Are you talking about modifying existing pdf files, or simply creating new ones?
OpenOffice/LibreOffice has a PDF Import extension which does a pretty good job of editing, i also found via a very quick google search a pdfedit program on sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit/
As for creating pdf files, there are countless programs for doing that, openoffice, pdflatex, virtually anything that can print to postscript combined with ps2pdf etc etc etc.
Sure, HTML is preferable to PDF for web content, but PDF is a pretty good format when used appropriately.
The ISP can only get a larger allocation of IPs from RIPE if they can justify their use and are actually using them... Giving them out to DSL users is a very effective way to "use" more addresses and gives them justification to get more. ISPs have been doing this for a few years to hoard addresses, and once they are no longer able to get new addresses they will gradually kick existing users off (probably by cranking up the prices until most users choose to take the cheaper nat option).
It's only going to take a long time because of short sighted implementation... IPv6 has been around for over 10 years now, and yet new applications are still being written which don't support it. How many places do you know that are running code which hasn't been touched in over 10 years, offering services over the internet? If v6 had been implemented into everything, even if not actively used, 10 years ago then it really would be just a case of flipping a switch.
And incidentally, you will still be able to tunnel ipv4 over ipv6 so you can setup a private ipv4 vpn between different locations over the ipv6 internet... It is only services which actually need to be offered to the general public that will need to be migrated fully to v6.
Most highend kit made in the last 10 years is capable of supporting v6 these days...
Many printers support v6 (my samsung does), but it's unlikely your printer will need to route outside of your local network so you can still use ipv4 for that anyway.
The iPhone supports v6 since ios version 4 (which can run on your 3g), technically earlier versions could have supported it too but apple chose to compile the kernel without support for it.
All the consoles which support online play are upgradeable, i'm not sure if any of them support v6 now but it wouldn't be hard for that support to be added.
The problem is a general lack of knowledge, you go into the IT department at any company and 9/10 times none of them will have any idea what ipv6 is.
There will be no demand for v6 until there is content available only on v6, and noone will ever put anything exclusively on v6 until there are sufficient users to access it.
PDF is not in itself a security hole... Adobe's reader on the other hand has many, and the problem is made worse by the apparent monoculture - many people think pdf is a proprietary format and that only the adobe tools are capable of reading it... I have even seen mac users download and install adobe reader because they think its required, had they simply attempted to open the pdf file in the first place they would have found that OSX ships with a much better PDF reader out of the box.
When anything has 90%+ marketshare it becomes a target for hackers, IE has been beaten down so is far less attractive so now people target flash and acrobat.
We really need user education, get enough people using alternative PDF readers and no single program will have enough marketshare to attract so much hostile attention.
So basically they are saying that *because* it is possible to produce a shoddy PDF file which is basically an image dump, that this is reason enough not to use the format? By this same reckoning, you could produce a really shoddy HTML page which also consists of images and no text... Virtually any format could be misused in this way.
So what's the alternative? That we all revert back to ASCII text since its incapable of holding graphics?
Personally i hate seeing poorly designed websites or pdf files as i described here, where the text is actually an embedded image (or worse - a flash file) and there is no clickable index etc. We should probably start naming and shaming pdf creation software, and those who use (or misuse) such tools.
It's simply targeted at end users, just like the iPhone primarily is... Corporate users are extremely conservative and have limited feature requirements... It's not a terribly good market because most companies will buy handsets which are a few years old or relatively lowend.
A firewall actually typically makes a DDoS more successful because you now have an additional device which must do more processing of the data. Most commercial firewalls will die much quicker than typical modern server hosts under typical DDoS attacks (such as comparing each packet against its ruleset, and trying to keep track of connection states etc)...
What you really want, is dedicated DDoS mitigation hardware, preferably connected to multiple upstream providers so the traffic can be filtered in multiple places and before it gets anywhere near your servers.
Microsoft are not aiming to invalidate software patents tho, they just want to invalidate this one patent. They want to wield patents against others in the same way i4i is doing against them. They want to make patent suits so expensive that small players like i4i can't do it, while microsoft can bully whoever they want.... This is very bad for everyone else.
