But annoyingly, whereas previously in the run box if you made a mistake you could go back and edit what you previously typed, in the new search box you have to type the whole command again.
OO are the trendsetters yes, but they chose a formula language which is based on that used by excel, as other vendors were already somewhat familiar with it... They also fully documented their extensions, so third parties could pick up on them, and they worked with OASIS to ensure that future versions of ODF address this issue.
MS on the other hand are not trying to work with the community, they chose to create their own format and force it through ISO rather than working with the existing format, when they grudgingly implemented ODF they added different incompatible extensions to everyone else in bad faith, and although their OOXML format got through ISO they have not actually implemented the final version that got approved.
Excel is the primary competitor yes, Gnumeric is great and is designed for accuracy while openoffice is designed for excel compatibility, the trouble with that is people will assume excel is correct and gnumeric is wrong because its lesser known.
OO is certainly bloated, but its not looking to win converts from gnumeric, its looking to win converts from excel which is even more bloated... Baby steps... If enough people migrate to OO, then it will become necessary to use open file formats, at which point it will be much easier to use gnumeric or any other spreadsheet too. The most important thing is to open up the market, then real competition can occur and bring improvements for everyone.
RIM stuff is largely security by obscurity at this point however, very few people have seemingly tried to pull their stuff apart, and the few that have didn't find good things, see the pwn2own contest from this year for one such example.
Android, iphone and even windows mobile devices are much easier to target because they are largely based on existing systems which are well understood... RIM are using a totally obscure black box that requires significant investment of time to reverse engineer. This doesn't mean it's secure, it just means that hackers will need to spend more time to find holes in it. On the other hand, it means that whitehats will also require more time to reverse engineer the system, whereas its highly possible that blackhats have already stolen the sourcecode.
Most devices provide the option to run a VPN between the handset and a server under your control, only RIM require that there be a server under their control sitting in between.
Most devices (RIM included) can also boot up and start talking to the network without requiring any user input, therefore the keys used for this encryption must be stored on the device somewhere, just waiting for someone appropriately skilled and motivated to work out how to extract them...
That is correct, the standard was incomplete and not fully functional in the 1.0 revision, and the 1.2 revision is aiming to address those problems.
That said, many standards are like this and have areas within them which are open to interpretation, generally those implementing the standards care about interoperability and will work together to work around the flaws in the short term, and fix them in the long term. Unfortunately this requires good will and doesn't work when you have parties such as MS who are intentionally seeking to subvert the standard.
As it stands, MS intentionally chose to implement their own extensions for spreadsheet formulae rather than following the general consensus everyone else had - namely to implement the same as openoffice (which itself is based on excel), and also chose not to participate in the development process for the ODF standard itself. MS actually went out of their way to implement their own nonstandard extensions, MS themselves sponsored the ODF converted plugin (http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/), and the source for it is available under the BSD license. It would have saved them a lot of time and effort to reuse this existing code which can already interoperate with other implementers, and yet they were willing to spend time and money to implement an intentionally incompatible version. A most despicable act if you ask me.
The standard did not define how to store spreadsheet formulae, so OpenOffice being the first implementation was forced to create their own extension to store this data. Most other implementations of ODF, including the microsoft-sponsored ODF plugin copied the OpenOffice extension in order to maintain interoperability...
MS however ignored this, and now created their own incompatible extension... Technically in compliance with the standard, but in practice they went out of their way to exploit flaws in the standard to break interoperability.
Re:While working on the spreadsheet format...
on
ODF 1.2 Is Approved
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· Score: 1
It was commercialized originally as staroffice, it sucked a lot more then than it does now...
Really it's not practical for a commercial vendor to compete in this space, they face a huge uphill battle against ms and would need to bleed money for years before they started making any profit, and then ms would buy them out and shut them down... Open source is really the only practical way to compete, as you can slowly improve over time without having the pressure of profit requirements.
Incidentally, msoffice users are also always plagued with incompatibilities and bugs, infact these problems are well known and only tollerated because people don't realise alternatives exist.
So both formats have flaws, but there are some key differences...
The guys behind ODF are actively trying to fix their flaws (hence this story) The guys behind OpenOffice aim for compatibility instead of blindly implementing a spec that is flawed and noone else follows
MS could easily have implemented the same extensions to ODF, and they had already done so in the earlier ODF plugin they sponsored, which was BSD licensed so they could have simply reused the code. Instead, they chose to go out of their way to write a new implementation which they knew would be incompatible with everyone else. They only implemented ODF at all to try and pull the wool over people's eyes, it was the bare minimum to try and fool those who were demanding open standards, while still trying to maintain their lock-in.
