Was anyone else disappointed by Ender's Shadow? Mostly I'm trying to forget about it. I truly enjoyed Ender's game, and thought the sequels were... medicore (except for Children of the mind, which was simply appalling). Then I went and read Ender's Shadow and it was Card quietly destroying Ender's Game for me. It was the whole "Well actually there's this other kid, and he's even smarter and better than Ender! He could have done the whole thing singlehanded without getting tired like Ender!". There seemed to be a need to "go one better" and hence make Bean "much better than Ender" which, at the same time, required a lot of Ender's speeches and actions (from the original book) to be recast as stupid and poor. Ender had enough flaws and issues in Ender's Game without making him semi-incompetent as well.
People have emotional reaction to words and most of them don't have the knowledge to evaluate the REAL threat (or the desire).
I think you vastly underestimate the threat fnord or terrorism fnord fnord. Terrorism fnord is something that we all must take seriously and fear fnord. If terrorists fnord get access to nuclear fnord or biological weapons fnord millions could die fnord. Or just think of the tragedy that could occur if terrorists fnord got a hold of a Dirty bomb fnord fnord!
The most depressing part is that I don't even really need the fnord's, people have been sufficiently well trained that we can get the same reaction from words that they can see.
One thing: my understanding (based on a course I took last term on verifying code) is that code provers are still very much a research topic. In particular they find it very hard to deal with pointers. Also the lecturer implied it was quite hard to prove pre-existing code bases and it was better to "refine" code from a specification into code proving it as you go.
Both are pretty much true - doing advanced things and still being provable is still under investigation, and certainly proving existing codebases is far from viable. Provability is something you have to do from the start. B-method is exactly what you say: a refinement of the specification, which then gets converted into code. SPARK is a language specifically designed to be provable - that's doesn't mean it is too restricted to write anything in, it just means you don't have all the conveniences available in other languages. Writing provable code is slower than writing code in other languages. The point is that if security really matters you make up for the slower development time in the huge gains in testing. It isn't worth writing every little desktop application provably (that's still a research topic), but we certainly know enough that if security is important it is possible to write something provable.
They do not directly mention Trusted Computing, but it looks like every expert they cite is in fact a Trusted Computing advocate. Hell, David Spafford was the author of the fairly famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers. I have to do some more Googling, but I think pretty much the entire committee has Trusted Computing ties.
You might want to check your DNS entries as apparently you're using a different "google" than I am. For starters '"David Spafford" TCPA' returns 0 hits of Google. Secondly, it's Eugene Spafford that took part in, and is cited in the report. Googling for Eugene Spafford and TCPA gives a few hits, but nothing about him writing any papers on TCPA. Confused, I went to his homepage and looked up his list of publications. Lo and behold, not a single mention of TCPA in any of his numerous books, journal articles or conference papers. He did write "Practical UNIX security" available from O'Reilly.
I'm sure if you continue to completely make stuff up you can find all manner of other connections to trusted computing. On the other hand if you care to join the rest of us in reality you might find that the report really has nothing to do with TCPA at all.
This all seems a little alarmist. Our IT infrastructure is far more secure than our physical infrastructure, because our IT infrastructure has grown up under constant threats from script kiddies, trojans, and worms. 9/11 was possible because we have (or had) a basically open, trusting society. That's not true online.
The actual report has less to say about terrorists and more to say about the general lack of real security and assurance in software systems that are generally available. For instance they spend some time decrying the "just keep patching" mentality, and argue that we should be considering security at a fundamental level. Mostly they just argue that more time and money ought to be spent actually designing and engineering secure software, given that right now security is a sad afterthought with most software. The principle being that as more and more of our world becomes connected online and we become more dependent on the network, the more precarious the postion becomes: just slapping endless patches over the holes as they appear is a poor solution.
In other words: over the last couple of decades IT has undergone an extremely rapid revolution as networking and interconnected computing has gone from being small local networks to a vast complex global network. Realtively speaking that change happened extremely rapidly and our ability to write software for such an environment simply hasn't kept up. It's time we took a deep breath, admitted that we're a little behind, and started knuckling down on the software assurance front.
