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Israel Suspends MS Office Purchases For Now
case_igl writes "The Seattle Times is reporting 'that in an apparent showdown over price, Israel's government has suspended purchases of Microsoft Office software and is encouraging the development of an open-source alternative.' The Finance Ministry has cooperated with Sun Microsystems and IBM in designing the Hebrew-language version of OpenOffice software, a freely distributed open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications. Microsoft representatives in Israel did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment." The Associated Press article is carried on many other sites as well.
I guess they don't welcome their old ms-overlord then...
More power to them! Microsoft Word's default Hebrew fonts are non-existent, and the alternative Hebrew fonts aren't very good. Nor are any of the office products very good at inputing right-to-left text. I hope the improvements to openoffice will make their way to other countries.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
You gotta watch them jews - they'll beat you down to the lowest price every time!
</sarcasm>
Disclaimer: I am jewish.
I'd like to see more countries do this. Hopefully it'll help convince businesses and people that Microsoft isn't the only choice.
Hebrew isnt the easiest language to work with on computers seeing it is read from right to left, which would make for interesting programming.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
This is definitely a move that will help push Linux further into everyday use. I wonder how soon Microsoft/Isreal will 'compromise' to help make the deal?
What OOo needs most is more support from powerpoint. We are forced to buy a copy of Office for every computer because we use powerpoint for so much. Features such as hyperlinks to other presentations and exit effects are show stoppers for openoffice.org.
What if 1 out of 100 /.ers got invovled with their local school/ school system technology group... I don't know what our school system (town of ~ 90,000 people, dont know fraction in school) pays for software, but we must have close to a thousand seats, even at academic prices, thats a lot..not to mention the educational value of having High school students forced to learn something about software
Big endian, Little endian, Big Little....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
mod parent DOWN
Nah, coding is easy.
What's interesting is if this is just a bargaining chit being used by israel to make MSFT drop thier price, Just like Thailand did!
Use the promotional code "LINUX" and get thousands off your Microsoft installation costs!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
...than you pretend it was.
"sink a known US ship"
As opposed to all those unknown US ships, I suppose.
But then, I nearly always support a civilized people (ie Israel) who are fighting the inferior (ie 90% of the UN).
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Tuck your hatred back in, it's flapping.
The pain you fell is your stereotype ignorance.
Get over it!
I wonder if this thread, we'll get posts from people who think it's COMPLETELY unreasonable and communist of Israel to stop supporting Microsoft, a foreign company, just because Microsoft has failed to provide the support the government of Israel demanded for their country's official language.
It's happened every other time this subject's come up; it's probably a matter of time..
-- Super Ugly Ultraman
or ?pr? ?firm? hired goon smoke&mirrors 'racist' enough?
.asp it's packed buy us?
you can have the fauxking infactdead FUDge in any flavor you waNT, so long
Can't agree on much (Israeli security concerns, real or imagined, are behind much of the Bush Administration's hard-line approach to Iran).
But at least they both agree that Free/Open Source Software is good! Maybe this is an opertunity for peace down the road!
Laughing? Don't. Think of it this way-- what better way to gain additional respect for someone you think probably just wants to annihiliate or repress your people than workign with them on development of open source software?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Don't worry, they'll probably post it as a dupe in half an hour's time :-)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
If you're going to try and correct me, at least have the right war. In 1967 Israel conducted a preemptive strike against Egypt and her neighbors. You're confusing the '67 and the '73 war.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
According to IDC, this not real. This is just another ploy.
rrrriiiiiiggggghhhhhhhttttt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
. .
Give me your pound of flesh, or we're taking the Nazarene to a Roman party!
If you must feed trols, don't use your +1 modifier. It just calls attention to the thread and makes it take longer to moderate it into irrelevence.
I think it can help quite a lot. The Israeli government has a lot of interaction with other governments and businesses. They have huge military contracts locally and abroad. They also contribute much government money to scientific research, so it may spread there as well. Since their government has so much interaction with so many different organizations I think it will help spread the word.
Developers: We can use your help.
Once we see what the Israeli government deploy on their desktops we will know if this is for real, or just a crude negotiation technique.
I'll point out the inaccuracies of your statements about Israel. Each one of your statements is false. Israel has been attacked continuously since it's formation in 1948. Israel attacked Egypt because Egypt was threatening quite openly to attack Israel. The land that was occupied by Israel following the war was given back. Israel has offered to create a Palestinian state more than once. The Palestinians refused to have a state. The Arab countries surrounding Israel also refused to take Palestinian refugees. Israel did not intentionally try to sink a US ship, much like the US did not intend to shoot down an airliner over the Indian Ocean in the 1980s.
I will assume that you use incorrect information because you hold a different belief about Israel. Either you are misinformed, or you choose to be.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Maybe the Israeli government will decide to put their money to better use and donate it to the OpenOffice.org project.
We can only hope...
No, your hatred is from your well-earned inferiority complex.
You get over your hate and buy a toothbrush and some toothpaste.
Disclaimer: Jewish by blood and upbringing, been to and love the Middle-East
We know there will be a lot of posts about "yeah! Stick it to the Man!" and "Microsoft sucks! Serves them right!" going on. But let's think a bit deeper into this. I like the actual reasons Israel is saying "no, we're not going to live under your tyrannical rule. We will search out other options". That has been a major argument over the years..."everyone uses Office, so do we". Well that's not the case anymore. Microsoft is still trying to strongarm its customers by any means neccessary. It started with the OS, then to the nutty licensing, and now by their refusal to split up Office (which if you recall used to be a collection of software you could buy individually). Good for Israel. Now...what next? Will other large companies go "hm...well it worked for them. Let's try it too" or will they just go "they're crazy" and continue to be lemmings like most of humanity is?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Hey, do you have a summary of this stuff with references? Even a good book? Something for us boobs who know nothing about the Middle East? Most of what I hear is from heavily biased sources, so I go to great lengths to ignore it... that practice, well, by definition makes me ignorant.
It would be nice if somebody put something together which explored the history, various biases and lies surrounding the issues (on all sides).
I know... nothing is devoid of bias, but even a 20-year old book would tell current events more accurately than the newspapers.
The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing applications.
Off the record, she refered to Bill Gates as a shlemil, and said they weren't going to take any more of his schmutz. They are tired of schlepping his insecure software around, paying far too much of their hard-earned mezuma for his khazeray.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I think what people fail to see in this argument, is that it really doesn't matter how the characters are oriented. It's all a matter of how they're displayed.
If you have:
AABBBCCCDDD in your memory, since that's the order in which the characters have been typed, the only thing you have to do is make your display routines in such a way that you write them 'on screen' from right to left.
For all the code involved in line checking, block operations, search and replace, etc, etc, it really doesn't matter how it looks on the screen, only how it's actually internally stored.
So the basic design of these Microsoft programs was faulty in that you can't define an orientation for the data you've used as input.
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
No, man: a new beer.
Companion product Herbrew to follow in a few months.
It seems to me that one of the reasons MS has always been able to create inconvienient packages from groups of software, and then sell at very high prices, is that they OWN most of the market. In other words, they're so big that you and I can't possibly expect to demand a concession.
Of course, now that countries are starting to realize that they're big enough to push back, we have more of a Goliath vs Goliath thing going on, and maybe MS will start to be more flexible in the way it offers its software. Maybe they'll start to consider adding a language pack when they stand to lose sales to an entire nation.
It'd be nice to be able, for instance, to buy Word and Excel without PowerPoint, Access, or FrontPage. (It'd be even nicer if Frontpage and everyone who contributed to it's creation were cast into Hell, but that's another story!)
As an Israeli computer technician, I see what everyone uses here. 95% (maybe more) windows. almost 100% office. now Israel's government is in a major budget crunch, and is cutting corners everywhere. Other corners cut: Handicapped support (not enough to live on now), public health benefits and so on.
as for the claims that MS office doesn't support hebrew, it depends which version. Every copy you can find in Israel will be "Hebrew Enabled" which provides FULL Hebrew support, including great help files and even the interface.
More power to them! Microsoft Word's default Hebrew fonts are non-existent, and the alternative Hebrew fonts aren't very good. Nor are any of the office products very good at inputing right-to-left text. I hope the improvements to openoffice will make their way to other countries.
I would assume that the main benefits would be of most use to (in order):
Other Semitic languages such as Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopian
Other right-left languages, such as Farsi.
