Linux and OpenOffice save Microsoft Presentation

EvilGrinUK writes "A presentation about Shared Source (SSI) by the head of Microsoft Ukraine was almost ruined when the Windows machine (a Tablet PC) linked to the projector developed problems. The solution was to adopt OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3, which was already running on the presenter's laptop (an IBM Thinkpad). Here's a picture."

Comments

Ha-Ha!

[SeanTobin]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<speech>
<voice>Nelson Muntz</voice>
<voiceArtist>Nancy Cartwright</voiceArtist>
<text>Ha-Ha!</text>
</speech>

Re:Ha-Ha!

[mcrbids]

He seems to be up to the chapter on ridiculing it, and doing at least B level work at that.

Did you notice his sig line?

Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;

He's quoting field names - they wouldn't even parse as a field name... Meaning, even if he got his SQL implementation to provide any results at all, it would be the literal string "karma", and not the numeric value he appears to be seeking...

Come off it, guys... So he skimmed "SQL for Dummies" and "XML for complete, braindead morons who want to sound cool". I'm not hiring him, neither are you. He/she plays the 'puter and enjoys thinking he knows how to do stuff.

He's just having fun, and you should be, too. Didja get the joke?

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Pantero Blanco]

I think the idea is that allowing people who really need to post anonymously due to censorship laws where they live is worth the GNAA's and the FP's.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[D'Sphitz]

you're wrong

Re:Ha-Ha!

[jacksonj04]

Actually, it would work fine for mySQL. Note that the quotes are ` and not '. This is an important differentiation, and helps mySQL when it gets confused by table names also being constants.

That piece of SQL selects the value of the column entitled 'karma' in the table 'users' for the row in which 'userid' is equal to '138474'.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[SeanTobin]

The SQL is perfectly valid. Backticks are used to denote field names in the SQL spec. If you are writing software to write a sql query and you don't know what the field names are (i.e. if they are user or integrator supplied at install or run time) then by placing them in backticks you indicate to the parser that they are indeed field names.

How would your sql parser handle:

SELECT * from sort where select like "%cow"

Some parsers will figure it out. Some won't. To each thier own.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[smackjer]

It's why Slashdot is user-moderated. Crap like this (usually) ends up where it belongs.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[ebvwfbw]

Those were backticks! A detail I missed.
(hangs head in shame, withdraws nerd card, backs away sheepishly)

Ok, I'll do it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<speech>
<voice>Nelson Muntz</voice>
<voiceArtist>Nancy Cartwright</voiceArtist>
<text>Ha-Ha!</text>
<action>runs into tree while riding on bike</action>
<text>It was worth it.</text>
</speech>

Now you have been ha-ha'd.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Don't take away people's ability to be anonymous?

Give people the ability to ignore those who are.

How about an "Ignore all anonymous users" option instead?

Re:Ha-Ha!

[geekboy642]

Jeff Albertson
Hank Azaria
Best. Thread. Ever.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[mcrbids]

No, dammit! I was right, after all!

That geek card goes BACK ON THE TABLE...

Backticks are a MySQL extension... I did some more poking...

Here's a mention of it.

My preferred database, PostgreSQL, which is frequently considered closer to ANSI SQL does not support backticks and returns an error if you attempt to use them.

It's a MySQL thing only. Since /. is hosted on a MySQL server, I guess it's right...

But my head no longer hangs, and I've re-asserted my geek card...

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Enigma2175]

Give people the ability to ignore those who are.

How about an "Ignore all anonymous users" option instead?

Preferences->Comments->Anonymous Modifier(-6)

Re:Ha-Ha!

[vsprintf]

Preferences->Comments->Anonymous Modifier(-6)

The problem with that is that many posters don't bother to post what they're replying to, and the discussion becomes nearly unreadable. If you have sensitive stuff to reveal, set up an account with no personal information. I too favor the end to AC posting. The conversation would become more polite generally, and the crap floods and typical nonsense would be greatly reduced. It's not like there aren't more than enough comments even without the AC posts.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Jeremi]

The problem with that is that many posters don't bother to post what they're replying to, and the discussion becomes nearly unreadable

Perhaps the solution, then, is to make it so that when a "qualified" user replies to an "unqualified" post, the unqualified post gets grandfathered in and shows up as well, despite the filter?

Re:Ha-Ha!

[vsprintf]

Perhaps the solution, then, is to make it so that when a "qualified" user replies to an "unqualified" post, the unqualified post gets grandfathered in and shows up as well, despite the filter?

That's a possiblity, but then you wind up with all the -1 troll AC comments, that some people just can't resist responding to, showing up again. Seriously, I think that doing away with AC posting would eliminate a lot of problems on Slashdot. I imagine the real reason for keeping it is the added traffic.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[swv3752]

There are valid reasons to have AC, though it is truly not anonymous. Ever notice that even though you post AC, you can not go back and moderate your own post? Then there are the IP bans. But I don't think doing away with AC will reduce the Crap out there. Email accounts are a dime a dozen.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[KermitJunior]

And we're so happy you took the time to read and post to something you consider "pathetic." Now we understand why you posted as AC.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[Bush Pig]

It would handle it badly, given that 'select' is a reserved word (or whatever), and the standard (IIRC) specifies that strings are to be surrounded by single quotes. Dunno about 'sort', but I'd be wary of trying to use it as a table name.

Re:Ha-Ha!

[vsprintf]

There are valid reasons to have AC, though it is truly not anonymous.

As I said before, I don't think the reasons are valid, but we can agree to disagree. Anyone who removes cookies and connects from a non-static address will be anonymous unless I've missed something (which is often the case).

Ever notice that even though you post AC, you can not go back and moderate your own post?

Well, no. I've never tried it. If I were to post something AC and be unwilling to post under my ID, why would I want to waste mod points on it? I don't generally waste mod points on AC posts where karma doesn't accrue. Maybe I'm missing something here.

But I don't think doing away with AC will reduce the Crap out there. Email accounts are a dime a dozen.

It takes a couple of minutes to set up a new account. That would be enough to send most of the HADD pre-teen crap flooders elsewhere. Two minutes is not a big hardship if you have something you really want to say. It would be interesting if Slashdot put a short-term (one week?) ban on AC posting to see what happened. Otherwise, it's all just conjecture. My guess is that they'd get a lot of new registered users and a lot less garbage posts.

oh my

[SComps]

this must have been embarassing LOL

Re:oh my

[Herschel Cohen]

Sorry, I for one do NOT "KNOW" that Impress mangled a powerpoint file. My experience has been, on Linux, that the view has been fine.

Re:oh my

[Ford Prefect]

what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.

Powerpoint presentations usually look pretty mangled anyway. I had endless problems with NeoOffice/J seemingly scrambling the formatting of work-related presentations, documents and so on, until I borrowed a Windows machine with Microsoft Office and discovered that was how the documents were supposed to look... ;-)

Re:oh my

[whoisshe]

what was more embarrassing is how badly open office mangled the powerpoint presentation, and you KNOW it did.

that's microsoft's fault for not using an open standard document format.

i'm looking forward to castigating MS regularly now, until they fully support the standard.

Re:oh my

[Xyde]

that's microsoft's fault for not using an open standard document format.

Yes, that's right.

Shame on Microsoft. And how rude that Office 2003 doesn't implement and utilize the wonderful and open OASIS file format that was ratified 3 days ago.

I don't expect much from Microsoft these days (god knows I'd be constantly disappointed if I did) but I somehow feel time travel is probably asking a bit much - even for them.

Re:oh my

[Doc Ruby]

It's Microsoft's fault, but it's our problem. Unless you value only gloating, the one who can change is the one who must. OOo must support even Microsoft's secret formats - Microsoft will only open them when they gain less advantage from them than they lose in their extra cost. By upgrading our open apps, we'll force Microsoft to change, even if it's too late for them.

Re:oh my

[Tsalg]

From the NeoOffice website (check it out yourself if you don't believe it): "NeoOffice/J is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use." The only software related "good enough for everyday use" I knew about so far was Scott McNealy's haircut.

Re:oh my

[vanka]

Not that I'm Microsoft's biggest fan or anything; but there may be a reason that PowerPoint may not display its own slideshows correctly.

Say you create a PowerPoint presentation and then open it in OpenOffice or NeoOffice or whatever, it then is mangled by the program. You save it in its mangled state and then open it on PowerPoint again. This mangles it even more.

I manage a few non-profit computer labs for seniors and low-income families and in one of my labs I installed OpenOffice (didn't feel like shelling out $200-$300 for each of the eight computers, nor did I have the funding), while at the two other labs and at home I have Microsoft Office. So when I type up some documentation at home and try to edit it at the OpenOffice lab, the Word document always get mangled. Any kind of formatting beyond the basic (font, font size, bold, italic, underline, text alignment) gets screwed so badly that I have to redo all the formatting. It is easier to leave it unformatted and do the formating in OpenOffice. I hope OpenOffice 2.0 fixes this.

That having been said, I do recommend OpenOffice to those who need basic wordprocessing and do not want to dish out $300. We teach basic computer skills at our labs and we teach (and give out CDs of) OpenOffice.

Re:oh my

[SillySilly]

PowerPoint and Word files look different on different Wintel machines. PPT and Word formats depend on the installed fonts, the system font size, random magic values from the printer driver, and probably the random number generator.

If you need to create a file that will look the same on most screens, you should probably use PDF or PostScript.

Or just stick to plain text. (what was that charset again?)

Re:oh my

[whoisshe]

jesus h christ, do we have to put smileys after *everything* that's obviously humorous?

Re:oh my

[RedBear]

Shame on Microsoft. And how rude that Office 2003 doesn't implement and utilize the wonderful and open OASIS file format that was ratified 3 days ago.

You have a sort of point, but in this case the standard has been in development and draft form for literally years. Microsoft has had plenty of chances to follow along with the development and provide 99% complete support for the format, even before it was ratified. Then all they'd have to do is put some tweaks in a patch for 100% support after the standard is finalized. The OpenOffice.org formats have been around and in active use for years now, but I don't see Microsoft supporting those either, and aren't they remarkably similar to the final ratified OpenDocument standards? Hmm, I think so. In other words, they've had their chance. It's not like the developing standards were kept secret until the day they were ratified, giving them only 3 days to work on it.

So yes, shame on Microsoft, as usual. Especially as we move into the future. If it's impossible for them to provide a simple drop-in translator for new file formats in their state-of-the-art office suite it doesn't speak highly of their software design, does it? Somehow I feel this is something well within their reach. I, like the GP poster, am also looking forward to castigating Microsoft at every opportunity until they fully support open document standards. It's a fool's errand, but someone has to do it.

Re:oh my

[norite]

LMAO....I hear you brother. How true!

Re:oh my

[Ford Prefect]

Say you create a PowerPoint presentation and then open it in OpenOffice or NeoOffice or whatever, it then is mangled by the program. You save it in its mangled state and then open it on PowerPoint again. This mangles it even more.

Actually, it was more a comment on the horrific aesthetic sense of some of the people producing the documents. I would have been happy with a '+1 teh Funney' but the moderators thought otherwise... :-)

Re:oh my

[vsprintf]

It's Microsoft's fault, but it's our problem. Unless you value only gloating, the one who can change is the one who must. OOo must support even Microsoft's secret formats . . .

So to generalize that to all F/OSS, you're saying we have to spend time and money reverse-engineering and supporting Microsoft's broken formats and extensions. That just allows MS to continue breaking and extending, with the OSS world constantly playing catch up and chasing a moving target. That's a loser's game.

With reverse-engineering becoming a legal gray area thanks to recent decisions, it's doubtful it will continue. Unless MS opens its standards or adopts open standards, MS-compatibility will soon be a dead end for OSS (and hopefully for MS as more governments and organizations demand their records be stored using open document standards).

Re:oh my

[Anonymous Coward]

Always mangled? Oh, I dunno, some prefer 'simplified', i.e. -- I always get a chuckle out of the classic "Gettysburg Address Reduced to Powerpoint".

http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/

[Note - you really must refer back to the original plain old 'dull' text version as you view this in order to refresh your memory of the terse, amazingly lucid text, and extract maximum value.]

