to upgrade - the OS is technically quite acceptable, as long as security patches keep coming), but they are nonetheless forced to release software that provides compatibility with their old softare. Given the embedded levels of complexity in that old software, this is not a very easy thing to do, even for a company that has special internal access to all of the source code.
And if you look at all the effort that's required of projects like OpenOffice filters, Samba, Linux NTFS and Wine, you can believe it's not easy.
Of course, in the process of starting up a new company everyone is filled with fervor, believing that their idea is so good it will be like an earthquake when it becomes known.
Reality is that there are all these other hurdles involved in marketing, getting startup funding, getting more funding, getting a working product, etc.
No one ever thinks about Corporate Death, only Life. When you're devoting yourself heart and soul to bringing to life some brand new idea, the very last thing you think of is an orderly exit strategy of what happens in the event you fail. Something along the lines of a Last Will and Testament that says if no buyers are found for a period of 2 years that the patent and software and all rights are donated to a charity, such as the EFF or the FSF.
And that's too bad, because some genuinely good ideas fall into oblivion until they're rediscovered, perhaps years later, and successfully brought into the mainstream.
...and the configuring, installing, maintaining and testing of patches.
So pick your poison:
Microsoft: "Windows is soooo e-z to use, any monkey can run a server!" (Collects cash from awe-struck boss.) Later, shit hits fan.
BSD: "Only leet h4Xor5 should edit config files and if they can't figure out what the hell to do from reading 50 man pages, the RFCs and the source code, then they should keep their sorry asses away from systems that are run by real men."
There's progress to be made in both security models.
You and others with unfettered access to those schemas through the latest MS applications like Office, Excel and C# are quite able to run the XML through any XSLT as much as you like. You can even use openly published XSLT to transform Word XML into other, more open XML based formats, as long as you buy the application and access to MS schema.
What's more problematic is whether others, without access to XSD, will be able to make a Word document saved as XML be able to look the way Word presents it. Or, to edit those XML files with anything but an MS application.
This is analogous to the long-standing problems with the.doc "standard": Strictly, RTF is documented, but it's value is disputed: presentation rules for RTF by Word are not completely documented publicly and different versions of Word can change how a document appears.
If obvious crypto voice links are simultaneously needed and illegal, you're between a rock and a hard place.
Rehearse beforehand with a few phrases, much like what the BBC used to broadcast to undercover groups in occupied Europe during WW2.
"Mr Green likes to eat bananas near the pharmacy."
Translation: "They're stalling."
"My socks were laundered yesterday."
Translation: "I think they're willing to settle for a contract in the projected amount."
Etc.
You won't have the full flexibility that you'd like, but it's better than no information.
[BTW, if your laptop isn't in your full possession 24/7, forget about using it for anything you wish to keep from prying eyes. Oh, and don't even think about hooking it up to your company's internal LAN afterwards.]
Excuse me, but there is absolutely no conclusive direct causal scientific evidence for the alien slow death ray theory. Further research is warranted and an independent review panel should consider new results after 10 years.
Sincerely,
Warren P. Foggbottom,
Lead Counsel,
Americans for Truth and Justice
Slow Death Ray Manufacturers Association
Walford has been researching and writing up his results with mice for years. His retort to fad discoveries is to "show me your old mouse".
Recently, an article appeared describing how he' subjecting himself to his own regimen of reduced caloric intake to improve longevity.
He admits it's difficult for people to restrain their diets, but he believes it's necessary if you want to live to be 120 years old.
In addition to quantity, there's the whole issue of diet composition, which is the second part of Calorie Restriction Optimum Nutrition.
The USDA food pyramid is an improvement over the basic 4 food groups I learned when I was young, but it's still been criticized, there are serious profits in making up our current set of foodstuffs.
But others have suggested alternatives that place the carbohydrate group as a smaller portion and put fruits and vegetables as the pyramid base.
The latter would be much more consistent with a hunter gatherer diet that predates agriculture and, IMHO, probably is more closely aligned with the way our bodies were meant to digest food. Our bodies have only recently begun to adapt to the advent of agriculture adn they certainly haven't adapted yet to modern high sugar diets (witness especially the incidence of diabetes among ethnic groups with less exposure to agriculture).
Oh well, soon enough we'll re-engineer ourselves to take power from whatever is highest energy density. Maybe nitromethane:)
such a strategy might protect local companies and markets in the short term, [but] it would make it more difficult for Asian companies to participate in world markets.
Given the size of China, Japan and Korean markets combined, I'd say that statement could be turned on its head.
The World markets might find solutions based on the Asian standards to be perfectly adaptable to simpler Western alphabets and to be less expensive, too.
I've noticed that, in terms of direct consequences, there isn't much difference between the actions of deliberately evil people and the hopelessly oblivious and ignorant.
Most of the people cutting you off on the freeway belong to the latter category, as much as we tend to think of them in the former.
IBM is one that's figured out how integration services can be marketed.
But Sun is the leading edge of three [Sun, Oracle, Microsoft] significant IT companies that stand to lose out as their business becomes commoditized: OSS dictates that companies can only charge for value-added to the existing pile of FOSS. The existing pile keeps growing, to the benefit of users everywhere.
People can buy low-end UNIX servers with NIS, NFS using Linux and *BSD and a lot of other technology that Sun developed. This is great; it's akin to the kind of price reductions people are accustomed to getting in the area of hardware (CPU, memory, disk space, network BW). But it's tough for a company like Sun because it means they can't have a static business plan.
Next in line to face the music will be anyone that sells an SQL platform. Everyone will ask pointed questions about exactly how much they're paying for Oracle, MS SQL, IBM DB2 for what does not exist in MySQL or Postgres. Some functionality, performance, reliability, support and integration; but the answer to the question has changed over the past several years and it will keep changing.
Lastly, MS provides desktop productivity applications. They've felt less competition (their biggest competition has been their own old software) than the businesses that have had to compete in the low end UNIX server market and the to compete in the SQL server market. But people are constantly asking questions about how much they're paying for what they actually get and they'll feel heat unless they can convince the buyer that they offer genuine true value-added.
There's probably a dozen or so postings already here (including your own PHP testimonial).
Granted, they're not random in the strictest sense (/. sure seems random), but it's a start.
I've been impressed with PHP (seems ideal for rapid application development) and have to wonder why projects like Pear and Horde don't have a greater uptake than they do.
Recurring security issues with PHP would make me nervous deploying in the context of financial transactions, though. News portals, blogs, calendars, mail and miscellaneous web tasks are nicely handled by PHP.
For example, users can ask their computers to retrieve all pictures that include a specific person's face or background."
Over the web, Google already has a service to retrieve images that is fun and even useful sometimes.
While MS is obviously out to conquer another market and has the bucks to sponsor research in its quest, it does have some good ideas buried in this pursuit. There's improvements to be found; improvements I'd even like to see in the FOSS that I use.
What I'd like to see are VFolders (in Evolution speak) of my home directory.
Not just the one directory tree that I create and get stuck with, but alternative, new trees looking into the same data.
Perhaps one view that's largely based on time (2003,...1999...) and subdivided down by month, etc.; another view that's based on frequency of access and of modification (~/.bashrc); another based on keyword hits from a glimpse search, perhaps with additional weighting for those search items in my home directory that I actually clicked on; etc.
Some of this technology exists in the form of suitable find commands, but I wouldn't mind having ls be able to list in the context of a choosable VFolder as well as what it gets from doing a stat() on the current directory.
right-wing people who praise the right to own guns as a means to overthrow an oppressive government do think about this.
I've never understood that part, either.
Trusting your subjects and fellow citizens, to me, represents one of the bravest moves of any government. It accords them with power and responsibilty that, throughout history, governments have sought to remove.
So now, in the U.S. anyway, the party in charge of government simultaneously advocates strong protection for the citizens' "rights" to possess lethal firearms and, on the other hand, takes away other "rights" such as privacy.
Actually, though, the most right-wing parts of the Republican party are suspicious, downright paranoid, that "liberals" will not only take away their firearms, but establish an Oppressive One World Government under the direction of the U.N.
Meanwhile, on the left, advocates for the right to privacy, etc., usually lose their enthusiasm for those principles once they've used the advantages of those rights to gain power and want to maintain control, er, "enforce laws".
Myself, I kind of like giving citizens as much power and responsibity as possible - but giving them comparably draconian punishment in case they abuse the power and responsibility entrusted to them.
If technology for video surveillance is becoming so inexpensive and easy to deploy, it makes sense for private citizens to record their authorities, make the information public and hold them accountable so that the public can expect as high standards of behavior from the authorities as the authorites expect of the public.
We communicate with our ATMs over a dedicated line.
Not phone lines?
I'm curious because I've used my ATM card overseas (works great, BTW, thanks).
Also, I've heard that banks are not entirely comfortable with the current system's network security model. I wasn't positive, 3DES sounds reasonably solid, but maybe it was a low number of secret keys, perhaps?
I like that IBM is thinking about ergonomic design and ways of getting a laptop to possess more of the features that people like about desktops.
But I wouldn't stop at a hinge that pushes the display up a few inches.
Why not make the keyboard, mouse and display easily detachable (with retracting flexible connector cords), so that you have a choice of putting it on your lap and typing away at the airport, or arranging the parts on a conventional desk, putting the keyboard just above lap height, the mouse 6 inches to the side, and good sized monitor (maybe 19") so that level sight hits the middle?
It's a shame that docking stations have to exist. The portable should support all of the same functionality without needing some extra docking station.
In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations.
I like the sentiment of people coming together to agree upon free standards, free software.
But another side of me remains skeptical that such a large group of politicians can form a meaningful consensus in finite time.
Oh well, there's still probably some value in high level governmental IT people publicly expression support for this or that good free software feature. It will make it easier for their worker bees to openly justify that FOSS prototype project instead of hiding it in a dark corner of the server room.
IIRC, Gates' stake in MSFT was worth as much as US$ 100 billion only about 3 years ago.
If there's been gains in the last year, they've been more than overshadowed by the losses many stockholders took in 2000.
That includes all of us with 201k defined contribution retirement plans, too.
I knew more than one person in 1999 that would tell me they were on track to retire in n years, where n<5.
Wait till the IMF clamps down on the U.S. for being a profligate deficit spender, like it already has for most of the nations in South America and Africa.
But there were some points of tension when the U.S. cruddy intelligence led to the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and when a U.S. spyplane flying off the coast made an emergency landing on a Chinese island.
Meanwhile, the government there is learning that it can divert attention from inconvenient issues (like corruption between the military and industry, lack of an open democratic process) by exploiting nationalistic sentiment (We vs They).
This is in the same grand tradition that is done in the United States and in Russia, so the rest of the world can feel safe knowing that all 3 of the largest nuclear superpowers are populated by emotional peasants.
does anyone think it's good software design to have a completely external and seperate entity (printer driver) determine how things should be displayed?
No, it's obviously not good software design.
But if I had over 90% market share with my office productivity software, and further profits depended upon me keeping users from migrating to rival office productivty software that must needs be compatible with mine, then the decision to hide the presentation rules makes a hell of a lot of sense from a pure business perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
gives the rest of the world more time to improve their competing products
That's the fundamental race.
Can Microsoft release Longhorn with best-in-class compatibility with all of their legacy technology before the rest of the world can reverse engineer the behavior and interfaces that MS uses now in its dominant technologies (Outlook/Exchange, Office .doc format, effective IE extensions to W3C standards, NTFS, etc.)
For many years, the largest and most significant competition to Microsoft has been itself - users content to use old versions of Microsoft software.
They have some power to retract support for old versions of their software (if you think the NT4 folks don't want to upgrade, just wait till the W2K people are told that they need to upgrade - the OS is technically quite acceptable, as long as security patches keep coming), but they are nonetheless forced to release software that provides compatibility with their old softare. Given the embedded levels of complexity in that old software, this is not a very easy thing to do, even for a company that has special internal access to all of the source code.
And if you look at all the effort that's required of projects like OpenOffice filters, Samba, Linux NTFS and Wine, you can believe it's not easy.
Of course, in the process of starting up a new company everyone is filled with fervor, believing that their idea is so good it will be like an earthquake when it becomes known.
Reality is that there are all these other hurdles involved in marketing, getting startup funding, getting more funding, getting a working product, etc.
No one ever thinks about Corporate Death, only Life. When you're devoting yourself heart and soul to bringing to life some brand new idea, the very last thing you think of is an orderly exit strategy of what happens in the event you fail. Something along the lines of a Last Will and Testament that says if no buyers are found for a period of 2 years that the patent and software and all rights are donated to a charity, such as the EFF or the FSF.
And that's too bad, because some genuinely good ideas fall into oblivion until they're rediscovered, perhaps years later, and successfully brought into the mainstream.
As long as humans are doing the coding
...and the configuring, installing, maintaining and testing of patches.
So pick your poison:
Microsoft: "Windows is soooo e-z to use, any monkey can run a server!" (Collects cash from awe-struck boss.) Later, shit hits fan.
BSD: "Only leet h4Xor5 should edit config files and if they can't figure out what the hell to do from reading 50 man pages, the RFCs and the source code, then they should keep their sorry asses away from systems that are run by real men."
There's progress to be made in both security models.
I'm curious, how did Microsoft drop the ball with respect to other XML-based Office suites?
Possibly by keeping the XSD proprietary?
You and others with unfettered access to those schemas through the latest MS applications like Office, Excel and C# are quite able to run the XML through any XSLT as much as you like. You can even use openly published XSLT to transform Word XML into other, more open XML based formats, as long as you buy the application and access to MS schema.
What's more problematic is whether others, without access to XSD, will be able to make a Word document saved as XML be able to look the way Word presents it. Or, to edit those XML files with anything but an MS application.
This is analogous to the long-standing problems with the .doc "standard": Strictly, RTF is documented, but it's value is disputed: presentation rules for RTF by Word are not completely documented publicly and different versions of Word can change how a document appears.
If obvious crypto voice links are simultaneously needed and illegal, you're between a rock and a hard place.
Rehearse beforehand with a few phrases, much like what the BBC used to broadcast to undercover groups in occupied Europe during WW2.
"Mr Green likes to eat bananas near the pharmacy."
Translation: "They're stalling."
"My socks were laundered yesterday."
Translation: "I think they're willing to settle for a contract in the projected amount."
Etc.
You won't have the full flexibility that you'd like, but it's better than no information.
[BTW, if your laptop isn't in your full possession 24/7, forget about using it for anything you wish to keep from prying eyes. Oh, and don't even think about hooking it up to your company's internal LAN afterwards.]
if being treated as an invalid as most people in a home
From what I understand, long term care in places of last resort is not nice. Care is generally minimal, to reduce cost.
A financial advisor I had once suggested that I go visit some of these homes and then decide how much to save for retirement.
In his words,
Occam's Razor
Excuse me, but there is absolutely no conclusive direct causal scientific evidence for the alien slow death ray theory. Further research is warranted and an independent review panel should consider new results after 10 years.
Sincerely,
Warren P. Foggbottom,
Lead Counsel,
Americans for Truth and Justice
Slow Death Ray Manufacturers Association
Walford has been researching and writing up his results with mice for years. His retort to fad discoveries is to "show me your old mouse".
Recently, an article appeared describing how he' subjecting himself to his own regimen of reduced caloric intake to improve longevity.
He admits it's difficult for people to restrain their diets, but he believes it's necessary if you want to live to be 120 years old.
In addition to quantity, there's the whole issue of diet composition, which is the second part of Calorie Restriction Optimum Nutrition.
The USDA food pyramid is an improvement over the basic 4 food groups I learned when I was young, but it's still been criticized, there are serious profits in making up our current set of foodstuffs.
But others have suggested alternatives that place the carbohydrate group as a smaller portion and put fruits and vegetables as the pyramid base.
The latter would be much more consistent with a hunter gatherer diet that predates agriculture and, IMHO, probably is more closely aligned with the way our bodies were meant to digest food. Our bodies have only recently begun to adapt to the advent of agriculture adn they certainly haven't adapted yet to modern high sugar diets (witness especially the incidence of diabetes among ethnic groups with less exposure to agriculture).
Oh well, soon enough we'll re-engineer ourselves to take power from whatever is highest energy density. Maybe nitromethane:)
such a strategy might protect local companies and markets in the short term, [but] it would make it more difficult for Asian companies to participate in world markets.
Given the size of China, Japan and Korean markets combined, I'd say that statement could be turned on its head.
The World markets might find solutions based on the Asian standards to be perfectly adaptable to simpler Western alphabets and to be less expensive, too.
I've heard, but not tried, putting a CD in microwave. Sparky platters ensue.
I've noticed that, in terms of direct consequences, there isn't much difference between the actions of deliberately evil people and the hopelessly oblivious and ignorant.
Most of the people cutting you off on the freeway belong to the latter category, as much as we tend to think of them in the former.
Companies exist to MAKE MONEY.
That's tough to do these days in IT.
IBM is one that's figured out how integration services can be marketed.
But Sun is the leading edge of three [Sun, Oracle, Microsoft] significant IT companies that stand to lose out as their business becomes commoditized: OSS dictates that companies can only charge for value-added to the existing pile of FOSS. The existing pile keeps growing, to the benefit of users everywhere.
People can buy low-end UNIX servers with NIS, NFS using Linux and *BSD and a lot of other technology that Sun developed. This is great; it's akin to the kind of price reductions people are accustomed to getting in the area of hardware (CPU, memory, disk space, network BW). But it's tough for a company like Sun because it means they can't have a static business plan.
Next in line to face the music will be anyone that sells an SQL platform. Everyone will ask pointed questions about exactly how much they're paying for Oracle, MS SQL, IBM DB2 for what does not exist in MySQL or Postgres. Some functionality, performance, reliability, support and integration; but the answer to the question has changed over the past several years and it will keep changing.
Lastly, MS provides desktop productivity applications. They've felt less competition (their biggest competition has been their own old software) than the businesses that have had to compete in the low end UNIX server market and the to compete in the SQL server market. But people are constantly asking questions about how much they're paying for what they actually get and they'll feel heat unless they can convince the buyer that they offer genuine true value-added.
hundred randomly-selected PHP developers interviewed, essay-style,
Good idea.
There's probably a dozen or so postings already here (including your own PHP testimonial).
Granted, they're not random in the strictest sense (/. sure seems random), but it's a start.
I've been impressed with PHP (seems ideal for rapid application development) and have to wonder why projects like Pear and Horde don't have a greater uptake than they do.
Recurring security issues with PHP would make me nervous deploying in the context of financial transactions, though. News portals, blogs, calendars, mail and miscellaneous web tasks are nicely handled by PHP.
For example, users can ask their computers to retrieve all pictures that include a specific person's face or background."
Over the web, Google already has a service to retrieve images that is fun and even useful sometimes.
While MS is obviously out to conquer another market and has the bucks to sponsor research in its quest, it does have some good ideas buried in this pursuit. There's improvements to be found; improvements I'd even like to see in the FOSS that I use.
What I'd like to see are VFolders (in Evolution speak) of my home directory.
Not just the one directory tree that I create and get stuck with, but alternative, new trees looking into the same data.
Perhaps one view that's largely based on time (2003,...1999...) and subdivided down by month, etc.; another view that's based on frequency of access and of modification (~/.bashrc); another based on keyword hits from a glimpse search, perhaps with additional weighting for those search items in my home directory that I actually clicked on; etc.
Some of this technology exists in the form of suitable find commands, but I wouldn't mind having ls be able to list in the context of a choosable VFolder as well as what it gets from doing a stat() on the current directory.
right-wing people who praise the right to own guns as a means to overthrow an oppressive government do think about this.
I've never understood that part, either.
Trusting your subjects and fellow citizens, to me, represents one of the bravest moves of any government. It accords them with power and responsibilty that, throughout history, governments have sought to remove.
So now, in the U.S. anyway, the party in charge of government simultaneously advocates strong protection for the citizens' "rights" to possess lethal firearms and, on the other hand, takes away other "rights" such as privacy.
