Nothing actually supports the ISO version of OOXML...
The ISO version of ODF is actually very widely supported, even MS now include support for it... However, the support is quite variable and there has been more than a little bad faith in the MS implementation...
The ECMA version is very different to the ISO version... The ECMA version is the one that was thrown out by ISO in the first ballot, and its also fairly close to what MS have actually implemented. The ISO version is based on a set of changes mandated by ISO, and likely even more changes would have been required were it not for the shady happenings around the second ballot... That said, nothing implements the ISO version whatsoever. The ECMA version has various flaws which make it virtually impossible for anyone other than MS to implement fully, there is plenty of documentation on these flaws online. The ISO version addresses some of these flaws, but many still remain.
ODF had a very different path through ISO a couple of years earlier, i believe the ballot votes were all yes aside from one abstention and it passed through in the first ballot, also the ISO version of ODF is the same as OASIS version 1.0.
The masses don't use photoshop, and certainly don't buy it... They also don't use quickbooks... Most people browse the web (and a significant proportion these days do so using firefox or chrome - which also run on linux), read email (probably via a web interface anyway) and talk to their friends through an im client (again, sometimes through the browser)... A lot of people would get on just fine with a stripped down linux that booted straight into a browser.
Sure there will be niche users who require particular apps, but they are generally in the minority and if the masses switched over to linux you can guarantee these niche apps would make the move sooner or later too. That said, there are also various niches in which windows is either poor or completely unusable.
Giving someone a livecd isn't terribly useful, they will use the livecd environment as if it was windows and get a bad impression of it because running from cd is slow. Instead, install it as a dual boot and show them what it can do and explain its advantages (eg package management, greater safety online etc).
The analogy is good, noone really cares *how* someone implements a given standard so long as their implementation complies with the standard and interoperates with other implementations...
Perhaps a better example is TCP/IP, there are thousands of different implementations out there including open ones (linux, bsd etc) and closed ones (windows, various proprietary embedded systems) and yet they all manage to talk to each other over the Internet just fine.
The Internet exists and has prospered precisely because it's based on open standards. There were plenty of proprietary networks back in the days, and they have pretty much all died out.
The same thing happens when using different versions of msoffice, their formats are so poorly documented that even their own apps can't open them reliably.
This is why a properly specified open format is important, so that everyone can implement it reliably... Unfortunately it seems that even tho MS have implemented OpenDocument, they have done so pretty badly...
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks? Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
I have worked with companies and governments that try to implement various restrictions to stop employees taking data out of the organisation... I have found that:
The restrictions are generally flawed (often the fault of ms for flawed implementation) and people can get round them easily. The restrictions only serve to hinder people's ability to work. Windows typically requires expensive additional software, eg software to prevent access to USB storage devices, and when this software crashes the underlying os allows the unwanted devices anyway. Even if the restrictions work, there are other ways, eg taking photographs of the screen, printing stuff out, stealing the internal hdd from the machine etc...
You place restrictions on removable media, uploads to the web, attachments via email, people will just find another way... It's better to log rather than to restrict, because if there are no restrictions people will often pick the easiest route and you can at least catch them in the act, and everyone else can get on with their work unhindered.
When implementing security policy, people only tend to think about the front door, they concentrate on features rather than implementation... They buy all kinds of junk claiming to support fancy sounding buzzwords not realising that there are often ways around all of this stuff...
I saw a system where someone was using a web based application to keep data of different security classifications and belonging to different customers separated, now sure if you go through the web interface it won't let you access other people's data but if you get access to the underlying server you obviously have access to everything... And yet, people were claiming that an admin on the server wouldn't be able to access the data because they cant do so through the web interface!
MSOffice is not the best suite out there and never has been... Wordperfect was always a superior word processor... OpenOffice is perfectly good especially when you consider the price.
MS keep people locked in, if the lock-in wasn't there then very few people would use their products at all.
Or why a tablet... How about dockable phones? Desktops reached the point several years ago of being fast enough for 99% of day to day uses, and phones are getting there now... So instead of desktop computers or large heavy laptops, why not a dockable phone? You could produce a tablet dock with a larger screen and battery, a desktop dock with ethernet, big screen and keyboard or a laptop dock... Either way you take the same basic system everywhere you go, you have all your data and can interact with it using a large screen and keyboard if you need to.
