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Israel's Finance Ministry To Distribute OpenOffice
dudeman2 writes "Israel National News reports that The Israel Finance Ministry said Sunday it will begin distributing Open Office for free as of next week. The ministry said that it would begin to distribute thousands of Open Office CD-ROMs at public computer centers and later on at community centers throughout the country, 'in a bid to reduce the technological gap between the rich and poor in Israel'."
The Scots got there first...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34593.html
According to Mac OS X Hints Panther supports hebrew, arabic and farsi now.
Ministry of Finance sources told Globes that the decision could be reversed if Microsoft Israel shows willingness to compromise on its pricing policy for tens of thousands of computer stations at government offices.
Sounds to me like Isreal is just trying to force Microsoft into giving them a price break on Office.
"How is a Jew supposed to use an application if only the command line supports their tongue?"
I assume the tongue your refer to is Hebrew and it's worth pointing out that not all Jews' native tongue is Hebrew (and nor, in fact, do all Jews know Hebrew) and conversely, non-Jews may also require Hebrew support for whatever reason.
While Israel may be pretty much all Jews who would welcome Hebrew language support, there is a distinction between the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion (one is a language, one is a religion), and using the two interchangably just causes problems and confusion - so I suggest you pick your words more carefully.
Manta
Israel National News, or Arutz Sheva (Channel 7) as it's more commonly known, is a heavily right wing biased media outlet whose management was recently sentenced to various prison terms for operating an illegal radio station.
More details here
It's an odd source for tech news.
theyre most likely bundling training, data-base switches, and maybe full linux installation into 'installment'.
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
if i recall correctly, the problem was the Mac version of Office not providing Hebrew support. OS X provides quite rich hebrew support in their libraries, so the technical barriers to a Hebrew Mac Office were perceived to be quite low, nobody is sure why MS wouldn't do it. There were no plans for adding it either. The Israeli government offered to pay for programmer time to add support but MS still refused.
This is where the Office monopoly started to look sour, it looked like MS was not going to do a Hebrew Mac Office "just because. Buy Windows." This demonstrated the effects of monopoly lock in and led to the search for alternatives.
It was a simple format document so the moral of the story is... You still need to SAVE AS RTF!!!!
Or state that the file is in OpenOffice format. Mailing documents to people without telling them what to use is somewhat rude, even if it is a common document. There are plenty of people out there who don't have ANY Office software, and/or even know what a ZIP file is.
Get in the habit. A simple "Here's your document is OpenOffice format" goes a lot farther than "Here's your document."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's called Jordan.
.sxc is the OOo spreadsheet extension.
Why is that? Because anti-Israeli nations will start pumping money into Palestine? The Arabs in Israel sure haven't proven to have the drive all by themselves. We've only seen progress since the creation of Israel in 1948. That's even with the Arabs attacking them every few years until the 1970's.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Mellel is a word processor for OS X that is made by and Israeli company which supports right-to-left languages including Hebrew. It's very well designed and attractive (aside from the logo) but it's a proprietary format and the RTF export is lacking. I'm sure these will be improved in future updates. Oh, it's $25.
Did your clients pay you? That's what they're talking about.
Because only about 15 million people worldwide speak fluent hebrew.
They (CFY) use Windows, as do we. [click 'home computers'] For us, this was purely a pragmatic decision, as there is some training on Microsoft OS's at school and it really would be a bit much to dump Linux on someone who is barely PC literate (not to mention the SAT prep software that has been donated to us is also Windows only). Yes, this does make the OS more espensive (by a factor of at least 2) than the hardware it runs on, but Microsoft does offer non-profit licensing options which we are currently working through the process to obtain (along with official 501(c)(3) statues (it takes at least 120 days, we're about a month in)).
+&x
When we moved our administration/secretarial staff onto OpenOffice it took about half an hour per worker to get them familiar with the basic differences. It also degraded productivity significantly for a couple of days as each worker got used to the different ways of doing things.
Many of these more experienced users also used some Macros and links to Access databases which entailed some time and effort to work around.The process was quicker for workers with less experience with MS Office, but then those users were much less productive when it comes to word-processing etc. so it was difficult to tell if they were having any additional problems with OpenOffice.
Our move entailed a half an hours workplace training, which meant half an hours of the trainers time and half an hour of the admin worker's time, plus an unquantified loss of efficiency for a couple of days.
On our salary scales it would come to a minimum cost of 10 pounds per worker, although with loss of productivity it could easily be 50 pounds depending on how slow the worker was to adapt. If you scale these kinds of costs up for thousands of users then you have a significant issue.
We made the move in order to stop using unauthorised copies, so it was cheaper than going legit by buying the correct MS Licenses, but if the Isreali Government already has the correct Licenses then there may be minimal short term savings, indeed there is probably a significant short term cost to be justified.
I think it's great!
But the Israeli's have always been ahead of the curve technologically. I could be wrong, but wearen't they evaluating openoffice as part of a plan to migrate to Linux?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Both sides? There are only two sides? How about Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Former Iraqi dictatorship, Egypt, or the terror-funding EU (who "need an investigation of where the funds go like they need a whole in the head")?
r en-qa.html
There is no Israel-Palestinian conflict, it's just the media-friendly face to the same old Arab-Israeli conflict. Arabs refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist, and Israel refuses to cease to exist, a rather simple equation.
And yes, Israel does have the right to claim the moral high ground, because mere days after Palestinians and Arabs joined in an attempted mass slaughter of her civilians, she responded with the most generous offer a victorious warring nation has ever produced - a return of the land for normalized relations - Arabs responded with their typical undying hatred of all things Jewish.
"On June 19, 1967, scarcely ten days after the cease-fire, the Israeli government decided in a secret cabinet session to return all of the Sinai Peninsula, all of the Golan Heights, to Egypt and Syria respectively in return for full peace treaties. At the same time, the Israeli government launched a clandestine operation to canvass 80 Palestinian notables on the West Bank about the possibility of creating an autonomous Palestinian entity, leading potentially to an independent Palestinian state. The Egyptians and the Syrians rejected this overture. They convened at Khartoum at the end of the summer, and they passed the infamous Three No's: no negotiations, no peace, no recognition of Israel. The Palestinian notables in the West Bank, the protocols of the discussions, all said they'd be interested in having an autonomous entity. They certainly wanted independence. But they were afraid if they concluded any peace treaty at all with Israel, they'd be executed. A historic opportunity was lost that summer, and we've lived with the consequences ever since."
- http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-06o
If you're looking for a villain in the Middle East, start with the dictatorships and tyrannies that have ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Kuwait, refuse to give them basic citizenship rights in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan (although Jordan is by far the best of that crew), refuse to allow Palestinians to immigrate (Saudi Arabia), and continue to fan the flames of hatred to perpetuate their proxy war against Israel. Find me a pro-Palestinian more concerned with the well-being of the Palestinian people rather than the desire to harm Israel in some way, shape, or form. I don't see all the apologists in Europe doing a damn thing to improve the living conditions of Palestinians in any Arab nations - a people forced to live in slum villages for the sole purpose of using their plight as a negotiating tool in their proxy war against Israel. I didn't hear a damn word when tens of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from Kuwait, yet I heard plenty about it when somebody simply (and falsely) <b>accused</b> Israel of <b>considering</b> it.
There is one party amongst all these people that has an open, liberal democracy that not only includes over 1 million Arab and Druze citizens (including an Arab member on the Supreme court), but also provides the highest standard of living for any Arab in the entire Middle East. Israel has made quite a few mistakes - bringing in a dictator from Tunisia at the urging of the U.S. government being the most egregious, but to try to equate the two sides while ignoring the funding and motivation from the Arab world is utterly puerile.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
M$ has a big ad thingy in Israel about "copy software - go to jail".
...
Which is a lie, since Israeli copyright law dos not hold for private, none-profit use.
If you want protection from that, you have to sell your program as a product, not as a "creation".
But then you can't sell it without a decent warenty
So It appears that the ad strategy has backfired.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Palestine isn't a state occupied by anyone - it's a name of a former province of Roman Empire. There was never a state of Palestine. There's no brutal occupation either. What happens here is unprecedented war of terror against civilian population of Israel and you and those like you are denying the right of Israel to defend itself (by calling it "brutal occupation"). And that *is* racism.
You may find unofficial translations of the GPL into Hebrew at law.co.il and guides.co.il.
Take an OpenOffice.org Writer file (SXW). Rename the file to have the extension SXC. (For OOo Calc -- the spreadsheet.)
Now open it.
It opens as a Writer document just fine.
All OOo documents use the same XML structure. Based on some information in the META-INF directory, OOo is able to deduce that the top level of the document should open in Writer.
What do I mean by all this META-INF nonsense? Try this experiment: take any OOo document and rename it's extension (from SXC, SXW, etc.) to ZIP. Now unzip it. You get a Content.xml file, a META-INF folder, and other goodies if your document contained embedded pictures, etc.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Technically speaking, Jews are as much Palestinians as Arabs are. Palestine is just a name Romans gave to the land of Judea which they occupied some 2000 years ago. (And Judea was a Jewish country at the time, can you imagine that?)
As to the gap between Jews and Arabs, it would be much smaller if Arafat would stop wasting all those billions EU and USA are transferring to him, to buy guns, bulding rockets and continuing to fund terrorist activities like blowing up civilian Jews in school buses and supermarkets.
It was Apple who did not provide support for Hebrew and Arabic and a lot of other languages in OS X 10.0. The first version of Office for OS X targeted OS X 10.1 which did not have support for Hebrew and Arabic. 10.1 was released 9/25/2001. Office X was released 11/19/2001. It wasn't before Apple release OS X 10.2 (8/26/2002) that the OS had support for Hebrew and Arabic. There is no reason to believe this is more than an engineering decision. Delay support for a feature until the OS supports it. I would be surprised if the next version of Office for the Mac does not support Hebrew and Arabic. Yes, I know it is fun to blame Microsoft for everything. However in this case, if you want to blame anyone, it should be Apple.