Ooooor OpenOffice could instead add Office 2003 XML output (in a subprogram granted), which was my whole point. There is not much to be gained as far as "open standards" go in moving to OpenDocument. Which makes me think that the only reason Slashdot cares so damn much is because of the OSS crusade.
a) People are upset with Microsoft because MS are pulling dirty tricks to block the competition. MS could add OpenDocument filters to Office, but doesn't want to, and the disingenuous statements about how hard and expensive it would be are annoying. (Office has filters for WordPerfect files, and MS had to reverse-engineer WordPerfect to make them; the OpenDocument format is public, which means it's available to MS too. Since WordPerfect filters were much harder than OpenDocument would be, and MS already made them, they are an existance proof that MS could do OpenDocument filters if it wanted.)
Not unlike how Microsoft Office XML filters could be written for OpenOffice? Why would Microsoft implement OpenDocument, it is just the default format of a minor competitor rubber-stamped by a small standards organisation.
b) The Microsoft solution isn't even available yet for testing; OOo has finished testing and released.
True, if you live before 2003 for some reason.
c) The Microsoft solution will not run on old computers.
Microsoft Office is overall considerably lighter than OpenOffice.
d) The Microsoft solution costs money for the upgrades.
This really is true.
e) The Microsoft solution, being a new XML-based format, will cause users to have to deal with document format change anyway. Now is the perfect time for MA to do this.
That's not an argument to change to OpenDocument in any way.
f) Blind users will not be locked out of the new format, even if Microsoft holds firm on the refusal to make a filter for the new format. Someone else could make a filter; OOo already has excellent import and export of Word documents; and if OOo has inadequate support for blind users, that can and will be fixed. The short-term annoyance of the blind users is NOT a good reason to stop a change that in the long-term benefits everyone (including those same blind users).
I think the short-term problem is more significant than the supposed long-term benefit. The only thing I can see that is really a decent argument is the cost, but it is a drop in the bucket. This argument just reads to me as; "Sure OpenOffice is worse in a variety of way than Microsoft Office, but it has only been in development for 19 years, it will blast right past Microsoft Office any time now! Open source power!".
g) The new format means that all users, including blind users, can choose among multiple competing products. Don't like OOo? Try AbiWord, KOffice, WordPerfect, etc. And I think MS will give in and support the new format once this is a done deal.
Except there is only OpenOffice to choose from at the moment with something that is anywhere close to a complete implementation (KWord has decent support for the word processing part, but the rest is nowhere to be found).
h) I don't think MS is completely evil. But it's clear that OpenDocument is a good thing for the users, better in fact than MS's upcoming new format. OpenDocument can be better than MS XML without MS XML being completely bad.
I think both are a damn crappy way to distribute documents, and this whole switch is a huge waste of time.
In order to allow access to visually impared people without making them use the screen reader software they already own, we should instead impair access to all of the non-disabled people who can't afford either Office 12, or the computer upgrade required to run it.
Right, Office is far from ideal as well, I don't see that much point in moving to OpenOffice however. If nothing else the system requirements are even worse.
but the real issue here is whether anybody will be able to access this information in 50 years when Microsoft doesn't sell Office 12 anymore, and isn't maintaining the MSXML format documentation. That requires an open format specification, and has nothing to do with patents at all.
Maintaining the format specification? Once you have the Office 12 XML schema you have the Office 12 XML schema. There is nothing more to it. Sure if somehow all known copies of it is lost we are in trouble, but the same goes for OpenDocument. The only issue I can think of is if you for some reason refuse to accept the Office XML schema license, which you have already stated that you apparently don't have any issue with.
Think about it. If you don't use an open format you've got to migrate all your documents with each new version for continued access. The second you miss a version, from the persoective of the majority of people you've lost your data. With an open format you have no ongoing expenses because people are free to interpret the information based on the readily available instructions.
But the issue is the same for Office XML and OpenOffice here, one can go on using one version of Microsoft Office just as well as one can go on using one version of OpenOffice. OpenOffice's format will change with time (by necessity) as will Microsoft Office's format. Both are well-documented where they are now however so any data created now will continue to be easily readable.
I'll state here to though; Neither Office 2003 XML or OpenDocument is a sane way to distribute documents into the general public. I am just arguing against since it seems that people want to replace one bad solution with another that don't offer any improvement.
It's actually a crusade about State Sovereignty. The point is that OpenDocument, like ASCII and certain forms of PDF, is a international standard that is freely available for any programmer, company, or government to create software to read, write, or otherwise mangle documents that were stored in that format.