A disproportionate amount while the filthy rich pay virtually nothing? Or paying for the government to simply WASTE that money instead of building roads or other useful things? Or even worse, paying so that certain people within the government can embezzle the money...
How much of what you pay in tax actually goes on things that benefit the taxpayers like roads, and how much gets wasted or used on things which are detrimental to the tax payers?
Or more importantly, how much lower could the taxes be if waste/inefficiency was eliminated, and those who avoid taxes were made to pay?
Because music is what sells the t-shirts... Digital publication will simply become a promotional activity, basically a form of advertising, it will serve to advertise merchandise like t-shirts as well as services such as live performances and hired appearances etc.
It's not a better situation for children at all, they will end up with a cheaper console but being unable to afford games for it...
You also get old consoles deprecated far too soon, (MS are more guilty of this than sony), an older console could be produced far more cheaply and still provide entertainment for poorer kids.
It's also a flawed business model simply because it cannot exist without government intervention into the market and consumer hostile features implemented in the device.
essentially I think there's a levelling quality about it and an aspect that makes the web and technology very much in the grasp of areas of society that would otherwise never get it
Very few people use a PS3 to browse the web, a generic PC where competition has pushed down prices combined with free software actually does far more to put technology within reach of the poor.
And these copy protection schemes were also cracked... Sure there was no internet with text dumps, you typically acquired your games from friends who could photocopy the manual for you, or you got actual pirate copies from street vendors who would supply a printed or text file copy of the manual.
Also you don't get manuals anymore, apparently they cost too much. When i bought elite 2, it came with 3 printed books and a poster.
Piracy never killed the Amiga... This was a myth largely perpetuated by the late scalpers in the Amiga market who tried to nickel and dime the last Amiga users... $35 for a TCP stack, which requires a $30 GUI toolkit, another $30 each for a browser, irc client or even a telnet client. All of this made the Amiga far too expensive for Internet use, so people either bought another platform or pirated the software.
Commodore killed the Amiga, slacking on updating the hardware (AGA came far too late), poor marketing, and finally by going bankrupt while being the only supplier of Amiga compatible hardware or the core OS.
Everyone i know who had an Amiga had a stack of purchased games and an even bigger stack of pirated ones, none of them could afford to purchase all the games they had and if there was no piracy would just have had a much smaller stack of games - they couldn't afford more.
Many people who bought Amigas did so specifically because copying games was easy compared to the cartridge based systems of the day, and most of those people also bought games as well as pirating them. Most Amiga users i knew back in the days had more purchased (ie not counting pirated) games than any of their console owning friends.
Exchange yes, not keep copies... Back in the days one of a group would buy a game, everyone else copied it off them and we would play the games networked.
Platforms like the PC, Amiga, C64 and others thrived because of piracy... People (mostly kids) would trade games with their friends and keep copies, most of the people i knew bought as many games as they could afford and then pirated others. Without piracy, those people would just have had less games, they simply didn't have the money to buy more. I still have a stack of original games from publishers who i would never have heard about had i not pirated their games from friends.
All DRM schemes, including those on consoles do is hurt legitimate consumers...
Lost/damaged media (especially when kids are involved) Inconvenience of having to have the media instead of playing a game from HD False positives from DRM schemes preventing paying customers from playing
Actual organised pirates don't care about any of this, they actually have a superior product for a cheaper price..
So what they should do is tollerate casual piracy (eg kids sharing games with friends), stop wasting their time/money/public image on implementing draconian drm schemes and ensure that legitimate customers actually get a better product than the pirates do.
Which would make it impossible to access the web using free software, you would have to pay for an h.264 license if you wanted to browse the web... That starts a slippery slope, and in a few years time anyone wanting to use linux might end up having to buy licenses from a large number of sources, or buy a distro which includes them. Gone would be the days of downloading a free cd image and using it.
Software companies are scared of free (as in no cost) software, because they realise that if they have to face competition, eventually it will force prices down to nothing. Just look at hardware, years of competition have resulted in very rapid innovation in the hardware space, combined with rapidly dropping prices and razor thin margins. The only reason hardware isn't given away free is because of per unit costs (ie materials & manufacturing)...
The use of patents is twofold, firstly to provide a base on software prices to prevent competition driving the price to zero and second (later) to create an artificial barrier of entry into the market so that smaller more nimble competitors cannot compete with the established players, thus allowing them to keep prices high.
