Unfortunately because we butted our nose in there in the first place and amplified a mess (ref: Iran/Iraq war) we have a mess to clean up.:( I'd like to see a withdrawl plan as well, but then, I'd like to see a GOOD presidential candidate rather than a choice between a jerk and an idiot in 2008.
Unfortunately, we won't get either wish now, will we? We'll be in Iraq for 20 more years to come, and the 2008 election will be between two slimeballs, with the possible chance of a reasonable decent, intelligent human being in a third party who doesn't have a prayer of a chance of being elected.
So how can we cut spending? Stopping advances in warfare hygiene isn't the solution. Heck, I might buy that gum for camping/hiking trips where there may not be plentiful water.
When you're the one in the trenches, it matters to you. It's good that you want to save money, but cut the spending in the right places.
It's good to see that you are showing your gratitude (or lack thereof) for the very same people who swore their lives to protect and preserve your constitutional right to make that statement.
The money they're spending is a pittance compared to practically anything else in the military.
I'd rather the military spend money on our own troops' well being and raise their pay rather than bailing out every pissant country who didn't attempt to thwart would-be dictators before it was too late. America spends (well our politicians spend) far too much taxpayer money bailing everyone else out when we have plenty of our own problems to deal with.
The current war in Iraq could have been avoided if George H. W. Bush had finished the job in Desert Storm - instead he let Saddam go, and caused problems to continue. Hell, why did we even bail out Kuwait in the first place? They had plenty of money, they should have paid us back for bushing Saddam out - or we should have simply stayed out of it.
Likewise - in Afghanistan, as soon as the Taliban were overthrown, we should have pulled out and let them clean up their own mess. Why? Again, we have enough domestic problems without squandering taxpayer money on everyone else's problems.
My point? Again, it comes to cutting military spending in the right places, and where you spend money on new items/technologies/ideas, picking the right ones. I happen to think that improving hygiene which in turn improves morale and overall physical health is a VERY good thing to spend money on.
until he started working for me. On his machine I did not give him a choice - for his office apps he can use OpenOffice.org or simply not work. Now that he's used it for a week he has discovered that he can do everything he needs in the OOo suite and is going to be installing it on his home PC. He hasn't run into performance issues with large files yet, but by the time he does I expect the OOo will have addressed at least some of those issues.
He was a Microsoft Office fan prior to this week (and to be fair, Microsoft Office IS an excellent product) but now sees that MS Office is not the only available option in the real world.
Ditto for Windows 2003 - although I will probably be marked -1 Troll again for posting something which even slightly criticizes Microsoft on something based in truth.
In order to obtain benchmarks over that long period of time, one must avoid reboots.
I mean, you DO patch your Windows XP box, don't you? Most of the security patches require a reboot. No wonder Microsoft cannot get any data on long-term performance including stability and memory leaks - they're constantly rebooting so their test boxes don't get pwned by script kiddies!;)
This patent application is for a business process.
Method: company shall analyze prior art and patent prior art in obvious, clear violation of patent laws, counting on patent clerks' willingness to simply rubber-stamp any moronic patent application to come in the door with the application fees. Prior art shall be patented, and then company will send out cease-and-decist letters to businesses violating the new illegal patent. When companies laugh company off, company shall sue infringing company for damages due to loss revenue and force licensing fees moving forward.
Oh, and yes I know this is feeding the trolls, but:
These are administrative bungles and NOT security holes inherent to Unix/Linux/*nix. If you RTFA you will notice that not only is *nix affected, but every other platform (e.g., Windows) due to vulnerabilities in the application (perl, php), so let's not continue the platform wars, mmmmkay?
I notice that one of the listed vulnerabilities in awstats - definitely the fault of the administrator because not only is there a patched awstats version to address this well-documented vulnerability (check the project page at sourceforge), but you should also NOT make awstats publicly available. Lock it down so it can be accessed either only from your local/LAN IP range, or at least use http authentication (read up on.htaccess, man htpasswd/htpasswd2).
If you don't understand how to do either, I wouldn't say that you shouldn't be allowed near computers (everyone has to start from somewhere) but I will tell you that you need to RTFM. Yesterday.
Chances are that if you don't have the vulnerable apps locked down or patched already, you've already been rooted. Download/install rkhunter and chkrootkit and run them, keep them updated, set them up on cron jobs (man crontab), and actually read the reports daily - or at least the summaries.