Thanks. It is actually quie a good report all things considered, with the main thrust being that more money needs to be spent of fundamental research into security, and that the NSA and ARDA need to produce more unclassified research. The listed research goals are all quite sensible as well, focusing on such things as increasign software assurance through better engineering practices, and building more secure protocols for general use.
Someone kindly provided an alternate link to the report (http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/CyberSecurity.p df) and if MS or similar have ahand in it, it's fairly well removed - most of the comittee seem to be academics from a variety of Universities around the US. There's a the president of AT&T and someone from Dell, but otherwise it's mostly just academics. I see no signs of a slide into trusted computing - mostly just a lot of complaint about the relatively slipshod state of current critical IT infrastructure.
There is nothing they couldn't dream up as a terrorist or other attack on the IT infrastructure that hasn't been thought up already by others, even in the terror game it is hard to be truely original. And at least by going through the exercise of thinking like an attacker they may help spur the development of better defenses, traps, early warnings, recovery procedures , what have you.
The problem is not that no one has thought about the problems of security of software assurance enough to have come up with solutions, the problem is the solutions haven't made their way out of theory and into practice. It's not that the theory is new either - a lot of the ideas are 10 years old or more. The problem is that there are too many people who are happy with what they have and never bothered to look at what the theorists have actually devised. Why do you think the NSA created SELinux? It wasn't because they were planning to create a secure operating system - they themselves say that they did it to demonstrate that such controls can easily be built into "mainstream operating system". Read that as: the've done the research, know the solutions (this sort of architecture is, research wise, quite old), and are so frustrated that no one was actually using it that they hacked it into the most mainstream OS they could just to show people how.
If you consider the task of writing secure software applications, rather than just OS architectures to vastly enhance security, there are still perfectly good options out there. If you're serious about high integrity software (be it for security, or for fault tolerance) you ought to be proving your code. No, seriously - you can statically mathematically prove your code providing you use the right tools. For instance there are things like B-method or SPARK which use allow you to actually prove the partial correctness of your code (partial correctness in the sense of "if it terminates, it terminates with these properties..."). The concept of having a separate prover as a safety and correctness checker, as opposed to letting static typing and the compiler catch the most glaring errors, seems eminently sensible. The techniques for how to do this sort of thing are quite old, and it is becoming increasingly practical to do full proofs given the power of computers these days. Again, this is the category of "something we know how to do, but mostly never bother with".
I use the menu hotkeys a lot in excel, the most common one I use is +E D (Edit/Delete). In Excel that deletes the cell, in spreadsheet it deletes the worksheet!
So by usability you mean "reproduing key for key every shortcut and menu entry from MS Excel"? That's not usuability. If you want to delete the contents of a cell in Calc you can use the delete or backspace key or if using the menus: Alt+E O. If you want to remove the cell completely then you'll want Alt+E E, which is hardly less usable than Alt+E D. I don't see the problem.
For reference, to delete the worksheet in 2.0beta you now need to use Alt+E S S D, which is hardly something you'll do by accident very often.
It is being worked on. No, it hasn't made it into 2.0, but it looks like they have a provisional svg2draw translator - it just needs a little more work. It's not like they are completely ignoring the issue.
Oddly it is for the same reason that I favour TeX and LaTeX. They do precisely what you tell them to do. You can always step in and say "No, I want you to do exactly this! no matter how stupid it looks". Of course the downside is that it all relies on arcane commands, but one you know them you can pretty much do what you want.
To be honest, there are no converters from latex to anything that are decent
I find the LaTeX to PDF and LaTeX to DVI converters to be quite excellent (not just decent). I think you'll be able to find a LaTeX to Lyx converter that works quite well as well. If you want to convert to MS Word or OpenOffice then things get much trickier because, in the end, we're actually talking about different kinds of applications. TeX and to a lesser extent LaTeX are about typesetting, while Word and Writer are about word processing. There are many many things that you can do in TeX that just can't be done in Word or Writer. Expecting to have a converter that is "(supporting all the addons one can have)" is like expecting a photohop to MS Paint converter to support all photoshop's features in the resulting MS Paint document. It just can't happen. That's nto to say converters can't exist, merely that they must necessarily be restricted in what they can do.
