Sigh. You clearly didn't read the paper all that closely. Take, for example, your first objection:
However, just to humour you, I read the updated presentation.
"These costs are passed on to the consumer" What strikes me is that he quotes this ATI PR man but he fails to cite where he gets this quote from. In fact, the top 20 Google searches all reference back to his paper, or people who quote his paper. Can you give me a link to where this was supposedly said, because Gutmann doesn't supply it.
Strange, don't you think?
Yes, I find it strange that you can't be bothered to read the section titled "Sources":
Sources
Because this writeup started out as a private discussion in email, a number of the sources used were non-public. The best public sources that I know of are:
* Output Content Protection and Windows Vista from WHDC.
* Windows Longhorn Output Content Protection from WinHEC.
* How to Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection from WinHEC.
* Protected Media Path and Driver Interoperability Requirements from WinHEC.
(Note that the cryptography requirements have changed since some of the information above was published. SHA-1 has been deprecated in favour of SHA-256 and SHA-512, and public keys seem to be uniformly set at 2048 bits in place of the mixture of 1024 bits and 2048 bits mentioned in the presentations).
An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes from ATI, in the form of Digital Media Content Protection from WinHEC. This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire presentation like a mantra.
I've got the Powerpoint Gutmann links to open right now. Gee, what do you know? What's that third bullet on slide 9 say? Come on, I know you can read it as well as I can: "These costs are passed on to the consumer"
quoting me:
In fact, he relentlessly hammers home the fact that/all/ efforts to protect the distribution of content have broken down sooner rather than later. To which you reply:
Which is still argument from a moral perspective faked as a technical viewpoint.
Sigh. No, it's not. Gutmann simply cites both specific examples and expert opinions why Microsoft's DRM simply does not and cannot work. Your failure to recognize the difference between wishful thinking and the reality of what has happened historically leads me to believe that you might just be a Microsoft shill.
Having read through this 'updated' presentation, it is still practically starved of any technical information about how MFPMP.exe works and which parts of it are vulnerable or heavy. He provides Microsoft presentation slides as 'illustration only', then uses them to try and prove a point, thus failing to understand what 'illustration only' actually means. Ou and others actually go ahead and provide real, documented evidence of the DRM system working exactly how Microsoft have said it does, to which Gutmann replies "Oh, they're working from an outdated paper". The news for him here is his new paper provides nothing new or concrete whatsoever to prove his claims. Gutmann quotes not only the vendors who are actually stuck implementing the hardware and drivers for this crap but Microsoft's own design documents as to what has to happen, and you're getting hung up on what Gutmann himself says is an imperfect understanding of one single executable does? Please. Red herring time.
Tell you what. You go ahead and let Microsoft do your thinking for you. I'll keep reading all of the available evidence from all sources and make up my own mind, mmkay?
Actually, this is exactly what I had to do this time around. As I mentioned in an earlier post, though, is why did it fail this time and not all the times before? It's never been an issue for me before. What changed/got broken? That's the $64,000 question.
I'd say that you haven't read Gutmann's updated paper. He took input from several sources, including correcting errors that Microsoft kindly pointed out to him. However, his basic stance remains, and I think he's got a defensible position. Examples are all over the updated version of the paper, so I'll just whet your appetite with just a couple examples in the section titled "Microsoft's Response":
In mid-January 2007, Microsoft responded to some of the points in this writeup. Some of the material was new and interesting (for example clarifying just what actually gets revoked when a driver revocation occurs), other parts seem more likely to have come from Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft's PR firm) than Program Manager Dave Marsh (The Inquirer wasn't too impressed by it either). I've updated the body text based on some of the clarifications, but for things that aren't directly relevant to the main text (which means the PR-spin items) I'll comment on them here. The important technical clarifications that affected the main body of the writeup are (1) exactly what happens when a driver is revoked, (2) what happens when a tilt bit triggers, and (3) which portions of the output are affected when content degradation takes place. The content-protection specifications were previously somewhat unclear about these various consequences of the protection mechanisms, so it's good to have this clarification on exactly what occurs.
...
Do things such as HFS (Hardware Functionality Scan) affect the ability of the open-source community to write a driver?
No. HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.
This claim is directly contradicted by a document by the same author that states:
"Such tests could involve loading a surface with an image, and then getting the chip to apply various visual effects to the image and reporting back the resulting pixels".
and then later on:
"The internal workings of the graphics chip must be kept secret, such that a hacker building an emulator could not find out the required information".
