Europe yes, US no. Last I checked, US birth rate was barely at "replacement level" (~2.1 babies/woman), Western Europe as a whole was slightly below, with variation between countries (some countries were well below, others at or slightly above). So without immigration, the US would basically remain at the same population, and Western Europe would slowly start declining. As it is, population is growing in both locations.
Except that in many Western European countries that replacement level is only held up, directly and indirectly, by the transmigration from the middle east and other regions. For whatever else that results in, it also results in a large-scale displacement and assimilation/suppression of the indigenous population. In many regions, groups that have been hundreds or thousands of years in a region are now finding themselves in the minority as the result of transmigration. A mixture of sellouts and useful idiots have helped speed the process.
As a whole, European nations have failed to learn lessons from the North American First Nations.
Whatever the case, the right to have children is/should be a fundamental right.
Even if they did not take care of their earlier children, even if they are criminals or whatever, similar to their requirement for food and shelter is the requirement to have children. In fact, I consider that this right jumps over everything everything else and should occupy the top spot, even above a persons right to live...
Funny you should phrase it that way.
Every "right" also comes with one or more corresponding responsibilities. In the case above, it include the ability to provide for those children produced. There is also the responsibility, in part held by the group, to ensure that only those likely produce children that will become assets shall reproduce.
Most previous cultures and civilizations had at least minimal criteria to meet to become an adult. Some let you live on in a sort of extended overtime childhood, but with out a say in governance nor permission to have a family.
Basically what is now happening is that the QA has been pulled on production.
The pollution created by agriculture is a potential concern if we needed more food, but the land area just isn't.
WoW and Civ have taught you the wrong models.
Yield varies tremendously depending on geology, location, hydrology, etc. This can vary greatly over even short distances. So to reduce the need for chemical and other pollution, you need to position the agricultural zones where they require the least added work.
Also, those "ridiculously high" yields are currently fully dependent end-to-end on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are used to make fertilizers and pesticides, to sow, cultivate, and harvest. Then you have the foods transported, so that they get properly stale, hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles using -- fossil fuels.
So some of the current growing food crises (plural) lay squarely at the feet of so-called developers who convinced communities and steam-rolled zoning commissions into paving over their best farmland. You can only import when someone else has a surplus which they are also willing to export.
Unfortunately even that well-thought out series of posts on why software- and business model-patents suck still brings into play some of the same old canards. From TFA:
"...and others like IBM and SAP explaining why these patents don't make much sense. Red Hat (expectedly) explained how software patents harm open source development..."
When that one comes up again and again it causes more harm than good. Of course it is true that software patents harm open source development. However, it is true only because software patents harm development in general: both closed and open. So by mentioning only open source, it is implied that closed source is not harmed. That is wrong, since development in general is affected.
However, focusing on development is also rather foolish and distracts from where the real harm lays: usage. Yep. Patents govern usage and where are larger numbers for any given piece of software, the number of developers or the number of users? So by talking only about development, attention is shifted away from the real damage.
One good point made by the article is that is states how open source shows that patents aren't necessary for software innovation. Like the above points, that point could also be made a little better
by putting it into the correct context. It is not Red Hat alone, but also a great many other companies and an even larger number of professionals and experts who point that out. So framing that observation as coming from only one single company also imbalances the debate.
If you read the article, there was no comparison done. The decision was outsourced to MS resellers who, surprise, peddled more MS wares. Comparison of other technologies never happened.
Oh, that and MS Sweden couldn't be bothered to look up any of the dozens of regional companies that provide support for non-MS systems and packages. That 'no support' argument worked in the early 1990's but not anymore.
Hey. Ease up with the slurs against the US. MS is not a US corporation any more than it is a European, African, East Asian or Indian. Though one could make a case for each based on how much taxes are dodged in each region. But if you want to split hairs about what MS is, you can see that it is more about power and isolation than about profit. Notice how many divisions are failing to run a profit. You can can also look at the behavior of its employees and large numbers of minions and come quickly to the conclusion that it is more of a cult.
