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China Upgrades from Microsoft Office
Badgerman writes "According to this Forbes article, fifteen Chinese ministries have started using a homegrown office software suite instead of Microsoft Office. The article also notes the Chinese government's encouragment of homegrown software and of a national Linux standard."
And protectionist anti-competitive policies for buying software is hardly something to celebrate. Governments should buy the best tool for the job, not try to prop up local industries.
Here are some example Chinese distros:
Red Flag
Cosix
Magic Linux
XTeam
Courtesy of Google (loads of hits on WPS Office):
1 0307/199035.html
http://www.pconline.com.cn/pcedu/soft/office/wps/
CLIPPY : I see you want to talk about evil and repressive governments using linux...
Hundreds of Iraqis civilians are being held in makeshift jails run by US troops - many without being charged or even questioned. And in these prisons are children whose parents have no way of locating them
But why are they writing their own, rather than taking the already very good OpenOffice.org, and working on that?
Perhaps because the office suite they're talking about has been around since 1988?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Also according to yahoo.com, Bill still owns 1,168,499,336 shares in MSFT. 6 million is neither here nor there,
Tp.
I happen to be in Beijing right now (just visiting). This week I've gone to a lot of shopping malls and computer stores looking arround, and I can say there is a *whole* lot of Linux out here. I Guess that M$softs antipiracy efforts here have backfired bigtime, now PHB's (at least in the corporate environment I am working at) are thinking twice before using pirated copies of MS. Considering that a copy of Windoze cost as much as 1/2 a months salary for a full-time programer, it is now very appealing to move to linux.
If you scroll down the list, you'll note that he's sold that many shares or more most months dating back to October 2001. He sold more than 10 million shares in both June and August of last year. The fact that he's sold 6 million shares this month is hardly an indication that he's "leaving the ship."
--
Rate NAKED People at Fuck Meter! (Not work safe)
Wikipedia Definition of WPS Office
Article about Kingsoft
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
We can do A/D
We can do SMS
We've almost got Exchange
We're really close on Office too.
Now with Novell on board (the creator of Active Directory), be certain that you'll see NT replacement versions of linux. Distributions will be tailored for specific tasks. You'll see a Linux Messaging Server, Linux Database Server, Linux file and Print Server, and anything else you will need, with very polished, centrally managed tools which will make Microsoft's MMC cry for mommy.
It's how you pay for it. Microsoft is already paid for with large discounts *if you take the lot*.
If you don't take the lot, it gets expensive, and you already have the stuff in place so it's not as if you can stop paying.
With the new MS pay as you go licensing deals that may change, I don't know but the Linux vendors need to find a way round the license bundling.
Deleted
Outside of China, there's an excellent benefit from China swarming all over Linux: This means there will be Linux support out of the gate for those strange, cheap, no-name peripherals you see in plain little boxes all over the computer stores. This means less reverse-engineering Windows drivers, and less hair pulling at trying to get specs from engineers all the way across the globe.
Moving on, the real way to look at this is that the two most populous countries on the planet (China and India) are both seriously looking at open source, free software and other non-MS software organisations for their governmental and other agencies.
Whatever you, me or anyone else thinks about MS, Linux, FreeBSD, MSOffice, and whatever else is really irrelevant. It's great to see people now having the choice which really hasn't been around (excepting other even more expensive options *cough* Apple *cough*).
Oh yeah cheap Thai WinXP without product activation story at the inquirer.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Sorry but Novell didn't invent Active Directory. They didn't invented the directory service concept either. They did invented their own directory service a couple of year before Microsoft did AD (called NDS or something).
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Er? The Chinese have no alphabet like Western languages. Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with Korean, Japanese, Mayan, Egyptian, etc.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
i believe that the directories that we are talking about are based on the x.500 spec.
novell was first with NDS, Netware Directory Services sometimes called ediretory. very close to the x.500 spec including some stuff that they put into it but recommended that you don't use (r/o partitions come to mind).
ms was *very* late to the dirctory part with ads, Active Directory Services. this is an expansion of the MS domain model. it appears to not be as x.500 complient as it should.
if you want a comparision of these, there is no beter experiment than hooking up 4 or 5 servers and building something out of directory services. if you can't do that, look to the microsoft annoucement that they put 2.5 million objects in an ads network. then compare to the brainshare demo where novell put over a *billion* objects into nds.
eric
Actually, MS Office XP runs perfectly under Cross Over Office. It also runs Photoshop 7 perfectly. Disney actually paid to have Photoshop 7 working since many more movies are being done with Linux and most graphical artists have Photoshop training. I just set this up for my brother-in-law who is a photographer and said he "needed" photoshop, I switched him to Red Hat 9 with OOo 1.1 (very good startup times) and Photoshop 7. It runs great. There is no slow down since Wine is NOT an emulator, it runs at native speed. I personally use Gimp 1.3.x and OOo-1.1 for all my needs. However, if you "need" one of these bigger MS Windows only apps, Cross Over works great for many of them. There is also WineX-3.x that runs more then 500 of the top games.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Actually the Microsoft IME (Input method env) is fairly sophisticated for Japanese. It is getting competitive with ATOK. I think ATOK's market share is probably in the toilet these days. Their software is better, but not so much better that it is worth paying for. Well maybe if you have to transcribe tons of text, but certainly not necessary for the average person. Just like browsers, MS will control the IME on its own platform.
The reason MS is having trouble in China is not because their software is bad, it's because China, like Japan and Korea don't want to hand their markets to a foreign company on a platter.
As a sensible publishing solution, MS is handicapped by having project leaders that hav no idea what good Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese typography look like. They want a minimum-cost conversion of a US-centric package, that's what they pay for and that's what they get.
MS is not handicapped, guess what!, they have Japanese and Chinese people working for them. They have large offices in both countries and have brought many Chinese and Japanese language experts to America to work in their research labs. They know about i18n and they know about typography. They have spent tons of money on buying people that know about it.
MS does make mistakes and does do stupid things, but they aren't quite as ignorant as you seem to make them out to be.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
- Korean
- Japanese
- Mayan
- Egyptian
(The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm .
Actually, it's $36 per PC for the *combo* of XP + Office.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Not the whole story, from your link:
So assuming that the original story is exactly true, even if the initial order is for the Win version, it would be much easier to transition to the Linux version from the same company in a year or so, perhaps in lieu of buying the next Windows upgrade, or when hardware is replaced. The same strategy as Sun in releasing Star Office for Windows as well as Linux and SunOS. First break the MSOffice umbilical, then changing OS isn't so hard. No need to mess around with Crossover and such.