Because I love paying for Windows and Microsoft Exchange licenses, and having all of my data tied into proprietary formats? I'm doing all I can to look for a real open source alternative to Exchange to avoid exactly that situation because although Microsoft does make damn fine products (Exchange is great considering the feature set, you will never convince me otherwise) I am disliking their anti-customer stance and their vendor-lock mechanisms (keeping formats completely proprietary and EULAs forbidding reverse engineering of the formats - MY data - etc.) more and more every day.
So what did I do for a CRM solution? I looked at Microsoft CRM, which was a free ad-on for M$ Exchange/Outlook/SQL Server, and I looked at SugarCRM. The choice was clear and so we went with SugarCRM. I did not discover vTiger (a fork of SugarCRM) until after we implemented SugarCRM but it's been working out fine for us, and once I upgrade it to the latest version we will be able to get even more use out of it and hopefully get good processes (help tickets, etc.) into place in one centralized (and open and documented) location.
When I came across this thread I immediately sent a long email to Novell customer relations, stating that if they dump KDE then I will be dumping the very distribution which won me (and consequently many of my company's workstations and servers) back over from Windows to Linux, after my not having touched Linux since 1997 or 1998.
I also stated that I suspect Trolltech's licensing is the underlying reason - and if that is indeed the case, why couldn't Novell work with Trolltech to change the licensing, or just buy them out, since Novell has the resources and can and has done that very thing with larger companies (e.g., SuSE, Ximian).
I dislike Gnome. No, I downright abhor Gnome, Gtk, and everything about it EXCEPT its liberal LGPL licensing. I've become less of a fan of GPL licensing and more of a fan of LGPL lately, ever since we considered developing Linux apps. GPL is not friendly to gaining commercial support (hence, you do not see many Linux games, Linux apps, etc) but Gtk is. However Gtk is an ugly environment for developers, and Qt/KDE is much more developer-friendly. If you want to offer a closed source app, you have a couple of options with Qt:
- GPL the GUI, completely split out the business logic and make the product two-tier or three-tier
- pay Trolltech's completely ridiculous ($1,900 / seat / year) licensing fee
Heck, at that price, it's cheaper to develop Microsoft Windows applications, fully licensed and everything, and you don't have to give away the farm with your product, either! Of course you won't have a prayer of going cross-platform if you do that, but you will be able to afford to develop the product. $1,900/seat is a ridiculous fee and plays right into the "Unix is more expensive" FUD.
What happened to etiquette in the workplace? Never mind security, respect for others is even more important. Hell, if everyone had respect for each others' humanity and right to live, we wouldn't NEED security.
Anyway:
Shoulder surfing = bad.
Someone is entering a password? Turn around and look away; even if you have a right to know it. It's just plain rude to watch someone type in a password.
We handle IT for several companies of 30 to 50 employees, and when users enter passwords, or when I have them create passwords for their accounts, I look away and ask them to type in a password(meeting n or x spec) and ask them to not share their password with anyone, and to not write it down but to memorize it.
Now, I have all the admin passwords, but I do not have the managers' passwords. I only know the passwords I need to know for a job. If I need to log into a user's account, I ask the user to log in for me, or I change the password, log in, do what I need to do, log out, and ask them to change the password again.
In a pinch I occasionally need to log in as one of the managers - in those rare cases (where I need to get the password over the telephone or whatever) as soon as I am finished I ask the manager to change the password.
I don't know other people's passwords (well, outside of my own company anyway) and I do not WANT to know their passwords. It's just plain rude, not even taking security issues into account.
I've been using SuSE for the past year and a half because it is the KDE-based distro which WORKS. Now they're dumping KDE/kwin as the primary interface? WTF? I actually LIKE integrated apps. I LIKE DCOP because I can automate nearly everything, be it command line or GUI.
Thanks Novell, I'll be switching to Mandriva if you do this.
Funny, I have a 266Mhz Pentium II with 256MB RAM here for my bookkeeper and I use the computer every couple of days (at minimum) and while I do have Microsoft Office 2000 on the machine, I much prefer running OOo on it, unless working on 1200-row or larger formatted spreadsheets.
