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Letters
OpenOffice in Home Office
I just read “MOXIE: Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment,“ (Hal Varian and Chris Varian, ACM Queue 1(5), July/August 2003). Thanks for running the study.
With the exception of my wife, my family has run OpenOffice on Linux for some time. My wife’s work forces her to use the Word doc format far more than the rest of us. Because of chronic Windows instability issues, she recently became the last of the tribe to make the move to the OpenOffice.org suite (again, on Linux).
In her experience, she has far less trouble importing Word docs than she does exporting to Word format. We’ve worked around this issue by giving her friends and coworkers copies of OpenOffice. The group is slowly migrating to using the OpenOffice format as its default.
Jim Coleman
The “Smart Disk” Is Already Here
When reading “A Conversation with Jim Gray” (Dave Patterson, ACM Queue 1(4), June 2003), I found myself asking, “What do you call a rack of 100 TiVo 2s with 250 GB of disk each?” I call it 25 terabytes of “TV Land” IDE disk for $20,000 with 100 USB 2.0 NICs and an embedded Linux on PowerPC core, which still retains a Unix console and shell. Add to this an OFDM receiver—and a triple-DES crypto capability—and you have a large variable population of wireless “Smart Disks” under centralized satellite management running an IP-stack optimized for streaming media capture and redistribution, with security and digital rights management.
R. Bob Lee
802.11 in Action
While I enjoyed “The Family Dynamics of 802.11” (Bill McFarland, ACM Queue 1(3), May, 2003), I would like to take issue with one point. Many people are already using 802.11 for outdoor mobile networking on a citywide scale in very mission-critical applications—for example, police and fire patrol units.
Mel Ray Notage
Bill McFarland responds: The success with these types of applications is a testament to the ingenuity of people like yourself, as well as the flexibility of the 802.11 protocol. I am honored to join the ranks of the long list of people who said, “It cannot be done,” only to be proven wrong.
Originally published in Queue vol. 1, no. 7—
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