I use firefox heavily on both Windows and Linux, and for some reason I have significantly more problems under windows, even with significantly more memory on the Windows box. I don't know if this is something that can be blamed on Windows, or if its just the result of bad decisions made by the firefox developers.
On 9/11/2001 something just short of 5k people died at the hands of terrorists, while around 25k died of starvation, and 32k died in auto accidents. Of course the second two happend again on 9/12, and 9/13, and 9/14...
One problem with this argument is that American workers are stuck in a position where they really can't compete. One big reason is the cost of real-estate in the US. Companies here have spent decades insisting that they needed to have all their workers in a handful of big cities. The result has been that the cost of real-estate near the big cities has gone up to the limit of what people can afford. Now companies are deciding that they don't need everyone sitting in the same offices anymore, but instead of moving jobs out to the more rural areas of the country they are taking the even cheaper route and moving the jobs overseas.
The US worker has also been saddled with some of the highest taxes in the world relative to the benefit we see as individuals. Most of the money goes to supporting an overgrown military that is trying to police the whole world. If the US were to seriously scale back it's military, many of the countries our workers are competing with would have to increase their military spending to compensate for the loss of stability a super-power ally provides.
I don't argue that the US has been the cradle of most of the ideas that have shaped the modern world, but I think that era has come to an end. By moving our jobs overseas we have completely given up our competitive advantage. There is nothing magic about being an American that automatically results in great invention and prosperity. The magic is in freedom. I am glad that we are loosing our monopoly on that resource, but we should have been smart enough keep our competitive edge as best we could through the transition.
I believe that the US can no longer sustain super-power status. If we try, we will go broke. Our workers can not compete in the world marketplace with such a burden tied to our backs. Sadly, we don't have time to learn this lesson the hard way. Our government deficit is so high that when the shock waves start to hit I fear the dollar wont survive.
Many security vulnerabilities are first discovered as crashes. If you can find a way to crash a process then you have made it do something its not supposed to do. Once you get into that area of undefined behavior the chances are good that the attack can be "tweaked" to execute arbitrary code. That is why crashes should be treated as security issues until it is proven otherwise, and often the simplest way to prove otherwise is to fix the bug.
I left Yahoo when they started throwing up so much garbage on their front page related to every single service they were trying to offer. It started getting real hard to find the content among all the self advertising.
Google has very much _not_ made that mistake. Their front page is about as simple as it can get.
My knowledge of electronics is a little bit rusty, but wouldn't it be hard to keep a consistant 5V on such a circuit, considering the physical length of the circuit and the degree of variable draw from the machines. I guess it could be helped to a large degree with a large capasitor in each PC, or in each cabinet.
I've actually been considering trying something like this on a lesser scale for a small rack of servers in my basement. I havn't looked yet to see how much it would cost to buy a big enough power supply with the right DC voltages. My goal is mainly to reduce the noise from all the fans, but I also suspect a single high efficiency power supply would save power over a stack of standard supplies.
What if you can download standard screwdrivers for free? What if tool-boxes from all of the major tool-box retailers (except one) already contained the standard screw drivers, or came with an offer to send you the new standard as soon as it was implemented?
You analogy (like most analogies) kind of falls flat. Why is it people never want to discuss the thing they are discussing?
So where do you think the charities get the money they have if nobody is donating? And why is it so many people are flat out lying about their charitable donations at tax time and nobody seems to get caught?
I guess you can believe what ever makes you feel better. Bill giving 2% still doesn't impress me.
and how many people really donate $1000 a year to charity? I don't mean they SAY they do on their taxes, or they donate an overvalued used computer or something else so that on paper it looks like $1000, but really donate it straight from their bank.
Or maybe thats just what selfish people like to tell themselves so that they don't have to feel guilty. I don't consider it to be anything to brag about; but for the sake of this discussion I give around 10% of my income to various charities. And its not money I have nothing else to do with. I support my wife and two kids on a relatively modist salary. Sometimes it gets hard to find the money to pay the bills, but some things are just more important than my own petty problems.
When Bill spends 2% of his income on charity work I am not impressed. Yes, its better than nothing, but I'm not going to nominate him for sainthood.
Who says evolution has to be genetic? Societal evolution can work under the same principles as as genetic evolution. Societies with stronger survival traits will grow more quickly and crowd out societies with weaker ones.