Noticing a pattern here... Ironically enough, these improvements are likely to help develop the software for those that Israel considers to be their enemies (the Arab world and Persia, being Iran and parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan).
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
The Israeli political system is paralized when it comes to peace, IMO, due to the low margin (2%) that parties need in order to qualify for the Knesset. This is why the current gov't is so dependent on the radical right-wing parties such as the National Religious Party (which many Israelis regard as fascist). Yet they are not stupid, and this unilaterial suggestion on their part has been a long time coming (if you read the Israeli press, you should have seen it at least a year ago, if not more).
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments. Hell, as an American, I don't have much respect for MY government! But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What exactly are you comparing between Israel and China? I see no similarities at all.
look-alike? offering won hundred dollars to hobbyists?
does the cruelty ever end?
While I would not like to overstate this, an open source project could be an small opportunity to bring Jewish and Muslim developers together. They share a common goal of wanting software that can handle text that reads right to left. Anything, even something as small as an open source project, that can help bring people together in the Middle East has to be a good thing. While open source is not a magic elixir for world problems, working together is always a useful step.
Think global, act loco
The format for traditional chinese is left to right. I know this because I'm a internationalization engineer for a software product.
Is the money that I make forcing people to buy things that they don't need (for example, an entire office license if all they need is Outlook) worth the money that I lose when people start flocking to free alternatives when they don't like I'm offering?
Microsoft (or any company for that matter) stands on very shaky ground when the market starts going in a different direction and they refuse to be flexible. This is just like the RIAA and file sharing. If the RIAA in the mid 90's when CD burners were about to hit the market had dropped the price of CD's, and offered a legitimate electronic distribution method, things like Napster would not have been such a big hit. They created unrest in the market by not being flexible and giving people what they want to buy, for the price they want. The same thing is now happening to MS. What does MS office have that OpenOffice doesn't? Nothing that mattered to Israel. So when they were forced to pay for something they didn't want or need, they looked for an alternative and found it.
Unless MS shapes up this will continue to happen and happen more rapidly. Mac OS, Linux, and all other *NIX will only gain market share as they become the viable alternative.
Just compare some of the licensing of Mac OS to MS. The new, fully loaded version of OSX? ~$130. The new fully loaded version of Windows XP? ~$200. The new fully loaded version of OSX Server? ~$1000 for unlimited users. The new fully loaded Windows server 2003? ~$4000 with 25 users. And that is not to mention Linux which is fully loaded for free!
They can't sustain this for long before something breaks.
SCO.com uses Linux
its the mans fault, he holds us back , gimme a title so when i feel opressed i can wave it about and you feel sorry for me
you say that like its a bad thing
Michael Oren is pro-Israel. Look for something else.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
I find it interesting that even as so many governments are making moves away from Microsoft, the US Department of Homeland Security designated Microsoft as its preferred supplier of desktops and servers.
Seeing the text come out right-to-left was really strange.
I'm not sure about programming in hebrew, i.e. r->l. Anyone know?
-- ac at work
Oh yeah, cos we wouldn't want to have anything but an anti-Israel viewpoint for any of this stuff, right?
He's got a bibliography, and presumably you have the ability to figure out if he's bullshitting you. And no, calling him 'pro-Israel' isn't good enough. You wanna be a bigot, at least be an educated one.
I think that it will become the 66 post war, by the look of things.
Big endian, Little endian, Big Little....
Suffering from little endian? Wish you had a big endian? You should check out these new pills to enlarge your endian!!! Guaranteed results!!! All natural. No excercises. No pain.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Israel was on the offensive since 1948. It was a state founded on terrorism, and has not given up the use of terrorism since.
Israel attacked Egypt. That's all that happened. They attacked Egypt in '56 and they attacked Egypt in '67. Egypt attacked Israel in '72.
Israel has not offered the Palestinians a state, they have offered the Palestinians the right to starve.
The airliner shot down was not over the Indian Ocean, it was over the Persian Gulf. And the Iranian Pilot was attempting to goad the US ship. It was his bad luck it was shot down.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It seems to me that Moderation is being used as punishment here more than anything else. This thread might be off-topic, but it arose from normal discussion.
-- Morosoph
But Israel is quickly becoming the new China, and I'd frankly rather have a MS friendly, but reasonable government (because, lets face it, with the issues Israel is facing, office suite choice is not as great an indicator of intelligence and penis size as we'd like to think), than the current OSS embracing religious zealots.
Disclaimer: Jewish by blood and upbringing, been to and love the Middle-East
My guess would be that we're in agreement here. For the 55+ years of her existence, Israel has never seemed to shake her dogged infatuation with marxism.
When I glanced at this /. header, my initial thought was "Gee whiz [which, by the way, is a polite euphemism for - oh, never mind]: All they're doing is handicapping their people with an inferior product; sure, the initial costs are a little [well, a lot] greater with Microsoft, but those initial costs are more than compensated for by the accompanying gain in human productivity."
It's pretty easy to predict that Stallman's campaign against the idea of intellectual property rights would be lent a willing ear by a people with [what seems to be] a predisposed affinity for marxism, but, in the long run, if they succomb to this latest bit of utopian wheedlery, they will be, like socialists always and everywhere, just shooting themselves in the foot [feet?] yet again.
Israel really did attack the radio survellence ship Liberty, killing 34 americans. It is very clear that the attack was not a mistake. The best guess is they did it to prevent information about prisoner massacres from getting out. The adminstration (Johnson?) hushed it up.
See, for example, http://www.ussliberty.org or better yet Google for yourself and make up your own mind.
Honest.
I have not seen such willful ignorance in quite some time.
Go take the time to actually learn something about what happened, and then people might start taking you seriously.
An internal issue of one nation?! One nation blockading another nation from using the Suez Canal is hardly 'an internal issue of one nation'...
In the Golan Heights today, Microsoft employees and shareholders threw rocks and bottles at Isreali soldiers, who fired back with rubber-coated 8x10 glossy photos of Linus Torvalds, injuring one Microsoft employee in the left upper arm. In response to the violence, the Isreali government ordered pizzas delivered and watched reruns of South Park and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Egypt controls one side of the canal. And the other. The canal is internal to Egypt. To say otherwise would be like saying the Mississippi River should be considered an international and free-for-all waterway.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Yes, but they did get an F for computer security from the House of Representatives. Getting security advice from the class dunce doesn't strike me as a great idea. If the DOD, another F recipient, doesn't like OpenBSD, perhaps we should have a second look at it too.
Think global, act loco
I'm an admitted Apple addict (fan-boy, whatever...), so...
I installed OO.o for OS X the other day, and poked around a bit. Gotta admit, it isn't anywhere near as easy to use outa the box as either Office or AppleWorks, at least for me (got both installed). That said, I think it has a lot of potential, and I'm anxious to see what the Aqua-native version will bring. And the folks over at OO.o admit that it's not for the faint-of-heart, and recommend it only for geek-y types at this time.
I'd like to see Apple release an update to AppleWorks, for both Mac and Windows. I also think Apple should support Linux as well, and expect that they eventually will. The more competion that MS has, the better off we all are. It's not like MS can't make good software - Office v.X and Flight Simulator come to mind as examples of good products.
Anyways, hopefully MS will continue with their recent trend of seeking outside input (as with the questionaire sent to Linux users.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Please don't forget that your government is one of the few that lets you freely state that without hunting you down like a criminal.
The truth shall set you free!
Some unbiased pointers:
Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Israel Shamir
uncovering media myths about the middle east
Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Co
Bullshit.
The majority of FOSS supporters never met a dictator they didn't like.
By Internationalism, do you mean "Let's make a slave trading nation the chair of our Human Rights Comission"?
Don't get sanctimonious with me, asshole.
sure http://www.historychannel.com. although if your american you might find it a bit shocking as we tend to over-sympathize with the jews when in all reality they are the ones who are wrong.
Ariel Sharon openly hates palestinians, threatened to assassinate they're leader. claims he will never back down and will fight them untill the day he dies (which hopefully is soon). atleast when netanyahu was in office he got things done and *almost* came to an agreement with the palestinians.
Recently I did some freelance translation work for Microsoft. Actually some brochures highlighting the benefits of using licenced software versus pirated sw. The files I was sent were in rtf format and I did the job successfully using Open Office 1.1 in Linux.
