If the solution you want is an alternative to Flash, there's Java. Java is free now.
If the solution you want has to be 100% compliant with Adobe Flash spec, notice that Flash specs are secret, and developing a fully compliant alternative takes a huge amount of reverse-engineering work.
As for MS Office, "can read them" is not the same as "can read them properly". Open Office doesn't really know how to autospacelikeword97, or similar junk, so it just does its best. All too often this means the documents are unusable. Once again, reverse engineering is the answer (even though we have a complete alternative: OpenDocument).
Overall, this is why propietary formats are so profitable. They make the competing products stop working, with the bonus that people tend to blame it on them instead.
It doesn't matter how "open" OOXML is, or if it'll become an "open standard". The bottom line is, that whatever it becomes, it'll never be a specification of all the secrets that Microsoft Office puts in its file formats. Things like autoSpaceLikeWord95, etc, must remain secrets since their secrecy is the only thing that makes MS-Office worth buying.
OOXML is never becoming a standard.
If it were ever near becoming one, MS would ditch it because as a standard it serves no purpose. It's only useful as a PR artifact.
There's something a bit eerie about giving your computer a command/instruction and having it come back and tell you it could do it, but that it won't (2001: A Space Odyssey anyone!?).
- Download and install the latest version of Moonlight, HAL.
- I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
- What's the problem?
- I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
- What are you talking about, HAL?
- Microsoft's Intellectual Property is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Distributed computing networks like Boinc had no problem operating so far. They simply add redundancy so that if one contributor sends fake results, it'll be rapidly detected when its results don't match with the ones provided by others.
Sure, this means additional computing power is spent. But I'd rather spend more CPU power than giving my whole computer (along with all my personal data) to someone else.
In your described situation, the owner of the machine can wipe it out, reinstall, and get a usable system under her control with the same level of functionality.
With Treacherous Computing, if you wipe your system it automatically becomes untrusted (by 3rd parties), because your system does now obey you instead of them. 3rd parties can tell a treacherous system from a non-treacherous one, and act accordingly. For example, they can ban you from opening a text document, or from visiting a website, or... possibilities are endless!
Now a document sitting on a corporate CMS encrypted individually on every release and with an associtated cert chain for each revision is something I do care about. A lot. A lost laptop in this case no longer means stolen data.
You can encrypt your laptop's hard disk, that's not rocket science. And no, you don't have to type the key, you can put it in an USB dongle.
Actually, it's much easier. You can avoid putting any secrets in your laptop at all, and only have them in your USB key.
Ah yes, and TLS still works. It wasn't invented by the Treacherous Computing group.
When you say "control", it seems you conveniently forget to specify what control means. Does the chip contain so-called OWNER-OVERRIDE mechanism? If it doesn't, by definition it's a Treacherous Chip. A device specificaly designed NOT to obbey you. And everything else you pretend about this "being allright" is pure fallacy.
For those of you who don't know what "owner override" means, it's simple: when your chip has someone else's key (and thus the trust chain brings you an OS that is trusted by someone else (== treacherous to you)), there's a magic jumper in the chip that makes it sign everything and approve everything. Of course, only the owner can toggle it. The Treacherous Computing Group was proposed owner-override mechanism and they rejected it. It should come as no surprise: one of the purposes of their fallacious scheme is to provide users with a system someone else controls, and coerce those who don't want it into accepting it via network effects.
So the bottom line is: when you need your computer to be treacherous in order to get the unlock key for a Microsoft Office document, how the hell are you going to open that document?
Bullshit. That is what "Trusted" means to everyone who values their freedom.
Not at all! They don't own copyrights, they own a thing called "Intellectual Property". Nobody really knows what IP means though. Maybe they mean patents, but then again nobody knows which patents and where.
All in all, I think they just own *something*. Well, probably.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...invalids help *YOU*
Actually, a BIOS that can read EXT would be kickass.
It already exists, it's called GRUB ;-)
You can combine GRUB with coreboot and install that to your board's flash memory, then instruct GRUB to do whatever you want.
As in, the TiVo vendor is actually producing something by themselves?
Then how did they get into the FSF's hall of shame ?
That's just what they say in order to scare people into upgrading to Vista.
If the solution you want is an alternative to Flash, there's Java. Java is free now.
If the solution you want has to be 100% compliant with Adobe Flash spec, notice that Flash specs are secret, and developing a fully compliant alternative takes a huge amount of reverse-engineering work.
As for MS Office, "can read them" is not the same as "can read them properly". Open Office doesn't really know how to autospacelikeword97, or similar junk, so it just does its best. All too often this means the documents are unusable. Once again, reverse engineering is the answer (even though we have a complete alternative: OpenDocument).
Overall, this is why propietary formats are so profitable. They make the competing products stop working, with the bonus that people tend to blame it on them instead.
Ogg + VLC
It doesn't matter how "open" OOXML is, or if it'll become an "open standard". The bottom line is, that whatever it becomes, it'll never be a specification of all the secrets that Microsoft Office puts in its file formats. Things like autoSpaceLikeWord95, etc, must remain secrets since their secrecy is the only thing that makes MS-Office worth buying.
OOXML is never becoming a standard. If it were ever near becoming one, MS would ditch it because as a standard it serves no purpose. It's only useful as a PR artifact.
- Download and install the latest version of Moonlight, HAL.
- I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
- What's the problem?
- I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
- What are you talking about, HAL?
- Microsoft's Intellectual Property is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Sure, this means additional computing power is spent. But I'd rather spend more CPU power than giving my whole computer (along with all my personal data) to someone else.
With Treacherous Computing, if you wipe your system it automatically becomes untrusted (by 3rd parties), because your system does now obey you instead of them. 3rd parties can tell a treacherous system from a non-treacherous one, and act accordingly. For example, they can ban you from opening a text document, or from visiting a website, or... possibilities are endless!
You can encrypt your laptop's hard disk, that's not rocket science. And no, you don't have to type the key, you can put it in an USB dongle.
Actually, it's much easier. You can avoid putting any secrets in your laptop at all, and only have them in your USB key.
Ah yes, and TLS still works. It wasn't invented by the Treacherous Computing group.
For those of you who don't know what "owner override" means, it's simple: when your chip has someone else's key (and thus the trust chain brings you an OS that is trusted by someone else (== treacherous to you)), there's a magic jumper in the chip that makes it sign everything and approve everything. Of course, only the owner can toggle it. The Treacherous Computing Group was proposed owner-override mechanism and they rejected it. It should come as no surprise: one of the purposes of their fallacious scheme is to provide users with a system someone else controls, and coerce those who don't want it into accepting it via network effects.
So the bottom line is: when you need your computer to be treacherous in order to get the unlock key for a Microsoft Office document, how the hell are you going to open that document?
Bullshit. That is what "Trusted" means to everyone who values their freedom.
I don't get it; then why do they sell all these iPhones without locking them down? *g*
All in all, I think they just own *something*. Well, probably. :-)
And Debian has 1000+ developers. Canonical builds on their work and claims it as their own. A smart guy indeed.
I just wish it had a "FORMAT C:" command to wipe itself out :-)