chrisbray.co.uk

I know I've promoted the use of OpenOffice.org the Open Source competitor to Microsoft's Office 2007, citing anecdotal experience of lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and equal functionality for a long time, but now it's official!

The Copenhagen Business School has just released a study into using OpenOffice.org vs Microsoft Office 2007 and it would appear they agree with me!

The article itself is written in Danish but the executive summary at the start is in English and explains three TCO analyses for implementing OpenOffice.org in a local hospital, a national hospital and the entire public service.

I think the figures do the talking themselves:

Two other quotes hold particular significance to me:

Sadly showing how closed source software still dominates the Danish public sector by way of long term "agreements" and "partnerships", even with proven cost benefits and functional equality Open Source software still has to fight against an uneven playing field.

Open Source software has made big gains in developing markets such as South America and Eastern Europe with this report proving massive cost benefits I can only hope we start to see some more open minded thinking from the people with power in the wider European and world IT industry.

Real credit for this discovery must go to Erwin Tenhumberg for his post entitled "OpenOffice.org Study by the Copenhagen Business School" where I found this report.

I use VMWare Server quite a lot at work for testing and evaluating operating systems and things, and this does a really good job of allowing me to take my work with me to any machine and just running the VM to get going.

I've been experiencing something strange recently, every now and again when I move a VM from our works laptop (Dell Vostro 1500, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2gb RAM etc) to my desktop VMWare kept giving me a "VT is Available but not Enabled" message, which was funny since my desktop (again a Dell Vostro 200, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM) clearly had "Virtualization Technology (VT)" set to "Enabled" in the BIOS. I'd even upgraded to the latest BIOS version from the Dell website to make sure there were not problems there.

Since Intel VT Virtualization Technology is supposed to be real good for helping improve the speed of virtualised systems and the only way to run a 64bit guest under VMWare Server, this morning I decided to have a go at fixing this and I managed to solve the problem.

It turns out that in order to enable VT technology on my Dell Vostro 200 desktop I needed to not just reboot the pc, not just power off the pc, but to unplug the power cord completely and allow the PC to go cold!

There is some kind of residual power consumption that means that changing the setting in the BIOS and rebooting is not sufficient to actually change the setting on the CPU! This even persists through a BIOS upgrade!

Let me know if this information is helpful to anyone :)

EDIT: 23/Jan/2008 - It would appear the setting didn't persist or something since I'm still finding the same problem again! Grrrr... If anyone from Dell knows how to fix this PLEASE get in touch!

EDIT2: 08/May/2008 - It seems Dell have fixed the problem in the latest 1.0.13 BIOS revision, available from the Dell support site.

I just stumbled across an interesting site.

This site suggests the the www. prefix used for so long on website domains should be treated as deprecated and we should move away from using it.

Why you ask, well http://no-www.org states:

And I think it's an interesting idea, had we not grown up with the www. prefix we wouldn't assume to type it, and there are plenty of sites that do not use it, but deprecated? I can't help but think that's a little bit harsh!

Does anybody have any comments on the use of a www. (or the specific non-use) with respect to search engine rankings?

Personally all of my sites conform to "Class A" of the no-www compliance standards, the same site accessible both with and without the www. prefix.

It would appear that someone was listening when I was amongst the people calling for the ISO committee that was voting on it to Vote No To Office Open XML since it failed to meet the criteria set out by the ISO for adoption as an International Standard.

Microsoft put their typically positive spin on this citing it as a milestone towards the adoption (press release can be found here) but the fact is that this is a blow to the ill thought out and technically flawed format.

Hopefully there will be more support for the far more open and truly cross platformODF format suggested by OASIS which has already been implemented by many office suites.