I personaly will not buy any album that does not have the CD logo on it. At this point that prety much means I'm not buying any music from the major labels.
The first is that "innovation" is nothing but a marketing buzzword. People tend to get all excited about it, but what is really imortant is "interoperability" although it is much less sexy. For instance, what made the Internet a booming success was that anyone could create applications or web-pages because open standards like tcp/http/html made it possible. Content on the pre-internet AOL was certainly more innovative than the early web, but the web won because there was no gatekeeper to slow things down and collect a toll. Looking at the plight of the AOL programmer the explosion of the web was a bad thing, but in the end we all are better off.
The second point I think you are missing is that most of the employment for developers comes from custom or in-house software. It is a very small percentage of developers that are employed doing the "next big thing".
If you want a Lamborgini in your garage, thats fine with me. But if you want to do it by blocking competition with proprietary protocols that lock me out of my own data, then we have a problem.
I have personaly had about all the innovation I can take. When there is something that I want to do and can't, it is almost always becuse of proprietary lock-in and closed data. I would love nothing better than to see an end to this age of so-called innovation, and say hello to a new age of openness. Sorry if you don't get your Lamborgini.
While I agree 100% with what you say, I don't believe that the majority of CEOs in the world do. At least in companies that I have worked for the sales staff "brings in the money" and technical staff are just "overhead".
Do you think that this could be used to supplement a conventional system? Baffles in the top of the convection chamber could be closed when the outside air gets too hot or humid, and this may be a nice backup for partial or total failure of the standard system.
I don't really see the issue as usable space as much as material and construction costs. If your designing new construction you would eventually reach a point where you could either do a conventional roof, or build a taller one with dampeners and a convection chamber. The question would then be one of ROI.
If the air around the computers is at 70 degrees then I would expect the air several hundred feet above the computers to be more like 80 or 90 degrees. (No science here, just pulling numbers.) Dampeners could be installed to stop airflow when it is warmer outside than in the roof chamber. When the dampeners are closed the system would work just the same as existing systems today. In a cool climate this may not happen much at all.
I know that convection alone isn't a quick process, but my thinking was that specific cooling would be done by normal methods, and the convection cycle would exist just to make things more efficient. Instead of cooling the warmer air, use convection to collect it in a chamber where it can be exchanged with cooler outside air.
This could also work as a buffer for failures in the main cooling system. I worked in a datacenter where the cooling system failed completely. (The failure resulted from a botched install of a redundant system.) The temperature rose 20 degrees in two minutes and kept going. If there had been someplace for the heat to go I think we would have been much better off.
I do still think my idea is probably daft, and your reasoning is probably better than mine. It is still an interesting thought though. Maybe a smaller solution could work. Just make the room 20 feet taller and install fans to exchange outside air with what is in the top of the room.
I suspect that the humidity of the outside air would be another issue. High humidity would promote corrosion and low humidity would promote static electricity.
Ever try to pull a string around a corner, or ten corners? Your pull may be the same, but the result is not.
When the air is forced to turn a corner it creates more friction than if it is pushed/pulled in a straight line. This serves to both heat the air, and to cause the motors creating the negative/positive atmospheres to do that much more work.
I do wonder how much difference either effect really has. Doesn't seem like there should be much. Raised floors are optimal for taking advantage of convection currents, and I think that alone would overcome any disadvantages from sharp turns.
I've often wondered if it would make sense to design a data-center with several hundred feet of open space above it like a giant chimney. The roof could be designed to allow free air-flow but keep out the elements. Then cooled aid is pumped into the lower level and should remain there until it is heated and convection lifts it away. This way the outside air could be cooled as it is brought in, instead of trying to cool the hot air that is already inside. I'm sure someone will be able to tell me why this idea is daft.:)
So the *only* reason someone might think that sticking with a product that is used by 90% of market (formats included) is that they were influenced by Microsoft?
No, I dont think that is what was said. And the fact is, that many of the polical organizations that are jumping into this arguement receive much of their funding from MS. Are you saying that MS funds these groups without thinking that it will bias the output?
I actually went through most of the submitted comments on the Mass website, and most of those opposed were from political organizations losting MS as a major contributor or founding member.
I don't believe that Linda was implying that these organizations are wholly owned subsidiaries of MS, but the connection to MS funding is clear.
