...plenty of material for O'Niell colonies in the asteroids and moons, maybe even Mercury.
No need to go inflicting our half-assed terraforming technologies on poor lil' Mars for a few millennia yet. As well as the immense amount of time it'd take (can't just go steering hunks of Saturnian rings into the Arean deserts and throw some seeds after them - or put a hand into a slot in a big alien machine and have instant atmosphere - yes, even if you are Arnie), the amount of useable surface area that resulted wouldn't be that spectacular anyway.
But you can't say that it was a file format problem. One bad doc does not invalidate the entire file format.
I am in the position of being able to name a local (Perth, West Oz) law firm who had to re-key more than 20% of their templates when they switched from MS Office 97 to MS Office 2000, and then had to edit about another (overlapping) 20% when their main printer died for the last time and had to be replaced. And edit maybe 35% of their existing docs when they called them up to re-print them.
Did they even think of suing Microsoft over it? Hah! Double hah!
That's just one law firm. I saved a friend's bacon by back-porting an MS Word 2000 dotDOC so it could be read by an important client who refused to upgrade past MS Word 97. Nothing (not even RTF) that MS Word 2000 wrote the document out in could be read by MS Word 97 without crashing it and usually also the OS (we tested on '98SE and '2000) it ran on. I used OpenOffice 1.0 to fix that.
And so on.
However, I agree that it wasn't so much the file format (which is basically an unfiltered OLE dump, so blaming it would be reasonable) as MS Word's worse-than-naive crossing-the-freeway-blindfolded expectation that it would arrive 100% happy.
...the second user to load OOo gets it in milliseconds. I think that proves your point.
For the record, the server I observe this on is a dual P1000 with 2GB of RAM, the workstations are either the old Windows workstations with diskectomies or locally-built (Perth, West Oz) Linux-friendly thin clients. They run an MS Windows app under Win4Lin for now ('coz WINE doesn't do MS Access well enough yet), but the app itself is being re-engineered in Zope as I type, so presently they'll be MS Free and can stop paying for their virus scanner.
many companies base their entire inventory tracking and accounting systems on complex macro programs.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say "based" rather than "base". I know of two companies which went bankrupt because their macro-based accounting practices buggered things up.
One company found that the macros were stuffing things up when their biggest customer complained. Auditors were called in and found that the macros had overcharged for some things (some of them by an order of magnitude) and silently failed to charge for others. When the dust settled, the company had to pay back some humungous amout of money (millions, I think) and they survived that, but then a macro virus went through their business like a bushfire through spinifex and they suddenly discovered that their backup procedures really were as bad as the auditors had claimed. My little Linux gateway box was still faithfully doing its thing when the auctioneers came and took it away with the rest of the office equipment and furniture about three months later.
The other company rolled out a new version of MS Windows and MS Office, then discovered on Monday that the new MS Office broke their macros. In the time it took them to fix their macros, they nearly went out of business too. They contract out their accounting, now, and use stylesheets and templates to replace their macros for other stuff. If they hadn't done, the poor (absent) error-checking in the macros would have sent them bust as well. Technically, they did go bankrupt but the authorities took note of the reasons for it and let them keep trading for a month or two until their considerable cash flow had dragged them past the danger zone.
On a similar note, my book-keepers make a specialty of rescuing businesses from DIY accounting packages like MYOB. The businesses using them don't understand how the programs work. They enter data, they get regular reports, and not only are the reports wrong because the data's wrong (or in the wrong place), but they aren't able to meaningfully interpret even the wrong results. BKN take their data and paperwork and return reports which are not only rigorously correct but also meaningful in a business sense. On top of this, things like tax forms get submitted correctly and on time, which averts the fines and other cost associated with getting that wrong.