Why? Aside from the crappy Spreadsheet file i/o issue, OOo actually runs faster. File I/O is a big bottleneck, but for most documents performance is great. Personally were I in charge of OOo it would not have shipped with that major I/O issue (I'd mark it as a fatal defect; as in showstopper, actually) but let's be reasonable here: aside from a few problem areas OOo's performance is pretty good, and for those problem areas I have M$ Office 2000.
We also have Office 2003 licenses but around the same time we purchased those we started trying the OOo suite. On windows 1.1.x/1.2.x sucked (and was only marginally acceptable on Linux, IMHO) but when OOo 1.9(2.0 beta) was released, our general opinion of OOo changed. Mine did totally, actually. I used to hate running OOo but I'm glad I gave it a try, because the move from 1.2.x to 1.9.x was a great experience and now I prefer it to Office XP or Office 2000.
Oh, and why did we not install Office 2003? Because unlike Adobe Creative Suite 2, Microsoft does not offer de-activation for license transfers. Adobe implemented a fair and reasonable Activation scheme. Microsoft implemented an anti-consumer "every customer is a crook" activation scheme.
This would effectively kill off practically every Linux-based DVD player (I'm talking embedded set-top boxes) and would also kill amateur video authoring. The MPAA and RIAA already get too much leeway. Unlike in Canada, here they have their cake and their eating it, too. They not only collect a levy on blank media, but they have succeeded in keeping distribution of copies illegal, whereas in other countries they have been forced to choose whether they get levies or free distribution remains illegal.
How can they claim they're losing money while at the same time posting record profits (the movie industry in particular)? How can they try to eliminate Fair Use when it is clearly legal by both legislated law and "case law?"
Is/Are the MPAA/RIAA so blinded by greed that they can't see that pushing this kind of anti-customer policy through will only encourage everyone to not only boycott them at the stores, but create ambition to bypass the protection and actively distribute "pirated" content out of spite?
There was a DVD which shipped without CSS and Macrovision "protection" - and yet it was still a great seller. It was the first Harry Potter movie to go to DVD, if I recall correctly - and despite being totally unprotected it still sold very well.
Create content people want, they will buy it - providing you let them actually USE it.
What I think the real goal is:
IMHO, their real goal is to destroy independent film makers and recording artists. So-called "Indie" labels are all too often shell companies run by Capitol/EMI, Sony, Atlantic, and so forth and are not the slightest bit independent. However there are legitimately-independent record companies out there (they exist. Really!) and this kind of "protection" would work well toward killing off the real indies out there. Sure, they could use old equipment manufactured prior to the date that this piece of crap legislation gets rubber stamped into law by Dubya, but very likely if the RIAA/MPAA are going this far, they have likely pushed for resale of older equipment to be outlawed by the bill as well. Is the text of this proposed idiotic and fascist bill available on the web?
The problem with using Oracle, Postgresql, etc is that mere mortals cannot manage it.
Sure they could. Oracle comes with GUI-based management tools, and if they're too complicated for your users, there are plenty of third-party alternative management utilities which put Access' GUI to shame.
PostgreSQL, I'm not so sure, but there have got to be GUI apps out there for it.
Likewise, if you want to take MySQL into consideration, there's webmin, phpMyAdmin, mysql-administrator, and mysql-query-browser.
Even if the above weren't true, it is unlikely end users would be doing any actual maintenance, but just running queries. The data sources can be linked to from any OOo suite application and queries can ve very easily run from OOo itself. Most of the time you won't have users dropping tables or databases so I fail to see what the problem is.
[blockquote]Not to mention the fact that in the Linux world, nothing comes close to Access as a [programmable] frontend.[/quote]
OpenOffice.org Base is the OOo equivalent of Access, and what's more, linking to external data sources is far easier (for the average user) in OpenOffice.org than it is in Microsoft Office.
Base supports ODBC, forms, basic, and everything else you'd expect from a desktop database platform. What more do you need? Or, are you basing your argument on data that is a year or more old, before Base was introduced (e.g., OOo 1.2.x)? Your statement would have been 100% accurate 18 months ago, fairly accurate 12 months ago when OOo 1.9.xx/2.0 was not ready for use, and totally untrue six months ago, let alone now.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately because we butted our nose in there in the first place and amplified a mess (ref: Iran/Iraq war) we have a mess to clean up. :( I'd like to see a withdrawl plan as well, but then, I'd like to see a GOOD presidential candidate rather than a choice between a jerk and an idiot in 2008.
