RedOffice 4.0 Beta Updates OpenOffice UI

Johannes Eva writes "As IBM Lotus Symphony shows its first public version 1.0, the Chinese OpenOffice.org derivative RedOffice offers the first beta of its new version 4.0. The open source RedOffice gets a new UI inspired from Microsoft Office 2007, with a vertical 'ribbon.' Is this the future of OpenOffice.org?"

Comments

Microsoft

[dintech]

Oh dear. More evidence for the Microsoft "fact"-sheet that open source is indeed communism.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

Oh dear. More evidence for the Microsoft "fact"-sheet that open source is indeed communism. Be that so. Although some Russian leaders have ruined the idea of communism for many people, much of what we love about FOSS software could be seen as communist (or, at the very least, Marxist) ideas. That said, I love the MSO 2007 interface. Although I've used several different office products over the course of the years, I do not consider myself proficient in any of them. Nor do I want to invest the time to get proficient. In the rare times that I've used MSO 2007 at the university (at home I run Kubuntu), I've found that I can do my work quicker in MSO than in OpenOffice, which I am more familiar with. I would love to see the ribbon as an alternative UI in OOo. I don't see any reason that the program cannot have two UI's, other than lack of programmer time developing it.

Re:Microsoft

[Steauengeglase]

Actually that was the first thing I thought. The idea of Red "commie" Office just seems so Fox News friendly.

With talk of Wikipedia as Maoist and Linus's "communist roots", I'm not looking forward to the cultural backlash on all things "Open".

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, let me correct that for you:

"Although some Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Polish leaders have demonstrated the ultimate outcome of communism for many people..."

Re:Microsoft

[ShieldW0lf]

Be that so. Although some Russian leaders have ruined the idea of communism for many people,

Who supplied you with all your news about what was going on in those Communist states? Was it Stalin, or was it your own national news?

It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.

Both democratic capitalist states and totalitarian communist states have carrots and sticks.

In the democratic state, you are dominated through economics, but liberated from autocratic government, in totalitarian communist states, you are dominated by government, but liberated from dynastic capitalist empires.

Capitalism is the same as Totalitarianism, Communism is the same as Democracy, ain't nobody free on this hunk of dirt, and very few who even know well enough how to even ask for freedom in the first place.

Re:Microsoft

[jaxtherat]

Whoever modded that 'Flamebait' should have moded that 'Insightful'.

Speaking as someone who used to live behind the Iron Curtain, and DAILY thanks his parents for emigrating to Australia.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

i hate the ribbon, just can't get the hang of it.

Re:Microsoft

[Tranzistors]

Well, communism works great, if there is abundance. And in case of software, there is abundance.

Capitalism works on axiom "there is infinite human needs and wants, in a world of finite resources", and it can't normally work in world where production (copying) and distribution is very cheep, so it must make resources scares artificially (DRM and such).

Anyway, what these communist countries did wrong was what Software vendors and MAFIAA did - applied good paradigm in wrong situation.

Re:Microsoft

[Jonny_eh]

Communism/totalitarianism == top down control of people and the economy

Capitalism/Democracy == Emergent economy, and bottom up determinacy of government.

Commercial software develop sounds more like communism, and OOS sounds more like capitalism. It's all about perspective.

Re:Microsoft

[Enderandrew]

For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well. He took several ethnic groups that wanted to kill each other, and kept the peace by trying to enforce a semblance of equality between the groups. After his death, it all went to shit, there was some genocide, and Yugoslavia no longer exists. But the communist rule of Tito in Yugoslavia wasn't a bad thing.

Re:Microsoft

[clang_jangle]

Capitalism/Democracy == Emergent economy, and bottom up determinacy of government.

Oh yeah, it sure is great how we in the USA have such excellent representation in government. By golly, our system 'just works!'
/sarcasm

Re:Microsoft

[halivar]

Some of us like FOSS because of its capitalist and free market ideas.

Re:Microsoft

[billcopc]

Wow. If Australia is what you call an improvement, please.. pretty please don't ever set foot in Canada or your head will literally explode!

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

These are obviously the words of a commie. Get him!

Re:Microsoft

[dintech]

Yes but now we've got freedom and communism. It's a very groovy time.

Re:Microsoft

[xappax]

This is a common misconception. Communism does not imply authoritarian control of the economy.

Large-scale implementations of communism have tended to use authoritarian control to force a communist economic model. This was, in my opinion, an astonishingly bad idea.

Communism simply means that the economy is managed by the community. If the community government is totalitarian, communism will be enforced through totalitarianism. If the community government is a decentralized direct democracy, then the economy will be managed through direct democratic involvement by all the people.

This is in contrast to capitalism, in which the economy is ostensibly managed by nobody, and in practice managed by those who control the lions share of money or resources. This commonly leads to a small number of successful capitalists gaining effective centralized control of the economy.

Since a capitalist economy cannot be managed by the community, there is no recourse should the economy become dominated by a small number of centralized companies or people. Despite the democratic, emergent properties of the community government, the economy can still easily slip into a model that is centralized in all but name.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

Here, let me correct that for you:

"Although some Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Polish leaders have demonstrated the ultimate outcome of communism for many people..." All on the Russian model, and mostly with Russian assistance. Don't make me start linking to wikipedia now.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

Well, communism works great, if there is abundance. And in case of software, there is abundance. Thank you, that describes exactly the situation in as few words as I've yet seen.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well. As do numerous small communes throughout the world, most notably the Israeli kibbutzim.

Re:Microsoft

[steelfood]

What's particularly interesting is that China will be a huge proponent of OSS, as the government is very suspicious of closed-source software, especially ones developed in the US (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).

The people might not respect copyrights (the culture certainly doesn't have any interest in the concept of "intellectual property"), but the government will have to at least pay lip service to it, and that usually means playing by the GPL.

It's ironic, but it also makes sense that "open" governments have to hide their dirty laundry, while governments that have no need to maintain the pretense of being democratic and free can actually openly air their dirty laundry.

At the end of the day, the goal of governments, and the people working for them, is controlling the governed, and it's not only unrealistic, but naieve to think otherwise. The US government is just as guilty of this as Iran or North Korea, as we've been witness to over the past few decades since the witch hunt of the 50's, the difference being that the US government's limits are more in line with our expectations, and the Iranian government's limits are not. That and what we define to be within the boundaries of "good" appear to be more productive than what North Korea defines to be "good."

Anyway, I digress.

As soon as they get their act together, we should be seeing more OSS initiatives from China. After all, they wouldn't want the NSA hiding keyloggers in the export versions of Windows or Acrobat or PowerDVD or WOW or stuff like that. China will want control of the software that gets installed in their government computers, and oddly enough, the only way to do that without reinventing the wheel is to release control of the software.

Of course, proprietary software is still useful for making surveillance tools, but that's something we get to choose to install on our systems--for now at least.

Re:Microsoft

[CAIMLAS]

Here's the thing about software Marxism. Unlike real-world Marxism, nothing is prohibitive: you're still able - anyone is still able - to leverage the "communal" product for personal gain, with enough ingenuity and effort.

Such principles work in software, because there is (theoretically) infinite supply, whereas every single item in the real world requires production costs by nature. The infinite capacity for being copied, duplicated, and modified (cheaply!) negates the negatives of the philosophy much more thoroughly than it introduces more issues (ie, the effective resistance against monopoly).

Re:Microsoft

[MightyYar]

Everyone knows that frozen heads can't explode.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"ain't nobody free on this hunk of dirt, and very few who even know well enough how to even ask for freedom in the first place."

You sound like a teenager who is going through a big disillusionment phase where you think you know it all and enjoy making grand sweeping statements. The fact is that some people are more free than others.

You are not impressing me.

Re:Microsoft

[Maxo-Texas]

It could also be seen as christian ("Many hands make light work") or many other organizations of people of good will.

What breaks "communism" is evil human nature. What makes communism work is good human nature.

And the exact same thing can be said for capitalism and democracy. We are witnessing the destruction of both because the loss of reasonableness and good will by corporations and people of power.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

(the culture certainly doesn't have any interest in the concept of "intellectual property") What culture does?

Re:Microsoft

[Tranzistors]

What's particularly interesting is that China will be a huge proponent of OSS, as the government is very suspicious of closed-source software

That, or they will just leach and give nothing back. Why would they bother?

It's ironic, but it also makes sense that "open" governments have to hide their dirty laundry, while governments that have no need to maintain the pretense of being democratic and free can actually openly air their dirty laundry.

