1) Tivo users are less guilty of stealing content because the cost of broadcasting is relatively fixed. False
Not false. A TV station or network pays the same cost whether 0 people or 100 Million people watch its content. That's a fixed cost. Regardless of whether or not advertisers pay to compensate that, it's a fixed cost. Compare that to web browsing. Some people have a fixed cost, unlimited bandwidth provider, but most people don't. They pay by the GB, or they pay $x a month for so much bandwidth and then pay by the GB after they go over that.
Therefore, most web site owners pay less if 0 people view their site than they do if 100 million people view it. Not the same with TV broadcasters.
What if I view the page and fail to click on the advertisement? Is that also theft?
No. You were given the opportunity to view the ad. You are not required to do so, just that you are given the opportunity for an advertiser to get your attention. If they fail to do so, that's their problem.
As I said in another post, Web sites are basically the same thing as the "honor system" of selling products. If you take the product without paying the requested (but not enforced) price, it's not moral. It may not be the smartest way to do things, but it's still not moral to take advantage.
Advertisers don't want to force you to watch their ads (well, ok,they might want to.. but that's ridiculous). They just want the OPPORTUNITY for their ads to be watched. Adblockers are typically used to block all ads, wholesale, voiding the possibility of the viewer even having the opportunity to view the adds.
Suppose someone puts up a booth on the street with Ice Cream, and little drop box with a sign that says "Please pay.25 for each ice cream bar you take". You're saying it's perfectly MORAL for you to come along and take all the ice cream (or as much as you want) and not pay him a dime because he didn't provide a means to enforce the sale?
That's basically what you're arguing. "If they're so stupid as to use a model that allows circumvention, then i'm perfectly justified to circumvent it".
Is the Ice Cream guy stupid to use the honor system to get paid? Probably. But is it immoral to not pay the guy? Hell yes it is.
I think it's unlikely that GPL3'd toolchains will be much of a concern for anyone, since these tools are seldom extended or modified by commercial users. Kernels are a big one. Many Linux kernel developers appear to be pushing a move to GPL3, and while Linux seems to be still in the GPL2 camp, he also seems open to moving to GPL3 under the right conditions.
I agree. Battletech would make an amazing movie, but I don't really see it being commercially viable. You'd end up getting some rehashed, watered down story like Starship Troopers.
There are many reasons for this. Some kinds of war movies work well. Typically, those that involve platoons or groups of people that interact together. Submarine movies work good because everyone is there on the bridge. Same with shows like Star Trek.
Movies that center around single people in ships, fighting each other don't work well, because it's much harder to have character interaction, and seeing your squadmates on a video monitor doesn't work in the movies.
Now, it might work out to have the majority of the story outside the mechs. Maybe following a platoon of ground forces. But then we don't get that up-close-and-personal feel of the battle mechs that fans would be looking for.
We'll see, though.. as long as Uwe Boll doesn't do it...
Battletech, was actually the second version of the game. The orignal (which I still have a copy of) was called Battledroids. Both came after Robotech (well, actually after the japanese version - Macross), which itself was likely influenced by such shows as Battle of the planets, Star Blazers, and Voltron. (all of which are the American names for Japanese series, often totally unrelated to the storylines of the american versions)
Release cycles have changed a lot in the last 10 years or so. With the advent of iterative software development cycles, you can often times get betas that are not feature complete (the idea is to test the iteration cycles that are complete) but a release candidate should be feature complete most definitely.
I didn't say lying was acceptable. I didn't say doing any of the things you mention are acceptable. They are not, however, anti-trust violations.
Making arguments based on invalid pretexts is annoying, and doesn't give your argument any merit. What's worse, it makes the entire argument against Microsoft to seem childish, and inanane. Good job.
I'm not so sure about that. The burden of proof in a civil case is far less than that of a criminal case.
Should a persons be put on a "sex offenders" list if he is aquited in a criminal case, but liable in a civil one? I don't know the answer to that.
