I'll probably get modded as troll/flamebait, but this is the most important question and I'm surprised there aren't already more people asking the same:
Features are nice, of course, but how does it perform?
Currently, Open office is good 80% of the time, but it lands so hard on the 20% where it falls that it is arguable whether it is 'usable' in any real sense of the word in critical situations.
My two personal examples are presentations, in which animations and slide changing all run so slowly that it becomes unusable (like, lags increasing from 1 second to over 30 seconds in the first 10 slides), and macros in large spreadsheets (one which typically takes 30 seconds to run on 10,000 lines of data in MS Excel was running 1 line per second in OOo).
Since I use Linux and do, daily, use open office, I'm personally very hopeful that this release may solve these, and other, long standing problems. However if it doesn't, I'll be looking at reinstalling MS Office through Wine. I've already used this setup extensively when I needed to run an Access-based program, and it hurt much less than Open Office does.
The question is the balance between progress and stability. To say that it's not worth fixing something that isn't broken is true to a point, but when the setup (eg 10 year old browser on dialup) is so outdated, it becomes functionally identical to broken.
That's not to say he's got a good point - I normally restrain myself from upgrades (OS, browser, office suite, whatever) for at least a few points after a major release, unless there is good reason to push an upgrade. However, this is such an extreme example that it is verging on being stuck in the mud and proud of it.
A sensible discussion would focus on, eg, IE6 on WinXP/2k or FF 2.0 on Ubuntu 5.10/6.10, instead of something this outdated. After all, there are good arguments that say referencing the Encyclopaedia Britannica in your local library is more reliable than Wikipedia - but I know which is faster and more convenient.
Maybe Pakistan found something blasphemous? Or maybe China found something against their national interest? Maybe Canada got disgruntled by the unauthorised distribution of copyright data on it?
Or then again, maybe a corru^H^H^H^H targeted US company found all of the above?
...it's more likely just a misconfigured agent sniffer that needs to be fine tuned around the new FF version's specific appearance on a Linux box
The issues here are really testing and assumptions.
The testing issue is technically the most important, as a piece of web-based software as important as hotmail should be extensively tested in many configurations before major updates.
If the testing was missed or incomplete, it leads us to the second problem: Assumptions. Microsoft (or MSN) assumed that since they have 99% working correctly, and the 1% aren't using their latest and greatest (IE7 on XP/Vista), then it's good enough.
Incompetence vs malicious blocking was raised previously by the saga of gmail invitations all ending up as 'spam' in hotmail and getfirefox.com etc all being marked as fishing sites in the newly released IE7 - hardly an accidentally misconfigured filter in those cases.
The 2 reasons I left hotmail were a 2MB inbox long after regular document and photo files were encroaching on the 1MB size, meaning mailboxes would routinely be unavailable, and incompetent filtering of mail, causing any email received from an unknown sender to routinely be deleted without the recipient even seeing it. Both were outdated and fudged responses to a perceived threat (running out of server disk space and spam emails). Both were fixed very quickly once there was real competition in the webmail space.
While the GP may be blunt or even arrogant, it's clear that MS do engage in deliberate blocking policies like this, so it's not infeasible that this is deliberate.
A software glitch of this type (if that's what it was) has never happened in aviation history. Certainly not in the 10 year history of the 777, with more than 500 of them flying around the world, but not to any other type either.
IAAAE (I Am An Aeronautical Engineer) and to take serious issue with that statement.
According to the Times today, there have been at least 2 reported computer 'glitches' on 777s in the last 3 years. One lowered the airspeed from 270 to 158 knots along with putting the a/c in a 3000'/min climb causing it to stall. The other caused an uncommanded lurch to the right.
There have been numerous other computer (software AND hardware) glitches and failures in many aircraft, some leading to accidents (remember the A320 landing in the woods?) but most detected and corrected by the pilots. A brief search of the AAIB database should show that.
and yes, the aircraft did stall, despite what the article summary says
Of course it stalled. It hit the ground short of the runway - the pilots were doing everything possible to get over the fence. After flaring the aircraft, it is usually lowered to the ground. By holding off till stall (at a few metres above the ground), they probably got an extra 20 or 30m of flight. This was probably enough to get the aircraft onto the tarmac where it stopped, easing the evacuation and recovery. It did not, however, stall during flight when the error began.
How will this work with specifications that say "render text like Word 98?"
As covered in this link, it appears that most of these specifications have either been removed or documented. What this does mean is that perhaps it will be possible to truly understand what these formatting hooks refer to, not what MS have documented them as referring to...
Considering the code for rendering the older.doc formats is now officially considered 'unsafe' by Microsoft, and has been disabled in Office 2007, perhaps releasing the code itself (or choice chunks of it) would be just as useful?
Surely if you have a chunk of code for a no longer supported format, which you consider too buggy and unsafe, which is 10 years old and which you've disabled in your latest products, you wouldn't mind letting other people clean it up for free, since it can't be of any commercial value?
The worst proprietary 'hooks' such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules', appear now to have been documented - see this link. This in effect means that some of the quirkier behaviour of old versions of MS Office may now have been made public (difficult to say for sure as the ECMA resolution is behind a passworded site).
Microsoft would make their, and everyone else's, lives a lot easier if they went the whole way and documented the entire depreciated office formats, allowing others to write filters to correctly interpret them. This would also give them a foothold in claiming that the tags above truly do point to an open format, since the behaviours they refer to would be openly documented.
Interestingly the absolute worst elements, such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules' (the parent's article lists objections to about a dozen of these) seem to have been resolved.
This does raise the prospect that a truly open implementation of the format could be created, which was my biggest worry about a format which calls itself 'open'. What we were faced with before was a supposed standard format which had unexplained and undocumented hooks to long defunct, proprietary formats which only Microsoft could correctly implement. If these are now correctly documented, we may now have a format which anyone may be able to implement, although still in the firm grasp of Microsoft.
We may even have more information about how old versions of MS Office operated (if, for example, the mysterious footnote behaviour of various versions of Word has been explained).
However, since the resolution from ECMA is behind a passworded site, the official resolutions cannot be accessed. Odd behaviour for a standards creating body at a consultation stage, leaving us hoping the Czech team, and the others, have done their work.
I am really starting to believe that GNOME is a trojan horse, or at least some aspects of it.
Whatever the motives of individuals behind the Gnome project, it has contributed one of only 4 fully fledged (only 2 free), stable and heavy-weight desktop managers around. Not only that but it has contributed a toolkit of the highest quality and literally hundreds of excellent applications.
Let's face it - just as KDE didn't die when gnome was founded in reaction to linking to non-GPL code, so Gnome won't die if some bad decisions are made.
Much more likely is that the environment will continue to be developed to an excellent level, mistakes will continue to be made and competition between the FOSS alternatives will continue to drive them ahead of the competitors.
I think the problem here is that people are getting justifiably twitchy about the shoulder-to-shoulder attitude that some companies in the Open Source world have taken with Microsoft.
Combine this with the fear of being bulldozered by a company which has, in the past, been known to bulldozer competitors, and you get sensationalist and unbalanced reporting of this sort.
If indeed the Gnome team are taking the "It's here to stay, let's see what we can do with it" line, there's justifiable fear that this will translate to the same level of co-operation that has been seen with cross-licensed patent agreements.
It would be interesting to know what the folk on other development teams are thinking - probably waiting for the storm to blow over while quietly working out how to best implement support for OOXML in their own products. Koffice, for example, MUST be working on a converter/importer for OOXML since, like it or not, it's going to be around for a while.
Since all recent popular Linux distributions uses Gnome by default, does this really matter anymore?
The only new linux distribution to default to Gnome and exclude KDE in recent years has been Ubuntu. The overwhelming speed at which Ubuntu has grown (I'm posting from Gnome/Ubuntu now) has largely been down to the development team going the extra mile to develop a truely user-friendly interface.
However, as with all open source projects, alternatives are available - Kubuntu, for example, or simply 'apt-get install kde'. Personally I have both installed and highly value the competition and choice between them.
So yes, it does matter - it is trivially easy for individual users to switch to another desktop. All the apps they have got used to will still work (I use mostly KDE apps). The decision for the developers may take more consideration, but the users will continue to use what each feels is most appropriate. If one drifts away from being truly free, the effects will ripple back upstream.
As a Skype customer (adpsimpson) and software developer who has used
skype-out from across the world to stay in touch with folk at home, I
read with some interest on http://slashdot.org/ this morning that Skype
appears to read the system bios on start up.
While I am aware that there are legitimate reasons that some software
may do this, I cannot immediately think what a VOIP application would
require the data for.
Using closed source software is always a second-best from my point of
view, especially in terms of privacy and transparency of the
software's function - this in fact is what led me to Skype, since it
runs on Linux. As such I am slightly concerned about unexpected
application behaviour.
What does Skype do with this information? Is it transmitted across the
network in any form? Is it identifiable?
Seems I've just entered the unintentionally-trollish-joke-taken-for-a-troll camp. The original (ok, cryptic) meaning of my post was that this exploit is lame-ass - open source should be, apparently, so we're told by some, catching up with proprietory - and yet this is the best style of exploit it can come up with? It's crap!
Oh well. Suddenly I see the thrill of trolling. The pull of the dark side is strong. [mumble mumble hot grits mumble Natelie Portman mumble mumble overlords mumble mod me down but mumble mumble]
I thought open source software was meant to be playing catchup to proprietory programs, and then we see yet another lame-ass exploit.
This just shows why open source just isn't ready for the desktop.
In all seriousness, I know how long a London Bus is, I know that an elephant is pretty heavy, I know roughly how much shelf space the Encyclopedia Britannica takes up and I know tall buildings can be quite tall.
But I have no real concept of how big a white blood cell is, or how much some thousand words (how many thousand? It's out my mind now that it's off the screen...) really is.
For all I know, the hard drive in my computer could be storing 600 birthday cards per germ already and I wouldn't have a clue.
...introduce legislation that will prevent the FCC from creating technology mandates... ...These misguided requirements distort the marketplace..."
The irony of the attempt to introduce a law to prevent the ability from another government agency introducing laws in the area it was set up to oversee is amazing - laws to castrate the law-making powers of a government body?
How would this law, restricting the placing of restrictions on the market to by a body set up to restrict the market (one way or another), fit the mythical golden rule that the free market (without intervention or restrictions) is only one step below heaven/utopia?
Slashdot Mirror
For those who want to actually see it, not a blog about it - Jester
Parent links to shock site - do not click. This is much more amusing, if you want to click on something ;)
I'll probably get modded as troll/flamebait, but this is the most important question and I'm surprised there aren't already more people asking the same:
Currently, Open office is good 80% of the time, but it lands so hard on the 20% where it falls that it is arguable whether it is 'usable' in any real sense of the word in critical situations.
My two personal examples are presentations, in which animations and slide changing all run so slowly that it becomes unusable (like, lags increasing from 1 second to over 30 seconds in the first 10 slides), and macros in large spreadsheets (one which typically takes 30 seconds to run on 10,000 lines of data in MS Excel was running 1 line per second in OOo).
Since I use Linux and do, daily, use open office, I'm personally very hopeful that this release may solve these, and other, long standing problems. However if it doesn't, I'll be looking at reinstalling MS Office through Wine. I've already used this setup extensively when I needed to run an Access-based program, and it hurt much less than Open Office does.
From the article:
Repeat after me:
Coroloshn...
Corrorro...
Corrorashnisnotcausashn.
There. I sssayed it.
:)
Corrupt organisation seeks to further own aims.
Film at 11.
The question is the balance between progress and stability. To say that it's not worth fixing something that isn't broken is true to a point, but when the setup (eg 10 year old browser on dialup) is so outdated, it becomes functionally identical to broken.
That's not to say he's got a good point - I normally restrain myself from upgrades (OS, browser, office suite, whatever) for at least a few points after a major release, unless there is good reason to push an upgrade. However, this is such an extreme example that it is verging on being stuck in the mud and proud of it.
A sensible discussion would focus on, eg, IE6 on WinXP/2k or FF 2.0 on Ubuntu 5.10/6.10, instead of something this outdated. After all, there are good arguments that say referencing the Encyclopaedia Britannica in your local library is more reliable than Wikipedia - but I know which is faster and more convenient.
Good question, I'm glad you asked.
Certainly not Iran.
Maybe Pakistan found something blasphemous? Or maybe China found something against their national interest? Maybe Canada got disgruntled by the unauthorised distribution of copyright data on it?
Or then again, maybe a corru^H^H^H^H targeted US company found all of the above?
The issues here are really testing and assumptions.
The testing issue is technically the most important, as a piece of web-based software as important as hotmail should be extensively tested in many configurations before major updates.
If the testing was missed or incomplete, it leads us to the second problem: Assumptions. Microsoft (or MSN) assumed that since they have 99% working correctly, and the 1% aren't using their latest and greatest (IE7 on XP/Vista), then it's good enough.
Incompetence vs malicious blocking was raised previously by the saga of gmail invitations all ending up as 'spam' in hotmail and getfirefox.com etc all being marked as fishing sites in the newly released IE7 - hardly an accidentally misconfigured filter in those cases.
The 2 reasons I left hotmail were a 2MB inbox long after regular document and photo files were encroaching on the 1MB size, meaning mailboxes would routinely be unavailable, and incompetent filtering of mail, causing any email received from an unknown sender to routinely be deleted without the recipient even seeing it. Both were outdated and fudged responses to a perceived threat (running out of server disk space and spam emails). Both were fixed very quickly once there was real competition in the webmail space.
While the GP may be blunt or even arrogant, it's clear that MS do engage in deliberate blocking policies like this, so it's not infeasible that this is deliberate.
...as flamebait.
"We've not argued about this for a while. Let's have a shouting match...IAAAE (I Am An Aeronautical Engineer) and to take serious issue with that statement.
According to the Times today, there have been at least 2 reported computer 'glitches' on 777s in the last 3 years. One lowered the airspeed from 270 to 158 knots along with putting the a/c in a 3000'/min climb causing it to stall. The other caused an uncommanded lurch to the right.
There have been numerous other computer (software AND hardware) glitches and failures in many aircraft, some leading to accidents (remember the A320 landing in the woods?) but most detected and corrected by the pilots. A brief search of the AAIB database should show that.
Of course it stalled. It hit the ground short of the runway - the pilots were doing everything possible to get over the fence. After flaring the aircraft, it is usually lowered to the ground. By holding off till stall (at a few metres above the ground), they probably got an extra 20 or 30m of flight. This was probably enough to get the aircraft onto the tarmac where it stopped, easing the evacuation and recovery. It did not, however, stall during flight when the error began.
As covered in this link, it appears that most of these specifications have either been removed or documented. What this does mean is that perhaps it will be possible to truly understand what these formatting hooks refer to, not what MS have documented them as referring to...
(Thanks to zmotula for the link)
Considering the code for rendering the older .doc formats is now officially considered 'unsafe' by Microsoft, and has been disabled in Office 2007, perhaps releasing the code itself (or choice chunks of it) would be just as useful?
Surely if you have a chunk of code for a no longer supported format, which you consider too buggy and unsafe, which is 10 years old and which you've disabled in your latest products, you wouldn't mind letting other people clean it up for free, since it can't be of any commercial value?
Right?
--ducks the '-1 flamebait' mod---
The worst proprietary 'hooks' such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules', appear now to have been documented - see this link. This in effect means that some of the quirkier behaviour of old versions of MS Office may now have been made public (difficult to say for sure as the ECMA resolution is behind a passworded site).
Microsoft would make their, and everyone else's, lives a lot easier if they went the whole way and documented the entire depreciated office formats, allowing others to write filters to correctly interpret them. This would also give them a foothold in claiming that the tags above truly do point to an open format, since the behaviours they refer to would be openly documented.
But let's not hold our breath.
Interestingly the absolute worst elements, such as 'footnoteLayoutLikeWW8', 'lineWrapLikeWord6' and 'useWord97LineBreakRules' (the parent's article lists objections to about a dozen of these) seem to have been resolved.
This does raise the prospect that a truly open implementation of the format could be created, which was my biggest worry about a format which calls itself 'open'. What we were faced with before was a supposed standard format which had unexplained and undocumented hooks to long defunct, proprietary formats which only Microsoft could correctly implement. If these are now correctly documented, we may now have a format which anyone may be able to implement, although still in the firm grasp of Microsoft.
We may even have more information about how old versions of MS Office operated (if, for example, the mysterious footnote behaviour of various versions of Word has been explained).
However, since the resolution from ECMA is behind a passworded site, the official resolutions cannot be accessed. Odd behaviour for a standards creating body at a consultation stage, leaving us hoping the Czech team, and the others, have done their work.
Whatever the motives of individuals behind the Gnome project, it has contributed one of only 4 fully fledged (only 2 free), stable and heavy-weight desktop managers around. Not only that but it has contributed a toolkit of the highest quality and literally hundreds of excellent applications.
Let's face it - just as KDE didn't die when gnome was founded in reaction to linking to non-GPL code, so Gnome won't die if some bad decisions are made.
Much more likely is that the environment will continue to be developed to an excellent level, mistakes will continue to be made and competition between the FOSS alternatives will continue to drive them ahead of the competitors.
I think the problem here is that people are getting justifiably twitchy about the shoulder-to-shoulder attitude that some companies in the Open Source world have taken with Microsoft.
Combine this with the fear of being bulldozered by a company which has, in the past, been known to bulldozer competitors, and you get sensationalist and unbalanced reporting of this sort.
If indeed the Gnome team are taking the "It's here to stay, let's see what we can do with it" line, there's justifiable fear that this will translate to the same level of co-operation that has been seen with cross-licensed patent agreements.
It would be interesting to know what the folk on other development teams are thinking - probably waiting for the storm to blow over while quietly working out how to best implement support for OOXML in their own products. Koffice, for example, MUST be working on a converter/importer for OOXML since, like it or not, it's going to be around for a while.
The only new linux distribution to default to Gnome and exclude KDE in recent years has been Ubuntu. The overwhelming speed at which Ubuntu has grown (I'm posting from Gnome/Ubuntu now) has largely been down to the development team going the extra mile to develop a truely user-friendly interface.
However, as with all open source projects, alternatives are available - Kubuntu, for example, or simply 'apt-get install kde'. Personally I have both installed and highly value the competition and choice between them.
So yes, it does matter - it is trivially easy for individual users to switch to another desktop. All the apps they have got used to will still work (I use mostly KDE apps). The decision for the developers may take more consideration, but the users will continue to use what each feels is most appropriate. If one drifts away from being truly free, the effects will ripple back upstream.
Dear Sir/Madam,
As a Skype customer (adpsimpson) and software developer who has used skype-out from across the world to stay in touch with folk at home, I read with some interest on http://slashdot.org/ this morning that Skype appears to read the system bios on start up.
While I am aware that there are legitimate reasons that some software may do this, I cannot immediately think what a VOIP application would require the data for.
Using closed source software is always a second-best from my point of view, especially in terms of privacy and transparency of the software's function - this in fact is what led me to Skype, since it runs on Linux. As such I am slightly concerned about unexpected application behaviour.
What does Skype do with this information? Is it transmitted across the network in any form? Is it identifiable?
I look forward to your response,
Yours,
Andrew Simpson
oops...
Seems I've just entered the unintentionally-trollish-joke-taken-for-a-troll camp. The original (ok, cryptic) meaning of my post was that this exploit is lame-ass - open source should be, apparently, so we're told by some, catching up with proprietory - and yet this is the best style of exploit it can come up with? It's crap!
Oh well. Suddenly I see the thrill of trolling. The pull of the dark side is strong. [mumble mumble hot grits mumble Natelie Portman mumble mumble overlords mumble mod me down but mumble mumble]
Anyway, Windows is dead. Netcraft confirms it.
I thought open source software was meant to be playing catchup to proprietory programs, and then we see yet another lame-ass exploit.
This just shows why open source just isn't ready for the desktop.
A fresh Ubuntu install? I hear those guys will accept it :)
In all seriousness, I know how long a London Bus is, I know that an elephant is pretty heavy, I know roughly how much shelf space the Encyclopedia Britannica takes up and I know tall buildings can be quite tall.
But I have no real concept of how big a white blood cell is, or how much some thousand words (how many thousand? It's out my mind now that it's off the screen...) really is.
For all I know, the hard drive in my computer could be storing 600 birthday cards per germ already and I wouldn't have a clue.
Anyone care to quote how fast the Concorde went in Ford Escorts per millisecond? (the link will give you a good start)
Cue 2000+ flames. Doesn't anyone get tired of this?
The irony of the attempt to introduce a law to prevent the ability from another government agency introducing laws in the area it was set up to oversee is amazing - laws to castrate the law-making powers of a government body?
How would this law, restricting the placing of restrictions on the market to by a body set up to restrict the market (one way or another), fit the mythical golden rule that the free market (without intervention or restrictions) is only one step below heaven/utopia?