Only weeks after Massachusetts decided to ditch Microsoft Office, Open Office 2 is officially announced and released to the public. This version of Open Office has been claimed by some to be faster and superior to Microsoft Office. Most importantly, it adheres to OASIS, it is inter-operable, and free.

As Computerworld puts it:

The OpenOffice.org Project on Thursday released OpenOffice.org 2.0, adding new features that the group claim will resonate with users from business and governments right down to the home desktop. The product will be simultaneously released for a range of operating systems including Linux and Microsoft Windows.

An interesting nugget of information is this: the main ‘sponsors’ of Open Office, namely Sun Microsystems, have recently formed a pact with Google. This fact on its own right can lead to endless speculations, yet Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, recently denied some baseless rumour that Google aim to implement a Web-based Office suite.

Would Google possibly opt to improve and fund Open Office? Any prospects for ownership and integration with the Web? It is no secret that Linux-loving Google are involved in a heavy battle with Microsoft these days. Simply put, it is a “winner takes all” situation.

Windows XP slows down as time goes on due to patches, protective software, and Registry bloat

INDOWS Vista was already said to be a trainwreck, primarily due to its inability to deliver something innovative. It gives no compelling reason whatsoever for users to upgrade. People who have had the chance to fiddle with the Vista beta build can confirm this. In fact, it seems to be lagging behind other operating systems, notably Mac OS X as was previously confesses by a Microsoft evangelist.

On top of it all, hardware requirements of Windows Vista make it rather unappealing. Novell have said that Vista will drive away Windows users and ultimately lead them to Linux. To many, adopting Windows Vista probably means acquisition of a new computer, which will most probably contain Windows pre-installed for a variety of reasons that involve anti-fair trade practices.

Windows XP was first introduced to the public in late 2001 and, as we approach the end of 2005, Windows XP is worse than ever before. The many critical patches, which came in the form of Service Pack I & II have made it slower and less likely to interact with all underlying modules gracefully. With more Windows viruses in the wild, it requires more attention and maintenance than before, which has definitely led to unrest among its users community. In the mean time, Apple’s Tiger has been gaining strength and has even surpassed, in term of it functionality, the Microsoft equivalents — something that even Microsoft could not truly deny. KDE, in the mean time, has been growing very rapidly and it is now comparable with any other desktop layers and often surpasses the competition in terms of its functionality. See, for instance:

• KDE Plasma
• State-of-the-art Linux Screenshots
• Next Generation of X

It is also worth mentioning Ubuntu Linux, which has done tremendously well at easing a transition to a free operating system. Hewlett Packard have recently started selling Ubuntu desktops and laptops, as a matter of fact. Ubuntu comes in just a single CD, its hardware detection is admirable, and moreover it is stable and user-friendly. Its bundled Live CD makes another big pro as users who are too resistant to delete Windows can have a period of adaptation and gain some re-assurance with regards to their platform migration.

The number of sites with PageRank 10 is tiny when compared to the number of sites with PageRank 0. Conversely, traffic is largely centralised in sites with a high PR (more details)

little tour around Google has led me to a questionably out-of-date article from the Register. This Article is 2 years old, but it seems more true than ever these days because scraping and link-related spam/attacks are constantly on the rise.

Google has made no secret of its goal to “understand” the web, an acknowledgement that its current brute-force text index produces search results with little or no context. The popularity of Teoma demonstrates that even a small index can produce superior results for certain kind of searches. Teoma leans on existing classification systems.

While Google relied on PageRankâ„¢ to provide context, all was well. But PageRank is now widely acknowledged to be broken, so new, smarter tricks are required.

Regarded as heresy when we raised the issue last spring, now some of Google’s warmest admirers, MetaFilter’s Matt Haughey and web designer Jason Kottke have acknowledged the problem.

As Gary Stock noted here last May, Google “didn’t foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers. They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study – rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn’t prepared.”

The intersting fact is that Google themselves acknowledge the problem and I am sure difficulties have intensified, if anything, in the past 2 years. The specific reference to bloggers proves that very point as a new blog is set up every second these days.

Regarding the point about pages being indexed rather than learned from or understood, that is one of the catalysts that led me to starting Iuron. That site has attracted tremendous levels of interest since the idea had been conceived on the night on October 9^th. I set up the Web site and made an official announcement the following day. Yesterday I finished a 1-page formal proposal and I contacted the person who is perceived by some as the father of the Semantic Web. He was once my lecturer.

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

OHN H. Terpstra, a bold IT consultant, explains in an excellent article, which comes in 3 parts, how Microsoft and its disguised allies are working as a group toward abolishment of Linux on the desktop. The article presents a made-up case study and explains how some Linux incompatibilities are to be blamed for at a higher level.

Joe felt that Airgo Networks should be commended for its honorable handling of OSS, but he still had no luck there. When he called the company, he found out that no Linux drivers will be available for the Airgo chip set until late 2005 or early 2006.

The author also mentions the issue of cost, which is apparently well-controlled from up above, or contrariwise from down below, i.e. under the table.

Joe figured that since Linux is free, the cost of a laptop computer pre-loaded with Linux would cost less than one that shipped with Microsoft Windows. Wrong! The cost estimates he came up with were between $300 and $500 more for a system with Linux than for one with Windows.