But it fails in other way, for one OpenDocument's only complete implementation is relativly obscure. Something having been stamped by a standards orginasation does not have much practical impact compared to a well-documented standard from a company at any rate. It is not like standards organisations have any actual legal or social obligations, anyone can start up something they call a standards organisation.
can only be legally implemented by people MS decides to allow to implement it, for the purposes MS decides to allow. In the future it is even possible that they could remove previously granted permissions.
Incorrect. See, here the FUD is showing. You only have to accept the license (which contains no provisions about who you are or any other odd restrictions), the license is perpetual.
It is the responsibility of government to make many of these documents available to their constituents for as long as neccessary, no matter what computer OSs they may or may not run and what software companies may or may not exist. To do that you need a standard format that anyone can implement. OpenDocument is that format.
I'll just come out and state my opinion here; OpenOffice is a piece of crap, Microsoft Office is bad bu OpenOffice is worse. Why they have to run about and distribute things in the format of an office suite is a mystery to me anyway, but I don't see many advantages to switching to OpenOffice (pleasing 2% of the population perhaps, while pissing off a whole bunch of others). What they push documents around in internally while they are still being edited I don't think is a huge issue, can't say that I care if it is Microsoft Office or not.
Oh, wait, the OpenDocument link has changed since I originally made this rant a month ago, now Sun apparently makes a blanket grant. On the other hand people were pushing for this before the end of september as well. My original point however is that even though Microsofts schema license may not exactly be open-source purity it seems quite sufficient. This looks like a mindless OSS crusade to me.
Yeah, damn Microsoft running around paying visually impaired people to claim that they want to be able to read government documents. The nerve, like accessability is more important than switching from one office suite to another because some people dislike the licensing of the XML format of the current one!
Sorry to break up that little run of sarcasm to point out ahead of time; Almost every reply that I would automatically get to this post about the licensing of Microsoft Office 2003 XML schema license is to a great extent FUD. There is not really a terrible patent issue, all licensees get royalty-free rights to all Microsoft patents to allow using the schema freely. Granted this is GPL-incompatible since anyone distributing the result has to accept the schema license, and also the schema license has a BSD-style advertisement clause. These are hardly the earth-shattering taking-away-our-freedom-lets-sing-with-RMS issues though.
One notable thing to point out here is that OpenDocument actually has a similar IP issue, notice how you get a royalty-free license from Sun for the IP in that format?
Overall this is making an awful lot of noise considering that people are supposedly getting "liberated" from a fairly reasonable product here, despite it being from Microsoft.
So, out of curiosity, are you more into the NetBSD logo then? I didn't like it much at all at first, but on the other hand it might look better in 10 years than most.
But that is a service to someone else, that I could have provided by my free will if I had wanted. It is a disadvantage to the service given to me. Which makes it a genuine disadvantage to the service I am getting.
I don't think you quite understand what "service" means, this part of the agreement is clearly not any kind of service. It is rather on the payment end. And as such it is clearly a disadvantage.
The choices A and B exists. A person asks me: "Do you see any problem with B?". I answer: "Yes, B has property X which is bad.", you argue: "But you can pick A instead, therefore there is nothing wrong with B.".
The fact that I have other options is not in any way the point, the fact that they can require whatever they want is not the point either. I am stating in response to the original question that I consider them policing the content which is not directly related to the service a disadvantage in itself. Web standards are not holy, going on crusades for them just looks silly.
Seems people have some problems with reading comprehension here so I will try to spell things out in small easily digested pieces:
The original post asks: "Assuming this can/will be policed are there any *disadvantages* to the approach?".
To which I reply roughly: "I think it is very real disadvantage if service providers decide to police things I do that are not directly related to the service they provide."
Now given this I think you might also figure out that me not using them does not make the disadvantages of the idea go away.
It depends on what you mean by "slow." If you're talking about long running processes, then no, it isn't slow at all; in fact, it is quite fast. If you're talking about short-running processes, then the JVM startup time overshadows any commendable performance.
Yeah, it is a shame, if only Sun would do something like writing a new faster classfile verifier.
Well, one thing they do that is particularly interesting here is making money off patented research. The example that might be very relevant is that they have a patent on so-called hub/authority-ranking.
Hub/authority-ranking was invented about the same time as PageRank by Jon Kleinberg, a very simple overview is that for each search the method will assign hub and authority scores to the found pages. A page gets hub score for linking to authoritive pages, and an authority score is given by getting linked from hubs. This is of course a recursive definition, the results are approximately calculated by some nice matrix trickery. Any pages that don't contain the search terms but get a lot of authority are also included in the set.