Also look at how much damage MS has caused not just the IT sector, and not just the private sector, but also the public sector. Notice as desktop usage OS X and Linux, among others, increase the overall cost goes down.
As far as the Kubuntu CDs go, that's a great idea. Just be sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
Negroponte's selling out in poor style. The leaders he mentions are not high-tech. Most people in those positions refer to the GUI on a computer as "Windows" whether it's Gnome, KDE or FVWM. Kane seems positioned to do further harm or mitigate the harm.
Yeah. It's a nice article and there are a lot of improvements. Some unexpected like the better performance for SSDs.
Speaking of SSDs, I see CDs slowly but surely heading the way of the floppy. At some point, they're going to disappear from more or less all new units. They're off a few models already, but it's too soon to say when the tipping point will hit. When it does, the sales of read-only CDs will have to be replaced, possibly with read-write SD flash or USB sticks or something similar. Some thought will have to be put into how to best deal with that when the time comes.
Dude, this is a technology forum. If you want politics or religion then go elsewhere. You see the slams on that company because not only can't it deliver, it goes through great acrobatics and effort to avoid delivering. Brand recognition cuts both ways, and in a technology forum if a company consistently and persistently for decades makes bottom of the line technology and is bad about fixes and causes trouble, then of course you will see 'anti-' view points: it's called experience.
Maybe it is workable to provide some boost from a deep, rail-mounted launching sabot. Doesn't have to be rails, or rails alone. A giant, vertical gun could be a part with the space vehicle being bullet and the first stage sort of a discarding sabot. Yeah, it'd be expensive to dig a deep launching well and line it with apparatus for accelerating a space vehicle, but it might save a lot on getting the vehicle up to or closer to escape velocity. This could possibly replace at least the first stage.
Also, what about creating a path for the rocket, at least down here where the atmosphere is thickest. Some of the right kind and position of turbulence could clear a path. Maybe a laser cannon could punch the hole or the rocket could just chase an empty surface-to-air missile. It works for geese and cyclists to draft each other, why not also space vehicles?
Bullshit. Binary drivers are what we already have in too many cases. Notice that the years where binary drivers were all the rage, hardware support was at its worst. If you want good 'hardware' support for peripheral devices, the device manufacturers just need to take Bill's dick out of their mouth long enough to publish the APIs to their products.
Binary-only drivers tie the peripherals to specific architectures and OS versions. As part of the deal you get security and maintenance problems along with the portability problems. At this point, moving more in the direction of GPLv3 will keep OpenSolaris from being slowed by the dragging weight of binary-only drivers.
Opening the drivers expands the market for the hardware.
Downloading is a royal PITA. The registration is usually a deal-breaker. Almost nothing I've ever run across that's worth anything requires registration for download. However, as a (former) long-time Solaris / SunOS user and major FOSS user, I felt compelled several times to try to circumvent that. But then there's no real way do a network install and othewise week download choice.
That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
Since the court wants the APIs and documentation for the APIs, releasing the code is just a noisy distraction. It's like the tobacco companies turning over several semi-trailers of papers when forced to publish specific pages and documents.
Seriously, Lucas needs to say whether this is a problem for him concerning copyright (unlikely), trademarks (possibly), or patents (probably not). There is no such this as 'Intellectual Property' There are, however, separate and distinct areas of law each governing a separate topic: copyright, trademarks and patents.
So, titles like the main post above are simply helping to muddy the waters. This goes double for when the topic of software patents comes up. Please let the bullshit stop. You can do your bit by referring to copyright as such and not as 'IP'. Or by referring to trademarks as such and not as 'IP'. Or by referring to patents as such and not as 'IP'
Further, unless one is actively choosing to advocate in favor of software patents, lumping them together with regular patents only does a disservice. In the case of patents, differentiate between software patents and patents in the title and the 'tags'. Otherwise it's contributing to the confusion and lumping them in with something different that people have people have been indoctrinated for several generations to feel good about, rather than the new and abominable problem that it is.
So, choose your label correctly: 'copyright' xor 'trademark' xor 'patent' xor 'software patent'. Except for Internet Protocol (the IP part of TCP/IP) there is no 'IP',
If a bank only lets you connect via one OS/browser combo, you are effectively co-opted into the software ecosystem as designed by the bank- it's all their system. Very few banks in the UK have IE-only websites, so that's not a particularly big deal.
What is an issue is the wording - nothing in The Register's article suggests that they've included the magic phrase "where necessary". You could be using an SELinux box tightened beyond belief with no need for anti-spyware or antivirus, but if you get ripped off through a website, their first question is going to be "What antivirus are you running?" and if the answer isn't a well known commercial product, then it's your problem and not theirs.
People are leaving MSIE, if not also MS Windows, in droves. So flexing their M$ agenda by requiring MSIE would backfire quite nastily at this point.
Well, also seeing as the banks have been replacing secure ATMs with insecure ATMs due to putting the M$ ideological ahead of technological factors, it's only natural that they begin to follow the M$ practice of blaming the customer.
Further, some major banks took that ideology two steps further and started destroying crucial components of their infrastructure by replacing it with M$. It's so bad that Microsoft's XSS hole causes state consumer agencies to tell people to file for damages from Sampo Bank, Danske Bank and the others. Too bad so many advertising budgets are dependent on M$ otherwise we'd hear about it in the mainstream media.
Again, the M$ tactic of blame the user helps the banks. At the least it creates a smoke screen that allows the public to get all indignant about such preposterous attitudes thus drawing the focus of the banks' home made catastrophy or willful negligence.
I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are/all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?... No. Groklaw simply links to the whistleblowers. Such astroturfing doesn't work anymore, pretending there wasn't two years of ongoing outrage only works in Redmond and doesn't fool anyone here.
It may be news to a CEO, but programmers who write code (and their children) want to eat and have roofs over their heads, too.
That's the broken window falsehood in a nutshell, with a false dichotomy thrown in on the side.
Money and staff spent, in this case, re-inventing the wheel, is money and staff not spent on the core business activities. So,even if it's learning from others mistakes, going FOSS saves effort and that in turn boosts your core business activities (assuming reinvestment and not skimming by the execs). Software is only a tool, an enabler, for those core activities. In case you missed the last 25 years of computing, it's not an XOR choice between using the open source development model and making a profit. In fact, it's been show again and again that it's not only profitable, but makes your company more recession-proof. We've been through a few now and have seen the benefits.
Groklaw is among the sites currently being blocked from Europe along with related sites. If you're in Europe, you might need to go through a proxy to reach Groklaw articles.
It's hard to say whether all the Pro-Open Standards material and damning data on DIS 29500 is the cause or if it's the Iowa case evidence about MS' decade long jihad against 'non-believers'
Some years back I read about some lawn chairs that had been made, in part, from a block of Co-60 from scrapped medical equipment. When it came in from Mexico, a spot check found it. Radioactive scrap is a larger and more concrete risk that other problems.
Why would you need VBA programmers? We're talking about the product in the article, OpenOffice.org 3.0, and that does not use VBA.
You get javascript and python macros. So that means you don't have to waste money on a bag of shit just to do macros. You can have your macro programmers with a comp sci background. And you can have them participate in web development and other projects.
So it kills two birds with one stone. You are less likely to hire MS boosters who will run their little anti-technology jihadz against you from inside your own office, work is so much easier without them around. You get programmers that can participate in more than one area. Win-win situation.
Which two products? The specification currently before the standards bodies is not implemented anywhere by any application. Parts of it are. Parts of it aren't. Parts of it aren't even specified. And even if it were, the licensing still does not allow free software implementations. Not even MS Office 2007 supports the specification before the standards bodies.
MOOX isn't helping the ODF standard, which by the way is currently the standard for office documents. It's hurting it. It's even hurting the standards process: MOOX target is the same functionality that is already available in OpenDocument, and ODF is already the standard. OpenDocument already has many applications supporting it.
Novell is history. We all know that. It was up and down for a while, but went down for the count when it signed the deal to infect as much of its product as possible with proprietary specifications during a five year span. We're about halfway through that span.
Yes, that's a tremendous advancement. Now you can finally say goodbye to those awful VBA scripts and the "programmers" that follow them as baggage.
It's not new, but OpenOffice.org macros and scripting support both Javascript and Python. So, you don't need to learn a separate language just for macros. Even better, you have a larger pool of people to hire from. And best of all, that pool is of higher quality not being limited to the self-selecting One Microsoft Way crowd.
Since both javascript and python are used in web development and XML tools handle OpenOffice's main format, the OpenDocument Format, there is much less overhead in integrating document management and web apps and less need for disparate skill sets.
...Being an employee of M$ does not make a person evil, they just happen to be an employee of M$ and they are defined by their behaviour...
So it is all the the the qualifications and the qualities of the individual and how well they will fulfil that role...
The problem of conflict of interest, on its own, ought to be enough.
Re-read my post, the word 'evil' is not mentioned, just conflict of interest. Conflict of interest disqualifies any M$ candidates from the position. But as you imply, 'evil' is as evil does.
Since you make the association between M$ and the word evil, how else would you describe someone that works for an interest that causes harm to its customers and net-users in general, has an adversarial relation with its customers, has a multi-decade court-documented history of illegal and unethical practices? The 'I just work here' excuse doesn't cut it.
Don't confuse M$ with closed source. M$ is an opponent of both closed source and open source competition.
M$ has run its Jihad and for a decade, holding the 'net back. It's harmed innumerable businesses both inside and outside the IT sector. M$ stops now unless gullible people fall for the same lines again and again.
It really depends upon who M$ sends to represent them.
No. It does not. There is no positive outcome from M$ involvement involving governing a project which goes against the M$ fundamental business model(s).
Sure. Add in paying for tech support or the cost in man-hours it takes to keep it running. Both can make a serious dent where nobody expected to see one.
That's the big attraction for Debian. For a production system, support tasks drop to almost nothing. It's there. It runs. If and when a patch is needed, it is just that - a patch - and not any weird licensing changes or mutations in functionality.
Of the linux distros, it's an excellent choice for servers, perhaps the best. Given the rock-solid nature, it can be good for enterprise desktops, if you are willing to plan. However, Kubuntu LTS meets that need.
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Except that in many Western European countries that replacement level is only held up, directly and indirectly, by the transmigration from the middle east and other regions. For whatever else that results in, it also results in a large-scale displacement and assimilation/suppression of the indigenous population. In many regions, groups that have been hundreds or thousands of years in a region are now finding themselves in the minority as the result of transmigration. A mixture of sellouts and useful idiots have helped speed the process.
As a whole, European nations have failed to learn lessons from the North American First Nations.
Whatever the case, the right to have children is/should be a fundamental right.
Even if they did not take care of their earlier children, even if they are criminals or whatever, similar to their requirement for food and shelter is the requirement to have children. In fact, I consider that this right jumps over everything everything else and should occupy the top spot, even above a persons right to live...Funny you should phrase it that way.
Every "right" also comes with one or more corresponding responsibilities. In the case above, it include the ability to provide for those children produced. There is also the responsibility, in part held by the group, to ensure that only those likely produce children that will become assets shall reproduce.
Most previous cultures and civilizations had at least minimal criteria to meet to become an adult. Some let you live on in a sort of extended overtime childhood, but with out a say in governance nor permission to have a family.
Basically what is now happening is that the QA has been pulled on production.WoW and Civ have taught you the wrong models.
Yield varies tremendously depending on geology, location, hydrology, etc. This can vary greatly over even short distances. So to reduce the need for chemical and other pollution, you need to position the agricultural zones where they require the least added work.
Also, those "ridiculously high" yields are currently fully dependent end-to-end on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are used to make fertilizers and pesticides, to sow, cultivate, and harvest. Then you have the foods transported, so that they get properly stale, hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles using -- fossil fuels.
So some of the current growing food crises (plural) lay squarely at the feet of so-called developers who convinced communities and steam-rolled zoning commissions into paving over their best farmland. You can only import when someone else has a surplus which they are also willing to export.
Unfortunately even that well-thought out series of posts on why software- and business model-patents suck still brings into play some of the same old canards. From TFA:
When that one comes up again and again it causes more harm than good. Of course it is true that software patents harm open source development. However, it is true only because software patents harm development in general: both closed and open. So by mentioning only open source, it is implied that closed source is not harmed. That is wrong, since development in general is affected.
However, focusing on development is also rather foolish and distracts from where the real harm lays: usage. Yep. Patents govern usage and where are larger numbers for any given piece of software, the number of developers or the number of users ? So by talking only about development, attention is shifted away from the real damage.
One good point made by the article is that is states how open source shows that patents aren't necessary for software innovation. Like the above points, that point could also be made a little better by putting it into the correct context. It is not Red Hat alone, but also a great many other companies and an even larger number of professionals and experts who point that out. So framing that observation as coming from only one single company also imbalances the debate.
If you read the article, there was no comparison done. The decision was outsourced to MS resellers who, surprise, peddled more MS wares. Comparison of other technologies never happened.
Oh, that and MS Sweden couldn't be bothered to look up any of the dozens of regional companies that provide support for non-MS systems and packages. That 'no support' argument worked in the early 1990's but not anymore.
Hey. Ease up with the slurs against the US. MS is not a US corporation any more than it is a European, African, East Asian or Indian. Though one could make a case for each based on how much taxes are dodged in each region. But if you want to split hairs about what MS is, you can see that it is more about power and isolation than about profit. Notice how many divisions are failing to run a profit. You can can also look at the behavior of its employees and large numbers of minions and come quickly to the conclusion that it is more of a cult.
Also look at how much damage MS has caused not just the IT sector, and not just the private sector, but also the public sector. Notice as desktop usage OS X and Linux, among others, increase the overall cost goes down.
As far as the Kubuntu CDs go, that's a great idea. Just be sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
Negroponte's selling out in poor style. The leaders he mentions are not high-tech. Most people in those positions refer to the GUI on a computer as "Windows" whether it's Gnome, KDE or FVWM. Kane seems positioned to do further harm or mitigate the harm.
Yeah. It's a nice article and there are a lot of improvements. Some unexpected like the better performance for SSDs.
Speaking of SSDs, I see CDs slowly but surely heading the way of the floppy. At some point, they're going to disappear from more or less all new units. They're off a few models already, but it's too soon to say when the tipping point will hit. When it does, the sales of read-only CDs will have to be replaced, possibly with read-write SD flash or USB sticks or something similar. Some thought will have to be put into how to best deal with that when the time comes.
Dude, this is a technology forum. If you want politics or religion then go elsewhere. You see the slams on that company because not only can't it deliver, it goes through great acrobatics and effort to avoid delivering. Brand recognition cuts both ways, and in a technology forum if a company consistently and persistently for decades makes bottom of the line technology and is bad about fixes and causes trouble, then of course you will see 'anti-' view points: it's called experience.
Maybe it is workable to provide some boost from a deep, rail-mounted launching sabot. Doesn't have to be rails, or rails alone. A giant, vertical gun could be a part with the space vehicle being bullet and the first stage sort of a discarding sabot. Yeah, it'd be expensive to dig a deep launching well and line it with apparatus for accelerating a space vehicle, but it might save a lot on getting the vehicle up to or closer to escape velocity. This could possibly replace at least the first stage.
Also, what about creating a path for the rocket, at least down here where the atmosphere is thickest. Some of the right kind and position of turbulence could clear a path. Maybe a laser cannon could punch the hole or the rocket could just chase an empty surface-to-air missile. It works for geese and cyclists to draft each other, why not also space vehicles?
Bullshit. Binary drivers are what we already have in too many cases. Notice that the years where binary drivers were all the rage, hardware support was at its worst. If you want good 'hardware' support for peripheral devices, the device manufacturers just need to take Bill's dick out of their mouth long enough to publish the APIs to their products.
Binary-only drivers tie the peripherals to specific architectures and OS versions. As part of the deal you get security and maintenance problems along with the portability problems. At this point, moving more in the direction of GPLv3 will keep OpenSolaris from being slowed by the dragging weight of binary-only drivers.
Opening the drivers expands the market for the hardware.
Downloading is a royal PITA. The registration is usually a deal-breaker. Almost nothing I've ever run across that's worth anything requires registration for download. However, as a (former) long-time Solaris / SunOS user and major FOSS user, I felt compelled several times to try to circumvent that. But then there's no real way do a network install and othewise week download choice.
That gripe aside, the article is a bit premature. Though time is running out and it could become true if Sun decides to keep downloads off of anonymous FTP, AFS and Bittorrent.
Since the court wants the APIs and documentation for the APIs, releasing the code is just a noisy distraction. It's like the tobacco companies turning over several semi-trailers of papers when forced to publish specific pages and documents.
Seriously, Lucas needs to say whether this is a problem for him concerning copyright (unlikely), trademarks (possibly), or patents (probably not). There is no such this as 'Intellectual Property' There are, however, separate and distinct areas of law each governing a separate topic: copyright, trademarks and patents.
So, titles like the main post above are simply helping to muddy the waters. This goes double for when the topic of software patents comes up. Please let the bullshit stop. You can do your bit by referring to copyright as such and not as 'IP'. Or by referring to trademarks as such and not as 'IP'. Or by referring to patents as such and not as 'IP'
Further, unless one is actively choosing to advocate in favor of software patents, lumping them together with regular patents only does a disservice. In the case of patents, differentiate between software patents and patents in the title and the 'tags'. Otherwise it's contributing to the confusion and lumping them in with something different that people have people have been indoctrinated for several generations to feel good about, rather than the new and abominable problem that it is.
So, choose your label correctly: 'copyright' xor 'trademark' xor 'patent' xor 'software patent'. Except for Internet Protocol (the IP part of TCP/IP) there is no 'IP',
What is an issue is the wording - nothing in The Register's article suggests that they've included the magic phrase "where necessary". You could be using an SELinux box tightened beyond belief with no need for anti-spyware or antivirus, but if you get ripped off through a website, their first question is going to be "What antivirus are you running?" and if the answer isn't a well known commercial product, then it's your problem and not theirs.
People are leaving MSIE, if not also MS Windows, in droves. So flexing their M$ agenda by requiring MSIE would backfire quite nastily at this point.
Well, also seeing as the banks have been replacing secure ATMs with insecure ATMs due to putting the M$ ideological ahead of technological factors, it's only natural that they begin to follow the M$ practice of blaming the customer.
Further, some major banks took that ideology two steps further and started destroying crucial components of their infrastructure by replacing it with M$. It's so bad that Microsoft's XSS hole causes state consumer agencies to tell people to file for damages from Sampo Bank, Danske Bank and the others. Too bad so many advertising budgets are dependent on M$ otherwise we'd hear about it in the mainstream media.
Again, the M$ tactic of blame the user helps the banks. At the least it creates a smoke screen that allows the public to get all indignant about such preposterous attitudes thus drawing the focus of the banks' home made catastrophy or willful negligence.
That's the broken window falsehood in a nutshell, with a false dichotomy thrown in on the side.
Money and staff spent, in this case, re-inventing the wheel, is money and staff not spent on the core business activities. So,even if it's learning from others mistakes, going FOSS saves effort and that in turn boosts your core business activities (assuming reinvestment and not skimming by the execs). Software is only a tool, an enabler, for those core activities. In case you missed the last 25 years of computing, it's not an XOR choice between using the open source development model and making a profit. In fact, it's been show again and again that it's not only profitable, but makes your company more recession-proof. We've been through a few now and have seen the benefits.