Now, Microsoft has signed an consent decree, which is them voluntarily giving up certain behaviors. And for that, they have to honor, or risk criminal charges.
Just because I get tired of all the constant anti-microsoft rhetoric doesn't make me a shill. Yes, if you went back further than the last 2 dozen comments, you'd see a lot more.
Whether or not Microsoft "stacked" the ISO deck doesn't have any real bearance on anti-trust either. Having OOXML as an ISO standard is not anti-competitive. It may break other rules or laws, but anti-competitive? How? It's not like OOXML being an ISO standard forces anyone to use office.
Also, no. The Findings of fact do not declare Microsoft to be an illegal monopoly. Perhaps you shoul read it. It actually declares Microsoft to be a *LEGAL* one, ie having gained their monopoly legally. Further, Findings of fact don't draw any conclusions.
Now, the Conclusions of Law claimed that Microsoft had abused it's monopoly power illegally, but that doesn't mean Microsoft is an illegal monopoly. So no, it's not "well established" that they're an illegal monopoly, since that is not the case. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
It's not splitting hairs either. Do you consider it splitting hairs to say that someone who committed civil copyright infringement is guilty of felonious theft? It's a *HUGE* difference between civil proceedings and criminal ones. It's a *HUGE* difference betwee claiming someone is a felon, and someone merely being sued in a civil lawsuit.
Or are you going to start calling all those people sued by the MPAA and RIAA felons because they agreed to a settlement?
Since when does Microsoft have a monopoly in video game consoles? And since when is lying about defect rates even illegal? Perhaps something related to Sarbanes-Oxley or the SEC, but not anti-trust wise.
Further, Microsoft is merely backing HD-DVD, they don't own it. And HD-DVD certainly isn't a monopoly either.
By the way, Microsoft did the right thing with the Blue-Jay thing. They invalidated their own patent. But, since you ahve an axe to grind, I suppose you'll use anything you can get. Valid, or not.
I agree. And, that's why the majority of anti-trust remedies call for behavior changes. However, after a company, like Microsoft, has been under the anti-trust microsope for 15 years or so, they should have a good idea of what does and doesn't constitue anti-trust violations. There are, however, always going to be new issues (like suddenly, claiming Media Players are anti-trust issues).
Yes, I agree. Corproations that have been tried and convicted of criminal behavior shouldn't enjoy the same freedom of action as those who have not.
Now, what does that have to do with Microsoft? They have not been tried or convicted of any criminal activities. Perhaps you're confusing civil actions, ie a lawsuit, with a criminal trial. The former is two private parties (or the government acting as a private party) asking a court to rule over a dispute using laws to determine the 'winner'. The only outcome of a civil action is injunctive or monetary damages. (ie you owe $x or you must stop doing y). In rare cases, structural remedies may also occur.
Criminal trials, on the other hand, are about punishment for wrongdoing.
As an example, OJ Simpson was aquited of criminal charges in the murder of his wife. However, was found guilty in civil court and was required to pay damages to the plaintiffs. That's why his civil rights were not reduced at all, and he is not a convicted felon.
That's because ODF is under-specified. Let's see how big it is after they add the spreadsheet formula syntax they should have had in the first place. My guess is that it will be over 1000 pages. OOXML includes the specifications for sub-formats, such as DrawingML. And, it includes copious examples. Roughly half of it's size is examples and commentary, *NOT* specification.
Further, when MS submitted OOXML to ECMA, it was 2000 pages in size. The ECMA working group fleshed it out to 6000 pages.
Finally, the amount of calendar time a working group "works" on a standard cannot be adequately compared. Most working groups have comittee members who work part-time, and they're typically lucky if they can meet twice a year when they can align everyones schedules. the ECMA group was motivated, and worked on this full-time. I would estimate that ECMA spent at least 6x as many man-hours on the the standard than OASIS did.
You should read this comment by Gary Edwards, the president of the OpenDocument Foundation. Basically, he says that if MS joined the ODF OASIS TC, then they would have to add all the same functions to ODF as OOXML has, and that Sun would not allow this to happen.
