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New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Ministry of Education has declined to renew a licensing deal for MS Office on 25,000 Macintosh computers in the country's schools. The Education Minister has suggested that schools use the free alternative NeoOffice. The article quotes a school principal who pointed out that the NeoOffice website warns users to expect problems and bugs: 'That's not the sort of software we should be expecting kids in New Zealand to be using.'" Schools are free to buy their own copies of Office. A blog on the New Zealand Herald site argues that the Ministry should have paid Microsoft this time, but not renewed the deal and instead developed a transition plan to open source.
Well, they sort of DID choose Open Office, except that they chose the native MacOS X port of it instead of the "plain" version.
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/es/index.php
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
NeoOffice can be quite tricky to use. Or - It used to be quite tricky to use. I believe they've updated the version since I used it. It used to bug out on me all the time. In the end, I shelled out on Apple Pages.
Saying that though, there's no reason students couldn't use it. I never lost any data or too much time using it, and it's fine for basic word-processing or spreadsheeting.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
- OpenOffice in X11, which is ugly, and doesn't integrate with the rest of the system.
- OpenOffice for Mac, which is unstable and is only available in source form.
- NeoOffice, which is fairly stable, doesn't need X11, and works now.
Unfortunately, the work done by the NeoOffice team is licensed under the GPL, and so can't be pushed back upstream to the OpenOffice, which is LGPL. NeoOffice is a fork, and will remain so unless they decide to change their license, and so will need to pull changes down from upstream periodically. The OpenOffice native port stays in sync with changes in the main tree automatically.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Appleworks hasn't been updated in years. If you're talking about iWork, well, Pages is more about layout than plain old word processing, and probably costs about the same as Office, when volume/education discounts are included. And then you don't get a spreadsheet program.
Sounds a lot like Debian's idea of "unstable", which other people think of as "stable", or their idea of "stable", which other people think of as "military grade".
I've personally seen the IRQL error several times on machines that run Linux flawlessly (and more often!) If it's something that rears its head only when there's bad hardware, then Linux must be a magical operating system that can turn bad hardware into good.
They tell you out in front what to expect from their software.....
You did read the EULA didn't you? No? Really?
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It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. On Windows I love OO.o, but I tried NeoOffice and found it slow and not fun to use. That's not to disparage the hard work these folks have done on a very difficult project.
But your blanket statements about iWork are incorrect. I have bought iWork twice and it's a heck of a good software suite. Since we're talking about text docs instead of presentation I'll inform you it's the word processor that gets the use of styles RIGHT. OO.o was close, Word has done some catching up, but Pages (the iWork word processor) makes it easy, makes it efficient, and makes it work. You can do page layout if you'd like, but I use it for report writing and it's great software. As for Appleworks, it's true Apple has left it to wither on the vine, and its word processor was never much to write home about anyway. But Pages is great. We're not discussing presentation software here but I may as well throw this in: Keynote is a better presentation software package than OO.o and it's more fun to use than P-p-p-powerpoint. Its transitions are stunning, it's easy and intuitive to use. Finally, contrary to what you wrote, iWork costs US$79, a far cry from anything Microsoft produces for the Mac.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
In the early days many machines would run fine with DOS and Windows but would crash with signal 11 on Linux, particularly when running gcc. As strange as it sounds this was usually a hardware problem - bad memory. There was even a FAQ on the signal 11 problem. Saying 'but it works with Windows' does not really excuse bad hardware. Similarly, if hardware is generating BSODs on Windows, and you have good reason to believe they're not caused by Windows kernel bugs, then most likely the hardware is faulty and Linux just doesn't push it as hard, or perhaps masks the problem rather than trapping it and dying immediately (which is the safest course of action).
I can't rule out that Windows prints a meaningless complaint about IRQ levels when the real cause is a bug somewhere else.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you're trying to suggest BSODs are a thing of the past, I have just two things to say:
/ seminar/scpresentation.pdf
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL
Those are due to driver bugs. Page fault in non paged area means a bad pointer - you touched a page that was marked as not present, but since the area is unpaged the OS can't do anything to fix it.
IRQL not less than or equal is more interesting. NT has a concept of IRQL. It's an abstraction, and it means which interrupts are enabled. The lowest level in kernel mode is PASSIVE_LEVEL which means the scheduler is enabled. The next highest level is DISPATCH_LEVEL where it is not. Above that are the hardware interrupt levels. Now consider a spinlock, an OS synchronisation primitive. These are to protect shared resources. Drivers call KeAcquireSpinLock() to get them, do some stuff and then KeReleaseSpinLock() to release them. On a SMP system, KeAcquireSpinLock needs to raise IRQL and then acquire the lock. On a single processor system it just raises the IRQL.
http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/documents/irql.htm
So IRQL in Windows NT is very important thing. If the system is running at a raised IRQL, someone is holding a spinlock, or an interrupt is in progress.
