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Dept. of Defense Adopts StarOffice
Polar Pope writes "The Department of Defense has adopted
Sun's Open Source productivity suite
StarOffice (up to 25,000 units)." Honestly I don't see this as being that huge of a deal, but it sure is getting submitted a lot. Then again, 25k Linux boxes inside the DoD is cool.
StarOffice does NOT reliably open MSOffice documents. If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic. We discovered this the hard way at TiVo.
_Deirdre
I think that a headline proclaiming that the "Dept. of Defense Adopts StarOffice" is a little much. I'm working for the DoD, and we're using MS Office, as is most everyone else within the DoD. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is a major coup for Sun, but by no means have they taken the whole DoD.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...don't buy the hype...
Oh, fast save. Yah, non-deterministic is about right.
Fast save works by just saving a snapshot of the data structures inside Word. Pieces of text might be in any sort of order, and Word needs to walk the "piece table" to sort it all out. The normal save takes the extra moment to sort everything out and write it in sensible order.
This feature may have saved enough time to be worth something back when people were running Word on a 16 MHz 386, but even then I doubt it. (When you scroll around in the document, Word has to walk the piece table to show you the text, on the fly... so it's definitely fast enough for a save operation!) Back when I ran Word on a 486 I didn't notice any difference in speed between normal save and fast save. Alas, the default is for fast save, and people don't realize this.
At a place I used to work, they were indexing their documents, and the indexer did a pretty good job, but it couldn't correctly grok fast-saved documents. You could search for a string and sometimes not find it, depending on where the pieces were broken up! Turning off Fast Save made things work correctly.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You forgot to put it in context with recent news that DoD is preparing 6 billion contract with Microsoft. This is about as much as one year revenue of Microsoft and the government is traditionally M$'s best customer. If we are going to win ANYTHING in the government, chances are that it will spread inside very fast. They like the policy of one vendor and also like to save some money time from time. This might be one of the most important news for a long time...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
They do make SO for Windows. I know DoD is progressive and all, but I'm sure that at least 1 or 2 of the 25K is for windows.
-c-
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
This seems to be a completely incorrect interpretation of the events described. The office suite that's being replaced is Applix, not Microsoft. The agency that's switching to Star Office is doing so on Unix boxes where MS software wasn't available in the first place. Of course it's possible (if unlikely) that they'll be so happy with Star Office on their Unix boxen that they decide to start replacing MS Office on Windows machines, but there's no indication whatsoever that it's likely to happen. This switch has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
So I suppose that they fixed the whole not-being-able-to-print problem?? I suppose this will get modded as a troll, and I'm no MS lover, but StarOffice(OpenOffice, whatever) pales in comparision to Office 2000. That and IE IMHO are the only decent pieces of software that Microsoft has ever produced. Not excellent, just decent, usable and not overtly offensive.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
It's flexible, operating across many OS's. And no licensing fees means it was less expensive. It's refreshing to see our government striving to operate on a more cost-efficient basis.