Groupon is a good idea, but its nothing new... It's just group purchasing to get a bulk discount and there are plenty of other such schemes. The margins in such a venture will always be low because the customers by the very nature of the business are those looking to save money. So sound idea, but massively over valued company.
Well a 20 minute saving in time is not really worth the effort, that saving will be absorbed by landing/takeoff slot delays, checkin delays, congestion etc... But a plane ala Concorde which takes less than half the time is certainly worth having, especially for very long haul flights.
New modern airliners, only they are so slow compared to what was available in the 1970s... If I'm flying a long distance, i'd rather get there in half the time than sit for hours, even if the environment is more comfortable. Time spent travelling is time wasted.
Bring back Concorde!
Or better yet, surely technology has improved since the 1970s that we could build something *faster* than Concorde.
The current situation is that you end up with migrants coming who have HIV...
Over population is already a serious problem in some places, and it only fuels the tyranny and corruption... When you have an unsustainable level of population growth causing a shortage of food, people will become increasingly desperate to acquire food by whatever means necessary. They need to curb population growth, not through AIDS but through education and contraception (condoms would also help to reduce the spread of AIDS). Once the population is at a level whereby there are sufficient resources to feed everyone, these countries will be in a far better position to stabilise themselves.
The trouble with having large families, is that large families are themselves a cause for many of the problems...
You have a shortage of food and can't afford to feed yourself properly, so you have lots of kids and make the problem worse?
You may need lots of kids to look after you in old age, but who is going to look after them? They will have to do the same and so you get very rapid population growth... Population grows to unsustainable levels and then any problems like food shortage become much worse.
The situation reaches a point where the land simply cannot sustain the current level of population, and this population level is maintained artificially high by shipments of food from foreign countries.
Also when you have a situation of insufficient resources, people become desperate to acquire those resources via any means necessary and that results in ever more brutal wars.
If you have to admit to having been hacked (and its hard not to when its already gone public), its less shameful to be hacked by an elite group of hackers than a bunch of script kiddies.
Screens consume a lot less power these days too, a modern display uses a lot less than an old CRT.
Office 97 is no longer supported by its sole supplier... While it can still do its intended job perfectly adequately, it has a number of security holes that will never be fixed, and it cannot open files created by new versions.
If you intend to connect to a network or receive documents from third parties than office 97 is unusable now.
Like the people who run tons of software that is (sparc|alpha|hppa|power|mips) only and has no comparable x86 version? People who do work for which x86 was supremely under-powered even with quad processors? Even a low end Alpha could blow away the fastest x86 processors.
History repeats itself, attack from below pushes the more powerful, more power hungry and more expensive architectures into small niches...
Exactly, no solution fits all... Your needs are specialised, so you will occupy a niche of people who will continue to buy highend workstations...
For the vast majority of people computers became powerful enough for their requirements many years ago (aside from increasingly bloated software trying to mask that fact), and they are concerned about price, running cost (ie power usage), noise and that the machine is not an eyesore, and even more so are the companies who buy hundreds of desktops for their employees and don't want to buy a noisy, expensive, large and power hungry workstation for someone who's sole business use for it is to write letters.
A few dollars a month for a desktop... A few thousand dollars a month for an office full of desktops?
The average office worker doesn't do a lot with their computer, and has been doing much the same thing for years... The only thing stopping them from using 10 year old hardware is modern bloated software which is intentionally incompatible with older versions.
There's no reason that the average user's needs couldn't be fulfilled by a low power machine with equivalent processing power to a system from 10+ years ago, with power hungry x86 systems being relegated to the small niche of power users and certain classes of server.
(in short, watch what x86 did to Sparc/MIPS/Alpha/Power, attacked from below)
Open source R&D is shared, so you build 5% on top of someone else's work, then someone else builds an extra 5% on the sum of your work and what came before... To add to that, you can benefit from their extra 5% too should you wish to.
How much R&D do you think palm/hp saved by building webos on top of linux instead of having to develop their own os totally from scratch?
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But annoyingly, whereas previously in the run box if you made a mistake you could go back and edit what you previously typed, in the new search box you have to type the whole command again.
And to add to that, ODF has been updated with improvements (hence this story) while OOXML seems to have stagnated.
OO are the trendsetters yes, but they chose a formula language which is based on that used by excel, as other vendors were already somewhat familiar with it...
