They would have to dance for your amusement in order to get paid. They wont be able to dance once in front of a camera, and sell it infinite times anymore, which is much more fair. Continue working, continue being paid.
Yes, i have read and written to HFS+ partitions using linux. The restriction is that it doesn't support journaled HFS+ for writing (as in, it works but is unsupported because it hasnt been tested enough to be sure it wont corrupt the journal). The support is right there in the stock kernel sources, as well as support for mac partition tables (as used on PPC macs) which will also be created when you format an ipod on a mac. As for distro support, that I don't know, yellow dog obviously supports it as i'm sure would any PPC distro, and any distro when you've compiled the kernel yourself.
That's very true, however. Licenses like the GPL actually actually waive some aspects of copyright law. That is, they give you the end user additional rights that you would not have under straight copyright law. The aim is also to benefit the maximum number of people, while preventing a small number getting rich at the expense and exclusion of the masses.
Can't speak for NTFS, but my mp3 player uses HFS+ as a filesystem, which both linux and osx can access perfectly well.
On the other hand, a new filesystem designed specifically for embedded use would probably be a worthwhile development, and perhaps these patents will cause someone to do just that. Not that microsoft aren't too arrogant to include support for anyone else's filesystem.
I was responding to the blanket statement that "anyone with special requirements will be unable to use openoffice". I was showing that special requirements can go either way.
Programs supporting opendocument have APIs too... I understand koffice is especially powerfull in this regard, and i believe IBM's workplace suite is too.
No scanner reads the files thoroughly, it may have some idea where to look for common macros but that's about it... There are still more undocumented places where malware could hide, and the scanner has no hope of validating any of the data content to try and weed out potential exploits.
And where did you hear that it's ok to take a copy of msoffice from work and run it at home? I've never seen such a clause, and it would certainly terminate when you move jobs anyway, and use your files to ransom you into buying a copy.
Your complaint however, is a reason to stop using ms publisher as soon as possible. Your locked in to it, and your files are being held to ransom in a proprietary format, and because of that your stuck with using a sub-par application.
As you already said, scribus offers finer controls and the only reason it takes you longer to work with it, is lack of experience with it.
Why not create all new files with scribus, and only edit old ones using publisher... That way you can gradually free yourself from the dangers and hassles of proprietary files, and get used to a new app. It need not be scribus either, there are plenty of other DTP apps out there.
Incompetent windows people aren't a luxury... Competent ones are, just the same as competent unix people. Those same incompetent windows people, often don't know unix exists, or have ever tried using it, or else they would be incompetent unix people too.
People actually capable of setting windows up properly are few and far between, and much harder to find among the crowds of incompetent people.
Most ISP tech support is utterly useless tho, they will tell you to reboot, and reinstall the drivers etc, for hours on end, when the real problem is an outage at the network level. Also, supporting windows (or any graphical system) over the phone is very hard, as describing a graphical interface verbally is open to interpretation on both ends. A command line is much easier, since you can directly read the input/output without the need for further interpretation (you can read and write, cant you?).
If your lucky, you can get yourself through to someone in the networking department of the ISP, who actually has a clue what's going on, and they will usually have some unix knowledge too.
On the other hand, some ISPs have a policy of never admitting they had an outage, and trying to blame the customer for their lack of connectivity.
Some smaller ISPs will go out of their way to help non windows users, and sometimes even advertise this as a selling point of the ISP. Your also more likely to get a straight answer out of a smaller ISP, like: "There's an outage in your local telephone exchange, it should be back up in 30 minutes, so go do something else rather than wasting the next half hour pointlessly rebooting"...
I've actually known people who's systems were perfectly working, when the ISP had an outage and they called support, the support dept made them mess with drivers and IP configuration which actually broke their connectivity such that it still wasn't working when the ISP's outage was fixed. Had the done nothing to their machine, and simply waited, it would have worked again once the ISP fixed their problem.
Well, while a competent IT department can usually keep both linux and windows secure for the most part...
A sufficiently complex IT department can fix linux bugs themselves, while they have to wait for microsoft to provide a fix, which can often be up to a month.
