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Microsoft FUD Machine Aims at OpenOffice.org
Roblimo writes "If you're using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to (free) OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better/faster/cheaper MS Office is than OOo. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this "Competitive Guide" is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it -- and released his article under the FDL so you can feel free to republish his piece or share it with anyone you like, however you like." A followup to this story. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
Often it's not even possible to use Office formats between versions. Try to edit an MS Office 2003 file on a system that's using MS Office '97.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
I don't know if any of you read SysAdmin or Dr. Dobbs Journal (I get both) and the Microsof tFUD machine doesn't stop at OpenOffice. In my latest issue of SysAdmin was a pack containing a 180 day time crippled copy of Windows Server 2003 and a "Learning Resource" CD.
I went through part of the CD before I raised the "bullshit flag" over the following:
1. Poor Plug and Play support based on Solaris 2.6 and an equally ancient version of Linux. Did not mention HP-UX, IRIX, or AIX.
2. The only way to have a remote desktop similar to Terminal Services was to use VNC, what about a remote X session?
Microsoft would not get in so much trouble over this stuff if they simply told the truth. Or are they expecting Linux and Unix admins and developers to "jump ship" for some crippleware (not including "Windows Services for Unix" which Microsoft had to Interix to develop!Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
why yes - it opens corrupted office documents and saves documents directly to pdf. for me thats priceless.
OOo can export any of its documents to PDF, MS Office can not do that by itself. OOo can also export its presentations to Macromedia Flash(tm) which makes it very easy to put it out to a web page somewhere to share. You just click the Flash presentation to go to the next slide. Again, MS Office cannot do that. Those two features are very useful to me. Plus the format for OOo is open so I will always be able to read my documents with out paying the MS Tax. Not to mention that I can keep all my important docs as PDF by exporting them from OOo and not have to worry about some proprietary format going away after the support period has expired.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Adobe Acrobat
Not to be confused with the Adobe Reader that just about everyone has.
Every place that I have used or maintained Samba, I've also installed a network PDF printer for the client workstations to use (using this guide as a reference). Of course why stop there, you can also use the same concept descibed in the above link to install various printers like jpg, tiff (color and group 4 fax), and just about any other printer that gs can export to. These virtual printers make a great document converter for those people that you want to share stuff with that may not have the specific application to print or open the native file you may have to send them. Another advantage is printing confimations, receipts, web pages etc.. in electronic form instead of on paper.
Substitute ps2pdf in the above linked guide to gs for other printers, examples below
RGB color tiff at 300dpi:
gs -sDEVICE=tiff24nc -r300x300
Standard Group 4 Fax (tiff):
gs -sDEVICE=tiffg4 -r100x100
300dpi Jpeg:
gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300x300
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