So this document, the primary reference for Vista's content protection, states exactly the opposite of what's said in Microsoft's response, namely that standard chip functionality (in this case graphics rendering in a GPU) is exercised for HFS, and that the device details have to be kept secret to prevent someone emulating the functionality.
Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?
Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips.
While it's certainly tempting to quote the Slashdot response "Whose ass was this assertion pulled out of?", I'll provide a bit more context. This comment, that the overhead of Vista's content protection will lead to cheaper hardware, comes from a Microsoft product manager responsible for the content protection. An ATI product manager responsible for producing the actual hardware says:
"These costs are passed on to the consumer"
"This cost is passed on to all consumers"
"This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PC's"
"Costs are passed on to consumers"
"Costs are passed on to consumers, especially early adopters"
It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's doing it. In fact Vista overall has some really nice new technology and features built into it, it's just this one aspect of Vista that's troublesome. And just for the record I run various versions of Windows on... [counting]... seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and occasionally Solaris and QNX), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if I have their software all over my machines.
As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:
It all started with an email from George Ou, who decided, without ever hearing
my talk on content-protection issues or seeing the slides for the talk, that
what I'd said in the slides was wrong. I offered to send them to him, but by
then he'd gone ahead and posted his conclusions anyway, still without ever
actually having seen the slides that he's commenting on. Later he changed his
story to claim quite emphatically that he wasn't attacking the slides at all,
which seems a bit contradictory since the material wasn't present anywhere but
the slides.
...
He even went so far as to lodge a formal complaint about me with the
University, although since I'd been trying quite hard to ignore him (both he
and Ed even mentioned this in their blogs), I'm not really sure what he
complained about (details of complaints are treated as confidential). Maybe
it was the fact that I wasn't paying any attention to him.
...
Ed's tactics were slightly different. He posted his initial comments on a
blog whose existence I wasn't even aware of (and therefore had no way of
responding to) and then summarily declared victory in a later blog posting
based on the fact that I didn't reply.
...
In this entire time, neither George nor Ed ever tried to obtain the slides
from me ("I never asked for his slides" - George Ou), the actual material that
started this whole thing. I've sent out copies of the slides to *every single
person who asked for them*, but neither Ed nor George ever bothered contacting
me to get my side of the story, or to get the slides that they were attacking.
Indeed, all I got from Ed was a long sermon on professionalism.
...
Avoiding asking me for the current slides so that he can attack a ~9-month-
old copy of the writeup
...
In all this mass of trivia there's one major thing missing that would justify the title that he's chosen to use: Any attempt at all to address the central thesis of the content protection analysis, that trying to seal shut (portions of) the historically open PC architecture in the name of DRM is technically a really bad idea, and one that's bound to fail. As Bruce Schneier put it, "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet".
...
Appendix: Short response to Ed's article
"Because Gutmann has no hands-on experience with this technology"
Actually I do have direct, hands-on implementation experience, which I could have told you if you'd ever contacted me about any of this.
...
"Here's the information on this exact monitor"
So this is where his strategy of going for a nine-month-old writ
...The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.
When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame?
I invite you to try it yourself. Just insert a picture from an image file using just the default settings. Go ahead, I'll wait.
....
Back yet? Good. Then you'll know that the default setting, and so far as I can tell the ONLY setting, for inserting an image from a file REQUIRES that it be wrapped in a floating frame with its own anchor. Please tell me, how the H E double hockey sticks am I supposed to explain the nuances of dealing with that to a company of 50,000 people?
If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.
Heh. Haha. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (wipes tears from eyes) Thanks, I needed a belly laugh. Oh, wait. You were serious? Well, let me explain in really small words, then:
It. Won't. Work. Satisfied?
No? Well, I guess I'll have to use somewhat bigger words and more complex concepts. I hope you can follow along.
First, what I tried to do was NOT some "weird combination of native layout elements", it was straight up insertion of a graphic image into a document. This is Word Processing 101, folks. Well, OK. Maybe Word Processing 201. It certainly isn't graduate level, pie in the sky sort of stuff. It's just day in, day out normal work.
Second, I work for a company with more than 50,000 employees. We don't look at pilot projects for desktop deployments of such a basic component unless we fully expect to deploy it across at least half the footprint. However, any such pilot MUST still be able to effectively trade files and data with the rest of the company, or the pilot will be deemed a failure by the people who can sign checks. We don't have the luxury of isolating small workgroups. Everything that we do is too interconnected.