You download a file, which is a disk image. It mounts on the desktop, opens and shows a *single file* (a "package", which is actually a directory with lots of files, but you don't need to care). "Drag this file to your Applications folder, double click on it and it starts".
How hard is that to do?
If you're making a cross platform application like OpenOffice, very. Okay, it's quite easy, but the drag and drop disk image installer will weigh in at some ridiculous size. Because you need to be able to have it "just run" you need to include everything that you might need in the diskimage - you can't guarantee that every platform is going to have the required libraries. Next note that OO uses Java, mozilla, and python, among other things, so you're "package" is going to have to include a full version of each of those "just in case", let alone all the other small libraries that they make use of. Even if you do a static compile it will still be HUGE.
What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.
What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.
Adding some better scripting/macro capabilities should I think become a priority so people can make the same sort of mini-applications which are possible in excel/word
Well, given that they now have support for scripting in Python, things will definitely get better. Of course there's still the issue of the underlying APIs that the scripts are using. Having not actually done any OOo scripting work I can't vouch for those. Generally, though, it does look like they are payng attention to making scripting both easy and powerful.
Does the OpenOffice team actually realize there are real and serious interface usability and elegance issues with their program, and desire to fix this?
I think they do. Usability, consistency, and GUI cleanup were some of the major tasks for 2.0. No 2.0 doesn't magically correct everything, but as far as usability goes it makes great strides over 1.0. The other thing to note, of course, is that in the end OpenOffice is aiming to be a fairly close work-alike to MS Office to make transitioning easier. That means that it will have the same GUI and usability issues as MS Office, as well as any of it's own. The MS Office inherited usability issues aren't likely to go away all that soon unfortunately - not util OO get's enough of a userbase that it can forge its own direction in the Office application market.
If you have to use OpenOffice, but want real equations in documents and presentations, there's always this. It's quite a nice little plugin for OpenOffice that uses TeX to render math to an image file, which it then inserts into the document. The TeX commands used to render the image are inserted into image attributes in the header so that you can go back and edit equations as well. Simple and ingenious, and ought to become standard for OpenOffice. As nice as their equation editor is, it's rendering is ugly as sin compared to TeX.
Considering the utterly prohibitive costs to a small business should they ever be subject to a BSA audit while using the "free" version of MS Office, I'd say it's actually pretty expensive. Honestly, an audit can be a business changing experience. It just isn't worth the risk.
The last small company I worked for was busy transitioning as many staff as they could over to OpenOffice. They weren't doing this because OpenOffice was cheaper, they were doing this because they didn't have to bother with the task of filing and managing licenses - the reduced cost was just a bonus.
And when was the last time you used it? The point is not that OpenOffice works great now, but that it is getting better quickly. Many of your issus wit it may already be fixed, others might get fixed in the near future. As I said, it's the rate of improvement, not the current featureset that is the point here.
OpenOffice will never be equivalent to MS Office and so long as OO doesn't have a support option, it never will.
OpenOffice does have a support option. It's just that when you buy it with support included it is called StarOffice instead.
The ONLY people to claim OO will overtake MS Office are those that can do their own support and those that don't use many of MS Office's features.
Managing to have perfect MS Office document compatibility is something that may never happen as they're aiming at a moving target that MS can deliberately break if they so choose. The feature race, however, is probably in OpenOffice's favour in the long run. MS is ahead for now, but OpenOffice has been improving and adding features much faster than MS Office has been. Unless MS manages to kick themselves into gear OpenOffice being moe feature complete than MS Office is an inevitability - it's only a matter of time.
Indeed. My parents still use a Win95 system because it does what they need. Most importantly they've got used to and aren't keen to change - and that issue of change is a big one. I worry because when that box dies (and it will, it's pentium 100 from 1995, eventually it's just going to become unrepairable) my parents are going to be forced to upgrade. And that's going to be painful, particularly for my mother who is averse to anything different. Even if they stick with Windows, they'll be looking at a change to WindowsXP and Office2003 which is still a big change.
