Letters to the editor

Presentation programs may find IndeView useful. :-)

Hello,

just read your very interesting text on presentation programs
http://lwn.net/Articles/101846/
and I wonder if you might want to add a few words on IndeView?

:-)

Since you spoke about OpenOffice and about KOffice, it might be
interesting for readers, to learn that IndeView was made to convert
Impress and/or KPresenter presentations into a platform-independent
format that can be pressed onto a CD together with the small viewer
application.

So the user can send this CD to her customers/friends/whomever and let
them watch the presentation slides on their Linux, Mac OS/X or Windows
boxes: without the need of installing anything on their local harddisk.

Have a look: http://www.indeview.org

Note: IndeView is still in early development stage.
      It _is_ used in practice by many people already but it
      is limited since the current version can only show static
      images: no slide transision effects, no moving nor interactive
      parts inside a slide, no sound.

Still we like it - and work on making it better!  :-)

Cheers
Karl-Heinz
- -- 
Karl-Heinz         <mailto:khz@indeview.org>>        <mailto:khz@kde.org>>
  Zimmer                I n d e V i e w                    K D E
  Föhren       Presentations Beyond Limitations     Conquer your Desktop
www.fiehr.de            www.indeview.org                www.kde.org

Comments (none posted)

Free subscription offer

	I have made this offer in the past and I would like to do it again.

	Anyone who would like a subscription for one year of LWN who cannot
afford it or is not able to use a credit card (specifically those not in
the US) I am offering to pay of it.  I can't pay for a large number of
subscriptions* but I will try to do as many as possible for those in
need.  This isn't a joke or a hoax or anything.  It's a real offer from
a real person.

	No one took me up on this offer last year.  I hope someone does this
time.

Joe


* To be honest I can barely afford my own subscription but I do this
anyway to help support LWN and any Linux users who would find it
beneficial.

-- 
Joe Klemmer <klemmerj@webtrek.com>
Unix System/Network Administrator & Ad Hoc Programmer

Comments (6 posted)

Government: opennes in data rather than software

Just an idea.  We see a lot about government selecting FOSS, etc, rather than
closed software.

There is a whole other side that has the potential, not only for promoting open
software directly, but also aiding the development of open software:

What about more emphasis on the potential for governments insisting that their
tax-funded work result in data that is stored in interchangeable formats?

Most organizations distribute and store documents as Word files.  If I were
starting a company today I would insist on documents with an openly published
specification so that there is a good chance of accessing them later.  It is
horrifying to think of the quantity of data generated by governments that will
be irretrievable in just a few years time.

To put it another way, I would not be so bothered to see files coming out of
closed-source software if I knew that they were not adding to the difficulty of
objective selection of software in the future.

Alex.

--
Alex Stark

Outgoing address is temporary to avoid abuse: please use reply-to

Comments (1 posted)

MARID to close

I don't think I've seen you comment on this. The MARID working group
which was looking at the possibility of standardising something based on
Microsoft's SenderID or the equally fundamentally flawed SPF has
terminated.

Strike one for sanity :)

The problem with SPF and SenderID was that they made flawed assumptions
about how the world works -- in particular with respect to forwarding.
They each put forward a plan to make their assumptions come true, but
they required that _everyone_ out there should upgrade to make it all
viable.

Even if that were a realistic plan, their 'fix' was to make all mail
servers rewrite the 'responsible' address when forwarding mail, to take
responsibility for it themselves. When all mailservers are doing
something like that, it becomes _only_ a way of checking how much you
trust the individual mail server which is sending you the mail.

For example, my server could send a mail claiming to be from
	SRS0+xx+yy+lwn.net+editor@srs.infradead.org
... which _looks_ like it was from editor@lwn.net, but via one of my
servers. You have no idea; you only know how much you trust _me_.

And it _is_ all about trust. With spammers publishing SPF records to get
themselves a 'pass' you had to look up the domain in a
blacklist/whitelist -- some kind of trust database.

But given that SPF/SenderID could only really manage to work out a trust
level for _one_ hop -- the mail server which was actually sending you
the mail -- there was no point in what they were doing, and no point in
all the breakage with forwarding. You might as well have done it based
on the HELO instead, without breaking the whole world while you're at
it.

So let's let SPF and SenderID rest in peace.

Now it's time we got together and fixed up a real end-to-end solution
for verifying mail ownership, like DomainKeys or IIM.

In the interim, if you want to be able to stop receiving bounces to mail
you didn't actually send, try BATV. It's fairly trivial to implement and
it's unilateral -- you can just _do_ it and nobody else needs to know or
care.

http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss@v2.listbox.com/20...
http://brandenburg.com/CSV/draft-levine-mass-batv-00.html

-- 
dwmw2

Comments (6 posted)

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