Why else would there be a warning on the Windex bottle warning me not to spray it in my eyes?
Actually, I see that more as a problem with the legal system, not the lawyers. The lawyers are just doing their job, but the courts are coming up with the wrong answers, trying to protect people too much. You ought to be able to assume anything common sense... like the fact that cleaning fluids and sensitive body parts don't mix well. Just mark the bottle with the word "irritant" and assume everyone knows what that means.
You have a strange idea of investment bankers. Where I come from, they are generally people who invest their bank's money, usually in a business they foresee as being profitable. Asset stripping is not usually part of the process.
Actually, Windows NT can do fork() without the hacks that cygwin currently uses to make it work. The undocumented NtCreateProcess kernel function is capable of doing this.
To be fair, it's not completely FUD. There are still documents that neither OpenOffice nor AbiWord can read at all, let alone properly. Between the two, I can do most documents, but not all
The FUD I was referring to was a typical MS "study" which came to the conclusion that (IIRC) OO failed to correctly open somewhere in the region of 25% of MS Office documents. I think their study is approximately as legitimate as mine, which makes the figure look more like 2%.
Yes, when my Ford pick-up is having engine trouble, I always drive it to the nearest Harley Davidson to get it fixed.
You might if it was a Harley manufactured component that was failing.
Or, more accurately, if you have a Ford car which you've installed a Kenwood stereo in, but that stereo uses a special Ford component to integrate with the car; then if that component failed, who would you expect to fix it?
So, is Linus going to put out an advisory that there may be some random explit in the Gimp that allows user level access to hackers? I know there must be some random buffer overflow in the Gimp somewhere. Linus should point this out according to your logic, shouldn't he?
If Linus wrote the code, and told the application authors that they were only allowed to use it by accessing a.so file (installed into a special directory for each application that uses it, for no good reason that anyone could gather, and Linus insists that they aren't allowed to modify it in any way), and there was then an update to that.so file, I would expect the update that Linus issued to fix all copies of it, yes.
Of course, nobody behaves like this in the Linux world. Shared libraries are installed to/lib or/usr/lib and you only have one copy of each of them. An update would ensure that the single copy you depended on had the vulnerability eliminated.
But, I'll bet that MS gives developers permission to distribute these with Visual Studio,
Its worse than that, the DLL in question is distributed (with permission to redistribute) in the free Platform SDK download.
So, any VB program that does image manipulation may be poetentially vulnerable.
I've used the DLL in question from C++ and Java/JNI programs before now. _Anything_ might be vulnerable. Check for "GDIPLUS.DLL" in your applications' install directories. Or use the tool linked from the article.
And if I did do such a think, would it open in FireFox or exploder?
No new file format will work without the software being modified to support it. However, if you were to modify JPEG in this fashion you would be more likely to gain support than inventing yet another specialised file format, because for applications that use IJG jpeglib (or have similar levels of abstraction in their own JPEG handling code) and already understand alpha channels, it would probably be little more than 10-50 lines of code to support this addition.
In my company, nothing goes outside of the company in.doc format.
Absolutely. My company also uses PDF files whenever we can get away with it for just these reasons (1, 2 and 4 were a convincing combination when I discussed it with the MD), and if we must send a DOC file somewhere it is converted to that format from SXW before sending, so shouldn't contain any unwanted information.
The problem is, our clients and suppliers aren't quite so cautious.
Exporting to PDF without Acrobat is a VERY, VERY good feature in my opinion. Maybe a *SLIGHT* positive for the SMBs, if they switch to OO.
Agreed, and it is one of the main reasons that my company does use OO (alongside Office 97 -- we've seen no need to upgrade since then). But for most larger businesses, the cost of Acrobat is trivial, and it comes with some nice features that can be handy (such as adding annotations to a PDF file).
not true. I rarely see a.DOC file in the company for ANY business documents, including files from outside the company.
