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Scottish Police Revert to Microsoft Office
LordGuha writes "The Central Scotland Policy is removing StarOffice and replacing it with Microsoft Office citing lower maintenance and running costs and greater integration with other departments. According to the article StarOffice was implemented in 2000 when the department was low in cash but lately have estimated that the Microsoft software would cost no more and lead to greater efficiencies."
The other 95% were using Microsoft Office. So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office.
You know, it's crazy giving cops tools like Microsoft Office or StarOffice in the first place. 99.99% of people who use word processors don't get past the part where you hit keys and watch text appear on the screen. Oh yeah, and open and save documents. That's all they ever do.
I'd bet real money that the textarea element in a browser like Firefox provides all the text-editing functionality that these people need, especially if you add spell correct via JavaScript. Hit submit and there's your save function, to a central server that can be accessed from any department. Click a link and there's your file open functionality. Amazing!
You can even do forms! LOL
Why aren't they using a system like this? Because some idiot somewhere equates more-expensive with easier-to-use. It's the oldest story in IT, and it's always a tragedy.
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Why didn't you know?
In other news, math skills of Scottish police reported to be at an all time low.
It should be said that the quality of that version of StarOffice isn't what we can have now with OpenOffice.org or the new StarOffice.
The key question is, did their temporary move put enough pressure on Microsoft to get them a cheaper deal for Office? In which case, it's worth moving to OpenOffice even if you intend to move back...
Xenu loves you!
Firstly, it's Central Scotland Police, ie the police in the Central region, not all.d own_police/ ;-)
Secondly, they are migrating nearly *everything* back to MS. TheRegister have a better description here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_
complete with anglo-saxon mispronunciation joke
It's a shame, but maybe they are right. It's not easy to pay enough for good linux/unix admins on public sector wages.
Central Scotland Police are, as the article states, one of eight forces in Scotland. They also cover a relatively small area and employ "about 1000 officers" - compared with 7500 for the largest Scottish Police force, Strathclyde Police.
I work as a software designer for an Australian government department. They use the same sort of excuses for sticking with MS. In that case at least, it's lies. They stick with MS because it's executives that make the decisions and they get information from only two sources: MS sales staff and noisy linux zealots from within their own staff.
The zealots come off as zealots and are thus dismissed as having nothing useful to say.
The MS sales staff have "consultant" in their job title and are thus deigned (by the senior execs) to be experts on all things computerish.
Of course to those of us who grok operating environments and who don't grok executives and consultants see said executives as fools and their reasons as invalid.
Oh well.
.. this costs less, is well be cause of this:
TIME = MONEY * 3
In this sort of situation, the extra time it takes to convert documents to different formats, and keep those formats updated, totally outweighs the point of moving systems in the first place.
This should be a lesson to organisations, if you want to go open source; do it right - and change all systems at once.
I'm reminded of the "E-Learning" system at Best Buy...I think if they switched to Open Office and had a short but mandatory training module before they started working with it on how to use and convert any applicable proprietary formats to be compatible with all the Microsoft things they could save money on licensing. Unless Microsoft drops their prices WAY down for corporate customers they have plenty of money to implement an OSS solution and integrate it to be just as easy to use.
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
How can a $300 software package be cheaper then free?
I don't think Star Office is free. I think you're confusing it with Open Office.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
If they can talk the frugal out a Scotsman.
/part Scot, the stereotype is well deserved
a) StarOffice isn't free. You're thinking of OpenOffice.
b) Large organisations don't pay list price. This is software, Microsoft will have discounted it down to a point where they can regain the business.
why it is up to openoffice to try to read microsoft's documents. you know its a free download go get it and install it so you can read the people's documents that are created in openoffice.
openoffice uses open standards for file saving and microsoft doesn't - this isn't rocket science people. just run them side by side until you totally switch to open office.
...post this on /.