Its many and frequent difficult to fix problem bring customers back for service. The lack of a built in repository and very few/useless bundled apps, combined with the dangers of downloading random files brings users back to buy more software.
Give those customers a ubuntu box which has a simple app-store like method of adding additional software and a very low likelihood of malware infection and most of those users won't be back to the store to spend more money.
The crapware comes off the price of the total package tho... There is nothing to stop crapware makers producing similar crap for linux and doing the same thing.
You are not comparing like for like... A system with a clean crapware free install of windows would always cost more than a clean crapware free install of linux. Buying servers is a better example because its far less common for crapware to be bundled on server systems, and most server vendors provide linux and no software options on their servers.
I think OEMs should be required to be up front about the price of the machine with and without crapware, and should be required to make a (more expensive) option which excludes the crap.
They have made various threats against Linux, but have not taken any direct action... For MS, the threat of patents does guaranteed damage at no risk/cost to them... If they filed a suit then it might result in their patents getting invalidated or for it to be found that Linux does not violate them, thus leaving them with nothing.
Other companies have pledged their patents to a defensive-only pool, that is anyone can use those patents freely providing they don't file a patent lawsuit against any of the pool members.
Setting such a high price tag would simply keep small players out of the market, the likes of disney would continue renewing the copyright on mickey mouse indefinitely...
Incidentally, i4i are not a typical patent troll, they actually have and were selling a product when MS stole the idea and integrated it into their product effectively killing i4i's market. That said, it shows that you should never trust microsoft not to screw you and i4i should have known better with all the history.
Copyrights should be much shorter (maybe 5 years? very few works, especially software are still worth selling after this long anyway), and should require that the copyrighted work remains available for purchase at the same or lower price (allowing for inflation) for the duration of the copyright term. If you want to stop selling something, then copyright expires and the work falls into the public domain - no hoarding of works...
Any copyrighted works which are delivered in non original form (eg compiled software or drm'd media) should also be stored by a neutral third party so that when the work falls into the public domain, a usable copy is available.
Shorter copyright terms would force content creators to actually continue working for their money, it is sickening to see someone who hasn't produced anything of value in years continue to roll around in money.
Patents (and copyrights for that matter) may have started out with noble ideals, but today they are distorted to such an extent that their net effect is extremely harmful and very much evil. Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but today they actually impede innovation significantly. Even Bill Gates has said so.
As a long time user of third party instant messaging clients, i was horrified to see just how much crap comes with most of the official clients for the various IM networks...
Most malware these days doesn't come from questionable websites, it comes from otherwise perfectly legitimate websites which have been hacked (or are including content from third parties, eg ads, which have been hacked).
The computers kids will encounter in school will not be representative of what he might encounter outside of school... In UK schools just a few years ago they had acorn archimedes (arm based boxes running riscos) computers, and used those to teach kids... These days, such machines are nowhere to be seen. I remember learning wordperfect for dos at school, i haven't seen that in years either. And while the schools were using acorns and green screen dos machines, most kids had amigas or c64s at home. Also schools don't generally have massive budgets, and are likely to be several years behind the technology curve in any case.
When the kids being talked about here leave school who knows what they might encounter. Teaching them that there are lots of different systems and how to adapt is absolutely the right thing to do.
Developing an entirely new os is about the worst thing microsoft could possibly do from a business perspective...
Currently their single biggest selling point is compatibility, sure as you point out compatibility with something that has a fundamentally flawed design but still compatibility... If they were to ditch compatibility, then users would have to ditch all their existing apps (especially legacy apps which may be abandonware) and learn a completely new system thats not been tried and tested...
In other words, they would now saddle themselves with the biggest disadvantages associated with other platforms while offering none of the advantages of those platforms... Microsoft ditching compatibility with all their legacy cruft would probably be the best news apple and linux distros could ever receive.
First, $400 is a stupid price to pay for an SSL cert, many providers are much cheaper...
Some cert providers (Eg startcom) will provide unlimited certs under a particular domain, so assuming you use the same domain internally its quite easy to generate more certs for the same price you paid for your external certs.