If the documents from Microsoft (although I don't really know if they were from Microsoft because my direct client was not Microsoft) can be used on Open Office then why not in the Israel government, provided that the language support is there. My experience is that government clerks are not the brightest users anyway and they tend to use a limited range of features they have been tought. With some planning Open Office can be more than adequate for all real tasks in the government.
--
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
... sniped somewhat biassed discription of Israel's politics ...
... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
...)
This already happens. Israel's group of inux users mailing list has at least one Iranian participant. He is indeed respected personnaly.
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments
You know, that mantra just doesn't work. In 1929, in Hebron, the jewish settelers were very well known and respected by their arab neighbours, which massacered them one day w/o any warning.
It is not the political system in israel which is responsible for the right's ascent, but a recognition that the peace process was nothing more than a national-scale con-job. The palestinians decieved israel, by promissing peace, while maintaining a constant, low intensity, level of murdering Israelly civilians.
The Oslo agreements and the resulting violence were nothing more than a result of the Israelly left's stupidity and blind-optimism whenever the word peace is involved, while confronted with a clever, hateful and murderous opponent (the PLO, later PA).
As for personal respect: the conflict is national, ethnic and religious.
In other words, it is a collective (social) phenomena.
It will, IMHO, no more be solved by personal respect of single people than any other war in the history of mankind (please show me a counter example
This was one of the false arguments laid by the Oslo people: let us reach for a temporary solution, the two people will get to know each other, and surely will respect each other so much that war will not be possible.
Well, guess what, it didn't work.
Working for necessity's mother.
Iran refuses Israeli humanitarian aid for earthquake victims.
Islamofascist mad mullahs would rather their people die than get help from Jews.
And you claim it's the Israeli political system that's paralyzed by peace because of the low margin for Knesset representation.
And that is clearly a great thing, but don't forget that there are many more things to expect from a government. Some of us would like it to not only allow us to talk, but also to listen to us.
I agree. As a citizen it is good to be a strict parent with the government as your child... but too many Americans go beyond being a strict parent to the point of being an abusive parent.
When Israel took control of its territory, said territory was under the control of Jordan and other countries in the area.
. html
God made the Mississippi River, the Suez Canal was built by the French (along the path of an abandoned canal from the 13th--8th BC) and later purchased by the Brits. Moreover, the Suez Canal has been held to be an international waterway since 1888, and the UN has consistently upheld that since its inception.
from http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Suez_War
On August 9, 1949, the UN Mixed Armistice Commission upheld Israel's complaint that Egypt was illegally blocking the canal. UN negotiator Ralph Bunche declared: "There should be free movement for legitimate shipping and no vestiges of the wartime blockade should be allowed to remain, as they are inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of the armistice agreements."
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I propose a rule, unless your name is Bruce Almighty, you should keep your suggestions about what people should do to yourself. It's pointless, and it just makes the poster of such comments look absolutely ridiculous.
Infuriate left and right
Israel has been attacked continuously since it's formation in 1948.
...since its formation...
Do not use a freaking apostrophe there! grrr...
How big is the market for a Hebrew-enabled office? It can't be that big outside of a few Jewish schools, some of the Orthodox community in the US, and Israel itself.
It just sounds like a pricing game to me -- MS wanting (needing?) to sell the whole package in Hebrew to make any money keeping up their translation and the Israeli government objecting to the provisions of the seller.
It wouldn't surprise me if MS just decided to drop Hebrew altogether; it's a limited growth market, and the number of people who speak English in addition to Hebrew has to be huge, and with the demands of document portability, many would likely switch to the English version anyway vs. some other version which supports Hebrew.
I know, I know, it's another terrible example of American corporations exterminating a local culture in the name of profits, but that's just a political interpretation of economic reality.
A link would be nice.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'm not shure if i beleive the anti or pro israel story. I agree that anti-israel is not anti-jews. I have a bit more in for the palestinian side as i can see that there is no way they can bring in something agains the huge force of the israeli army. (Big brother is crushing you). There is no way to make suicide bombers be a good reaction, but shooting a tank with a AK-47 does not seem a 'fair fight'. I for certain can not grasp what drives these people to the brink of mutual destruction. Flaiming someone anonymously also does not really make your statement valid... Eb. stil wondering when Peace relly gets a meaning in the middle east.
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother. ... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this.
I wish I could go along with that, but it seems like a little bit of wishful thinking. Geekdom is the ultimate meritocracy -- politics is not. In computer science, you can tell a good solution from a bad solution -- it's all right there in front of you, and people who can come up with good solutions will be respected for those solutions regardless of race, religion, etc. In politics, what determines a good solution or a bad solution is the power of the person carrying out that solution and their ability to sway the public into thinking it was the right way to go all along.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I have a feeling that most of the " choose OpenOffice" things you see, including this one, are just negotiating tactics to get Microsoft to drop the price. Does anybody have any data about long-term switches away from Microsoft? Any data of people who ultimately buy Microsoft anyway?
Not wishful thinking data: objective stuff.
your example of said jewish settlers was a good example...
i think that a little something has happenned to the jewish people since then...namelessly the halocaust. has anything changed? mabye not, i suppose. but i at least want to think that there is another option that has been forged in the past 75 years, whether they take it or not.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
"Iran has made it clear that aid from everywhere would be accepted, except from its sworn enemy, Israel" right at the bottom of the article.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
Michael is the Godfather. Kiss his ring.
Here's some links, sorry about the lack of formatting:a ges/376370.ht ml
n .h tml
s J: www.cbsnews.com/track/sumhtml2003122821/stories/20 03/12/26/world/main590242.shtml%3Fcmp%3DEM8707+%2B iran+%2Bearthquake+%2Bisrael&hl=en&start=7&ie=UTF- 8
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/sp
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/1203/31ira
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:Oxley--2BJ
And the quote in question.
Jahanbakhsh Khanjani, a spokesman for Iran's Interior Ministry, said Saturday that Iran would accept aid from all countries of the world, aside from Israel. The announcement followed statements by foreign correspondents in Jerusalem, who reported that the Foreign Ministry had said that unofficial Israeli sources were considering sending aid to Iran. "The Islamic Republic of Iran accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organizations with the exception of the Zionist regime [Israel]," Khanjani said.
A group of Khazars have been invading your country since WW-I, and you crack down on the people in your country uprising against the invasion? Yeah, right.
Let's suppose a group of people in South America decided to start following the traditions of the North America Native Souix tribes, pre-United States. Then they came to the US and declared their own country on the shores of the Mississippi. Would the President of the US hold back the rednecks?
Pelorat wrote that. I'm simply tired of losing karma to asshats.
Palestinian suicide/homicide bombers target the *civilian* population more than military. But I suppose you can justify that somehow too.
Eh, dont bother with the facts, he'll just call you pro-Israel and dismiss your arguments.
-Pelorat (moderators can suck my nuts)
Taco Group Think will make you Free !!!
The spokeswoman said the government was unhappy with Microsoft's refusal to sell individual programs from its standard Office package, which includes e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing application
Perhaps the middle-eastern market is diffrent then the american one... but near as I'm aware you can still by Outlook, Word, and Excel seperatly. However, it makes little sence to as if you need two MS applications, you might as well buy Office. At least the american price is something like $200 for excel, $200 for word, and like $100 for outlook. The office professional edition is like $500 from buy.com, not sure about the SB edition, the upgrade is about $300 from buy.com.
Now... whether or not you can buy one copy of Office and install word on one machine, excel on another, and outlook on another is a little bit unclear to me. Back in 2000 I did actually ask microsoft about this, they... being tech support said "I don't know, sounds reasonable to me, but I don't know".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You're ignoring the giant number of threats that Israeli officials have made towards Israel, the fact that Sharon has made veiled threats to nuke Iran, and publically said that he will push for the US to attack Iran after Iraq. He made those comments in November 2002, when the US was just starting to press Iraq in the UN.
Iranians are both afraid of and angry at Israel. Israel accuses them of having nukes, despite having plenty of their own. Iranians are outraged that they are getting hassled for nuclear inspections, while Israel has barred inspectors from the Dioma nuclear plant.
Looks like you created that account just for this reply. You, sir, are a fanatic :-)
Infuriate left and right
What are you talking about? You can buy the parts of office separately. I just looked at CDW.com and was able to find separate listings for Excel and Word (I didn't look for any others). Am I missing something?
