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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS
CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency.
MS scorns the defection...
This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"
Because Office XP was so awful, we've stuck with Office 2000. We've just started receiving .doc files that Office 2000 can't open, but the latest release of Open Office can. Now, if anyone receives one of these latest Office files from outside, I just install OO. Everyone gets to keep their preferred version of MS Office while being exposed to Open Office in small doses.
What about Appleworks? Version 5, heck even version 6, has more than enough 'features' to write letters, reports, all that normal word processing stuff but doesn't feel bloated beyond beleif.
Okay, some issues:
1. Speed: There's no point in being 100% compatible with MS Office, if it's 200% slower.
2. Bloated: Same as MS Office.
3. No option to install a dumbed-down version.
4. For word-processing, AbiWord is 10 times faster, and has all useful features.
5. For spreadsheets, Gnumeric is 15 times faster, and has all and more features.
enuff said?
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Doing Bi-directional text well has lots of pitfalls. E.g. the software has to recognize when you start typing in a number and switch directions (The number five hundred thirty one still appears as 531 in hebrew, not 135).
Mixing left-to-right with right-to-left is even worse. E.g. when you are on the boundary between the two texts and hit the backspace key, which piece of text gets erased?
Lots of other subtle problems to getting it perfect. I hope they did a good job.
From the announcement:
According to the guidelines set by our legal department, we cannot release the full product, so we have built a set of diff source files and associated documentation.
I'm kinda confused by this one... Why couldn't they release the full source code? Is there anything stopping somebody from distributing the source after applying the diffs?
-mo
Israel's economy has been hit hard by Palestinian terrorists. The jihadis have forced the Israeli socialist system to reform itself. They're beginning to privatize their state-owned businesses which is a very positive step for Israel. Becoming a capitalist country will only help Israel gain more security as the efficiency of the marketplace kicks in and the government's resources are freed up to bolster their national defense.
Switching to OO is a good move because it'll give the Israeli more government to build up their security apparatus. Many slashdotters will disagree that that is a good thing because many of them think the Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israelis. The simple truth is that blowing up a starbucks as an isolated, intentional target is not a military counter attack. It is mass murder, and the Israelis are right for retaliating.
Then again, it's not like one goes to slashdot for insightful political commentary. For God's sake it's run by editors who largely consider the Clinton administration and Gore to be civil libertarians compared to Bush. Now watch the reactionaries mod me down so far down that my laptop's character set switches to Chinese....
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Well, that's pretty much it, except I would use the word "rational" instead of (sic) "genious".
science can answer all problems to include the meaning of life
Wrong. I'm a scientist and science tells me only about the nature - nothing more, nothing less.
I choose to believe that there is no meaning of life, there is no fundamental right or wrong, love is only a biochemical reaction in the brain and that consciousness does not survive beyond death. Nothing I see or hear tells me anything else, so it would be irrational to think otherwise.
The owls are not what they seem
Refuse to collaborate with them until they 'get it'."
What dreamland are you living in?
The real world.
All of our suppliers *must* use OO. No excuses. If they want our business, then they play by our rules.
Now we do have a few MS Office copies around for our customers - we play 'nice' with them.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
OpenOfice works great with all my files, in fact if it had exchange/templates it would be on par with MS Office 2003. Exchange in 2003 is faster, and has much more features. Syncing email is smooth as silk now over dialup/dsl. Visio has a great selection of icons, thats almost worth the price for the whole suite.
.ppt and MS Office had no problem opening that. Very impressive.
The other day, I recieved a PowerPoint that MSOffice couldnt open, OpenOffice opened it, exported back to
But thats for work, at home I save money and use OpenOffice/Mozilla.
To me science tells about how nature works. Natural science limits itself to questions which can be falsified, ie. proven wrong. Beyond those, my personal beliefs are not limited to or by the natural science.
For instance, those three points are not falsifiable by the natural science and are therefore out of science's jurisdiction. Therefore I cannot "know" them and that's why in my original post I used to the word "believe".