The moral of the story is that there are some things which bodging past is difficult and dangerous for, and "bodgy" pretty much defines a typical set of MS Office macros.
deployment: no difference except that with OOo it has to be redone less often.
data migration: necessary for both systems, more of a problem with OOo. MS-Access is only a part of MS Office Professional though, which does raise the cost for the MS side.
doc/macro conversion: doc conversion is a problem for both sides, as I can testify from personal experience. Anyone who uses MS Office macros for anything but the simplest automation tasks (ie, easy to rewrite if needed) will get what they deserve sooner or later.
training: OOo is indeed not the same as MSO, and is in some ways much easier to learn from scratch since in many areas it is more consistent (e.g. format char/par/page all in same menu in order).
carefully not faced by MS - cost: the cost of MS Office professional can cover a lot of evils, and in the vast majority of cases none of the above points will be relevant.
interoperability: OOo is actually better in many ways at transacting with older MS Offices than the newer MSO versions are.
viruses: hah! Seriously, I have never seen a virus from OOo, I have seen countless thousands from MSO. Experience suggests that MSO is far more susceptible to virus attack. If MS argues that it's more the platform's fault than the office suite... well, give us MS Office for Linux, and we'll test that theory out for you, eh? (-:
CRM: not relevant
Accounting data: not relevant
Personal portrayal of business: not relevant
Cost effective: OOo wins... this whole section kind of reads like MS ran out of ideas.
Limited compatibility: true, and MS wins that basic point, but most users will never notice the difference. The sub-point about not supporting a database client is false. I use OOo as a PostgreSQL client regularly.
integration with other tools: is more than good enough for 99% of users, and total integration carries some disadvantages as well, particularly in the areas of security and component choice. OOo allows considerable customisation of component choice, and integrates reasonably well with (for example) FireFox and ThunderBird. FireFox is just night-and-day more useful than Internet Explorer, particularly after you've clicked down a few of the extensions.
tailoring: OOo and anything you're likely to integration with it totally ace MS Office in terms of direct customisability and external file manipulation.
support: OOo documentation is still behind the curve, but community support is already significantly better than MSOs and accelerating
faster work: if you do your studies without subjects already accustomed to your favoured office suite, the results come out quite differently.
seamless exchange: is a myth. I regularly use OOo to enable document exchange between MSO users who have otherwise failed to exchange at all, let alone seamlessly.
office/windows deployment: is slower than rolling out entire offices with an automated network install, which would include OOo as a matter of course. Updates are a simple matter of dropping the.rpm files (or.pkg etc) into the office's update cache. Leading, of course, to cost savings well beyond the licence price for the team not using the MS products.
security: OOo provides many of the same security features as MSO, but some of them are not needed for OOo
investment: you can invest yourself into OOo, something not seriously possible with MSO. You can also take or leave each piece, each level of integration as you will, not being forced to submerge yourself in a meta-platform unless you wish to.
misc items from the trailing blurb: most of these are "features" not of MSO but of Outlook.
MSO's XML sucks: the non-Pro version strips out everything useful, the Pro
Even documents SaveAs'ed in "Word 97" or "Word 6" format from MS Office 2000, XP and 2003 will often break (as in, crash the app if not the entire OS) MS Office 97 (and of course earlier). On several important occasions I've used OOo (and even StarOffice 5.2) to read in such documents and rewrite them for MS Office users. I always write the rescued docs onto an OOo ISO: hint, hint.
OOo is also good for recovering corrupted MSO documents. I've done this for all versions of MSO. Install OOo even if you're not planning to use it for day-to-day stuff, you won't regret it. (-:
I see you're planning to leave the wonderful shiny world of Microsoft for the terrifying, unsupported cultural desert of the pinko communist terrorist-supporting hacker scumbag intellectual property thieves. Do you wish to:
* [_] surrender your first-born now as promised in the EULAs you agreed to?
* [_] put up with Microsoft deliberately breaking their file formats every three years?
* [_] recieve constant lawsuits from The SCO<*> Group?
* [_] commit suicide now before I hassle you into it?
* [X] power-cycle your brain and return to the fold?
...else a lot of other posters would have able to use spelling checkers, too.
IIRC in-form spell checking is a planned Konqueror feature, meaning of course that Mozilla and everything else will want one too. In-preview word checking is already a feature of FireFox, they have an extension that allows you to select a word, right-click, dictionary.
...which does seem pretty camel-through-eye-of-needle at ranges of tens of millions of km. Venus gets two flybys @3000km and 300km.
This is needed because Earth orbit is about 3x as energetic as Mercury orbit. Messenger needs to dump the other 2/3 of its momentum, and slingshot flybys are far and away the cheapest method for that. This requires eveything to be lined up just so.
It's a pity, really, because I suspect Mercury of harbouring numerous hermeological surprises (as surprising as Valles Marineris on Mars, a 3000km gouge up to 10km deep which was not formed by water, wind or tectonics), and a bugger-the-cost lets-burn-many-tonnes-of-propellant (much to meet Mercury, a little more to kick the probe into orbit around it) approach would get a probe there in only a few months.
We don't have many pictures of it yet, and the aforementioned surprises should stimulate significant scientific progress, most likely by killing off a large percentage of current solar system formation theories.
At least there will still be a probe. With Dubya at the reins, it could have been worse.
Microsoft's Office XML sucks. It comes in two flavours, one with everything useful stripped out and one up to the eyeballs in bizarre XML attributes and binary crap.
What I do with the HTML editor on my own site is edit the doc up in OOWriter, then shove it through a filter which "tops and tails" it, leaving the essence of it to be framed by a brace of PHP scripts. The scripts add headers, footers, banners, some geek stuff (translate, linked-to, validate) and common styles. I agree that it's not DreamWeaver, not a website designer, but for actually editing up pages it's night-vs-day better than Word or any other WP I've seen.
Thousands of people have now visited the majority of the sites listed there (with the notable exception of the Ark for some unfathomable reason), many of them completely under their own steam including several that I know personally (the "Trevor" mentioned by Jonothan Gray lives here in Perth, for example) and including many who went planning to discredit the whole show. They include engineers, archaeologists, geologists, name it.
All that I've ever run across have come away impressed, with three exceptions. You will find one news crew who gave up after digging a bathtub-sized hole in the ground at one site, one David Fasold who tried glory-hounding, and one Rene Noordbergen who objected and did a fair bit of political damage because Ron's ideas didn't quite match his own. Rene met a sticky end shortly afterwards, which is a bit scary.
Anyway, the sites that you can still get to are all there awaiting your critical eye.
I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation (also in MS format). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.
There is the question of 'de facto standard' [...].doc is an extremely widely used format
You should say "de facto standards" and "widely used formats".
The dotDOC written by MS Office 97 is different to MS Office 2000 and different in turn to MS Office XP - and of course the corresponding Mac versions of MS Office are all slighly different again. Then you have dotDOCs written by MS Office 2000 purportedly in an earlier dotDOC format (typically 97 or v6) which are different again. Later MS Word versions usually read the earlier dotDOCs OK, including "earler" dotDOCs written out by later MS Words, but will usually not be able to reliably write something that the genuinely earlier MS Word versions can read.
OpenOffice Writer is separately valuable for being able to take an "MS Office 97" dotDOC written by MS Office 2000, read it in without crashing, and write it out as a genuine MS Office 97 (or version 6) dotDOC that MS Office 97 (etc) can then read without crashing.
OO in HTML editor mode is also top class. Very good WYSIWYG and gotta love that "@" button.
...who uses and prefers OOo for writing and editing Chinese docs. His enthusiasm is such that others in the local Chamber of Commerce for the Middle Kingdom are taking it up, too. And there are about 100 times as many Chinese in the world as there are Australians.
In the era of DRDOS, I was using an Apple IIe, but I suspect its failure had more to do with it not offering any clear advantage over MSDOS.
Where do I start?
DR-DOS did a lot of things right that MS-DOS didn't. All of their command options were consistent in a way that MS-DOS only dreamed about. The help messages were actually informative.
The diskcopy program could use a file as a source or target. Single-disk copies actually used all available memory instead of a fixed chunk and force the user to swap. All of the command-line utilties could draw on all of available memory (not just the first 640kB) at will. FIND was actually useful (not by any stretch of the imagination a grep clone, but still way more useful than MS-DOS's FIND). You could do useful things with disk labels. XCOPY (remember that?) had twice as many options. The batch language, while still.BAT compatible, was streets ahead. The multi-user (TaskMax) and printing stuff worked more smoothly and reliably. If you installed Windows 3.11 under MS-DOS then overwrote it with DR-DOS everything sped up and it crashed less often. Most of the command would recurse. A real disk cache. A CURSOR program to do cursesy things from batches. Twice the debugger (SID). Undelete (DELWATCH). A better editor (certainly crapped all over EDLIN, anyway). A laplinky thingy (FILELINK). Semi-serious disk fiddling (mirroring etc): DISKMAP. A directory renamer. A SORT that was actually useful. A clever extended deleter (much more useful than DELTREE) called XDEL. And so on...
Brian: You're all individuals! Crowd, in unison: We're all individuals. Lone dissenter: I'm not! I suspect that this scene made a big impression on Gary Larsen.
...in fact, he was surprised that Evangelical Christians were so happy about his movie, given its heavy Marianism.
For reference, the two main Marian manuscripts cited are "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" by Anne Catherine Emmerich and "The Mystical City of God" by Saint Mary of Agreda.
If Jesus was just a clever, wise or insightful man, his entire life was essentially wasted, and on top of that he is recorded as lying about his abilities. All of the serious documentation we have available from the time (and there's a surprising amount of it) indicates that he was considerably more than that. Jesus is better documented than any of the Caesars. There's also a heck of a lot of non-literate archaeological evidence which is very difficult to explain if the canonical record is not reliable.
But in everyday life "we're all individuals" and will carry on believing what the majority tell us. "I'm not!"
It's one of only three 9X boxes in the place, everything else is 2000 bar one XP. I used to think of 2000 as being pretty reliable (for Microsoft) but am rapidly changing my mind.
9X does run RPCs under some circumstances but I'm not sure they're enough to get infected. Nevertheless, this box does all of the regular reboots and the like which are symptomatic of MSBlast. Perhaps it's actually got one of the "enhanced" derivatives.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to go inflicting our half-assed terraforming technologies on poor lil' Mars for a few millennia yet. As well as the immense amount of time it'd take (can't just go steering hunks of Saturnian rings into the Arean deserts and throw some seeds after them - or put a hand into a slot in a big alien machine and have instant atmosphere - yes, even if you are Arnie), the amount of useable surface area that resulted wouldn't be that spectacular anyway.
I am in the position of being able to name a local (Perth, West Oz) law firm who had to re-key more than 20% of their templates when they switched from MS Office 97 to MS Office 2000, and then had to edit about another (overlapping) 20% when their main printer died for the last time and had to be replaced. And edit maybe 35% of their existing docs when they called them up to re-print them.
Did they even think of suing Microsoft over it? Hah! Double hah!
That's just one law firm. I saved a friend's bacon by back-porting an MS Word 2000 dotDOC so it could be read by an important client who refused to upgrade past MS Word 97. Nothing (not even RTF) that MS Word 2000 wrote the document out in could be read by MS Word 97 without crashing it and usually also the OS (we tested on '98SE and '2000) it ran on. I used OpenOffice 1.0 to fix that.
And so on.
However, I agree that it wasn't so much the file format (which is basically an unfiltered OLE dump, so blaming it would be reasonable) as MS Word's worse-than-naive crossing-the-freeway-blindfolded expectation that it would arrive 100% happy.
...and it doesn't claim to be an XHTML editor. But in general, I too would find that annoying.
...than on anything you can possibly cram MS Office onto. (-:
For the record, the server I observe this on is a dual P1000 with 2GB of RAM, the workstations are either the old Windows workstations with diskectomies or locally-built (Perth, West Oz) Linux-friendly thin clients. They run an MS Windows app under Win4Lin for now ('coz WINE doesn't do MS Access well enough yet), but the app itself is being re-engineered in Zope as I type, so presently they'll be MS Free and can stop paying for their virus scanner.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say "based" rather than "base". I know of two companies which went bankrupt because their macro-based accounting practices buggered things up.
One company found that the macros were stuffing things up when their biggest customer complained. Auditors were called in and found that the macros had overcharged for some things (some of them by an order of magnitude) and silently failed to charge for others. When the dust settled, the company had to pay back some humungous amout of money (millions, I think) and they survived that, but then a macro virus went through their business like a bushfire through spinifex and they suddenly discovered that their backup procedures really were as bad as the auditors had claimed. My little Linux gateway box was still faithfully doing its thing when the auctioneers came and took it away with the rest of the office equipment and furniture about three months later.
The other company rolled out a new version of MS Windows and MS Office, then discovered on Monday that the new MS Office broke their macros. In the time it took them to fix their macros, they nearly went out of business too. They contract out their accounting, now, and use stylesheets and templates to replace their macros for other stuff. If they hadn't done, the poor (absent) error-checking in the macros would have sent them bust as well. Technically, they did go bankrupt but the authorities took note of the reasons for it and let them keep trading for a month or two until their considerable cash flow had dragged them past the danger zone.
On a similar note, my book-keepers make a specialty of rescuing businesses from DIY accounting packages like MYOB. The businesses using them don't understand how the programs work. They enter data, they get regular reports, and not only are the reports wrong because the data's wrong (or in the wrong place), but they aren't able to meaningfully interpret even the wrong results. BKN take their data and paperwork and return reports which are not only rigorously correct but also meaningful in a business sense. On top of this, things like tax forms get submitted correctly and on time, which averts the fines and other cost associated with getting that wrong.
The moral of the story is that there are some things which bodging past is difficult and dangerous for, and "bodgy" pretty much defines a typical set of MS Office macros.
"It can't be assault! I just touched him!" At Mach 2...
Seriously, we have how many tonnes of steel hitting the water at what speed?
Sorry to block, mariah - but on top of this, OOo survives corrupted docs (both its own and Microsoft's) far better than MSO.
Also, lakh and crore don't work that way. You'd write it 10,00,00,000 (ten crore, no lakh) not "1,000,000,00" as you did. <g/d/r>
I can't see why MS Word would be expected to pick up a typoe in a Quark document, can you? (-:
Even documents SaveAs'ed in "Word 97" or "Word 6" format from MS Office 2000, XP and 2003 will often break (as in, crash the app if not the entire OS) MS Office 97 (and of course earlier). On several important occasions I've used OOo (and even StarOffice 5.2) to read in such documents and rewrite them for MS Office users. I always write the rescued docs onto an OOo ISO: hint, hint.
OOo is also good for recovering corrupted MSO documents. I've done this for all versions of MSO. Install OOo even if you're not planning to use it for day-to-day stuff, you won't regret it. (-:
I see you're planning to leave the wonderful shiny world of Microsoft for the terrifying, unsupported cultural desert of the pinko communist terrorist-supporting hacker scumbag intellectual property thieves. Do you wish to:
* [_] surrender your first-born now as promised in the EULAs you agreed to?
* [_] put up with Microsoft deliberately breaking their file formats every three years?
* [_] recieve constant lawsuits from The SCO<*> Group?
* [_] commit suicide now before I hassle you into it?
* [X] power-cycle your brain and return to the fold?
<*> an acronym for "Sue Competing Organisations"
...else a lot of other posters would have able to use spelling checkers, too.
IIRC in-form spell checking is a planned Konqueror feature, meaning of course that Mozilla and everything else will want one too. In-preview word checking is already a feature of FireFox, they have an extension that allows you to select a word, right-click, dictionary.
...which does seem pretty camel-through-eye-of-needle at ranges of tens of millions of km. Venus gets two flybys @3000km and 300km.
This is needed because Earth orbit is about 3x as energetic as Mercury orbit. Messenger needs to dump the other 2/3 of its momentum, and slingshot flybys are far and away the cheapest method for that. This requires eveything to be lined up just so.
It's a pity, really, because I suspect Mercury of harbouring numerous hermeological surprises (as surprising as Valles Marineris on Mars, a 3000km gouge up to 10km deep which was not formed by water, wind or tectonics), and a bugger-the-cost lets-burn-many-tonnes-of-propellant (much to meet Mercury, a little more to kick the probe into orbit around it) approach would get a probe there in only a few months.
We don't have many pictures of it yet, and the aforementioned surprises should stimulate significant scientific progress, most likely by killing off a large percentage of current solar system formation theories.
At least there will still be a probe. With Dubya at the reins, it could have been worse.
Microsoft's Office XML sucks. It comes in two flavours, one with everything useful stripped out and one up to the eyeballs in bizarre XML attributes and binary crap.
What I do with the HTML editor on my own site is edit the doc up in OOWriter, then shove it through a filter which "tops and tails" it, leaving the essence of it to be framed by a brace of PHP scripts. The scripts add headers, footers, banners, some geek stuff (translate, linked-to, validate) and common styles. I agree that it's not DreamWeaver, not a website designer, but for actually editing up pages it's night-vs-day better than Word or any other WP I've seen.