Unfortunately, we won't get either wish now, will we? We'll be in Iraq for 20 more years to come, and the 2008 election will be between two slimeballs, with the possible chance of a reasonable decent, intelligent human being in a third party who doesn't have a prayer of a chance of being elected.
So how can we cut spending? Stopping advances in warfare hygiene isn't the solution. Heck, I might buy that gum for camping/hiking trips where there may not be plentiful water.
When you're the one in the trenches, it matters to you. It's good that you want to save money, but cut the spending in the right places.
It's good to see that you are showing your gratitude (or lack thereof) for the very same people who swore their lives to protect and preserve your constitutional right to make that statement.
The money they're spending is a pittance compared to practically anything else in the military.
I'd rather the military spend money on our own troops' well being and raise their pay rather than bailing out every pissant country who didn't attempt to thwart would-be dictators before it was too late. America spends (well our politicians spend) far too much taxpayer money bailing everyone else out when we have plenty of our own problems to deal with.
The current war in Iraq could have been avoided if George H. W. Bush had finished the job in Desert Storm - instead he let Saddam go, and caused problems to continue. Hell, why did we even bail out Kuwait in the first place? They had plenty of money, they should have paid us back for bushing Saddam out - or we should have simply stayed out of it.
Likewise - in Afghanistan, as soon as the Taliban were overthrown, we should have pulled out and let them clean up their own mess. Why? Again, we have enough domestic problems without squandering taxpayer money on everyone else's problems.
My point? Again, it comes to cutting military spending in the right places, and where you spend money on new items/technologies/ideas, picking the right ones. I happen to think that improving hygiene which in turn improves morale and overall physical health is a VERY good thing to spend money on.
until he started working for me. On his machine I did not give him a choice - for his office apps he can use OpenOffice.org or simply not work. Now that he's used it for a week he has discovered that he can do everything he needs in the OOo suite and is going to be installing it on his home PC. He hasn't run into performance issues with large files yet, but by the time he does I expect the OOo will have addressed at least some of those issues.
He was a Microsoft Office fan prior to this week (and to be fair, Microsoft Office IS an excellent product) but now sees that MS Office is not the only available option in the real world.
More geeks with gunked-up teeth, now that they have an excuse for not brushing. I hope this product doesn't hit the private sector!
(hint to newbie mods: I AM MAKING A FUNNY. CHUCKLE AND MOVE ON!)
Ditto for Windows 2003 - although I will probably be marked -1 Troll again for posting something which even slightly criticizes Microsoft on something based in truth.
Again, my post was topical, which only proves my point.
No kidding, yet I get marked a troll for making a FUNNY-yet-true remark, and your parents gets modded +2? WTF!
Troll? Bullshit.
I was making a funny, as in ha-ha. You guys are worse than Fark mods.
In order to obtain benchmarks over that long period of time, one must avoid reboots.
;)
I mean, you DO patch your Windows XP box, don't you? Most of the security patches require a reboot. No wonder Microsoft cannot get any data on long-term performance including stability and memory leaks - they're constantly rebooting so their test boxes don't get pwned by script kiddies!
This patent application is for a business process.
Method: company shall analyze prior art and patent prior art in obvious, clear violation of patent laws, counting on patent clerks' willingness to simply rubber-stamp any moronic patent application to come in the door with the application fees. Prior art shall be patented, and then company will send out cease-and-decist letters to businesses violating the new illegal patent. When companies laugh company off, company shall sue infringing company for damages due to loss revenue and force licensing fees moving forward.
Oh, and yes I know this is feeding the trolls, but:
These are administrative bungles and NOT security holes inherent to Unix/Linux/*nix. If you RTFA you will notice that not only is *nix affected, but every other platform (e.g., Windows) due to vulnerabilities in the application (perl, php), so let's not continue the platform wars, mmmmkay?
I notice that one of the listed vulnerabilities in awstats - definitely the fault of the administrator because not only is there a patched awstats version to address this well-documented vulnerability (check the project page at sourceforge), but you should also NOT make awstats publicly available. Lock it down so it can be accessed either only from your local/LAN IP range, or at least use http authentication (read up on .htaccess, man htpasswd/htpasswd2).
If you don't understand how to do either, I wouldn't say that you shouldn't be allowed near computers (everyone has to start from somewhere) but I will tell you that you need to RTFM. Yesterday.