Government has to keep good appearances, otherwise it will be replaced. The difference between democratic and totalitarian countries is the threshold (how bad it has to appear) and violence.

Re:Microsoft

[thegnu]

I think that open source is functional anarchy, actually.

OSS is NOT communism:
1. Nobody HAS to contribute according to their means.
2. Nobody HAS to receive according to their need.
3. Everybody does what they want.
4. ???
5. Profit!

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

Who supplied you with all your news about what was going on in those Communist states? Was it Stalin, or was it your own national news? What nation do you suspect I come from? Ya dumayu shto ti mnye ne znaysh.

Re:Microsoft

[Tubal-Cain]

Please, don't do that, I beg you! I don't want o be trapped on the never-ending clicktrail for the rest of the day.

Re:Microsoft

[R2.0]

"For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well."

For a while - until he died and the lid blew off.

One of the reasons that Yugoslavia "worked" is that Tito ruthlessly suppressed sectarianism and ethnicities. While it appeared to be a good thing, especially to the eyes of Western liberals who regard religion as evil, it had the effect of building a pressure cooker which blew apart in the 90's, causing violence far in excess of whatever Tito did. Iraq is the same way - Saddam suppressed the Kurds and Shia, and "kept the peace". But in doing so, he set the seeds for the situation we see now, with the US popping the cork prematurely.

You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term.

Re:Microsoft

[dintech]

This is my understanding too and I like it that way. Microsoft hates it because there are too many steps before step 5 and they don't understand step 4. :)

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

That, or they will just leach and give nothing back. Why would they bother?

In the case of patches to FOSS software, they can either maintain their own patches forever, with the possibility of them breaking at every release; or they can feed them upstream and have someone else maintain them. That's why.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Monkey]

Maybe he means his head will freeze and the water expanding inside will cause his skull to crack.

Re:Microsoft

[zappepcs]

That, or they will just leach and give nothing back. Why would they bother? Have you seen written Chinese?
Perhaps you've seen some of the foreign language attempts at putting warning labels in English on their products? Google for it, it's fun.

Language and dialects will ensure that they will contribute at least as far as making software compatible with their own language. Google translate does not make good foreign language error messages, and totally mangles the man pages. So, efforts like RedFlag Linux http://www.redflag-linux.com/chanpin/eindex.php just read their web site English and you'll see what I mean.

Re:Microsoft

[LizardKing]

For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well.

Hmm, and that would have nothing to do with the lack of free elections, state controlled media and secret police would it? It also was decidedly not a Communist state, more of a totalitarian one with a Socialist tinged economy, as it had a limited free-market economy. As for "going to shit" after Tito died, it was already headed that way with the Croatians openly protesting against the Federal Republic since 1971 (read up on the "Croatian Spring" for example). The 1974 constitution granted increased autonomy to the federal states, but this would only appease the non-Serbians for a short while, and even gave the legal right to secede which eventually triggered the collapse of the Federal Republic.

Re:Microsoft

[rbanffy]

While there is a great deal of overlap between communism and police states with aggressive dictatorships, they are not synonyms.

Often, the flag of communism is used as a bait to induce an unsatisfied population to help a group to rise to power and as an excuse to create mechanisms for repression of the previous government and, ultimately, to betray those ideals and the people who supported them as soon as their help is no longer necessary or their cooperation can be obtained by other means.

It's indeed a tragedy. But let's not confuse things. Neither non-communist countries are automatically paradises of civil rights nor communist countries are inevitably police-states. Things are a lot more complex than that.

Re:Microsoft

[tehcyder]

Speaking as someone who used to live behind the Iron Curtain, and DAILY thanks his parents for emigrating to Australia.

Well, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, at least there are no poisonous snakes there - the spiders have eaten them all.

Re:Microsoft

[TrebleJunkie]

"Capitalism works on axiom 'there is infinite human needs and wants, in a world of finite resources' and it can't normally work in world where production (copying) and distribution is very cheep, so it must make resources scares artificially (DRM and such)."

Actually, Capitalism can work in the situation you describe, it's just that we've never tried it. What people refer to as "capitalism" in today's world isn't really Capitalism.

Re:Microsoft

[Nerdposeur]

Oh yeah, it sure is great how we in the USA have such excellent representation in government. By golly, our system 'just works!'

I agree that there are lots of problems, have fear about Bush's policies, etc. But you have to admit that the U.S. at its worst (so far) is still a heck of a lot better than a totalitarian state.

Re:Microsoft

[Fred_A]

What culture does? There's a faint possibility that the people recently revealed in the Amazon basin actually do, but since nobody from the outside is allowed near them we can't be sure. However, one sign is that none of them appears to be running Linux.

Re:Microsoft

[Fred_A]

"For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well."

For a while - until he died and the lid blew off.

One of the reasons that Yugoslavia "worked" is that Tito ruthlessly suppressed sectarianism and ethnicities. Quite. And the kibbutzim were actually a bit smaller than Yugoslavia. I even suspect you could have fitted several inside the territory.

You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term. It's oh so tempting though...
mumblemumblebunchofmoronsmumble

But I can see how just killing them all would be the humane thing to do. Much more fair that way...

(Just kidding, my mom was a refugee from Yugoslavia. Ok, half kidding)

Re:Microsoft

[ShieldW0lf]

You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term.

Yes, it does. However, you have to wait until everyone who remembers when it all started is dead, and everyone alive was born into the situation. If you hold it together that long, you create a new cultural identity. If you don't hold it together for 4 generations, it disintegrates.

Re:Microsoft

[R2.0]

The Albanians and the Serbs have been fighting over Kosovo for HUNDREDS of years.

"If you hold it together that long, you create a new cultural identity."

Suppression increases the tendency to identify with one's religion or ethnicity - it doesn't just "go away" in 4 generations. Children are raised on the stories of how horrible their grandparents had it, and great-grandparents, and ancestors. They internalize that, and the division continue.

I don't disagree that people CAN come together blurring ethnic and religious lines; only that it cannot be forced.

Re:Microsoft

[VJ42]

Have you seen written Chinese? Perhaps you've seen some of the foreign language attempts at putting warning labels in English on their products? Google for it, it's fun. I think the "manual" for my mouse was translated from chinese, amongst the garbled nonsense, it includes these gems (under "Working conditions"):

• huge iron screen should not be put between the receiver and the mouse To avoid the interrupt of the receiving wireless signal

• optical mouse is adapted to plane of different color and different material, Such as wooden , paper , fabric etc. But not mirror plane in similar with glass, Lubricity colloid, if so ,mouse mat is proposal

The caps and the punctuation throughout the manual seem entirely random, and the random spaces around around the commas don't make it any easier to read either. At least the spelling's perfect.

Re:Microsoft

[bloodninja]

However, one sign is that none of them appears to be running Linux. I'm not so sure about that. The one painted black had that "is my printer really on fire?!?" look on her face.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Software by the people and for the people

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

much of what we love about FOSS software could be seen as communist

Wrong. Communism cannot be accomplished without coercion (meaning physical force or threat thereof); coercion is the first prerequisite of communism. You simply cannot have top-down, centralized control without coercion.

The open source development model, in glaring contrast, cannot be accomplished without free will. Accordingly, free will is the first prerequisite of open source development. That's why it exists.

Another way to look at this: communism is managed by a top-down pyramid scheme of power (meaning the special right to employ coercion), where the elite few at the very top control the entire pyramid. Open source is the exact opposite, constructed from the bottom-up out of pure free will.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that has to be one of the more enlightened answers I have seen:)

Re:Microsoft

[westlake]

Well, communism works great, if there is abundance. And in case of software, there is abundance.

Where do you find abundance?

OpenOffice.org is essentially a creation of Sun. Staffing. Finance. Administration. Sun has spent megabucks on Star Office and OpenOffice.org and is still playing catch-up.

The GIMP isn't competitive in Photoshop's core markets.

You can find second and third tier apps easily enough. But how many are serious candidates for "best of breed?"

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Whil I agree with you that capitalism assumes that consumer resources, or "processed resource" are finite, the whole concept is predicated on the assumption that raw natural resources are infinite. Only manmade "processed goods" are finite, but infinitely growable since economy (and population) is "ever growing". You cannot advocate a continuous growth economy without the implied assumption of infinite resources (the cornucopia concept). What is not infinite from that point of view is the amount of human effort in converting said resource into a consumable good... but with a growing population and economy that can be solved... because the raw natural resources themselves are infinite. There is an implicit distincition between a man-made resource (which is desirable, and limited) and a raw natural resource (which is necessary and fortunately unlimited). This is why economists insist on denying peak oil. Because the funamental flaw in their card house will be revealed. (Of course when you hear commecials about how America can "free" itself of oil dependency throuh the "clean" use of coal, you know that particular house is coming crashing down on your head... when's peak coal due?)