All that I've ever run across have come away impressed, with three exceptions. You will find one news crew who gave up after digging a bathtub-sized hole in the ground at one site, one David Fasold who tried glory-hounding, and one Rene Noordbergen who objected and did a fair bit of political damage because Ron's ideas didn't quite match his own. Rene met a sticky end shortly afterwards, which is a bit scary.
Anyway, the sites that you can still get to are all there awaiting your critical eye.
I don't use the equation stuff very much, but find it heaps easier and more powerful than MS Office's equivalent.
I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation (also in MS format). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.
You should say "de facto standards" and "widely used formats".
The dotDOC written by MS Office 97 is different to MS Office 2000 and different in turn to MS Office XP - and of course the corresponding Mac versions of MS Office are all slighly different again. Then you have dotDOCs written by MS Office 2000 purportedly in an earlier dotDOC format (typically 97 or v6) which are different again. Later MS Word versions usually read the earlier dotDOCs OK, including "earler" dotDOCs written out by later MS Words, but will usually not be able to reliably write something that the genuinely earlier MS Word versions can read.
OpenOffice Writer is separately valuable for being able to take an "MS Office 97" dotDOC written by MS Office 2000, read it in without crashing, and write it out as a genuine MS Office 97 (or version 6) dotDOC that MS Office 97 (etc) can then read without crashing.
OO in HTML editor mode is also top class. Very good WYSIWYG and gotta love that "@" button.
...who uses and prefers OOo for writing and editing Chinese docs. His enthusiasm is such that others in the local Chamber of Commerce for the Middle Kingdom are taking it up, too. And there are about 100 times as many Chinese in the world as there are Australians.
There's plenty around, all you need do is not limit yourself to websites you feel comfortable with.
Where do I start?
DR-DOS did a lot of things right that MS-DOS didn't. All of their command options were consistent in a way that MS-DOS only dreamed about. The help messages were actually informative.
The diskcopy program could use a file as a source or target. Single-disk copies actually used all available memory instead of a fixed chunk and force the user to swap. All of the command-line utilties could draw on all of available memory (not just the first 640kB) at will. FIND was actually useful (not by any stretch of the imagination a grep clone, but still way more useful than MS-DOS's FIND). You could do useful things with disk labels. XCOPY (remember that?) had twice as many options. The batch language, while still .BAT compatible, was streets ahead. The multi-user (TaskMax) and printing stuff worked more smoothly and reliably. If you installed Windows 3.11 under MS-DOS then overwrote it with DR-DOS everything sped up and it crashed less often. Most of the command would recurse. A real disk cache. A CURSOR program to do cursesy things from batches. Twice the debugger (SID). Undelete (DELWATCH). A better editor (certainly crapped all over EDLIN, anyway). A laplinky thingy (FILELINK). Semi-serious disk fiddling (mirroring etc): DISKMAP. A directory renamer. A SORT that was actually useful. A clever extended deleter (much more useful than DELTREE) called XDEL. And so on...
Brian: You're all individuals!
Crowd, in unison: We're all individuals.
Lone dissenter: I'm not!
I suspect that this scene made a big impression on Gary Larsen.
For reference, the two main Marian manuscripts cited are "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" by Anne Catherine Emmerich and "The Mystical City of God" by Saint Mary of Agreda.
If Jesus was just a clever, wise or insightful man, his entire life was essentially wasted, and on top of that he is recorded as lying about his abilities. All of the serious documentation we have available from the time (and there's a surprising amount of it) indicates that he was considerably more than that. Jesus is better documented than any of the Caesars. There's also a heck of a lot of non-literate archaeological evidence which is very difficult to explain if the canonical record is not reliable.
But in everyday life "we're all individuals" and will carry on believing what the majority tell us. "I'm not!"
It's one of only three 9X boxes in the place, everything else is 2000 bar one XP. I used to think of 2000 as being pretty reliable (for Microsoft) but am rapidly changing my mind.
9X does run RPCs under some circumstances but I'm not sure they're enough to get infected. Nevertheless, this box does all of the regular reboots and the like which are symptomatic of MSBlast. Perhaps it's actually got one of the "enhanced" derivatives.