On the other hand, if its internal to your network why don't you create an internal certificate authority and just ensure its root cert is trusted by all your devices.
Just colo your own piece of hardware, that way you benefit from redundant connections with decent upstream rates (connections with decent upstream are very expensive to get wired up) and most likely an sla, reliable power with backup, a decent environment for the server... You supply the hardware so you configure it how you want and have root, make sure the box has a lights out management card so you can gain access to it regardless of what state the OS is in.
The "training costs" are often talked about but never really needed, a modern linux is familiar and point-click enough that people will get along with it just fine with minimal fuss... It may well be different, but going to different versions of windows and msoffice is also different.
Also, since this is a *NEW* office, the employees won't already be using anything, you tell them before they start what your using and if they don't like it they don't have to take the job.
One of the biggest burdens on most companies, and the biggest factor keeping them on windows is lock-in, if your setting up a new office then ensuring you don't get locked in to anything like that is very important.
As for support, free software gives you the choices of "online support" and "various levels of paid support"... Proprietary software only gives you the "low level of paid support included in price" and "higher level of paid support at extra cost". It's effectively different tiers, and free software has an additional lower/cheaper tier thats not available with proprietary software. If you don't want/need support you save money, if you do want it then you may or may not save money depending on the packages available.
When people start at a new company, they have to use whatever that company has and will generally just get on with it... It's not "change" if this company starts off on OOo, and if you don't like what they're using you're free to reject the job offer and work elsewhere.
The biggest things keeping people on msoffice are lockin (including the despised change you talk about), if your starting a new company then lock-in is something you can (and most definitely should) easily avoid.
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Are you talking about modifying existing pdf files, or simply creating new ones?
OpenOffice/LibreOffice has a PDF Import extension which does a pretty good job of editing, i also found via a very quick google search a pdfedit program on sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit/
As for creating pdf files, there are countless programs for doing that, openoffice, pdflatex, virtually anything that can print to postscript combined with ps2pdf etc etc etc.
Sure, HTML is preferable to PDF for web content, but PDF is a pretty good format when used appropriately.
The ISP can only get a larger allocation of IPs from RIPE if they can justify their use and are actually using them... Giving them out to DSL users is a very effective way to "use" more addresses and gives them justification to get more. ISPs have been doing this for a few years to hoard addresses, and once they are no longer able to get new addresses they will gradually kick existing users off (probably by cranking up the prices until most users choose to take the cheaper nat option).
It's only going to take a long time because of short sighted implementation...
IPv6 has been around for over 10 years now, and yet new applications are still being written which don't support it. How many places do you know that are running code which hasn't been touched in over 10 years, offering services over the internet? If v6 had been implemented into everything, even if not actively used, 10 years ago then it really would be just a case of flipping a switch.
And incidentally, you will still be able to tunnel ipv4 over ipv6 so you can setup a private ipv4 vpn between different locations over the ipv6 internet... It is only services which actually need to be offered to the general public that will need to be migrated fully to v6.
Most highend kit made in the last 10 years is capable of supporting v6 these days...
Many printers support v6 (my samsung does), but it's unlikely your printer will need to route outside of your local network so you can still use ipv4 for that anyway.
The iPhone supports v6 since ios version 4 (which can run on your 3g), technically earlier versions could have supported it too but apple chose to compile the kernel without support for it.
All the consoles which support online play are upgradeable, i'm not sure if any of them support v6 now but it wouldn't be hard for that support to be added.
The problem is a general lack of knowledge, you go into the IT department at any company and 9/10 times none of them will have any idea what ipv6 is.
There will be no demand for v6 until there is content available only on v6, and noone will ever put anything exclusively on v6 until there are sufficient users to access it.
The problem is as usual, one of incompetence and ignorance.
Incompetent users create websites without appropriate alt tags, and those same users create PDF files which are also incorrectly created...
Ignorant users then view these files and don't notice, or don't care, that they have not been created correctly.
Because only a very small minority of users actually do bother to check, they simply get ignored.