NonXMLdude

Re:oh my

[Doc Ruby]

Well, it's generalized to all software development - actually, all engineering. The designer must accept the environment they can't change, and compensate for it, when they must, to get the results they need. This is, in fact, true of all human relationships, and no less so of open software development.

Re:oh my

[chefren]

That's a loser's game.
The question is should we keep playing it or give up now and just mail our souls in to Bill?

Re:oh my

[richlv]

actually, oo.org works fine for most of documents i receive. maybe you can try out your documents with latest 1.9 snapshot (m104, http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html) and see wether there still are some problems. if there are, you could try to specify them and file issues at http://contributing.openoffice.org/qa.html (you have to register first)

Re:oh my

[richlv]

as redbear already mentioned, this standard has been available for quite some time - and what is even more interesting, at the start microsoft was participating in committee... they withdrew. so not only they had a chance to implement opendocument, but also to give their input on it and influence final result. guess that was not enough.

Re:oh my

[vsprintf]

Well, it's generalized to all software development - actually, all engineering. The designer must accept the environment they can't change, and compensate for it, when they must, to get the results they need.

It seems it's just you who is claiming the MS "environment" can't be changed. It's sad to see young people who believe that Microsoft is some immutable power because they've never known anything else. There was a time when MS was a very minor player in software, and that will likely be the case again. The MS "environment" is already changing due to pressure from F/OSS, and it has certainly been a benefit to MS's customers.

This is, in fact, true of all human relationships, and no less so of open software development.

Urrpp. Please, I'll get my pop psychology from Dr. Phil, thanks anyway.

Re:oh my

[vsprintf]

The question is should we keep playing it or give up now and just mail our souls in to Bill?

I'm hoping that's a joke (although it doesn't sound very funny), but my answer is why not keep our souls and self-respect by declining Bill's products whenever possible? Why waste time playing the catch-up game when Microsoft is busy buying legislation to prevent reverse-engineering, and it will all come to nothing? The window (forgive the groaner) on that kind of compatibility is rapidly closing, so should we just sit and cry, give up and embrace MS, or appreciate the people who did that work in the past while moving on and pushing for open standards?

The only real market locks Bill has are Word documents and broken web sites. Oh, yeah, there's the spyware, adware, viruses, and other crap, but most people don't actually want that. You can mail your soul in, but Bill isn't getting mine. He burned my trust and all the bridges years ago.

Re:oh my

[vanka]

Actually, I did try several snapshots of 1.9, but they were so unstable on my system that I was not able to do anything with them. Writer crashed as soon as I opened it while Impress gave me about five minutes before it too crashed. So for now I decided to stick with what is stable.

Re:oh my

[richlv]

how old were they ?
although i was able to crash almost all builds up to 80-something, after this it bacame harder and harder. 100 and 104 haven't crashed - so far ;)

if you can reproduce a crash with latest build, you definitely should file an issue. if you don't tell anyone about the problem, nobody will be able to fix it ;)

and i myself am using 1.1., too - there are two showstoppers for me. one is toolbars returning to upper right hand corner after almost every action when using generic widgets. other is removal of "return to editing position". i hope that these problems could be fixed in 2.0.2 ;)

How funny.. Cache slower than original...

[OlivierB]

The original link is fster than the cache

http://paq.osdn.org.ua/~mike/img/MS-uses-OOo/hpim2 544.sized.jpg

Re:How funny.. Cache slower than original...

[simonecaldana]

The original link is fster than the cache

was.

Re:How funny.. Cache slower than original...

[SiO2]

Pictures, huh?

Yep. I can use Photoshop, too. Er, I mean GIMP, you sensitive! ; )

SiO2

Re:How funny.. Cache slower than original...

[whitehatlurker]

This site is really slow, but this text was rescued off the page found there. Note that this is REALLY REALLY OLD!

Text says:

Thanks! But we were kind of slashdotted :-)

Intro

Well guys you really made my day -- poor old Duron 800/512M with some 3 dozens of sites and 300 gigs of free software on FTP was literally crawling until I've limited this vhost to 1 conn/IP. And figuring it out has taken some of my lame time, too. :-]

Okay, nevermind that -- hope that those who managed to get the contents yesterday enjoyed the situation. :-)

Facts
This is old news: the event happened on October 9, 2004.
Microsoft rep in Ukraine had to use free software to get on with a presentation on a free software conference since his munition failed to cooperate with projector.

See below (also posted to the places I could track down).

Resources

Please refer these images if you need and not original gallery -- these are hosted on 4-way Xeon, SCSI RAID and faster pipe, not on overloaded all-in-one server:

[Links omitted for pity's sake ...]

Is it true?

[sebisor]

Can somebody verify that the info is accurate?

Re:Is it true?

[archen]

I believe this isn't the first time someone associated with MS has done this. I've heard of a similar incident happening in Europe. Really I don't think this is newsworthy information. All of us know that you can end up with a bad office install, or office will end up with corrupted documents. Many of us also know that you can open such documents with Open Office just fine. I recommend this to uses on our own network every so often, so this is old hat. Another nice trick is to open MS office documents with Open Office, then save them with OO (to the MS format) and watch the file size decrease up to 30% at times and be able to open them JUST FINE in MS office.

Re:Is it true?

[muszek]

I believe this isn't the first time someone associated with MS has done this. I've heard of a similar incident happening in Europe.

OT: Like it or not, Ukraine is in Europe.
Europe doesn't end neither at German, nor at Polish border...

On topic: I wonder what excuses did they give...

Re:Is it true?

[MightyMartian]

I do think having to use OpenOffice had to be somewhat embarassing.

Re:Is it true?

[Cyberax]

It's a true story. There was a message in Russian LUG about that from a conference participant: http://lists.lug.ru/pipermail/oo-discuss/2004-Octo ber/012275.html

PS: yes, I read Russian.

Re:Is it true?

[Anonymous Monkey]

I can't confirm this story but I've had a very similar experience.

I was working at an almost all MS office as a bookkeeper. Most of the accounting was done with Exel, good backups were kept, and the server had UPS. Still, one day a major spreadsheet got corrupted, as did all it's back ups. All the office was in freak out mode, except for me, I downloaded and installed Open Office (I think it was ver 1.0.1) and opened the corrupted spreadsheet. Cut the data out, pasted it into a new Excel spreadsheet and saved the day!

Ironically I was spoken to about installing non approved software...

Re:Is it true?

[Bad D.N.A.]

A similar thing happed to me recently. I was on my way on a business trip where I had to do a presentation using powerpoint. I was on the airplane cleaning off my laptop trying to free up a little disk space. I have no idea what I did but somehow I totally hosed my MS office app. Thank god I had OO installed. Worked like a charm. Three cheers for OO.

Re:Is it true?

[HardCase]

Yeah, apparently it's true, but it happened last September. Whew...that's some breaking news story.

-h-

Re:Is it true?

[ChairmanMeow]

Europe doesn't end neither at German, nor at Polish border...

Interestingly, when the media was having their pope-a-palooza last month, one of the commentators on CNN claimed that the next pope would definitely be from Europe, "unlike his predecessor." Apparently, he forgot Poland...

Re:Is it true?

[Dread Pirate Shanks]

OO.o doesn't always open .ppt documents fine; my physics lecture notes are always PowerPoint presentations, but OpenOffice.org can sometimes misinterpret the symbols. Nothing's worse than studying for an exam and wondering why the derivative of airplane over star equals hand.

Re:Is it true?

[LilMikey]

OO.o doesn't always open .ppt documents fine; my physics lecture notes are always PowerPoint presentations, but OpenOffice.org can sometimes misinterpret the symbols. Nothing's worse than studying for an exam and wondering why the derivative of airplane over star equals hand.

Maybe you need to turn off the improbability drive of your laptop.

Re:Is it true?

[DavidD_CA]

Many times, you can retrieve corrupted Excel documents by using a little Excel trick.

Open a brand new spreadsheet and link cell A1 to the A1 in your corrupted sheet (you'll have to type the formula in manually). Then drag that A1 to all corners of the spreadsheet, and more often than not you'll get your data back -- sans formatting.

Re:Is it true?

[Carewolf]

My physics lecture notes are always DVI files, but OpenOffice.org can't open those either.

Re:Is it true?

[jrockway]

Uh, but xdvi and dvips should have no trouble.

Re:Is it true?

[Todesmetall]

Simply read the TeX files and imagine what the output would look like...

Who would want to write lecture notes with Powerpoint? Getting symbols and equations right in MS Word is a real PITA, and I imagine Powerpoint isn't any better at this.

Re:Is it true?

[Jesus_666]

OO.o doesn't always open .ppt documents fine; my physics lecture notes are always PowerPoint presentations, but OpenOffice.org can sometimes misinterpret the symbols. Nothing's worse than studying for an exam and wondering why the derivative of airplane over star equals hand.

That's not a PowerPoint problem. Your professor simply ran out of latin, greek, hebrew, cyrillic and chinese characters to use as variable names, so he had to find a new "alphabet". We're currently using Linear A.

Re:Is it true?

[Anonymous Monkey]

That's cool, I would mod you insightfull if I had not already poasted...

Re:Is it true?

[pandrijeczko]

Are you sure it's Russian? I can read it and I can only read Ukrainian (although I'm a bit rusty with it).

Or shall we just strip down to our baggy trousers & have a wrestle on the Steppes in order to settle the argument like *REAL* Cossacks!

Re:Is it true?

[muszek]

Yeah, in high school I spent a year in U.S. (1996/97). People constantly kept asking me if Poland is the same thing as Iceland (and neat stuff like "do you use cutlery over there?"). Even smart ones...

Getting further off-topic: I had a class couple of years ago, called "Which Europe and What Kind of Europe" and we had a long discussion on what is Europe and what's not... only geographic borders are clear - if you look at it from a different angle (political, cultural, etc.), you never can tell precisely. Two examples: inhabitants of some Pacific island (sorry, can't remember) are getting European Union passports; Israel plays in European Championships (soccer). But talking about Poland being non-European country (while it's "the most" central European) sure is funny. Getting back to the topic. My neighbor has just came to copy some SCSI drivers, because he was re-installing Windows. He left my flat with no drivers and Ubuntu Live in his pocket :D

Re:Is it true?

[jrumney]

I believe this isn't the first time someone associated with MS has done this. I've heard of a similar incident happening in Europe.

Ukraine is in Europe, and this happened back in October 2004. Are you sure you're not remembering the same incident?

Re:Is it true?

[Nutria]

but OpenOffice.org can sometimes misinterpret the symbols.

I think OOo can do font substitution. Also, maybe you need to install another font? (Unless it's OOo/Windows, instead of OOo/Linux...)

Re:Is it true?

[Phoinix]

I had a similar incident where I had to give a presentation.

- I used "Impress Photo Album Creator" OOo macro to import a bunch of images and then save the presentation in a power point format.
- Worked on the presentation with Office XP (better templates and themes).
- I always remove the unique ID and trace features in Office XP Options before I save it.
- The conference room PC had MS Office 2003.

When I went to present the thing, I kept receiving an error. I tried the back up copy on my USB drive and in my email with the same results. So While the "people" were waiting, I had to run to another PC, use OOo to save the presentation as a PDF file (and a SWF file as an additional backup), and then come back to make the presentation as a PDF file. The presentation went well, but I think that MS had included some blacklisting features which gives these errors. I know some people who had the same problem except in a large conference room where they had to present with out any projections! At first I thought that it was the fault of the presenter, or using Adaptec while burniing the CD, but when this happened to me, I knew that it is some nut engineer @ MS who wants us to use only MS products.

I learned my lesson. I was able to give my presentation in time, but from now on, I will install OOo at every PC I use.

Just a suggestion for some people who have ~ 100MB presentations, One can also use Power Point Viewer since it loads every slide as you are presenting.

Re:Is it true?

[Chr0n0]

On another note, someone found the corporate memo written in Russian that translates to something like: "Get rid of the comrade" Signed, Bill Gatosky

Re:Is it true?