I think everybody should ban MS, because it rots. Inflexible, very static so far as modularity goes, and I think it's sometimes too user-friendly -- what with all those @%!* help windows showing up all the time of their own voilition.
-[EPSILON]-
Stargoat you are either very misinformed or unbelievably biased, most likely both.
The treaty of Westphalia (may want to check your spelling next time) ended the 30 years war in Europe and has nothing to do with anything that has been mentioned here. If you think the Treaty of Westphalia is some kind of uber-law that is applicable to the entire world in modern time then I hope you are Christian since under that treaty non-Christians (and their dominions) have essentially no rights. Kind of ironic to try to apply that to the Israel-Egypt conflict.
The "casus belli" (again with the spelling) was not only the closing of the canal to Israeli shipping which is clearly an act of war under international law. This was tolerated by Israel for some time because of its outlet at the port of Elat. The more flagrant violations of international law were the blockade at the Bab el-Mandab Straits and the constant harassment to Israeli shipping from Sharm el-Sheikh, effectively denying Israel the use of Elat, its only east-bound outlet for imports/exports.
Not to mention the expulsion by Egypt of UN peacekeepers from Sinai which had been put in place as a condition for the armistice following the 1956 war. I guess the amassment of hundreds of thousands of troops, tanks and artillery at the border of Israel by a megalomaniac (Nasser) who had been rallying the entire Arab world for most of a decade to "throw the Jews into the sea" and who was still at a state of declared war with Israel is not a good reason for a pre-emptive strike. Perhaps Israel should have waited for a joint Egyptian-Syrian strike to respond (like they did in 1973 and almost were annihilated but for the buffer provided by the lands gained in 1967) so that you could have your sensibilities covered? Right on!
The USS Liberty case has been one of the most investigated and written upon military incidents in history. Every serious investigation has concluded it was a case of mistaken identity. Please tell me ONE reason why Israel would have been motivated to kill U.S. sailors and destroy a USS toward the end of a very short, and otherwise very successful, war?
Perhaps you could benefit from reading some history, it does not have to be Michael Oren, anyone else with his reputation for veracity will suffice.
you mean towards iran?
You have to admit, using gunships to hold Arafat prisoner in his own complex, is an excellent bargaining position to be in.
Hussein was a great man. While Sharon has big boots to fill, he has gotten the job done. The fact that Arafat is still alive should tell you that Sharon may not be the loose cannon you make him out to be.
Young Ariel Sharon massacres ...
The attack on Qibya took place in the evening of October 14, 1953. It began with an artillery barrage at the village until Israeli troops reached the outskirts of the village. Mines were laid out on roads to prevent Jordanian troops from joining the fight. When the village had been cleared of resistance, Israeli soldiers ordered the civilains to leave their homes and stated that they would be demolished; they then laid explosives around many of the houses and blew them up. The claim that villagers were given an opportunity to flee is contradicted by the fact that the Israeli units had an order to achieve maximum civilian casualties. At dawn the operation was considered completed and the Israeli troops returned home.
Forty five villagers' houses had been destroyed, as well as the mosque, the school and the water reservoir. Over 50 people were killed, two thirds of them women and children. The rest of the village population, around 2,700 in number, were able to flee. The Israeli government initially claimed that the killing was carried out by Jewish civilians living near the border, but later admitted that it was done by military forces.
Have the balls to go poke around MEMRI.
Some prime examples of "progressive Islamic thought":
Iranian Daily: 'Extremist Jews Plotting to Assassinate Chirac,' Mossad Agents Behind Najaf Blast
Three Saudi Dailies Publish Government Official's Op-Ed: 'Jews are Masters at Manipulating the Media, Money, World Organizations'
Based on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals
And of course, there is nothing like the official sermons of the PLO, er, Palestinian Authority, where such great statements are uttered with the full knowledge of the PLO:
"This is the fate that Allah has bestowed upon us, people of Palestine, that we be worthy of struggling and giving our souls on this good and blessed land... Blessings to our Shahids. Blessings to our Shahids who sacrifice their souls easily for the sake of Allah. Blessings to our Shahids who were burned yesterday in their cars" (referring to suicide care bombers, apparently)
And here:
""We tell them: in as much as you love life - the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom".
"No preacher or sermonizer has right to begin his words without blessing all our Shahids... The Jews cannot influence the actions of our youth and children. But for you, Allah has chosen Shahada... Allah had honored our youth... by choosing you and by choosing from among you the Shahids... Is the Shahid dead like other dead, which requires us to offer condolences and mourn with his family, friend and relatives? Or is the Shahid enjoying virtues and the ability to perform miracles, which gives us the right to congratulate the Shahid and his family?... We have the right to congratulate the Shahids' families, and not extend condolences and sorrow of our Shahids, if they [sacrifice themselves] to Allah... But the Shahid is spared the agony of death. This is one of the miracles of the Shahid. Is it not enough that the Shahid weds 72 black eyed [virgins]?... When the Shahid sees the grace of martyrdom and death for the sake of Allah he will wish to return to this world to be killed in it ten times... The Shahid - is it enough for him that he does not feel the blow of the sword or the pain of death or of the killing rather, as one of you feels a [wasp] sting..."
"A young man said to me: 'I am 14 years old, and I have four years left before I blow myself up'... We, the Muslims on this good and blessed land, are all - each one of us - seekers of Martyrdom... The Koran is very clear on this: The greatest enemies of the Islamic nation are the Jews, may Allah fight them... Blessings for whoever assaulted a soldier... Blessings for whoever has raised his sons on the education of Jihad and Martyrdom; blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew's head..."
"O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the Jews... They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them... The Jews are like a [gas] pedal - as long as you step on it with your foot, it doesn't move, but if you lift your foot from it, it hurts you and punishes you. This is the case of the Jews."
"Religion of peace" my ass.
I installed OO.o for OS X the other day, and poked around a bit. Gotta admit, it isn't anywhere near as easy to use outa the box as either Office or AppleWorks, at least for me (got both installed).
You really should try running it under GNU/Linux instead (either intel Linux via VirtualPC, or PPC linux on another partition) if you'd like to see the current state of the art as far as Open Office is concerned.
As I found out, to my dismay when I tried to get my girlfriend up and running on Open Office with her Powerbook 17", Open Office for Mac is kludgy (runs under X11, not aqua), out of date (v. 1.0.3 vs. 1.1 in the Linux and Windoze world), and buggy (font issues, and it won't print to her HP all-in-one printer no matter how many sheep we burn in offering^H^H^H^H^H what workarounds are tried, and yes, I have exhausted all of the suggestions in the Apple fora as well as google searches too numerous to count).
I ended up (reluctantly) suggesting she stick with Microsoft Office for Mac for the time being, and we can revisit Open Office if and when it ever gets decent Mac support. It works fine for her, and she is happy again. Very happy, actually, as she is no longer running windows (read: her laptop doesn't crash like her old Dell Inspiron with Windows/ME did) and she can get the work done she needs to. Becoming entirely Microsoft free is something she'd like to do, but Open Office simply isn't ready on her platform.
In the interim I continue to run Open Office exclusively, under Linux via PowerPC on my Powerbook, and under Linux on my intel computers, exporting to MS format when I need to send her something she can edit.
That said, I think it has a lot of potential, and I'm anxious to see what the Aqua-native version will bring. And the folks over at OO.o admit that it's not for the faint-of-heart, and recommend it only for geek-y types at this time.
Indeed it does, and on platforms it does support natively it is very good. I too can't wait for an aqua version (1.1 hopefully), and I think Apple made a big mistake in not putting some muscle into getting a native release sooner. There are plenty of people switching to Apple out of loathing for Microsoft, my GF included, and telling them they'll still be buying and running MS Office is a surefire way to squandor an opportunity to wean people away from their competitor completely.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Whenever someone speaks in less than glowing terms of Israel, people beging shouting about Anti-Semitism. This is nonsense. A serious discussion must be had about Israel without name-calling. The cry of Anti-Semitism has too long been a cover that Israel and her advocates uses for illegal and immoral actions.
Israel is a nation stated founded on and using the principles of terrorism. Israel continues to use terrorism to achieve its goals. US support for Israel must end. This has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with mass thievery and terrorism.
The attack on the Liberty was a deliberate attempt to cover troop movements in preparation for an assault on the Golan Heights. Israel had very good reasons for keeping that attack secret, mainly that they did not want American interference in the United Nations during the final offensive. They thought they could get away with it, and they did.