Joe did a Google search to find Linux on laptop suppliers and obtained five price offers. Many Windows laptop specials offered a free bundled LCD monitor or a free bundled printer. No such offer was found for a Linux pre-loaded laptop.

It is worth referring back to an item that illustrates that fact. Dell Computers are selling an open PC (i.e. no operating system = bland hard-drive) for more than a computer with Windows pre-installed. Microsoft is apparently subsidising hardware or relishes on illegal kickbacks.

In John’s article he tends to become more political towards the end.

Joe had to pay for Microsoft Windows when he had no desire to use it, because he would have paid more for a machine without it. Why should consumers suffer cost increases to use a free operating system? Why are governments around the world so silent on this matter? Isn’t it time for the consumer to be better informed of the graft and corruption in the IT retail industry?

I, for once, could not agree more.

Let a BoxTrapper handle the ‘poop’

OXTRAPPERS are a mechanism for stopping large volumes of E-mail spam. The key idea is relatively simple as the following paragraph explains.

For each E-mail that comes in, require the sender to post a quick confirmation of his/her existence. The server sends the unknown sender a stub, which is then replied to as-is to complete verification. Once this is done for the first time, the sender is whitelisted and need never verify his/her identity again. Under this type of framework, untrusted senders must be accepted in order for their messages to be viewed immediately and not considered to be spam. And guess what? It works! BoxTrappers queues can be viewed periodically, just in case a genuine senders did not bother to get themselves whitelisted by replying to the verification request.

I have 3 BoxTrappers on this domains, but they are sometimes misused as spammers attempt to break them, much as they destroy anything where scams, links, and on-line shopping are involved. Spammers will often identify themselves using E-mail addresses of real people, who are not truly themselves, thereby causing traffic from the BoxTrappers (if not abusive mail from the spam recipient) to be sent to genuine innocent people and businesses. Moreover, I have recently come to grips with a trend where the spammers identify themselves as people coming from my own domain. They get whitelisted automatically in this way, so I guess they found a BoxTrapper weakness or loophole. Nonetheless, it remains easy to filter or identify such spam. It is only a shame that it can become visible by escaping the queue and thus be time-consuming.

These days, as I continue to edit this item, the spammers still manage to get past the BoxTrapper. Again, they do so by intentionally picking up E-mail addresses with my domain name, e.g. register@schestowitz.com. These come up with message bodies like “Please change you password, go to URL…” and with other username variations to register, e.g. webmaster, admin, etc.

As explained before, the domain name gets them automatically whitelisted, which is the core and very source of the trouble. These repeat almost on a daily basis (several times a day in fact) and I wonder how many Webmasters are gullible enough to fall for these scams, which I am convinced have become a widespread plague by now.

PDF‘s, text files, HTML‘s and
directories in the KDE Desktop with previews (click to enlarge)

ERTAIN issues arise when habits and user orientation in his/her desktop are interfered with. Desktop environments, installers, filesystem structures, or even platforms in general are often more workable and thus successful if they comply with the expectation of new users. What if these are made too stringent by the developers, however? What if decisions and conventions are voted for without involvement of the end-user?

Many desktop environments, free ones in particular, are not made uniform. The resulting diversity and flexibility leads to difficulties in using somebody else’s settings, i.e. working in conjunction under the same session. Some GNU/Linux distributions include more or less any desktop environment which exists while settings are kept apart and well-separable for each user of the system and each desktop environment. So, where does the the problem lie? Give users more freedom, I suggest, and make that the norm. It is, after all, their own computer and they understand their needs better than the developers of the operating system.

What appears worse than all is the scenario where decisions are arrogantly by the vendor and then enforced. This is often the path that operating systems such as Mac O/S (to its varieties) and Windows do. Give the user some more choice, I say, by adding options for endless customisation that has very few boundaries, if any (Open Source). Give all users the freedom they deserve and allow them to express individuality and adapt/tailor their desktop environment to suit their needs. Menu entries and other widgets will remain unaffected, so documentation, for instance, will not suffer as a consequence.

People work differently on a variety of applications, for a wide variety of purposes. The domains in which they work differ as well. A person working with many open windows at any given time might prefer to have “focus follows mouse cursor”. Contrariwise, to some, this “focus follows mouse cursor” behaviour is highly adverse to habits. To list yet another example, a Web server needs to have a light desktop environment that is less susceptible to breakage and consumes small amounts of RAM.

These considerations are all highly defensible. If Linux was to be deployed in more public clusters, for example, choice could (and should) be given as to which desktop environment should be used. Different strokes for different folks, but all can be catered for provided that disk space is made available. The pertinent settings would reside in the home directory of each user. Thumbs up to Gnome, KDE, and the rest of the self-motivated window manager teams around the world.

Related item: KDE Versus GNOME

Referrer spam count in October logs (click image to see it full-sized)

OME decent-scale DoS attacks, carried out by hijacked Windows workstations, have returned to the site. This comes after presistent attempts to take down the server, spamming it with URL‘s in the process.

This recent wave of attacks is one which can better be coped with due to experience acquired the last time. Sadly, I suspect that the attackers, whoever they may be, are reading my outcries in the blog and are getting a real kick out of it. Therefore, this will probably be my last post on the topic, however compelling the need to mention it becomes.