Comunism on the other hand, is for situations where survival of each individual depends on the goodwill and/or survival of other members of the collective. A small tribe in the Kalahari desert will most likely have a very communistic econoconmic system, as the survival of each member of the tribe is made easier by the survival of the others who can help him (they need the work/energy of other humans to increment their own... that work is a limted raw resource, like in capitalism). In a larger society, communism is only viable when some critical raw natural resource is limited, hence the survival of each individual depends on nobody accumulating more of the scarce yet necessary limiting resource than the others, because accumulating it means death to others (and hence death to the guy who accumulates because others will not tolerate it for long). When a large society cannot perceive the survival need to ration that fundamental resource, then there is no collective tolerance (in the long term) for communism. Under the wise leadership of our present and past economist capitalist overlords, it is probable that we will reach global communism in a non too distant future.

Re:Microsoft

[westlake]

What's particularly interesting is that China will be a huge proponent of OSS, as the government is very suspicious of closed-source software, especially ones developed in the US (*cough* Microsoft *cough*).

Microsoft is building a $300 million dollar research campus in Beijing.

Zhongguancun, known as Beijing's "Silicon Valley," was approved by the Chinese government as the first national level high-tech industrial development zone in 1988.
The area houses thousands of high-tech companies, about 40 universities such as Peking University and more than 200 science institutions. Microsoft breaks ground for 5,000-person Beijing R&D center

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"Communism does not imply authoritarian control of the economy."

But it does not work without it. My mom once said to me - soviets crashed because people were no longer afraid so much that they will work for nothing.
Than happens when my grandparent's generation retired. They were the one living through Stalin, wars, Holodomor. Our parent did not experience those things so they were not afraid enough.

Re:Microsoft

[yutt]

"You can't take large populations of ethnically and religiously diverse populations, put them in close contact, and tell them "Get along - or else". It just doesn't work over the long term." Please, provide an example of a present or historical governmental system that doesn't use force or threat of force to keep polar extremists under control. You example may be true, but it is true under any system of government.

Re:Microsoft

[rastoboy29]

Actually, no.  Non-Communist states may not be paradise--true.  But Communist states _must_ be authoritarian in order to function, as ultimately some arbitrary person has to make the decision of who gets what, as opposed to the "invisible hand".

Re:Microsoft

[rastoboy29]

No, you're wrong--Read Ayn.  I recommend Atlas Shrugged.

Communism == kleptocracy, as opposed to having ANY good reason to be in power.  Capitalism is no paradise, but it's far friendlier to freedom than any other system.

Re:Microsoft

[rbanffy]

"some arbitrary person has to make the decision"

Someone, perhaps according to a fixed set of rules, as opposed to nobody really making the decision. I am not too sure which one is better.

Communist states need not to be authoritarian. The only pre-requisite is the rule of law. Capitalism is more flexible in that regard.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

For what it is worth, Yugoslavia under Marshall Tito worked out fairly well. As do numerous small communes throughout the world, most notably the Israeli kibbutzim.

The Israeli Kibbutzim worked... for a while. But now they are either failing miserably, existing mostly because of government support, getting privatized, or both.

From a social point of view, many people who grew up in the Kibbutz describe the experience as a horrible trauma, calling themselves "Kibbutz survivors". Apparently, if you didn't "fit in", the whole tiny society turned against you (think highschool x 100).

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

If you hold it together that long, you create a new cultural identity. Have you got any real-world examples?

Re:Microsoft

[xappax]

But it does not work without it.

Oh, for reals? Who's the authoritarian ruler over the the Amish? Because their economy is pretty damn communist, and that seems to be working out for them just fine.

You're right that the Soviet Union could not work without authoritarian control. That doesn't mean that any form of community management of an economy is impossible without a dictator.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

Here, let me correct that for you: "Although some Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, Yugoslavian, Romanian, and Polish leaders have demonstrated the ultimate outcome of communism for many people..." All on the Russian model, and mostly with Russian assistance. Don't make me start linking to wikipedia now. Do you have any other examples of openly communist countries? If I remember correctly, every country that described itself as "communist", as opposed to just "socialist", was influenced by the "Russian model", and was an oppressive, and usually, dirt-poor dictatorship.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

Neither non-communist countries are automatically paradises of civil rights nor communist countries are inevitably police-states. Things are a lot more complex than that.

Do you have an example of a communist country (note that I said "communist" and not "socialist") that wasn't a police-state?

I mean, even if I could think of such an example, it would still be the the exception that proves the rule... but honestly, I can't think of a single one.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.

Brainwashing?

Was there ever a communist country that wasn't totalitarian?

Re:Microsoft

[rbanffy]

I would say there never were any communist countries. It is yet to be implemented.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

I would say there never were any communist countries. It is yet to be implemented.

Actually there were communist countries. There still are. There's no real debate on that issue.

What you mean is that there were no countries you would call "communist". But, frankly, you don't get to decide.

Re:Microsoft

[rbanffy]

I agree there are countries that call themselves communist countries, but neither they get to decide what is communism.

There is no such thing as social equality in dictatorships. A communist society is classless and I never heard of a so called communist country that didn't have a class system, at least in the form of separating members of the Party from non-members.

The illusion of communism breaks up when the government ceases to represent the interests of the people, and shapes public opinion to its convenience.

Sadly, this last trait is not exclusive of the dead "communist" dictatorships of the past century.

Re:Microsoft

[nidarus]

I agree there are countries that call themselves communist countries, but neither they get to decide what is communism.

The point is that the issue has been already decided. There's simply no debate within the general public as to what is meant by "communist country". Whether this is an accurate description or not is completely irrelevant.

The only thing you get by using that term in the "correct" manner, is confusion. There's no reason for anyone else to know, or to care about your personal definition.

Anyway, IIRC, communist countries were called that way because they were striving for Communism, which was considered to be a utopic state, a sort of paradise on earth. So in a sense, Communism was never "implemented", but "communist countries" were, and they all were oppressive dictatorships.

Re:Microsoft

[Arturus_Magi]

None of these countries are/were actually communist, though. There is a reason the full name of the Russian hegemony was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Short and Long answer

[poetmatt]

Here's the short answer: no.

Here's the long answer: every derivative of OO can make its own UI if they choose to, such as in this case from windows. This doesn't mean all OO will do so. Therefore, no.

Red...

[Justabit]

Is it ribbon or tape?

Re:Red...

[morgan_greywolf]

Is it ribbon or tape?

RedOffice Assistant: I can see that you're trying to create a table. Please wait 14-21 days while the RedOffice Table Committee meets to determine if we'll allow you to do that.
User: Arrgghh!!!

Re:Red...

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Clippy: I see you're writing about Tianamen square. Do you want to turn yourself in to the nearest police station, or shall we come pick you up?

Re:Red...

[Anonymous Coward]

RedOffice Assistant: I can see that you're trying to create a table. Please wait 14-21 days while the RedOffice Table Committee meets to determine if we'll allow you to do that.
User: Arrgghh!!!

*CANCEL OPERATION*
RedOffice Assistant: You seem to have cancelled a request to the RedOffice Table Committee. Please fill out form AEO12423 with an explanations for your withdrawal and be sure to send a copy to each RedOffice Table Committee member. Allow for 30 days processing time.
User: Arrgghh!!! Do you have to be Japanese to do Seppuku?

Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Airw0lf]

http://www.johannes-eva.net/images/2008_05_27_redoffice_review/2008%2005%20-%20RedOffice%20-%20Screenshot%208%20Format%20Templates.png That text in French says "One should eat the cat hot. When it's cold it's disgusting..." Whatever happened to the "quick brown fox?"

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[larry bagina]

Must be ancient chinese recipe.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's pointing out the perils of pussy-eating necrophilia?

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ancient? I'm quite sure I had it yesterday...

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[tijmentiming]

The Quick brown fox is the sentence to show all the available characters in the english language. Every other language has it's own sentence. It's called a Pangram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Hortensia Patel]

Yes, but that ("Il faut manger...") is clearly not a pangram, or anywhere close.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[CastrTroy]

Except the 2 sentences repeated in the picture doesn't use every letter. It's missing Z,X,V,W,Q,J,B,K,P, and Y. So out of 26 letters, it only uses 16. Probably would have been better to go with Lorem Ipsum.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[jonas_jonas]

Well, that's difficult in chinese, because it would be a very very loooooooong sentence.