Chances are that if you don't have the vulnerable apps locked down or patched already, you've already been rooted. Download/install rkhunter and chkrootkit and run them, keep them updated, set them up on cron jobs (man crontab), and actually read the reports daily - or at least the summaries.
Really?
Windows Web Server edition?
Small Business Server (all editions?)
Because I love paying for Windows and Microsoft Exchange licenses, and having all of my data tied into proprietary formats? I'm doing all I can to look for a real open source alternative to Exchange to avoid exactly that situation because although Microsoft does make damn fine products (Exchange is great considering the feature set, you will never convince me otherwise) I am disliking their anti-customer stance and their vendor-lock mechanisms (keeping formats completely proprietary and EULAs forbidding reverse engineering of the formats - MY data - etc.) more and more every day.
So what did I do for a CRM solution? I looked at Microsoft CRM, which was a free ad-on for M$ Exchange/Outlook/SQL Server, and I looked at SugarCRM. The choice was clear and so we went with SugarCRM. I did not discover vTiger (a fork of SugarCRM) until after we implemented SugarCRM but it's been working out fine for us, and once I upgrade it to the latest version we will be able to get even more use out of it and hopefully get good processes (help tickets, etc.) into place in one centralized (and open and documented) location.
Mod parent up!!
When I came across this thread I immediately sent a long email to Novell customer relations, stating that if they dump KDE then I will be dumping the very distribution which won me (and consequently many of my company's workstations and servers) back over from Windows to Linux, after my not having touched Linux since 1997 or 1998.
I also stated that I suspect Trolltech's licensing is the underlying reason - and if that is indeed the case, why couldn't Novell work with Trolltech to change the licensing, or just buy them out, since Novell has the resources and can and has done that very thing with larger companies (e.g., SuSE, Ximian).
I dislike Gnome. No, I downright abhor Gnome, Gtk, and everything about it EXCEPT its liberal LGPL licensing. I've become less of a fan of GPL licensing and more of a fan of LGPL lately, ever since we considered developing Linux apps. GPL is not friendly to gaining commercial support (hence, you do not see many Linux games, Linux apps, etc) but Gtk is. However Gtk is an ugly environment for developers, and Qt/KDE is much more developer-friendly. If you want to offer a closed source app, you have a couple of options with Qt:
- GPL the GUI, completely split out the business logic and make the product two-tier or three-tier
- pay Trolltech's completely ridiculous ($1,900 / seat / year) licensing fee
Heck, at that price, it's cheaper to develop Microsoft Windows applications, fully licensed and everything, and you don't have to give away the farm with your product, either! Of course you won't have a prayer of going cross-platform if you do that, but you will be able to afford to develop the product. $1,900/seat is a ridiculous fee and plays right into the "Unix is more expensive" FUD.
What happened to etiquette in the workplace? Never mind security, respect for others is even more important. Hell, if everyone had respect for each others' humanity and right to live, we wouldn't NEED security.
Anyway:
Shoulder surfing = bad.
Someone is entering a password? Turn around and look away; even if you have a right to know it. It's just plain rude to watch someone type in a password.
We handle IT for several companies of 30 to 50 employees, and when users enter passwords, or when I have them create passwords for their accounts, I look away and ask them to type in a password(meeting n or x spec) and ask them to not share their password with anyone, and to not write it down but to memorize it.
Now, I have all the admin passwords, but I do not have the managers' passwords. I only know the passwords I need to know for a job. If I need to log into a user's account, I ask the user to log in for me, or I change the password, log in, do what I need to do, log out, and ask them to change the password again.
In a pinch I occasionally need to log in as one of the managers - in those rare cases (where I need to get the password over the telephone or whatever) as soon as I am finished I ask the manager to change the password.
I don't know other people's passwords (well, outside of my own company anyway) and I do not WANT to know their passwords. It's just plain rude, not even taking security issues into account.
I've been using SuSE for the past year and a half because it is the KDE-based distro which WORKS. Now they're dumping KDE/kwin as the primary interface? WTF? I actually LIKE integrated apps. I LIKE DCOP because I can automate nearly everything, be it command line or GUI.
Thanks Novell, I'll be switching to Mandriva if you do this.
Oh come on, I thought my post was funny! :(
BSD? BSD is a tool of the Debil! It's from the same folks who invented LSD!