If left to a free market, software would become a business where no money can be made (as it has no natural floor to pricing), and all commercial software development would be done by companies using it to aid other lines of business (hardware, consultancy, internal use etc)... You would also find that a majority of software would be open source because pooling your development effort would save a lot of money (think of the effort of building your own embedded os from scratch vs using linux and making the tweaks you need).
Google most likely realise this, which is why they make their money from offering services.
Because many people already have such GPUs for playing games, and yet very few people play games 24/7... It's quite feasible that someone could play games during the day, and let their GPU do cracking at other times.
If you know the source password is less than a certain length (ie less than the keysize), then thats what you attempt to brute force instead of the derived key... Go for whichever (actual key, source password) has the least possible combinations.
The fact it originated at MS was not the problem...
It was bloated and incomplete... There was already an existing fully open standard they could have contributed towards instead of making their own (OASIS invited them to join the ODF board on more than one occasion). They forced their format through ISO using plenty of well documented questionable tactics.
Google have done nothing of the sort, their format is effectively a newer version of the codec ogg theora was based on, the documentation is clearly complete enough to be useful and they have provided reference code under terms open enough that most developers wether they're commercial or open should be able to use it.
I think WebM should become part of the HTML5 spec as the standard video codec, and if there's anything better which is also open by the time HTML6 comes along it could easily be superceded.
There is no reason other than greed for any browser maker not to support WebM. Having such support would require very little work, and could reuse the existing google supplied code because its license is liberal enough. Having WebM support would also only benefit the end users (ie customers) of the browser, there is no downside from a customer perspective. The only reason Apple and MS choose not to support it is because they want to make money from h.264, to the detriment of their customers.
Newer and less widely used search engines often have better results, because there are thousands of spammers out there trying to game the bigger search engines.
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Word supports ODF since 2007 SP2, and 2010 includes this support by default...
The support doesn't seem to be very good however...
Nothing actually supports the ISO version of OOXML...
The ISO version of ODF is actually very widely supported, even MS now include support for it... However, the support is quite variable and there has been more than a little bad faith in the MS implementation...
The ECMA version is very different to the ISO version...
The ECMA version is the one that was thrown out by ISO in the first ballot, and its also fairly close to what MS have actually implemented.
The ISO version is based on a set of changes mandated by ISO, and likely even more changes would have been required were it not for the shady happenings around the second ballot... That said, nothing implements the ISO version whatsoever.
The ECMA version has various flaws which make it virtually impossible for anyone other than MS to implement fully, there is plenty of documentation on these flaws online. The ISO version addresses some of these flaws, but many still remain.
ODF had a very different path through ISO a couple of years earlier, i believe the ballot votes were all yes aside from one abstention and it passed through in the first ballot, also the ISO version of ODF is the same as OASIS version 1.0.
The masses don't use photoshop, and certainly don't buy it... They also don't use quickbooks... Most people browse the web (and a significant proportion these days do so using firefox or chrome - which also run on linux), read email (probably via a web interface anyway) and talk to their friends through an im client (again, sometimes through the browser)...
A lot of people would get on just fine with a stripped down linux that booted straight into a browser.
Sure there will be niche users who require particular apps, but they are generally in the minority and if the masses switched over to linux you can guarantee these niche apps would make the move sooner or later too. That said, there are also various niches in which windows is either poor or completely unusable.
Giving someone a livecd isn't terribly useful, they will use the livecd environment as if it was windows and get a bad impression of it because running from cd is slow. Instead, install it as a dual boot and show them what it can do and explain its advantages (eg package management, greater safety online etc).
The analogy is good, noone really cares *how* someone implements a given standard so long as their implementation complies with the standard and interoperates with other implementations...
Perhaps a better example is TCP/IP, there are thousands of different implementations out there including open ones (linux, bsd etc) and closed ones (windows, various proprietary embedded systems) and yet they all manage to talk to each other over the Internet just fine.
The Internet exists and has prospered precisely because it's based on open standards. There were plenty of proprietary networks back in the days, and they have pretty much all died out.
The same thing happens when using different versions of msoffice, their formats are so poorly documented that even their own apps can't open them reliably.