Groklaw is among the sites currently being blocked from Europe along with related sites. If you're in Europe, you might need to go through a proxy to reach Groklaw articles.
It's hard to say whether all the Pro-Open Standards material and damning data on DIS 29500 is the cause or if it's the Iowa case evidence about MS' decade long jihad against 'non-believers'
Some years back I read about some lawn chairs that had been made, in part, from a block of Co-60 from scrapped medical equipment. When it came in from Mexico, a spot check found it. Radioactive scrap is a larger and more concrete risk that other problems.
Why would you need VBA programmers? We're talking about the product in the article, OpenOffice.org 3.0, and that does not use VBA.
You get javascript and python macros. So that means you don't have to waste money on a bag of shit just to do macros. You can have your macro programmers with a comp sci background. And you can have them participate in web development and other projects.
So it kills two birds with one stone. You are less likely to hire MS boosters who will run their little anti-technology jihadz against you from inside your own office, work is so much easier without them around. You get programmers that can participate in more than one area. Win-win situation.
Which two products? The specification currently before the standards bodies is not implemented anywhere by any application. Parts of it are. Parts of it aren't. Parts of it aren't even specified. And even if it were, the licensing still does not allow free software implementations. Not even MS Office 2007 supports the specification before the standards bodies.
MOOX isn't helping the ODF standard, which by the way is currently the standard for office documents. It's hurting it. It's even hurting the standards process: MOOX target is the same functionality that is already available in OpenDocument, and ODF is already the standard. OpenDocument already has many applications supporting it.
Novell is history. We all know that. It was up and down for a while, but went down for the count when it signed the deal to infect as much of its product as possible with proprietary specifications during a five year span. We're about halfway through that span.
Yes, that's a tremendous advancement. Now you can finally say goodbye to those awful VBA scripts and the "programmers" that follow them as baggage.
It's not new, but OpenOffice.org macros and scripting support both Javascript and Python. So, you don't need to learn a separate language just for macros. Even better, you have a larger pool of people to hire from. And best of all, that pool is of higher quality not being limited to the self-selecting One Microsoft Way crowd.
Since both javascript and python are used in web development and XML tools handle OpenOffice's main format, the OpenDocument Format, there is much less overhead in integrating document management and web apps and less need for disparate skill sets.
...Being an employee of M$ does not make a person evil, they just happen to be an employee of M$ and they are defined by their behaviourSo it is all the the the qualifications and the qualities of the individual and how well they will fulfil that role...
The problem of conflict of interest, on its own, ought to be enough.
Re-read my post, the word 'evil' is not mentioned, just conflict of interest. Conflict of interest disqualifies any M$ candidates from the position. But as you imply, 'evil' is as evil does.
Since you make the association between M$ and the word evil, how else would you describe someone that works for an interest that causes harm to its customers and net-users in general, has an adversarial relation with its customers, has a multi-decade court-documented history of illegal and unethical practices? The 'I just work here' excuse doesn't cut it.
Don't confuse M$ with closed source. M$ is an opponent of both closed source and open source competition. M$ has run its Jihad and for a decade, holding the 'net back. It's harmed innumerable businesses both inside and outside the IT sector. M$ stops now unless gullible people fall for the same lines again and again.
No. It does not. There is no positive outcome from M$ involvement involving governing a project which goes against the M$ fundamental business model(s).
Can you say "conflict of interest" ?
There. I knew you could.
That's the big attraction for Debian. For a production system, support tasks drop to almost nothing. It's there. It runs. If and when a patch is needed, it is just that - a patch - and not any weird licensing changes or mutations in functionality.
Of the linux distros, it's an excellent choice for servers, perhaps the best. Given the rock-solid nature, it can be good for enterprise desktops, if you are willing to plan. However, Kubuntu LTS meets that need.