Most of this is chinese

cjk radicals

cjk unified ideographs 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

cjk unified ideographs extension a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

cjk unified ideographs extension b 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

cjk compatibility ideographs supplement 1 2 3

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Anonymous Coward]

It was eaten.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure but in French the usual pangram is more like "Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume". The one the GP referred to is quite odd (not a pangram), and a bit gross.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[naapo]

That text in French says "One should eat the cat hot. When it's cold it's disgusting..." "Cat"? Surely you mean "pussy"; in which case I'd agree.

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[r_jensen11]

The Quick brown fox is the sentence to show all the available characters in the english language. Oh really....? ZZ-Top would be impressed. In fact, of the 5 different characters (4 if you are only counting letters), you're batting at .600 (.750). While phenominal for baseball, it still runs up short of 1.000

Jani would also be disaappointed, as would Yugoslavia

Re:Bizarre Screenshot From Writer

[Nullav]

Whatever happened to the "quick brown fox?" As you can see, it has been supplanted by the golden-brown cat.

innovation? or ...

[ionix5891]

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Re: innovation? or ...

[mrbluze]

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? China is one of the greatest flatterers out there by that measure!

Re: innovation? or ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, humility is a confucian value, you insensitive clod!

Re:Keep the Chinese in your prayers

[mrbluze]

And a large number of those human beings are trying to cope with the devastation and after-effects of a terrible earthquake.

Which is why we should be happy/sad/elated/positive/thoughtful about RedOffice?

Did I miss something here?

Oh no...

[MassiveForces]

In future, we all speaka the Chinese?!

Re:Oh no...

[BiggerIsBetter]

In future, we all speaka the Chinese?! Damn dude, didn't you watch Firefly?

Re:Oh no...

[RobBebop]

I believe that the Mandarin in Firefly was mostly a fun way to get curses past the USA censors.

Having just typed that sentence, I think I've blown my mind.

Re:Oh no...

[Falstius]

Considering how badly they pronounced the Chinese, it would have gotten past the Chinese sensors.

"dog ten"[bleep]

Re:Oh no...

[steelfood]

Except there really wasn't anything interesting in the Firefly curses. They weren't real curses a la shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits or even fart, turd, or twat (and yes, I stole the list from George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words sketch from Wikipedia).

It would've been really sweet if they actually used curses, but no, the worst was something like, "your mom's a dirty pig" or something along those lines.

They also used Mandarin, which doesn't quite have the colorful and often amusing phrasing that Cantonese does. Mandarin curses tend to emulate Cantonese ones anyway (the use of "mother" in Chinese curses, probably borrowed from the British, is of Cantonese origin which the northerners recently picked up in the past twenty years).

It would've been really amusing if Jayne actually said something like "Fuck their mom's smelly cunts" or something more colorful in Chinese, but alas, it was not to be... It probably wouldn't've been censored either, as their Chinese was so butchered anyway only a native Chinese speaker really familiar with poorly spoken Chinese would've been able to decipher it. And the amount of those who'd actually watch Firefly probably number in the low hundreds, if not tens, across the US.

Re:Oh no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Me fail Chinese? That's hai di lao yue.

Language Confusion?

[Aehgts]

An article written in English showing a Chinese program being installed on a French OS.
I'm sure the new UI is fantastic, based on the eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs
with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was.

Makes me want to install RedOffice and blog about it.
And then three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people installing RedOffice and blogging about it.
They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,
I said fifty people a day installing RedOffice and blogging about it.
And friends they may thinks it's a movement.


(Apologies to Arlo)

Re:Language Confusion?

[tecker]

And on Spanish Ubuntu!

Re:Language Confusion?

[bloodninja]

An article written in English showing a Chinese program being installed on a French OS. No. It's an article written in English showing a Chinese program being installed on a French virtual machine running in a Spanish OS.

Fuck.

Re:Language Confusion?

[digitalgiblet]

Aehgts, they have a special bench for people like you... :-)

To avoid being totally off-topic, let me say that copying Office 2007 is not the swiftest move in the universe. I don't hate Microsoft the way MOST people around here do, but for the life of me I can't explain why they changed the UI so much for Office 2007. Stuff I've known how to do since the 1980s in Word and Excel are suddenly difficult to do. I assume the functions are still there, I just can't bloody find them.

And now there is a version of Open Office that copies THAT?

To badly paraphrase Qui Gon or Calgon or Obi Wan or Obadiah or whatever, "Who's the bigger fool? The Fool or the fool that follows the fool. How about the fool that follows that fool? Or the dude who just follows along not really knowing who he's following? No foolin. Who's up for foos ball?"

Re:Language Confusion?

[EvanED]

To be fair, the Office 2007 UI is actually one of the more impressive things MS has done recently. They put a lot of effort, thought, and UI research (user studies) into that design, and while the outcome is a bit polarizing, the feedback I've heard has been largely very positive, even from within Slashdot.

I can't speak to it personally though, as I don't have a copy. I'd like to though.

Re:Language Confusion?

[value_added]

"Who's the bigger fool? The Fool or the fool that follows the fool.

Reading that I can't decide whether I feel better about having abandoned word processors when Word killed WordPerfect years ago, or smug that I've been happily using LaTeX ever since.

I'd settle for smug, but then I'd be the fool if I didn't recognise that it's what happens in the corporate world (at least in the area of office software) that sets the rules and standards the rest of us are obliged to follow.

Re:Language Confusion?

[TuringTest]

I can't explain why they changed the UI so much for Office 2007.Stuff I've known how to do since the 1980s in Word and Excel are suddenly difficult to do. I assume the functions are still there, I just can't bloody find them.

The interface has been changed so that the people who couldn't find all the options that where hidden in a 2nd-level tab under the 3rd-level menus, now can bloody find them more easily. For the first time and against all MS tradition, they have boldly broken backwards compatibility in introducing this new interface layout, with the rationale that most of those hidden functions were not used by many people to begin with.

Re:Language Confusion?

[TuringTest]

You're not missing much, the Ribbon interface feels mostly like using a website in which the tools were organized in tabs.

The 2007 interface is not that revolutionary as much as it's using a well-studied paradigm (web browsing) in a context (complex desktop applications) where it's traditionally not seen due to inertia, even if it would make sense.

Re:Language Confusion?

[msuarezalvarez]

Well, you seem to think that LaTeX is a word processor... so one has to take everything you say on the subject with a block of salt.

Re:Language Confusion?

[amorsen]

Perhaps you should learn to read:

[..]abandoned word processors[..], or smug that I've been happily using LaTeX ever since. The grand parent gave up on word processors and switched to LaTeX. If he thought that LaTeX was a word processor, he wouldn't be able to use LaTeX and at the same time not use a word processor.

Re:Language Confusion?

[D Ninja]

To be fair, the Office 2007 UI is actually one of the more impressive things MS has done recently. They put a lot of effort, thought, and UI research (user studies) into that design, and while the outcome is a bit polarizing, the feedback I've heard has been largely very positive, even from within Slashdot. Yes. Absolutely yes. I've been using MS Office for a long time and although the changes took a little bit of time to get used to, never again must I browse 18 menu levels down to find the stupid superscript option.

MS Office 2007 is worth the cost of upgrading (unlike Vista).

Re:Language Confusion?

[sagematt]

An article written in English showing a Chinese program being installed on a French OS running in a Spanish VM.

Re:Language Confusion?

[prockcore]

Grain of salt. You've reversed the meaning of the phrase when you start talking about more than 1 grain of salt.

Re:Language Confusion?

[msuarezalvarez]

Huh?

Re:Language Confusion?

[prockcore]

The phrase "grain of salt" means there is so little "meat" there, you only need a single grain of salt to season it.

By saying stuff like "take with a block of salt", you're reversing the meaning of the phrase. You really meant "take with half a grain of salt" or something along those lines.

Re:Language Confusion?

[msuarezalvarez]

You probably should take a look at Wikipedia's Grain of salt page...

MS Office or KOffice?

[cp.tar]

Really, I seem to remember some of these GUI changes from the KOffice GUI design contest a year or two ago. So who exactly are they copying?

Re:Keep the Chinese in your prayers

[bsDaemon]

Well, his name is BadAnalogyGuy, after all. Just add non-sequiturs to his bag of tricks and it'll all become obvious :-p

p.s. -- no offense to BadAnalogyGuy

That's Odd

[Erie Ed]

In communist china....oh wait...