Third, you may have noticed that I said I was working for a COMPANY, not a governmental agency. As such, we don't get to dictate what our customers and vendors use. Whatever they wish to use as a medium of communication, we have to adapt to. Now, granted, we spend metric boatloads of cash (that's a technical term, btw) on specialized communication applications and interfaces to do that for the more obscure stuff that our vendors want to use, and metric fleets of boatloads of cash (another technical term) for the more obscure stuff that our customers want to use. (Why the difference? Because the customers give us cash while the vendors expect us to give/them/ cash.)
However, if our theoretical and increasingly mythical pilot project is to stand any chance of success, the participating users absolutely/must/ be able to use their existing communications channels without modification. Asking vendors to make changes to/their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us can make them cranky. Asking CUSTOMERs to make changes to/their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us might make them look for someone else to give their money to. Therefore, if we can't produce documents that are at least somewhat close to what outside organizations expect, the pilot will be deemed a failure.
On a final note, you want to know what REALLY annoys me about this particular incident? I've done this sort of image insertion using OOo, then saving it as a.doc format for literally years and I've never seen this behavior before. What on earth got broken? And why on earth didn't anyone notice during the beta cycle??
In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen
Wellll, not quite. Take it from a hardcore OOo user. I've used it for my primary office suite for about 5 years in a company that is a pure MS shop. Generally, I do all my work while saving to.odf formats, then do a final export to.doc so people will be able to open it for comments and edits. While things have improved, there are still tasks that are much more clumsy than they need to be in OOo.
For me, the most painful thing that I've run into recently is partially due to the abysmal documentation that comes bundled with OOo and partially a clumsy implementation. The manuals that are located on the Website really used as the native help system. They are FAR better than the extremely limited and misleading information included in the help files. For example, compare and contrast the two sources for how to handle images.
Recently I was using OOo 2.2, then 2.3 to work on a short 30 page whitepaper (including the appendixes) for work. I needed to insert just two image files to illustrate a point I needed to make. This is a task I've done plenty of times and it's never as easy as it should be. This last time, for whatever reason, was more than usually painful.
It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. Time and again I'd click on the image and get just the image and not the frame that bounded it. I wouldn't notice, re-size or move the image, then wonder why I still wasn't getting the text to flow properly around it.
After much mucking around, I FINALLY got them both where I wanted them, then saved the file as a.doc. Imagine my horror when I opened the document up with MS Word and realized that all of my work had been for naught, BECAUSE OOo HAD DELETED THE IMAGES WHEN SAVING THE DOCUMENT AS MS OFFICE.doc!!!!!!!!!!
No, this wasn't a PEBKAC problem. I double and triple checked saving the document in Office XP format. I even saved it as.doc, then opened it in OOo just to make sure that it wasn't MS Office misinterpreting the image placements. Nope, still missing.
To say I was pissed would be an understatement. Oh, sure, I could have exported the file as a.PDF, but then how would my boss be able to make comments and pass it back to me? A read-only format just doesn't work in that case.
Besides, this is the first time that I can remember that OOo has failed me in such a fundamental way. Lord only knows why, because I sure don't. It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.
Will I open a trouble ticket with the OOo team? Maybe, if I can figure out a way to duplicate the problem in a file that's not full of company confidential information. This is a HUGE issue. I can't believe somebody didn't stumble across it during the beta cycles.
Some guy claims he just invented garden bells? Pray, tell me. What on earth is non-obvious about hanging a bell in a garden????? There's gotta be more to this story. Googling for "garden bell"+walmart+patent doesn't turn up anything useful, though.
You proceed from false assumptions. The exit polls were quuite simply wrong. To base your argument on that is pretty damning.
Why do you state that the exit polls were wrong? Organizations have been doing them for quite literally, decades. Year after year, election after election, the exit polls matched up quite nicely with the actual voting results. I don't recall seeing any deviation up until the 2000 election, and I've been watching election results in the U.S. since the mid 60s.
Why all of a sudden did the deviations start to occur? If you know of solid evidence that the organizations doing the exit polls suddenly lost their expertise, I'd love to hear it. Failing that, I'm more inclined to accept the exit polls as circumstantial evidence that someone had been tampering with the elections. It seems to me that's a more logical inference to draw.
Look, if little game companies like id software, Epic Games, Splash Damage, and S2 Games with developer counts measured in the single and double digits can deliver their Linux version of their product on the same CD as the Windows one (or available as a download shortly thereafter) and do so consistently year after year, version after version, then/anyone/ can do it. If they can continue to deliver their product as a cross platform offering and make money at it, then/anyone/ can. It's just not that tough!
If you're serious about developing a cross platform application, quit your whining, dig in, and learn how to do it. Here, I've even did a little Googling so you don't have to: Linux Game Development. While this series of articles are focussed on game development, the basic principles they cover can be used for any market niche.
