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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."
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<speech>
<voice>Nelson Muntz</voice>
<voiceArtist>Nancy Cartwright</voiceArtist>
<text>Ha-Ha!</text>
</speech>
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
The original link is fster than the cache
2 544.sized.jpg
http://paq.osdn.org.ua/~mike/img/MS-uses-OOo/hpim
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Can somebody verify that the info is accurate?
It looks like Open Office didn't open the presentation properly. Look at all of those crazy symbols.
/. ++
Let's just hope they [MSFT] don't get all miffy about it, eh?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...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
What's the big deal here? Right tool for the job. The other laptop wasn't working during crunch time, so why not?
He is so fired
Be careful, Microsoft might think this counts as a Shared Source Initiative.
Will this appear in ANYWHERE but slashdot? I mean, will common people know about it? And more important... will they even care?
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.
This story seems a little skinny on details. Does anyone have any more information?
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 ?
And not one story about all the presentations given at Linux World that were done using Power Point on Windows.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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?
That's almost on an par with the infamous Windows 98 crash video!
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.
e d.jpg
http://www.collegechixors.com/images/hpim2544.siz
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?
[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."
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Microsoft's public failures are always amusing.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
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.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
... it's clearly an operating system problem on the tablet, not a hardware problem. Linux to the rescue!
...us; another funny thing is that Microsoft proposed to sponsor the conference too but we decided to politely decline the generous offer) ;-) ;-)
------------------
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
* 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
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
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.
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.
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
They're just demonstrating their superior error handling.
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...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
who is she? leave a comment!
Someone actually used Coral Cache in a direct image link from a slashdot story?!?
... dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria...
World... ending... pigs flying
(-1: Silly)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
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!
Michael Shigorin EMT.Com.UA * OSDN.Org.UA * Linux.Kiev.UA * ALTLinux.ORG
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!
Facts (below)
As for the facts:
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)
Michael Shigorin EMT.Com.UA * OSDN.Org.UA * Linux.Kiev.UA * ALTLinux.ORG
n/t
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.