Aside from that, if your staff are sufficiently skilled they will be able to make significant savings by using linux. Most of the complaints about the cost of staff skilled enough to run linux, don't take into account that staff to run windows securely cost the same or more.
I've seen several comparisons that compare the cheapest staff running windows, with expensive and competent linux admins. In practice, this would result in a horrendously unreliable and insecure windows network. Try putting a job advertisement up, offering a low wage to run a windows based network and see the quality of your applicants.
It's less to do with shoddy workers, and more to do with commercial attitudes. Microsoft products gain a lot of their stability problems from their sheer complexity. Windows is massively more complicated than any other OS, which results in far more places for bugs to lurk, and makes it much harder to maintain. The extra complexity was desired from a commercial perspective, because it makes the software harder to clone (remember the dos clones?).
They also make a business decision when deciding whether or not to fix problems: Will the cost of producing the fix, cost more than the business that will be lost by not fixing it? Because of vendor lock-in, the chance of losing customers is much lower (the customers has to do the same assessment, will the cost caused by the bug outweigh the cost of migrating away), so the chance of bugs being fixed is much lower.
In short, there is very little incentive for microsoft to improve their products, and the only people who do have that incentive (the users/customers) don't have the ability to make the necessary fixes. In contrast, open source software is usually written by people who use the software too, and any user has the potential to fix bugs or pay someone else to do it.
There is also no incentive for open source software to be more complex than it needs to be, infact doing so is a negative because it reduces the chances of other people wanting to help develop it.
Many office workers have been moved between different versions of windows, dos and macos running a variety of different applications. Often supposedly the same applications also differ wildly between platforms (mac versions of msoffice and ie are very different to the windows versions).
That said, the actual requirements of these workers is fairly low, and it won't take them too long to re-learn, especially if the new applications are similar to the old ones. The amount of retraining required for an average user to migrate from xp/msoffice2003 to kde/openoffice is very small, and could easily be less than the retraining required to migrate to vista/office2007.
As for admin staff, competent linux admins are no more expensive than competent windows admins, but will usually be able to manage more machines. Sure, you can use cheaper and less competent staff to run windows systems, and these less competent staff will probably have never heard of linux... But do you really want incompetent staff running your network? Such staff are likely to configure your network poorly, resulting in virus outbreaks, hacks and/or downtime.
In terms of software costs, the more machines you have the more you save with linux... And it's not just the cost of the OS, most common apps are available for free too, whereas on windows you often have to buy expensive extras (decent firewall, office apps, antivirus, secure remote management programs, anti spyware)
The migration can also be handled gradually, you can migrate windows users to running openoffice, firefox etc. There is a plugin for msoffice to support opendocument files now, and openoffice can read ms files fairly reliably (no worse than using multiple versions of word).
Don't forget that PC's often get replaced every few years, and the apps being used replaced along with them. If well thought out, a migration can be planned over several years, starting by ensuring that any custom in-house apps are platform agnostic (which should always be mandated in any case, because you never know what you might want to be running in the future) and any data is stored in open vendor-neutral formats.
What is more tried and trusted than unix, which has been around a lot longer than windows and was widely used long before windows even existed.
Would you rather those taxes you pay, go into the pockets of microsoft shareholders? Or be saved for other things, like schools etc... Or paid to local staff to support open software.
You claim that linux is not "tried and trusted", and yet it has been successfully implemented in many places already, and is based on unix which has been around even longer. On the other hand, windows may be widely implemented but it is also widely known to be unreliable, insecure and flawed.
Not that linux is perfect, but it does have many advantages from a state government perspective: Any flaws it has, can be fixed using some of the money you save on licensing, if everyone does this linux will improve very quickly. It's free and open, which saves you not only the cost of buying the software, but also significant savings in procurement procedures and license management. You can also supply the exact same software for people to run at home if they need to. The use of open file formats means that state residents are not forced to buy expensive proprietary software to interact with the state, plus important government records will still be readable in years to come. Several states have already realised how important this is.