Lots of kernel routines are documented in the DDK as being only callable at a certain maximum IRQL. Typically, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL is caused by touching paged data at a raised IRQL which can't work as the pager risks a deadlock when it tries to acquire spinlocks to page it in, or less likely by calling a function which is documented as not being callable at that IRQL.
If you look at the stackframe, you can see which driver is to blame and either disable or update it. If the system has always been unstable, check the RAM.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft are experimenting with static code analysis and automated test cases to catch driver errors like this
http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/soft/teaching/ws05
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I work as a "Technology Assistant" in a high school and I can guarantee that this is a fact. My job is to help teachers and students with technology, which means anything from software to running the performing arts theatre in the building. Teachers are, for the most part, absolutely against having to learn anything. When we upgraded our computers recently we went with some newer versions of various software packages and you should have heard the whining. I use NeoOffice on my MBP and my PowerMac at home and it is totally fine for just about anything the students will need. As far as things like the yearbook and school newspaper, well they use Indesign for that anyway. Another time there was copious amounts of whining to be heard.
Working as the the technology admin for a school district, I can vouch for the insanity that runs through educators minds.
I'm amazed when the majority of the people tasked with teaching our children the fundamentals of computing (basic word processing etc..) in a completely controlled environment can even turn their computers on and log in. Most educators learn to navigate around in MS office and the mention of new software generally causes them to wet themselves. Anytime a move to a open source solution is discussed, it is almost immediately destroyed by administration. This is despite the fact that most public schools are extremely cash strapped and moving to open source makes immediate financial sense. This has more to do with fear than anything else. Even though education recieves discounts from MS and others, the costs can still be considered high.
Lobbying for open source office solutions makes sense in school settings for a simple reason: anyone can acquire and use this stuff at home. I can't tell you the amount of times we've had to help students convert files between platforms so we get their work to jive with MS office. Most people can't afford or are willing to purchase this software for home use, yet in schools we are using full versions of MS office.Your television will not tell you when to start the revolution.
Right. Now we have that ever-so-helpful "you need to restart your computer" thing in four different languages. It doesn't even mention an error anymore.
I use OO (Open Office) on my Sun workstation and MS Office on my desktop machine at work, as well as OO on my Linux workstation and NeoOffice on my Macbook Pro at home.
.csv formatting, and lack of scalability with its Access database. I have yet to run into similar issues, or any issues for that matter, running OO or NeoOffice.
To compare MS Office and OO/NeoOffice and say MS Office has no problems would be stretching the truth. I've had to deal with some show stoppers on MS Office - particularly its inconsistent spreadsheet support for
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
You mean as in "OMFG, Windows XP *STILL* requires a floppy disk to install RAID/SCSI drivers?"
Actually, they *are* switching from MS Office to iWork. NeoOffice is only being mentioned as an alternative for those people/schools who think they need more than iWork provides.
;-) ). His beef with the current situation seems to be that schools were told that certain software would be made available to them under a central license, and at that point his school chose to use Macs. Now, the software he was told would be available is going to cost them an extra NZ$4000, when schools who chose to use PCs are not being disadvantaged.
The head teacher quoted mentioned that there would be compatibility issues with them using different software, and that it was hard enough teaching students and staff to save things in the right place anyway, never mind having to choose a format to save in. He then went on to say that he wasn't actually familiar with the alternatives that it is being suggested they use (and hence really didn't know whether there would *actually* be issues), but that he was concerned about it anyway.
At that point, I was thinking "lazy fool" - surely teaching kids the general principles to enable them to use any piece of suitable software is precisely what they *should* be doing, not taking the short-cut and getting the kids hooked on MS' bait-and-switch (it's cheap and easy now, but when you want to do it for yourself in a few years' time...).
Anyway, as it went on he also said that he would like to see the whole system move away from MS, and towards Open Source (and I thought maybe he wasn't such an idiot after all
The "man from the ministry" being interviewed at the same time seemed to be knowledgeable and competent, and mentioned that MS had been very helpful (agreeing to remove the macs from the license, which they don't like to do, as I expect anyone with an MCA will tell you), and that is likely that they will be moving more towards Open Source over the next few years. I think I heard NZ$30m over 3 years mentioned in that context, and maybe $5m saved by cutting out Office for Macs.
In short, they were agreeing violently on most issues - but not on whether or not the head's school should be given NZ$4000 to buy MS Office for the machines on which they've decided they really want it. I expect that once they've tried Keynote (it seemed to be Powerpoint he was most worried about) they'll be pretty happy with it.
The real issue here would seem to be the way the press (NZ Herald in particular I believe) have reported this minor or non- issue. I don't know whether they're biased, poor at their job, or just lazy... whichever way, they're full of something that looks & smells like the proverbial.