Re:That's Odd

[bloodninja]

In communist china... ... the office software puts the ribbon on you.

Probably a good idea...

[corpsmoderne]

Seeing the screenshots, I realize that displaying the tools vertically on each side of the screen is the only good way to smartly use your screen space, as long as your document is in "portrait" mode and that most of the screen these days are more large than high...

Re:Probably a good idea...

[bloodninja]

...and that most of the screen these days are more large than high... Dude, when I'm high, ..., I'm large as well.

Re:Probably a good idea...

[pmontra]

Don't know... I can fit two windows of Writer, Firefox and putty side by side on my 1680x1050 screen, but will I still be able to do that if every application starts using vertical side menus? I'd rather use other programs than having to buy a laptop with a wider snowboard-sized screen and carry it with me. Menus at the top of the window are just fine for me.

Do we make it configurable and let each user choose the preferred layout?

Its not gonna make it....

[tecker]

The server is bleeding bad. Less then 20 Posts and its already down. Be Kind and use the cache

All your documents are belonging to us...

[Frosty Piss]

Given China's propensity to spy on its own citizens and foreigners as well, one wonders what back-door document stealing code snips are buried deep within this OO fork...

Re:All your documents are belonging to us...

[pembo13]

Seriously? This China related alarmism on Slashdot is really saddening

Re:All your documents are belonging to us...

[pdusen]

The NSA didn't touch it, did they?

Re:All your documents are belonging to us...

[MightyYar]

Yes, the Chinese government is not scary at all. They would never mow down their own unarmed civilians holding a peaceful demonstration, let alone SPY!

Re:All your documents are belonging to us...

[One Childish N00b]

I think the GP's point was that the Chinese government is too busy mowing down their own unarmed civilians holding a peaceful demonstration to go to the trouble to steal your Star Trek slash fiction.

Re:All your documents are belonging to us...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the parent a TROLL? We ***KNOW*** the Chinese are hacking our networks, why wouldn't they distribute spyware?

count me out

[oliverthered]

I prefer the nice hiding menus in earlier versions of office, after you've been using them for a while you only see the functions you use not a whole mess of stuff you don't want taking up loads of real estate.

Re:count me out

[Hijacked Public]

Taking up screen space is my biggest complaint about the UI for MSOffice 2007. I prefer the layout and such, but the inability to customize icon sizes and empty space and such is annoying. A lot like the Sidebar in Vista, from the little I've used it it seems to be fixed to a certain spot on the screen with fixed widget sizes.

I do prefer ribbonish UIs over menu bars though. I'd like to see more apps get on the bandwagon so some refinement can happen. Something as simple as making all of the panels quick to hide/unhide, like Adobe Lightroom, would be a big step forward. Once I get into the body of some report I'm writing in a word processor I'd like to be able to get all of the tools out of my way and concentrate on what I'm typing. The menu bar UI has less visual clutter than a ribbon UI in this situation, but a few small improvement could fix that.

And a less cartoonish icon set would be nice too.

And Ubuntu: why is the app named "OpenOffice Spreadsheet" in the Applications menu, but "OpenOffice Calc" when it opens? If all the OO apps weren't that way I'd think my launchers were screwed up.

Re:count me out

[MightyYar]

I prefer the nice hiding menus Diffrn't strokes... that's the first thing I turn off. :)

Re:count me out

[oliverthered]

ah, you're one of those people who enjoy going through the list of 500 applications they've installed trying to find the correct one.

Re:count me out

[MightyYar]

Oh hell no! I hit Command-Shift and start typing the name of the application, if it's not already sitting on my Dock.

Vertical toolbars FTW!

[bazorg]

I for one welcome... using less toolbars at the top and bottom edges of the screen. I've been trying to find an add-on for Firefox to allow just that, as there is plenty of empty space on the sides of my "wide screen" when I'm not watching films.

Arranging all toolbars as "vertical ribbons" with the current OOo is possible and I kind of like it.

Re:Vertical toolbars FTW!

[moreati]

Fission is a nice add on to reclaim some vertical space in Firefox. It makes the address bar behave as in Safari, so the status bar can be switched off.

Re:Vertical toolbars FTW!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, the dimensions of a paper compared to a widescreen monitor makes it rather silly to waste space in the top/bottom of the screen rather than using the space to the sides where there isn't anything anyway.

wait a minute....

[commodoresloat]

I thought open source was terrorism! I guess we have to wait for the al-Qaeda version of OpenOffice. Soon the world's mujahideen will have the full open suite of office productivity tools they need to destroy the Zionist-Crusader alliance.

Re:wait a minute....

[legirons]

I guess we have to wait for the al-Qaeda version of OpenOffice. Can you download that from the US government?

Just More Language Confusion?

[Andor666]

You forgot something...

That Windows is running on a virtual machine (Virtual BoX) over a Linux OS configured on spanish... so...

English article about a Chinese RedOffice installed on a french Windows XP running on a VM on a spanish Linux...

Now THAT'S difficult...

Likely Hidden Feature:

[FurtiveGlancer]

When activated, the ribbon also enables your webcam, so the RedOffice interface crew can monitor your "user experience." The goal, of course, is to improve useability. This begs the questions "of what?" and "for whom?"

Re:Likely Hidden Feature:

[stormguard2099]

doh, I meant to put this: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=570991&cid=23626699 , in response to you.... oops

OOo menus are very popular

[flyingfsck]

So many people have thanked me for installing OpenOffice.org to replace the totally unusable MS Office 2007, that I really hope this remains a Chinese feature.

MS Office 2007 ribbons is the best thing MS could have done to promote OOo adoption. We should all send 'thank you' letters to uncle Steve for that.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[Anonymous Coward]

This is either bullshit, or the people you installed OOo for are idiots, unable to adjust to a far better UI.

But let's have some clarity: How many is "so many"? I've read so many stories where the teller says "so many", "lots of", etc, only to mean "my spouse (down whose throat I shoved my own opinion) and two friends".

That your post got modded "5, Insightful" is an embarrassment to slashdot.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[Falstius]

My chinese is pretty poor, but I do think this implementation of a 'ribbon' looks more appealing than that in Office 2007. And as much as the new UI annoys me, the quick formatting buttons in the new Powerpoint are a nice way to add simple visual appeal to my presentation slides. There is a happy compromise to be had in there somewhere.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[RootWind]

To tell you the truth, I think it is dependent on how willing the person is to learn new things. Here's what I found out with a small sample (probably not representative). I was tasked with rolling out Office 2007 as a trial to a group of 185 college students and ~70 faculty. From our informal survey, approval over 2003 after initial 1 hour exposure: Students: 62.1%; Faculty: 42.8%. After 1 month, Students: 82.1%; Faculty: 54.3%. From the students and faculty that said they were not familiar with Office, the majority preferred 2007. And as expected, those who considered themselves experts, mostly preferred 2003.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[twistah]

I am not saying Office 2007 is great (i.e it takes about 5 clicks to find the current running version) but OOo is pretty atrocious as well. It reminds of me using WordPerfect, or MS Works, on an old Mac. Clunky, outdated GUI and only half-supports certain features. Many people who are not open source/free software types use it and judge all such software by it, which is unfortunate.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[pdusen]

Oh, where to begin. I have not met a person who has used Office 2007 and chose specifically to go back to 2003 (And this is a university setting here, with all sorts of stupidity and entitlement flying around.) The fact is that Office 2007's interface is totally superior to that of earlier office versions, and to OpenOffice.org. The only issue that ANYONE can cite is that it is different. But unlike other application UI changes, if you sit down with the new ribbon for five minutes or less (and I have complete confidence in this), you will quickly be doing everything you could do before and more, because the layout is far more logical and natural.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? It's funny, my parents used to ask me all the time for help on how to do things in Office. Now, with Office 2007, they barely ask for help with anything anymore... mostly because they can find what they're looking for themselves in the ribbons.

Personally, I think it's amazing.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[rmcd]

Well, I'm in a university setting and I use 2003 where I can. The ribbon sends me up a wall and I know a lot of people who detest it. Of course being different is an issue, why shouldn't it be? Why should we all have to relearn a familiar interface???

Just a few comments on the new UI:

1. Where are the VBA editor and the form controls? (by default, not after you've found the "show developer ribbon" in the "popular" (??) options section.)