Otherwise, quit your bellyaching. You're not adding anything useful to the conversation.
Precisely! Computers, especially with the internet, are magnificent learning tools, but they are useless for formal education (except in computer-related fields, of course). The high school I went to mandated and budgeted that there would be at least three computers in every classroom. The result? Three perpetually dormant computers in every classroom.
That sounds more like a failure to develop a strategic plan than a failure of the technology. In my school district, we have one junior high with a better than 1:1 ratio PC/student. Every student is issued a Macbook at the beginning of the school year. The other junior high is using carts of laptops and is maintaining about a 3:1 ratio.
In both cases, the teachers were introduced to the technology slowly over a couple of years before the schools moved aggressively to their current configuration. The teachers had time to figure out how they could leverage the technology. Their lesson plans now incorporate desktop technology as a natural part of the toolset available to the kids. In the former case, kids turn in a majority of their homework electronically.
I've been a parent volunteer/observer for the senior high's tech committee for a couple of years now. The senior high staff (and the district staff, for that matter) has been watching the two junior highs to see what works and what doesn't. Based upon that experience, they have decided that their own staff is not quite ready to commit that heavily. However, they are eager to get them up to speed as quickly as possible.
Last year, they replaced some old teacher desktops with laptops so that all teachers would/finally/ be able to carry their computers with them from classroom to classroom. As part of the drive to get some of the more recalcitrant teachers learning new technology, the principal mandated that all assignments and grades would be updated online several times a week (if not daily).
The district technology office also expanded and cleaned up a website that had been written by a parent for the high school to cover all schools in the district. The website pulls info from the database that the teachers update so the kids (and more importantly, their parents) can track their daily progress. It's apparently a huge hit, as traffic to the website was up over 1,000% from the previous year. For example, I know my wife and I make our kids accountable to what's reported there.
Meanwhile, the tech committee is urging teachers to find new ways of leveraging the technology that they have. Some examples that I'm aware of:
The math department went out and bought a couple of smart boards and digital projectors last year for their AP classrooms. The teachers have been using them to get the kids to work problems on the smart board, then saving the results for later retrieval on the teacher's website.
Other teachers without smartboards but with digital projectors get the kids participating by passing around a wireless keyboard.
One math teacher did a short introduction of the history of mathematics by building a lesson plan based upon Google Earth.
In another example, one teacher is now using the shared carts of laptops that the Econ department has to do all tests for her class online. The kids get immediate feedback (which they love), and she has a reduced grading workload. Win/win, eh?
Other teachers are using the free material available from MIT and other schools to augment their lesson plans.
At the last meeting, I did a quick demo of Freemind and got a pretty positive reaction. Most (all?) of them are familiar with mind or concept mapping. (It was new to me up until several months ago.) The teachers immediately recognized that a tool like that could be leveraged as a visual aid to show relationships between topics as part of a lecture series. One teacher commented that some of the
Support for security patches and feature upgrades will end April 2009.
Really? Windows 2000 security patch support doesn't end until July 2010. I know this fact because we're trying to figure out what to do about the 25,000 Win2k desktops and 2,500 Win2k servers we still have in our branch offices. (Maybe we should go back to OS/2? lol)
People don't start citing research papers or hard data until college (and even then, only in Grad School for a lot of colleges - sad huh?)
Boy, I'll say. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the 60s and 70s. Not exactly the cultural center of the universe by any means. Still, even in that time and place, students were encouraged to find other sources besides encyclopedias in elementary school. We were all expected to find our way around a library catalog by the time we were in junior high.
By the time I was in high school, the only kids still referencing the encyclopedias in their homework were the ones who cared more about taking shop than college prep classes because it was generally cost at least a letter grade drop. Many teachers would give a paper referencing an encyclopedia a failing grade.
Now you're telling me that in this day and age, when research is so bloody easy, that college students think it's OK to even crack open an encyclopedia? Let alone use one as a reference in a paper?? In the words of my teenage daughter, "Ewwwww!"
25 years ago I was paying.14/kW/hour to a rural electric co-op, so.17/kW/hour today sounds pretty reasonable.:)
Kidding. I know there's a huge difference between costs measured at the plant and costs measured at the end point. Still, how much more will a typical electric grid tack on? I'd be surprised if it was more than a nickel in an urban setting, or maybe.15/kW/hour back at my old co-op. Is that really all that bad in the grand scheme of things?