But yes, I also believe that religions are inherently dangerous, should not have any place in the infrastructure (government, military, schools,...) of a modern society and should be weeded out by time.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm as much an Open Source lover as the next FreeBSD religious geek, but the way I see the train going right now, here's where it'll get:
.. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.
.doc/.xls/.ppt/whatever files, it becomes _illegal_ [in the US] for OpenOffice to attempt to open them under the DMCA. Unless this can somehow be steered away, OO is going to be beheaded swiftly and cruelly, and nobody will use anything besides MS Office, because nothing else will open MS Office formats.
DMCA is already in action. TCPA and DRM are coming on us in the next couple of years, we already know Microsoft's Paladium will be present in longhorn. Fritz chips are already being sold, and sooner than we might like, DRM-enforcement will migrate from our motherboard into our CPU. Microsoft, Disney, the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been lobbying Intel and AMD over this for a while now.
This actually gets on-topic when the DMCA is used to trash competition, as in cases of 3rd-party-made garage-door remotes, printer cartridges and
Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their
Many questions are asked about how this will affect non-US countries without silly DMCA legislation, and the legal answer is "It won't". The economic one however says "If there is no US market for products like OO, quite a few them may simply cease to exist". Add to that the unwillingness of many OS developers to contribute their time to an open source project that is used in other countries but makes them criminals in the US where they live, and where they cannot use their own project where they work.
OO may simply not bother breaking the DRM on Office files for non-US clients. And that would indeed hurt Israeli clients.
This conclusion makes me question the wisdom of moving an entire government agency to OO. It actually hurt me to say that.
Cheers.
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The next thing the Israeli govement thinking about is to adopt Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer for use with internal web applications and messaging. In the Hebrew press we got few messages about it in the past week, but I can't approve yet how much seriously they are.
The problem is that the Hebrew localization project for Mozilla still missing few features, because of [mostly] UI bugs in the browser.
Most of the major bugs in Mozilla for Hebrew users can be found in this list (Tsahi is the person who did most of the l10n progress). Any help would be welcome!
Hopefully, one day, we will get our whole goverment to use Linux on each desktop...
>You have to understand something, the voices of SONY and the RIAA are the only voices that the government is listening to.
I believe the confusion is in the word "governments", which you use to refer to the Bush administration, but which I intended to use to refer to government agencies like Israel's Commerce department, the German government, China, Peru, etc. that are scared away by American lobbyist backed monopolies like Microsoft. I'm not sure about Sony, but the RIAA definitely does not have a very creditable reputation in lobbying these governments.
Just my $.02
--
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable -- John F. Kennedy
The real issue is compatability with Hebrew.
SUN IBM and the Israeli Gov' spent real mony getting it into OO.
There is no alternative because no other office supports Hebrew.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Nevertheless, it seriously questions Microsoft's commitment to customisation and localisation. At least with a good contractor behind them they know they have a good chance of getting what they want if and when they want it.
I'm quite an advanced Office suite user, and in using Open Office I have never found any feature that was lacking, particularly on the word processor side. I have styles, layouts.... you name it. I hear about all these features that MS Office supposedly has that make a difference - what the hell are they?
Atheism is a misnomer; it really should be called 'anti-theism'. Linguistical the 'a' does not denote a negative. Consider 'moral', 'immoral', and 'amoral'. 'Amoral' is not acting against morality, but with lack of concern towards morality. 'Immoral' is acting against morality.
'Anti-theism' ('imtheism' doesn't sound right...) would be stating that god does not exist. 'Atheism' should be the lack of concern as to whether or not a god exists. Note that this is different from 'agnosticism' which simply states that knowing whether or not god exists is impossible (at least at this time).
One of my personal pet peeves.
--etrnl--
"More than likely the Israeli decision went to OOo because it contained the right features, or enough of the right ones."