The best I could do (I live in a different country, so support is tricky) is give them a newish (my old system when I moved out of the country) system to run alongside their old one. I let them install Linux on it themselves, and they seem happy enough to manage with Linux (it's as big a change for them as upgrading), but they use it in parallel with the old system, because movign away all at once is too hard. I'm hoping to slowly transition them to the newer system so that when the old one dies at least they won't be left with the sudden change of a forced upgrade.
A couple days ago there was some discussion in the thread about the Star Wars fan film about film editing and where to learn somethign about it. Catwoman is a fantatsic example, and all aspiring amateur editors should pay attention: This is exactly how not to edit a film. Just about everything that could be done badly was done badly. Honestly, I think a monkey sat in front of a copy of Final Cut Pro could have done a better job.
I hope someone never lets that man direct again.
For the record, I was forced to witness portions of the film while on a plane. I didn't have sound (why would you?!), but even occasional glances up were enough show all the bad editing, acting, and directing available in that film.
The restrictions in Starter Edition (low maximum resolution, limited number of applications that can be run at once) are completely arbitrary. Microsoft hasn't put these restrictions in place because it makes the software cheaper, it has put them in place because it wants to force a cheaper version to be less functional.
The problem is that, regardless of whether users would actually need the functionality that Starter Edition doesn't have, people won't like it. People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled. It doesn't matter whether the restrictions affect them, they feel insulted by being offered something that has been willfully hobbled.
Sure, there's an issue of non-standard toolkits, etc, but the first obstacle to standardizing anything is the install. Autopackage provides the possibility of a single way to install AND uninstall applications on every Linux distribution. That's why it's important.
I think Autopackage is fantastic, and am looking forward to the day when most developers package their software that way. If you're looking for a standardised way to install and manage software though, I'd suggest you look into Smart as well.
It's complementary to Autopackage - Smart covers respositories and distribution provided packages (As nice as Autopackage is, it isn't designed for install/upgrade of the base system). Smart is effectively a replacement for apt/yum/urpmi etc. It is a package manager and dependency solver. The important point to you is that unlike all those tools mentioned it is completely pluggable for backends and channels. That means it can (and does) support.rpm,.deb, and even slackware.tgz. Moreover it can understand apt repositories, urpmi repositories, yum repositories, red-carpet channels etc. It can even mix and match between those if you like (though messes may result from randomly mixing distro repositories).
The point is that, in theory, every current major distro (presumably even gentoo, I haven't looked at the details, but I imagine an ebuild backend can be written as well) can use Smart as the base software install/patch/upgrade interface, regardless of what they do behind the scenes. That means (presuming it gets the uptake it deserves) we could see a (from the user point of view) single way to install/patch/upgrade base software on every linux distribution - the fine points of package format, repository layout etc. can be hidden behind Smart's common interface.
Combine that with Autopackage's interface for third party/additional applications, and managing software on Linux will look more clean, consistent, and uniform than anythign else.
Berlin, to which you refer, became fresco which doesn't appear to have had any updates since 2003. I think we can call that mostly dead. Berlin/Fresco was supposed to replace X with something entirely new.
Cairo is something entirely different and runs on top of X11. It is simply a new rendering model for on screen drawing. Think of it as being akin to DisplayPostscript or Aqua: instead of addressing the screen in terms of pixels it addresses it in terms of regions, paths, fills, etc. The model is based on SVG. Cairo isn't restrcted to X11 however, it can run on top of a variety of display systems including Aqua, OpenGL, and Win32. Think of it as a cross platform rendering abstraction if you like. If GTK adds the ability to render to Cairo then GTK/Cairo will automatically work on all the listed platforms (rather than requiring separate Aqua and Win32 ports of GTK).
Slashdot Mirror
Was anyone else disappointed by Ender's Shadow? Mostly I'm trying to forget about it. I truly enjoyed Ender's game, and thought the sequels were... medicore (except for Children of the mind, which was simply appalling). Then I went and read Ender's Shadow and it was Card quietly destroying Ender's Game for me. It was the whole "Well actually there's this other kid, and he's even smarter and better than Ender! He could have done the whole thing singlehanded without getting tired like Ender!". There seemed to be a need to "go one better" and hence make Bean "much better than Ender" which, at the same time, required a lot of Ender's speeches and actions (from the original book) to be recast as stupid and poor. Ender had enough flaws and issues in Ender's Game without making him semi-incompetent as well.
