OSNews on the LinuxWorld Exhibition Floor 166
Expo writes "OSNews reports on the second day of the LinuxWorld Expo. Highlights of the article is CodeWeaver's CrossOver Photoshop effort and the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with _all_ the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format. NewsForge also has a report."
New format? (Score:2, Informative)
From the post: the fact that OpenOffice.org is collaborating with _all_ the other major Linux office suites and word processors towards the creation of a new, open XML-based, file format.
From the article: some Gobe people were there, and they were all discussing the idea of creating a new, XML-based, common format
Isn't there a difference between 'discussing the idea' of creating a new format and actually doing it?
Wow it is fun out here. (Score:2, Informative)
The highlights from linux world for me? Getting a pic of 17 Microsoft Employes all holding up a bumpersticker that said "You shouldnt Buy software from ex convicts". Besides that the allways insperational Linux Bowl/ or by its proper name the Golden Penguin Bowl when my Friend Arthur Ulfelt(? last name allways screws me up) got picked to be on the sides. And unfortunatly again one of my friends were on the looseing team since last year I got my friend Jesse Crocker to go up on one of the sides he lost forgetting that Trinity was in room 303 and he missed the 20 people makeing signs that said it with there fingers. Oh well. Arthurs shigning moment was when he said as the answer "Food" to the questoin is C6H1206 food or poisen =)
Photoshop on Linux is a good thing (Score:4, Informative)
The only app for Linux that's competitive in this space is GIMP. According to GIMP's web site, supporting CMYK will "require a complete rewrite" of the painting engine and will not be available until GIMP 2.0 which some speculate will never come to fruition.
There are entire industries blocking on Linux having the capabilities that Photoshop provides. This is a great step in the right direction, even if it's just a stop-gap until GIMP 2.0 is available.
CMYK is a color model in which all colors are described as a mixture of these four process colors. CMYK is the standard color model used in offset printing for full-color documents. Because such printing uses inks of these four basic colors, it is often called four-color printing.
In contrast, display devices generally use a different color model called RGB, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. One of the most difficult aspects of desktop publishing in color is color matching -- properly converting the RGB colors into CMYK colors so that what gets printed looks the same as what appears on the monitor.
Photoshop does this rather well.
Oy, it's bad (Score:4, Informative)
The floor seems empty, the booths seems thin, and the coolest thing I think I saw was this handheld voice rec translator - and it was running Windows.
And - RedHat seems like a bunch of revolutionaries compared to the other exhibitors. They actualy use the words Open Source.
Way downhill from last year (where's Ximian and the cool jungle booth?)
Low quality article (Score:4, Informative)
Commenting on the Athlon, the article starts out with:
"running at 1800 MHz (2200+) with the AthlonXP CPUs already maxed out in both speed and heat"
The 2400+ and 2600+ Athlon will very likely be released on the 21st of THIS month. And they are supposed to be running much cooler. AMD found a glitch in the Athlons that was responsible for a good deal of the chips heat.
Re:I really don't get the big deal. (Score:4, Informative)
XML allows you to define your own document format standards and embed those standards into your documents, for on-the-fly validation during parsing. DTDs can be distributed to your vendors, and they can draft documents according to that DTD, and be assured some level of compatibility with your software.
2) Heirarchal Storage of Data
This may not be that important to a lot of people, but it offers the ability to categorize data in common groupings with duplication of meta data. It's great for, say, directory structures and whatnot. Sure, there's LDAP, but that's an interface standard. This is a storage standard.
3) Readability
There's a whole debate over how readable XML is, given the prevalance of markup, but I would argue that the heirarchal outlines are much more intuitive than a flat file format. Well-designed DTDs and well-named tags help reduce the interference of markup.
4) Conciseness
XML wouldn't be good for, say, a network layer protocol, but as an interface between applications and users it is fairly small for what it does. Sure there's "overhead" and "bloat", but who wants to visually parse run-together character strings or hexadecimal encoded bytes?
5) Standardization
XML has to make a lot of concessions because it is designed to be universal. It's a standard. Yes, not all applications make use of all the features it offers. They don't have to. But those features are available so more applications can make use of it. It's widely used, it's open, and it works.
XML is good at what it's designed for. The standardized office document formats are a great place for it, as it offers the user *some* readability outside of an application framework while preserving special markup. Ever try reading a
Re:I really don't get the big deal. (Score:3, Informative)
Try writing a parser for any widely used file format. Go ahead I dare you, DOC, RTF, anyone. Just the parser, so the end result is a syntax tree in memory. See how long it takes to get anything useful. Don't stop there think of revisions of the format. Languages, are we going to have one solid C library and thats it? Aren't we going to support Ruby and Phython? Think of the API to get other programs to use your in-memory parse tree. How are you going to do that? Another API?
XML makes this trivial. with libxml or any of the other popular XML libraries, no *real* coding is involved, just supply the DTD. And plus XML libraries are everywhere. DOM is documented and understood by programmers who may not have encountered your format before, shortening the learning curve for use of your product
With an XML file format *any* of those libraries can be used to edit the format. No more sending mouse clicks to Microsoft word to do simple doc conversions or other hacks. Just write a *very* short PERL script that would parse this file. Also because XML is becoming the parser language of choice, there is a good chance that suitable XML libraries are available for your platform/langauge or installed already.
The idea to use XML is most likely from coders who have had to deal with these parser issues for years. I doubt it was handed down my OpenOffice "management".
Re:I really don't get the big deal. (Score:2, Informative)
That is the real beauty of XML, portability from one source to another. Wich is also helped and aided by it being both an Open standard and a Human readable way of storing data.
Re:Photoshop on Linux is a good thing (Score:4, Informative)
FYI, for non-professional use, creating RGB images and then converting them to CMYK works fine. I have created a number of flyers, folders, and other print materials in this fashion. The final colors come out looking a bit different from what was on the screen (paricularly the blues), but it certainly looks just fine.