The reason companies are considering linux, and local governments aren't, is because in a company there is pressure from above to save money, thus making the company more profitable. Government workers don't care how much money they waste, anything they save will just be squandered elsewhere. This is why state run services are so inefficient, and cost the states running them millions, yet when the services are sold to commercial companies they become hugely profitable (look at the privatisation of water/gas/etc in the UK), if these government services had been run in the same way as a commercial business they could have been huge money earners for the government.
There are so many other areas of lock-in in the IT industry, many of which are much worse and harder to work around than Apple's. Look at microsoft's document formats not to mention their own DRM schemes, and various other methods of lock-in.
Now, while i agree that any kind of lockin, including apple's is bad, they are by no means the worst offender. Many people have already mentioned the burn to CD method, and you can always buy your music from somewhere else, apple don't have a monopoly on music distribution, or even sufficient grip over the market to assert any pressure on consumers. The tie-in is also one way, you can play standard drm-free mp3s on the ipod anyway.
I consider being forced to run windows and/or msoffice, in order to read documents sent to me by various companies to be a far worse kind of lockin, but too many people are already locked in, so they don't realise the situation. Apple wouldn't be having these kinds of issues if they'd established a microsoft-level stranglehold over the market already.
Well it wouldn't be just to suit you... There are many valid technical and business reasons for using an open format, that's why there are frequent stories about large organisations switching.
If their requirements are specialised or demanding, then it entirely depends what is so specialised about their needs... There are a lot of things openoffice can do, that msoffice can't... If these features are what you need, ms is out in the cold. Also, if you have a special requirement which neither app implements, you can at least hire programmers to implement it into openoffice.
You may need an office suite to run on multiple platforms (linux, solaris) You may need your office suite to behave the same on multiple platforms (msoffice for windows and mac are wildly different) You may have java, javascript or python programmers on staff to write macros, msoffice only allows macros to be written in vba. You may need ISO compliance. You have have extra specialised requirements, that require you to make in house modifications to the core code. You may need to parse documents using external programs - this is much easier with xml based documents in an open format. You might want the ability to give employees/students/users/etc their own copy to run at home. You might need to parse the documents as they enter your organisation checking for embedded malware, viruses etc.. much easier with an open format.
You can use scribus, which aims to provide an open alternative to ms publisher... I've never really used either, so i can't comment on relative features etc.
SUN will provide support for openoffice, at a price. You don't get support for any other office suite for free either, you either have to pay for it and get support bundled, or you pay for it and then pay extra for support. At least openoffice is free, so those who don't want support don't need to pay anything.
This plugin is incomplete, and fails on all but the simplest of files... It also doesn't insert itself into the open/save dialog, it adds new import/export as odf options to the menu, which are entirely counterintuitive... It is not possible to autosave as odf, and saving manually requires going through a seperate process, as does loading. The plugin is designed to discourage the use of ODF and make it as difficult as possible.
They do this in the wrong way... The format doesn't need to cater for old bugs, that's utterly ridiculous.
Instead of the tags like "handlesmallcapslikemsword95formac" or whatever they have, they should handle this in the conversion stage, and convert the buggy behaviour to a standard way of representing the same thing (in the above example, small caps are 2pt smaller than they should be, so reduce the font size by 2pt)... And if converting back the other way, this can also be taken into account.
With their way, only files originally created with these old buggy apps will actually ever convert back, it wont be possible to convert a newer file back to an older format properly.
It seems that their own knowledge of the format is severely lacking too... Try opening or saving a word file with ms publisher, the support is far worse than any version of openoffice i've seen.
Used dumb terminals come up on ebay regularly, and are usually quite cheap... They're also small and quiet, and consume a lot less power than an old PC while also being more reliable.
When PNG was designed, a 109mhz processor would have been considered very fast. When JPEG was first designed, it took 30+ seconds to decode and display a 640x480 file... So maybe now is the right time to use a slower but more efficient compression routine, as it would almost certainly still be faster on modern computers than JPEG/PNG were when new. Although, with the greater availability of bandwidth nowadays there's also less of a need for such compression anyway.
I've heard this argument before, but never with an actual list of what features are supposedly not supported. And, microsoft have always been a member of OASIS and could have contributed to the development of the ODF format, it was their choice not to.
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They would have to dance for your amusement in order to get paid.