I'd work more towards.pdf in the near-term and see how these openDoc formats shake out.
Great, so everyone can just sit back and wait to see how OpenDoc shakes out. Then in ten years we can all pat ourselves on the back because we took the safe route and lo-and-behold OpenDoc imploded. How exactly to you expect a conversion to take place if everyone is too chicken to stand up first?
There is also a flip-side to your logic. The fact is that there _will_ be a conversion over to XML document formats for Office applications. Microsoft has their prefered version, and the rest of the industry has theirs. Wouldn't it be a little irresponsible to convert to the new Microsoft format without waiting ten years or so to see which becomes dominent? Of course as all that time goes past you will still be using the old binary document formats that everyone knows are going to be obsolete.
I'd work more towards.pdf in the near-term and see how these openDoc formats shake out.
Massachusetts is going to be using pdf where it is appropriate. But pdf is not a format that can be effectively used for many purposes. Nobody is going to use pdf for spreadsheets for instance.
...as of now we only have the equivalent of a papal bull decreeing this is to be so. I suspect that there will be considerable push-back from the business (especially multi-state, multinational business) community which interacts with Massachusetts if this politicized OpenDocument requirement is applied too religiously.
Wow, two references to religion in the same paragraph. I guess we are supposed now see that the ODF movement is just religious idealism fostered by anti-Microsoft fanatics. Its funny that when Microsoft declares the future of XML office documents to be the yet incomplete MSO XML you believe them without question. But when a major customer declares that they will only accept ODF you become a skeptic. I think you have a little religion yourself.
Microsoft is not in business to give a new format a free-ride into ubiquity.
I never have, and never will accuse Microsoft of not acting in their own best interest. But as a customer, I have interests of my own. If MS, or any other company, chooses not to align themselves with my interests than I will not use their product.
Nearly all the members of the OpenDocument collective are Microsoft enemies and many of them are know to have launched lawsuits against Microsoft in the past. Some have even done this multiple times. ...
The members of the OpenDocument format group should be forced to signed a "NO Lawsuits" contract before its supported in Office.
Some companies have competitors and others have enemies. MS has enemies because of their long history of business practices that are designed to prevent competition, not win in the marketplace. Your suggestion of a "NO Lawsuits" contract would be ridiculous in any case, but especially so in light of Microsoft's history. No business would ever sign such an agreement, and in fact I don't see Microsoft stepping up to the plate to do so with their new "open" XML format. Your ignoring the fact that in almost every case MS lost the suit, or settled because they knew they would. MS has always been willing to break the law if they believe the benefits outweigh the penalties
One of the major charges brought against Microsoft vs. Sun in the JAVA case was the fact that Microsoft broke the Java potential by "intentionally" only supporting version Java 1.0.
That is a clear red herring, and does nothing to change the fact that MS _intentionally_ broke their agreements concerning Java, and _refused_ to remedy the situation by bringing their implementation into compliance. Sun wasn't looking for a $2B award from Microsoft when they created Java. They wanted a ubiquitous development platform to provide true competition in the software marketplace. Microsoft was willing to do anything to stop that from happening. Your focusing on one small aspect to avoid looking at the big picture.
Additionally what you are asking is for Microsoft to support and chase a format already widely discussed and described on the web as incomplete and broken.
I am not asking MS to do anything. I want open formats for Office Documents, and I don't care if MS has anything to do with that or not. What I will not do is fall for the argument that MS is rejecting OSF on technical grounds. MS will compete when it has to, but it will first do whatever it can to prevent competition from ever taking place.
I don't think there is a single file standard that has not be criticized by someone as being incomplete and broken, but in fact complaints about ODF have been really few. I don't recall seeing complaints anywhere that the standard is broken, and the only complaints I have heard about it being incomplete relate to the specification of spreadsheet formulas. For the most part this hasn't been a problem, but to address this concern efforts have already begun to turn the existing de-facto standards into a formal standard. Microsoft has made no effort to make their "standard" anything other than de-facto. (De fact
Maybe this is true in your backyard, but globally that is not the case. For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer, and open office is rapidly becoming popular in may overseas circles. I know I read that the open-office format is actually the most used format in the world when you consider that users of MSO are fairly equally divided among the various versions. I'm to lazy to look it up now, but it certainly seems plausible. And if its not the case now I expect it soon will be. Every office sweet that is not MSO is, or soon will be, supporting ODF as the default. It is also a given that the ODF formats have a much larger market share than Microsoft's XML format that hasn't even been released yet.
OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field.
Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere" nature of the platform. As a condition of calling their product JAVA Microsoft was required to support the standard properly, and they _chose_ not to. If there had been incidental compatibility issues that MS had shown an interest in resolving that would have been an entirely different matter. Instead they chose to ignore their obligations because they believed the legal bills would be less than the cost of allowing platform competition.
I find the suggestion that ODF is a subset of the MSO formats to be either ignorant or misleading. Many of the most demanding office users were heavily involved in the creation of the OD formats. For instance, Boing was very involved because they have unusually complex needs that they need addressed. They have to manage some of the most complicated documents in existence, and they have to be able to access those documents properly 30 years down the line.
If Microsoft was so concerned that there are important features missing from ODF then they had ample opportunity to bring that up in the standards process, but they chose instead to be uninvolved because they saw it as unimportant. ( That is their claim, but more likely they saw it as enabling open competition which they hate. )
Any features that MS sees as missing from ODF formats are most likely there because MS has a history of creating the data formats to serve the needs of the code instead of the needs of the data. In an inter-operable world the data must come first, but MS is not interested in an inter-operable world. Letting your data be defined by your code is a much faster way to write software, but it is one of the main factors that keeps one version of MSO from being able to properly read data from other formats. Its also the reason that MSO has had such a hard time converting to other formats like HTML.
OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec
I hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change. First of all, the MS track record for backward compatibility with their own older formats is well known to be piss poor. Second, in the history of computers I don't think there has ever been a document format more complex than ascii text that hasn't changed. But open formats like HTML have a much better track-record with backwards compatibility than proprietary formats ever have.
Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field. That is the driving reason behind everything they are doing in this arena. Their first choice would be to not support the format at all, but if that is not an option then they want to support it in a way that makes it appear broken or inferior. Given that goal, it seems that supporting the standard through a third party set of tools with only import/export instead of native support is the way to go.
I don't see the need for that on a modern desktop system. Most of the guidelines in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard come from a historical idea that you can share the same programs on every UNIX system on a site by mounting an NFS share on/usr, but this is an extra unnecessary complication for home users. Who even has separate / and/usr partitions today?
I think your usage of the word "most" is a little over-reaching. There are many reasons for having a smaller root partition with only critical tools installed.
Your point about it being an "unnecessary complication" for home users is also interesting. Firt, I would point out that there are more than "home users" that use Linux. Second, I would like to know exactly what complication you are talking about. If both directories are in the path, why would a user care which directory a given program is in?
One of Linux's advantages is that it is not aimed at any single segment of users, or usage scenarios. Thats not to say it can't meet the needs of specific user groups, but those needs are met in ways that don't excluse the needs of other user groups.
When doing server builds, I always have a small root partition for disaster recovery purposes. If I need to do a restore of/usr it is much simpler if it has its own partition, and if I can know that the binaries I am using to restore it wont be overwritten during the restore.
I think the parent tricked you! The official description is:
The/usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture independent data files.
Not at all. I was just making a general definition of/usr/share, not a legalistic one. I actually did point out later in the post that it is often used for man pages because they are architectualy independent. I have in fact seen executables shared from that directory in cluster environments with homogenious hardware. (Although it was not on Linux.)
I see this said often, and it's really just silly. Editing obscure files in/etc is the accepted and recommended way of configuring unix systems and services, whereas directly editing the Registry in Windows is neither recommended nor expected.
Not true. All windows configuration is done through the registry, just not always through regedit. Most Linux distros have graphical tools for configuring the system as well. What method is or is not recomended is moot. Windows doesn't recomend that you edit the registry directly because it is confusing and easy to screw up. The majority of windows users are not computer geeks, while the majority of linux users are. It's only natural that linux users would prefer going straight to/etc. That doesn't mean its the only way.
Also, as a windows user there have been many times that I have had to go straight to the registry to change things. For instance, its the only way I know of to lower your MTU when traversing a non-localy terminated VPN. I also go into the registry frequently to backup application configurations that I want to keep after a rebuild. Its much easier to grab app.conf out of/etc than it is to pull that data from the windows registry.
