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Technology Stocks : Novell (NOVL) dirt cheap, good buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Bannister who wrote (29778)	1/4/2000 10:42:00 PM
From: Retired Eagle One	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 42771

Hi, i bought 1000 shares of NOVL at 40 a few days back. Great timing? I feel like I fool for jumping on it so fast - but i was blind to what is now tax selling going on in the market. so, that's a new lesson to learn for next year .... is never buy anything the first week of january - maybe i will stretch that out longer depending on how much NOVL goes down the next few weeeks. I think your email is telling me some good news....right? that NOVLs XML will grow into something really big and NOVL will make alot of money? Is XML the stuff that makes caching possable? Is NOVL caching going to be the big money maker for NOVL this year or something else? Thanks for reading this - i am just trying to break down your millions of points of light into something easier to understand. Keep it simple?

To: Steve Bannister who wrote (29778)	1/5/2000 12:09:00 PM
From: Scott C. Lemon	Respond to of 42771

Hello Steve, > I guess I see XML being around for a while. It will be ... in one form or another. ;-) Obviously a lot of companies are hard at work trying to see how they can "use" XML as an advantage for their products ... over a competitors. > MS supports it big time so their apps including office will "spit > and suck" it. Yes ... and with their BizTalk initiative they are trying to push the standards (de facto standards) in their direction. I'm sure they will continue to do this. I think that we agree that schema is important, and they will push to create schema and use it in their applications. The "spit and suck" that you refer to is a classic use of "filters" which provide translations between a variety of formats. I'd have to look for more detail on the specific schema that Microsoft is using for all of their application data ... but one thing is for sure, they will no doubt support all of their existing filters. I think that they realize that support of numerous standards is going to provide more flexibility that support for a single standard. I just read an article about the cell phone industry ... the article was detailing the current situation of cell phones that are being designed around the "newest" standards ... vs. the phones which are being built to support numerous standards. The article explained, and I agree, that open support for multiple standards will provide a better, more flexible product. Remember the days of Novell's Open Protocol Technology? ;-) > The trends in enterprise application integration seem to be to use > XML as the common data format. It (XDI) is a candidate to replace > EDI. But again, this seems to be in the area of flexible data interchange ... not meaning that all of the system, top to bottom, is rewritten around XML. There is a big difference between allowing the XML data to be used in an API call, vs. the entire software being rewritten so that the XML format is preserved all the way down to storage. There are many optimizations that are lost if this is done ... > It is about to become the lingua franca of directory. Or is it the "lingua franca" for the exchange of directory information? Before leaving Novell, actually at last BrainShare, I proposed that a protocol could be built which would allow very simple requests to be made, with responses being returned in XML format. I referred to is as XDAP. Although I couldn't get many takers then, it appears that other people in the industry understand the power of this. It doesn't mean that I have to rewrite NDS to gain this ... it's a very simple process of layering a new API and access protocol on the existing NDS ... or even LDAP directory. If I do it this way, then I still retain all of my legacy application support (which I need to do), plus other access protocols (such as LDAP), but I also then gain the ability to make simple directory requests and get my results back in an XML formatted response. > Its is seen by smarter people than me as the replacement on the web > for HTML. Of course ... although I would say that those smarter people see it as the next step evolution of HTML ... obviously HTML was a "least common denominator" of far more complex languages such as SGML ... XMXL will grow in power and use, and will become a stronger standard ... until the next evolution ... > So why not store it natively until it is replace after a while to > gain the efficiencies? But this is where I'm not sure that I understand your use of the word "efficiencies". I do see the efficiency of a data exchange language, and XML offer a lot in this space. But as for storage for example, how are you going to store a .GIF or .JPG in XML? Are you going to UUEncode it? How does XML deal with the storage of binary data? What about a full length motion picure? And then what happens when I want to open the file with a legacy application ... what do I do then? This is where I see people going a little bit overboard with XML ... I can see, maybe, a database of information about motion pictures, and the ability to retrieve that data in XML ... which would contain a pointer to the actual motion picture file ... I can see an interface into a huge DB2 or Oracle database that would allow the query to be sent via XML, and the results to return formatted in XML ... but not the underlying data store ... It appears to me that even in the evolving biological world (as you know, always my reference for learning about future directions) while some thoughts are best expressed in a particular language, the actual "thought" is not "stored" in that language. (Of course this then brings about the studies that have been done on multi-lingual people vs. uni-lingual people ... facinating work has been done which outlines that completely different neural patterns based on when the multiple languages were learned ...) > And we agree on the importance of caching and schema. I knew that we agreed here ... ;-) Scott C. Lemon