And you'd need to reset and reinitialize the display when you left windows and returned to the native OS... Videocards aren't designed to be virtualized, and nor are their drivers.
Virtually every unix around at the time supported TCP/IP natively... VMS also had support for TCP/IP, tho i don't think it was on by default. AmigaOS had an official TCP stack made by Commodore (admittedly it was pretty crap, so most people ran third party stacks) Most of the Internet consisted of unix machines anyway. Microsoft was behind the curve in the days before windows 95, because users of DOS, whether running windows on top of it or not, had to obtain a third party stack in order to connect, whereas many unixes could connect out of the box.
As you've found bugs during use, have you bothered reporting them? I've found headings to be very buggy on word too, sometimes if you have a mix of landscape and portrait pages the page headers will flip back and forth between the different sizes.
Bugs in word cost businesses and non-profits millions every year... Pretty much all software is buggy, but we have a better chance of improving openoffice than we do word.
There's nothing to prevent these companies from joining OASIS and contributing towards future versions of the ODF standard... Infact, had they done this in the first place instead of trying to ignore it, this problem wouldn't exist now.
Why? For pointing out that rich successful businessmen don't become rich and successful by giving money away? There's always something to be gained, whether it's PR, tax breaks or increased product/brand exposure. Can you prove me wrong?
Why do you even need the source? Once multiple implementations of a specification are available, and people start trying to interoperate with them, compatibility issues will get discovered and reported, and developers will investigate and determine which implementation is the buggy one by comparing output against the spec.
All a PR stunt and tax scam. An attempt to appear generous, and buy some goodwill, while actually profiting in the background through tax breaks, free advertising and increased market share. Not saying that their actions don't have positive side effects, but the primary reason they're doing it is to benefit their own business and you shouldn't lose sight of that.
I have several monitors that will handle HDTV resolutions, but no actual HDTV... Is there any way to convert HDTV signals to work with a VGA, 13W3 or DVI monitor? I don't want to buy a whole new TV just to play a few videogames and watch a small percentage of movies...
Let's not forget that microsoft are doing the same with OpenDocument and OfficeXML... Opendocument came first, was agreed upon by multiple vendors, and microsoft were invited to join the committee that defined the standard and contribute towards it... They refused, and later created their own format, which is just going to hurt both formats and the consumers.
Well, Yes... If it becomes too hard to pirate windows, then of those millions of people who run pirated copies, many will stick with older versions, and some will move to linux or pirated macosx... Either way, it reduces the marketshare of vista. Just think, where would microsoft be without piracy? Most of asia would probably be running linux by now.
Which is why they said "when all other things are equal"... They're saying if an open and proprietary piece of software are equal on quality, usefullness and price, then the open one should be chosen.
Aside from that, there are many valid business reasons to choose open source:
Support - support can be gotten from local vendors (it makes sense for a government to spend money locally instead of to a foreign company, if they spend locally they get a portion of it back in tax and contribute to their own local economy)
Dependency - Not being dependent on another country, aside from the political reasons, currency fluctuations can cause significant problems, and there's the "business risk" of using a foreign product (what if trade relations sour?)
Accountability - Being able to examine and improve the sourcecode can be very usefull, especially for a large organisation... And especially in a country where labour is relatively cheap. Getting a foreign proprietary vendor to implement a feature you need is often very difficult, hiring some local contract programmers to write it could work out a lot cheaper and quicker, especially if you work together with other organisations that need the same features.
Future proofing - Having the source means that, if need be, you can continue supporting the code indefinately... proprietary software essentially dies once it's original vendor stops supporting it. This vendor can then hold you to ransom to buy the new versions, or may just leave you high and dry.
Microsoft own and control future versions of their format, and control the biggest (and currently only) implementation of it. ODF on the other hand is controlled by a group of companies, a group that microsoft was given every chance to join. Any standard should be controlled in this way, either by a group of competing companies or an independent body, otherwise it can always be twisted to favour one vendor at the expense of another.
Microsoft were invited to participate in the development of the ODF format, and yet they refused. This was before ODF got any momentum, so microsoft had no motivation to pay lip service to open formats yet. Organisations didn't start waking up to the dangers of proprietary formats until after ODF version 1 was finalised... There's no reason why microsoft couldn't participate in the development of future versions, they just choose not to. Obviously it would be much better to have a single standard with every vendor on board.
Even DB2 isn't so proprietary... It's an implementation of SQL, and although SQL could be a lot more standardized than it is, in the vast majority of cases where a database is required it's not too much work to substitute DB2, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL or Postgres etc...
Part of the size difference is because opendocument tries to reuse existing standards wherever possible (mathml, images are stored as jpeg/png/whatever format etc) and microsoft's format tries to reinvent the wheel each time.