This is why a properly specified open format is important, so that everyone can implement it reliably... Unfortunately it seems that even tho MS have implemented OpenDocument, they have done so pretty badly...
How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks?
Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?
I have worked with companies and governments that try to implement various restrictions to stop employees taking data out of the organisation...
I have found that:
The restrictions are generally flawed (often the fault of ms for flawed implementation) and people can get round them easily.
The restrictions only serve to hinder people's ability to work.
Windows typically requires expensive additional software, eg software to prevent access to USB storage devices, and when this software crashes the underlying os allows the unwanted devices anyway.
Even if the restrictions work, there are other ways, eg taking photographs of the screen, printing stuff out, stealing the internal hdd from the machine etc...
You place restrictions on removable media, uploads to the web, attachments via email, people will just find another way... It's better to log rather than to restrict, because if there are no restrictions people will often pick the easiest route and you can at least catch them in the act, and everyone else can get on with their work unhindered.
When implementing security policy, people only tend to think about the front door, they concentrate on features rather than implementation... They buy all kinds of junk claiming to support fancy sounding buzzwords not realising that there are often ways around all of this stuff...
I saw a system where someone was using a web based application to keep data of different security classifications and belonging to different customers separated, now sure if you go through the web interface it won't let you access other people's data but if you get access to the underlying server you obviously have access to everything... And yet, people were claiming that an admin on the server wouldn't be able to access the data because they cant do so through the web interface!
MSOffice is not the best suite out there and never has been...
Wordperfect was always a superior word processor...
OpenOffice is perfectly good especially when you consider the price.
MS keep people locked in, if the lock-in wasn't there then very few people would use their products at all.
Or why a tablet... How about dockable phones? ... Either way you take the same basic system everywhere you go, you have all your data and can interact with it using a large screen and keyboard if you need to.
Desktops reached the point several years ago of being fast enough for 99% of day to day uses, and phones are getting there now... So instead of desktop computers or large heavy laptops, why not a dockable phone?
You could produce a tablet dock with a larger screen and battery, a desktop dock with ethernet, big screen and keyboard or a laptop dock
A reasonable amount is one thing...
A disproportionate amount while the filthy rich pay virtually nothing?
Or paying for the government to simply WASTE that money instead of building roads or other useful things?
Or even worse, paying so that certain people within the government can embezzle the money...
How much of what you pay in tax actually goes on things that benefit the taxpayers like roads, and how much gets wasted or used on things which are detrimental to the tax payers?
Or more importantly, how much lower could the taxes be if waste/inefficiency was eliminated, and those who avoid taxes were made to pay?
Because music is what sells the t-shirts... Digital publication will simply become a promotional activity, basically a form of advertising, it will serve to advertise merchandise like t-shirts as well as services such as live performances and hired appearances etc.
It's not a better situation for children at all, they will end up with a cheaper console but being unable to afford games for it...
You also get old consoles deprecated far too soon, (MS are more guilty of this than sony), an older console could be produced far more cheaply and still provide entertainment for poorer kids.
It's also a flawed business model simply because it cannot exist without government intervention into the market and consumer hostile features implemented in the device.
essentially I think there's a levelling quality about it and an aspect that makes the web and technology very much in the grasp of areas of society that would otherwise never get it
Very few people use a PS3 to browse the web, a generic PC where competition has pushed down prices combined with free software actually does far more to put technology within reach of the poor.
And these copy protection schemes were also cracked...
Sure there was no internet with text dumps, you typically acquired your games from friends who could photocopy the manual for you, or you got actual pirate copies from street vendors who would supply a printed or text file copy of the manual.
Also you don't get manuals anymore, apparently they cost too much. When i bought elite 2, it came with 3 printed books and a poster.
Piracy never killed the Amiga... This was a myth largely perpetuated by the late scalpers in the Amiga market who tried to nickel and dime the last Amiga users... $35 for a TCP stack, which requires a $30 GUI toolkit, another $30 each for a browser, irc client or even a telnet client. All of this made the Amiga far too expensive for Internet use, so people either bought another platform or pirated the software.
Commodore killed the Amiga, slacking on updating the hardware (AGA came far too late), poor marketing, and finally by going bankrupt while being the only supplier of Amiga compatible hardware or the core OS.
Everyone i know who had an Amiga had a stack of purchased games and an even bigger stack of pirated ones, none of them could afford to purchase all the games they had and if there was no piracy would just have had a much smaller stack of games - they couldn't afford more.