Israel did not need to attack in '67. Egypt was withdrawing and other countries in the region were standing down. There was no need for war. (In '73, Meir was so much an obstinate fool that she forced unpreparedness for the obviously impending attack.) Instead, Israel chose to attack because it was a point before Egypt and her neighbors could get any stronger.
Israel attacked Egypt in 1967. This is was the action. Israel committed the Middle East to war, not Egypt. Nasser was in the process of removing his troops from Egypt when Israel attacked. There was no excuse for Israel's belligerence.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Bundling is just another word for profit maximizing. Microsoft makes more money by bundling, even just slightly. The newspaper example is best used. A wants just the sports section and is willing to pay 30c for it. B just wants entertainment & the front section and wants to pay 40c for it. If each of them buy it, they may 70c total, but if they can charge 50c for both people, they make a dollar.
The point is that Microsoft is trying to milk everyone for more than they're worth. Israel isn't doing anything wrong beyond saying "why are we choosing Microsoft if their support is sub-par. Why shouldn't we find a better prices solution that is completely compatible". Microsoft has to be competative (with free) or convince more lemmings to follow them off the cliff.
-M
You know, that one
God spoke to me
I need more sleep, I was glancing at the comments and thought the link in the article above was "goatse.cx" as opposed to "govexec".
I admit that these are Jewish sites and pro-Israel. They are, however, as close as I've seen to being objective and sticking to historical facts. (I am Jewish and Israeli.)
Myths & Facts Online - A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict
And for up-to-the-minute information on the latest news, see HonestReporting. Their newsletter offers some fascinating insight on Mideast events and how they are portrayed in the media, most often biased in favor of the Palestinians.
*sigh* .. Can the name "Israel" ever be mentioned here without waking all the bigots and spurring a political debate? This doesn't happen if the country mentioned is, say, China.
phozz
This situation is far far worse. Catholics and protestants may get along like a house on fire but it is as nothing as jews and muslims AND catholics AND protestants AND etc etc etc.
There are also far more nations who have an interest in the situation. France doesn't give a hoot about ireland but it does have an intrest in keeping its muslim relations happy. America doesn't want to upset the jewish population and prefers having a stable allie in that region of the world. All the arab nations have to deal with a populace that for a part wants to see Israel wiped out why also dealing with the reality that if there is going to be any wiping out for now it is the Israelies doing it. All the offical stuff like wars has gone really really wrong for arab nations. Imaging WW2 starting and 6 days laters the poles are half way to Berlin and moving fast. Or to reflect size. The dutch. Scary stuff if you are on the wrong side.
Further more is the problem that arabs ain't united. They kill each other off routinely and the amount of arabs killed by israel over the entire history of the conflict fades into nothing by what arabs do to each other. Why are the koerds not helped? Why are the palenstines not given land somewhere else? No arab nation would allow such trouble makers to run around inside their borders. Might give others ideas.
The solution? There isn't one sadly except a really nasty one. It needs to get out of control. For now the stalemate is just to handy for to many outsiders to do anything. Israel can't do anything. Peace? They seen what peace does. They are surrounded by enemies who want to eradicate them and they know far to well what that can lead to. One moment of weakness could lead to Israel being overrun. Each time Israel lowers restrictions suicide bombers strike.
The palenstines can't do anything. The suicide bombers are not under their control and with nothing to loose their are always new volunteers. Their current leaders do very well from the status quo. Enough aid has been poored into palenstine to make every one of them rich yet most can barely survive. Arafat and his cronies are rich.
The only thing I see happening is that something must cause the rest of the world to step in and make some really though choices. Current peacekeeps are for show. Has the UN in lebabon done anything except provide target practice? No.
Maybe after a massacre takes place like in the balkans or ruwanda will a foreign force intervene and draw some real borders wich neither side is allowed to cross and enforce it with deadly force.
The idiotic situation now is that the palenstines need Israel for jobs and hospitals and that Israel seems to need the labor. The first step to stop any fight is to seperate the combatants and cool them off away from each other. Not to get them to be friends and work together while the punches are flying. Doesn't work has never worked will never work. Prove me wrong by pointing out an example in history,
So as we end 2003 I think this conversation will be held for much much longer until something goes wrong. A few dozen people killed in a year isn't wrong enough sadly. Hell more people die on the road then in violence even over there. We don't do anything anywhere to stop that do we?
Happy drinking and driving and calling the cops fascists for trying to stop us killing each other.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
49% of Israel/Palestine is Hebrew.
What kind of elections prevent the majority from voting?
Nah, not switching away from M$ Office. What's interesting is that like in a landslide, more and more countries and large corporations find out that if they pull out a Linux box, and mention a pilot project, prices for M$ products suddenly start to drop.
If that isn't enough, you threaten to go away, use OO and Linux, and mention again how well the pilot project was going.
Never been so easy to get the local M$ rep to dump his prices well below anything you had ever seen before.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
MS-Suicide Bomber?
You truly are delusional.
First of all, I never said you were anti-semitic, just ignorant as to the seo-political and military aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Your obstinance als proves you are anti-israel. Not to mention your need to inject arab/israeli politict into a topic that has nothing to do with it. You have proven as much:
(1) The USS Liberty was shot on off the coast of Egypt. So how does shooting down a US vessel hunderds of miles away help to keep "covert" the operation? And how "covert" was the operation? Everyone knew it was coming. Syrian harassment for the past 2 decades from the plateau was a major cause of the war. And what about the dozens of Soviet ships in the area? If Israel could keep its plans "covert" from the Russians it surely could have done so vis-a-vis the US without having to shoot at a navy vessel of its ONE ally in the entire world. Your story just doesn't hold water.
(2) Egypt was withdrawing? Check out Nasser's speech on May 22, 1976 (less than 2 weeks prior to the beginning of the war) http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Peace/aqaba.html Sure doesnt sound like talk of a withdrawing army or "standing down" to me.
(3) I don't get your point about Israel not "needing" to attack because Egypt was not strong enough. So, they should wait to attack until their demise is assured? Are you nuts? Even you must realize that Israel's one hope of survival is anticipating the Arab's moves and acting before it is too late. What you are asking for is suicide.
I'm done with you. I'm getting back on topic.
Probably not. You don't want to confront the fact of Arab anti-Semitism.
Only in Seattle, where MS is a good neighbor, would any "journalist" say this is "apparent showdown over pricing"
Someone has not been paying attention, perhaps willfully so, apparently.
It's over features that Israel offered to PAY for, and MS blew them off for years.
It's about lack of customer support, and MS arrogance... That OOffice just happens to be a 95+% replacement for Word (today), and happens to be Free in both senses of the word, is just a bonus.
The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.
The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of "dual loyalty." A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labeled as anti-semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).
However, one should note that many prominent neoconservatives are not Jewish, such as Michael Novak, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, and Max Boot. Second, neoconservatives in the 1960s were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It has only been since this conflict, which has raised the specter of Israel's military invincibility, that the neoconservatives have become preoccupied by Israel's security interests. They support Israel's role as the strongest ally of the United States in the Middle East and as the sole Western-style democracy in the region.
Moreover, they have long argued that the United States should emulate Israel's tactics of pre-emptive attacks, especially Israel's unprovoked, pre-emptive unilateral attacks in the 1980s on nuclear facilities in Libya and Iraq. Despite (or perhaps because of) condemnation by the United Nations, neoconservatives have admired such Israeli adventures, arguing that the United States, like Israel, should act in its national interests, regardless of international law.
duh.
...
check this link out
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&&q=qiby a
Iran is in a tough situation. It's surrounded by enemies. The US is occupying iraq and has hundrteds of thousands of troops there. Bush has labled the entire country evil. Israel is a sworn enemy. relations with Turkey have always been rocky.
I imagine the entire country feels like they are on the brink of destruction. It's can't be a fun place to live when the people who hate you are lined up at the border with massive firepower.
War is necrophilia.
In this regard you are most completely wrong. It was intentional to sink the Liberity who was successfully intercepting Israeli war communications.
We knew it!
And we couldn't allow the fact that we knew this to become known at that time.
Bad moves all around, but the incident was no accident from anyone's perspective.