Well, you're in an unusual position, then. Of the last 3 projects my company has been involved in, one has provided technical documentation of a system we need to integrate with as.DOC files, and one produced the invitation to tender as a.DOC file, required us to provide our tender document in.DOC format, and part of the job included converting some.DOC files to PDF. For the third contract, everything was done on paper.
Like a standard lossy format with support for alpha?
JPEG supports arbitrary channels. If you really want it, you could add an alpha channel to a JPEG stream and use that. The reason we don't have it is because there's very little point.
Title pages -- I shouldn't have to press enter a bunch to put my name in the approximate middle of the page. There should be a wizard of some sort that lets you choose between different layouts for title pages.
I have a lot of shit from Word trying to vertically centre anything. It just doesn't seem to be capable of automatic vertical alignment, which plain _sucks_.
Meanwhile, I have constant struggles with fonts reverting to the default paragraph style at near random. (It seems to crop up when backspacing one paragraph into another?...)
The problem is that word stores a paragraph's style in the end-of-paragraph marker. When you delete this, it forgets about that style and picks up the style of the paragraph you just joined to it instead. The workaroud is to press shift-left delete instead of backspace; this joins the bottom paragraph to the top, rather than the other way around.
the various versions of Outlook i've used all opened text files just fine in Notepad without any fuss - always have, never had to change anything.
MS Outlook et al tend to use the attachment filename to determine which external application to launch. If he's sending files out with a non-standard extension, this might be confusing the e-mail program.
One of the problems open/star office has is that it takes forever to save or open a document due to its gzipped xml format.
I routinely edit documents that are in the region of 150-200 pages long in OpenOffice, and save times only exceed a second if my hard disk is in power-saving mode. It is, in fact, faster than MS Word. This is probably due to the fact that less disk I/O is required on the compressed file than on the hugely bloated MS one.
The problem, however, is that it doesn't support background saving. You can't carry on editing while it is performing the save, which you can with MS Word.
I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends. Anybody care to comment on what can be done to 'sell' OO.org to these people?
Not a lot. There are four good reasons for using OO.org:
1. Cross platform support -- this is pointless for the people you're talking about. 2. Zero up-front cost -- not a benefit to anyone who's willing to pirate MS's software 3. Access to source code, ability to make your own improvements -- not a benefit to anyone who isn't a programmer and would never consider hiring one 4. File format that is easy to write external tools to manipulate -- only useful if you have an unusual requirement that MS Office doesn't solve itself
I can't think of any other convincing reason to use OpenOffice.
Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.
An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.
People think that the sun is an easy target because it's "down" in the gravity well, but you have to remember that you're starting with earth's orbital velocity, which you need to cancel out to 'fall' to the sun. That's about 18.5 miles/second.
Easily achievable. 18.5 miles/sec is roughly 30 km/s. So, you need to cancel that energy? Well, that's 450 megajoules per kilogram you'll need to put in. I believe you get _substantially_ more power than that out of fission reactions.
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years
Do you know how much of that stuff you'd need before you would even notice the difference from background levels? Remember that the longer the half life, the more atoms you need to produce the same amount of radioactivity. Doubling the half life halves the amount of danger posed by the radiation emitted. Its as simple as that.
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Why else would there be a warning on the Windex bottle warning me not to spray it in my eyes?
Actually, I see that more as a problem with the legal system, not the lawyers. The lawyers are just doing their job, but the courts are coming up with the wrong answers, trying to protect people too much. You ought to be able to assume anything common sense... like the fact that cleaning fluids and sensitive body parts don't mix well. Just mark the bottle with the word "irritant" and assume everyone knows what that means.
You have a strange idea of investment bankers. Where I come from, they are generally people who invest their bank's money, usually in a business they foresee as being profitable. Asset stripping is not usually part of the process.
Actually, Windows NT can do fork() without the hacks that cygwin currently uses to make it work. The undocumented NtCreateProcess kernel function is capable of doing this.
One mailing list discussion about this.