2. Where is solver? (Hint: not in the add-ins menu) And why does it install under "data" rather than "formulas"

3. Why are "macros" under "view" rather than under "data" or "formulas"?

4. It's great to learn those keystrokes, except that solver is "alt-A y2" on one machine and "alt-a y3" on another.

5. If the ribbon is so great, why didn't Microsoft use it to display the advanced options?

Generally speaking, I find the ribbon steers me to the use of the mouse much more than I prefer. I *hate* mouse-centric interfaces unless you're doing something like drawing.

I wonder why Microsoft couldn't have made the old menu system optional? Borland had alternative menu systems 20 years ago. In a corporate setting, let IT disable the menus if they really want to.

I have no objection to anyone saying they prefer the ribbon. But you're being shallow to dismiss those who don't.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[PCM2]

1. Where are the VBA editor and the form controls? (by default, not after you've found the "show developer ribbon" in the "popular" (??) options section.)

Well... you can get there by doing View->Macros, and from there you can choose either Edit or Create. But now that you mention it, thank you for pointing out the "Show Developer Ribbon" option; I had no idea that it was even there.

P.S. FWIW I think Office 2007 is the best version they've ever done, even (finally) surpassing the Mac versions.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[AnyoneEB]

Since there seem to be a lot of people who like each UI, and the project is open source, is there any reason preventing either (1) old style vs. ribbons simply being a preference or (2) having one remain as a fork only different in the UI? There is no reason to have a battle between the pro-ribbon people and the can't-stand-the-ribbon people.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[rmcd]

I understand people who have positive reactions to 2007. I give Microsoft a *lot* of credit for being courageous and trying something different. I take away all that credit and then some for forcing *everyone* to change in lockstep, and for the change in file formats that more or less forced people to upgrade.

For crying out loud, we live in a world with Vi vs Emacs flamewars! One size does most certainly does *not* fit all.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[zsau]

I dunno. Anyone who puts the "Insert Footnote" feature (previously in Insert) somewhere other than Insert is just screwing with my brain. Sure, some people use them for references (history I think does it?), but I've only incredibly rarely seen footnotes used as references or references used as footnotes. This is really just an irritation, but I had to use the help for it, and Word's help is incredibly bad. (Actually I've had to use Help an awful lot with this version, and frequently I just end up asking someone else or poking at every icon until I come up with what I want.) And anyway, I reckon that you should just choose "Insert Reference" and format the reference as a footnote or APA style or whatever at a later stage, coming from a LaTeX background :)

There's a bunch of other things like this too. Of course, it's generally pretty good, and I guess there's no way they could've made it perfect for all users, but by making the changes bigger than they had to it's become worse. (In the case of footnotes, I think it doesn't much help that footers are in the insert page, even though footers are *basically* always there, just sometimes blank.)

The other big problem I have with it is that there's a bunch of elements which don't have text some of the time --- right now I'm looking at the "Review" page and I can see six icons with no caption. I have no idea what they do. Three of them are disabled, but I'm delighted to see the tooltip still works. Thing about the tooltip is, is that it takes a long time to come up, and it takes a long time to come up with every single option. A lot of programs I use (maybe it's a Linux thing? I'm not sure) will have a delay before the first tooltip comes up, but after that they come up instantly as soon as you move the mouse to the next icon. If you want to find something but don't know where it is, you have to contend with these effectively invisible options. What they need here is some automatic browsing mode that shows mini-tooltips automatically.

Lastly I've found most people think the little arrow in the group caption to pull up a dialog box is confusing and unintuitive; certainly someone had to point it out to me. It's also very hard to describe.

Re:OOo menus are very popular

[pdusen]

I'm not dismissing those who don't, I'm dismissing those who lament it when it is clearly (in my experience) so successful.

Article conclusion

[Macka]

Says it all really:

Redoffice 4.0 beta new UI is really intuitive and useful. The "Live Preview" function is great and should definitively be adopted in OOo after 3.0. Though slower than OOo 3.0 beta, RedOffice runs at an acceptable speed on my old harware. I also hope they will release a Linux version soon.

RedOffice shows a possible way OOo could develop in the future. However, the chinese writing is extremely compact and allows RedOffice's exceptional menu structure. It remains doubtfoul that the user interface could be translated in other languages without major changes in its layout.

Re:Article conclusion

[poetmatt]

You think people read articles on slashdot?

You must be new here!

Big Red

[Gothmolly]

Does it automatically inform the authorities when you commit thoughtcrime ?

Odd omissions

[Anonymous Coward]

Just trying it out and for some reason it doesn't recognize Tibet?

"is this the future?" I hope not

[Anonymous Coward]

The ribbon is one of the suckiest features of the sucktastic Orifice 2007. (OOXML comes in second.) It makes finding everything difficult.

Now, the little toolbar that appears above text right after you highlight it, that is pretty useful, because I want to change something about the text, and I'd prefer not to drag the mouse all the way across the screen. But that's about the only thing they did right in Office 2007.

Communism not a problem?

[Nerdposeur]

It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem...

So removing people's monetary incentives to work harder or learn difficult skills is not a problem? You must have a lot of faith in people's unselfishness.

Your naive outlook makes you a perfect target for domination. ;)

Re:Communism not a problem?

[xappax]

So removing people's natural desire to work together or share knowledge about difficult skills is not a problem? You must have a lot of faith in people's selfishness.

Your sociopathic outlook makes you a perfect businessperson, but questionable human being. ;)

Re:Communism not a problem?

[I confirm I'm not a]

communism-the-economic-model absent totalitarianism-the-political model has been tried - successfully - at least twice: in Anarcho-Communist sections of Spain during the Civil War, and in Ukraine (again by anarchists) in the early 1920s. Both times the eventual failure was brought about not by economic collapse but by... totalitarianism. The Red Army defeated Nestor Markov's Black Army in Ukraine, and the Red Army's paymasters in the CPSU and the pro-Moscow CP of Spain crushed the "fascists" in the anarchist unions in Spain. Your uninformed outlook makes you a perfect target for capitalist brainwashing. ;)

Re:Communism not a problem?

[ShieldW0lf]

communism-the-economic-model absent totalitarianism-the-political model has been tried - successfully - at least twice: in Anarcho-Communist sections of Spain during the Civil War, and in Ukraine (again by anarchists) in the early 1920s. Both times the eventual failure was brought about not by economic collapse but by... totalitarianism. The Red Army defeated Nestor Markov's Black Army in Ukraine, and the Red Army's paymasters in the CPSU and the pro-Moscow CP of Spain crushed the "fascists" in the anarchist unions in Spain. Your uninformed outlook makes you a perfect target for capitalist brainwashing. ;)

I appreciate your point.

That is why I am in favour of a modified form of direct democracy, in which a person has the capacity built into the voting system to allow them to either personally vote on any and every issue if they wish, or to assign their vote to any individual they wish for as long or short a time frame as they wish.

Human beings have a herd instinct, and they will throw their support behind strong central rule when they are under threat. When they're not under threat, that is when they wish to follow their own agendas, be they individual pursuits or voluntarily following leadership that they believe in.

I think such a system could work where Anarcho-Communism failed, because it would not try to enforce an idealistic freedom that the realities of the world will not permit, but systematically and automatically leave the participants with as much self-determination as is practical, while still allowing them to rally into an efficient vertical power structure when under threat.

The trouble with Chinese OpenOffice

[wcrowe]

The trouble with Chinese OpenOffice: thirty minutes after I'm done writing a document, I want to write it again.

Re:The trouble with Chinese OpenOffice

[Sfing_ter]

You should type it with chopsticks, it takes longer and you feel more satisfied when you're done.

What ribbon?

[gravis777]

From the screenshots, it looks more like they stole the UI from Gimp or Photoshop. I see nothing even remotely similar to Office 2007's ribbon in there.

Re:What ribbon?

[Enderandrew]

Gimp's UI is completely different from that screenshot, and completely different from Photoshop.

step in right direction

[codename.matrix]

With more and more widescreen displays it makes sense to move from the menubar to a sidebar-like approach. I think RedOffice might be on to something here. It still has some quirks in the interface but maybe OpenOffice.org 3 will move more functionality in a stylish sidebar. When you look at Impress there is already some stuff moved to a sidebar. The way RedOffice currently has it implemented is a bit crude and doesn't look that well but I like the idea ...

Hope the future of OOo is better than it's past

[rduke15]

new UI inspired from Microsoft Office 2007 [...] Is this the future of OpenOffice.org?

When OOo came, I was thrilled to hear there was an alternative to MS-Word. It turned out to be a bloated MS-Word clone, just orders of magnitude slower, and filled with bugs.