Jedidiah.
People have emotional reaction to words and most of them don't have the knowledge to evaluate the REAL threat (or the desire).
I think you vastly underestimate the threat fnord or terrorism fnord fnord. Terrorism fnord is something that we all must take seriously and fear fnord. If terrorists fnord get access to nuclear fnord or biological weapons fnord millions could die fnord. Or just think of the tragedy that could occur if terrorists fnord got a hold of a Dirty bomb fnord fnord!
The most depressing part is that I don't even really need the fnord's, people have been sufficiently well trained that we can get the same reaction from words that they can see.
Jedidiah.
One thing: my understanding (based on a course I took last term on verifying code) is that code provers are still very much a research topic. In particular they find it very hard to deal with pointers. Also the lecturer implied it was quite hard to prove pre-existing code bases and it was better to "refine" code from a specification into code proving it as you go.
Both are pretty much true - doing advanced things and still being provable is still under investigation, and certainly proving existing codebases is far from viable. Provability is something you have to do from the start. B-method is exactly what you say: a refinement of the specification, which then gets converted into code. SPARK is a language specifically designed to be provable - that's doesn't mean it is too restricted to write anything in, it just means you don't have all the conveniences available in other languages. Writing provable code is slower than writing code in other languages. The point is that if security really matters you make up for the slower development time in the huge gains in testing. It isn't worth writing every little desktop application provably (that's still a research topic), but we certainly know enough that if security is important it is possible to write something provable.
Jedidiah.
They do not directly mention Trusted Computing, but it looks like every expert they cite is in fact a Trusted Computing advocate. Hell, David Spafford was the author of the fairly famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers. I have to do some more Googling, but I think pretty much the entire committee has Trusted Computing ties.
You might want to check your DNS entries as apparently you're using a different "google" than I am. For starters '"David Spafford" TCPA' returns 0 hits of Google. Secondly, it's Eugene Spafford that took part in, and is cited in the report. Googling for Eugene Spafford and TCPA gives a few hits, but nothing about him writing any papers on TCPA. Confused, I went to his homepage and looked up his list of publications. Lo and behold, not a single mention of TCPA in any of his numerous books, journal articles or conference papers. He did write "Practical UNIX security" available from O'Reilly.
I'm sure if you continue to completely make stuff up you can find all manner of other connections to trusted computing. On the other hand if you care to join the rest of us in reality you might find that the report really has nothing to do with TCPA at all.
Jedidiah.
This all seems a little alarmist. Our IT infrastructure is far more secure than our physical infrastructure, because our IT infrastructure has grown up under constant threats from script kiddies, trojans, and worms. 9/11 was possible because we have (or had) a basically open, trusting society. That's not true online.
The actual report has less to say about terrorists and more to say about the general lack of real security and assurance in software systems that are generally available. For instance they spend some time decrying the "just keep patching" mentality, and argue that we should be considering security at a fundamental level. Mostly they just argue that more time and money ought to be spent actually designing and engineering secure software, given that right now security is a sad afterthought with most software. The principle being that as more and more of our world becomes connected online and we become more dependent on the network, the more precarious the postion becomes: just slapping endless patches over the holes as they appear is a poor solution.
In other words: over the last couple of decades IT has undergone an extremely rapid revolution as networking and interconnected computing has gone from being small local networks to a vast complex global network. Realtively speaking that change happened extremely rapidly and our ability to write software for such an environment simply hasn't kept up. It's time we took a deep breath, admitted that we're a little behind, and started knuckling down on the software assurance front.
Jedidiah.
Thanks. It is actually quie a good report all things considered, with the main thrust being that more money needs to be spent of fundamental research into security, and that the NSA and ARDA need to produce more unclassified research. The listed research goals are all quite sensible as well, focusing on such things as increasign software assurance through better engineering practices, and building more secure protocols for general use.