They wont be able to dance once in front of a camera, and sell it infinite times anymore, which is much more fair. Continue working, continue being paid.
Yes, i have read and written to HFS+ partitions using linux.
The restriction is that it doesn't support journaled HFS+ for writing (as in, it works but is unsupported because it hasnt been tested enough to be sure it wont corrupt the journal). The support is right there in the stock kernel sources, as well as support for mac partition tables (as used on PPC macs) which will also be created when you format an ipod on a mac.
As for distro support, that I don't know, yellow dog obviously supports it as i'm sure would any PPC distro, and any distro when you've compiled the kernel yourself.
That's very true, however.
Licenses like the GPL actually actually waive some aspects of copyright law. That is, they give you the end user additional rights that you would not have under straight copyright law.
The aim is also to benefit the maximum number of people, while preventing a small number getting rich at the expense and exclusion of the masses.
Can't speak for NTFS, but my mp3 player uses HFS+ as a filesystem, which both linux and osx can access perfectly well.
On the other hand, a new filesystem designed specifically for embedded use would probably be a worthwhile development, and perhaps these patents will cause someone to do just that. Not that microsoft aren't too arrogant to include support for anyone else's filesystem.
I was responding to the blanket statement that "anyone with special requirements will be unable to use openoffice". I was showing that special requirements can go either way.
Programs supporting opendocument have APIs too... I understand koffice is especially powerfull in this regard, and i believe IBM's workplace suite is too.
No scanner reads the files thoroughly, it may have some idea where to look for common macros but that's about it... There are still more undocumented places where malware could hide, and the scanner has no hope of validating any of the data content to try and weed out potential exploits.
And where did you hear that it's ok to take a copy of msoffice from work and run it at home? I've never seen such a clause, and it would certainly terminate when you move jobs anyway, and use your files to ransom you into buying a copy.
Your complaint however, is a reason to stop using ms publisher as soon as possible.
Your locked in to it, and your files are being held to ransom in a proprietary format, and because of that your stuck with using a sub-par application.
As you already said, scribus offers finer controls and the only reason it takes you longer to work with it, is lack of experience with it.
Why not create all new files with scribus, and only edit old ones using publisher... That way you can gradually free yourself from the dangers and hassles of proprietary files, and get used to a new app. It need not be scribus either, there are plenty of other DTP apps out there.
Incompetent windows people aren't a luxury... Competent ones are, just the same as competent unix people.
Those same incompetent windows people, often don't know unix exists, or have ever tried using it, or else they would be incompetent unix people too.
People actually capable of setting windows up properly are few and far between, and much harder to find among the crowds of incompetent people.
Most ISP tech support is utterly useless tho, they will tell you to reboot, and reinstall the drivers etc, for hours on end, when the real problem is an outage at the network level. Also, supporting windows (or any graphical system) over the phone is very hard, as describing a graphical interface verbally is open to interpretation on both ends. A command line is much easier, since you can directly read the input/output without the need for further interpretation (you can read and write, cant you?).
If your lucky, you can get yourself through to someone in the networking department of the ISP, who actually has a clue what's going on, and they will usually have some unix knowledge too.
On the other hand, some ISPs have a policy of never admitting they had an outage, and trying to blame the customer for their lack of connectivity.
Some smaller ISPs will go out of their way to help non windows users, and sometimes even advertise this as a selling point of the ISP. Your also more likely to get a straight answer out of a smaller ISP, like:
"There's an outage in your local telephone exchange, it should be back up in 30 minutes, so go do something else rather than wasting the next half hour pointlessly rebooting"...
I've actually known people who's systems were perfectly working, when the ISP had an outage and they called support, the support dept made them mess with drivers and IP configuration which actually broke their connectivity such that it still wasn't working when the ISP's outage was fixed. Had the done nothing to their machine, and simply waited, it would have worked again once the ISP fixed their problem.
Well, while a competent IT department can usually keep both linux and windows secure for the most part...
A sufficiently complex IT department can fix linux bugs themselves, while they have to wait for microsoft to provide a fix, which can often be up to a month.
Aside from that, if your staff are sufficiently skilled they will be able to make significant savings by using linux. Most of the complaints about the cost of staff skilled enough to run linux, don't take into account that staff to run windows securely cost the same or more.