When I hear an argument like this, I see why Microsoft isn't too worried about Open Source competition (even though they consider it the biggest threat around). Microsoft is simply keeping its eyes open in the back of its head to see how closely it's being followed.
Have you ever actually used the Hebrew version of Office? I have. The right-to-left support is very impressive. It is much more elegant and complete than anything Open Office has to offer. It is also well-tested, which is something that can't be said for OO's right-to-left support at the moment. I ran into bugs left and right (pardon the pun) in Open Office on Linux, primarily because Windows has support for right-to-left languages throughout the OS now and it therefore feels much more integrated and "natural". It is much more difficult to find that level of end-to-end support for these languages in free software. This may change, but I'm simply pointing out the current state of things.
In fact, this whole episode seems to be nothing more than an effort to attain some bargaining power. Which is their right to do, absolutely. In fact, Israel would be stupid not to shop around.
But in the end, if Israel is seriously interested in obtaining the best software with the most support for its localized culture, it will probably stick with MS Office. In fact, I'm sure they would LOVE to stick with Microsoft Office right now because they LIKE it, but are facing a bit of a budget shortfall and want to see what they can squeeze out of Microsoft's profit margins.
Apple makes money selling its hardware, period. In order to buy the $130 version of OSX (which by the way should be called an upgrade, since it is impossible to buy a Mac without an Apple OS installed), you have already forked over a premium for the Apple hardware. When you look at total cost, Apple loses every time, and always will as long as its market share stays at 5%.
Reuters? AP? Propaganda? Hahahahaha.
You're as bonkers as those Nazi-Zionist conspiricy theorists and Protocols of the Elders of Zion believers.
And what would you suggest for good, unbiased reporting? Fox News? Arutz Sheva?
Just because the reporting doesn't put the State of Israel in a particularly good light doesn't mean it's biased. It might have something to do with the fact that the State of Israel doesn't do an awful lot that can be considered "good", mightn't it?
'If you want Hebrew, just buy Windows'
Israel's response was: 'If you don't support Hebrew, we won't buy Microsoft'.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Please go join your terrorist friends in the great welfare state.
1.) The attack on the Liberty took place to avoid a premature US censure of Israel in the United Nations.
2.) Egypt was withdrawing. It's a fact. It's one of the reasons why Israel was so successful in the Sinai.
3.) Israel attacked first. Israel began the war. The war was not justified. It was justified earlier in the year, but not when it took place. The timing of the war made it clear that it was a calculated landgrab.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
That site (HonestReporting) is incredibly self-defeating. It has a real chip on its shoulder over 'bias' in the media, then goes to on report news stories in an incredibly pro-Israel light.
Hello Dr. Evil
A particularly excellent book is
"From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters
Joan Peters was hired by a Saudi Arabian Institute to do a book on the conflict exposing Israel. Ms. Peters possesed a flaw that ruins many journalists. She was after the truth. The book gives an excellent and comprehensive overview.
Find it on Amazon.
Best
www.honestreporting.com
facts on the conflict and a HUGE EYE OPENER on how biased the media is.
I imagine a place where students who protest for Freedom & Democracy get beaten is likely a place where a significant number of the population WISHES for the "destruction" of their government.
Parent comment is Unpopular, not Flamebait.
A news agency that describes a terrorist bombing in an Israeli nightclub under the headline "Bomb Mars Historic Day For Palestinians" is no agency I am going to trust. Neither should you.
phozz
All sources of information are biased, you can't get away from it. All you can do is pick from multiple sources and decide for yourself what it all means.
I'd like a Western "global", secular, academiclly-slanted viewpoint on the modern history of the Middle East.
Avoiding Arab anti-Semitism and playing "see no evil" won't change the truth.
Kinda like taking over puerto rico in the spanish/american war ages ago, and still refusing to make them citizens or give them idependance decades after the fact. The only reason I can think to deny them citizenship(they have no voting rights or anything) is racism of thier 'mixed' ethnicity. Most aren't even aware of this sadly.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
I see, what better way to avoid US censure than to attack a US vessel. I like your logic.
The reason Israel was so sucessful is that it caught Nasser with his pants down. Besides, Nasser was a complete military incompetent and his generals were all skillless lackeys. Nasser didn't know he was loosing the war until 100% of his air force and most of his army was completely destroyed. He learned his lesson by the time '73 came around. Still lost, though! I guess in the end the difference was that the Jews were figthing for their very survival while the Arabs were fighting for sand and rocks.
True. True. False. True, false. Landgrab? Sure, land which was exchanged for peace with Egypt in 1979, land which helped Israel survive the next war (which was surely coming) by fighting only on enemy soil, land which has kept Syria at bay for nearly 4 decades. You talk about it as if it was Hawaii or New York. Its desert and rocks which are only valuable if you intend to make war on your neighbors. Israel will gladly give back the Golan and West Bank in exchange for peace treaties. But the truth is that to Syria and the PLO the land is worthless if it comes at the price of having to make peace with Israel.
Keep it coming goat
its just a matter of time before Goliath (MS) gets
his head lopped off!
AMinfo
Please cite an example of something that is "incredible", I'd like to hear it.
phozz
It's always been easier to say I'm sorry than to ask for permission. Besides, I said avoid censure in the UN. Israel wanted the best possible UN brokered peace treaty. That couldn't have happened with US opposition.
The reason Israel was so sucessful is that it caught Nasser with his pants down.
Nasser wasn't expecting a fight. Israel attacked unnecessarily. It's a fairly obvious conclusion.
He [Nasser] learned his lesson by the time '73 came around.
Nope, check your facts. Nasser was dead. Sadat led Egypt in '73.
Israel still retains parts of the West Bank. Israel controls all of Jerusalem. Israel has the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. They gave back Sinai, which is just a desert. Israel still retains the important and useful pieces of land from the '67 war. The war was a landgrab.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It may be primarily a display problem but it gets a lot more complicated when you start mixing left-right, right-left and up-down languages in the same document, even more so in the same line. This is not uncommon. Issues include sentence justification, sentence termination, input methods, context sensitive characters (like Korean) and searching.
---
Open source works because of simple statistics. There are 6,300,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a small fraction of that population will have both the means and motivation to create free software. And once it's been created it can be copied millions of times.
munich. qibya. shatilla. intifada. settlements.
sharon's walls. arafat's thuggery. 48 war. 56 war. 73 war. 82 war.
they are all bad. both sides.
you are the one spewing vitriol. the previous links are are actually quite insiteful and not, what you call "anti-semitic". (cripes! Modern Arabs are more "Semite" than modern Jews).
financial and for military hardware. I'm sure they can afford a $500 for office and xp. Infact they should support american companies, since its these companies tax dollars that help pay for the 3billiion/year financial package Israel gets every year.
God bless America
vivre la france
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
Your imagination is not an acceptable substitute for actual correlation between data and postulate.
where did all of this come from, the Isrealis reject Microsoft and somehow this becomes about the Isreali/Palestinian conflict. The two aren't linked except by the thinnest of threads.
Hopefully one day the Israelis will realize that what is important is not who is right, but how to stop what is happening.
The point is not that it is Israel's fault, but it is Israel's problem, and it will not be solved by the same callous police tactics that have failed to solve the problem for decades.
The two sides are not morally equivalent, despite your asinine belief in the absence of evil in this world.
No culture in history has ever had public rejoicing at the suicide-murder of "enemy" civilians by their own children - until today's Arabs.
I think that the greatest thing in OSS co-operation is that it can be seperated from politics. Yes, it could contribute to peace, which will be great, but it will exist and be great even if hostility and dispute over territory will continue.
The Israeli government, and some Israeli OSS programmers, are putting efford into the improvement of RTL support in OO, KDE etc. So do some Arab programmers, and perhaps some Arab governments too. Do they do it for each other? No, they do it for themselves, but each one benefits from the other's effort.
When I go to an OS project and add a feature I need, I don't care who else will benefit from it. When I use an OS project, I don't care who developed the features I need.
Think of a few software companies, which are rivals and develop competing products. There will be no peace between them. But they may in fact co-operate to develop a shared standard or an OS library, for all of them to use, which will benefit them all.
I do not see anything wrong with that headline.
AP and Reuters provide wholesale news to public new sources, it is not their job to editorialise or take any emotive stances on either side because that would bias all the media using their stories as a basis for their own.
honestreporting.com appears to have its own agenda in trying to get key media vendors to cease publishing views of the Israel/Palestine conflict that do not show Israel as sole the victim. The name of the site, given its obviously Israel focused content, is a sad indictment in itself.