Funny, I have a 266Mhz Pentium II with 256MB RAM here for my bookkeeper and I use the computer every couple of days (at minimum) and while I do have Microsoft Office 2000 on the machine, I much prefer running OOo on it, unless working on 1200-row or larger formatted spreadsheets.
Why? Aside from the crappy Spreadsheet file i/o issue, OOo actually runs faster. File I/O is a big bottleneck, but for most documents performance is great. Personally were I in charge of OOo it would not have shipped with that major I/O issue (I'd mark it as a fatal defect; as in showstopper, actually) but let's be reasonable here: aside from a few problem areas OOo's performance is pretty good, and for those problem areas I have M$ Office 2000.
We also have Office 2003 licenses but around the same time we purchased those we started trying the OOo suite. On windows 1.1.x/1.2.x sucked (and was only marginally acceptable on Linux, IMHO) but when OOo 1.9(2.0 beta) was released, our general opinion of OOo changed. Mine did totally, actually. I used to hate running OOo but I'm glad I gave it a try, because the move from 1.2.x to 1.9.x was a great experience and now I prefer it to Office XP or Office 2000.
Oh, and why did we not install Office 2003? Because unlike Adobe Creative Suite 2, Microsoft does not offer de-activation for license transfers. Adobe implemented a fair and reasonable Activation scheme. Microsoft implemented an anti-consumer "every customer is a crook" activation scheme.
This would effectively kill off practically every Linux-based DVD player (I'm talking embedded set-top boxes) and would also kill amateur video authoring. The MPAA and RIAA already get too much leeway. Unlike in Canada, here they have their cake and their eating it, too. They not only collect a levy on blank media, but they have succeeded in keeping distribution of copies illegal, whereas in other countries they have been forced to choose whether they get levies or free distribution remains illegal.
How can they claim they're losing money while at the same time posting record profits (the movie industry in particular)? How can they try to eliminate Fair Use when it is clearly legal by both legislated law and "case law?"
Is/Are the MPAA/RIAA so blinded by greed that they can't see that pushing this kind of anti-customer policy through will only encourage everyone to not only boycott them at the stores, but create ambition to bypass the protection and actively distribute "pirated" content out of spite?
There was a DVD which shipped without CSS and Macrovision "protection" - and yet it was still a great seller. It was the first Harry Potter movie to go to DVD, if I recall correctly - and despite being totally unprotected it still sold very well.
Create content people want, they will buy it - providing you let them actually USE it.
What I think the real goal is:IMHO, their real goal is to destroy independent film makers and recording artists. So-called "Indie" labels are all too often shell companies run by Capitol/EMI, Sony, Atlantic, and so forth and are not the slightest bit independent. However there are legitimately-independent record companies out there (they exist. Really!) and this kind of "protection" would work well toward killing off the real indies out there. Sure, they could use old equipment manufactured prior to the date that this piece of crap legislation gets rubber stamped into law by Dubya, but very likely if the RIAA/MPAA are going this far, they have likely pushed for resale of older equipment to be outlawed by the bill as well. Is the text of this proposed idiotic and fascist bill available on the web?
Dang it I was mixing HTML and UBB tags. Sorry about that!
Sure they could. Oracle comes with GUI-based management tools, and if they're too complicated for your users, there are plenty of third-party alternative management utilities which put Access' GUI to shame.
PostgreSQL, I'm not so sure, but there have got to be GUI apps out there for it.
Likewise, if you want to take MySQL into consideration, there's webmin, phpMyAdmin, mysql-administrator, and mysql-query-browser.
Even if the above weren't true, it is unlikely end users would be doing any actual maintenance, but just running queries. The data sources can be linked to from any OOo suite application and queries can ve very easily run from OOo itself. Most of the time you won't have users dropping tables or databases so I fail to see what the problem is.
Lastly,OpenOffice.org Base is the OOo equivalent of Access, and what's more, linking to external data sources is far easier (for the average user) in OpenOffice.org than it is in Microsoft Office.
Base supports ODBC, forms, basic, and everything else you'd expect from a desktop database platform. What more do you need? Or, are you basing your argument on data that is a year or more old, before Base was introduced (e.g., OOo 1.2.x)? Your statement would have been 100% accurate 18 months ago, fairly accurate 12 months ago when OOo 1.9.xx/2.0 was not ready for use, and totally untrue six months ago, let alone now.