It's like swearing in the church (as we in Holland use to call it). Actually, in my company I've made the same calculation. I use some program's which only work with MS Office and it would cost me more to have them rewritten then to buy the 10 licenses for ms-office. Also, the employees would have to learn openoffice/staroffice which is easily done, but the time it will take to give support for questions like "how do I change my stylesheet", "how does this work..." etc will cost me even more then the licenses alone...
Central Scotland Police has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft that will see the force standardise on Microsoft Server 2003 and Windows XP (SP2). The deal was struck under the Office of Government Commerce's (OGC) agreement with Microsoft to offer preferential rates for public sector organisations, and will cost the force less than £60,000 per year. 60000 pounds = +/- 60 pounds/workplace = +/- 108 USD It is not because they could not read the other documents, it is because MS offered them W2k3 + Office2k3 for a mere 100 dollars! Where can I get their software that cheap?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
First time I've ever posted here, and I really knew what to expect from this thread, but I had to say this.
We all automatically assume that the police organization doesn't know what it's doing, doesn't know how to perform cost-benefit analysis, and all are just a bunch of non-tech-savvy pawns. They made the switch to OpenOffice *5* years ago. You don't think that's enough time to give something a shot and evaluate it? You don't think that's enough time to see how much something is going to cost or impact your organization? You don't think that they had people working on it and trying to honestly switch to OSS? Unless you work there, I think your post is way out of line (as well as a lot of others in this thread).
I'm not a Microsoft apologist, but why can't you see past your own point of view? OSS isn't better just because it's free or because it's not Microsoft. Sheesh. Give these people some credit for at least trying something new.
RTFA They only have to pay 100$/seat for the Windows + Office deal.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There are still some major problems for Star Office.
First it normally defaultly saves in Star Office Format not MS Word format, yes this is an easy change but people when they are done just hit the save Icon and they are done, they don't want to go threw tens of choices and find the document that everyone else uses.
Second Individuals has invested time in MS Office. From those High School Computer Class to College Classes, CS101. The education system for computers are so dumb that they teach people how to use Microsoft Word but not a Word Processor. So almost everyone who enters the Work field know Office.
Third Speed. Open Office has had a speed problem from day 1. Yea Office isn't a speed daemon but it is fast where the users feel it is important, boot up and typing and saving.
Forth Interface. Open Office is setup with a good interface for Linux but not for Windows or Mac. This is actually very important to know the OS you are porting to and follow the OS's Interface guidelines. If you don't the application looks 3rd party and just doesn't feel right.
Fifth Work Flow. Open Offices goal is to create all the functionality and compatibility of Office but it forgot to get the work flow. Watch a non technical person use Office and you will see that their ways of solving problems may surprise you. They avoid using Style Sheets and just go for the Font Drop Down, except for hitting tab they will use the space and they never ever use hot keys for anything. The menus are off limit to them (The same with the windows start button) If they don't see it it must be an advanced feature that they shouldn't use.
Open Office is good for techs but not for normal people
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think you need to look further than initial purchase cost.
.doc format sitting right here to prove you wrong.
If you RTFA, there's a very telling sentence:
Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland's Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups
OpenOffice is fine if all you're doing is opening up a letter or a simple form in Word format. But if you want to claim that it's faultless for all documents, I have many thousands of pages in Word
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Anyone having trouble with it still is usually using Linux and hasn't gotten their true-type fonts working correctly.
Of course, the Scots could have used OpenOffice for free, but a top official was quoted as saying "functionally, it's a superior product, but we just prefer the MS-style clipart".
Can just imagine their posters "Wanted. Bank robber." And then it has a clipart pic of some guy in a stripey shirt holding a bag labelled "swag".
Q: How was copper wire invented?
;)
A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny...
Well, I'm all Scottish and I just wanted to point out that, as a race, we have the proportionately highest incidence of philanthropy of any nation on the planet*. Look at folk like Carnegie. Don't get me started on inventions, for which we are also, as a race, reknowned...
