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If viruses, security holes, pop-up ads, lack of tab browsing, spyware issues, etc were not enough to convince you to switch from IE to another browser (Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Opera, Konqueror come to mind..) — well I have a few more reasons.

Recently I have been working on CSS2/XHTML websites. For those of you who do not know, cascading style sheets (CSS) is a web standard from 1998 that aids in consistent website design. You can re-define standard HTML syntax and create your own styles. Beyond that, it provides precise positioning, layers and other features that are similar to those found in desktop publishing programs.

XHTML is an HTML document written to be XML compliant. What does this mean? Essentially this provides structure to the document so it is more accessible to a wider audience and provides defined strucutre to compliant documents.

So what is my gripe this time around? Well the simple answer –> Internet Explorer has the WORSE compliance to CSS2/XHTML when compared to all other modern web browsers (those listed above). What is truly disappointing is the fact that Microsoft is a member of the W3C who is the body that promotes web standards and Microsoft is undoubtedly the one organization that could EASILY be the first one to compliance with these standards.

In addition to this incompliance, Microsoft has broken support with perhaps the most useful image format available for website development: PNG. What is PNG? To put it simply, it is a patent-free replacement for GIF. It supports alpha-transparency, lossless compression, variable bit depth, etc. PNG was developed back in 1995 and yet again, all of the modern web browsers have support for PNG except for Internet Explorer (though I’ll give some kudos to the Mac IE team.. they have better support than the IE/Win32).

There are workarounds to provide PNG style functionaility in Internet Explorer. This involves adding kludge to your site that detects the browser and rewrites PNG images with propietary Internet Explorer filer code for IE users. Biggest problem is web standards are suppose to eliminate this unnecessary browser detection kludge.

What is the solution? Unfortunately for many, it is to succumb to the limitations of Internet Explorer and not use alpha-channel transparent PNGs (which are, btw, very beautiful), not to use many of the great features of CSS2/XHTML and instead use significant amount of kludge (in the way of browser detection scripts, javascript, applets, flash animations, and so forth) to work-around these issues.

My solution? Same as always — use a web standards browser. Not only are most of them free, but they have modern features, backwards compatible with non-standard sites and usually will even import settings from IE. For website developers — I *HIGHLY* urge to design your pages to the standards, not specific browsers.

OpenOffice.org has finally received some acknowledgement from Microsoft! In this sales and marketing flyer, Microsoft makes a case for why people should use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice.org….

Anyways, for those that are wondering, here are some reasons why Microsoft feels you should NOT use the OpenOffice.org productivity suite:

1. OpenOffice.org is not free — even though you can download it, there are other hidden cost such as installation & deployment, user training, document conversion, and rewriting macros.

My take: OpenOffice.org is free of licensing costs that Microsoft has. Microsoft software, the last time I checked also had to be installed, deployed, users trained, etc so it seems like the same cost going with either suite. Document conversion? Perhaps.. OOo does import Microsoft Office formats and does so fairly well — there might be some adjustments necessary to complex documents.

2. You NEED the features of Microsoft Office.

My take: The guide, states “I only need basic features, OpenOffice is good enough.” — simple answer — this is true. Most users only need basic features and virtually all users only use a small subset of the features in the Office suite. Microsoft apparently thinks they know better and believe you NEED more features. A few points that Microsoft makes regarding the need of features:

- Exchange business transaction information with customers/vendors —> perhaps use of open standards is a better idea — PDF, email, websites anyone?

- Ensure mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack —> Microsoft’s operating systems are the ONLY ones being attacked by viruses. Microsoft’s full version of Office is only availabble on Microsoft’s operating systems (sure there is a Mac port, but without Access, Outlook, etc..) — seems like it makes more sense to use an office suite that is not dependant on a virus proned system to begin with (hint: OOo is officially supported on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD)..

- Effectively manage customer relationships so as to maximize sales —> not quite sure how MS Office does this better than OOo? No examples provided.

- Quickly access key information from accounting and other business applications —> I have done this in OOo just fine. Infact, integration with my other non-OOo apps is fairly seamless.. not to mention crossplatform compatible.

- Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner. —> Interesting tidbit– the guide was NOT designed using Microsoft Office’s Publisher but instead using QuarkXPress 4.11. Heck, it wasn’t even done on a Microsoft OS, it was created completely on a Macintosh and saved in Adobe’s PDF format. So much for Microsoft trying to make a point — remember, this IS sales & marketing material.

- Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small business does not have the resources of a large company for IT integration and support. —> ok.. OpenOffice doesn’t have license fees, supports MS documents and has the features needed (plus lots of cool features not found in MS Office) — your point Microsoft?

OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. —> counter, Sun Microsystems provides lots of input into OOo and provides StarOffice, essentially the commercial version (with support) of OOo.. so if you NEED support, go with StarOffice.

OpenOffice offers limited compatibility with Office. –> Ok .. you got me there Microsoft. Without you opening up your file format standards, the OOo integration team had to reverse engineer their MS file format support. If MS would open up their formats (open standards) then 99.999% compatibility would most likely be the outcome. On the flip side, OOo is an open standards file format and Microsoft has absolutely 0% compatibility with it.

I think you get my point. Microsoft is doing the FUD thing with OOo instead of trying to be innovative (yes, believe it or not, innovation can still occur in producitivity suites.. check out some of the neat features in OOo or some of the stuff Apple is doing with products such as keynote!) —–

Needless to say, here are some advantages of OOo:

– no platform lock in — available for 5 platforms with unofficial ports for others.
– no licensing costs — the money stays in your pocket.
– open source, documented API, etc — need to develop a custom solution? EVERYTHING is available for you to do it.
– style based interface — if you use desktop publishing programs like Indesign, or QuarkXpress or are a web designer using CSS you already know the benefit! OOo integrates tightly with styles and as a result, can do lots of interesting things based on the styles. Once you use them, you will wonder how you were able to get away without using them in MS Office.
– Non-intrusive interface — no paper clip, no pop-up helpers acknowledging that you are writing a letter, etc..etc..etc.. Needless to say, its great to have an interface that assists, not hinders the content creation process.

Of course, why not try it out yourself! Point your browser to openoffice.org and download your own, fully functional, non-demo, non-trialware, etc version today!

I was sent a very interesting link that talks all about Microsoft. For those of you who do not know much about Microsoft and the computing industry in general, it is a real eye opener. For those of you who know about Microsoft’s business tactics, it might enligthen you to things that you did not know.

UPDATE: I posted the link before reading the entire document. Granted, while the majority of this is true (and perhaps all of it true at one point in time) as always with the tech industry, things change and certain examples are not applicable anymore.

K3B is a CD & DVD burning application optimized for KDE. It provides similar functionaility to applications such as Nero and Easy CD Creator on Windows.

The interface, as you can see from the screen shots, is easy to understand. On the first screen, select the type of project that you want to do: Audio CD, Data CD, Copy CD ro DVD and from there, simply drag and drop files from the top to the bottom.

The application provides a bar at the bottom of the screen to signify how much space on the CD has been utilized and how much is available. After the CD is setup the way you want, simply click the BURN button at the bottom and sit back and wait for the CD to be finished. Below is a screen shot of the actual burning process:

The thing that I really like about K3B is the fact that the interface is simple to quickly get started with, but not underpowered. Out of the box, K3B supports WAV, MP3, FLAC and my personal favorite, Ogg Vorbis music formats. However, given the pluggable nature of K3B, it is very simple to point it to another file format/decoder and have it support it (pluggable audio decoding). In addition, K3B can normalize the volume levels of audio tracks to make a consistent volume level across the entire CD.

It also supports all of the formats that advanced users might want to create. This includes Video CDs (VCD 1.1, 2.0, SVCD), CD-i, CD-Extra, CD-Plus, eMovix CDs, direct CD copies, El-Torito boot images, multisession CDs, Rockridge & Joliet support, DAO/TAO, DVD-R(W), and DVD+R(W). In addition, K3B provides CD ripping capabilities with CDDB and CD-TEXT support and encoding to virtually every audio format (WAV, MP3, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis come standard).

Of course, because it is a KDE application, it automagically gets many of the KDE services as freebies — it can be plugged in (via KParts) to other applications, utilize KIOSlaves for grabbing data from remote sources, etc.

About a week ago, I talked with a dean at a local tech school and we were discussing a 5 year plan for a smallish network — couple servers, about 30-40 desktops, etc.

He was promoting a plan that would remove all the existing desktops & servers and replace them with a standardized, fairly powerful desktop (2.5Ghz+, 256 or 512MB RAM, etc..) as well as a beefy back-end server. To top it off, the entire thing would run some variant of Windows (Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server) — of course, this excluded the stuff that needed TRUE security, which would run FreeBSD — primarily the Internet gateway, web server and mail server.

The reason to keep the desktops pretty much the same would be due to ghosting (making hard drive images) of the desktop software so “troubleshooting” would be nothing more than simply wiping the hard drive clean and restoring from an approved, standardized image. Software would be pushed out to the clients and installed when people use the computer, each system would run a virus scanner, spyware scanner and other bandaid fixes for the security and structural issues of Windows.

From a tech support / sys admin point of view, it seemed pretty cool — I would be creating quarterly images, running around, deploying them to the various systems, making sure virus scanners were maintained, and the specs of the hardware would heighten my geek self esteem “yah, I admin a 40-node network of 2.6Ghz computers and a server that has a 4 disk RAID 5 setup and quad processors! woot Woot!”

But then I sat back a bit, and thought about what the customer did — basic database, word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing .. you know, basic office stuff. Furthermore, usually only half of the computers are being utilized at any particular time and in many cases, there is a low usage of the cpu. The bottom line results in a network that 95% of the system resources are being wasted — either in RAM having duplicate data at the various machines, CPUs remaining idle, etc — and i think 95% is a low estimate– probably closer to 97-98%..

Getting back to the clusterish terminal service project that I mentioned a while back — it could be possible to create a centralized server (perhaps the same specs as the aforementioned dual/quad processor server..) that would contain ALL of the applications, software and data that users of the network uses. Boot the pre-existing machines (Pentium II/266 to Pentium 4 2Ghz) as essentially X-window dummy terminals/cluster nodes and watch for an increase in the utilization of all of the resources of the network.

As mentioned in that previous article, since the majority of the apps are the same across the various users, they would most likely already be loaded in RAM and load instantaneous for additional users. Because the systems would not need to run resource heavy band aid fixes such as virus scanners, spyware blockers, etc, the overall performance would be better than the super-powerful, exceedingly expensive Windows network … not to mention the reduced cost of software licenses (Linux/FreeBSD/Mozilla/OpenOffice/KDE/Kopete are free to use) and reduced cost of admining (update software at the server and ALL clients are updated, instantly)..

Sounds pretty neat to me .. what makes it even cooler is the fact that an upgrade to ANY machine on the network (in particular the server) would benefit ALL users of the network. Plain and simple. More ram, more processors.. doesn’t matter.. everyone benefits.

Unfortunately, according to the dean, its irrelevant because “Its a Windows world” .. I suppose this means that the following hold true:

1. OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Windows because it sells new computers (my plan could reuse 5 year old systems..)

2. Support people like Windows — need to install security updates, virus definition updates, spy ware updates, software updates, etc to all computers — not simply a centralized system.

3. Installers like Microsoft — its a lot more profitable to tear out a computing infrastructure every 3-5 years than simply upgrade a server (which on Linux/FreeBSD would amount to pulling the hard drive out of the old server, and popping it into the new server … Windows would require a reinstall of umm.. everything.)

4. Users like Microsoft — “its what I know” — yah .. right. I have yet to run into someone outside the tech industry who *truly* uses Microsoft/Windows specific features — everything they “know” is transferable knowledge to another OS in a matter of days..

5. Others use Windows, so I need to as well. What kinda bogus excuse is this? Email is standard, PDF is a standard, cross platform format, websites are cross platform standards (well umm. should be), etc.. Interoperability of printers, files, and other data is essentially a non-issue (well except for perhaps some closed Microsoft formats that carry a rather strong anti-competitive EULA)

So I guess thats it — the FOSS community, who I can strongly argue has created technologically superior programs (take a look at the high accolades that projects such as Mozilla, KDE, OpenOffice, GAIM and others have received), is unable to get into businesses because of that very reason. People who should be looking out for the best interests of companies and individuals — who are hired as consultants — will advocate Windows for their own self interest.

So I guess the dean is right .. “Its a Windows world” .. of course, by not changing attitudes or investigating other solutions, it will remain a Windows world. Hopefully these influential individuals will awake from their slumber and realize the world is larger than Microsoft .. a world where superior technology exist. A world where computer systems shouldn’t need to be updated religiously on a 3-5 year schedule. A world where IT budgets are significantly reduced, or at least put to better use (ie adding value to a business, not simply applying security patches). A world where businesses are not threatened with BSA audits and forced into very restrictive EULAs. A world where OEMs are not the hand puppets of a single monopolistic, anti-competitive corporation. A world where technology exists for the sake of making insanely great technology, not for purely profit motive. I get to enjoy that world, and hopefully one of these days, it will be the world.