Surprisingly sensible all things considered.
Jedidiah.
Someone kindly provided an alternate link to the report (http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/CyberSecurity.p df) and if MS or similar have ahand in it, it's fairly well removed - most of the comittee seem to be academics from a variety of Universities around the US. There's a the president of AT&T and someone from Dell, but otherwise it's mostly just academics. I see no signs of a slide into trusted computing - mostly just a lot of complaint about the relatively slipshod state of current critical IT infrastructure.
Jedidiah
There is nothing they couldn't dream up as a terrorist or other attack on the IT infrastructure that hasn't been thought up already by others, even in the terror game it is hard to be truely original. And at least by going through the exercise of thinking like an attacker they may help spur the development of better defenses, traps, early warnings, recovery procedures , what have you.
The problem is not that no one has thought about the problems of security of software assurance enough to have come up with solutions, the problem is the solutions haven't made their way out of theory and into practice. It's not that the theory is new either - a lot of the ideas are 10 years old or more. The problem is that there are too many people who are happy with what they have and never bothered to look at what the theorists have actually devised. Why do you think the NSA created SELinux? It wasn't because they were planning to create a secure operating system - they themselves say that they did it to demonstrate that such controls can easily be built into "mainstream operating system". Read that as: the've done the research, know the solutions (this sort of architecture is, research wise, quite old), and are so frustrated that no one was actually using it that they hacked it into the most mainstream OS they could just to show people how.
If you consider the task of writing secure software applications, rather than just OS architectures to vastly enhance security, there are still perfectly good options out there. If you're serious about high integrity software (be it for security, or for fault tolerance) you ought to be proving your code. No, seriously - you can statically mathematically prove your code providing you use the right tools. For instance there are things like B-method or SPARK which use allow you to actually prove the partial correctness of your code (partial correctness in the sense of "if it terminates, it terminates with these properties..."). The concept of having a separate prover as a safety and correctness checker, as opposed to letting static typing and the compiler catch the most glaring errors, seems eminently sensible. The techniques for how to do this sort of thing are quite old, and it is becoming increasingly practical to do full proofs given the power of computers these days. Again, this is the category of "something we know how to do, but mostly never bother with".
Jedidiah.
I use the menu hotkeys a lot in excel, the most common one I use is +E D (Edit/Delete). In Excel that deletes the cell, in spreadsheet it deletes the worksheet!
So by usability you mean "reproduing key for key every shortcut and menu entry from MS Excel"? That's not usuability. If you want to delete the contents of a cell in Calc you can use the delete or backspace key or if using the menus: Alt+E O. If you want to remove the cell completely then you'll want Alt+E E, which is hardly less usable than Alt+E D. I don't see the problem.
For reference, to delete the worksheet in 2.0beta you now need to use Alt+E S S D, which is hardly something you'll do by accident very often.
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
It is being worked on. No, it hasn't made it into 2.0, but it looks like they have a provisional svg2draw translator - it just needs a little more work. It's not like they are completely ignoring the issue.
Jedidiah.
Oddly it is for the same reason that I favour TeX and LaTeX. They do precisely what you tell them to do. You can always step in and say "No, I want you to do exactly this! no matter how stupid it looks". Of course the downside is that it all relies on arcane commands, but one you know them you can pretty much do what you want.
Jedidiah.
To be honest, there are no converters from latex to anything that are decent
I find the LaTeX to PDF and LaTeX to DVI converters to be quite excellent (not just decent). I think you'll be able to find a LaTeX to Lyx converter that works quite well as well. If you want to convert to MS Word or OpenOffice then things get much trickier because, in the end, we're actually talking about different kinds of applications. TeX and to a lesser extent LaTeX are about typesetting, while Word and Writer are about word processing. There are many many things that you can do in TeX that just can't be done in Word or Writer. Expecting to have a converter that is "(supporting all the addons one can have)" is like expecting a photohop to MS Paint converter to support all photoshop's features in the resulting MS Paint document. It just can't happen. That's nto to say converters can't exist, merely that they must necessarily be restricted in what they can do.