John (haggis eating**, kilt wearing***, bagpipe loving**** Scotsman)
* Source: John's International Survey of Racial Philanthropy, August 2005;
** McSween's;
*** Only at Weddings or when abroad;
**** I lied about loving bagpipes. They are no less than weapons of mass distruction disguised as musical instruments...
"and the need to interoperate more smoothly with other departments running Windows."
Aka, dominance brings it own appeal.
Loading...
I'll probably get strung up on a length of Cat5 by enraged slashdotters for writing this, but there's a reason why people who have used MS Office products tend to continue using them: they're well-designed, and they work well enough for most purposes. I'm not talking about accountants and actuaries who try to shoehorn Excel + VB macros into acting like a Real Programming Language for financial calculations, but the mere fact that you have fax templates, that you can copy and paste easily from one app to another, and that you can run a decent little database using Access if you want. That as a manager running an office, you can put "skilled with MS Office applications" in a job ad for a secretary and find someone who can at least click through menus and generate the documents you need. That the applications look professional and clean and they come with a support number for a company that will not go out of business anytime soon. That the company will at least attempt to help you fix your problems and whom you can blame if something goes horribly wrong. ("It's not my fault, it's that damn Microsoft app!" you say to your VP who's pissed at the monthly reports being late again.)
OpenOffice is pretty good, and I use it exclusively on my work laptop running Ubuntu, but my choice in running Linux and other open-source applications is all about my freedom to use, redistribute and modify the application as I see fit, unencumbered by restrictive EULAs and software patents and all the baggage that goes along with shrink-wrapped commercial software. I'm willing to take the time and effort necessary to re-learn how to copy formulas instead of values in a spreadsheet app, where the default save locations live in the word processing app, and how to turn off the @#$(*! assistant. Most people don't care that much, and are willing to spend the money to use something they're familiar with and that is a de facto standard instead of taking the harder path. And don't get me wrong, it is harder to use even something as pretty and polished as Ubuntu + OpenOffice for a user familiar with Microsoft products, although it's a damn sight easier than it was 5 years ago.
Most people are lazy, and want to get things done as simply as possible. Big software companies take advantage of that, both at a personal and a corporate level. There's a reason why Microsoft is the gigantic software behemoth that it is, and that's because it understands this and understands how to sell products to individuals and organizations. That doesn't mean that its software is technologically superior, or more fun to hack on, or more free to use; but it makes people buy more stuff from them.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
I make close to 40 dollars an hour. If I spend 10 hours learning OpenOffice, any savings are washed out. Will it take me 10 hours to leran? No... but what if I have to spend 15 minutes working around a difference? How about 2 minutes fixing some document that didn't translate well? Add em all up, and the savings is gone. Now perform these calculations, but use Doctor salaries. Use attorney salaries. Or executive assistant salaries. Do the math. The cost of software is really insignificant in comparison to people-time.
Most slashdotters advocating open source on the desktop think they are battling a monopoly or vendor lock-in. From a business's perspective, the best software is ALWAYS the software you know, the software with which you are most productive.
REAL Cops use ed!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Of course this is not a problem with OpenOffice per se, it's a problem of imperfect interoperability between OpenOffice and Word, i.e. the Word loader in OO is imperfect. But this shouldn't be a problem if all your documents are in OpenOffice format, and all your users use it - provided you don't need to exchange many documents with other organisations using Word. I have many large and complex documents created in OpenOffice (which is far nicer to use than Word), and because I have no need to ever load them in Word at all (they get distributed as PDF), the solution works well.
I've started playing around with the OpenOffice 2 beta and it's support for loading Word files has definitely improved (as has it's PDF export). Some of my older .doc files that I previously could not open in OO 1 I can now open perfectly. I hope it's good enough though to start being compelling enough to attract "converts". Converting to open formats costs money in the short term, of course, and will be a "painful" process for the world to go through, but the whole idea is that you save money in the long term, and ultimately it's necessary to move away from proprietary formats, because it's needlessly inefficient.
You know, I just read that as:
"Scottish Police Pervert to Microsoft Office"
And suddenly it all made sense...