The nice thing about this method is that it deals well with smaller communities and concepts, where a search for Java with PageRank (and thus Google) will go on and on about the programming language the hub/authorities ranking will have a better chance to pick out a separate set of results for the island and present a few hubs and authorities for each at the top of the results. PageRank fails this kind of things horribly since Java the language has such an incredible pagerank. It also does a lot better for sources that might not refer to the terms searched for directly, Google does this to a very small extent by adding the link text to the set of terms on a page, but the hubs/authorities method gets way better results.
The downside is that the matrix calculation has to be done for each search with hub/authorities whereas Google precalculates PageRank for all pages every few months.
So, this sure seems like a somewhat relevant nugget of information here:)
I know that yesterday's quarterly report was not the greatest, but I didn't think it was bad enough to start warranting this type of chair-throwing behavior with South Korea.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about economics, but Microsoft apparently had a 24% higher profit this quarter than the same one last year, can this really be a bad result? Does Microsoft have to keep growing to "make it"? I would think intuitivly that as long as they make a profit they are doing great and breaking even is, well, breaking even.
It is amazing how Microsoft goes from failure to failure and yet never learns. Considering their astronomical losses the stock-holders should really drop them like a hot potato immediately.
Not that suprising at this point, it is a new system, it tries to create a new market and it does so in the enterprise space. Things don't suddenly catch on when it comes to enterprise data service, Sun has to offer the service to get the talk going and in another few years we will really know if it turns out good or not. It is much too early to make any judgements about the feasability of the project.
Personally I think the idea might work, but it might not in this incarnation. There seems to be a fair chance that Sun can claim to be ahead of its time again, which has in some ways been a while. Which is a good thing in itself, Sun has historically been a nice company to work with but has suffered from some stagnation for a number of years.
"This existing chip" if you happen to live in late 2007. If this Power chip happens to actually match the Pentium M in IPC (which is far from easy) they will still have to count on Intel being unable to squeeze out another 5W out of the Pentium M for a full 20 months.
So, we get dual-core 2.0 GHz and 25 watts in two years? Without any more information this is far from impressive. Intel will have Yonah out in volume early 2006, which is dual-core, expected to clock to well over 2 GHz and with fairly low maximum power requirements (the current rumor is that the 2 GHz version will be in the ballpark of 30 watts TDP). In another two years this POWER chip has better offer some pretty kicking IPC or it'll be fairly uninteresting.
Yeah, they should just have hired a team of hackers that could break into peoples machines and install Java on them while they slept. This whole "people having to download software to have it" thing is a horrible move.
Haha, good stuff. So then the title should read "Zend executive announces Java dead and replaced with Zend PHP".
Good to hear though since this just seemed a bit too silly to be true. Sure PHP is a way easier way to get the typical website up and running, but the Java stack of libraries and tools is incredibly much more comprehensive. Sure this means that PHP is an excellent pick for 90% of all web applications in the world, whereas Java shoots for the full 100% but is more difficult to deal with. This is even just dealing with J2EE, as the parent states there is an incredible amount of very specialized functionality available for Java.
Summary: We are better off with both PHP and Java (I use both), but PHP replacing Java across the board is less likely than Java replacing PHP.
Yet, Microsoft must change; this old stance has not been working.
Yeah, it is amazing how badly Microsoft Office is doing these days, they'd better start supporting the OpenOffice format so that they can get a chance at being mainstream too.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooooor OpenOffice could instead add Office 2003 XML output (in a subprogram granted), which was my whole point. There is not much to be gained as far as "open standards" go in moving to OpenDocument. Which makes me think that the only reason Slashdot cares so damn much is because of the OSS crusade.
Not unlike how Microsoft Office XML filters could be written for OpenOffice? Why would Microsoft implement OpenDocument, it is just the default format of a minor competitor rubber-stamped by a small standards organisation.
b) The Microsoft solution isn't even available yet for testing; OOo has finished testing and released.
True, if you live before 2003 for some reason.
c) The Microsoft solution will not run on old computers.
Microsoft Office is overall considerably lighter than OpenOffice.
d) The Microsoft solution costs money for the upgrades.
This really is true.
e) The Microsoft solution, being a new XML-based format, will cause users to have to deal with document format change anyway. Now is the perfect time for MA to do this.
That's not an argument to change to OpenDocument in any way.
f) Blind users will not be locked out of the new format, even if Microsoft holds firm on the refusal to make a filter for the new format. Someone else could make a filter; OOo already has excellent import and export of Word documents; and if OOo has inadequate support for blind users, that can and will be fixed. The short-term annoyance of the blind users is NOT a good reason to stop a change that in the long-term benefits everyone (including those same blind users).