[smchris]

A few years ago (we're talking free StarOffice) people used to send me the mangled email .doc attachments they received. I must have opened about 5 of 7 that way. Mixed blessing. Presumably because StarOffice was too dumb to attempt to deal with the bad code and ignored it?

Re:Is it true?

[TheoMurpse]

It's Russian. It says something like
[...] problem in the instrument room with the connection of tablet to the projector... So it was not the fault of Microsoft:)
and on and on the writer goes about the incident.

Oh!

[Heliologue]

The irony is delicious!

Re:Oh!

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

It is, is it not?

Not working correctly

[Nytewynd]

It looks like Open Office didn't open the presentation properly. Look at all of those crazy symbols.

Re:Not working correctly

[justforaday]

Really? Are you sure? They sure do look funny to me...

Re:Not working correctly

[darkonc]

Try learning Ukranian (or russian, or...)

Re:Not working correctly

[dunkelfalke]

this is definitely russian and not ukrainian. open office is also in russian.

Re:Not working correctly

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

News for you; long before america was born, there was some other civilizations, using other charsets, such as latin-1, iso9960-1.

Wow, you mean the iso9960-1 charset was invented before 1776?

Re:Not working correctly

[richie2000]

Look at all of those crazy symbols.

It's supposed to be like that. It's Microsoft's Shared Source initiative where they do like SCO and obfuscate code by using weird fonts.

Re:Not working correctly

[TylerL82]

Wow, you mean the iso9960-1 charset was invented before 1776?

Yes, but they called it ifo9960-1 back then.

Re:Not working correctly

[lintux]

And if anyone wonders what it would be in Latin:

Predostavlenie dostupa k ishodnomu kodu

It's been a while since my last time to read cyrillic, so I hope I didn't mess up. :-)

Re:Not working correctly

[jrockway]

ISO9960 isn't a charset. You must be thinking of ISO9660, the standard for CD-ROM filesystems.

Re:Not working correctly

[Jesus_666]

Obviously ISO9660-1 has not been in use during the last century and ISO reassigned the number 9660 to the CD-ROM filesystem.

Re:Not working correctly

[cp.tar]

In English it would be, I think, "A presentation of access to source code".

I do not speak Ukrainian, so I might be wrong. It might not be a presentation; the other words are definitely correct.

Um ...

[Sonic McTails]

I'm not sure if I'm should be scared or not ...... BTW, what the hell is up with the new image text?

Re:Um ...

[glassjaw rocks]

It prevents scripts from posting.

Re:Um ...

[Sonic McTails]

I relieze that, but why effect logged in users. Bots post AC cause once an account gets modded down enough, it starts posting on -1 by default

Re:Um ...

[nagora]

What image text?

Re:Um ...

[Ford Prefect]

I relieze that, but why effect logged in users.

Obviously it only affects a lower class of user. I, with excellent karma, have all sorts of benefits made available to me, merely starting with the absence of any 'captcha' images when posting comments.

A 'Post Comment' page for one of us elite users is a wondrous sight, bedecked with jewels, carefully sculpted ornamentation, additional, powerful checkboxes and radio buttons... Ah! But you are too lowly to even comprehend such things.

So, begone!

Re:Um ...

[the real darkskye]

There's no image text here.
Maybe its for people with sub-excellent karma?

Re:Um ...

[glassjaw rocks]

Minerva is the name of my hometown and everytime I see your sig, I cringe. Anyways, If I had mod points and didn't allready post on this topic, you'd get one.

It's always nice when Open Source can lend a hand

[WillAffleckUW]

Let's just hope they [MSFT] don't get all miffy about it, eh?

Yeah! Linux saved the day...

[mjpaci]

...and at the same time embarassed Microsoft. Maybe now the mighty Goliath can be slain!

How many Slashdotters now have to change their shorts?

--bitter

Re:Yeah! Linux saved the day...

[bman08]

I would hope all of them, but if this story leads to more slashdotters changing their shorts from time to time, I'm all for it.

Re:Yeah! Linux saved the day...

[HardCase]

How many Slashdotters now have to change their shorts?

It depends on whether they've worn 'em inside out yet or not, but I'd say all of them should have changed their shorts a long time ago. Now is as good a time as any...

-h-

Re:Yeah! Linux saved the day...

[mrchaotica]

I'm not wearing shorts, you insensitive clod!

Re:Yeah! Linux saved the day...

[danharan]

Knowing the "editors", we should have a dupe within two weeks.

Not that that's often enough...

Big deal?

[1155]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job. The other laptop wasn't working during crunch time, so why not?

Re:Big deal?

[Space Coyote]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job. The other laptop wasn't working during crunch time, so why not?

Microsoft demonstrating that Linux and OO.o can be the right tool for such a job? That is a big deal.

Re:Big deal?

[tehshen]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job.

I doubt Microsoft wants to show people that OpenOffice is 'the right tool for the job' that much.

Re:Big deal?

[gregbaker]

What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job.

I suspect this has a lot more to do with Windows video drivers than anything.

I spend a good chunk of time dealing with laptops and projectors and I can tell you wil certainty that display drivers are getting harder and harder to get working with projectors.

There was a time when you could press fn-F4 and flip to the external display. Now, there's a control panel on the system dock (or whatever that thing with all the icons is called). You might get an extended desktop, you might have to go through four dialogs to find a setting, you might never find it. Mercy on your soul if you have a wide-screen display.

My new tablet refuses to drive the external display at resolution >800x600, even though the built-in display and projector both have a native resolution of 1024x768. Even that takes multiple-clicks to get turned on. It works exactly right under Linux (fn-F4 and Bob's your uncle at 1024x768), but the Windows drivers get in the way.

My guess is the presenter had a new laptop with such a display driver. OO-guy had an older laptop, or had this stuff stored out already.

Re:Big deal?

[fafaforza]

Linux and OO.o can be the right tool for such a job? That is a big deal.

For running some stupid PPT presentation that probably could have been authored by any high school or ollege student? Not realy a big deal in my eyes.

Re:Big deal?

[shadowzero313]

I don't work in some big huge corporation or something, but I'm a student tech for my high school. I have to retrieve quite a few files for students, especially off slightly mangled floppy discs. I've learned to love hex editors in the process. High school kids can put an incredible amount of useless crap in a powerpoint or word doc, and openoffice can open them just fine, and resave them to office with no problems. I don't know how you can say 2.0 will fail horribly when 1.1 is fine for most importing anyway.

Re:Big deal?

[Caltheos]

Perhaps you are getting the wrong kind of laptops. On IBM Thinkpads we have (A,T,G-series) haven't had one problem with projectors. Just hit Fn-F7 and it pops up an easy to read menu, select the right one and boom its there....now why can't these things autodetect....

Re:Big deal?

[Cecil]

Sorry, what do 90% of businesses use Microsoft Office for? Hmmmm, running some stupid PPT presentations that could have been authored by any high school or college student. Why won't they use Linux or OpenOffice? Because their files won't be totally compatable and they don't want the headache. It is a big deal.

Re:Big deal?

[fafaforza]

If you were the IT head of a company, would you want your users switching to Linux on their laptops? I wouldn't. I wouldn't want them using Windows either. Preferably they'd be using OSX.

But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network. And a large number of cards are not supported under linux.

There's also the fact that most people are familiar with Windows. Fewer are familiar with linux. And familiarity with linux is a very wide spectrum, between wireless, hybernation/sleep, X, the myriad of WMs, etc. Would you, as an IT manager, responsible for the budget, spending, and use of your resources, the overhead of trying to support another platform?

Re:Big deal?

[brkello]

Yes, because we all know dealing with drivers in linux is simpler than dealing with drivers in Windows *cough*. One device wasn't acting properly, they used another one. It just shows the maturity of Slashdotters that they find this interesting at all.

Re:Big deal?

[brkello]

No, it isn't a big deal and your statement that it is is fairly rediculous. If Linus presents the benefits of Linux over Windows and something goes wrong with his Linux laptop, would he be advocating the power of Windows over Linux if the only other thing available to present was a Windows machine? Of course not. So linux can be used to present power point slides...holy crap! I better switch everything to Linux now...Windows is useless! Moron. It just shows the near retarded level of bias on this site that this gets modded insightful. The title could read: Linux can show slideshows! That's how much of a big deal it is.

Re:Big deal?

[gregbaker]

My tablet has an Intel Extreme Graphics chip (HP/Compaq TC4200), integrated into the 845 chipset. Its uses the i810 driver under Xfree86.

I've had many student laptops of all descriptions behave badly on a projector. These are often the lower-end brands. A wide-format screen is certain death, but will often work if you first set a 4:3 aqspect ratio. An old laptop with a nothing-special driver and hardware will work every time.

I must agree with the sibling post: I think all of the IBM laptops I've seen have worked just fine.

Re:Big deal?

[Dan Ost]

But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network. And a large number of cards are not supported under linux.

I find this argument disengenious. People who willingly switch to linux
generally support themselves using the community as a resource. If everyone
was switched, then you would need support staff trained on Linux, but you
could simply retrain your existing support staff (assuming they weren't dead
weight) and that would be their new job since they would no longer have to
support the old OS.

For example, the tech support here doesn't even know us Linux users exist
because they only pay attention to people to ask them for help. We're quite
capable of supporting ourselves and so we don't even show up on their radar.

Re:Big deal?

[MyHair]

I concur. WinXP has fancy-pants drivers for dual-head laptop setups, and the video driver frequently have their own dual-head display, and they step all over each other. It took me a while to figure this out. Each had options to combine the displays into one desktop, show the desktop on one and a movie on the other and other crazy stuff. Turns out mirroring the display exactly is quite difficult to get right with all the settings to fiddle with. The guy I was helping was a trainer, and he presents PowerPoint, software demos, videos and other stuff, but the videos were showing full screen on his lcd display while blanking out the overhead! Finally got it working with a perfect desktop mirror at 800x600.

Re:Big deal?

[timbo234]

But back on point, you would need a separate staff to offer support to those laptops. Anything from configuring Xorg, to trying to get the wireless card to work, to actually joining a network.

Configuring xorg and joining a network is as simple as Windows, if not more so, on modern distros like Mandriva or Suse these days. There's no evidence that it would take more tech support to do this with Linux and with Windows.

But back on point, how is any of this different from companies that have Linux servers and Windows desktops? Windows is only 50% of the server market, yet if say 95% of business use Windows desktops then 45% of businesses will be running Linux or *BSD or MacOS or something else as well as windows.

We do this at my company - all Linux servers and all Windows desktops (except for my workstation :)) and there's no need for a seperate staff - there's me full-time doing both Linux server admin and Win desktop support and there's a consultant 1-day a week who helps with Linux server admin. We have about 25 windows users in total and 10 servers at each of 2 sites (some are just router/firewall boxes).

Re:Big deal?

[masdog]

I think all of the IBM laptops I've seen have worked just fine.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Consider the focus of the Thinkpad line. Unlike many business laptops, which appear to be standard home machines with more power, the Thinkpads are designed FOR business.

I've owned two IBM laptops so far, and they are usually my first recommendation when someone asks me which laptop they should buy.

uh oh!

[aweiland]

He is so fired

Re:uh oh!

[thesandtiger]

Why would he be fired?

It isn't like people at MSFT don't know that OO.o can do stuff like this, and I think he'd be fired for fucking up the presentation by not doing this rather than pretending that reality is different than it is.

Re:uh oh!

[Barryke]

Please, something to consider:

case A.
Lets assume a windows presentation goes wack, and the day will be saved by linux.
Reaction: OSS / Linux rul3z and MS / Windows sucks!

case B.
Lets assume a linux presentation goes wack, and the day will be saved by windows.
Reaction: *none*

Reactions.
Why do we find B weirder?
Because we find it more normal than A.

.
.

My reflection on this.
I've see more not-working linux machines
than i see not-working windows machines.

Mind that I do _not_ mean a crash, i mean
"a machine wich for some reason won't function as it is supposed to do."

.
.