I think it is quite fair to draw a parallel between the registry and/etc, and in comparison linux wins hands down. Windows does generaly have better gui configuration tools than most linux distros, but that is becoming less and less true every day. In fact, I believe that some distros already have better gui configuration tools than windows; although that is often a matter of taste and perspective.
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I use firefox heavily on both Windows and Linux, and for some reason I have significantly more problems under windows, even with significantly more memory on the Windows box. I don't know if this is something that can be blamed on Windows, or if its just the result of bad decisions made by the firefox developers.
I read it on the Internet so it must be true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_accident
On 9/11/2001 something just short of 5k people died at the hands of terrorists, while around 25k died of starvation, and 32k died in auto accidents. Of course the second two happend again on 9/12, and 9/13, and 9/14 ...
One problem with this argument is that American workers are stuck in a position where they really can't compete. One big reason is the cost of real-estate in the US. Companies here have spent decades insisting that they needed to have all their workers in a handful of big cities. The result has been that the cost of real-estate near the big cities has gone up to the limit of what people can afford. Now companies are deciding that they don't need everyone sitting in the same offices anymore, but instead of moving jobs out to the more rural areas of the country they are taking the even cheaper route and moving the jobs overseas.
The US worker has also been saddled with some of the highest taxes in the world relative to the benefit we see as individuals. Most of the money goes to supporting an overgrown military that is trying to police the whole world. If the US were to seriously scale back it's military, many of the countries our workers are competing with would have to increase their military spending to compensate for the loss of stability a super-power ally provides.
I don't argue that the US has been the cradle of most of the ideas that have shaped the modern world, but I think that era has come to an end. By moving our jobs overseas we have completely given up our competitive advantage. There is nothing magic about being an American that automatically results in great invention and prosperity. The magic is in freedom. I am glad that we are loosing our monopoly on that resource, but we should have been smart enough keep our competitive edge as best we could through the transition.
I believe that the US can no longer sustain super-power status. If we try, we will go broke. Our workers can not compete in the world marketplace with such a burden tied to our backs. Sadly, we don't have time to learn this lesson the hard way. Our government deficit is so high that when the shock waves start to hit I fear the dollar wont survive.
Many security vulnerabilities are first discovered as crashes. If you can find a way to crash a process then you have made it do something its not supposed to do. Once you get into that area of undefined behavior the chances are good that the attack can be "tweaked" to execute arbitrary code. That is why crashes should be treated as security issues until it is proven otherwise, and often the simplest way to prove otherwise is to fix the bug.
I left Yahoo when they started throwing up so much garbage on their front page related to every single service they were trying to offer. It started getting real hard to find the content among all the self advertising.
Google has very much _not_ made that mistake. Their front page is about as simple as it can get.
My knowledge of electronics is a little bit rusty, but wouldn't it be hard to keep a consistant 5V on such a circuit, considering the physical length of the circuit and the degree of variable draw from the machines. I guess it could be helped to a large degree with a large capasitor in each PC, or in each cabinet.
I've actually been considering trying something like this on a lesser scale for a small rack of servers in my basement. I havn't looked yet to see how much it would cost to buy a big enough power supply with the right DC voltages. My goal is mainly to reduce the noise from all the fans, but I also suspect a single high efficiency power supply would save power over a stack of standard supplies.
You analogy (like most analogies) kind of falls flat. Why is it people never want to discuss the thing they are discussing?
So where do you think the charities get the money they have if nobody is donating? And why is it so many people are flat out lying about their charitable donations at tax time and nobody seems to get caught?
I guess you can believe what ever makes you feel better. Bill giving 2% still doesn't impress me.
Or maybe thats just what selfish people like to tell themselves so that they don't have to feel guilty. I don't consider it to be anything to brag about; but for the sake of this discussion I give around 10% of my income to various charities. And its not money I have nothing else to do with. I support my wife and two kids on a relatively modist salary. Sometimes it gets hard to find the money to pay the bills, but some things are just more important than my own petty problems. When Bill spends 2% of his income on charity work I am not impressed. Yes, its better than nothing, but I'm not going to nominate him for sainthood.
Who says evolution has to be genetic? Societal evolution can work under the same principles as as genetic evolution. Societies with stronger survival traits will grow more quickly and crowd out societies with weaker ones.
I personaly will not buy any album that does not have the CD logo on it. At this point that prety much means I'm not buying any music from the major labels.
But once you talk to everybody, how do you know that the shape you discerned isn't shaped by your own bias? :)
I think there are two things you are missing.
The first is that "innovation" is nothing but a marketing buzzword. People tend to get all excited about it, but what is really imortant is "interoperability" although it is much less sexy. For instance, what made the Internet a booming success was that anyone could create applications or web-pages because open standards like tcp/http/html made it possible. Content on the pre-internet AOL was certainly more innovative than the early web, but the web won because there was no gatekeeper to slow things down and collect a toll. Looking at the plight of the AOL programmer the explosion of the web was a bad thing, but in the end we all are better off.
The second point I think you are missing is that most of the employment for developers comes from custom or in-house software. It is a very small percentage of developers that are employed doing the "next big thing".
If you want a Lamborgini in your garage, thats fine with me. But if you want to do it by blocking competition with proprietary protocols that lock me out of my own data, then we have a problem.
I have personaly had about all the innovation I can take. When there is something that I want to do and can't, it is almost always becuse of proprietary lock-in and closed data. I would love nothing better than to see an end to this age of so-called innovation, and say hello to a new age of openness. Sorry if you don't get your Lamborgini.
While I agree 100% with what you say, I don't believe that the majority of CEOs in the world do. At least in companies that I have worked for the sales staff "brings in the money" and technical staff are just "overhead".
But if I fail to meet the needs of the account then I will be fired. So the situations arn't as different as you make it sound.
Do you think that this could be used to supplement a conventional system? Baffles in the top of the convection chamber could be closed when the outside air gets too hot or humid, and this may be a nice backup for partial or total failure of the standard system.
I don't really see the issue as usable space as much as material and construction costs. If your designing new construction you would eventually reach a point where you could either do a conventional roof, or build a taller one with dampeners and a convection chamber. The question would then be one of ROI.
If the air around the computers is at 70 degrees then I would expect the air several hundred feet above the computers to be more like 80 or 90 degrees. (No science here, just pulling numbers.) Dampeners could be installed to stop airflow when it is warmer outside than in the roof chamber. When the dampeners are closed the system would work just the same as existing systems today. In a cool climate this may not happen much at all.
I know that convection alone isn't a quick process, but my thinking was that specific cooling would be done by normal methods, and the convection cycle would exist just to make things more efficient. Instead of cooling the warmer air, use convection to collect it in a chamber where it can be exchanged with cooler outside air.
This could also work as a buffer for failures in the main cooling system. I worked in a datacenter where the cooling system failed completely. (The failure resulted from a botched install of a redundant system.) The temperature rose 20 degrees in two minutes and kept going. If there had been someplace for the heat to go I think we would have been much better off.
I do still think my idea is probably daft, and your reasoning is probably better than mine. It is still an interesting thought though. Maybe a smaller solution could work. Just make the room 20 feet taller and install fans to exchange outside air with what is in the top of the room.
I suspect that the humidity of the outside air would be another issue. High humidity would promote corrosion and low humidity would promote static electricity.
Ever try to pull a string around a corner, or ten corners? Your pull may be the same, but the result is not.
:)
When the air is forced to turn a corner it creates more friction than if it is pushed/pulled in a straight line. This serves to both heat the air, and to cause the motors creating the negative/positive atmospheres to do that much more work.
I do wonder how much difference either effect really has. Doesn't seem like there should be much. Raised floors are optimal for taking advantage of convection currents, and I think that alone would overcome any disadvantages from sharp turns.
I've often wondered if it would make sense to design a data-center with several hundred feet of open space above it like a giant chimney. The roof could be designed to allow free air-flow but keep out the elements. Then cooled aid is pumped into the lower level and should remain there until it is heated and convection lifts it away. This way the outside air could be cooled as it is brought in, instead of trying to cool the hot air that is already inside. I'm sure someone will be able to tell me why this idea is daft.
No, I dont think that is what was said. And the fact is, that many of the polical organizations that are jumping into this arguement receive much of their funding from MS. Are you saying that MS funds these groups without thinking that it will bias the output?
I actually went through most of the submitted comments on the Mass website, and most of those opposed were from political organizations losting MS as a major contributor or founding member.