Take a look at Marcinko's service record. You don't go from seaman recruit to full commander, collect that much fruit salad, and get to form not just one but _two_ elite military outfits without being the real deal. This guy ranks up there with Carlos Hathcock when it comes to real Vietnam era heros:)
Richard Machowicz sounds like a complete fake. Want to know what a real SEAL sounds like? Check out Red Cell, a DVD and VHS release that details Dick Marcinko's tiger team operations against Naval installations all over the world. If you can find it, that is. It never did see a broad distribution.
Add David Eddings to the list of authors who got this right. He notes in a foreword of the republished _The_Belgariad_ that he ended up writing a 12 volume cycle. He references a couple of classics from the ancient world who did the same thing (their names escape me at the moment, however). Anyhow, The Belgariad is 5 novels, The Mallorean is another 5, Belgarath the Sorceror is a prequel, and Polgara the Sorceress is the follow up prequel that ties right back to The Belgariad. Eddings said he ended up writing the book equivalent of dope, and he's had people hooked for 20 years.:)
I tried Ubuntu 7.04 just recently in a Virtual PC, guess what?
The mouse doesn't work at all. How it that that for progress?
I'll see your virtual PC anecdote and raise you a laptop and three homebrew desktops. I'm posting this from a VMWare hosted session right now. This is a Dell 610 running Windows XP as the host OS. My wife is 20 feet away from me, working on a Dell 620 running Kubuntu 7.04 that I installed for her. Down in the basement I've got three more PCs that I built myself running the same distro. Two are Intel motherboards with 2.5 Ghz P4s on them. I forget who made the third motherboard, but I can tell you it's got an AMD 64 bit 4400+ dual core processor on it. All of the mice (an eraser head on my virtual host, a touchpad and an external Logitech on my wife's laptop, one Microsoft mouse and a couple of Logitechs downstairs) worked just fine from the very beginning.
Tell me again just how buggy Ubuntu 7.04 is. I love fairy tales.:)
Please don't talk to me about touchpads. I/hate/ touchpads. Let me say that again: I f'in HATE touchpads. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. For Ghu's sake, even Dell gives me a laptop with both.
Megazoomer. Not exactly part of the base OS, is it? Like I said, OS/X makes some serious mistakes.
Sigh. Oh, well. She needs Photoshop, and I'd rather have her run it on OS/X instead of Windows. So, we're stuck with Jobs' mess for a while.
I can only comment for myself, so don't take this as a general indictment of OS/X. However, I can tell you that I really dislike the OS/X GUI. I've tried out Macs off and on since the very first one came out in January of '84. Remember those? The only option was black and white monitor built into the computer case with no external video out? No way to add RAM (or any other peripheral) to a system with only 128K? No hard drive? That damn single button mouse that we're/still/ stuck with by default?
As far as I'm concerned every single Mac that I've looked at suffered from the same problem: An ooh-shiny interface which is designed/only/ by interface designers. Look, don't get me wrong. Usability studies are necessary. Designers are necessary. But when I spend a couple of thousand dollars on a Macbook Pro for my wife, I damn well expect it to come with a two button mouse built into the keyboard. (Don't get me started on touchpads vs. the eraser head) I also expect that I won't be asked six times in a week how to open a menu because Apple thinks that every single app can only open a menu on the top instead embedding it into the window like everyone else. We also really/hate/ the fact that she can't get a true maxed window without a lot of messing around.
In my view the OS/X interface succeeds at its goal. It is a triumph of interface design over engineering all right. Too bad Jobs still hasn't figured out how to successfully balance the two. In the meantime, I'll go back to KDE and fluxbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I find it strange that you can't be bothered to read the section titled "Sources":
I've got the Powerpoint Gutmann links to open right now. Gee, what do you know? What's that third bullet on slide 9 say? Come on, I know you can read it as well as I can: "These costs are passed on to the consumer"
quoting me: In fact, he relentlessly hammers home the fact that
Sigh. No, it's not. Gutmann simply cites both specific examples and expert opinions why Microsoft's DRM simply does not and cannot work. Your failure to recognize the difference between wishful thinking and the reality of what has happened historically leads me to believe that you might just be a Microsoft shill.
Having read through this 'updated' presentation, it is still practically starved of any technical information about how MFPMP.exe works and which parts of it are vulnerable or heavy. He provides Microsoft presentation slides as 'illustration only', then uses them to try and prove a point, thus failing to understand what 'illustration only' actually means. Ou and others actually go ahead and provide real, documented evidence of the DRM system working exactly how Microsoft have said it does, to which Gutmann replies "Oh, they're working from an outdated paper". The news for him here is his new paper provides nothing new or concrete whatsoever to prove his claims. Gutmann quotes not only the vendors who are actually stuck implementing the hardware and drivers for this crap but Microsoft's own design documents as to what has to happen, and you're getting hung up on what Gutmann himself says is an imperfect understanding of one single executable does? Please. Red herring time.Tell you what. You go ahead and let Microsoft do your thinking for you. I'll keep reading all of the available evidence from all sources and make up my own mind, mmkay?