PDF is not in itself a security hole... Adobe's reader on the other hand has many, and the problem is made worse by the apparent monoculture - many people think pdf is a proprietary format and that only the adobe tools are capable of reading it... I have even seen mac users download and install adobe reader because they think its required, had they simply attempted to open the pdf file in the first place they would have found that OSX ships with a much better PDF reader out of the box.
When anything has 90%+ marketshare it becomes a target for hackers, IE has been beaten down so is far less attractive so now people target flash and acrobat.
We really need user education, get enough people using alternative PDF readers and no single program will have enough marketshare to attract so much hostile attention.
So basically they are saying that *because* it is possible to produce a shoddy PDF file which is basically an image dump, that this is reason enough not to use the format?
By this same reckoning, you could produce a really shoddy HTML page which also consists of images and no text... Virtually any format could be misused in this way.
So what's the alternative? That we all revert back to ASCII text since its incapable of holding graphics?
Personally i hate seeing poorly designed websites or pdf files as i described here, where the text is actually an embedded image (or worse - a flash file) and there is no clickable index etc.
We should probably start naming and shaming pdf creation software, and those who use (or misuse) such tools.
It's simply targeted at end users, just like the iPhone primarily is...
Corporate users are extremely conservative and have limited feature requirements... It's not a terribly good market because most companies will buy handsets which are a few years old or relatively lowend.
A firewall actually typically makes a DDoS more successful because you now have an additional device which must do more processing of the data. Most commercial firewalls will die much quicker than typical modern server hosts under typical DDoS attacks (such as comparing each packet against its ruleset, and trying to keep track of connection states etc)...
What you really want, is dedicated DDoS mitigation hardware, preferably connected to multiple upstream providers so the traffic can be filtered in multiple places and before it gets anywhere near your servers.
Microsoft are not aiming to invalidate software patents tho, they just want to invalidate this one patent. They want to wield patents against others in the same way i4i is doing against them. They want to make patent suits so expensive that small players like i4i can't do it, while microsoft can bully whoever they want.... This is very bad for everyone else.
Small shops like windows...
Its many and frequent difficult to fix problem bring customers back for service.
The lack of a built in repository and very few/useless bundled apps, combined with the dangers of downloading random files brings users back to buy more software.
Give those customers a ubuntu box which has a simple app-store like method of adding additional software and a very low likelihood of malware infection and most of those users won't be back to the store to spend more money.
The crapware comes off the price of the total package tho... There is nothing to stop crapware makers producing similar crap for linux and doing the same thing.
You are not comparing like for like...
A system with a clean crapware free install of windows would always cost more than a clean crapware free install of linux.
Buying servers is a better example because its far less common for crapware to be bundled on server systems, and most server vendors provide linux and no software options on their servers.
I think OEMs should be required to be up front about the price of the machine with and without crapware, and should be required to make a (more expensive) option which excludes the crap.
They have made various threats against Linux, but have not taken any direct action...
For MS, the threat of patents does guaranteed damage at no risk/cost to them... If they filed a suit then it might result in their patents getting invalidated or for it to be found that Linux does not violate them, thus leaving them with nothing.
Other companies have pledged their patents to a defensive-only pool, that is anyone can use those patents freely providing they don't file a patent lawsuit against any of the pool members.
Setting such a high price tag would simply keep small players out of the market, the likes of disney would continue renewing the copyright on mickey mouse indefinitely...
Incidentally, i4i are not a typical patent troll, they actually have and were selling a product when MS stole the idea and integrated it into their product effectively killing i4i's market. That said, it shows that you should never trust microsoft not to screw you and i4i should have known better with all the history.
Copyrights should be much shorter (maybe 5 years? very few works, especially software are still worth selling after this long anyway), and should require that the copyrighted work remains available for purchase at the same or lower price (allowing for inflation) for the duration of the copyright term. If you want to stop selling something, then copyright expires and the work falls into the public domain - no hoarding of works...
Any copyrighted works which are delivered in non original form (eg compiled software or drm'd media) should also be stored by a neutral third party so that when the work falls into the public domain, a usable copy is available.
Shorter copyright terms would force content creators to actually continue working for their money, it is sickening to see someone who hasn't produced anything of value in years continue to roll around in money.
Patents (and copyrights for that matter) may have started out with noble ideals, but today they are distorted to such an extent that their net effect is extremely harmful and very much evil.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but today they actually impede innovation significantly. Even Bill Gates has said so.
As a long time user of third party instant messaging clients, i was horrified to see just how much crap comes with most of the official clients for the various IM networks...
Most malware these days doesn't come from questionable websites, it comes from otherwise perfectly legitimate websites which have been hacked (or are including content from third parties, eg ads, which have been hacked).
The computers kids will encounter in school will not be representative of what he might encounter outside of school...
In UK schools just a few years ago they had acorn archimedes (arm based boxes running riscos) computers, and used those to teach kids... These days, such machines are nowhere to be seen. I remember learning wordperfect for dos at school, i haven't seen that in years either.
And while the schools were using acorns and green screen dos machines, most kids had amigas or c64s at home.
Also schools don't generally have massive budgets, and are likely to be several years behind the technology curve in any case.
When the kids being talked about here leave school who knows what they might encounter. Teaching them that there are lots of different systems and how to adapt is absolutely the right thing to do.
However there has been relatively little interest in finding such bugs in windows, because previously you never needed to.
Developing an entirely new os is about the worst thing microsoft could possibly do from a business perspective...
Currently their single biggest selling point is compatibility, sure as you point out compatibility with something that has a fundamentally flawed design but still compatibility... If they were to ditch compatibility, then users would have to ditch all their existing apps (especially legacy apps which may be abandonware) and learn a completely new system thats not been tried and tested...
In other words, they would now saddle themselves with the biggest disadvantages associated with other platforms while offering none of the advantages of those platforms...
Microsoft ditching compatibility with all their legacy cruft would probably be the best news apple and linux distros could ever receive.
First, $400 is a stupid price to pay for an SSL cert, many providers are much cheaper...
Some cert providers (Eg startcom) will provide unlimited certs under a particular domain, so assuming you use the same domain internally its quite easy to generate more certs for the same price you paid for your external certs.
On the other hand, if its internal to your network why don't you create an internal certificate authority and just ensure its root cert is trusted by all your devices.
Linux supports many more CPUS/Cores than that...
If you can afford one, SGI will happily sell you an Altix UV1000 which has 512 sockets and up to 2048 cores, running linux.
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/uv/
It also looks like they're planning to make even bigger versions of this system in the future.
I believe SGI has a few of these systems, or even bigger versions of this in the top500 list.
Just colo your own piece of hardware, that way you benefit from redundant connections with decent upstream rates (connections with decent upstream are very expensive to get wired up) and most likely an sla, reliable power with backup, a decent environment for the server... You supply the hardware so you configure it how you want and have root, make sure the box has a lights out management card so you can gain access to it regardless of what state the OS is in.
The "training costs" are often talked about but never really needed, a modern linux is familiar and point-click enough that people will get along with it just fine with minimal fuss... It may well be different, but going to different versions of windows and msoffice is also different.
Also, since this is a *NEW* office, the employees won't already be using anything, you tell them before they start what your using and if they don't like it they don't have to take the job.
One of the biggest burdens on most companies, and the biggest factor keeping them on windows is lock-in, if your setting up a new office then ensuring you don't get locked in to anything like that is very important.
As for support, free software gives you the choices of "online support" and "various levels of paid support"... Proprietary software only gives you the "low level of paid support included in price" and "higher level of paid support at extra cost". It's effectively different tiers, and free software has an additional lower/cheaper tier thats not available with proprietary software. If you don't want/need support you save money, if you do want it then you may or may not save money depending on the packages available.
When people start at a new company, they have to use whatever that company has and will generally just get on with it...
It's not "change" if this company starts off on OOo, and if you don't like what they're using you're free to reject the job offer and work elsewhere.
The biggest things keeping people on msoffice are lockin (including the despised change you talk about), if your starting a new company then lock-in is something you can (and most definitely should) easily avoid.