I don't believe that Linda was implying that these organizations are wholly owned subsidiaries of MS, but the connection to MS funding is clear.
Great, so everyone can just sit back and wait to see how OpenDoc shakes out. Then in ten years we can all pat ourselves on the back because we took the safe route and lo-and-behold OpenDoc imploded. How exactly to you expect a conversion to take place if everyone is too chicken to stand up first?
There is also a flip-side to your logic. The fact is that there _will_ be a conversion over to XML document formats for Office applications. Microsoft has their prefered version, and the rest of the industry has theirs. Wouldn't it be a little irresponsible to convert to the new Microsoft format without waiting ten years or so to see which becomes dominent? Of course as all that time goes past you will still be using the old binary document formats that everyone knows are going to be obsolete.
I'd work more towards .pdf in the near-term and see how these openDoc formats shake out.
Massachusetts is going to be using pdf where it is appropriate. But pdf is not a format that can be effectively used for many purposes. Nobody is going to use pdf for spreadsheets for instance.
Wow, two references to religion in the same paragraph. I guess we are supposed now see that the ODF movement is just religious idealism fostered by anti-Microsoft fanatics. Its funny that when Microsoft declares the future of XML office documents to be the yet incomplete MSO XML you believe them without question. But when a major customer declares that they will only accept ODF you become a skeptic. I think you have a little religion yourself.
Microsoft is not in business to give a new format a free-ride into ubiquity.
I never have, and never will accuse Microsoft of not acting in their own best interest. But as a customer, I have interests of my own. If MS, or any other company, chooses not to align themselves with my interests than I will not use their product.
Nearly all the members of the OpenDocument collective are Microsoft enemies and many of them are know to have launched lawsuits against Microsoft in the past. Some have even done this multiple times.
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The members of the OpenDocument format group should be forced to signed a "NO Lawsuits" contract before its supported in Office.
Some companies have competitors and others have enemies. MS has enemies because of their long history of business practices that are designed to prevent competition, not win in the marketplace. Your suggestion of a "NO Lawsuits" contract would be ridiculous in any case, but especially so in light of Microsoft's history. No business would ever sign such an agreement, and in fact I don't see Microsoft stepping up to the plate to do so with their new "open" XML format. Your ignoring the fact that in almost every case MS lost the suit, or settled because they knew they would. MS has always been willing to break the law if they believe the benefits outweigh the penalties
One of the major charges brought against Microsoft vs. Sun in the JAVA case was the fact that Microsoft broke the Java potential by "intentionally" only supporting version Java 1.0.
That is a clear red herring, and does nothing to change the fact that MS _intentionally_ broke their agreements concerning Java, and _refused_ to remedy the situation by bringing their implementation into compliance. Sun wasn't looking for a $2B award from Microsoft when they created Java. They wanted a ubiquitous development platform to provide true competition in the software marketplace. Microsoft was willing to do anything to stop that from happening. Your focusing on one small aspect to avoid looking at the big picture.
Additionally what you are asking is for Microsoft to support and chase a format already widely discussed and described on the web as incomplete and broken.
I am not asking MS to do anything. I want open formats for Office Documents, and I don't care if MS has anything to do with that or not. What I will not do is fall for the argument that MS is rejecting OSF on technical grounds. MS will compete when it has to, but it will first do whatever it can to prevent competition from ever taking place.
I don't think there is a single file standard that has not be criticized by someone as being incomplete and broken, but in fact complaints about ODF have been really few. I don't recall seeing complaints anywhere that the standard is broken, and the only complaints I have heard about it being incomplete relate to the specification of spreadsheet formulas. For the most part this hasn't been a problem, but to address this concern efforts have already begun to turn the existing de-facto standards into a formal standard. Microsoft has made no effort to make their "standard" anything other than de-facto. (De fact
Maybe this is true in your backyard, but globally that is not the case. For one thing, you can count the state of Massachusetts as one big customer, and open office is rapidly becoming popular in may overseas circles. I know I read that the open-office format is actually the most used format in the world when you consider that users of MSO are fairly equally divided among the various versions. I'm to lazy to look it up now, but it certainly seems plausible. And if its not the case now I expect it soon will be. Every office sweet that is not MSO is, or soon will be, supporting ODF as the default. It is also a given that the ODF formats have a much larger market share than Microsoft's XML format that hasn't even been released yet.
OpenDocument Format is a legal mine-field.
Microsoft had to pay Sun $2B because they intentionally created a broken implementation of Java in order to break the "Write Once Run Everywhere" nature of the platform. As a condition of calling their product JAVA Microsoft was required to support the standard properly, and they _chose_ not to. If there had been incidental compatibility issues that MS had shown an interest in resolving that would have been an entirely different matter. Instead they chose to ignore their obligations because they believed the legal bills would be less than the cost of allowing platform competition.
I find the suggestion that ODF is a subset of the MSO formats to be either ignorant or misleading. Many of the most demanding office users were heavily involved in the creation of the OD formats. For instance, Boing was very involved because they have unusually complex needs that they need addressed. They have to manage some of the most complicated documents in existence, and they have to be able to access those documents properly 30 years down the line.
If Microsoft was so concerned that there are important features missing from ODF then they had ample opportunity to bring that up in the standards process, but they chose instead to be uninvolved because they saw it as unimportant. ( That is their claim, but more likely they saw it as enabling open competition which they hate. )
Any features that MS sees as missing from ODF formats are most likely there because MS has a history of creating the data formats to serve the needs of the code instead of the needs of the data. In an inter-operable world the data must come first, but MS is not interested in an inter-operable world. Letting your data be defined by your code is a much faster way to write software, but it is one of the main factors that keeps one version of MSO from being able to properly read data from other formats. Its also the reason that MSO has had such a hard time converting to other formats like HTML.
OpenDocument is a version 1.0 Spec
I hope your not saying here that MS doesn't want to support a document format unless it knows that the format will never change. First of all, the MS track record for backward compatibility with their own older formats is well known to be piss poor. Second, in the history of computers I don't think there has ever been a document format more complex than ascii text that hasn't changed. But open formats like HTML have a much better track-record with backwards compatibility than proprietary formats ever have.
Microsoft doesn't want ODF to succeed, because they don't want to have to compete on an open playing field. That is the driving reason behind everything they are doing in this arena. Their first choice would be to not support the format at all, but if that is not an option then they want to support it in a way that makes it appear broken or inferior. Given that goal, it seems that supporting the standard through a third party set of tools with only import/export instead of native support is the way to go.
I think your usage of the word "most" is a little over-reaching. There are many reasons for having a smaller root partition with only critical tools installed.
Your point about it being an "unnecessary complication" for home users is also interesting. Firt, I would point out that there are more than "home users" that use Linux. Second, I would like to know exactly what complication you are talking about. If both directories are in the path, why would a user care which directory a given program is in?
One of Linux's advantages is that it is not aimed at any single segment of users, or usage scenarios. Thats not to say it can't meet the needs of specific user groups, but those needs are met in ways that don't excluse the needs of other user groups.
When doing server builds, I always have a small root partition for disaster recovery purposes. If I need to do a restore of /usr it is much simpler if it has its own partition, and if I can know that the binaries I am using to restore it wont be overwritten during the restore.
I think the parent tricked you! The official description is:
Not at all. I was just making a general definition of /usr/share, not a legalistic one. I actually did point out later in the post that it is often used for man pages because they are architectualy independent. I have in fact seen executables shared from that directory in cluster environments with homogenious hardware. (Although it was not on Linux.)
Not true. All windows configuration is done through the registry, just not always through regedit. Most Linux distros have graphical tools for configuring the system as well. What method is or is not recomended is moot. Windows doesn't recomend that you edit the registry directly because it is confusing and easy to screw up. The majority of windows users are not computer geeks, while the majority of linux users are. It's only natural that linux users would prefer going straight to /etc. That doesn't mean its the only way.
Also, as a windows user there have been many times that I have had to go straight to the registry to change things. For instance, its the only way I know of to lower your MTU when traversing a non-localy terminated VPN. I also go into the registry frequently to backup application configurations that I want to keep after a rebuild. Its much easier to grab app.conf out of /etc than it is to pull that data from the windows registry.
I think it is quite fair to draw a parallel between the registry and /etc, and in comparison linux wins hands down. Windows does generaly have better gui configuration tools than most linux distros, but that is becoming less and less true every day. In fact, I believe that some distros already have better gui configuration tools than windows; although that is often a matter of taste and perspective.