I think the short-term problem is more significant than the supposed long-term benefit. The only thing I can see that is really a decent argument is the cost, but it is a drop in the bucket. This argument just reads to me as; "Sure OpenOffice is worse in a variety of way than Microsoft Office, but it has only been in development for 19 years, it will blast right past Microsoft Office any time now! Open source power!".
g) The new format means that all users, including blind users, can choose among multiple competing products. Don't like OOo? Try AbiWord, KOffice, WordPerfect, etc. And I think MS will give in and support the new format once this is a done deal.
Except there is only OpenOffice to choose from at the moment with something that is anywhere close to a complete implementation (KWord has decent support for the word processing part, but the rest is nowhere to be found).
h) I don't think MS is completely evil. But it's clear that OpenDocument is a good thing for the users, better in fact than MS's upcoming new format. OpenDocument can be better than MS XML without MS XML being completely bad.
I think both are a damn crappy way to distribute documents, and this whole switch is a huge waste of time.
Right, Office is far from ideal as well, I don't see that much point in moving to OpenOffice however. If nothing else the system requirements are even worse.
but the real issue here is whether anybody will be able to access this information in 50 years when Microsoft doesn't sell Office 12 anymore, and isn't maintaining the MSXML format documentation. That requires an open format specification, and has nothing to do with patents at all.
Maintaining the format specification? Once you have the Office 12 XML schema you have the Office 12 XML schema. There is nothing more to it. Sure if somehow all known copies of it is lost we are in trouble, but the same goes for OpenDocument. The only issue I can think of is if you for some reason refuse to accept the Office XML schema license, which you have already stated that you apparently don't have any issue with.
Think about it. If you don't use an open format you've got to migrate all your documents with each new version for continued access. The second you miss a version, from the persoective of the majority of people you've lost your data. With an open format you have no ongoing expenses because people are free to interpret the information based on the readily available instructions.
But the issue is the same for Office XML and OpenOffice here, one can go on using one version of Microsoft Office just as well as one can go on using one version of OpenOffice. OpenOffice's format will change with time (by necessity) as will Microsoft Office's format. Both are well-documented where they are now however so any data created now will continue to be easily readable.
I'll state here to though; Neither Office 2003 XML or OpenDocument is a sane way to distribute documents into the general public. I am just arguing against since it seems that people want to replace one bad solution with another that don't offer any improvement.
But it fails in other way, for one OpenDocument's only complete implementation is relativly obscure. Something having been stamped by a standards orginasation does not have much practical impact compared to a well-documented standard from a company at any rate. It is not like standards organisations have any actual legal or social obligations, anyone can start up something they call a standards organisation. can only be legally implemented by people MS decides to allow to implement it, for the purposes MS decides to allow. In the future it is even possible that they could remove previously granted permissions.
Incorrect. See, here the FUD is showing. You only have to accept the license (which contains no provisions about who you are or any other odd restrictions), the license is perpetual.
It is the responsibility of government to make many of these documents available to their constituents for as long as neccessary, no matter what computer OSs they may or may not run and what software companies may or may not exist. To do that you need a standard format that anyone can implement. OpenDocument is that format.
I'll just come out and state my opinion here; OpenOffice is a piece of crap, Microsoft Office is bad bu OpenOffice is worse. Why they have to run about and distribute things in the format of an office suite is a mystery to me anyway, but I don't see many advantages to switching to OpenOffice (pleasing 2% of the population perhaps, while pissing off a whole bunch of others). What they push documents around in internally while they are still being edited I don't think is a huge issue, can't say that I care if it is Microsoft Office or not.
Oh, wait, the OpenDocument link has changed since I originally made this rant a month ago, now Sun apparently makes a blanket grant. On the other hand people were pushing for this before the end of september as well. My original point however is that even though Microsofts schema license may not exactly be open-source purity it seems quite sufficient. This looks like a mindless OSS crusade to me.
Sorry to break up that little run of sarcasm to point out ahead of time; Almost every reply that I would automatically get to this post about the licensing of Microsoft Office 2003 XML schema license is to a great extent FUD. There is not really a terrible patent issue, all licensees get royalty-free rights to all Microsoft patents to allow using the schema freely. Granted this is GPL-incompatible since anyone distributing the result has to accept the schema license, and also the schema license has a BSD-style advertisement clause. These are hardly the earth-shattering taking-away-our-freedom-lets-sing-with-RMS issues though.
One notable thing to point out here is that OpenDocument actually has a similar IP issue, notice how you get a royalty-free license from Sun for the IP in that format?
Overall this is making an awful lot of noise considering that people are supposedly getting "liberated" from a fairly reasonable product here, despite it being from Microsoft.