Oh, Please... Mr. Anonymous Coward. I'll bet dollars to donuts my user id is far lower than yours. My Karma is far higher than yours. And i've posted to a lot more topics than you have, I just haven't felt the need to comment in much of anything lately other than the hypocricy surrounding ODF and their anti-ooxml rhetoric that nobody seems to ever question.
For the record, I don't think OOXML is a great standard either, but I believe it has a necessary place in the archival of legacy documents, and the storage of documents generated by Office in a publicly documented and standardized format. That's something I don't believe can be done with ODF because ODF is under-specified... so much so that even OpenOffice has more than 100 application defined tags that it stores in ODF documents, presumably because ODF isn't capable of representing native OpenOffice formats.
For crying out loud. It's a fucking document standard. It's not about the survival of the human species as so many people seem to want to portray it.
No, the bias is how much weight is given to those arguments. The exact same issues, for the most part, exist in ODF, yet you don't see those people complaining about those issues there.
The only difference here is that Microsoft defines the application defined tags as deprecated, rather than letting implementors find out about them on their own. In other words, it's Sun lying by omission.
The tags you mention are deprecated, and will never be used by any version of Office to create OOXML documents, other than when converting legacy documents. They're a non-issue. They're simply defined for completeness, because apps will HAVE to deal with them whether the standard defines them or not, just like apps have to deal with OpenOffice's crud... they just don't tell anyone about it.
Microsoft is not the only member of the ECMA working group. It also includes Apple, Novell, Corel, The British Museum, The Library of Congress, etc... You implication that OOXML is only proposed by Microsoft is false.
The point was that the ODF comittee is composed by a majority of members with a financial interest in preventing Microsoft from doing anything to succeed.
Actually, the articles you link to are a bit disingenuous. Sun controls the ODF committee at OASIS. It's employees account for abou 1/3 of the working group, including the chair. If you include IBM who is closely tied to Sun on this subject it's over 50% between two companies. Sun has created an illusion of openness quite successfully, and people have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
People continue to harp about the patent issue, but one of the top open source licensing advocates, who literally wrote the book on open source licensing, doesn't see a problem with Microsoft's patent license.
The thing you're NOT doing is looking at what biases the people you're trusting have. They are aligned with Sun for financial reasons. They have reason to want ODF to succeed that has nothing to do with it's quality as a standard.
For example, the second article you link to says this at the bottom:
"The author is Vice President & Director of Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc"
How about we get some analysis by people that do NOT have a financial stake in the winner?
Hmm.. Interestingly enough, the german IBM delegate then somehow managed to join the Kenyan delegation, and managed to write the objection. How can someone be both a german and kenyan delegate?
The two most successful (in terms of end-user acceptance, not market share in particular) are OSX and Windows. Both of these platforms share at least some common traits, and since both of those companies have invested millions, if not billions of dollars into usability studies, one should try to learn from what they do right.
This is not to say everything they do is correct, but areas that are common between the two suggest that two independant entities thought it was a good idea, and thus should be giving serious consideration.
Areas that are similar between them:
Common clipboard formats Consistent user interface (whether or not you agree with that particular interface) Unified installation and packaging systems. Consistent configuration systems * The appearance of monolithic applications (explained below) Fast UI
* Now, what do I mean by the appearance of monolithic applications? By this, I mean that each application is an island, even though they have interoperability between them. Each app appears to stand alone, even if part of a "suite". Each app, even if built upon other components, doesn't expose those components to the user. It's just the app.
Linux gives the appearance of being piecemeal. Of being a disparte group of objects, applications (even within an application), and systems. Even apps in the same group (kde, gnome, etc..) often have significantly different UI's, configuration engines, and general feel. Skins aren't enough to change that.
I know many people like to prattle on about choice, but you can still have choice and consistency. Some will argue that Apple and Microsoft aren't all that consistent either, but there's a difference. When apple and ms make a change, they move forward with that change so that new apps start to conform to that change. In linux, people just do things the way they want, and screw what anyone else thinks.
It's a tough nut to crack, and, unfortunately, probably not possible in a community development model simply because there is nobody with any authority to set standards. Even the LSB is often disregarded, and the LSB doesn't go anywhere near far enough because it has to appease dozens of different distro makers.
Simply put, what needs to be done, can't be done without destroying what makes Linux so great to so many people. As such, there will always be too much resistance to do what is necessary to make Linux compete with Apple and Microsoft (or any other proprietary vendor, such as Adobe). You'll get bits and pieces, but it will never be enough...
Did it ever occur to you that the Office 2007 was finished before the OOXML spec was? Remember, there were many changes in ECMA comittee long after Office 2007 was finalized.
No. What it means is that Office has so much legacy code that they can't rewrite it all to be conformant. Think of OOXML as a target that MS feels they can eventually meet with office, not necessarily what office will actually meet today. After all, much was changed in OOXML after Office 2007 went to bed. One would expect the next version of Office to be much closer to the spec, since they will have had a full design cycle to conform to it.
Dude. You do realize that OpenOffice also has OLE and SSPI support, right? These are platform specific features, and any office product on Windows has to support them, or they won't be very popular.
You're not coming up with some kind of revelation. It's more of a "Duh, no shit sherlock".
It should also be pointed out that many of his complaints would require application specific extensions in ODF as well. i.e. ODF doesn't define a way to encrypt documents, or store filesystem metadata. Where he talks about calculation chains and other aspects that have no equivelents in current ODF documents because of a lack of spreadsheet formula definition, etc...
Basically, many of his arguments could be said about ODF (though not all), since ODF doesn't provide a standard way to do those things, they would therefore have to be application dependant.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Tivo users are less guilty of stealing content because the cost of broadcasting is relatively fixed.
False
Not false. A TV station or network pays the same cost whether 0 people or 100 Million people watch its content. That's a fixed cost. Regardless of whether or not advertisers pay to compensate that, it's a fixed cost. Compare that to web browsing. Some people have a fixed cost, unlimited bandwidth provider, but most people don't. They pay by the GB, or they pay $x a month for so much bandwidth and then pay by the GB after they go over that.
Therefore, most web site owners pay less if 0 people view their site than they do if 100 million people view it. Not the same with TV broadcasters.
What if I view the page and fail to click on the advertisement? Is that also theft?
No. You were given the opportunity to view the ad. You are not required to do so, just that you are given the opportunity for an advertiser to get your attention. If they fail to do so, that's their problem.
As I said in another post, Web sites are basically the same thing as the "honor system" of selling products. If you take the product without paying the requested (but not enforced) price, it's not moral. It may not be the smartest way to do things, but it's still not moral to take advantage.
You really don't understand advertising.
Advertisers don't want to force you to watch their ads (well, ok,they might want to.. but that's ridiculous). They just want the OPPORTUNITY for their ads to be watched. Adblockers are typically used to block all ads, wholesale, voiding the possibility of the viewer even having the opportunity to view the adds.
Ok, let's look at this another way.
.25 for each ice cream bar you take". You're saying it's perfectly MORAL for you to come along and take all the ice cream (or as much as you want) and not pay him a dime because he didn't provide a means to enforce the sale?
Suppose someone puts up a booth on the street with Ice Cream, and little drop box with a sign that says "Please pay
That's basically what you're arguing. "If they're so stupid as to use a model that allows circumvention, then i'm perfectly justified to circumvent it".
Is the Ice Cream guy stupid to use the honor system to get paid? Probably. But is it immoral to not pay the guy? Hell yes it is.
I think it's unlikely that GPL3'd toolchains will be much of a concern for anyone, since these tools are seldom extended or modified by commercial users. Kernels are a big one. Many Linux kernel developers appear to be pushing a move to GPL3, and while Linux seems to be still in the GPL2 camp, he also seems open to moving to GPL3 under the right conditions.
I agree. Battletech would make an amazing movie, but I don't really see it being commercially viable. You'd end up getting some rehashed, watered down story like Starship Troopers.
There are many reasons for this. Some kinds of war movies work well. Typically, those that involve platoons or groups of people that interact together. Submarine movies work good because everyone is there on the bridge. Same with shows like Star Trek.
Movies that center around single people in ships, fighting each other don't work well, because it's much harder to have character interaction, and seeing your squadmates on a video monitor doesn't work in the movies.
Now, it might work out to have the majority of the story outside the mechs. Maybe following a platoon of ground forces. But then we don't get that up-close-and-personal feel of the battle mechs that fans would be looking for.
We'll see, though.. as long as Uwe Boll doesn't do it...
Uhh.. actually, it's the other way around.
Battletech, was actually the second version of the game. The orignal (which I still have a copy of) was called Battledroids. Both came after Robotech (well, actually after the japanese version - Macross), which itself was likely influenced by such shows as Battle of the planets, Star Blazers, and Voltron. (all of which are the American names for Japanese series, often totally unrelated to the storylines of the american versions)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battletech
Yeah, I don't get it either.
Release cycles have changed a lot in the last 10 years or so. With the advent of iterative software development cycles, you can often times get betas that are not feature complete (the idea is to test the iteration cycles that are complete) but a release candidate should be feature complete most definitely.
I didn't say lying was acceptable. I didn't say doing any of the things you mention are acceptable. They are not, however, anti-trust violations.
Making arguments based on invalid pretexts is annoying, and doesn't give your argument any merit. What's worse, it makes the entire argument against Microsoft to seem childish, and inanane. Good job.
I'm not so sure about that. The burden of proof in a civil case is far less than that of a criminal case.
Should a persons be put on a "sex offenders" list if he is aquited in a criminal case, but liable in a civil one? I don't know the answer to that.
Now, Microsoft has signed an consent decree, which is them voluntarily giving up certain behaviors. And for that, they have to honor, or risk criminal charges.
Just because I get tired of all the constant anti-microsoft rhetoric doesn't make me a shill. Yes, if you went back further than the last 2 dozen comments, you'd see a lot more.
Whether or not Microsoft "stacked" the ISO deck doesn't have any real bearance on anti-trust either. Having OOXML as an ISO standard is not anti-competitive. It may break other rules or laws, but anti-competitive? How? It's not like OOXML being an ISO standard forces anyone to use office.
Also, no. The Findings of fact do not declare Microsoft to be an illegal monopoly. Perhaps you shoul read it. It actually declares Microsoft to be a *LEGAL* one, ie having gained their monopoly legally. Further, Findings of fact don't draw any conclusions.
Now, the Conclusions of Law claimed that Microsoft had abused it's monopoly power illegally, but that doesn't mean Microsoft is an illegal monopoly. So no, it's not "well established" that they're an illegal monopoly, since that is not the case. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
It's not splitting hairs either. Do you consider it splitting hairs to say that someone who committed civil copyright infringement is guilty of felonious theft? It's a *HUGE* difference between civil proceedings and criminal ones. It's a *HUGE* difference betwee claiming someone is a felon, and someone merely being sued in a civil lawsuit.
Or are you going to start calling all those people sued by the MPAA and RIAA felons because they agreed to a settlement?
Since when does Microsoft have a monopoly in video game consoles? And since when is lying about defect rates even illegal? Perhaps something related to Sarbanes-Oxley or the SEC, but not anti-trust wise.
Further, Microsoft is merely backing HD-DVD, they don't own it. And HD-DVD certainly isn't a monopoly either.
By the way, Microsoft did the right thing with the Blue-Jay thing. They invalidated their own patent. But, since you ahve an axe to grind, I suppose you'll use anything you can get. Valid, or not.
I agree. And, that's why the majority of anti-trust remedies call for behavior changes. However, after a company, like Microsoft, has been under the anti-trust microsope for 15 years or so, they should have a good idea of what does and doesn't constitue anti-trust violations. There are, however, always going to be new issues (like suddenly, claiming Media Players are anti-trust issues).
Yes, I agree. Corproations that have been tried and convicted of criminal behavior shouldn't enjoy the same freedom of action as those who have not.
Now, what does that have to do with Microsoft? They have not been tried or convicted of any criminal activities. Perhaps you're confusing civil actions, ie a lawsuit, with a criminal trial. The former is two private parties (or the government acting as a private party) asking a court to rule over a dispute using laws to determine the 'winner'. The only outcome of a civil action is injunctive or monetary damages. (ie you owe $x or you must stop doing y). In rare cases, structural remedies may also occur.
Criminal trials, on the other hand, are about punishment for wrongdoing.
As an example, OJ Simpson was aquited of criminal charges in the murder of his wife. However, was found guilty in civil court and was required to pay damages to the plaintiffs. That's why his civil rights were not reduced at all, and he is not a convicted felon.
That's because ODF is under-specified. Let's see how big it is after they add the spreadsheet formula syntax they should have had in the first place. My guess is that it will be over 1000 pages. OOXML includes the specifications for sub-formats, such as DrawingML. And, it includes copious examples. Roughly half of it's size is examples and commentary, *NOT* specification.
c onsortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story% 3D20070629070544217
Further, when MS submitted OOXML to ECMA, it was 2000 pages in size. The ECMA working group fleshed it out to 6000 pages.
Finally, the amount of calendar time a working group "works" on a standard cannot be adequately compared. Most working groups have comittee members who work part-time, and they're typically lucky if they can meet twice a year when they can align everyones schedules. the ECMA group was motivated, and worked on this full-time. I would estimate that ECMA spent at least 6x as many man-hours on the the standard than OASIS did.
You should read this comment by Gary Edwards, the president of the OpenDocument Foundation. Basically, he says that if MS joined the ODF OASIS TC, then they would have to add all the same functions to ODF as OOXML has, and that Sun would not allow this to happen.
http://about.diigo.com/about/show?url=http://www.
Oh, Please... Mr. Anonymous Coward. I'll bet dollars to donuts my user id is far lower than yours. My Karma is far higher than yours. And i've posted to a lot more topics than you have, I just haven't felt the need to comment in much of anything lately other than the hypocricy surrounding ODF and their anti-ooxml rhetoric that nobody seems to ever question.
For the record, I don't think OOXML is a great standard either, but I believe it has a necessary place in the archival of legacy documents, and the storage of documents generated by Office in a publicly documented and standardized format. That's something I don't believe can be done with ODF because ODF is under-specified... so much so that even OpenOffice has more than 100 application defined tags that it stores in ODF documents, presumably because ODF isn't capable of representing native OpenOffice formats.
For crying out loud. It's a fucking document standard. It's not about the survival of the human species as so many people seem to want to portray it.
No, the bias is how much weight is given to those arguments. The exact same issues, for the most part, exist in ODF, yet you don't see those people complaining about those issues there.
/ 20/beyond-the-basics.aspx
For example, OpenOffice creates ODF documents with more than 100 application defined tags. See http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/02
The only difference here is that Microsoft defines the application defined tags as deprecated, rather than letting implementors find out about them on their own. In other words, it's Sun lying by omission.
The tags you mention are deprecated, and will never be used by any version of Office to create OOXML documents, other than when converting legacy documents. They're a non-issue. They're simply defined for completeness, because apps will HAVE to deal with them whether the standard defines them or not, just like apps have to deal with OpenOffice's crud... they just don't tell anyone about it.
Microsoft is not the only member of the ECMA working group. It also includes Apple, Novell, Corel, The British Museum, The Library of Congress, etc... You implication that OOXML is only proposed by Microsoft is false.
The point was that the ODF comittee is composed by a majority of members with a financial interest in preventing Microsoft from doing anything to succeed.
