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Chinese Government to Use Only Local Software
owlmon writes "CNET Asia is reporting that China has outlawed foreign software in government applications. I expect that software buyers outside of the government will have to follow this lead. It's the same "network effect" that has powered Microsoft's growth for years. When the entire Chinese government is using WPS Office, anyone doing business with the government will feel mighty encouraged to follow suit. Otherwise, how will they exchange documents?"
Dear Mister Cnet,
... at's because i haven't WASHed in threeeee days, son." ... you want a drink?"
This is a fantastic article. I just have a few suggestions on how to clean it up.
First off is the introduction. It's too wordy. You dance around your thesis like a barefoot child on a griddle. Try being more direct, more concise. Get right to your point, then move on.
Now I'm not terribly familiar with the scientific method, but I think your experiment isn't described fully enough for the audience to gain any insight from it. First of all, you haven't given us much of a hypothesis to go on. What is it you really hope to gain from your testing? We have a vague ideal of the goal, but it's hard to see the true motivation that's pushing you towards such a goal.
Your depiction of the experiment itself is more than adequate. I don't really have any complaints here. It actually reminds me of an experiment I devised in my youth. Heh, that was a real mess. I remember it like it was yesterday.
It was the summer of 1873. The country was industrializing and the West was still being settled. For a young lad in rural Kansas, such as myself, life was a little more interesting with the railways making far-off cities more accessible to the common folk. My parents had been planning a trip to Knoxville for some time now, to visit relatives. My father sold a few of his cattle and scraped together enough money for us to make the journey. Mom, pop, my two brothers Anthony and Skeet, and my sister Juliana, all got on the Southern Express, headed east for St. Louis and on to Knoxville.
It had never occurred to me just how boring a train ride could be. My brothers ignored me, as usual, and my sister was fawned over by my mother constantly. With my dad sleeping most of the time, I was left to entertain myself.
The train was very crowded. I'd never seen so many people crammed into one place outside of church. Some of them weren't farm-folk, neither. There were a couple men and ladies in fine dress clothes, probably city dwellers. A few man were even worse dressed than us, probably miners or something. One of them had been staring at me for almost half an hour. I went over and talked to him.
"Hey mister. This your first time on train? It is for me!"
"Nooo, I ride trainss hic all the time."
"You okay mister? You smell funny."
"Heh heh
"My mom says to take a bath every day or the devil will eat my soul!"
"Well, now, ain't that precious
"Okay!"
That man introduced me to alcohol, my future, and my undoing. That man's moonshine set me on a long road to endless sorrow and pain. My drinking problem escalated rapidly. Upon arriving in Knoxville, I had already completed five twelve-step programs. None of them worked.
Fast foward to 2173. Shortly after my 900th birthday, I will go out for a binge with my friends Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. The three of us have been buddies for longer than I can remember. We will often get together to swap stories, talk about girlfriends, that sort of thing. We will drink, of course -- always heavily and always grain alcohol. Jesus never has any problem with the stuff, of course, but Karl and I can only down so much before we go blind and vomit our intestines out on the bar. Jesus can really work miracles, though. That guy will always have us patched up by morning.
Anyways, Jesus and Karl will be having a heated discussion about the relative merits of kittens and puppies.
"Kittens are fuzzy, and God is fuzzy, therefore kittens are better," Jesus will argue.
"Yes, but puppies grow into dogs, and dogs work in packs for greater effeciency, and to the benefit of dogs everywhere," will be Marx's counter.
"Kittens are really soft, and God is soft, therefore kittens are better," Jesus will reply.
"Dogunism has no place for your purring and your pawing and your meowing! The barkin
oriental people are really ugly
If I were an American citizen I'd be careful what I say about China - the next superpower. After all, there's only so much space in Guantanamo.
and wish for their speedy demise,
I applaud them for shunning M$..
This is about the ONLY good thing the communist government has done since it came to be.
OTOH, it's going to be much harder for the NSA to hack them, if they are running Linux.
If they were to run M$ products any 5 year old or the NSA could waltz in and browse the entire country at will like a dumb tourist with a camera around his neck..
Maybe the gubmint should convince Billy boy to GIVE M$ products free of charge to China so the whole country has that *special* built in back door..
As long as it's not Microsoft, who cares?
ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-soh
Actually, this isn't true. I regularly recover MS Word 2000 documents using OpenOffice. Word creates files it later cannot read back in on a fairly regular basis, and OpenOffice seems to be able to read them, even when Word can't.
OpenOffice has a better Word Import Filter than MS-Word does. As an added bonus, opening a Word or Excel document in OpenOffice and saving it in OO format -- without changing anything -- results in a smaller file that is also standards-based. Plus, one can export to PDF directly. Practical experience has shown my office staff that OpenOffice produces PDFs more reliably than MS-Office+Acrobat.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.