So, out of curiosity, are you more into the NetBSD logo then? I didn't like it much at all at first, but on the other hand it might look better in 10 years than most.
But that is a service to someone else, that I could have provided by my free will if I had wanted. It is a disadvantage to the service given to me. Which makes it a genuine disadvantage to the service I am getting.
I don't think you quite understand what "service" means, this part of the agreement is clearly not any kind of service. It is rather on the payment end. And as such it is clearly a disadvantage.
The choices A and B exists. A person asks me: "Do you see any problem with B?". I answer: "Yes, B has property X which is bad.", you argue: "But you can pick A instead, therefore there is nothing wrong with B.".
The fact that I have other options is not in any way the point, the fact that they can require whatever they want is not the point either. I am stating in response to the original question that I consider them policing the content which is not directly related to the service a disadvantage in itself. Web standards are not holy, going on crusades for them just looks silly.
Now given this I think you might also figure out that me not using them does not make the disadvantages of the idea go away.
One disadvantage I can think of is that it is none of their fucking business. They are not there to police the content.
Yeah, it is a shame, if only Sun would do something like writing a new faster classfile verifier.
Hub/authority-ranking was invented about the same time as PageRank by Jon Kleinberg, a very simple overview is that for each search the method will assign hub and authority scores to the found pages. A page gets hub score for linking to authoritive pages, and an authority score is given by getting linked from hubs. This is of course a recursive definition, the results are approximately calculated by some nice matrix trickery. Any pages that don't contain the search terms but get a lot of authority are also included in the set.
The nice thing about this method is that it deals well with smaller communities and concepts, where a search for Java with PageRank (and thus Google) will go on and on about the programming language the hub/authorities ranking will have a better chance to pick out a separate set of results for the island and present a few hubs and authorities for each at the top of the results. PageRank fails this kind of things horribly since Java the language has such an incredible pagerank. It also does a lot better for sources that might not refer to the terms searched for directly, Google does this to a very small extent by adding the link text to the set of terms on a page, but the hubs/authorities method gets way better results.
The downside is that the matrix calculation has to be done for each search with hub/authorities whereas Google precalculates PageRank for all pages every few months.
So, this sure seems like a somewhat relevant nugget of information here :)
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about economics, but Microsoft apparently had a 24% higher profit this quarter than the same one last year, can this really be a bad result? Does Microsoft have to keep growing to "make it"? I would think intuitivly that as long as they make a profit they are doing great and breaking even is, well, breaking even.
It is amazing how Microsoft goes from failure to failure and yet never learns. Considering their astronomical losses the stock-holders should really drop them like a hot potato immediately.
Personally I think the idea might work, but it might not in this incarnation. There seems to be a fair chance that Sun can claim to be ahead of its time again, which has in some ways been a while. Which is a good thing in itself, Sun has historically been a nice company to work with but has suffered from some stagnation for a number of years.
Not to mention the time they spent circling around trying to find a mailbox on the Galapagos.
"This existing chip" if you happen to live in late 2007. If this Power chip happens to actually match the Pentium M in IPC (which is far from easy) they will still have to count on Intel being unable to squeeze out another 5W out of the Pentium M for a full 20 months.
So, we get dual-core 2.0 GHz and 25 watts in two years? Without any more information this is far from impressive. Intel will have Yonah out in volume early 2006, which is dual-core, expected to clock to well over 2 GHz and with fairly low maximum power requirements (the current rumor is that the 2 GHz version will be in the ballpark of 30 watts TDP). In another two years this POWER chip has better offer some pretty kicking IPC or it'll be fairly uninteresting.
Yeah, they should just have hired a team of hackers that could break into peoples machines and install Java on them while they slept. This whole "people having to download software to have it" thing is a horrible move.
Good to hear though since this just seemed a bit too silly to be true. Sure PHP is a way easier way to get the typical website up and running, but the Java stack of libraries and tools is incredibly much more comprehensive. Sure this means that PHP is an excellent pick for 90% of all web applications in the world, whereas Java shoots for the full 100% but is more difficult to deal with. This is even just dealing with J2EE, as the parent states there is an incredible amount of very specialized functionality available for Java.
Summary: We are better off with both PHP and Java (I use both), but PHP replacing Java across the board is less likely than Java replacing PHP.
Just want to point out that the template library approach is similar to the way JSP works. So even then the comparison PHP <=> JSP is quite apt.
Yeah, it is amazing how badly Microsoft Office is doing these days, they'd better start supporting the OpenOffice format so that they can get a chance at being mainstream too.
Well, that's not terribly helpful then. Thanks anyway though.