Actually, this is exactly what I had to do this time around. As I mentioned in an earlier post, though, is why did it fail this time and not all the times before? It's never been an issue for me before. What changed/got broken? That's the $64,000 question.
...
First, I'll let Gutmann comment on his use of various OSes:
As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
I invite you to try it yourself. Just insert a picture from an image file using just the default settings. Go ahead, I'll wait.
....
Back yet? Good. Then you'll know that the default setting, and so far as I can tell the ONLY setting, for inserting an image from a file REQUIRES that it be wrapped in a floating frame with its own anchor. Please tell me, how the H E double hockey sticks am I supposed to explain the nuances of dealing with that to a company of 50,000 people?
Heh. Haha. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (wipes tears from eyes) Thanks, I needed a belly laugh. Oh, wait. You were serious? Well, let me explain in really small words, then:
It. Won't. Work. Satisfied?
No? Well, I guess I'll have to use somewhat bigger words and more complex concepts. I hope you can follow along.
First, what I tried to do was NOT some "weird combination of native layout elements", it was straight up insertion of a graphic image into a document. This is Word Processing 101, folks. Well, OK. Maybe Word Processing 201. It certainly isn't graduate level, pie in the sky sort of stuff. It's just day in, day out normal work.
Second, I work for a company with more than 50,000 employees. We don't look at pilot projects for desktop deployments of such a basic component unless we fully expect to deploy it across at least half the footprint. However, any such pilot MUST still be able to effectively trade files and data with the rest of the company, or the pilot will be deemed a failure by the people who can sign checks. We don't have the luxury of isolating small workgroups. Everything that we do is too interconnected.
Third, you may have noticed that I said I was working for a COMPANY, not a governmental agency. As such, we don't get to dictate what our customers and vendors use. Whatever they wish to use as a medium of communication, we have to adapt to. Now, granted, we spend metric boatloads of cash (that's a technical term, btw) on specialized communication applications and interfaces to do that for the more obscure stuff that our vendors want to use, and metric fleets of boatloads of cash (another technical term) for the more obscure stuff that our customers want to use. (Why the difference? Because the customers give us cash while the vendors expect us to give /them/ cash.)
However, if our theoretical and increasingly mythical pilot project is to stand any chance of success, the participating users absolutely /must/ be able to use their existing communications channels without modification. Asking vendors to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us can make them cranky. Asking CUSTOMERs to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us might make them look for someone else to give their money to. Therefore, if we can't produce documents that are at least somewhat close to what outside organizations expect, the pilot will be deemed a failure.
On a final note, you want to know what REALLY annoys me about this particular incident? I've done this sort of image insertion using OOo, then saving it as a .doc format for literally years and I've never seen this behavior before. What on earth got broken? And why on earth didn't anyone notice during the beta cycle??
From Peter Gutmann's excellent "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection". This paper should be required reading for anyone considering purchasing a Vista PC for ANY use.
Wellll, not quite. Take it from a hardcore OOo user. I've used it for my primary office suite for about 5 years in a company that is a pure MS shop. Generally, I do all my work while saving to .odf formats, then do a final export to .doc so people will be able to open it for comments and edits. While things have improved, there are still tasks that are much more clumsy than they need to be in OOo.
.doc. Imagine my horror when I opened the document up with MS Word and realized that all of my work had been for naught, BECAUSE OOo HAD DELETED THE IMAGES WHEN SAVING THE DOCUMENT AS MS OFFICE .doc!!!!!!!!!!
.doc, then opened it in OOo just to make sure that it wasn't MS Office misinterpreting the image placements. Nope, still missing.
.PDF, but then how would my boss be able to make comments and pass it back to me? A read-only format just doesn't work in that case.
For me, the most painful thing that I've run into recently is partially due to the abysmal documentation that comes bundled with OOo and partially a clumsy implementation. The manuals that are located on the Website really used as the native help system. They are FAR better than the extremely limited and misleading information included in the help files. For example, compare and contrast the two sources for how to handle images.
Recently I was using OOo 2.2, then 2.3 to work on a short 30 page whitepaper (including the appendixes) for work. I needed to insert just two image files to illustrate a point I needed to make. This is a task I've done plenty of times and it's never as easy as it should be. This last time, for whatever reason, was more than usually painful.