Many people who bought Amigas did so specifically because copying games was easy compared to the cartridge based systems of the day, and most of those people also bought games as well as pirating them. Most Amiga users i knew back in the days had more purchased (ie not counting pirated) games than any of their console owning friends.
Indeed...
The best thing that could happen to Linux right now, is for MS to come down hard on pirates.
Exchange yes, not keep copies...
Back in the days one of a group would buy a game, everyone else copied it off them and we would play the games networked.
Do Apple systems not qualify as *nix anymore?
Platforms like the PC, Amiga, C64 and others thrived because of piracy... People (mostly kids) would trade games with their friends and keep copies, most of the people i knew bought as many games as they could afford and then pirated others. Without piracy, those people would just have had less games, they simply didn't have the money to buy more. I still have a stack of original games from publishers who i would never have heard about had i not pirated their games from friends.
All DRM schemes, including those on consoles do is hurt legitimate consumers...
Lost/damaged media (especially when kids are involved)
Inconvenience of having to have the media instead of playing a game from HD
False positives from DRM schemes preventing paying customers from playing
Actual organised pirates don't care about any of this, they actually have a superior product for a cheaper price..
So what they should do is tollerate casual piracy (eg kids sharing games with friends), stop wasting their time/money/public image on implementing draconian drm schemes and ensure that legitimate customers actually get a better product than the pirates do.
Which would make it impossible to access the web using free software, you would have to pay for an h.264 license if you wanted to browse the web...
That starts a slippery slope, and in a few years time anyone wanting to use linux might end up having to buy licenses from a large number of sources, or buy a distro which includes them. Gone would be the days of downloading a free cd image and using it.
Software companies are scared of free (as in no cost) software, because they realise that if they have to face competition, eventually it will force prices down to nothing.
Just look at hardware, years of competition have resulted in very rapid innovation in the hardware space, combined with rapidly dropping prices and razor thin margins. The only reason hardware isn't given away free is because of per unit costs (ie materials & manufacturing)...
The use of patents is twofold, firstly to provide a base on software prices to prevent competition driving the price to zero and second (later) to create an artificial barrier of entry into the market so that smaller more nimble competitors cannot compete with the established players, thus allowing them to keep prices high.
If left to a free market, software would become a business where no money can be made (as it has no natural floor to pricing), and all commercial software development would be done by companies using it to aid other lines of business (hardware, consultancy, internal use etc)... You would also find that a majority of software would be open source because pooling your development effort would save a lot of money (think of the effort of building your own embedded os from scratch vs using linux and making the tweaks you need).
Google most likely realise this, which is why they make their money from offering services.
But it's not royalty free (like all the other web standards), thus making it unusable in free software...
Because many people already have such GPUs for playing games, and yet very few people play games 24/7...
It's quite feasible that someone could play games during the day, and let their GPU do cracking at other times.
If you know the source password is less than a certain length (ie less than the keysize), then thats what you attempt to brute force instead of the derived key... Go for whichever (actual key, source password) has the least possible combinations.
There are perfectly legal reasons for cracking encryption...
Data recovery (eg forgotten passwords)
Security auditing
Crypto development (ie stress testing)
The fact it originated at MS was not the problem...
It was bloated and incomplete... There was already an existing fully open standard they could have contributed towards instead of making their own (OASIS invited them to join the ODF board on more than one occasion). They forced their format through ISO using plenty of well documented questionable tactics.
Google have done nothing of the sort, their format is effectively a newer version of the codec ogg theora was based on, the documentation is clearly complete enough to be useful and they have provided reference code under terms open enough that most developers wether they're commercial or open should be able to use it.
I think WebM should become part of the HTML5 spec as the standard video codec, and if there's anything better which is also open by the time HTML6 comes along it could easily be superceded.
There is no reason other than greed for any browser maker not to support WebM. Having such support would require very little work, and could reuse the existing google supplied code because its license is liberal enough. Having WebM support would also only benefit the end users (ie customers) of the browser, there is no downside from a customer perspective.
The only reason Apple and MS choose not to support it is because they want to make money from h.264, to the detriment of their customers.
Newer and less widely used search engines often have better results, because there are thousands of spammers out there trying to game the bigger search engines.