To be fair, it's not completely FUD. There are still documents that neither OpenOffice nor AbiWord can read at all, let alone properly. Between the two, I can do most documents, but not all
The FUD I was referring to was a typical MS "study" which came to the conclusion that (IIRC) OO failed to correctly open somewhere in the region of 25% of MS Office documents. I think their study is approximately as legitimate as mine, which makes the figure look more like 2%.
no doubt their next generation Office will, unlike everyone else, have a secrity hole that can be activated by an XML file.
I wouldn't be surprised. Numerous applications in the past have had security holes in parsers for ASN.1, which is a much simpler data structure.
So I was all patched up according to the Windows Update and the Office Update sites and I figured I was done. Maybe I was too smart for my own good?
Hmm. Perhaps you haven't thought about any of those other applications that you may have installed that use the library, all of which need an update?
I'd download & try the tool linked from the article. It _does_ do a much better job.
Yes, when my Ford pick-up is having engine trouble, I always drive it to the nearest Harley Davidson to get it fixed.
You might if it was a Harley manufactured component that was failing.
Or, more accurately, if you have a Ford car which you've installed a Kenwood stereo in, but that stereo uses a special Ford component to integrate with the car; then if that component failed, who would you expect to fix it?
So, is Linus going to put out an advisory that there may be some random explit in the Gimp that allows user level access to hackers? I know there must be some random buffer overflow in the Gimp somewhere. Linus should point this out according to your logic, shouldn't he?
.so file (installed into a special directory for each application that uses it, for no good reason that anyone could gather, and Linus insists that they aren't allowed to modify it in any way), and there was then an update to that .so file, I would expect the update that Linus issued to fix all copies of it, yes.
/lib or /usr/lib and you only have one copy of each of them. An update would ensure that the single copy you depended on had the vulnerability eliminated.
If Linus wrote the code, and told the application authors that they were only allowed to use it by accessing a
Of course, nobody behaves like this in the Linux world. Shared libraries are installed to
But, I'll bet that MS gives developers permission to distribute these with Visual Studio,
Its worse than that, the DLL in question is distributed (with permission to redistribute) in the free Platform SDK download.
So, any VB program that does image manipulation may be poetentially vulnerable.
I've used the DLL in question from C++ and Java/JNI programs before now. _Anything_ might be vulnerable. Check for "GDIPLUS.DLL" in your applications' install directories. Or use the tool linked from the article.
And if I did do such a think, would it open in FireFox or exploder?
No new file format will work without the software being modified to support it. However, if you were to modify JPEG in this fashion you would be more likely to gain support than inventing yet another specialised file format, because for applications that use IJG jpeglib (or have similar levels of abstraction in their own JPEG handling code) and already understand alpha channels, it would probably be little more than 10-50 lines of code to support this addition.
In my company, nothing goes outside of the company in .doc format.
Absolutely. My company also uses PDF files whenever we can get away with it for just these reasons (1, 2 and 4 were a convincing combination when I discussed it with the MD), and if we must send a DOC file somewhere it is converted to that format from SXW before sending, so shouldn't contain any unwanted information.
The problem is, our clients and suppliers aren't quite so cautious.
Exporting to PDF without Acrobat is a VERY, VERY good feature in my opinion. Maybe a *SLIGHT* positive for the SMBs, if they switch to OO.
Agreed, and it is one of the main reasons that my company does use OO (alongside Office 97 -- we've seen no need to upgrade since then). But for most larger businesses, the cost of Acrobat is trivial, and it comes with some nice features that can be handy (such as adding annotations to a PDF file).
not true. I rarely see a .DOC file in the company for ANY business documents, including files from outside the company.
.DOC files, and one produced the invitation to tender as a .DOC file, required us to provide our tender document in .DOC format, and part of the job included converting some .DOC files to PDF. For the third contract, everything was done on paper.
Well, you're in an unusual position, then. Of the last 3 projects my company has been involved in, one has provided technical documentation of a system we need to integrate with as
Do you have a reference to those patents?
Like a standard lossy format with support for alpha?
JPEG supports arbitrary channels. If you really want it, you could add an alpha channel to a JPEG stream and use that. The reason we don't have it is because there's very little point.