For somoeone who hated Word, it was the same but worse.

I sure hope the future of OOo is NOT to continue (badly) cloning MS-word. I have not tried Office 2007 yet, but I still hope that some day OOo can offer a real alternative and be different.

(In the meantime I use TextMaker)

Re:Hope the future of OOo is better than it's past

[meringuoid]

When OOo came, I was thrilled to hear there was an alternative to MS-Word. It turned out to be a bloated MS-Word clone, just orders of magnitude slower, and filled with bugs.

Have you tried AbiWord? Certainly it's a Word clone, but it's small, and fast, and free.

Re:Hope the future of OOo is better than it's past

[Draek]

Why don't you try Abiword instead, then? OO.o, like MS Office itself, aims to be an "everything but the kitchen sink"-style suite, whereas Abiword (and Gnumeric, for spreadsheets) try only to be a good word processor.

Personally though, I prefer LaTeX. Faster and more intuitive once you get the hang of it, and *much*, *MUCH* better than Word or anything else like it when you have to deal with mathematical formulas, which in my case is "most of the time", being a math student and all that.

No, no it doesn't

[stormguard2099]

http://begthequestion.info/

"Begging the question" is a form of logical fallacy in which a statement or claim is assumed to be true without evidence other than the statement or claim itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

It does NOT mean to raise the question like you have used it.

If your children grow up to be philosophers they will thank me one day...

Courier, we missed you...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with chinese people and that crappy Courier font!

It's not a UI update, infact thats a UI-downgrade, infact it's almost as bad as installing Vista...

By force or by enticement?

[Nerdposeur]

So removing people's natural desire to work together or share knowledge about difficult skills is not a problem? You must have a lot of faith in people's selfishness.

Touche. But I read the parent poster's comment to mean "Communism is not inherently worse than capitalism." I disagree. While there are clearly people who will create FOSS merely for their own satisfaction, there are plenty of unpleasant/difficult jobs out there, and you either have to force people to do them, or entice them. The most straightforward way to entice them is to offer more money until the demand rises to meet the need.

If you think that lots of people will spend 4 years in college, 4 more years in medical school, and 3 years in residency to become a doctor who gets 4 a.m. emergency calls, then be happy making the same amount of money as their hamburger-flipping comrades, I do think that's naive. I wouldn't want a doctor who went into the field *only* for money, but yes, money is a factor in nearly everyone's career decisions.

Re:By force or by enticement?

[shywolf9982]

Okay, we're going a bit offroad here. Medics were paid more (in a way or another) even in the communist states.
The fundamental difference between capitalism and communism was that capitalism was an ecosystem with different needs and actors, each pulling for its own side, and this combined "pulling" made the system reach a stability (it's a natural stable system).
Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets.
The communist approach did had one highlight: the quick electirifcation and modernization of Russia. However, on the other hand, any single mistake from the "big bosses" in the Kremlin had catastrophic consequences.
With a capitalist system, we can afford having completely dumb leaders :D.

Re:By force or by enticement?

[ShieldW0lf]

Communism, on the other hand, called for totally arbitrary pre-planning of economy (you couldn't really go and tell people "do what the fuck you want"), which were the infamous Quinquennial plans of the Soviets.

That is a falsehood. The arbitrary nature of planning comes from a lack of democratic process in determining leadership, not from the nature of the economic system. If a responsive democratic process were in place, this would not happen.

Re:By force or by enticement?

[shywolf9982]

No, this has nothing to do on how you select leaders.
This has to do with the fact that, with communism, economy MUST be lead.
You can't just build a meat-packing plant and tell the director there "do what the fuck you want". You need to know what the country needs and coordinate the economic effort.
Ideally, with capitalism, economy has no lead. In fact, it has: economy would not produce enough advanced innovation, and in fact most of the innovation comes from government funded stuff (be it military production or whatever else).

Re:By force or by enticement?

[Fred_A]

Okay, we're going a bit offroad here. Medics were paid more (in a way or another) even in the communist states. "Save people, eat every day (eat what you cut), become a doctor !
Join the state medical school today !"

(sorry)

The fundamental difference between capitalism and communism was that capitalism was an ecosystem with different needs and actors, each pulling for its own side, and this combined "pulling" made the system reach a stability (it's a natural stable system). No it's not. Just look at what's happening right now. Without regulation it's a bloody (strictly speaking) mess.

Neither system is perfect. But one is much much much much much more forgiving.
The communist system requires more or less perfect people. Therefore it cannot work.

Hopefully some day someone will come with a fresh idea.

Re:By force or by enticement?

[shywolf9982]

Neither system is perfect. But one is much much much much much more forgiving.
The communist system requires more or less perfect people. Therefore it cannot work. +1

I was talking about the "ideal" capitalism. I completely agree with you.

UI

[MonsterTrimble]

From the article: "RedOffice shows a possible way OOo could develop in the future. However, the chinese writing is extremely compact and allows RedOffice's exceptional menu structure. It remains doubtfoul that the user interface could be translated in other languages without major changes in its layout." First, I very much disliked MS Office 2007's UI layout (based on Beta 2) however if OO decided to make this an option (OO3 remix?) I would certainly be interested in trying it out. It may convert me. Second, maybe it was me but I DROOLED over the icons. They look so much cleaner then 2.4's icon set. I'm sorry, but they look like they were lifted from Office 97.

Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the future of OpenOffice.org?

Is ripping off MS Office the future of OOO? We would have to kind of say no, since that's it's history, not it's future.

However, we'd have to say yes, since ripping off MSO will obviously continue as long as OOO is around.

FOSS: everyone else's ideas long to be free!

Re:Future?

[msuarezalvarez]

Of course, because there are so many ways to do a word-processor... and also, of course, we all know that MS came up with the whole concept and design and interface all by themselves. Ah, the nerve of FOSS!

The only excuse for your attitude is extreme youth---something like less than 6 years old...

Lotus Symphony

[Jason Levine]

Back when I tried the Alpha version of Lotus Symphony, I really liked the UI and the fact that I could import WordPro documents (as we're standardized on *shudder* Lotus WordPro here at work). What I didn't like was that Symphony would change all OpenOffice.org file associations to itself when it was installed and every time it was run. There was no option to leave the file associations alone. (Much less an opt-in to change them in the first place.)

Since then, I've kept a wary eye on Symphony. Their latest release notes state: "It is now supported to change the file types to be associated with IBM Lotus Symphony during installation." In addition, the notes talk about a "File Type Associations panel." Hopefully, this means that they realized the error in the Alpha version and have made the file associations opt-in both on install and on program launch.

(If anyone knows for sure, I'd be happy to hear what the latest version does with file type associations.)

Re:Lotus Symphony

[Petrushka]

What I didn't like was that Symphony would change all OpenOffice.org file associations to itself when it was installed and every time it was run. There was no option to leave the file associations alone.

You could always try running in a non-administrator account -- though I'm aware that that's a radical idea.

On the whole, I preferred the UI of Symphony to OpenOffice too. I liked OpenOffice 1.x even more, and would probably still be using it if it supported ODF properly. OpenOffice is going down a very sad road of trying to make itself identical to Microsoft Office in exactly the worst possible ways. Things like

• using MSO-like right-click behaviour (right-click moves selection)
• having to faff through bullets/numbering when moving the cursor with left/right arrow keys (instead of treating bullets purely as paragraph-level formatting)
• random autoformatting, e.g. when pressing delete at the end of a paragraph (or is it when pressing backspace at the start of a paragraph? or is it both?)
• always, always forgetting which view I want to see in the stylist every time I open a file

... and stuff like that. I'd try RedOffice, but I suspect I might have some difficulties with not being able to read the Chinese UI. Honestly, it's enough to make one want to use LaTeX ... except that often I need ad hoc WYSIWYG page layout ...

Microsoft may hunt those down

[Jugalator]

Developing software with the "Fluent UI" (ribbon interface in common mouth) is permitted by Microsoft, except when the software directly competes with the Microsoft Office 2007 line of products. This license was most likely written with OOo and the likes in mind. It can be debated whether this interface is similar enough or not though, but there you have it anyway.

Office UI licensing site

Re:Microsoft may hunt those down

[D Ninja]

Would this be a patent enforcement? I don't understand how a software license can enforce something like this.

Can you explain (legalese is not my thing)?

Which rock are you living under?

[mangu]

It's not communism-the-economic-model that's the problem, it's totalitarianism-the-political-model. You can't dissociate the two in your mind because your own nation has been brainwashing you to think of them as inseparable, most likely since the time you were born.