Having worn both hats, geek and suit, I have to say you can't make this kind of decision purely on technical OR non-technical criteria. You have to use all your knowledge to do what's best for the organization.
Personally, I'd have taken this deal if I were the IT director, and I'm borderline Linux zealot. You take Ceasars salt, you do Ceasars bidding -- and if crucifiction doesn't appela to you, you look after his interests. MS offered them a deal that's a no-brainer. Just do the math.
They have about 1000 officers plus support staff. Don't know how many licenses this is but MS offered them a package deal at £60,000, which divided by the staff works out to £60/body/year. So it's as close to free beer as makes no difference, especially if this saves a staff position a year dealing with the fact nearly everyone else uses MS. Let's say that financially, it's the same as getting the software for free.
Add to this that the deal includes software they need to comply with legal requirements, software they estimate they'd have paid £100,000 to build custom, and now they're far ahead. It's the same old story, fortunately less common today than a few years ago: the app I need isn't available on Linux. In a couple of years when the deal runs out, the free alternatives will have closed the gap more, either forcing the market price of MS software down, or making it even more feasible to switch over if that really makes sense.
From MS's standpoint, this is very smart move. This deal is exactly what I'd have offered. MS wasn't making any dough from these guys anyways, an since its marginal cost for duplicating the software is nil, the limitation on dropping their price is that they don't want to encourage people to switch just to get the deal. That level is probably close to zero at this point in time: for most organizations, the TCO savings of F/OSS isn't attractive enough to switch once the you factor in sunk costs, conversion/training costs, and short term opportunity costs.
So, MS walks away with 60K in their pocket per year, which is not much but it is better than zero. They also get the priceless publicity of a high profile organization going F/OSS and giving up.
It's a natural and, unfortunately, effective competitive strategy in a business where the marginal cost of a product is zero. I expect that as Linux and OpenOffice get better and better we'll be hearing a lot more stories like this.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"go threw tens of choices" ... "Individuals has invested time in MS Office" ... "everyone who enters the Work field know Office" ... "Forth Interface" ... "Open Offices goal"
:)
A Sixth Problem: Spell-checking and grammar checking don't seem to work properly.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Why dinnae they switch to ScotsOffice? Microsoft, Open, whatever Office you use, if it's not Scottish, it's CRAP!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Where is the OSS answer to Exchange??
Maybe here? I personnaly perfer Novell's (SuSE's) OpenExchange, easier to set up and install. Been using it at the office for over 2 years now.
I never understood why they can't just save things as RTFs more often. Is it because that would require the use of a complicated *gasp* pull-down menu? If they're so worried about compatibility, why not just use RTFs for things that don't use images? And I'm just assuming the police don't use wordart as frequently as my 6th grade class did. And why is there such a bias against the TXT format? If all you're concerned about is the information in the document and pictures aren't necessary, why does it have to look pretty?
Esoteric reference.
You know, it's crazy giving cops tools like Microsoft Office or StarOffice in the first place. 99.99% of people who use word processors don't get past the part where you hit keys and watch text appear on the screen. Oh yeah, and open and save documents. That's all they ever do.
You've spent how long exactly sitting in a UK police station watching policemen use computers? Your experience does not coincide with mine.
I typically install LAMP even on desktops so webapps can be run locally. The browser is just another GUI.
There is no way that other OS should be mentioned on the same page as Linux for web services. Linux wins hands down.
The folks locked into that other OS are to be pitied. It is not that Windows is wonderful, but that they have been allowed to establish and maintain a monopoly by illegal means. If they were so good they would not have to use illegal means. Look at the "final agreement". They are allowed to set quotas to distributors at the 50% level and servers aren't even covered. They are allowed to punish distributors that ship PCs without Windows. What a sham when DOJ helps the criminals in their wrongdoing.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Well, I work IT in a law enforcement agency, and so I can speak to that. The parent is right, you don't know what the Hell you're talking about.
Police use Word to fill in reports, forms, etc. that could definitely not be formatted using Wordpad. They also have to save that form data, which could not be done with a web form or Acrobat Reader.