Title pages -- I shouldn't have to press enter a bunch to put my name in the approximate middle of the page. There should be a wizard of some sort that lets you choose between different layouts for title pages.
I have a lot of shit from Word trying to vertically centre anything. It just doesn't seem to be capable of automatic vertical alignment, which plain _sucks_.
Meanwhile, I have constant struggles with fonts reverting to the default paragraph style at near random. (It seems to crop up when backspacing one paragraph into another?...)
The problem is that word stores a paragraph's style in the end-of-paragraph marker. When you delete this, it forgets about that style and picks up the style of the paragraph you just joined to it instead. The workaroud is to press shift-left delete instead of backspace; this joins the bottom paragraph to the top, rather than the other way around.
Yes, but as XML is only a standard for building file formats, not a file format itself, this doesn't mean an awful lot.
I'm looking for a spreadsheet that [...] can use the R1C1 reference style instead of the A1 reference style.
Out of interest... why? I don't see any particular reason why R1C1 style would be "better" than A1, etc.
I have my own problems with the open office spreadsheet app (related to its restrictive sheet size limits), but this isn't one of them...
the various versions of Outlook i've used all opened text files just fine in Notepad without any fuss - always have, never had to change anything.
MS Outlook et al tend to use the attachment filename to determine which external application to launch. If he's sending files out with a non-standard extension, this might be confusing the e-mail program.
One of the problems open/star office has is that it takes forever to save or open a document due to its gzipped xml format.
I routinely edit documents that are in the region of 150-200 pages long in OpenOffice, and save times only exceed a second if my hard disk is in power-saving mode. It is, in fact, faster than MS Word. This is probably due to the fact that less disk I/O is required on the compressed file than on the hugely bloated MS one.
The problem, however, is that it doesn't support background saving. You can't carry on editing while it is performing the save, which you can with MS Word.
I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends. Anybody care to comment on what can be done to 'sell' OO.org to these people?
Not a lot. There are four good reasons for using OO.org:
1. Cross platform support -- this is pointless for the people you're talking about.
2. Zero up-front cost -- not a benefit to anyone who's willing to pirate MS's software
3. Access to source code, ability to make your own improvements -- not a benefit to anyone who isn't a programmer and would never consider hiring one
4. File format that is easy to write external tools to manipulate -- only useful if you have an unusual requirement that MS Office doesn't solve itself
I can't think of any other convincing reason to use OpenOffice.
Businesses don't care about interoperability.
Huh? I hear interoperability concerns cited as the number one reason that businesses still use Windows & MS Office. It has become standard practice in recent years for business documents (e.g. proposals, invoices, etc.) to be passed around as MS Word documents. People are nervous to move away from MS Word because they are concerned that they might not be able to open these documents in another system. They get worried about MS's FUD about OpenOffice not being able to open some huge percentage of MS documents.
Sure, your Fortune 50 companies may need some features that OO doesn't provide, but the number of office suite users in those companies is a small minority compared to those in SMEs.
An interesting point about OO's file format is that it is very conducive to being manipulated by external programs. And if it becomes ISO standardised, then that would provide some level of assurance that the format will be supported long term. This kind of thing can be important when it comes to building an information management system around the files.
Can the ISO standardize an MS-Patented way of saving documents??!!
Are you saying MS has patents on the way OpenOffice uses XML?
How???
People think that the sun is an easy target because it's "down" in the gravity well, but you have to remember that you're starting with earth's orbital velocity, which you need to cancel out to 'fall' to the sun. That's about 18.5 miles/second.
Easily achievable. 18.5 miles/sec is roughly 30 km/s. So, you need to cancel that energy? Well, that's 450 megajoules per kilogram you'll need to put in. I believe you get _substantially_ more power than that out of fission reactions.
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years
Do you know how much of that stuff you'd need before you would even notice the difference from background levels? Remember that the longer the half life, the more atoms you need to produce the same amount of radioactivity. Doubling the half life halves the amount of danger posed by the radiation emitted. Its as simple as that.