"I say, I say, are they, are they naming a opera-ating system after me?"
Posted on 11/30/2002 8:22:03 AM PST by Eala
An anonymous reader writes
"Everything I have read concering MS's future plans: Palladium, Client/Server tie in, Office 11 breaking backward compatability, 3 year licensing plans, product activation - all leave me with a foreboding sense of the potential synergy for furthering Microsoft's goals of complete domination. Now this article tells about Longhorn's new filesystem being based on the the future Yukon server. And surprise it will only work with new hardware, which they want to be Palladium enabled. And all pitched to you under the rubric of Security & Efficency. For years MS has been accused of only wanting people to run MS Software. Now according to the article, 'Microsoft doesn't think computer users should have to use one program to read and write a word-processing file, another to use a spreadsheet, and a third to correspond via e-mail. Rather, the company thinks, a single program should handle it all.' One program to rule them all, one program to bind them, indeed."
I am still stuck trying to get XSL to let me print out my opcode table in a useful XHTML format! I may have to go to SVG if I can't get it to do what I want soon...
"I say, I say, are they, are they naming a opera-ating system after me?"
It doesn't look like it will be to sell upgrades - it will be to sell new hardware which is an order of magnitude improvement in storage and speed over the best PCs of today. Think mega-multimedia, and oh yes by the way you can't buy the hottest new home movies and music unless it runs on the Palladium box with Windows 2005. Sure Microsoft will be sued over this, but it will be 2010 before the case reaches the Supreme Court, and perhaps by then that will be the only OS legal to run in the USA because the gummint can spy on it so well :-)
I've done a bit of XML programming and am curious about your comment. I think of a computer language as something that is executed, something that has variables and conmditional execution. Some languages are interpreted rather than executed, but they contain verbs and can be compiled into executable code.
XML, on the other hand, appears to be a digital equavalent of Russian dolls -- a container for data, but not for code. You could write a language in XML, provided you also write a suitable interpreter, but I don't see that this is implied in the definition of XML.
(buncha tea sips)
A computer language is not executed, but rather it is translated into something the computer can execute. Or, it is translated into some other language that another process can then translate into something the computer can execute.
Take C code for example. I think we would both agree that C is a computer language, yet a computer can't execute C code. In some cases a compiler is used to translate C into something a computer can execute (machine code), but in most cases the compiler translates the C code into assembly code (which a computer can't execute) which is translated into object code (which a computer can almost execute) which is then processed by a linker that spits out the machine code that a computer will execute.
(I put the emphasis on the terms not because I think they are new to you, clearly they are not, but so I can try and show how I see the analogies shaping up for our semantic discussion)
something that has variables and conditional execution. Some languages are interpreted rather than executed, but they contain verbs and can be compiled into executable code.
Well, not all programming languages are like that. Sure the procedural ones that map almost one-to-one directly on a processor do (C, Pascal, BASICs). But Prolog, LISP, Smalltalk, and others are definitely languages but behave radically different.
XML, on the other hand, appears to be a digital equavalent of Russian dolls -- a container for data, but not for code.
Well, it is like the Russian dolls, it is a container for data. But there is no reason that the data can't be code. Just look at XSLT. It is an XML language, and it is code. It has constructs to enable you to interate over input XML data, recurse, loop, search, compare, conditionally execute, and all the things one thinks of with a computer language.
What I meant when I said "It's actually a language, which by its definition and the nature of XML is almost not a format" was that since XML was designed to be extensible, it doesn't really do anything at all; you have to extend it before it is useful...i.e. it's is almost NOT a format, because it's not a format until you write a DTD or a Schema to define your own data format using its precepts.
Last night I drove 60 miles round trip to the Apple Store for their 6 PM to Midnight sale-a-thon. I have NEVER used anything Apple (except Quicktime for Windows).
What amazed me was the cross-platform tools they had...You can run Win 98, Win ME, Win 2000, and Win XP if you absolutely must run PC specific software on a Mac.
My goal is to acquire one this coming year and avoid Gates-Games (Palladium, TCPA, 'Fritz Chips', and, of course, Longhorn).
I will retain my three PC's for doing legacy stuff, as well as backup untill I can evaluate the above mentioned cross platform products.
And, late next year, probably get Linux dual booted on said PC's
I only have one nitpick with that XML explanation link:
Technical readers may find it more useful to think of XML as being SGML-- rather than HTML++
That really should be XML is "--SGML", not "SGML--", if you think about it :-)
LOL!!!
My latest machine is a Sony Vaio 1.7 GHz Celeron running XP which I only bought to run educational software that REQUIRES QuickTime for Windows (QT for Win has been 'broken' for at least a year!)
Because of the 'spyware' and assorted 'backdoors' [at LEAST three!], the machine is not connected to the Internet, in any manner, shape or form.
We use 'Sneakernet' for security purposes!!
I stopped messing around with dual boot on my latest machine and went instead with removable hard disk drive bays. It is much cleaner that way, and I don't run the risk of letting a partition editor mess up an innocent partition!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.