Jedidiah.
You download a file, which is a disk image. It mounts on the desktop, opens and shows a *single file* (a "package", which is actually a directory with lots of files, but you don't need to care). "Drag this file to your Applications folder, double click on it and it starts".
How hard is that to do?
If you're making a cross platform application like OpenOffice, very. Okay, it's quite easy, but the drag and drop disk image installer will weigh in at some ridiculous size. Because you need to be able to have it "just run" you need to include everything that you might need in the diskimage - you can't guarantee that every platform is going to have the required libraries. Next note that OO uses Java, mozilla, and python, among other things, so you're "package" is going to have to include a full version of each of those "just in case", let alone all the other small libraries that they make use of. Even if you do a static compile it will still be HUGE.
Jedidiah.
What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.
What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.
Jedidiah.
Adding some better scripting/macro capabilities should I think become a priority so people can make the same sort of mini-applications which are possible in excel/word
Well, given that they now have support for scripting in Python, things will definitely get better. Of course there's still the issue of the underlying APIs that the scripts are using. Having not actually done any OOo scripting work I can't vouch for those. Generally, though, it does look like they are payng attention to making scripting both easy and powerful.
Jedidiah.
Does the OpenOffice team actually realize there are real and serious interface usability and elegance issues with their program, and desire to fix this?
I think they do. Usability, consistency, and GUI cleanup were some of the major tasks for 2.0. No 2.0 doesn't magically correct everything, but as far as usability goes it makes great strides over 1.0. The other thing to note, of course, is that in the end OpenOffice is aiming to be a fairly close work-alike to MS Office to make transitioning easier. That means that it will have the same GUI and usability issues as MS Office, as well as any of it's own. The MS Office inherited usability issues aren't likely to go away all that soon unfortunately - not util OO get's enough of a userbase that it can forge its own direction in the Office application market.
Jedidiah.
If you have to use OpenOffice, but want real equations in documents and presentations, there's always this. It's quite a nice little plugin for OpenOffice that uses TeX to render math to an image file, which it then inserts into the document. The TeX commands used to render the image are inserted into image attributes in the header so that you can go back and edit equations as well. Simple and ingenious, and ought to become standard for OpenOffice. As nice as their equation editor is, it's rendering is ugly as sin compared to TeX.
Jedidiah.
When Microsoft Office is free[ed2k link]?
Considering the utterly prohibitive costs to a small business should they ever be subject to a BSA audit while using the "free" version of MS Office, I'd say it's actually pretty expensive. Honestly, an audit can be a business changing experience. It just isn't worth the risk.
The last small company I worked for was busy transitioning as many staff as they could over to OpenOffice. They weren't doing this because OpenOffice was cheaper, they were doing this because they didn't have to bother with the task of filing and managing licenses - the reduced cost was just a bonus.
Jedidiah.
And when was the last time you used it? The point is not that OpenOffice works great now, but that it is getting better quickly. Many of your issus wit it may already be fixed, others might get fixed in the near future. As I said, it's the rate of improvement, not the current featureset that is the point here.
Jedidiah.
OpenOffice will never be equivalent to MS Office and so long as OO doesn't have a support option, it never will.
OpenOffice does have a support option. It's just that when you buy it with support included it is called StarOffice instead.
The ONLY people to claim OO will overtake MS Office are those that can do their own support and those that don't use many of MS Office's features.
Managing to have perfect MS Office document compatibility is something that may never happen as they're aiming at a moving target that MS can deliberately break if they so choose. The feature race, however, is probably in OpenOffice's favour in the long run. MS is ahead for now, but OpenOffice has been improving and adding features much faster than MS Office has been. Unless MS manages to kick themselves into gear OpenOffice being moe feature complete than MS Office is an inevitability - it's only a matter of time.
Jedidiah.
Indeed. My parents still use a Win95 system because it does what they need. Most importantly they've got used to and aren't keen to change - and that issue of change is a big one. I worry because when that box dies (and it will, it's pentium 100 from 1995, eventually it's just going to become unrepairable) my parents are going to be forced to upgrade. And that's going to be painful, particularly for my mother who is averse to anything different. Even if they stick with Windows, they'll be looking at a change to WindowsXP and Office2003 which is still a big change.