Hahahaha

[anderm7]

Be careful, Microsoft might think this counts as a Shared Source Initiative.

Not to be a partypooper but...

[Spy der Mann]

Will this appear in ANYWHERE but slashdot? I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?

Ummm, let's review: a Ukrainian Microsoft rep had a laptop problem, so they showed his presentation on someone else's Linux laptop.

Why on earth would "common people" (charming phrasing, BTW) care? This is only "news" in the sense that it's fuel for today's anti-Microsoft raving.

We Powerbook owners pull some Windows user's fat out of the fire on a weekly basis -- it's not really news.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[GMFTatsujin]

Yes. It will appear on his annual performance review at Microsoft regional headquarters. It will also appear on the pink slip given to him later that week.

If he's clever, it will finally appear on his resume' when he applies for a new job with a funded OSS project...

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[BroncoInCalifornia]

Will this appear in ANYWHERE but slashdot? I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?

Well Mr Spy der Mann,
Obviously you care!

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[bman08]

No because it's not a big deal to anybody who doesn't read slashdot. Welcome to life in a niche. It's just like how it would be awesome to some people if some racecar driver who was sponsored by pepsi drank a coke or something. While it may mean next to nothing in the grand scheme, it's funny to us, let's just enjoy it.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[swillden]

I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?

Who cares?

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Chalex]

According to some guy on the internet, this story is old. http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/36819/index.h tml

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[StuffJustHappens]

Will this appear in ANYWHERE but slashdot?
BR)Umm..yeah..I read it about 3 days ago elsewhere. Nice to see /. catching up.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Stankatz]

Well, since Microsoft probably advertises on every major TV news network, you won't see it there. You won't hear about it on NPR either, because they advertise there too. (If you don't believe me, just search the NPR archives to see how many stories were done on the European MS anti-trust case.) So the general public will probably be shielded from this unpleasantness.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will this appear in ANYWHERE but slashdot? I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?

Although people are selective of which articles they comment on, one thing I've learned from reading Slashdot is that the audience is very diverse. There are many (often silent) MS zealots on here, and I'm guessing the majority Slashdot's readers are using IE. I love open source and Linux. I also think .NET is great. I use Linux at home but am happy to code in C# at work. To each their own I guess.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[l3v1]

Yes, in fact I've read all this and saw the pictures a few days ago. I'm not that surprised to read 1-2.. days' old stuff on /. these days. And even those become duplicates eventually.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Incidentally other types of these stories do break (albeit in sort of a ha-ha weird bit of the day sense).

Bud employee fired for drinking Coors (the link itself says "offbeat").

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[booch]

First of all, this is not someone who sponsors Microsoft. It is Microsoft. So it'd be more like the Ford auto racing team driving a Chevy. Second, there have been media stinks made when a Pepsi spokesperson drinks Coke, or vice-versa. I believe it was Brittney Spears who got caught in such a "scandal" a year or 2 ago.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[n0ano]

Hmm, is that like it's no big deal that a Budweiser distributor employee was fired for drinking Coors while he was not on the job, as documented here. I guess this also means nothing in the grand scheme.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[deviator]

no.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[debiansid]

Not too many but here's some I could find:

The Inquirer
HTML FixIt.Com
PCLinuxOnline

PCLinuxOnline seems to be the original news breaker as both the above articles refer to it.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[MattHaffner]

"What, by using MS Office to open their own files. What a win that is!"

No, Keynote,
you insensitive clod!

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[GMFTatsujin]

Yeah. We call it Red Hat.

Or IBM.

Or Suse.

Or...

Or SCO? Naaaaaw.

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[cascadefx]

Only that, according to the writeup, he DIDN'T show it on SOMEONE ELSE'S laptop... he showed it on HIS OWN laptop using Linux... which was ALREADY loaded on HIS laptop.

"The solution was to adopt OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3, which was already running on the presenter's laptop"

Re:Not to be a partypooper but...

[Trogre]

Well, I read about it first over here yesterday.

Powerpoint Crash

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of a time in college during a MS presentation when the MS powerpoint crashed into an Apple desktop. Oh well, its business, you do what you need to do. Microsoft is relativly pragmatic these days.

Re:Powerpoint Crash

[ssj_195]

This reminds me of a time in college during a MS presentation when the MS powerpoint crashed into an Apple desktop

Ouch. I hope no one was hurt :(

Pardon?

[ogleslurp]

This story seems a little skinny on details. Does anyone have any more information?

laughed out loud at that picture

[Adult film producer]

ahh the irony.. "shared source initiative"..... :D

what is it with slashdot running all these captchas lately ? "To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image:" I did this yesterday, shouldn't there be a period of grace for logged in users ?

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[ignorant_newbie]

>shouldn't there be a period of grace for logged
>in users

um... let's see. how hard is it to copy the cookie from your browser's cache and then fake the user agent ? really really simple? ok. so the answer to your question is no.

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[ubuntu]

what is it with slashdot running all these captchas lately ? "To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image:"

Apparently, the Slashdot editors think our comments are so stupid that we HAVE to be bots. Sorry, Taco, we really are that stupid. At least I am. No wait. I mean, my posts are. I mean, I'm not a bot. I'm sure I'm smarter than a bot, even though I keep typing the captcha thing wrong. Maybe it's an IQ test, like a minimum height requirement on a Roller Coaster. I got it on my third try. What I'm trying to say is... uh, I forgot.

Dammit IQ Captcha, what are you trying to tell me!?!?!?

===========

Slashdot User Ubuntu, Your IQ = 86

Some famous celebrities with your IQ are:
Paris Hilton
George Bush
the cast of Friends

The computer we recommend for you is:
Apple Macintosh with One-Button Mouse

===========

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[game kid]

The computer we recommend for you is:
Apple Macintosh with One-Button Mouse

That's hot.

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[DeadSea]

I haven't seen any captchas. Have I just not posted recently enough? Are they turned off if karma is high enough? Are they only for anonymous cowards?

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[fatquack]

Never seen the captcha, is it on new posts or on replies?

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[deviator]

Lumping Paris Hilton and George Bush together like that insults her intelligence.

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[Morgor]

Maybe the intellectual level of the comments would be much higher if slashdot infact allowed more bots to comment?

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[Jesus_666]

Then we have Googlebot posting in a story about MSN search and all hell breaks loose. Great idea.

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[deviator]

All of the above.

Re:laughed out loud at that picture

[TopSpin]

I haven't seen any captchas.

I have. Karma=Excellent, UID<1000, subscriber. Perhaps it has to do with my habits; I usually log in with the first "Preview" I perform when posting. In the last week or so I've gotten a captcha each time.

Interesting...

[GReaToaK_2000]

I bet someone is without a job now...

Now we know why Gates wants Interoperable SW

[team99parody]

Remember we thought Gates was lying when he said he wanted Interoperable software

Perhaps he was being sincere - with interoperable software the bugs in windows are more tollerable.

Intersting.

[Atzanteol]

And not one story about all the presentations given at Linux World that were done using Power Point on Windows.

Re:Intersting.

[bman08]

This is like going on a porn site and complaining that they show a lot of chicks making out and no dudes. It's not what we're here for.

Re:Intersting.

[BigRedGPK]

really? now that's f'ed up...

Timmay

Re:Intersting.

[scovetta]

Thanks for the intro to gentoo. I think I'll try it out. Oh, -1 Offtopic, too.

Re:Intersting.

[LearnToSpell]

Why is that funny? It's not exactly a presentation for Mr. Uber-leet Linux Admin, is it? If you wanted to learn Swahili, and I gave you a primer that was written entirely in Swahili, how useful would that be?

So many difficult questions, I know...

Re:Intersting.

[NanoGator]

"And not one story about all the presentations given at Linux World that were done using Power Point on Windows. "

Funny thing is, it probably wasn't anything special about Linux or OO that 'saved the day', but rather that was what happened to be handy.

I'm normally a Diet Coke drinker, but I was really really thirsty and Diet Pepsi is what I have available to me. If somebody described that as Diet Pepsi saving my day, I'd roll my eyes.

Re:Intersting.

[rotor]

At Linuxworld Boston this year I did see one presentation done on Windows XP. Man, wasn't the presenter embarassed when it blue-screened.

Re:Intersting.

[LupusUF]

"I'm normally a Diet Coke drinker, but I was really really thirsty and Diet Pepsi is what I have available to me. If somebody described that as Diet Pepsi saving my day, I'd roll my eyes."

true, but it would make it more amusing if you were giving a speech to coke execs while drinking a diet Pepsi. Perhaps it would not have saved the day, but it would be amusing. I remember websites put up pictures of Brittney Spears drinking coke when she was the Pepsi spokesperson.

Re:Intersting.

[NanoGator]

"I did not RTFA, but didn't MSOffice act up, as in: without Linux and OO 'happening to be handy', the presentation would have been fubar?"

Whoever had it handy saved the day. In that situation niether OO nor Linux deserve credit for 'saving the day'. If either of them did something that Windows/Office couldn't do, then I'd have a differnt story to tell you.

Not to be cynical but...

[DaedalusLogic]

Can we see a schedule for this conference and where it took place? All we have is links to organization web sites and this photo at the moment.

If this is supposed to be proof of something, I want confirmation. Then I'll really start laughing.

Because honestly, who is to ay it wasn't just one guy putting up a slide and snapping a photo?

Re:Not to be cynical but...

[l3v1]

link

Embarassing...

[bobbis.u]

That's almost on an par with the infamous Windows 98 crash video!

Was...

[Erik_]

That was the case... now 4 mins later the /. effect looms :-)

BS

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you couldn't find a real story to post?

A) That image could easily be recreated in any office with a projector

B) Microsoft ALWAYS watermarks their presentations, there is not one on the picture

C) There is no link to a credible news site with this info. I'm sure if this were to really happen, every news site would be ALL OVER IT...

Re:BS

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

A. Perhaps, and if that's true, you'll see a retraction or a story about it soon enough. Until then, enjoy.

B. Microsoft HQ, perhaps. But this is Microsoft Ukraine, which may have different policies.
Take this, for example, which was found via a Google search on Microsoft's own site for Ukraine. While it may be from 2003, I'm guessing they'd have that 'watermark' policy for longer.

C. Because clearly a story about Microsoft running a presentation on Linux trumps stories about al-Zarqawi's injury and the Senate filibustering.

Another link

[It doesn't come easy]

I don't think the picture makes it too easy to see that this is OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3 (unless you can read Romanian?), but here is an alternate link to the picture (the other link isn't working for me...).

Re:Another link

[bchernicoff]

Actually it says OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 in the title bar.

Re:Another link

[darkonc]

I don't think the picture makes it too easy to see that this is OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3

It's pretty clear that it's OO1.1.2. the upper left icon on the window reminds me of TWM -- not sure about that, but it's almost certainly not Windows.
The image zoom extension to Firefox definitely helps.

WHAT!!??

[ubuntu]

Are my eyes deceiving me? Please tell me that Microsoft didn't get OpenOffice version 2 before the rest of us did!

Re:WHAT!!??

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they do have that big technology-partnership with Sun. Perhaps their new Sun alliance is focused on their need for a stable office suite.

Re:WHAT!!??

[failure-man]

Uh, you've been able to download the beta for months.

Ah-ha!

[jmony]

This is a funny one. Now, maybe Microsoft should buy Sun... ;-)

Microsoft's competitive advantages

[team99parody]

Why should we be surprised. A MSFT exec already told us that runningRunning Linux is Microsoft's competitive advantage.

"Hilf is the director of Microsoft's platform technology strategy group....

Linux running at Microsoft? Isn't that sacrilege? Think of it <b>more as a competitive advantage</b>, said Hilf."

Re:Microsoft's competitive advantages

[arivanov]

Hmm... Circa 1997 80%+ of country MSFT ops ran their webservers on Linux or Solaris. The moment Netcraft published this and they became a laughing stock it was all migrated to IIS within 2 weeks. Similarly, I do not really believe in such posturing. MSFT is a marketing driven organisation and if their marketing decides that a specific instance of running Linux is bad for the current marketing campaigns there will be a big crater in its place in less then 5 seconds.

Better Photograph

[CypherXero]

I cleaned the photograph up in Photoshop, and I made it MUCH better looking, so you can actually SEE what's going on in the image.

http://www.collegechixors.com/images/hpim2544.size d.jpg

Re:Better Photograph

[intangible]

Nice try, but the last time I clicked on a link with "collegechix" in the url, I was distracted at work for an hour.

Re:Better Photograph

[FirstTimeCaller]

I took a look at your image... but the whole time I was waiting for it to appear, I thought to myself... "please don't be the goatse guy, please don't be the goatse guy."

Thankfully it wasn't. Good job.

soviet ukraine

[phoenix42]

in soviet ukraine, microsoft uses linux?

Re:offtopic question

[Adult film producer]

I am logged in... and there's the captcha again... right below this text input box. Just above it is this

Name adult film producer [ Log Out ]
Email van@i2pmail.org
Subject
Comment

*shrug* entering another captcha :(

IBM hardware to the rescue

[tsmithnj]

What's so unusual about that?

Slashdot: Old news that does not matter...

[ReallyNiceGuy]

This is already 2 days old.

Isn't ready for the desktop?

[winse]

yeah right

Priceless

[nowt]

Oh, so you want it to work! Well... (whips out openoffice) Tada! --microsofty

Hooray

[bsquizzato]

YES! What an overwhelming win for the open source community! Sure to put us in the lead over Billy now!

Hah, but really, it is a funny story :)

Happens the other way too

[Leif_Bloomquist]

Come on, let's be honest here. How many times has Windows saved the day for a Linux application, or even install?

i.e. For myself, back when trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on my machine at home, I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae, etc.

It's stable now, but having a working (out of the box) Win2K install to fall back on was crucial to "save" my Linux installation.

Let's not be too smug here, would this have been news if they'd been bailed out by a different Windows version?

Re:Happens the other way too

[james_shoemaker]

Actually my first linux install was helped by my OS/2 install and each following linux install has been helped by the previous install (into different partitions for just that purpose).

James

Re:Happens the other way too

[james_shoemaker]

When I installed windows 2K to run turbo-tax I needed to use my linux install to download the drivers to get it to work.

James

Re:Happens the other way too

[Imagix]

Nitpick... but this isn't a Linux vs. Microsoft story.. it's an OSS application vs. Microsoft...

Re:Happens the other way too

[argent]

back when trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on my machine at home, I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae, etc

Funny, I've never had that problem with FreeBSD. Even back in the bad old days, it was:

Slot boot floppy, slot root floppy, partition disk, configure network, select distribution, commit... and let it download and install itself overnight.

Re:Happens the other way too

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Knoppix for that.

Re:Happens the other way too

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

not to be a dick, but I have never had to do that with my openbsd box. it has always worked out of the box for me. sure, I had to do a little bit of research to figure out the correct settings for my XF86Config (it was a laptop, and I had to find Modelines), but other than that, it all Just Worked.

Also, any time I load openbsd on a desktop with a regular monitor, X works w/o any configuration needed.

Re:Happens the other way too

[arcade]

How many times has Windows saved the day for a Linux application, or even install?

I've never experienced that. I've experienced it the opposite way (linux saving windows' day) at least 10-20 times.

For myself, back when trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on my machine at home, I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae,

I've never had that problem in linux. My network cards has always been supported, and I've never had to reboot into windows.

I've had to reboot to linux to fetch the network drivers for windows though. Windows has extremely sucky hardware support in my experience.

Re:Happens the other way too

[Jahz]

"I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae, etc."

I can see your point, and I agree that Windows can definitely be a helpful thing to have. Your argument, however, is quite flawed. In this case Windows did NOT save your Linux install... the internet did! You could just have easily used Mac OS X or another Linux box.

The super-post of this ./ article was meant to show that OSS projects like Linux and OO.o can take over for a Windows machine without any trouble, and to highlight their reliability in an emergency. Any OS can browse the web, download files etc.

If your linux presentation machine crashed, could a windows box retrieve the presentation files from your (ext3/xfs/jfs/etc.) drive? Could MS Word open a StarOffice SWX file? I think not (easily).

Re:Happens the other way too

[cthrall]

> I've never had that problem in linux. My network
> cards has always been supported, and I've never
> had to reboot into windows.

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!!!

Re:Happens the other way too

[greed]

In that case, ANY up-n-running system with Internet access would help you out. You'd need to be able to write compatible media, of course, and using the same HDD is obviously the easiest.

I got my first Linux PC running using a Mac and a questionable copy of DOS 5 that came with the surplus PC. (It had all of COMMAND.COM and the hidden system files.) This was before OS X, so the Mac didn't have a way of writing the boot disk image to floppy; but it would compress _just_ enough to fit on a DOS floppy, so I used my one (1) 1.4 MB diskette to get a copy of unzip, the boot disk image, and the DOS program for writing it to diskette on the PC.

Had that machine been able to boot from CD, no problem. I had a nice, bootable install CD. It was a crappy version of TurboLinux from a magazine cover, but it was enough to bootstrap a better distro without having to mess with DOS again.

Re:Happens the other way too

[darkonc]

For the initial install, you need something to get the updates, etc.

Similarly, I won't let someone go onto the net with a virgin 2000 or XP install. I'll use knoppix to download the initial updates, spybot and adaware. (I had one student who gave up after 4 attempts to install upgrade without getting infected).
(( Just recently, I had a friend who had to do a (dell) clean-and-install. By the time she called me, she had a 'virgin' machine infected like a cheap crack-whore. Nothing much to do other than reinstall, then use Linux to grab updates and tools before letting her loose. ))

In this case, however, the MS guy had a completed install -- and if MS can't keep their own software working properly, how can you expect a regular joe blow to?

Re:Happens the other way too

[ilitorat]

Don't project your experiences on other people, just because you never had a problem with driver issues doesn't mean such a thing doesn't exist. I'll never understand why people reply to threads where someone explains an issue they have and people feel the need to say it didn't happen to them so it must not be an issue... Just cause it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it isn't occuring. I've never has XP crash but that doesn't mean they write perfect software...

Re:Happens the other way too

[petermgreen]

surely if your fixing pcs it would be prudent to have some kind of safe net with minimal access to or from everything else that you can hook pcs up to to download patches get data off etc.

just a second nic in a linux box with nat enabled and tough firewall settings would do the job it doesn't have to be anything fancy.

Re:Happens the other way too

[darkonc]

A Knoppix CD is a trivial to setup and a lot smaller to carry around.

That's rich

[g0bshiTe]

[MSFT-Tablet]"Damn, I am crapping out."
[lin-laptop]"I can save the day."
[MSFT-Tablet]"I will never be saved by riff-raff the likes of you. You are open source and therefore evil. I was created using millions of dollars in r&d capitol. You were made from donations, and other open source contributors, and are therefore an inferior product."
[lin-laptop]"Yeah, but I can do something you can't right now."
[MSFT-Tablet]"What's that?"
[lin-laptop]"Run your presentation."

Re:That's rich

[Neopoleon]

"You are open source and therefore evil. I was created using millions of dollars in r&d capitol. You were made from donations, and other open source contributors, and are therefore an inferior product."

Of course...

"Donations."

Like from IBM :)

(And, for future reference, "capitol" refers to a building where state government functions are carried out.)

Re:That's rich

[ignorant_coward]

"Like from IBM :)"

And Sun, and Red Hat, and HP, and Novell, and ...

IBM is a master marketeer to have such a huge fan base at Slashdot, when IBM probably develops as much or more proprietary software than Microsoft (DB2, mainframe OS, Smartsuite, "IBM Global Services" consulting, AIX, etc.).

Re:haha

[Rei]

Microsoft's public failures are always amusing.

Where is the problem?

[grumpyman]

Is it more about the intel-based tablet PC than anything MS? May be Linux/OpenOffice will also crash on the same machine.

Re:offtopic question

[erlenic]

I'm getting them, and as you can see, I'm logged in. Mine was this: xdgtttx.

Step into my office...

[Stankatz]

Hopefully that guy has already started his job search. I don't think Microsoft US is going to like this.

I Call Shenanigans

[adamjone]

I'm sorry, but this just seems a bit too contrived. Forget for a second that this story would be all too easily faked (a couple of snapshots of a slideshow, and links to MS websites do not prove a story for me). The presenter just happened to have a live boot disk with him that had OO installed. And he just happened to be able to recover the doc from the Windows PC that was "experiencing trouble". I know if the tables were turned, no one on Slashdot would give a second thought to discrediting this story.

As much as I love to see egg on Microsoft's face, I call shenanigans on this one.

Re:I Call Shenanigans

[tomstdenis]

Where did you get boot disk and the sort from?

It says a Linux Laptop ... nothing about "linux running off a USB dongle on a laptop" ...

Tom

Re:I Call Shenanigans

[tomstdenis]

First, I never said the story is legit [or as presented factual]. I just said that the persons gripe with the story wasn't based on what was presented.

And why would I be in line? Currently I hold two jobs in software development and cryptographic support [re: software developer/cryptographer].

As a fresh college grad I safely make enough money to be considered "not a pogey-seeking failure".

But thanks for trying ya 2-bit troll. The trick to really get under peoples skin is to actually know the person you are trying to insult. John Viega and Robert Silverman have managed to do so [publicly no less].

Essentially not only are you a troll ... but you're a bad one at that.

Tom

Was his PowerPoint patched

[mrm677]

I devoted long hours to a PowerPoint presentation. In about hour 12 or 13, PowerPoint 2002 kept crashing whenever I tried to open the file. Unfortunately I did not have any previous revisions before the save which messed things up.

I thought I was hosed, but I tried opening it in OpenOffice and it worked fine. Then a friend suggested I run "Office Update". Once I did this, PowerPoint opened the file without problems.

Did this dude bother to update his PowerPoint?

Re:haha

[Anonymous Coward]

I, great strong Linux, have once again humbled weak, ineffectual Windows. Linus Torvalds is a far greater god than child-like Bill Gates. Linus is mightier, wiser and wears better clothes, while infantile Bill Gates looks like a 1970s college graduate flung into the future by a malfunctioning Centrino processor that generated a mighty graviton wave.

I, great strong Linux, shall conquer the world, and all shall run KDE (for Gnome is evil and the tool of despots and deviants).

I have spoken.

Linux. . .

[kfg]

. . .for when our shit don't work. It'll save your butterfly's arse. What would you like to boot that actually runs today?

KFG

Re:Linux. . .

[kz45]

for when our shit don't work. It'll save your butterfly's arse. What would you like to boot that actually runs today/

I hate to break it to you, but the machine running microsoft office had a hardware problem. This is why open office was used. Because they just happened to have a system up an running with linux/open office. It has nothing to do with the superiority of OSS applications.

Re:Linux. . .

[kz45]

Of course any Microsoft apologist would still blame the hardware (or sometimes the user, thus indirectly claiming that MS software is not userfriendly enough).

and any OSS apologist would still blame it on a microsoft apologist, when in reality, it's a hardware problem.

Reminds me of something that just happened to me

[aardwolf204]

I'm the sysadmin of a company of about 100. The other day I was in the CEO's office waiting to give him a presentation on the latest version of the Intranet. The boss came in very upset, he had been having some problems with his laptop and hadn't been able to boot into windows all morning. There was a very important document on his drive that he just had to have for a meeting later that afternoon. I turned off the projector and started to attempt to recover his documents.

First I tried Bart PE, a Windows XP bootable CD. It allowed me to see the hard drive, but the file sizes were all wrong. I tried to connect it to the network but it wouldn't recognize the network card. I tried plugging in a USB flash drive but it wouldn't recognize that either.

DOS was out of the question as the drive was NTFS. Then it hit me, I had a copy of Knoppix 3.8 on me. I booted it up and it saw the network and thumbdrive instantly. I saved the boss's files and he was very impressed. While I was setting him up on a spare notebook he was playing with the menus in KDE and we made small talk about governments and businesses saving tons of cash by switching to Linux, Open Office, and other free software.