2004 - the year Microsoft's prices bend, buckle or break?
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 31/12/2003 at 21:47 GMT
Analysis The Israeli government's decision to suspend Microsoft purchases will be old news to Register readers - we broke the story back in October.
But it's the subsequent developments of sweet Thai deals, first reported by YNet, that have implications far beyond the Middle East. Procurement departments in EMEA and the Americas will be watching developments with keen interest.
Two factors contributed to the Israeli moves. The Finance Ministry plays a key strategic role, and was responsible for signing a general license agreement with Microsoft. That agreement expires today. Faced with an economic depression, Israeli government departments face IT budget cuts of 25 per cent, and OpenOffice 1.1 now looks a viable alternative.
(It's more of a de facto, rather than an explicit shut-out. Departments can still negotiate their own arrangements, and US aid ensures that some licensees are, particularly in the military.
Microsoft scorned the Treasury's decision back in November, comparing OpenOffice functionality to Word 97. But feature saturation appears to have done little to persuade the ministry that OpenOffice is a bad deal. In short, it's not more features that the users need, but lower prices.
Israel, we understand, has become the first EMEA country to ask Microsoft for Thai discounts. Faced with low-cost illicit versions of its software, Microsoft dropped the $600 list price to just $37 in the Royal Kingdom. Will Microsoft bend? And will other countries follow suit?
Microsoft can certainly afford to. Redmond's $6 billion a year Office team coasts along on profit margins of 69 per cent. (And a fitter, leaner Microsoft that could shake off the paralysis of its 'meetings culture' could boast an even higher margin). Israeli departments were enjoying a discount over list: ranging from $130 a desk for basic Windows/Office to $186, but are refusing to pay more than the Thai price. Microsoft insists that the Thai deal was strictly a one-off.
There's no doubt that Microsoft, amongst others, finds itself under margin pressure. Sun Microsystems has revamped its software pricing, vowing to turn the $20 billion global software market into a $3 billion market. Sun prices its confusingly-named Java Desktop System, a Linux PC client, at $100 per seat, or $150 in a combined package with the Java Enterprise System which includes the server software (messaging, clustering, grid, etc) too.
But not all public sector procurement departments seem to have realized what power they have. Despite Whitehall's decision to trial Linux/OpenOffice with as many as 500,000 desktops as the prize, the UK education sector recently signed a 'Memorandum of Understanding' that boasted of "spending between 20 and 37 per cent less than might have been expected". Which doesn't sound like such a great deal.
With OpenOffice and Linux bringing serious competition back to the desktop for the first time in almost a decade, Microsoft's prices have only one way to go: down. Redmond's decision to pursue other revenue sources - patents - is as the Free Software Foundation's counsel Eben Moglen said here simply the start of Plan B: "Microsoft executives are aware they have crossed a maturity threshold - they can't grow as quickly as they have before; and even blockbluster products won't change this dramatically," he observed.
So how far, and how fast? (R)
The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft
Comment In the beginning there was Microsoft. Then it exploded
By Charlie Demerjian: Sunday 28 December 2003, 11:31
EVERY SO often, there is a big shift in an industry. The shifts are not usually visible until long after they've happened, making you look back and say: "Oh yeah, things were different back then".
We are experiencing a major IT industry shift right now, and if you know where to look you can actually see it as it happens. This shift is all about Microsoft and open source.
Until very recently, Microsoft owned everything in the personal computer business, both low and high on the food chain. The low end was occupied by Palm, the high end by Sun, IBM and others. In the vast soft middle, there was Microsoft and only Microsoft.
Everyone who challenged it was bought out, cheated out of the technology, or generally beaten into the ground with dirty tricks, by ruthless competition, or on rare occasions, with a better product. Listing the failures would consume more column inches than a person could read in a year.
Netscape, Stac, Wordperfect, Novell, and others are among the notable casualties. Those that technically survived are ghosts of their former selves.
Just as the press proclaims the inability of anyone to challenge the Redmond beast, control is slipping from Microsoft. As with any company faced with a huge loss of market share, Microsoft is acting predictably, pretending it is not happening, and putting on a smiley face when asked about prospects. On the inside, Microsoft is as scared as hell.
One of the richest companies on earth, run by one of the richest people on earth afraid? What can you mean?
Hung, Drawn and Quartered
To put things in perspective, Microsoft has always performed better each quarter than the one before. Whenever the financial types settle on quarterly earnings, Microsoft always manages to pull a few more cents per share out of their hat, and beat those earnings. The collective bunch of jackals and worms that are known as 'Wall Street' sit slack jawed in amazement, and give half hearted golf claps. Rinse and repeat every quarter, including the analysts' 'amazement'.
How it does this is no trick. It has profit margins on its two major products of over eighty per cent. The rest of the products, from handhelds to MSN and the Xbox are all horrific money losers. Its finances are so opaque and badly presented, that it can shuffle money around from one part of the company to another without anyone noticing. Make too much money one quarter? Stash it in the closet labeled investments, or write off some losses. Not making the numbers? Cash in some assets and make a 'profit'.
Overall, it has been able to show a smooth earnings curve, and surprise on the upside every time it reports a quarter. Monopolies and almost no cost to make your physical product other than R&D has its advantages.
Corporations cry Linux
About a year ago, things started to change. The cries that Linux would dethrone Microsoft remained the same, but there was a shift in the corporate reaction to those cries. CxOs started to say 'tell me about it'. In a down economy, free is much cheaper than hundreds of dollars, and infinitely more attractive. Linux started gaining ground with real paying customers using it for real work in the real world, really.
Up until then, Microsoft had simply ignored the tuxedoed threat. Then it started reacting with the usual FUD, the Halloween memos, various white papers and clumsily purchased studies. Somehow, people didn't buy the fact that $1,000 a head was cheaper than free, and so Microsoft had to move on to a different tactic. Since it couldn't buy the company that produced Linux, the GPL prevented the usual embrace and extend, and people had simply grown to hate Microsoft for all the pain they had been caused over the years, the firm found itself in a bind. How do you compete when all your dirty tricks are eith
Compare that to the rest of MS revenues and see what that means.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
'Nationalist' Iranians who 'wave the flag' for their country, no matter what it's government does, are no better than 'wave the flag' Americans who do the same.
There, did I end the clever exchange of $7 words?
A Good Intro to NetBS
Finally David will thomp the snott out of Goliat Bill Gates
Who wins, who's wounded!?
Couldn't happen between two nicer outfits!
Enjoy the blood!
Interestingly one language, I forget which, the word for foreigner is something closer to what we term barbarian!
The word for "foreigner" in Chinese, "Goh lou" if I recall right in Mandrine Chinese, means "barbarian". And though I don't recall for sure I think the Japanese word also translates literally to "barbarian".
Should there be a Law?
I also saw a great program on PBS recently in which they brought Israeli and Palestinian kids together.
I didn't see the PBS program but it sounds like a program I heard of before wherein Isreali and Palestanian children for whom one or both parents were killed were brought together at something like a camp. Among things counselors would have them do is to play different parts in skits about the conflict thereby getting an idea of how the other side feels and what they go through. While they didn't all become friends their outlook was better and they were more willing to live peacefully and to give up their hostility than when they first got there.
Should there be a Law?
How can an Arab be anti-semetic? Are they self hating?
Should there be a Law?
The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.
The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of "dual loyalty." A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labeled as anti-semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).
A neocon doesn't need to be a Jew to support Israel. Some neocons are fundamentalist Christians and they believe the second coming of the "messiah" will happen only when Jews are in total control of of the "Promised land", Isreal. Therefore they would do anything to make sure Jews do control the area.
Should there be a Law?
I think that the thing to do is seperation: all palestinians to their own palestinian state in the Bank, all jews to their own Jewish state in the rest.
This means that I don't want a single palestinian in the borders of Israel and a single Jew in the borders of Palestine.
Ah, it sounds like ethnic cleansing. At the same tyme why not build up work camps. Oh and what about those Palestanians who are Jews themselves? Yes, there are Jewish Palestanians just as there are Christian Palestanians and Muslim Palestanians.
Should there be a Law?
If you are in love with a awoman you aare in hard times, and if not, you are in hard times. Why must you be so harsh. You know nothing.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Ethnic cleansing is an ambiguous term, i.e. it has 2 possible meanings: deportation and genocide.
