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New Zealand Rejects Office For Macs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the my-word,-how-can-our-students-excel? dept.

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.

12 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about, expect problems and bugs with any software?

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    It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
    1. Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by jintxo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    2. Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by suv4x4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's the trouble Open Source gets from being honest. Microsoft just hides the bugs and creates an illusion of problem free computer usage. Then they insist you keep windows update running all the time....


      You know, I'm surprised at the Orwellian speak coming from both the likes of Microsoft and the anti-Microsoft crowd.

      We don't have Microsoft just "fixing bugs", oh no. We have Microsoft "HIDING bugs and creating the ILLUSION of problem free computer usage".

      How on Earth do you create the *illusion* of problem free computer usage? You let Word crash and popup a box "Calm down user, this was just a part of your problem free computer usage"?

      Office works fine enough, the sad part in all of this, is they don't have good enough competitors, because they have stagnated for years and years.

      Then Office 2007 which offered lots of innovation in the interface, features, wizard etc. But why? Is it because Open Source was picking up and MS Office were terrible at "hiding bugs"? No, it's because people just got stuck with Office 97: Microsoft's competing with their own software.

      It's sad.

    3. Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Informative

      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".

    4. Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by El+Lobo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Great example.Both of them are produced by hardhare problems. The same problem in Linuzz would cause a Kernel panic. Not, not blue, but BLACK..

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      It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
    5. Re:Expect problems and bugs with OS software? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you're trying to suggest BSODs are a thing of the past, I have just two things to say:

      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/ seminar/scpresentation.pdf

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      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;
  2. MS Office has plenty of bugs too... by baptiste · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.'
    Just because Microsoft doesn't include this disclaimer on their website doesn't make MS Office any less buggy. This guy's students have been using buggy software their whole lives, from MS and others. Welcome to the information age. At least NeoOffice is being upfront about it.
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    Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
  3. How much? by igny · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How much do they save, and is there a way to invest some of this money into further development of NeoOffice?

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    In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
    1. Re:How much? by Domstersch · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's unclear how much money they save. The total licensing deals the government has made with Microsoft are speculated to be worth about NZ$100 million (US$72m) over the next ten years. But the Maharey, the Minister of Education, said the dispute was regarding NZ$2.7m worth of Microsoft Office licenses that would not (otherwise) be used (because the macs in question aren't currently using Office) but which Microsoft insisted the Ministry pay for.

      So, we know they're saving more than $2.7m and less than $100m, but we're not told exactly how much.

      By the way, macs aren't extensively used outside of primary (roughly, elementary schools) and intermediate (school years 7-8) in New Zealand. Every high school I can think of (many) have one or two macs at most, and classes full of PCs. So, to my mind, Le Sueur is wrong, and NeoOffice _is_ the sort of software we can expect kids to use. It's unreasonable to claim five to twelve year olds have a need for (supposedly) superior, high-class spreadsheets, databases and business presentations.

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      =w=
  4. It'll do the job. by LaminatorX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't trust NeoOffice to seamlessly handle a giant shared/published spreadsheet with lots of custom macros for dozens of users across a multi-office corporate WAN. OTOH, I'd trust it without hesitation to do anything a k-12 teacher or student would need to do with it.

    1. Re:It'll do the job. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's what I was going to say -- for graphing a quadratic function or pasting plagiarized text out of Wikipedia, it'll be fine.

  5. Re:The sad thing is: The motive is all wrong! by Domstersch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here's a hint as to why this won't happen: it's not the Minister of Education's job to spend my (yep, I'm a kiwi) tax money on helping "the product or the community". But do you know what is his job? To ensure that children in my country get the best education they can. And that means that when he has the choice of donating money to a software development group or spending it on one of the underfunded schools throughout the country, he must spend it on the kids.

    You hear the "somebody, think of the children" argument a lot these days. But this is one case where it applies well. It is Maharey's job to think of the children. And they are best served by using the money elsewhere.

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