It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. Time and again I'd click on the image and get just the image and not the frame that bounded it. I wouldn't notice, re-size or move the image, then wonder why I still wasn't getting the text to flow properly around it.
After much mucking around, I FINALLY got them both where I wanted them, then saved the file as a
No, this wasn't a PEBKAC problem. I double and triple checked saving the document in Office XP format. I even saved it as
To say I was pissed would be an understatement. Oh, sure, I could have exported the file as a
Besides, this is the first time that I can remember that OOo has failed me in such a fundamental way. Lord only knows why, because I sure don't. It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.
Will I open a trouble ticket with the OOo team? Maybe, if I can figure out a way to duplicate the problem in a file that's not full of company confidential information. This is a HUGE issue. I can't believe somebody didn't stumble across it during the beta cycles.
Some guy claims he just invented garden bells? Pray, tell me. What on earth is non-obvious about hanging a bell in a garden????? There's gotta be more to this story. Googling for "garden bell"+walmart+patent doesn't turn up anything useful, though.
Why do you state that the exit polls were wrong? Organizations have been doing them for quite literally, decades. Year after year, election after election, the exit polls matched up quite nicely with the actual voting results. I don't recall seeing any deviation up until the 2000 election, and I've been watching election results in the U.S. since the mid 60s.
Why all of a sudden did the deviations start to occur? If you know of solid evidence that the organizations doing the exit polls suddenly lost their expertise, I'd love to hear it. Failing that, I'm more inclined to accept the exit polls as circumstantial evidence that someone had been tampering with the elections. It seems to me that's a more logical inference to draw.
Sigh. Not this tired old argument again!
Look, if little game companies like id software, Epic Games, Splash Damage, and S2 Games with developer counts measured in the single and double digits can deliver their Linux version of their product on the same CD as the Windows one (or available as a download shortly thereafter) and do so consistently year after year, version after version, then /anyone/ can do it. If they can continue to deliver their product as a cross platform offering and make money at it, then /anyone/ can. It's just not that tough!
If you're serious about developing a cross platform application, quit your whining, dig in, and learn how to do it. Here, I've even did a little Googling so you don't have to: Linux Game Development. While this series of articles are focussed on game development, the basic principles they cover can be used for any market niche.
Otherwise, quit your bellyaching. You're not adding anything useful to the conversation.
Ummm, I think that was sort of the GP's point. :)
That sounds more like a failure to develop a strategic plan than a failure of the technology. In my school district, we have one junior high with a better than 1:1 ratio PC/student. Every student is issued a Macbook at the beginning of the school year. The other junior high is using carts of laptops and is maintaining about a 3:1 ratio.
In both cases, the teachers were introduced to the technology slowly over a couple of years before the schools moved aggressively to their current configuration. The teachers had time to figure out how they could leverage the technology. Their lesson plans now incorporate desktop technology as a natural part of the toolset available to the kids. In the former case, kids turn in a majority of their homework electronically.
I've been a parent volunteer/observer for the senior high's tech committee for a couple of years now. The senior high staff (and the district staff, for that matter) has been watching the two junior highs to see what works and what doesn't. Based upon that experience, they have decided that their own staff is not quite ready to commit that heavily. However, they are eager to get them up to speed as quickly as possible.
Last year, they replaced some old teacher desktops with laptops so that all teachers would /finally/ be able to carry their computers with them from classroom to classroom. As part of the drive to get some of the more recalcitrant teachers learning new technology, the principal mandated that all assignments and grades would be updated online several times a week (if not daily).
The district technology office also expanded and cleaned up a website that had been written by a parent for the high school to cover all schools in the district. The website pulls info from the database that the teachers update so the kids (and more importantly, their parents) can track their daily progress. It's apparently a huge hit, as traffic to the website was up over 1,000% from the previous year. For example, I know my wife and I make our kids accountable to what's reported there.
Meanwhile, the tech committee is urging teachers to find new ways of leveraging the technology that they have. Some examples that I'm aware of:
By the time Sputnik launched, China /definitely/ knew it was in the line of fire. Mao had already decided to go his own way by then.
I don't know that much about India's history, so I won't speculate how people there felt.
You really don't see the contradiction in that sentence?
Really? Windows 2000 security patch support doesn't end until July 2010. I know this fact because we're trying to figure out what to do about the 25,000 Win2k desktops and 2,500 Win2k servers we still have in our branch offices. (Maybe we should go back to OS/2? lol)
Boy, I'll say. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the 60s and 70s. Not exactly the cultural center of the universe by any means. Still, even in that time and place, students were encouraged to find other sources besides encyclopedias in elementary school. We were all expected to find our way around a library catalog by the time we were in junior high.