I should hope so. OO risks getting a black eye if they're missing that one big important feature. Let's say, for example, they don't synch well with PocketPC. (Disclaimer: I have NFI if OO syncs with PocketPC or not. Though I invite clarification on it, I am talking hypothetically here.) Let's then say that PocketPCs suddenly become real popular with the Gov't. Ouch. Is the Open Source Community going to rush to their aide, or is the Gov't going to find themselves buying copies of OfficeXP so they can get their work done?
This can turn really good for the community if they're quick to respond to demands big customers like this have. But it can just as easily turn ugly if things don't happen so well. Money motivates companies to satisfy demand like this. I'm not sure how well tested the community's good will to satisfy is.
"Derp de derp."
OpenOffice can run as a "web service" that can be queried. It has a great API called UNO that I suggest you check out.
This allows you to write all sorts of cool apps that can use the backend of OpenOffice as part of a web services architecture. I use it to convert all documents sent and received via email into pdf so that viruses are not propagated internally or externally and so that everyone can read the document. If there is some reason why someone *MUST* see the original attachment that was sent, it can be retrieved from a webpage.
I've been using OO.o for a few months now and have yet to find any big issues with it when compared to O2k. .docs which are some bastardized... thing.)
Tables are easy to use, page numbering may take a bit to find, but until O2k it was a bitch to find there, too.
I like the integrated PDF export, something that if you want to do in MSO, you gotta get acrobat for a few hundred $'s... haven't had a problem yet.
I just sold my friend on OO.o a few months back and he's used it more than I, just made up somthing in calc and exported it to Excel 2k/XP without a hitch (his machine is Windows 2000).
I've also lightly used Linux as a desktop OS (i don't largly due to lack of good 3D support for my geforce4), and find the cross platform compatibility an outright godsend. I used MSO 98 for that mac and found i had to save as an office 97 doc and then open it, converting up automagically to o2k, breaking the reverse compatibility until i resaved as o97. with OO.o, the headache isn't there (though OO.o doesn't do mac classic and an OSX port is still on the way, i rarely use macs anyhow.)
MSO stinks, OO.o is better, any flaws in compatibility is due to the stupidity of the closed source format used by M$. at least with the oo.o files you can open them with your favorite zip utility and see what makes them tick. (Oo.o files are just zip archives containing xml files with the actual formatting and content therein, unlike
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
Except you forget (or are unaware) that many thinkers of that era (including Galileo and Newton, among others) studied the world around them in a scientific manner because they believe God was rational and would create things in a logical way. The advancement of science was because of their religious faith. The bible says to "love the Lord your God with all your mind" as well as heart, soul, and strength. God has never asked for mindless unthinking devotion.
Constitutionally Correct
spurious? As the story you linked to states, Not supporting hebrew on the Mac version of Office is tantemount to abusing their monopoly in Office to prevent users from switching to Mac operating systems.
Buttsex.
Actually, we expected a lot of push-back from our suppliers, but they have migrated rather easily. A few of the smaller ones have ditched MS Office for their own work - they love the price and it "heads down keep working" productutivity.
We just got tired of all the difering versions of MS Office documents and coulden't stomach another round of MS "Upgrades" - we took some of our money we saved and had a vendor appreciation party. Lots of free booze and a great meal makes everybody happy.
The only thing we can't find a replacement for is Outlook - the scheduling bits of it are quite good. (The Email portion sucks, and we don't allow anbody to use Outlook for their email for securty reasons)
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
If you sat down at 80% of the workstations installed in most government departments or boring old corporates around the world you'd see that most places are still happily using things like PIII600's with 128Mb RAM and users don't complain at all. Oh, and don't forget the laptops of similar age.
They don't have to complain, since what you mentioned is way enough for the average user. After all most of their work is editing various text documents, and running one application.
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
If you've been working for 10 or more years...how in the world would you squeeze your resume into one page? With the needs for diversity and multiple talents...I just can't put everying on one sheet and have it make sense. Mine is more like a CV than a resume. I want to give skills, and a brief synopsis of what I've done with those skills on previous jobs. I'm mostly into contracting or working as a contract employee....maybe that's the difference?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........