I've seen several comparisons that compare the cheapest staff running windows, with expensive and competent linux admins. In practice, this would result in a horrendously unreliable and insecure windows network. Try putting a job advertisement up, offering a low wage to run a windows based network and see the quality of your applicants.
It's less to do with shoddy workers, and more to do with commercial attitudes.
Microsoft products gain a lot of their stability problems from their sheer complexity. Windows is massively more complicated than any other OS, which results in far more places for bugs to lurk, and makes it much harder to maintain. The extra complexity was desired from a commercial perspective, because it makes the software harder to clone (remember the dos clones?).
They also make a business decision when deciding whether or not to fix problems:
Will the cost of producing the fix, cost more than the business that will be lost by not fixing it?
Because of vendor lock-in, the chance of losing customers is much lower (the customers has to do the same assessment, will the cost caused by the bug outweigh the cost of migrating away), so the chance of bugs being fixed is much lower.
In short, there is very little incentive for microsoft to improve their products, and the only people who do have that incentive (the users/customers) don't have the ability to make the necessary fixes. In contrast, open source software is usually written by people who use the software too, and any user has the potential to fix bugs or pay someone else to do it.
There is also no incentive for open source software to be more complex than it needs to be, infact doing so is a negative because it reduces the chances of other people wanting to help develop it.
Many office workers have been moved between different versions of windows, dos and macos running a variety of different applications. Often supposedly the same applications also differ wildly between platforms (mac versions of msoffice and ie are very different to the windows versions).
That said, the actual requirements of these workers is fairly low, and it won't take them too long to re-learn, especially if the new applications are similar to the old ones.
The amount of retraining required for an average user to migrate from xp/msoffice2003 to kde/openoffice is very small, and could easily be less than the retraining required to migrate to vista/office2007.
As for admin staff, competent linux admins are no more expensive than competent windows admins, but will usually be able to manage more machines. Sure, you can use cheaper and less competent staff to run windows systems, and these less competent staff will probably have never heard of linux... But do you really want incompetent staff running your network? Such staff are likely to configure your network poorly, resulting in virus outbreaks, hacks and/or downtime.
In terms of software costs, the more machines you have the more you save with linux... And it's not just the cost of the OS, most common apps are available for free too, whereas on windows you often have to buy expensive extras (decent firewall, office apps, antivirus, secure remote management programs, anti spyware)
The migration can also be handled gradually, you can migrate windows users to running openoffice, firefox etc. There is a plugin for msoffice to support opendocument files now, and openoffice can read ms files fairly reliably (no worse than using multiple versions of word).
Don't forget that PC's often get replaced every few years, and the apps being used replaced along with them. If well thought out, a migration can be planned over several years, starting by ensuring that any custom in-house apps are platform agnostic (which should always be mandated in any case, because you never know what you might want to be running in the future) and any data is stored in open vendor-neutral formats.
What is more tried and trusted than unix, which has been around a lot longer than windows and was widely used long before windows even existed.
Would you rather those taxes you pay, go into the pockets of microsoft shareholders? Or be saved for other things, like schools etc... Or paid to local staff to support open software.
You claim that linux is not "tried and trusted", and yet it has been successfully implemented in many places already, and is based on unix which has been around even longer. On the other hand, windows may be widely implemented but it is also widely known to be unreliable, insecure and flawed.
Not that linux is perfect, but it does have many advantages from a state government perspective:
Any flaws it has, can be fixed using some of the money you save on licensing, if everyone does this linux will improve very quickly.
It's free and open, which saves you not only the cost of buying the software, but also significant savings in procurement procedures and license management. You can also supply the exact same software for people to run at home if they need to.
The use of open file formats means that state residents are not forced to buy expensive proprietary software to interact with the state, plus important government records will still be readable in years to come. Several states have already realised how important this is.
The reason companies are considering linux, and local governments aren't, is because in a company there is pressure from above to save money, thus making the company more profitable. Government workers don't care how much money they waste, anything they save will just be squandered elsewhere. This is why state run services are so inefficient, and cost the states running them millions, yet when the services are sold to commercial companies they become hugely profitable (look at the privatisation of water/gas/etc in the UK), if these government services had been run in the same way as a commercial business they could have been huge money earners for the government.