By the time I was in high school, the only kids still referencing the encyclopedias in their homework were the ones who cared more about taking shop than college prep classes because it was generally cost at least a letter grade drop. Many teachers would give a paper referencing an encyclopedia a failing grade.
Now you're telling me that in this day and age, when research is so bloody easy, that college students think it's OK to even crack open an encyclopedia? Let alone use one as a reference in a paper?? In the words of my teenage daughter, "Ewwwww!"
25 years ago I was paying .14/kW/hour to a rural electric co-op, so .17/kW/hour today sounds pretty reasonable. :)
.15/kW/hour back at my old co-op. Is that really all that bad in the grand scheme of things?
Kidding. I know there's a huge difference between costs measured at the plant and costs measured at the end point. Still, how much more will a typical electric grid tack on? I'd be surprised if it was more than a nickel in an urban setting, or maybe
Back then, you could argue it was. :)
Take a look at Marcinko's service record. You don't go from seaman recruit to full commander, collect that much fruit salad, and get to form not just one but _two_ elite military outfits without being the real deal. This guy ranks up there with Carlos Hathcock when it comes to real Vietnam era heros :)
Richard Machowicz sounds like a complete fake. Want to know what a real SEAL sounds like? Check out Red Cell, a DVD and VHS release that details Dick Marcinko's tiger team operations against Naval installations all over the world. If you can find it, that is. It never did see a broad distribution.
More on Marcinko can be found here.
Add David Eddings to the list of authors who got this right. He notes in a foreword of the republished _The_Belgariad_ that he ended up writing a 12 volume cycle. He references a couple of classics from the ancient world who did the same thing (their names escape me at the moment, however). Anyhow, The Belgariad is 5 novels, The Mallorean is another 5, Belgarath the Sorceror is a prequel, and Polgara the Sorceress is the follow up prequel that ties right back to The Belgariad. Eddings said he ended up writing the book equivalent of dope, and he's had people hooked for 20 years. :)
I'll see your virtual PC anecdote and raise you a laptop and three homebrew desktops. I'm posting this from a VMWare hosted session right now. This is a Dell 610 running Windows XP as the host OS. My wife is 20 feet away from me, working on a Dell 620 running Kubuntu 7.04 that I installed for her. Down in the basement I've got three more PCs that I built myself running the same distro. Two are Intel motherboards with 2.5 Ghz P4s on them. I forget who made the third motherboard, but I can tell you it's got an AMD 64 bit 4400+ dual core processor on it. All of the mice (an eraser head on my virtual host, a touchpad and an external Logitech on my wife's laptop, one Microsoft mouse and a couple of Logitechs downstairs) worked just fine from the very beginning.
Tell me again just how buggy Ubuntu 7.04 is. I love fairy tales. :)
Please don't talk to me about touchpads. I /hate/ touchpads. Let me say that again: I f'in HATE touchpads. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution. For Ghu's sake, even Dell gives me a laptop with both.
Megazoomer. Not exactly part of the base OS, is it? Like I said, OS/X makes some serious mistakes.
Sigh. Oh, well. She needs Photoshop, and I'd rather have her run it on OS/X instead of Windows. So, we're stuck with Jobs' mess for a while.
I can only comment for myself, so don't take this as a general indictment of OS/X. However, I can tell you that I really dislike the OS/X GUI. I've tried out Macs off and on since the very first one came out in January of '84. Remember those? The only option was black and white monitor built into the computer case with no external video out? No way to add RAM (or any other peripheral) to a system with only 128K? No hard drive? That damn single button mouse that we're /still/ stuck with by default?
/only/ by interface designers. Look, don't get me wrong. Usability studies are necessary. Designers are necessary. But when I spend a couple of thousand dollars on a Macbook Pro for my wife, I damn well expect it to come with a two button mouse built into the keyboard. (Don't get me started on touchpads vs. the eraser head) I also expect that I won't be asked six times in a week how to open a menu because Apple thinks that every single app can only open a menu on the top instead embedding it into the window like everyone else. We also really /hate/ the fact that she can't get a true maxed window without a lot of messing around.
As far as I'm concerned every single Mac that I've looked at suffered from the same problem: An ooh-shiny interface which is designed
In my view the OS/X interface succeeds at its goal. It is a triumph of interface design over engineering all right. Too bad Jobs still hasn't figured out how to successfully balance the two. In the meantime, I'll go back to KDE and fluxbox.
Well, that certainly explains you. :)