So Linux saved the day for his poor broken Windows box, just a little ironic. Now this sysadmin is never leaving without a copy of Knoppix again.

old story, but still

[lheal]

... it's clearly an operating system problem on the tablet, not a hardware problem. Linux to the rescue!
------------------

From the README on the site:
Intro
[...]
1. This is old news: the event happened on October 9, 2004.
2. Microsoft rep in Ukraine had to use free software to get on with a presentation on a free software conference since his munition failed to cooperate with projector.
3. See below (also posted to the places I could track down).
[...]
As for the facts:

* it was not Master but ALT Linux Compact 2.3 (page|ISO|ML)
* it was Third Ukrainian Free Software Developers' and Users' Conference
* it was sponsored by IBM, Novell and EMT (yeah, I work for ...us; another funny thing is that Microsoft proposed to sponsor the conference too but we decided to politely decline the generous offer)
* it is the head of Microsoft Ukraine, Mr. Valery Lanovenko
* it is the Tablet PC which failed to feed the projector on the secondary head properly to blame
* and indeed it's OpenOffice.org on our Linux/ThinkPad running their PowerPoint presentation ;-)
* IMG_0395 has Mr. Lanovenko's personal comment -- he tries to make an impression that it was PDF (we as the conference staff recommended to keep those at hand) but all of us know OOo doesn't display PDFs ;-)
[...]
--
Michael Shigorin
mike at osdn dot org dot ua
EMT.Com.UA * OSDN.Org.UA * Linux.Kiev.UA * ALTLinux.ORG

Get the facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Did someone say using Linux is more expensive?

Get the facts M$

My Prediction

[stlhawkeye]

I make this post every time we talk about Microsoft and Linux.

The next generation of Windows after Longhorn will have a Linux kernel (or other UNIX-like kernel). Expect it by 2015.

Re:My Prediction

[stlhawkeye]

Yeah, just like I was supposed to have a flying car, affordable robot that can clean, cook, mow the lawn, and feed the pets, AND my fully-automated home by 2000?

If Apple can build a proprietary commercial-grade GUI on top of an open-source kernel based on NetBSD, why can't Microsoft build a proprietary commercial-grade GUI on top of an open-source kernel based on Linux?

Interoperable?

[CrazyDwarf]

I thought he said INOPERABLE!

Ms's new slogan

[Turn-X Alphonse]

"It just doesn't work" seems more accurate now.

Reminds me of IBM using Amigas with SCALA

[GQuon]

Reminds me of IBM using Amigas running the SCALA presentation program at. That was rather funny to us Amiga users when certain people told us about the superior nature of the IBM-compatible and how sub-standard our Amigas were.

"Eating your own dog food" -- using your own products internally, is a commendable policy, but it should not become the "not-invented-here"-syndrome -- rejecting better solutions just because they're from a competitor. IBM was just using the best product for the job. I doubt they've kept the Amigas running to this day though.

Re:offtopic question

[croddy]

i don't see it.

Hardware fail, not software

[YrWrstNtmr]

On topic: I wonder what excuses did they give...

From the extremely sketchy details, it appears it was a hardware failure. Another machine (Linux) was already up and running, so they used OOo on that machine to run the PPT, instead of holding up the presentation while a Windows/Office machine was booted up.

Nothing about MSOffice failing to run or open the presentation, just a simple hardware substitution in the middle of a presentation.

Of course, I could be wrong, but that's what I get out of it.

Re:Hardware fail, not software

[fafaforza]

But don't let the facts ruin everone's fun. The hobby-developed underdog Linux supports the entire Microsoft corporation. Yup...

Re:Hardware fail, not software

[Curtman]

just a simple hardware substitution in the middle of a presentation.

They teach you that on the first day of MCSE training. Always blame the hardware.

Re:Hardware fail, not software

[cascadefx]

Repeat after me:

The TABLET PC is a M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T initiative. The worked on the specs with a number of vendors, including putting some of their engineers in among the harware engineers at the various partner companies including Toshiba.

2003 Nebula Awards

[Johnzo]

I saw something similar at the 2003 Nebula awards in Seattle. Dr. Rick Rashid, founder of Microsoft Research, gave the keynote address. He had some video for us, but he couldn't figure out how to make Windows Media Player play through the banquet room's projector. All we got was a black square surrounded by that horrendous WMP silver-blob interface.

It was funny to see him squirm. Of course, someone in the back yelled out for him to "get a Mac!" We never did see the exciting video he promised.

Though his address was dull as dishwater--it dealt mostly in boring generalities that did nothing to excite either my IT self or my SF self--he did unintentionally demonstrate a primary motif of SF: that technology by itself isn't interesting--rather, it's the malfunctions that are interesting.

Well, what would *you* have done?

[Neopoleon]

I figured the comments would be full of negative little "ha ha" moments.

But, if you've ever given a presenation, then you *know* how tough it can be. Demos and talks which have been working fine for days, weeks, and months have a way of suddenly breaking down when you need them most. Don't know why this is.

So, this guy (if this is true) did what he had to so that the presentation could continue.

Is that really something worth laughing at?

Plus, it just goes to show that not everybody at Microsoft feels the same way about certain... "other" technologies. Yeah, it might be a fine "ha ha" for other people at the company, but those of you who are pushing the OSS agenda should really be congratulating this guy for sticking his neck out.

And, had this been a presentation on some Linux subject and something had gone wrong with the presentation machine (Linux machines *do* crash, too, you know), then what would the presenter have done?

People are laughing, but many of us on the Windows side of things have no problem firing up an alternative operating system. We have our loyalties, but it doesn't mean we're all totally pig-headed.

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[team99parody]

But, if you've ever given a presenation, then you *know* how tough it can be. Demos and talks which have been working fine for days, weeks, and months have a way of suddenly breaking down when you need them most. Don't know why this is.

There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening.

I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters if you tolerate the attitude that "[anything] which has been working for days, weeks, and months [could] have a way of suddenly breaking down whhen you need it most".

It's fine if he's demoing a pre-release-prototype or something; but this was a supposedly "released" non-beta product that was screwing up whatever he was trying to accomplish.

Yes, I've given many many presentations before. What would I have done? Had a backup of the presentation on a CD or USB device so regardless of what failed in my laptop, I could have given it successfully by borrowing someone else's laptop.

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, if you've ever given a presenation, then you *know* how tough it can be. Demos and talks which have been working fine for days, weeks, and months have a way of suddenly breaking down when you need them most. Don't know why this is.

Which is why most of us who know better switched from Windows a long time ago. Mysterious shit doesn't happen with any other O/S.

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[Neopoleon]

"There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening."

Not to point fingers, but I've also worked on plenty of Linux installs that have crapped their pants (mostly because of X, I'll admit).

"I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters"

Do you really think that we would approach a medical, airline, or governmental system in the same way we'd approach a consumer device like a tablet?

The tablet runs a version of XP that's been beefed up with tablet support. Like XP, this OS comes bundles with the ability to handle a wide array of hardware/software combos. It's been pretty well demonstrated that the *vast* majority of XP (and cousins) crashes are due to bad third-party drivers, particularly where video is concerned.

If we were building a device for a medical purpose, for example, we'd probably start with Windows XP Embedded and only include the components absolutely necessary for the system to run (note that Windows CE would also be a good bet). We certainly wouldn't include things that weren't needed. I'm guessing, for example, that many pieces of medical equipment will get by fine without drivers for the latest Audigy, or whatever, and so we wouldn't include support.

A consumer device needs to be ready to deal with many hardware and software scenarios that Microsoft can only begin to guess at. A vertical need, like medical or airline equipment, can be put together in a very targeted way so as to avoid the problems normally associated with consumer hardware.

Look at Apple - they own almost the entire hardware and software stack. They control everything from the OS to the mail app to the web cam drivers, and their machines *still* crash like crazy (I own a PowerBook, and although I love the thing, it *does* crash, and when it does, it *really* crashes).

Think about that, and then think about every cheap piece of unsupported hardware that actually works with XP. Will all of them? No, but many do, and that's incredible. It's something for which we don't get enough credit.

So, yeah. I understand your concerns, but we know better than to treat specialized devices like general purpose consumer platforms.

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[Neopoleon]

"Which is why most of us who know better switched from Windows a long time ago. Mysterious shit doesn't happen with any other O/S."

Of course.

No other OS's crash or exhibit strange behavior while running certain applications.

And that, my friend, is why there's no such thing as a core dump :)

Hey... wait a minute...

Re:Well, what would *you* have done?

[JohnFluxx]

A core dump is when the kernel kills an app, not when the app kills the kernel. There's a big difference there.

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[jackcarter]

So Linux saved the day for his poor broken Windows box, just a little ironic. Irony is when the opposite of what is expected occurs. This is completely expected, and therefore not irony. In case it wasn't clear, that wasn't intended as a grammar police thing, but rather a "Ha-ha, Linux will always prevail, that's obvious" sort of thing.

How many times has Microsoft saved Linux?

[Rotten168]

And we just haven't heard of them. I personally can recall dozens of times.

Re:How many times has Microsoft saved Linux?

[mdwstmusik]

... I personally can recall dozens of times.

I'd like to hear about some of them. I've never been in a situation where Windows could correct a problem that I was having with Linux. I have, however, been in many where the opposite was true.

Re:How many times has Microsoft saved Linux?

[Rotten168]

Oh please, even my old Windows-hating boss used to need to use it constantly. Mostly due to the inferior applications. Give it a rest, Lin-o-nut.

Re:How many times has Microsoft saved Linux?

[mdwstmusik]

Lin-o-nut?

I use both Linux and Windows and was really hoping to be enlightened on how Windows could save the day when I had a Linux problem. I thought 'dozens of times' I must be missing something. Apparently not. You couldn't come up with one concrete example. Just a smart ass comment.

Win-o-jerk!

...Which only proves

[vitalyb]

Microsoft might not like Linux but it will use it on the first good opportunity.

I am sure though, if that gets into the real press Micrsoft will hurry to tell how badly the OO rendered the presentation and how that projector sucked. Hell, probably the Windows machine crashed because the Linux machine was sending malicious radio waves to it.

It's F9 baby

[magi]

This isn't the first OpenOffice Impress slide show I see people running in non-full-screen windowed mode. So, remember, F9 starts the slide show in full screen.

In Acroread, it's Ctrl+L. I learned this only after a two-hour presentation in windowed mode.

Disappointinly, you apparently can't get full screen mode at all in xpdf nor gv. I've seen a lecturer do his entire course with windowed xpdf under Linux.

Re:It's F9 baby

[SirTalon42]

In KPDF its Control+Shift+F to go full screen (same with almost all other KDE apps)

Re:It's F9 baby

[rob_horton]

Try xpdf -fullscreen

Link to the original article

[marq00z]

The original article was at PCLinuxOnline and contains a lot more information. http://www.pclinuxonline.com/article.php?sid=9792

Re:haha

[buckymatters]

They're just demonstrating their superior error handling.

Proof

[darjen]

This definitely prooves beyond a reasonable doubt that MS sucks and Linux is the best. We can now finally rest in our ongoing struggle against this giant, evil monopoly that has plagued us for so long Way to go guys!

Bets anyone?

[bushda]

Anyone want to wager on how much longer that guy will be employed by Microsoft?

Ya know that MS must lurk @ /., and something like this (if it can be verified as authentic) is a pretty black eye to MS.

That being said, I'm sitting here giggling with maniacal laughter just thinking about the whole thing. :)

OpenOffice as the savior

[xeno]

Ok, not quite. But I've been doing my part to promote OOo by installing it on every machine in my extended family (more than I'd care to count at the moment), but I don't remove the usual MS Office apps. And I don't proslytise about OOo. I just tell them: "When Word or Excel explodes or does something really weird, just save what you have and open it up in OpenOffice. It'll work every time, and it doesn't do weird stuff without letting you know what's happening." I gotta say, more than half come back and say "Holy crap, this saved my ass, and it's FREE???"

My 10y/12y niece and nephew are getting refurbed Tpad 600's (almost done today), and they actually asked for OOo and knew about the built-in PDF feature. It ain't the world, but a kid in school showing his friends an-app-that-just-works(tm) trumps a huge advertising budget every time. That's why MS poured so much advert money into dislodging Apple from US schools. (Of course, for MS, this is the dime-bag method. For OOo it's a bit more altruistic...)

J

Sometimes OO has better compatibility

[dodongo]

I don't remember the exact problem we were having in my lab, but someone was preparing to give a presentation which they made in PowerPoint on one of our PowerMacs. They took it over to a Windows box because the room for the presentation only had that available, and the damned presentation wouldn't load.

You can imagine the amount of cussing that ensued.

I don't have MS Office on my Windows laptop, but I do have OO.o, and lo and behold, I was able to open my labmate's presentation. But the real kicker is that I was able to Save as... and the file popped out in a format MS Office on the Windows box would read.

It was about the most bizarre file compatibility thing I've ever seen.

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[sffubs]

Actually, DOS is not completely out of the question.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfsdos .shtml

Still, Knoppix is a better way.

Hahahah!

[The Bungi]

That's precious! Quippy! I was about to tell the story about having to download driver tarballs from my Windows machine to fix a borked RH9 installation, but I guess that would be considered flamebait in this context!! HAHAHA!!!

Cripes.

Yawn...

[fitten]

Not only is this last week old but it is hardly interesting. I can't tell you how many presentations I've given about Linux software that we've written using PowerPoint.

I've also emailed presentations that were written on Linux using OpenOffice and displayed on PowerPoint because someone forgot to bring the right laptop...

Yawn...

Re:offtopic question

[SirTalon42]

It seems people with good (excellent?) karma don't have to do it. Thats more reason to not post useless crap (like this :-D) so you don't get modded down into oblivion.

But! The GPL is Viral!!!

[AntiCopyrightRadical]

So shouldn't Microsoft have to release their presentation as open source now?

For the Record: The GPL is not Viral like that. Microsoft still has full legal rights to their content.

But it would be nice if someone challenged them, to force them to state that the GPL doesn't take away their independent copyrights.

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[darkonc]

For me, the process of recovering a virus-infected PC includes running clam-av from knoppix (in the hopes that it helps find anything that's seriously embeded in the OS, as a driver, etc.)

When a Mac...

[D_Lehman(at)ISPAN.or]

This isn't too bad. But, I'll be more impressed when I see Gates caught with an iMac while on vacation to edit his home movies with. Or, someone spying Steve Balmer working out listening to an iPod. Forget necessity, that's explainable, like why Hotmail ran linux servers. Show me an example of clear preference, and you've got an MS film clip that'll make CNN for about a week.

Mod Submitter Up!

[Hobart]

Someone actually used Coral Cache in a direct image link from a slashdot story?!?

World... ending... pigs flying ... dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria...

(-1: Silly)

Re:Mod Submitter Up!

[InsomniaCity]

Yeh, its absolutely brilliant for those of us behind firewalls beyond our control that won't let us access the ports Coral uses!

Re:Mod Submitter Up!

[KingSkippus]

Amen. I couldn't access the link until I copied-and-pasted the link into my address and removed the Coral suffix and port.

If anyone else reads this way-down comment, people like me sure would appreciate it if you posted both Coral and non-Coral links. Something like this example link (non-Coral) might be nice.

Yeah, I am really lazy, but I figure that your extra ten seconds of effort will save thousands of people an extra five seconds of effort. With the extra time humankind collectively saves, we could easily discover the cure to cancer within a year or so. Of course, I just used up a lot of people's extra time in posting this comment, so it looks like the cure will have to wait until 2007.

USENIX, same story

[ink]

Last time I went to USENIX (2003) it was about 50/50 Powerpoint and others. Some used Apple's Keynote, and some used Openoffice.org.

Of course, the best presentations didn't have slides at all. They used real examples, when appropriate and actually spoke, instead of reading slides. The keynote by Neal Stephenson was that way.

Not First Time Strenghts, Weakeness Demonstrated.

[Erris]

And not one story about all the presentations given at Linux World that were done using Power Point on Windows.

If what you say is true, it's not news and it just goes to show the power of free software. Everyone has to deal with legacy equipment using Winblows. Despite the great efforts by M$, using such equipment is not too difficult and happens routinely. Free software efforts have managed to decode M$ formats, a task which well funded companies were not able to do as well or as quickly. The ability of free software to keep up with that kind of crap is miraculous. Free software is able to deal with other people's stupidity and malice. As demonstrated here, relying on M$ to get things done is stupid, but it's possible that the Linux World Expo had crufty projection equipment and did not let anyone boot anything else. So what?

Microsoft's poor performance is a self inflicted discgrace. Despite their monopoly power over hardware makers, which results in every hardware maker on earth creating drivers for M$, M$ routinely fails to deliver. Recommendations of daily reboot, four minitue to own times when connected to a network and the BSoD the happens all too frequently are symptoms of M$'s inability to deal with their own anti-competitive complexity. They have put so many barbs in for everyone else, and have so long neglected real quality issues that their products are unstable and essentially unusable. We're not talking about any old schmoe here, we're talking about a Microsoft Representative who should have the best support and upkeep possible. When people like that, or Bill Gates himself, the blame is easy to place.

Hi from Kiev -- we're OK, and it's old but fact ;)

[gvy]

Thanks for the direct link, cache lags indeed as I can see; there's a story page there too (thrown together after the first wave of pre-slashdot effect hit our gallery; and yes, the fact is just as this, there is one more independent photo link there).

The bottleneck ATM is the shaper, we enjoy sponsored colocation and hardware (by WNet ISP) and current outbound traffic is around 512Kbps.

Otherwise, our ALT Linux server that's serving you now is perfectly OK, given it's 4-way Xeon with a meg cache per CPU with a gig of RAM and SmartArray. So load average is more like: 0.19, 0.14, 0.12.

Here's a postcard from Apache (no nginx on top of it even ;-) -- 167 requests currently being processed, 8 idle servers (I've upped MaxClients from 150 to 250, hope it's enough for some time -- seen 180+ max today).

and here's top's top:

CPU0 states: 1.1% user, 4.4% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 93.3% idle
CPU1 states: 0.2% user, 0.2% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.1% idle
CPU2 states: 0.3% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.2% idle
CPU3 states: 0.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.4% idle
Mem: 1033300k av, 680024k used, 353276k free, 0k shrd, 4168k buff
346864k active, 246712k inactive
Swap: 522072k av, 2240k used, 519832k free 482032k cached

PS: we'll be doing 4th conference like that this October, feel free to contact me during next weeks if you're eager to travel to Kiev and roll a speech on Free Software!

Re:It's always nice when Open Source can lend a ha

[TheTomcat]

Dude.
Too much [Wikipedia].

S

Linus Torvalds Saved by Windows XP!

[Jahz]

"At a presentation on the progress of the linux kernel, Linus Torvalds Linux-based laptop it the dust. The presentation was saved by a kind audience member who volunteered his Windows XP laptop to finish displaying the remainder of the presentation." Ever seen this article? Of course not. It doesnt exist. and THATS why this is a big deal.

Old news

[vginders]

Did anybody checked this? It's old: http://paq.osdn.org.ua.nyud.net:8090/~mike/img/MS- uses-OOo/ [IMG] hpim2544.jpg 11-Oct-2004 21:25 460k [IMG] hpim2544.sized.jpg 11-Oct-2004 21:25 95k

Re:offtopic question

[sffubs]

My karma is listed as "good", but I'm not special enough to not have to decode an image.

Posting this prolly won't help either...

YEAH

[jurt1235]

Well, anyway it is interesting that Microsoft has running linux machines standing around at places this close to public, makes me wonder how high the linuxcounter project goes within Microsoft.

Excel file saved by OO-Calc

[sktea]

I had a similar experience when a user in my organization couldn't open an Excel workbook -- Excel 2002 crashed whenever the user tried that specific XLS file. I checked first that Office XP was fully patched (it was); then I opened the offending file in Calc and identified the problem: a column which normally contained a simple formula somehow got corrupted. Instead of the formula, there was a long string of gobbledygook in each cell in that column. I replaced the string with the correct formula, saved it in XLS format and voilá! The user thanked me and I informed all of the IT support folks to keep a copy of OpenOffice handy for just such an occasion.

Re:Not First Time Strenghts, Weakeness Demonstrate

[110010001000]

It must be nice to be caught in a reality distortion field. There is no excuse for Linux World presenters not to be using Linux/OSS for their presentations. The "projection equipment" is not dependent on Powerpoint - it simply uses the VGA output port. BTW, this story is a hoax. The last time it supposedly occurred in September during a joint MS/Novell conference. But dont let reality creep in!

kind of more full text (Get The Facts, heh)

[gvy]

Well there was the bottom part of the message holding the explanation itself:

Facts (below)

As for the facts:

• it was not Master but ALT Linux Compact 2.3 (page|ISO|ML)
• it was Third Ukrainian Free Software Developers' and Users' Conference
• it was sponsored by IBM, Novell and EMT (yeah, I work for ...us; another funny thing is that Microsoft proposed to sponsor the conference too but we decided to politely decline the generous offer)
• it is the head of Microsoft Ukraine, Mr. Valery Lanovenko
• it is the Tablet PC which failed to feed the projector on the secondary head properly to blame
• and indeed it's OpenOffice.org on our Linux/ThinkPad running their PowerPoint presentation ;-)
• IMG_0395 has Mr. Lanovenko's personal comment -- he tries to make an impression that it was PDF (we as the conference staff recommended to keep those at hand) but all of us know OOo doesn't display PDFs ;-)

You bet there was some debate afterwards but no tomatoes flying (which was quite the fear of Mr. Lanovenko's coworkers) :-) Shameless plugs

BTW, there's going to be 4th such conference this autumn (first weekend of October), you're welcome! (details at the conference site, see above)

Re:Not First Time Strenghts, Weakeness Demonstrate

[Atzanteol]

it's possible that the Linux World Expo had crufty projection equipment and did not let anyone boot anything else.

It's possible, but not true.

One developer (yes, well-respected developer) simply stated (expecting flames) that Power Point was better and said he would not take any questions on that during his presentation.

Though that was a few years back. The last time I saw him at LWCE he was using a Mac with some other presentation software.

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[aardwolf204]

Then I guess it wont help to tell you that the next week on our quarterly conference call I received the quarterly champion award complete with glass trophy. Find a job where the boss is an old fortran guru.

In Soviet Russia, documents save you!

[njchick]

n/t

Re:In Soviet Russia, documents save you!

[temcat]

But remember, sometimes they can delete you, too...

Is this really noteworthy?

[rockhome]

Is this really worth anyone's time? Big deal, a machine broke down and an alternative was found. Does this really count as noteworthy outside of the relatively low "ha-ha" factor?

How appropriate...

[at_slashdot]

Ads by Google:
"Linux Comparison

Get The Facts: Windows vs. Linux. Read The Independent Analysis Now."

I think I just got the facts without the "independent" analysis paid by Microsoft.

Another 'Big Deal'...

[Chordonblue]

...would be if MS would actually start supporting the format they helped create (OASIS).

your slashdot problems:

[ImaLamer]

You failed the Turing test.

Considering...

[Svartalf]

...that you needed to download updates, etc. you probably had hardware that wasn't officially supported under RH 8.0 to begin with.

Something about listed hardware and OSes runs through my mind right at the moment...Oh yeah...

"You shouldn't expect anything that is not on the list to work."

Give him a +1 Interesting (Amiga story)

[Chordonblue]

"I doubt they've kept the Amigas running to this day though."

Nah, not with Scala running on PC's - even I switched over to that. I think the main difference with eating your own dog food / not-invented-here is that the balance changes when you're talking about open source.

IBM's attempt to use what they promote is commendable, as is Novell's. The beauty of this particular approach is that code from within or without can serve to better their own product and that's what's exciting to me. Even if IBM/Sun/Novell's in-house product was allowed to become staid, there are always others out there dilligently modifying the original code, adding features, fixing bugs, etc.

As an example of this cross-pollination, look how IBM has started to embrace OpenOffice.org - that's an example of how companies are starting to 'get it'.

Re:We tried this...

[Elshar]

First, you realize that OpenBSD != Knoppix, nor is OBSD in any way, shape, or form even closely related to knoppix?

That said, the main complaints were that they couldn't find games or spyware that they were accustomed to?!

And then you ditched the whole effort, and fired the guy because one employee didn't back his project up at all, and managed to bork it while it was reading from a database?! You sure you should be his boss? Or that he was the one you should've fired?

Just a disclaimer: I dislike linux. Alot. I do use it though, and I have to say from your story, not only did you seem to be against it to begin with, you seemed to also dislike the employee, as you clearly let him do it just so you could find an excuse to undo it, and then fire him.

Otherwise, you'd have had him 'fix' the issues people had. Can't find notepad? Well here, use gvim/gedit. Can't find mspaint? Here's gpaint. kcalc?

What? You need a calculator? How 'bout xcalc, or
All the stupidass games that are default in windows (solitare, minesweeper, mahjongg, hearts, pinball) are also pretty much defaults in kde.

Just a few hours with the affected employees and they'd have been retrained. And, if he'd edited the menus, he could've made it look so much like windows they'd have barely noticed.

So what Powerpunt doesn't like talking to itself

[Original Cynic]

Why is this so shocking to anybody? All you have to do is to generate a Powerpunt presentation using a MAC then transfer it to a PC. At BEST you end up with a presentation with MANY misinterpreted fonts and symbols. I routinely resort to opening "broken" powerpunt presentations in Open Office then resave them as powerpunt to recover them. I have found that if I stay on the same computer and operating system (ie winders) then Symbols and Fonts problems become almost nonexistent.

where was the the news coverage..

[sucati]

when my laptop (running mandrake 9) crashed while I was attempting to give a presentation on the benefits of leveraging opensource technologies in our applications. Turns out it didn't like the video source being switched to a projector. Nonetheless talk about embarassing and no I'm not making this up. I'm a huge linux/opensource proponent but this story is just one-sided.

Re:haha

[Snay.Boot]

Little off topic, but I saw a Natwest cash machine (ATM) last week, with a Microsoft Vicual C++ Runtime Error. Probably not actually M$es fault, but youd think something like a cash machine would need to be secure. Oh well, some people never learn...

Re:We tried this...

[macshome]

Erm... I do believe that post was a joke. Sheesh...

lame, people

[globaljustin]

What's the deal?

Why do some Linux geeks have to respond to the parent's post with: "Oh, well, I didn't have that problem when I installed MY Red Hat 8.0, really it's pretty easy. I played starcraft, downloaded pr0n, and brushed my teeth while I installed Red Hat."

It's obvious that you condescending dorks have something to prove...get a girlfriend, then you can brag to her about your Linux skills.

Parent's post was an individual annecdote. It should be taken as such, and not as some kind of rant against Red Hat. He/She obviously knows how to get things done w/ a computer.

Re:lame, people

[Slashcrap]

Why do some Linux geeks have to respond to the parent's post with: "Oh, well, I didn't have that problem when I installed MY Red Hat 8.0, really it's pretty easy.

This is a discussion forum. That means a place where people discuss things. The way it works is that someone posts a fact or opinion and then other people post replies. Now the shocking thing is, and I think you're going to need to focus all of your obviously considerable intellect to grasp this, they may actually disagree with or point out inaccuracies in the original post!

It's obvious that you condescending dorks have something to prove...get a girlfriend, then you can brag to her about your Linux skills.

I'd rather do that than have to brag about how I used my stunning wit to summon up some deeply unoriginal cliches and use them to put down people discussing their choice of OS on a discussion forum where people discuss their choice of OS.

I think that if I were in that situation, suicide would be an attractive option.

Re:lame, people

[globaljustin]

are you flaming?

just because this is an open discussion forum does not make every post equal. People post all kinds of crap on here, which makes the good, ON-TOPIC posts stand out more.

I think bragging about how you can run Red Hat with no problems instead of discussing the actually issues mentioned in the post is off-topic and lame.

If you can tell me how some uber-geek bragging about how he/she 'didn't have those problems, red hat is so easy' is an on-topic post discussing choice of OS, then please do so, otherwise don't bother responding.

Re:lame, people

[Slashcrap]

are you flaming?

How very perceptive of you. I can see it's going to be difficult to get anything past you.

People post all kinds of crap on here, which makes the good, ON-TOPIC posts stand out more.

Quite right. Looking through your posting history I can't help wondering - are you thinking of writing one at any point?

I think bragging about how you can run Red Hat with no problems instead of discussing the actually issues mentioned in the post is off-topic and lame.

I don't really give a shit about Ded Rat to be quite honest. It's nearly as brain damaged as Windows in my experience. I wouldn't touch it with a shitty stick if I weren't paid good money to do so.

The reason for my reply was that you were being an insulting little prick. Now that's fine when it's done with any style or originality, but you can't even manage that. Just tired old cliches that betray your utter lack of personality.

And here's the thing - people with tedious personalities and no sense of humour tend not be terribly successful with women. Unless you are a multi-millionaire with a 12inch cock, I find it hard to believe that you speak from a position of strength when you trot out the old "you use Linux so you're smelly and can't get laid" lines.

You are a waste of carbon and your shitty posts are a waste of electrons. Have you ever considered Usenet as an outlet for your stunning insights? You'd fit right in.

Re:haha

[moonty]

Saw this one in Las Vegas -- Windows XP virtual memory error.

Re:Famebaits

[Shin Chan]

Here's one for you: Bill Gates is pretty famous.

You were asking for famebates, right? :)

Re:find a new job bro

[Aeiri]

I'm sure you're paid pretty well, but don't you think there's a better place for your talents?

Score:-1, Missed the Point

Got married.

[CustomDesigned]

get a girlfriend, then you can brag to her about your Linux skills

I'm married with four kids. And whenever I get too long winded on an anti-microsoft rant, my wife starts crying. That means it's time to get back to the real world. She understands the social and political aspects of open source, but not the technical. The book that really helped her understand was "The Joy of Linux".

Her favorite famous geek is Richard Stallman - because he is focused on long term goals of freedom and social justice, explains them in non-technical language, and doesn't get hung up on the technical issues of the day.

Re:find a new job bro

[Anonymous Monkey]

Thanks. But just to set your heart at ease, I no longer work at that office (I was temp to hire and I had the joy of telling them No, when they offered to hire me) and the talking too was not that stern.

Re:We tried this...

[iabervon]

Your problem is that you installed Knoppix on the machines. Really, it's meant to be run off of the CD (and only one CD per sysadmin). That means that people won't generally have to deal with the extra productivity except in emergencies.

Re:haha

[aichpvee]

Bill Gates looks like a 1970s college graduate flung into the future by a malfunctioning Centrino processor that generated a mighty graviton wave.

Bill didn't graduate from college...

Re:We tried this...

[jred]

Even *I* got it, and I'm a dumbass.

How many rendering problems were there?

[geekee]

I'ver yet to open an office document of any real commplexity in oo and have it render correctly. Even worse, excel charts are just gone.

Ok, seriously, what is going on

[ribo-bailey]

xbox360 is using IBM chips, Apple wants to use Intel chips, and MS is using openoffice and linux for their presentations. BIIZAARRROOOO WORLD!!!

A picture is worth...

[gnarlin]

Well, my thousand words are up!

Twice in less than one week...

[pandrijeczko]

...that a Slashdot article has mentioned Ukraine!

Careful now, IBM will opening call-centres there next!

The Revolution is near!

[agotterba]

How can I now allow this man
To hold dominion over me?
This desperate man whom I have hunted
He gave me my life. He gave me freedom.
I should have perished by his hand
It was his right.
It was my right to die as well
Instead I live... but live in hell.

And must I now begin to doubt,
Who never doubted all these years?
My heart is stone and still it trembles
The world I have known is lost in shadow.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
And does he know
That granting me my life today
This man has killed me even so?

Re:haha

[zeno_2]

but he *looks* like it

You are missing the bigger issue

[dsci]

The real point here is that there was a working alternative available; in this case, it was a non-MS product. If OOo did not support the MS file format, this presentation would have died.

The real point is this shows one practical utility of open file formats.

thumbs nose

[globaljustin]

score YOU -1, sometimes being three steps ahead means being one step behind

Messenger VS Content

[quarkscat]

So the messenger used by MSFT to deliver their propaganda was a linux laptop running OO.o.

The content, however, was that MSFT's Shared Source initiative brings something useful to developers -- which it cannot do because MSFT's SS is far more viral than GPL could ever be.

IMHO, OO.o needs to work on a reality checker plug-in that detects bullshit propaganda in the content, and perhaps changing the background color similar to the USA's DHS Threat Level color chart.
It would need to be an optional plug-in, since it would otherwise render OO.o completely unsuitable for certain corporate and government use. Either that, or else a diagonal watermark across the offending text: "Nothing to see here. Move along."

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[Lord Faust]

Knoppix has saved me a few times. I can honestly say that it was the only thing I came out of my operating systems (read: Unix / Linux) course with, that has been of any use. Everything else was just pro-OSS / anti-MS diatribe.

I'm all for teaching people the value of MS alternatives, but adopting a holier-than-thou attitude in regards to yourself -vs- Windows users isn't how to ingratiate people to your cause.

Thankfully, Knoppix -- and other distros -- are good enough products that they've allowed me to ignore the Linux zealots and continue trying out the various OSS products I come across.

As far as the story goes; good showing on OO's part, but hardware issues can affect anyone. Don't get too cocky.

Funny thing ..

[The MESMERIC]

Using when I am stuck with a hardware problem.

- Combo Printer/Scanner that won't work.
- Internal/External Dial-up/ADSL modem
- Palm OS that won't synchronize via USB.

... Microsoft Windows XP saves the day.
Sad but true.

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[Mistah Blue]

And more importantly, you were able to demonstrate to you CEO why he may not want to be held hostage to Microsoft.

BULL

[jackofallbrandnames]

If he had Windows (pick a version), it would have worked just as well on that IBM Thinkpad, too. The problem is faulty hardware...tablets and pdas just aren't durable enough for software that requires the dependability of timed presentations. Linux products would fail if installed on the Tablet as well...if they 'ever' get there.

microsoft 's trust on there machine is nil now

[smileplzz]

Even the microsoft peole cant trust there own machine now.this really is a cool news . microsoft sucks linux rocks

Re:We tried this...

[felixdzerzhinsky]

"Really, it's meant to be run off of the CD (and only one CD per sysadmin)." Knoppix is free and open source software you can make as many copies as you want. I ran knoppix as a hard disk install for one year with no problems. Dare I say it, it basically becomes Debian. Still Kanotix is probably better as a hard disk install. Less tweaking to do after installing. Personally these days I am running Ubuntu.

Hide it with a proxy

[SgtChaireBourne]

Hmm... Circa 1997 80%+ of country MSFT ops ran their webservers on Linux or Solaris. The moment Netcraft published this and they became a laughing stock it was all migrated to IIS within 2 weeks.

More likely they just changed the identification strings sent out by the server. Or else just slapped a proxy in front of the offending servers, like with Hotmail.

Two weeks, without warning, would be an incredibly short time for any large migration let alone major servers. Given that they've been unable to port Hotmail off of BSD and on to their own crufty products for going on a decade, I think that the proxy trick is more likely than real migration.

Double Quotes?

[krischik]

Well, I remember that DB2 uses double quotes to denote id. With double qutoes you can use spaces inside id's, keywords as id and last not least id's become case sensitive (without double quotes they are converted to upper case).

So quoting id's is quite usefull. Only It should have been:

Karma: SELECT "karma" FROM "users" WHERE "userid"=138474;

Re:Reminds me of something that just happened to m

[fredrik70]

nice one!
there is another way as well IIRC, you can take the windows install CD and boot into the cmd prompt from there in order to try to retrieve files.