There are so many other areas of lock-in in the IT industry, many of which are much worse and harder to work around than Apple's. Look at microsoft's document formats not to mention their own DRM schemes, and various other methods of lock-in.
Now, while i agree that any kind of lockin, including apple's is bad, they are by no means the worst offender. Many people have already mentioned the burn to CD method, and you can always buy your music from somewhere else, apple don't have a monopoly on music distribution, or even sufficient grip over the market to assert any pressure on consumers. The tie-in is also one way, you can play standard drm-free mp3s on the ipod anyway.
I consider being forced to run windows and/or msoffice, in order to read documents sent to me by various companies to be a far worse kind of lockin, but too many people are already locked in, so they don't realise the situation. Apple wouldn't be having these kinds of issues if they'd established a microsoft-level stranglehold over the market already.
Well it wouldn't be just to suit you...
There are many valid technical and business reasons for using an open format, that's why there are frequent stories about large organisations switching.
If their requirements are specialised or demanding, then it entirely depends what is so specialised about their needs...
There are a lot of things openoffice can do, that msoffice can't... If these features are what you need, ms is out in the cold. Also, if you have a special requirement which neither app implements, you can at least hire programmers to implement it into openoffice.
You may need an office suite to run on multiple platforms (linux, solaris)
You may need your office suite to behave the same on multiple platforms (msoffice for windows and mac are wildly different)
You may have java, javascript or python programmers on staff to write macros, msoffice only allows macros to be written in vba.
You may need ISO compliance.
You have have extra specialised requirements, that require you to make in house modifications to the core code.
You may need to parse documents using external programs - this is much easier with xml based documents in an open format.
You might want the ability to give employees/students/users/etc their own copy to run at home.
You might need to parse the documents as they enter your organisation checking for embedded malware, viruses etc.. much easier with an open format.
You can use scribus, which aims to provide an open alternative to ms publisher...
I've never really used either, so i can't comment on relative features etc.
SUN will provide support for openoffice, at a price.
You don't get support for any other office suite for free either, you either have to pay for it and get support bundled, or you pay for it and then pay extra for support. At least openoffice is free, so those who don't want support don't need to pay anything.
This plugin is incomplete, and fails on all but the simplest of files...
It also doesn't insert itself into the open/save dialog, it adds new import/export as odf options to the menu, which are entirely counterintuitive...
It is not possible to autosave as odf, and saving manually requires going through a seperate process, as does loading. The plugin is designed to discourage the use of ODF and make it as difficult as possible.
They do this in the wrong way... The format doesn't need to cater for old bugs, that's utterly ridiculous.
Instead of the tags like "handlesmallcapslikemsword95formac" or whatever they have, they should handle this in the conversion stage, and convert the buggy behaviour to a standard way of representing the same thing (in the above example, small caps are 2pt smaller than they should be, so reduce the font size by 2pt)...
And if converting back the other way, this can also be taken into account.
With their way, only files originally created with these old buggy apps will actually ever convert back, it wont be possible to convert a newer file back to an older format properly.
It seems that their own knowledge of the format is severely lacking too...
Try opening or saving a word file with ms publisher, the support is far worse than any version of openoffice i've seen.
Used dumb terminals come up on ebay regularly, and are usually quite cheap...
They're also small and quiet, and consume a lot less power than an old PC while also being more reliable.
What you want is a dumb terminal, and these already exist and are widely available.
Most support X11/XDMCP or RDP.
When PNG was designed, a 109mhz processor would have been considered very fast.
When JPEG was first designed, it took 30+ seconds to decode and display a 640x480 file...
So maybe now is the right time to use a slower but more efficient compression routine, as it would almost certainly still be faster on modern computers than JPEG/PNG were when new. Although, with the greater availability of bandwidth nowadays there's also less of a need for such compression anyway.
I've heard this argument before, but never with an actual list of what features are supposedly not supported.
And, microsoft have always been a member of OASIS and could have contributed to the development of the ODF format, it was their choice not to.