Actually, though, the most right-wing parts of the Republican party are suspicious, downright paranoid, that "liberals" will not only take away their firearms, but establish an Oppressive One World Government under the direction of the U.N.
Meanwhile, on the left, advocates for the right to privacy, etc., usually lose their enthusiasm for those principles once they've used the advantages of those rights to gain power and want to maintain control, er, "enforce laws".
Myself, I kind of like giving citizens as much power and responsibity as possible - but giving them comparably draconian punishment in case they abuse the power and responsibility entrusted to them.
Transparency ought to cut both ways.
If technology for video surveillance is becoming so inexpensive and easy to deploy, it makes sense for private citizens to record their authorities, make the information public and hold them accountable so that the public can expect as high standards of behavior from the authorities as the authorites expect of the public.
We communicate with our ATMs over a dedicated line.
Not phone lines?
I'm curious because I've used my ATM card overseas (works great, BTW, thanks).
Also, I've heard that banks are not entirely comfortable with the current system's network security model. I wasn't positive, 3DES sounds reasonably solid, but maybe it was a low number of secret keys, perhaps?
I like that IBM is thinking about ergonomic design and ways of getting a laptop to possess more of the features that people like about desktops.
But I wouldn't stop at a hinge that pushes the display up a few inches.
Why not make the keyboard, mouse and display easily detachable (with retracting flexible connector cords), so that you have a choice of putting it on your lap and typing away at the airport, or arranging the parts on a conventional desk, putting the keyboard just above lap height, the mouse 6 inches to the side, and good sized monitor (maybe 19") so that level sight hits the middle?
It's a shame that docking stations have to exist. The portable should support all of the same functionality without needing some extra docking station.
In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations.
I like the sentiment of people coming together to agree upon free standards, free software.
But another side of me remains skeptical that such a large group of politicians can form a meaningful consensus in finite time.
Oh well, there's still probably some value in high level governmental IT people publicly expression support for this or that good free software feature. It will make it easier for their worker bees to openly justify that FOSS prototype project instead of hiding it in a dark corner of the server room.
IIRC, Gates' stake in MSFT was worth as much as US$ 100 billion only about 3 years ago.
If there's been gains in the last year, they've been more than overshadowed by the losses many stockholders took in 2000.
That includes all of us with 201k defined contribution retirement plans, too.
I knew more than one person in 1999 that would tell me they were on track to retire in n years, where n<5.
Wait till the IMF clamps down on the U.S. for being a profligate deficit spender, like it already has for most of the nations in South America and Africa.
someone has a use for this
You bet.
How long are you willing to wait for your stereo receiver to boot up, your TV, or your TiVo?
This is a really important issue for embedded devices like consumer electronics built on Linux.
constantly improving
Over the long haul, yes.
But there were some points of tension when the U.S. cruddy intelligence led to the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and when a U.S. spyplane flying off the coast made an emergency landing on a Chinese island.
Meanwhile, the government there is learning that it can divert attention from inconvenient issues (like corruption between the military and industry, lack of an open democratic process) by exploiting nationalistic sentiment (We vs They).
This is in the same grand tradition that is done in the United States and in Russia, so the rest of the world can feel safe knowing that all 3 of the largest nuclear superpowers are populated by emotional peasants.
The courts decide what laws are just or not.
These days, I get the impression that courts are rather strictly focussed on only two things:
- Whether some action represents a violation of some law.
- Whether the collection of laws is logically consistent.
but very little at all about what the common person may think is "justice".The courts are interpreters; they rely upon the legislatures to enact laws, just or otherwise.
there were many different mail protocols
Ah, yes.
I remember having to chain together various tricky monstrosities back in the 80's, like
but it's been well over a decade since I've ever had to do anything like that.This is a great thing, this practical reduction to zero in the number of corner cases that have to be handled.
does anyone think it's good software design to have a completely external and seperate entity (printer driver) determine how things should be displayed?
No, it's obviously not good software design.
But if I had over 90% market share with my office productivity software, and further profits depended upon me keeping users from migrating to rival office productivty software that must needs be compatible with mine, then the decision to hide the presentation rules makes a hell of a lot of sense from a pure business perspective.