They also fully documented their extensions, so third parties could pick up on them, and they worked with OASIS to ensure that future versions of ODF address this issue.
MS on the other hand are not trying to work with the community, they chose to create their own format and force it through ISO rather than working with the existing format, when they grudgingly implemented ODF they added different incompatible extensions to everyone else in bad faith, and although their OOXML format got through ISO they have not actually implemented the final version that got approved.
Excel is the primary competitor yes, Gnumeric is great and is designed for accuracy while openoffice is designed for excel compatibility, the trouble with that is people will assume excel is correct and gnumeric is wrong because its lesser known.
OO is certainly bloated, but its not looking to win converts from gnumeric, its looking to win converts from excel which is even more bloated... Baby steps... If enough people migrate to OO, then it will become necessary to use open file formats, at which point it will be much easier to use gnumeric or any other spreadsheet too. The most important thing is to open up the market, then real competition can occur and bring improvements for everyone.
RIM stuff is largely security by obscurity at this point however, very few people have seemingly tried to pull their stuff apart, and the few that have didn't find good things, see the pwn2own contest from this year for one such example.
Android, iphone and even windows mobile devices are much easier to target because they are largely based on existing systems which are well understood... RIM are using a totally obscure black box that requires significant investment of time to reverse engineer. This doesn't mean it's secure, it just means that hackers will need to spend more time to find holes in it. On the other hand, it means that whitehats will also require more time to reverse engineer the system, whereas its highly possible that blackhats have already stolen the sourcecode.
Most devices provide the option to run a VPN between the handset and a server under your control, only RIM require that there be a server under their control sitting in between.
Most devices (RIM included) can also boot up and start talking to the network without requiring any user input, therefore the keys used for this encryption must be stored on the device somewhere, just waiting for someone appropriately skilled and motivated to work out how to extract them...
That is correct, the standard was incomplete and not fully functional in the 1.0 revision, and the 1.2 revision is aiming to address those problems.
That said, many standards are like this and have areas within them which are open to interpretation, generally those implementing the standards care about interoperability and will work together to work around the flaws in the short term, and fix them in the long term. Unfortunately this requires good will and doesn't work when you have parties such as MS who are intentionally seeking to subvert the standard.
As it stands, MS intentionally chose to implement their own extensions for spreadsheet formulae rather than following the general consensus everyone else had - namely to implement the same as openoffice (which itself is based on excel), and also chose not to participate in the development process for the ODF standard itself. MS actually went out of their way to implement their own nonstandard extensions, MS themselves sponsored the ODF converted plugin (http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/), and the source for it is available under the BSD license. It would have saved them a lot of time and effort to reuse this existing code which can already interoperate with other implementers, and yet they were willing to spend time and money to implement an intentionally incompatible version. A most despicable act if you ask me.
Actually both implemented the standard...
The standard did not define how to store spreadsheet formulae, so OpenOffice being the first implementation was forced to create their own extension to store this data. Most other implementations of ODF, including the microsoft-sponsored ODF plugin copied the OpenOffice extension in order to maintain interoperability...
MS however ignored this, and now created their own incompatible extension... Technically in compliance with the standard, but in practice they went out of their way to exploit flaws in the standard to break interoperability.
It was commercialized originally as staroffice, it sucked a lot more then than it does now...
Really it's not practical for a commercial vendor to compete in this space, they face a huge uphill battle against ms and would need to bleed money for years before they started making any profit, and then ms would buy them out and shut them down... Open source is really the only practical way to compete, as you can slowly improve over time without having the pressure of profit requirements.
Incidentally, msoffice users are also always plagued with incompatibilities and bugs, infact these problems are well known and only tollerated because people don't realise alternatives exist.
So both formats have flaws, but there are some key differences...
The guys behind ODF are actively trying to fix their flaws (hence this story)
The guys behind OpenOffice aim for compatibility instead of blindly implementing a spec that is flawed and noone else follows
MS could easily have implemented the same extensions to ODF, and they had already done so in the earlier ODF plugin they sponsored, which was BSD licensed so they could have simply reused the code. Instead, they chose to go out of their way to write a new implementation which they knew would be incompatible with everyone else.
They only implemented ODF at all to try and pull the wool over people's eyes, it was the bare minimum to try and fool those who were demanding open standards, while still trying to maintain their lock-in.
How much space does an install of excel take? OO may be bloated in its own right, but not when you compare it to the competition...