They also use Word to interact with Excel and Access databases. When you're sending out a notification letter to 180 victims in a given county, you better believe it's a helluva lot easier to use Word's mail merge than typing each name individually in Wordpad.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Trust me, the police not only use Word, but a whole bunch of other software as well. And you should be glad they do.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Microsoft historically has gone for the easy way out by hiding the complicated functions below a pretty "Click 'OK' to automatically install and configure your firewall" MessageBox, which is fine if you're writing a document, but not so good if you need to tweak out your server for maximum functionality and security.
You can see this mentality in everything they do. From Visual Studio with it's horrible automatically-generated code, to their AD permissions 'wizard', they are all about one thing: selling widgets. And the number one rule is selling a mass-market product requires convenience over functionality or security.
LAMP is built for the do-it-yourself/tinkerer crowd, and therefore the average person will never be able to install, configure, or maintain a LAMP environment or application.
Yeah, right.
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
:)
I'm late to the thread here, but it seems that most people with the 'OpenOffice is nearly there' argument haven't really seen MS Office being used in medium to large organizations.
The MS Office integration with the network system (AD/Exchange) and now Sharepoint make the technical menu imitations of OpenOffice nearly irrelevant.
From a website, I can click a button, open a spreadsheet *in the browser* (not a full browser takeover, just embedded in part of the web page), make changes/updates, then save the document, and it'll save back on the network drive (or wherever it came from) seamlessly. If live realtime document collaboration of any Office doc was able to be embedded in IE already, I wouldn't be surprised.
MS has moved beyond the reach of OpenOffice for the next few years because they've taken multi-domain integration to the next stage, way ahead of the fragmentation that exists (almost by definition) in the open source world.
I'm writing this as someone who has pretty much used LAMP for about 9 years, and uses Linux on my desktop daily for the past 3.
Now, if someone was to take the novell openexchange system and define new protocols such that Firefox/Mozilla could do realtime openoffice document embedding and communication with the openexchange server, throwing in an embedded gaim client using a jabber protocol for good measure, and made this cross platform, that would be a serious contender. I'm afraid that won't happen for a few years, until a bunch of OSS developers get a glimpse of what's going on in the corporate world. Unfortunately, that may *never* happen, as many of them wouldn't get hired in the first place.
In short, Microsoft is staying ahead of the competition now by offering extremely tight integration among their core products, and it's only going to continue to go down that path. Not saying it's a bad thing - it's really the only way they *can* go, and I think it'll serve them well easily for another 3-5 years. That's about as far as I'll make predictions.
creation science book
funny, I've been making my living for the last 6 years with projects going away from Microsoft and Unix(tm) to Linux, and not a one has gone the other way. We're bound to see a percentage of cases where that happens, but is that the case in the majority of enterprises that have chosen to use open source? Buggy software can be written as either closed or open source, the license of a software has nothing to do with quality. A solid requirements gathering process, management of developers, discipline, version control, regression testing, use of user feedback & bug reporting, these are some things that make good software.
Apparantly the network was linuxservers at branch offices with MS Windows Desktops running StarOffice. To top it off expensive Sun servers running Staroffice stuff was in the mix. This was not what i would call a Linux migration in the first place! It was more of a Sun -> Microsoft migration.
i shpolice_1.html
Even more astonoshing is the fact that Microsoft apparantly promised to help develop an application that according to the Scottish would cost £100.00!
They only paid £60.000 for the licenses so i would say they got a VERY sweat deal on this. Can you get any cheaper than to get paid to use a product?
Read this article for some facts:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/11/HNscott
HTTP/1.1 400
/. is really circling the drain regarding enlightned debate.
/. orthodoxy.
It is so tiresome to see everybody screaming about OSS providing freedom to choose software tools - but it is only good when the choice is excersized in favour of Linux. The instant a choice is made to MS (god forbid) the hue and cry appears condemning those regressive bastards as idiots or dupes.