I am very much against genocide. But, given that I see no solution except continuing ethnic clashes or seperation, deportations are the lesser evil.
Oh, and BTW, ask yourself: if Israel withdraws from the teritories, wouldn't that mean deportation, or "ethnic cleansing" in you terms, of the jewish settelers in the bank ?
It's hypocrisy and double-standard to demand that Israel deports its own jewish citizens while denouncing any possible deportations of arabs as "ethnic cleansing"
Again, I don't like deportations, and I think that the borderline should be drawn such that as few people (both arabs and jews) get deported as possible. But since this is the alternative to this continuing war of attrition, within which much worse things than deportations happen as a matter of routine, then this is what should be done.
IOW: war is much worse than moving an appartment.
Working for necessity's mother.
I assume you tried to read my post, but i gather that you did not understand that i condemn both sides. Destroying civilian lives and property is no way to win a war. but there seem to be a group of verry hard headed people there who do not seem to se the cycle of violence theyr in. When someone explains his position using his argumants both sides seem plausible up to a given level. Both have crossed my lines. When an group is driven to extreemes the extremists get a firm ground, with all the horrific side effects this has. Therefore i not only blame the extremists on the palestinian side. As the Israeli people still have much more resources (e.g. money, international standing, influence) they should be able to make the first steps (be the wiser ?), but all i hear from the probably biast BBC that every positive step (however small) is rewarded with new settlements and more demands.
On the other hand, though, many non-native-Hebrew speakers and non-Jews live as full citizens in Israel, and non-Palestinian non-Jews (such as the Bedouins) also serve in the Israeli army. Does Israel have discrimination problems? Yes, but so do most countries. Have you checked out how enlightened France deals with its Muslim minority recently?
Also, Turkey and Israel are allies. They even trade military information, I believe. Jordan and Israel are in a state of peace. The King of Jordan's uncle recently said in the New York Times that when the Palestinians get their own state (although we all know that may be years and the specifics all have to be worked out) he'd like to see a BeNeLux model for the three countries so they could cooperate economically.
Additionally, Egypt and, I believe, Morocco also have relatively good relations with Israel.
Israeli technological improvements, therefore, help many friends in the Middle East as well as enemies.
Also, US Courts and Israeli Courts have been known to take each other's opinions into account (although never as binding precedent), in the same way US, British and Canadian courts do. So Microsoft being a convicted monopolist in the U.S. is even more likely to make an Israeli politician or bureacrat pause and consider their options....
Still, it will be interesting to see Microsoft's reaction. Will this being a smaller market make them more or less likely to cave in. Would they abandon the smaller market altogether? This could be good or bad for smaller countries worldwide, which could then, in turn, be good or bad for open software.
Yeah, for centuries muslims ruled the Jews and relegated them to inferior dhimma status. Non-muslims under muslim rule had to pay a special tax the jiyza, just to exist. If they did not pay that tax they would be sent to jail, and their dhimmi community had to make good on the taxes owed or they would be killed, the muslims invented taking hostages on a large scale for money. When collecting the jiyza muslim officials were supposed to be higher than the Jews, and they were suppossed to strike the Jews with blows at the same time as taking the tax, to let the dhimmis know that their pyshical well being depended on paying the tax. The only reason why dhimmi communities survived at all was because of the few muslims who are not fanatics(the majority in muslim societies are usually fanatics), the taxes paid, and also because many Jews and Christian dhimmis in addition to the jiyza also paid for protection from muslim notables. Just like you do not kick a important person's dog, the muslims do not bother important notables' dhimmis.
Do not listen to those Arabian nitwits, read some of Bat Ye'or's works on the dhimmis to get the true history. They were living together alright, but it was worse than being a negro slave in the United States, to be a dhimmi of the muslims.
it is extrememly significant that the palestenians who fled israel during the war to jordan, syria etc ended up being first class citizens of those countries.
dude, you have no idea what you are talking about. Palestinaians in syria and jordan are treated worse than they are in israel, by far. King Hussein massacred palestinian refugees by the millions (Look up: "black september"). he prompted a palestinian uprising in Jordan because he treated them so poorly. Palestinians in Jordan are anything BUT first class citizens. Syria is the same way: send them all to lebanon and give them weapons to make them happy enough.
Israel treats palestinians as well as any arab country does. Noone wants palestinian refugees. But, unlike jordan, Israel can't just massacre them all and kick them all out because of international pressure. Its sorta funny how King Hussein killed more palestinians in a shotr period of time than Israel would ever dare to, because if they did it would be the end of American aid and any kind of support.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Oh, and BTW, ask yourself: if Israel withdraws from the teritories, wouldn't that mean deportation, or "ethnic cleansing" in you terms, of the jewish settelers in the bank ?
It's hypocrisy and double-standard to demand that Israel deports its own jewish citizens while denouncing any possible deportations of arabs as "ethnic cleansing"
Isreali settlers should never of been allowed to settle in the occupied territories to begin with. Now as far as relocating them, that's exactly what Isreal did in 1979 after Egypt and Isreal signed their agreement. All the Isreali settlements in the Sinai Peninsula were dismantled.
And what of the Jewish Palestinians? Or the Arabs who are Israeli citizens, afterall there are Arab members of the Israeli Parliament? I don't like deportation either, for either side. Deportation only creates hardlines in those being deported, some of those being forcibly relocated get bitter and will strike out any way they can.
Though it's hardly known there almost was an agreement reached at Taba, Egypt in 2000-01 wherein Arafat made significant compromises:
"Uri Avnery"
"5.9.01"
"The Day Barak's Bubble Burst"
"Were a student to present Professor Shlomo Ben Ami with the paper that was published in his name in the HaAretz supplement (14.9.01), the professor would have handed it back with the comments: 'Grade: 50%. Large holes in the argument. Many internal contradictions. No connection between the facts and the conclusions. No support for the main argument. Try again!'"
"The article, presented as an interview, must be read several times before the weaknesses become apparent. As it extends over 8 long pages, it can be assumed that most readers were satisfied glossing over the headlines and the highlighted quotations, phrased like campaign slogans. Thus Ben Ami further augments the damage that he and Barak wreaked when their short and catastrophic political term of office crashed to its end."
"From between the lines, scattered unintentionally, emerges a true picture. He says of himself and of Barak: 'We were not really members of the 'in-group' of the left. Neither of us were members of the peace industry. Neither of us is a true peace industrialist.' His words, ironically intended, can be translated more simply: neither of them knew anything about the Palestinians, the traumas, the historical narrative, the fears and ambitions of the designated partner. Ben Ami and Barak shared the staggering audacity to approach this historical peace-making task equipped exclusively with ignorance and arrogance - military bravado in Barak's case, and intellectual vanity in Ben Ami's."
"The ignorance worked against them as they did not understand the internal code of the Palestinians but were entirely imprisoned in that of ours. Hence they simply did not understand the other side. All its positions were incomprehensible and all its actions unanticipated. Those who understand the Palestinian issue, who have spent long years studying the subject and thousand of hours of personal dialogue, with some degree of empathy, with Palestinians were not surprised by any of the moves made. (Allow me to remind you that I myself predicted and published in advance most of the steps taken by the Palestinians.)"
The Day Barak's Bubble Burst
The above is just the first section, the whole thing is 5 pages to printout. There's also this, I started on paragraph 4:
"Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres, and Barak (again in the first half of his brief tenure in office) did negotiate with the Palestinians at Oslo (after suffering a painful rise in Palestinian violence against Israelis in 1993), but avoided the key issues. They ensured failure by strategic error. Each hoped to use time and fact creation to produce a phony Palestinian state, one that would be as comfortable for Israel as possible regardless of its consequences for the requirements of the Palestin
Should there be a Law?
You use a product for 5 minutes, compare it against products on which clearly you have incvested considerable time and effort to get results out of them and in an unsurprising fashion you declare a product you barely know "difficult to use".
My logic organ hurts.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I am Jewish and I understand why people are anti-Semitic with all of this anti-Israel stuff in the press. But this is wrong, because most of us are not Zionists. Many of us do not really think about Israel, except as something connected through the religion. And who really believes in talking deities and burning bushes, etc., any more? Yours truly, Y'ishral Mnemhenemnh
God will smite you.
whoops, that was what i meant