Groupon is a good idea, but its nothing new... It's just group purchasing to get a bulk discount and there are plenty of other such schemes. The margins in such a venture will always be low because the customers by the very nature of the business are those looking to save money.
So sound idea, but massively over valued company.
Well a 20 minute saving in time is not really worth the effort, that saving will be absorbed by landing/takeoff slot delays, checkin delays, congestion etc...
But a plane ala Concorde which takes less than half the time is certainly worth having, especially for very long haul flights.
New modern airliners, only they are so slow compared to what was available in the 1970s...
If I'm flying a long distance, i'd rather get there in half the time than sit for hours, even if the environment is more comfortable. Time spent travelling is time wasted.
Bring back Concorde!
Or better yet, surely technology has improved since the 1970s that we could build something *faster* than Concorde.
The current situation is that you end up with migrants coming who have HIV...
Over population is already a serious problem in some places, and it only fuels the tyranny and corruption... When you have an unsustainable level of population growth causing a shortage of food, people will become increasingly desperate to acquire food by whatever means necessary. They need to curb population growth, not through AIDS but through education and contraception (condoms would also help to reduce the spread of AIDS). Once the population is at a level whereby there are sufficient resources to feed everyone, these countries will be in a far better position to stabilise themselves.
The trouble with having large families, is that large families are themselves a cause for many of the problems...
You have a shortage of food and can't afford to feed yourself properly, so you have lots of kids and make the problem worse?
You may need lots of kids to look after you in old age, but who is going to look after them? They will have to do the same and so you get very rapid population growth... Population grows to unsustainable levels and then any problems like food shortage become much worse.
The situation reaches a point where the land simply cannot sustain the current level of population, and this population level is maintained artificially high by shipments of food from foreign countries.
Also when you have a situation of insufficient resources, people become desperate to acquire those resources via any means necessary and that results in ever more brutal wars.
If you have to admit to having been hacked (and its hard not to when its already gone public), its less shameful to be hacked by an elite group of hackers than a bunch of script kiddies.
All about PR spin.
Indeed thats primarily what UK based VPN services are used for, to access things like BBC iPlayer and other such resources.
a, not really.. you can easily eliminate potential proxy services by assuming that at minimum they comply with the local data retention laws...
b, possibly, but who do they claim to "cover your ass" from?
Screens consume a lot less power these days too, a modern display uses a lot less than an old CRT.
Office 97 is no longer supported by its sole supplier...
While it can still do its intended job perfectly adequately, it has a number of security holes that will never be fixed, and it cannot open files created by new versions.
If you intend to connect to a network or receive documents from third parties than office 97 is unusable now.
Sounds familiar...
Like the people who run tons of software that is (sparc|alpha|hppa|power|mips) only and has no comparable x86 version? People who do work for which x86 was supremely under-powered even with quad processors? Even a low end Alpha could blow away the fastest x86 processors.
History repeats itself, attack from below pushes the more powerful, more power hungry and more expensive architectures into small niches...
Exactly, no solution fits all... Your needs are specialised, so you will occupy a niche of people who will continue to buy highend workstations...
For the vast majority of people computers became powerful enough for their requirements many years ago (aside from increasingly bloated software trying to mask that fact), and they are concerned about price, running cost (ie power usage), noise and that the machine is not an eyesore, and even more so are the companies who buy hundreds of desktops for their employees and don't want to buy a noisy, expensive, large and power hungry workstation for someone who's sole business use for it is to write letters.
A few dollars a month for a desktop...
A few thousand dollars a month for an office full of desktops?
The average office worker doesn't do a lot with their computer, and has been doing much the same thing for years... The only thing stopping them from using 10 year old hardware is modern bloated software which is intentionally incompatible with older versions.
There's no reason that the average user's needs couldn't be fulfilled by a low power machine with equivalent processing power to a system from 10+ years ago, with power hungry x86 systems being relegated to the small niche of power users and certain classes of server.
(in short, watch what x86 did to Sparc/MIPS/Alpha/Power, attacked from below)
Open source R&D is shared, so you build 5% on top of someone else's work, then someone else builds an extra 5% on the sum of your work and what came before... To add to that, you can benefit from their extra 5% too should you wish to.
How much R&D do you think palm/hp saved by building webos on top of linux instead of having to develop their own os totally from scratch?
Most of IBMs revenue actually comes from consultancy...
And most of their proprietary hardware can be ordered with linux.
Unfortunately many musicians these days don't love music at all, they simply love money and music is nothing more than a means to an end.