But what's to say microsoft's implementation actually follows the published spec? Just because they published the spec, doesn't mean they will follow it. This is aiming at non technical people who want openly documented standards, but lack the technical knowledge to actually verify the claims.
This "bridge" software as you put it, has many flaws in it's current incarnation... The support for ODF is very poor, images are stripped, tables of contents are lost, hyperlinks are made into the most generic form of hyperlinks (formatting is lost) and many more such issues...
Also, when you install the plugin into word, you don't get an extra format listed in the save as dialog, you get seperate menu options entitles "open odf" and "save as odf"... If you try to save as odf, your prompted to first save the file in a proprietary microsoft format before you can "convert" it. I`m sure this is intentional, so people will find it inconvenient to first save and then convert.
So, vista now has traffic shaping... Linux has had this for years, as i`m sure have many other OS's, i've been using the linux traffic shaping facilities to deprioritise bittorrent traffic and prioritise voip traffic for quite some time.
As for the stack having been rewritten from the ground up, it's amusing to see them make lots of the same mistakes that have been made in other tcp stacks when they were newly written too.
The beauty of laptop mode, is that, short of a hardware failure or user stupidity, a laptop knows how much battery is left and won't just power off randomly. Laptop mode disabled the delayed writes feature when your battery gets below about 10%.
That's a step backwards... With 3.1, you could disable the swap if you had 8 or 16mb of ram, and performance was hugely improved (not sure why, i imagine the swapping system was just incredibly poorly designed).
Well, with a low power CPU you could get away without a CPU fan too... Also, flash makes the machine more resilient to knocks and sudden movement. What would be a nice idea tho, is to kit a laptop out with a huge amount of normal ram, or slightly slower ram made from obsolete chips... So you could cache the entire OS/apps, and then spin down the drive. You could also have a separate battery to keep the ram live while the rest of the machine is turned off, and a program/procedure to resync the data in this area onto the permanent storage of a physical (potentially external) disk. Or you could just store the OS and apps in here, and store your data on flash devices, so no problems if the power is lost. This setup would not only use less power, but also be faster than a spinning drive.
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And you'd need to reset and reinitialize the display when you left windows and returned to the native OS... Videocards aren't designed to be virtualized, and nor are their drivers.
Virtually every unix around at the time supported TCP/IP natively...
VMS also had support for TCP/IP, tho i don't think it was on by default.
AmigaOS had an official TCP stack made by Commodore (admittedly it was pretty crap, so most people ran third party stacks)
Most of the Internet consisted of unix machines anyway.
Microsoft was behind the curve in the days before windows 95, because users of DOS, whether running windows on top of it or not, had to obtain a third party stack in order to connect, whereas many unixes could connect out of the box.
As you've found bugs during use, have you bothered reporting them?
I've found headings to be very buggy on word too, sometimes if you have a mix of landscape and portrait pages the page headers will flip back and forth between the different sizes.
Have you tried reporting these issues as bugs to the openoffice developers? Or, voting for existing bugs if someone else has already reported them.
It's supported 65536 rows since version 2.0.
Bugs in word cost businesses and non-profits millions every year...
Pretty much all software is buggy, but we have a better chance of improving openoffice than we do word.
There's nothing to prevent these companies from joining OASIS and contributing towards future versions of the ODF standard...
Infact, had they done this in the first place instead of trying to ignore it, this problem wouldn't exist now.
Why? For pointing out that rich successful businessmen don't become rich and successful by giving money away?
There's always something to be gained, whether it's PR, tax breaks or increased product/brand exposure.
Can you prove me wrong?
Do you really think they would ever have gotten 95% of the market if it weren't for piracy?
Why do you even need the source?
Once multiple implementations of a specification are available, and people start trying to interoperate with them, compatibility issues will get discovered and reported, and developers will investigate and determine which implementation is the buggy one by comparing output against the spec.
All a PR stunt and tax scam.
An attempt to appear generous, and buy some goodwill, while actually profiting in the background through tax breaks, free advertising and increased market share.
Not saying that their actions don't have positive side effects, but the primary reason they're doing it is to benefit their own business and you shouldn't lose sight of that.
I have several monitors that will handle HDTV resolutions, but no actual HDTV...
Is there any way to convert HDTV signals to work with a VGA, 13W3 or DVI monitor? I don't want to buy a whole new TV just to play a few videogames and watch a small percentage of movies...
Let's not forget that microsoft are doing the same with OpenDocument and OfficeXML...
Opendocument came first, was agreed upon by multiple vendors, and microsoft were invited to join the committee that defined the standard and contribute towards it... They refused, and later created their own format, which is just going to hurt both formats and the consumers.
Well, Yes...
If it becomes too hard to pirate windows, then of those millions of people who run pirated copies, many will stick with older versions, and some will move to linux or pirated macosx... Either way, it reduces the marketshare of vista.
Just think, where would microsoft be without piracy? Most of asia would probably be running linux by now.
Which is why they said "when all other things are equal"...
They're saying if an open and proprietary piece of software are equal on quality, usefullness and price, then the open one should be chosen.
Aside from that, there are many valid business reasons to choose open source:
Support - support can be gotten from local vendors (it makes sense for a government to spend money locally instead of to a foreign company, if they spend locally they get a portion of it back in tax and contribute to their own local economy)
Dependency - Not being dependent on another country, aside from the political reasons, currency fluctuations can cause significant problems, and there's the "business risk" of using a foreign product (what if trade relations sour?)
Accountability - Being able to examine and improve the sourcecode can be very usefull, especially for a large organisation... And especially in a country where labour is relatively cheap. Getting a foreign proprietary vendor to implement a feature you need is often very difficult, hiring some local contract programmers to write it could work out a lot cheaper and quicker, especially if you work together with other organisations that need the same features.
Future proofing - Having the source means that, if need be, you can continue supporting the code indefinately... proprietary software essentially dies once it's original vendor stops supporting it. This vendor can then hold you to ransom to buy the new versions, or may just leave you high and dry.
Microsoft own and control future versions of their format, and control the biggest (and currently only) implementation of it.
ODF on the other hand is controlled by a group of companies, a group that microsoft was given every chance to join. Any standard should be controlled in this way, either by a group of competing companies or an independent body, otherwise it can always be twisted to favour one vendor at the expense of another.
Microsoft were invited to participate in the development of the ODF format, and yet they refused.
This was before ODF got any momentum, so microsoft had no motivation to pay lip service to open formats yet. Organisations didn't start waking up to the dangers of proprietary formats until after ODF version 1 was finalised... There's no reason why microsoft couldn't participate in the development of future versions, they just choose not to.
Obviously it would be much better to have a single standard with every vendor on board.
Even DB2 isn't so proprietary...
It's an implementation of SQL, and although SQL could be a lot more standardized than it is, in the vast majority of cases where a database is required it's not too much work to substitute DB2, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL or Postgres etc...
Part of the size difference is because opendocument tries to reuse existing standards wherever possible (mathml, images are stored as jpeg/png/whatever format etc) and microsoft's format tries to reinvent the wheel each time.
But what's to say microsoft's implementation actually follows the published spec? Just because they published the spec, doesn't mean they will follow it. This is aiming at non technical people who want openly documented standards, but lack the technical knowledge to actually verify the claims.
This "bridge" software as you put it, has many flaws in it's current incarnation...
The support for ODF is very poor, images are stripped, tables of contents are lost, hyperlinks are made into the most generic form of hyperlinks (formatting is lost) and many more such issues...
Also, when you install the plugin into word, you don't get an extra format listed in the save as dialog, you get seperate menu options entitles "open odf" and "save as odf"... If you try to save as odf, your prompted to first save the file in a proprietary microsoft format before you can "convert" it. I`m sure this is intentional, so people will find it inconvenient to first save and then convert.
So, vista now has traffic shaping...
Linux has had this for years, as i`m sure have many other OS's, i've been using the linux traffic shaping facilities to deprioritise bittorrent traffic and prioritise voip traffic for quite some time.
As for the stack having been rewritten from the ground up, it's amusing to see them make lots of the same mistakes that have been made in other tcp stacks when they were newly written too.
The beauty of laptop mode, is that, short of a hardware failure or user stupidity, a laptop knows how much battery is left and won't just power off randomly. Laptop mode disabled the delayed writes feature when your battery gets below about 10%.
That's a step backwards...
With 3.1, you could disable the swap if you had 8 or 16mb of ram, and performance was hugely improved (not sure why, i imagine the swapping system was just incredibly poorly designed).
Well, with a low power CPU you could get away without a CPU fan too...
Also, flash makes the machine more resilient to knocks and sudden movement.
What would be a nice idea tho, is to kit a laptop out with a huge amount of normal ram, or slightly slower ram made from obsolete chips... So you could cache the entire OS/apps, and then spin down the drive. You could also have a separate battery to keep the ram live while the rest of the machine is turned off, and a program/procedure to resync the data in this area onto the permanent storage of a physical (potentially external) disk.
Or you could just store the OS and apps in here, and store your data on flash devices, so no problems if the power is lost.
This setup would not only use less power, but also be faster than a spinning drive.