The best I could do (I live in a different country, so support is tricky) is give them a newish (my old system when I moved out of the country) system to run alongside their old one. I let them install Linux on it themselves, and they seem happy enough to manage with Linux (it's as big a change for them as upgrading), but they use it in parallel with the old system, because movign away all at once is too hard. I'm hoping to slowly transition them to the newer system so that when the old one dies at least they won't be left with the sudden change of a forced upgrade.
Jedidiah,
A couple days ago there was some discussion in the thread about the Star Wars fan film about film editing and where to learn somethign about it. Catwoman is a fantatsic example, and all aspiring amateur editors should pay attention: This is exactly how not to edit a film. Just about everything that could be done badly was done badly. Honestly, I think a monkey sat in front of a copy of Final Cut Pro could have done a better job.
I hope someone never lets that man direct again.
For the record, I was forced to witness portions of the film while on a plane. I didn't have sound (why would you?!), but even occasional glances up were enough show all the bad editing, acting, and directing available in that film.
Jedidiah.
The restrictions in Starter Edition (low maximum resolution, limited number of applications that can be run at once) are completely arbitrary. Microsoft hasn't put these restrictions in place because it makes the software cheaper, it has put them in place because it wants to force a cheaper version to be less functional.
The problem is that, regardless of whether users would actually need the functionality that Starter Edition doesn't have, people won't like it. People are simply averse to buying products that have been deliberately crippled. It doesn't matter whether the restrictions affect them, they feel insulted by being offered something that has been willfully hobbled.
Jedidiah.
Sure, there's an issue of non-standard toolkits, etc, but the first obstacle to standardizing anything is the install. Autopackage provides the possibility of a single way to install AND uninstall applications on every Linux distribution. That's why it's important.
.rpm, .deb, and even slackware .tgz. Moreover it can understand apt repositories, urpmi repositories, yum repositories, red-carpet channels etc. It can even mix and match between those if you like (though messes may result from randomly mixing distro repositories).
I think Autopackage is fantastic, and am looking forward to the day when most developers package their software that way. If you're looking for a standardised way to install and manage software though, I'd suggest you look into Smart as well.
It's complementary to Autopackage - Smart covers respositories and distribution provided packages (As nice as Autopackage is, it isn't designed for install/upgrade of the base system). Smart is effectively a replacement for apt/yum/urpmi etc. It is a package manager and dependency solver. The important point to you is that unlike all those tools mentioned it is completely pluggable for backends and channels. That means it can (and does) support
The point is that, in theory, every current major distro (presumably even gentoo, I haven't looked at the details, but I imagine an ebuild backend can be written as well) can use Smart as the base software install/patch/upgrade interface, regardless of what they do behind the scenes. That means (presuming it gets the uptake it deserves) we could see a (from the user point of view) single way to install/patch/upgrade base software on every linux distribution - the fine points of package format, repository layout etc. can be hidden behind Smart's common interface.
Combine that with Autopackage's interface for third party/additional applications, and managing software on Linux will look more clean, consistent, and uniform than anythign else.
Jedidiah.
On the off chance you're not trolling.
Cairo != Berlin == Fresco.
Berlin, to which you refer, became fresco which doesn't appear to have had any updates since 2003. I think we can call that mostly dead. Berlin/Fresco was supposed to replace X with something entirely new.
Cairo is something entirely different and runs on top of X11. It is simply a new rendering model for on screen drawing. Think of it as being akin to DisplayPostscript or Aqua: instead of addressing the screen in terms of pixels it addresses it in terms of regions, paths, fills, etc. The model is based on SVG. Cairo isn't restrcted to X11 however, it can run on top of a variety of display systems including Aqua, OpenGL, and Win32. Think of it as a cross platform rendering abstraction if you like. If GTK adds the ability to render to Cairo then GTK/Cairo will automatically work on all the listed platforms (rather than requiring separate Aqua and Win32 ports of GTK).
Jedidiah.