Don't offer choice if you are pushing an agenda. It is their choice, they tried something different - and it did not work out for them. Lets stop getting the knickers in a twist simply because someone went against the
This isn't really any big surprise. Microsoft Office became the defacto standard a long time ago, so not using Office automatically puts you out of step with the majority of businesses. Even if StarOffice and OpenOffice had 100% compatibility, they would still not be Microsoft Office. Whether by ethical means or not, Microsoft won the market, so until such time as PCs are no longer in use or we no longer need tools like Microsoft Office, competitors don't stand a chance no matter how good they are. Indeed, Windows itself is not the secret of Microsoft's power, that would be Office.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I've tried it and hate it. It's why I use macs: linux office apps suck. My office mate is a dieshard roll-your-own linux user and has been using star office as long as it has been around. He still truggles with it's byzantine menus. My other office mate is also a pure linux user and he gave up on it. He only uses TeX. He found remebering laTex is actually a lot easier and more consistent and powerful than remembering the star-office menu confusion.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It amazes me when open source fanatics are so arrogant as to suggest that anyone preferring a closed source product must either be stupid or receiving bribes from Microsoft. However, that's what happens any time that there's a Slashdot story where an organization chooses a Microsoft product over an open source product.
I have both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on my systems at home. I have found OpenOffice to be a really competent package that I heartily recommend to many home users. On the other hand, there are things about MS Office (such as the spreadsheet graphing capabilities) which are superior. I've also found the subtle formatting differences that cause widows, orphans, and page break problems when switching between the two packages. I can easily envision a department, agency, etc. regretting a switch to OpenOffice if they exchage documents with others using MS Office.
I take back what I said about piracy.. Downloading music is illegal!! I love Bush! Just say no to hacking!
which is the reverse of normal events, ergo it makes the news. Dittos for the Scottish police wp change.
Because so many people and businesses are converting to Linux and FOSS it's not news any more, so stories about that movment are rarely published anymore.
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per capita death rates of Americans in DC and LA are greater than American soldier combat deaths in Iraq, so when are we pulling out of DC or LA?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
When you try to do something even mildly advanced in OOo (like using Avery Labels in Landscape instead of Portrait mode) or even something as simple as printing a #10 envelope, OOo often falls down, badly.
When these issues are brought up to the developers (via their bug reporting system), the report is either ignored outright (in the case of the envelope printing) or the report is dismissed as a "feature enhancement" request and not a bug.
Come on people, you can't ask people to submit bug reports only to ignore or dismiss those reports.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that this agency indeed had submitted bug reports and were summarily ignored and/or dismissed. Hint time folks: this tends to piss people off, especially decision makers!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
We've used several "office" applications here in schools and I must say this:
Staroffice was terrible when we brought it in. Hard to use, with incompatability errors and a generally unpleasant interface. For quite awhile it propogated a mindset that anything that wasn't MS Office was frightening
Openoffice.org on the other hand (and perhaps more modern StarOffice versions), is very nice, better interface, decent (and improving) compatability, etc. Kids picked up Impress faster that I have, and design some *very* kickass presentations with it. The built-in PDF export facility from the document editors is nice too...
For those that prefer a slightly nicer interface than OO, depending on your version I've found quite a few people enjoyed Abiword as a replacement for the just word component of office.
Seriously, even as an OSS advocate I really disliked StarOffice, but there were/are better alternatives out there.
Very frustrating for me as a UNIX admin, and user. ALL, and let me put that in bold, ALL recruiters and HR people will only handle .doc resumes. Not a single recruiter or HR person I have ever dealt with (in 10 years) would accept a PDF, ASCII, or other formatted document. I find that fucking retarded, but it's something that we have to deal with if we want to eat.
.doc attachment of the job description. That pisses me off too.
Don't believe me? I have documented my job search. The best is when they send a blank email with a
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
If a poor nob nae kin wri bou a pizant wi sgain, how kin the nob gi his scuttin port i da hopper?
...
Tha plus ih don ha up-kilt cam add-ons fer da lassies
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --