MS make assumptions about what they think the files should contain, whereas OO works on the assumption that MS might implement features they aren't aware of therefore when OO encounters corruption it just assumes it to be a new feature MS have implemented but which hasn't been reverse engineered yet.
I think if it only affected companies that charged for software then RedHat would just give the software away for free (like they mostly do already) and still charge for support/update services....
I find the same thing... I don't bother to block unintrusive ads, but anything that irritates me (any ads with sound or excessive animation, anything that comes up infront and obscures the content your trying to view, anything that tries to open a new browser window) will get that ad supplier blocked and usually causes me to not return to the site that foisted it upon me.
The modern Cisco kit can indeed handle ipv6 in hardware, but the cost of replacing the old equipment is quite high, especially when the current equipment is more than capable of handling the traffic load currently going over it.
Also ipv6 stacks are not always well optimized or tested, the first versions implemented into cheap lowend routers and other proprietary embedded devices will probably be pretty bad.
Land isn't terribly scarce, there is lots of land not being used around the world, sure land people want to live on is scarce but do you think bacteria really care where they live?
Your passengers can buy and drink beer... Some of us get travel sick and can't do anything while travelling as a passenger, as a driver most people don't feel travelsick.
Parking costs will vary depending where you go, what if your visiting a place which has its own parking? What if you park for cheap/free over in jersey and get the short/cheap train journey over to manhattan? Also, if the price difference is $360 then even in manhattan you can park for quite some time on that money.
Trains only even begin to approach being practical in large cities (think new york metro, london underground etc)...
My experience of trains has been almost universally bad, unless you happen to be starting and ending your journey next to stations which have a direct train between them you will probably get there much quicker by car... Many journeys require taking extremely inefficient routes because of the positioning of the train lines and stations... Journeys which require multiple trains often involve a lot of waiting around in cold dirty stations with inadequate seating... If you miss the train or its cancelled you can be screwed, you might find yourself stranded somewhere and end up having to pay for a hotel or sleep on the street. If where your going to/from is not near a station then add the time and cost of those journeys on top of the train journey itself. Trains are often extremely overcrowded, its hard to work or drink a beer when your standing and there are other passengers crammed in beside you. Trains which aren't crowded tend to be late night or early morning, if you start using a laptop or ipad etc on some trains you can expect to have it stolen from you. Drinking alcohol is illegal on some trains. Some trains don't have toilets (or the toilets are unusable). Some trains have no heating/cooling, or the systems are broken resulting in extremes of temperature. Trains are often dirty or smelly, and you can often encounter dirty/smelly passengers especially on crowded trains in hot conditions (its quite hard not to stink of sweat in conditions like that).. Overcrowding on many trains is so bad that it would be illegal to transport animals in such conditions.
The cheapest train tickets are booked long in advance, and are based on fixed times... You lose all your flexibility and must travel at exact predetermined times.. If you don't want to do that or are unable, you will typically have to pay a LOT more for your ticket. If you finish your business early, you could be spending hours waiting for the train your scheduled for.
Current methods to generate electricity are inefficient, current methods of storing electricity are also inefficient especially when you also have to move heavy items like batteries around... Liquid fuel may not be the most efficient idea, but if it can be created in a carbon neutral and sustainable way then why not? Liquid fuel is far more practical to deal with than batteries right now.
Electric vehicles are currently not terribly practical... They require heavy (and relatively inefficient) batteries filled with toxic chemicals, and these batteries need to be replaced periodically too (so what happens to all the chemicals?). The extra weight of the batteries relative to a tank of fuel also decrease the efficiency of the vehicle, and then a tradeoff has to be made between range and efficiency. As you add more batteries you get diminishing returns on range because of all the extra weight you have to carry. Electric vehicles also take a long time to charge, and while technically you could swap batteries out this would be terribly impractical due to the weight and relatively short lifespan of batteries. Also your electricity has to come from somewhere, and currently that means coal power stations that are far more polluting than modern cars.
On the other hand, producing fuel using bacteria would be massively speeding up the current cycle, the plants producing the fuels would be consuming CO2, creating a fuel which is easily stored and moved to where its needed and when its used CO2 would be released again only to start the cycle afresh. There's nothing wrong with CO2 emissions so long as we have a balance between emission and consumption... The problem with the current fossil fuels is that the part of the process which consumes CO2 is extremely slow.
Why? The idea of CO2 emissions being bad is based on that carbon having previously been stored in chemical form underground... If you start producing fuel using bacteria then either the bacteria themselves, or the production of the food to feed them will consume CO2, thus creating a cycle considerably faster than the one which produced the underground oil reserves. If you decrease emissions of CO2, while also increasing use of CO2 eventually we will have a problem of not enough CO2 in the air.
That said, this sounds like a disruptive technology so either its bullshit or some large oil companies will buy up the tech and bury it until they run out of oil to sell at ridiculously high prices.
Use a regular gre based ipv6 tunnel, he.net and sixxs.net both provide such tunnels.
Also, complain to your cable and dsl companies... IPv6 is part of the DOCSIS 3 specification for cable internet so you'd hope cable isps will support it sooner rather than later (my cable provider sent a router which has ipv6 support, but so far the isp aren't offering any such service)
You could create a proxying system using dns whereby an ipv4-only host is placed on a virtual ipv4 network with a combined router and caching dns server... When you request a hostname from the dns server which has an AAAA record, the server allocates a virtual ipv4 address within the virtual network and then returns an appropriate A record to the client... Any connections to this virtual address are then proxied to the real ipv6 address.
Another problem, is that although routers and operating systems support ipv6, that support is not very widely used and thus not very widely tested... Things can often break in completely unexpected ways... This is why the US government is now requiring network equipment suppliers to use ipv6 themselves.
Many higher end routers process routing in hardware, and older versions of this hardware can only handle ipv4... If these devices support ipv6 at all then it will be in software only and very slow compared to the hardware switching... I have a system connected to a cisco catalyst 4006 switch and suffers from this issue, i can push gigabit speeds of ipv4 but nowhere close to that with v6.
The worst part of living in a Microsoft world to my mind is that they've produced a legion of intellectually crippled sysadmins, who view competing products like Unix with either derision or fear, often times not realizing how inferior Microsoft is in some areas.
Indeed, i have to deal with people like this every day... The problem is that smart competent people will evaluate multiple options and pick the one that best suits their needs, but people doing this would result in lost business for MS. So they would rather have an army of clueless drones that will accept what they're given and not try to think for themselves.
The problem I so often have with these claims is they seem to mistake ease of installation with the actual maintenance of the software.
Indeed, and monkey can get a windows based network up and basically hobbling along, and this is what their marketing concentrates on... In many cases, a monkey could get many linux based setups hobbling along in the same way, its just that there is no marketing trying to convince people of this.
However, you don't want a system that is barely functional being managed by someone who has no clue how it really works... You want someone who knows the system inside out, who will configure the system to run optimally and ensure that necessary updates are applied in a timely manner etc. However, running a system optimally is actually much harder with windows than it is with unix:
Under the interface, the windows system is actually far more complicated than any unix system... As soon as you try to do anything advanced which isn't catered for by the gui, or have to fix a serious problem it becomes extremely complex. Windows suffers from security related design flaws which either have to be accepted as security risks, or kludgily worked around... Things like authentication with uncracked hashes, weak password hashing, file typing (including execute ability) by filename, broken apps which only run as admin, disorganised filesystem etc... Windows lacks centralised package management, you will probably have to spend extra to buy a patch management system. Windows requires anti virus, you will probably have to pay a lot of money for this too.
So sure, if you want a horrendously insecure and flakey network, hire the cheapest MCSEs you can and then you have money left over to buy the software... Such a setup will probably seem ok for a while too, until something goes badly wrong. If you want a network thats reasonably secure and functional you will need to hire decent competent (ie more expensive) staff in any case. So why not run unix instead of windows, you will need less staff which will be a significant saving for people at this competence level, and you will obviously save on all the software (and perhaps be able to use less/cheaper hardware).
Give them OpenOffice, the interface will be far more familiar to them than "the ribbon thing", they will have the benefit of storing their data in open file formats, they will have the benefit of a cross platform suite, they will have the benefit of being able to give a free copy to any employee who wants to run it at home and they will save money now and will be able to upgrade to future versions for free too. If OpenOffice ever gets a ribbon interface, you can pretty much guarantee there will either be an option to turn it off, or someone will maintain a forked version that doesn't have it.
This is often conveniently ignored in MS funded studies...
Sure, it's a given that moving from MSOfffice 2003 to OpenOffice 3 would result in users having to get used to a new interface and some formatting issues with older files...
But moving from MSOffice 2003 to 2007 or 2010 will also result in exactly the same issues, only without the cost and openness benefits that a move to OpenOffice would bring. In fact, the interface differences are actually greater moving from one MS version to another than going from MS 2003 to OpenOffice 3.x.
Users hate change, but sooner or later change will be forced upon them, either because your thinking long term and moving to a more open system, or your thinking short term and moving from your old unsupported proprietary software to a newer version that will just give you a few more years before another forced upgrade. Might as well actually get some benefit from a process which irritates users.
A proprietary solution does not necessarily have merit if you depend on an external company, it depends on the skills provided by that external company. The problem is that external company will have their own interests at heart, and that will mean providing you whatever setup brings them the most profit rather than the one that best suits your needs.
However if you are a company that provides support to others in this way, it makes a LOT of sense for you to start moving towards open source... If all your doing is reselling other people's products and providing first line support, not only will your margins be extremely thin and the value-add support you provide fairly low level (since you don't have control over the products, and have to defer harder questions to the original vendor), but sooner or later your customers and suppliers are going to realise they can save money and get better service by cutting you out of the loop. On the other hand, if you are providing open source then your client doesn't have to worry about the perceived difficulties of running such software because thats your job, they can't easily cut you out of the loop because that would require them hiring their own competent IT staff to replace your services (although they could replace you with a similar company, so long as your service is decent and prices reasonable it wouldnt be worth doing), and you don't have to pay 90% of the sales cost to a third party vendor - all the profit is yours to either keep or squeeze if you need to compete on price.
A lot of these external support companies really do very little to earn their money, they shift boxes, take a small commission and hire a bunch of (cheap) clueless monkeys to unbox and forward your support calls to the original supplier.
In terms of integration, proprietary software may well integrate more easily with other proprietary software from the same vendor, however this is usually less to do with good interoperability, and more to do with proprietary software often being designed to explicitly not integrate with any competing software. So costs aside, moving away from software designed to lock you in is a very important aspect especially if your thinking long term. While proprietary software is far more likely to try locking you in than open source, not all proprietary software is designed this way.
On the other hand, if you have the source code integration is always possible if its important enough to you.
It's not the fact that they run windows which makes an attractive target... It's the fact that you can guarantee with 99% certainty that any government or corporation you choose to attack will be running windows and msoffice... Diversity is the key, and a lack of diversity is extremely dangerous.
Also while linux will have security bugs, bugs can get fixed... Many of the problems with windows are fundamental design flaws which cannot be fixed without breaking compatibility, and if your going to ditch windows compatibility you might as well just run linux anyway.
The WebM specification is complete enough that it can be implemented by third parties. There are already multiple open and closed source applications implementing WebM.
The WebM specification also comes with a reference implementation which is licensed under liberal terms.
OOXML includes references to proprietary technology which is not documented in any open standard.
OOXML (and perhaps WebM too) includes ambiguities which will force anyone implementing it to either make a guess or consult a reference implementation... The only reference implementation of OOXML is closed source and would require reverse engineering to fill in the blanks in the spec. Aside from areas where the spec is unclear, MSOffice also doesn't comply with some aspects of the published spec which are clearly defined. Also the ISO version of OOXML has no reference implementation at all. If WebM includes any such ambiguities they will be picked up by any third parties who try to create their own implementations, and the documentation can be filled in accordingly.
Google are open to improvements from third parties, MS are not.
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MS make assumptions about what they think the files should contain, whereas OO works on the assumption that MS might implement features they aren't aware of therefore when OO encounters corruption it just assumes it to be a new feature MS have implemented but which hasn't been reverse engineered yet.
I think if it only affected companies that charged for software then RedHat would just give the software away for free (like they mostly do already) and still charge for support/update services....
I find the same thing... I don't bother to block unintrusive ads, but anything that irritates me (any ads with sound or excessive animation, anything that comes up infront and obscures the content your trying to view, anything that tries to open a new browser window) will get that ad supplier blocked and usually causes me to not return to the site that foisted it upon me.
The modern Cisco kit can indeed handle ipv6 in hardware, but the cost of replacing the old equipment is quite high, especially when the current equipment is more than capable of handling the traffic load currently going over it.
Also ipv6 stacks are not always well optimized or tested, the first versions implemented into cheap lowend routers and other proprietary embedded devices will probably be pretty bad.
Land isn't terribly scarce, there is lots of land not being used around the world, sure land people want to live on is scarce but do you think bacteria really care where they live?
A 2-car garage will probably fit 2 smarts and an SUV... No real need for a big "trip" car if you have an SUV.
Your passengers can buy and drink beer...
Some of us get travel sick and can't do anything while travelling as a passenger, as a driver most people don't feel travelsick.
Parking costs will vary depending where you go, what if your visiting a place which has its own parking? What if you park for cheap/free over in jersey and get the short/cheap train journey over to manhattan? Also, if the price difference is $360 then even in manhattan you can park for quite some time on that money.
Trains only even begin to approach being practical in large cities (think new york metro, london underground etc)...
My experience of trains has been almost universally bad, unless you happen to be starting and ending your journey next to stations which have a direct train between them you will probably get there much quicker by car...
Many journeys require taking extremely inefficient routes because of the positioning of the train lines and stations...
Journeys which require multiple trains often involve a lot of waiting around in cold dirty stations with inadequate seating...
If you miss the train or its cancelled you can be screwed, you might find yourself stranded somewhere and end up having to pay for a hotel or sleep on the street.
If where your going to/from is not near a station then add the time and cost of those journeys on top of the train journey itself.
Trains are often extremely overcrowded, its hard to work or drink a beer when your standing and there are other passengers crammed in beside you.
Trains which aren't crowded tend to be late night or early morning, if you start using a laptop or ipad etc on some trains you can expect to have it stolen from you.
Drinking alcohol is illegal on some trains.
Some trains don't have toilets (or the toilets are unusable).
Some trains have no heating/cooling, or the systems are broken resulting in extremes of temperature.
Trains are often dirty or smelly, and you can often encounter dirty/smelly passengers especially on crowded trains in hot conditions (its quite hard not to stink of sweat in conditions like that)..
Overcrowding on many trains is so bad that it would be illegal to transport animals in such conditions.
The cheapest train tickets are booked long in advance, and are based on fixed times... You lose all your flexibility and must travel at exact predetermined times.. If you don't want to do that or are unable, you will typically have to pay a LOT more for your ticket. If you finish your business early, you could be spending hours waiting for the train your scheduled for.
Current methods to generate electricity are inefficient, current methods of storing electricity are also inefficient especially when you also have to move heavy items like batteries around...
Liquid fuel may not be the most efficient idea, but if it can be created in a carbon neutral and sustainable way then why not? Liquid fuel is far more practical to deal with than batteries right now.
Electric vehicles are currently not terribly practical... They require heavy (and relatively inefficient) batteries filled with toxic chemicals, and these batteries need to be replaced periodically too (so what happens to all the chemicals?). The extra weight of the batteries relative to a tank of fuel also decrease the efficiency of the vehicle, and then a tradeoff has to be made between range and efficiency. As you add more batteries you get diminishing returns on range because of all the extra weight you have to carry.
Electric vehicles also take a long time to charge, and while technically you could swap batteries out this would be terribly impractical due to the weight and relatively short lifespan of batteries.
Also your electricity has to come from somewhere, and currently that means coal power stations that are far more polluting than modern cars.
On the other hand, producing fuel using bacteria would be massively speeding up the current cycle, the plants producing the fuels would be consuming CO2, creating a fuel which is easily stored and moved to where its needed and when its used CO2 would be released again only to start the cycle afresh. There's nothing wrong with CO2 emissions so long as we have a balance between emission and consumption... The problem with the current fossil fuels is that the part of the process which consumes CO2 is extremely slow.
Why? The idea of CO2 emissions being bad is based on that carbon having previously been stored in chemical form underground...
If you start producing fuel using bacteria then either the bacteria themselves, or the production of the food to feed them will consume CO2, thus creating a cycle considerably faster than the one which produced the underground oil reserves. If you decrease emissions of CO2, while also increasing use of CO2 eventually we will have a problem of not enough CO2 in the air.
That said, this sounds like a disruptive technology so either its bullshit or some large oil companies will buy up the tech and bury it until they run out of oil to sell at ridiculously high prices.
Use a regular gre based ipv6 tunnel, he.net and sixxs.net both provide such tunnels.
Also, complain to your cable and dsl companies... IPv6 is part of the DOCSIS 3 specification for cable internet so you'd hope cable isps will support it sooner rather than later (my cable provider sent a router which has ipv6 support, but so far the isp aren't offering any such service)
You could create a proxying system using dns whereby an ipv4-only host is placed on a virtual ipv4 network with a combined router and caching dns server... When you request a hostname from the dns server which has an AAAA record, the server allocates a virtual ipv4 address within the virtual network and then returns an appropriate A record to the client... Any connections to this virtual address are then proxied to the real ipv6 address.
Another problem, is that although routers and operating systems support ipv6, that support is not very widely used and thus not very widely tested... Things can often break in completely unexpected ways... This is why the US government is now requiring network equipment suppliers to use ipv6 themselves.
Install windows 7, it tries to bring up an ipv6 tunnel by default... I'm surprised the stat isn't higher than 34% really.
Many higher end routers process routing in hardware, and older versions of this hardware can only handle ipv4... If these devices support ipv6 at all then it will be in software only and very slow compared to the hardware switching...
I have a system connected to a cisco catalyst 4006 switch and suffers from this issue, i can push gigabit speeds of ipv4 but nowhere close to that with v6.
Legitimate customers always get screwed in the name of "anti piracy", the actual pirates usually have a far better product.
Doesn't matter if Apple employees are allowed to resell them or not, someone in China will soon start manufacturing them.
The worst part of living in a Microsoft world to my mind is that they've produced a legion of intellectually crippled sysadmins, who view competing products like Unix with either derision or fear, often times not realizing how inferior Microsoft is in some areas.
Indeed, i have to deal with people like this every day... The problem is that smart competent people will evaluate multiple options and pick the one that best suits their needs, but people doing this would result in lost business for MS. So they would rather have an army of clueless drones that will accept what they're given and not try to think for themselves.
The problem I so often have with these claims is they seem to mistake ease of installation with the actual maintenance of the software.
Indeed, and monkey can get a windows based network up and basically hobbling along, and this is what their marketing concentrates on...
In many cases, a monkey could get many linux based setups hobbling along in the same way, its just that there is no marketing trying to convince people of this.
However, you don't want a system that is barely functional being managed by someone who has no clue how it really works... You want someone who knows the system inside out, who will configure the system to run optimally and ensure that necessary updates are applied in a timely manner etc.
However, running a system optimally is actually much harder with windows than it is with unix:
Under the interface, the windows system is actually far more complicated than any unix system... As soon as you try to do anything advanced which isn't catered for by the gui, or have to fix a serious problem it becomes extremely complex.
Windows suffers from security related design flaws which either have to be accepted as security risks, or kludgily worked around... Things like authentication with uncracked hashes, weak password hashing, file typing (including execute ability) by filename, broken apps which only run as admin, disorganised filesystem etc...
Windows lacks centralised package management, you will probably have to spend extra to buy a patch management system.
Windows requires anti virus, you will probably have to pay a lot of money for this too.
So sure, if you want a horrendously insecure and flakey network, hire the cheapest MCSEs you can and then you have money left over to buy the software... Such a setup will probably seem ok for a while too, until something goes badly wrong.
If you want a network thats reasonably secure and functional you will need to hire decent competent (ie more expensive) staff in any case. So why not run unix instead of windows, you will need less staff which will be a significant saving for people at this competence level, and you will obviously save on all the software (and perhaps be able to use less/cheaper hardware).
Give them OpenOffice, the interface will be far more familiar to them than "the ribbon thing", they will have the benefit of storing their data in open file formats, they will have the benefit of a cross platform suite, they will have the benefit of being able to give a free copy to any employee who wants to run it at home and they will save money now and will be able to upgrade to future versions for free too.
If OpenOffice ever gets a ribbon interface, you can pretty much guarantee there will either be an option to turn it off, or someone will maintain a forked version that doesn't have it.
This is often conveniently ignored in MS funded studies...
Sure, it's a given that moving from MSOfffice 2003 to OpenOffice 3 would result in users having to get used to a new interface and some formatting issues with older files...
But moving from MSOffice 2003 to 2007 or 2010 will also result in exactly the same issues, only without the cost and openness benefits that a move to OpenOffice would bring. In fact, the interface differences are actually greater moving from one MS version to another than going from MS 2003 to OpenOffice 3.x.
Users hate change, but sooner or later change will be forced upon them, either because your thinking long term and moving to a more open system, or your thinking short term and moving from your old unsupported proprietary software to a newer version that will just give you a few more years before another forced upgrade.
Might as well actually get some benefit from a process which irritates users.
Actually there is the third, very common but quite ridiculous option...
Commercial software doesn't do what you want, so you change your business practices to work around how it does do things.
A proprietary solution does not necessarily have merit if you depend on an external company, it depends on the skills provided by that external company. The problem is that external company will have their own interests at heart, and that will mean providing you whatever setup brings them the most profit rather than the one that best suits your needs.
However if you are a company that provides support to others in this way, it makes a LOT of sense for you to start moving towards open source... If all your doing is reselling other people's products and providing first line support, not only will your margins be extremely thin and the value-add support you provide fairly low level (since you don't have control over the products, and have to defer harder questions to the original vendor), but sooner or later your customers and suppliers are going to realise they can save money and get better service by cutting you out of the loop.
On the other hand, if you are providing open source then your client doesn't have to worry about the perceived difficulties of running such software because thats your job, they can't easily cut you out of the loop because that would require them hiring their own competent IT staff to replace your services (although they could replace you with a similar company, so long as your service is decent and prices reasonable it wouldnt be worth doing), and you don't have to pay 90% of the sales cost to a third party vendor - all the profit is yours to either keep or squeeze if you need to compete on price.
A lot of these external support companies really do very little to earn their money, they shift boxes, take a small commission and hire a bunch of (cheap) clueless monkeys to unbox and forward your support calls to the original supplier.
In terms of integration, proprietary software may well integrate more easily with other proprietary software from the same vendor, however this is usually less to do with good interoperability, and more to do with proprietary software often being designed to explicitly not integrate with any competing software.
So costs aside, moving away from software designed to lock you in is a very important aspect especially if your thinking long term. While proprietary software is far more likely to try locking you in than open source, not all proprietary software is designed this way.
On the other hand, if you have the source code integration is always possible if its important enough to you.
And will probably be a pretty half assed linux distro, instead of a usable one...
It's not the fact that they run windows which makes an attractive target...
It's the fact that you can guarantee with 99% certainty that any government or corporation you choose to attack will be running windows and msoffice... Diversity is the key, and a lack of diversity is extremely dangerous.
Also while linux will have security bugs, bugs can get fixed... Many of the problems with windows are fundamental design flaws which cannot be fixed without breaking compatibility, and if your going to ditch windows compatibility you might as well just run linux anyway.
The WebM specification is complete enough that it can be implemented by third parties. There are already multiple open and closed source applications implementing WebM.
The WebM specification also comes with a reference implementation which is licensed under liberal terms.
OOXML includes references to proprietary technology which is not documented in any open standard.
OOXML (and perhaps WebM too) includes ambiguities which will force anyone implementing it to either make a guess or consult a reference implementation... The only reference implementation of OOXML is closed source and would require reverse engineering to fill in the blanks in the spec. Aside from areas where the spec is unclear, MSOffice also doesn't comply with some aspects of the published spec which are clearly defined. Also the ISO version of OOXML has no reference implementation at all.
If WebM includes any such ambiguities they will be picked up by any third parties who try to create their own implementations, and the documentation can be filled in accordingly.
Google are open to improvements from third parties, MS are not.