Actually, the articles you link to are a bit disingenuous. Sun controls the ODF committee at OASIS. It's employees account for abou 1/3 of the working group, including the chair. If you include IBM who is closely tied to Sun on this subject it's over 50% between two companies. Sun has created an illusion of openness quite successfully, and people have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
People continue to harp about the patent issue, but one of the top open source licensing advocates, who literally wrote the book on open source licensing, doesn't see a problem with Microsoft's patent license.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2192
The thing you're NOT doing is looking at what biases the people you're trusting have. They are aligned with Sun for financial reasons. They have reason to want ODF to succeed that has nothing to do with it's quality as a standard.
For example, the second article you link to says this at the bottom:
"The author is Vice President & Director of Business Affairs at the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc"
How about we get some analysis by people that do NOT have a financial stake in the winner?
Hmm.. Interestingly enough, the german IBM delegate then somehow managed to join the Kenyan delegation, and managed to write the objection. How can someone be both a german and kenyan delegate?
n nexed-kenyan-iso-national.html
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/05/has-ibm-a
Sounds like both sides aren't playing fair.
I was referring to support for these technologies in ODF documents.
What else do you need?
Tons.
The two most successful (in terms of end-user acceptance, not market share in particular) are OSX and Windows. Both of these platforms share at least some common traits, and since both of those companies have invested millions, if not billions of dollars into usability studies, one should try to learn from what they do right.
This is not to say everything they do is correct, but areas that are common between the two suggest that two independant entities thought it was a good idea, and thus should be giving serious consideration.
Areas that are similar between them:
Common clipboard formats
Consistent user interface (whether or not you agree with that particular interface)
Unified installation and packaging systems.
Consistent configuration systems
* The appearance of monolithic applications (explained below)
Fast UI
* Now, what do I mean by the appearance of monolithic applications? By this, I mean that each application is an island, even though they have interoperability between them. Each app appears to stand alone, even if part of a "suite". Each app, even if built upon other components, doesn't expose those components to the user. It's just the app.
Linux gives the appearance of being piecemeal. Of being a disparte group of objects, applications (even within an application), and systems. Even apps in the same group (kde, gnome, etc..) often have significantly different UI's, configuration engines, and general feel. Skins aren't enough to change that.
I know many people like to prattle on about choice, but you can still have choice and consistency. Some will argue that Apple and Microsoft aren't all that consistent either, but there's a difference. When apple and ms make a change, they move forward with that change so that new apps start to conform to that change. In linux, people just do things the way they want, and screw what anyone else thinks.
It's a tough nut to crack, and, unfortunately, probably not possible in a community development model simply because there is nobody with any authority to set standards. Even the LSB is often disregarded, and the LSB doesn't go anywhere near far enough because it has to appease dozens of different distro makers.
Simply put, what needs to be done, can't be done without destroying what makes Linux so great to so many people. As such, there will always be too much resistance to do what is necessary to make Linux compete with Apple and Microsoft (or any other proprietary vendor, such as Adobe). You'll get bits and pieces, but it will never be enough...
Did it ever occur to you that the Office 2007 was finished before the OOXML spec was? Remember, there were many changes in ECMA comittee long after Office 2007 was finalized.
No. What it means is that Office has so much legacy code that they can't rewrite it all to be conformant. Think of OOXML as a target that MS feels they can eventually meet with office, not necessarily what office will actually meet today. After all, much was changed in OOXML after Office 2007 went to bed. One would expect the next version of Office to be much closer to the spec, since they will have had a full design cycle to conform to it.
Dude. You do realize that OpenOffice also has OLE and SSPI support, right? These are platform specific features, and any office product on Windows has to support them, or they won't be very popular.
You're not coming up with some kind of revelation. It's more of a "Duh, no shit sherlock".
It should also be pointed out that many of his complaints would require application specific extensions in ODF as well. i.e. ODF doesn't define a way to encrypt documents, or store filesystem metadata. Where he talks about calculation chains and other aspects that have no equivelents in current ODF documents because of a lack of spreadsheet formula definition, etc...
Basically, many of his arguments could be said about ODF (though not all), since ODF doesn't provide a standard way to do those things, they would therefore have to be application dependant.