I can't dissociate the two in my mind because practical experience has amply demonstrated that the economic model of communism needs a totalitarian state to work. Can you cite one single example of a country that adopted a communist economy under a democratic government, and managed to keep it working for at least five years?

In the democratic state, you are dominated through economics

False, because states that have a free economy become prosper. You are much more dominated by economics in Cuba than in the USA. And don't start with this "embargo" thing, because if the Cuban economy were productive enough they wouldn't care a bit about having commerce with the USA.

Capitalism is the same as Totalitarianism, Communism is the same as Democracy,

And black is the same as white, wet is the same as dry, etc. Sorry, but you cannot play with words like that, not if you want to express a coherent thought.

The important lesson that must be learned from the current Chinese regime is that they abandoned the communist economic model, after trying and trying again with different ways to run a communist economy.

Now, OTOH, this meme about "Free Software is Communism" may be right, and this could be the one way in which a communist economy could function. It seems that there are enough people who are willing to share, as long as nothing is taken away from them.

There was even a joke in the Soviet Union about this: the party commissar asks a peasant to share his cows with the other and the peasant agrees. Then the commissar asks the peasant to share his pigs and again the peasant agrees. But when the commissar asks the peasant to share his hens, the answer is no. "Why", the commissar asks. "Because I raise hens, not cows or pigs" is the answer.

Maybe some day we will have fully automated production, and nanotechnology, and human-equivalent artificial intelligence, and whatever else is needed to have a totally automatic production of goods. In that day, a communist economy may function, but with restrictions. For instance, real estate will still be a scarce resource, which will have to be controlled in some way, be it a totalitarian state or a capitalist economy.

But for now, free software production is the only economic system that has ever been able to function adequately in a communist model.

Word processors are dead, I fear.

[argent]

When OOo came, I was thrilled to hear there was an alternative to MS-Word. It turned out to be a bloated MS-Word clone, just orders of magnitude slower, and filled with bugs.

Indeed. EVERYONE seems to be cloning the worst features of Word, because that's apparently by far the easiest way to create a program that can roundtrip to Word and back without losing formatting. And that's apparently the only critical feature.

So I've given up. By preference I write documents in HTML+CSS now. I'd use Docbook or something similar, if there were good tools available.

Don't even talk to me about TeX. Been there, done that, got the incomprehensible error messages.

Ribbon

[folstaff]

I started using Office applications before there was an office and I have used Office 2007 for over a year. The combination of the ribbon interface while excluding backward compatibility is the stupidest decision I have ever seen Microsoft make. I am including Windows ME, Microsoft Bob, and that annoying Clippy.

Re:Ribbon

[Anonymous Coward]

Get over it. Did they change the keyboard shortcuts? I mean, with 15+ years of Office usage, you must have learned them at some point?

The Ribbon was a brave move by Microsoft. It consolidated menus and toolbars with duplicated features into one entity that is arguably the best of both. Sadly it requires relearning, and some simple things seem to be harder now.

The RedOffice screenshots look interesting because it looks like a better implementation for modern widescreen displays.

Selfishness is predictable

[Nerdposeur]

P.S. - I *do* have a lot of faith in people's selfishness. And I like it when I can plainly see that their selfish motives will compel them to do something that benefits me.

When someone says "I want to give you free money for no apparent reason," I see no reason for them to be so selfless and I am suspicious. When someone says "I want to do the dirty work of fixing your car in exchange for big bucks," I understand their motives and think it's safe to trust them.

I know some wonderfully unselfish people, but when dealing with strangers, I do not assume that they're wonderfully unselfish. Do you?

Re:Selfishness is predictable

[Haeleth]

When someone says "I want to give you free money for no apparent reason," I see no reason for them to be so selfless and I am suspicious. When someone says "I want to do the dirty work of fixing your car in exchange for big bucks," I understand their motives and think it's safe to trust them.

Really? Personally I'm always highly suspicious of people who want to fix my car: I don't really understand how cars work, so they could claim to be doing essential work cheaply, and really be doing unnecessary work (or no work at all) and then ripping me off, and it would be hard for me to tell the difference. Why do you suppose they would do neither more nor less than the necessary work, and charge me a reasonable price, when they would benefit more (with zero risk of discovery) by behaving selfishly and either not doing the right work or charging an extortionate price?

That's why, before I take my car to be fixed, I'm sure to ask around people I know to get recommendations. These people then tell me which mechanics they trust and which they don't: in other words, they give me free advice for what you would presumably describe as "no apparent reason". And I trust them precisely because of this: because nobody is paying them to say anything, they have nothing to gain by lying.

Re:Selfishness is predictable

[Nerdposeur]

That's why, before I take my car to be fixed, I'm sure to ask around people I know to get recommendations. These people then tell me which mechanics they trust and which they don't: in other words, they give me free advice for what you would presumably describe as "no apparent reason". And I trust them precisely because of this: because nobody is paying them to say anything, they have nothing to gain by lying.

You make a good point: I'm overgeneralizing by implying you can only trust people when they're selfish. Of course that's not true - my friends gave me good advice on finding a mechanic when I moved to this town, just because they're nice. And of course I don't think of personal relationships the same way I view businesses whose sole purpose is selfish - to make money - or workers, whose main purpose in that role is to make money.

But consider the mechanic: does he have more to gain by ripping me off, or by doing good work and getting my "free" word of mouth? I think the latter is better for him in the long run. Does the bank have more to gain by emptying my account, or by keeping my business and keeping their reputation intact? Definitely the latter.

Anyway, this discussion started from my assertion that Communism doesn't work because it removes people's selfish motivations to work harder or acquire difficult skills. Surely you don't think that people will line up to work on road paving crews, in law firms, and as secretaries, all content to receive the same salary? Selfish motivation is at least a factor in everyone's work decisions - even if we are quite generous in our personal lives. Otherwise, why work at all?

Re:Selfishness is predictable

[xappax]

Surely you don't think that people will line up to work on road paving crews, in law firms, and as secretaries, all content to receive the same salary?

Where did this "everyone gets the same salary" thing come from? I guess it's been proposed in some extreme theoretical implementations of communism, but even the "bad" communists, like China and Russia didn't pay everyone the same.

The premise of a communist (read: community managed) economy is that people get paid according to what the community decides, rather than according to whatever the free market allows or doesn't allow.

So, if the community agrees that being a doctor (or a garbageman) is hard enough or unpleasant enough that it should be paid higher, they can do that.

The only difference is that salaries are being determined by direct democracy (assuming your government is a direct democracy), rather than the arbitrary and highly gameable system of the free market.

Re:Selfishness is predictable

[ShieldW0lf]

Thank you.

Stop coping Micorsoft and make something new

[vosester]

Wow when I first read the title I thought at last some one has come up with a new GUI for OOo and again it is cloning Microsoft.

OOo and linux in the desktop space need to set itself apart form other software by been new and not a cheep solution to an old problem.

It is a shame because I like the Ribbon. FOSS should have come up with this years ago instead of just copying Microsoft.

I hate Microsoft products and refuse to use them but if you in the IT Industry you can not escape them.

When I was setting up an company's software stack. They insisted that it be the lasted Office,
I begged with them not to get it and cited my reasons
(New UI,New File format, cost, etc) The first time I used Office2007 I was really impressed,
For the first time ever I think Microsoft deserves a pat on the back.

The best way I can put it is I work under the same way as doctors.
I know more about computers (body) than you BUT it is your system (body), whether you take my recommendation is up to you.
So maybe some times the customer knows what's better for themselves than some pros do.

Ribbons? Uggh...

[Firefalcon]

I really hope not. Being in IT, I thought I should get the hang of Office 2007 and hated it (especially the ribbons), preferring Office 2003 (and now I've switched to Linux on my main machine, I'm using OpenOffice anyway).

Ouch

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap it looks terrible.

Open Source ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame none of it is Open Source - or will be contributed back up-stream. Shame the new metaphore appears to work only in asian languages with very short translations. ie. - yet another sadly proprietary OO.o derivative.

In China,

[gzipped_tar]

... only old people use RedOffice. Well seriously, although RedOffice is rarely used even in China (most of us use OO or MS Office), it's worth a try. As far as I know, the RedOffice is part of the Red Flag OS, a Redhat-based Linux desktop OS aimed at the business desktop market. One thing I don't like about the Red Flag, apart from the name, is their tradition of copying MS's UI design. It's desktop environment (GNOME if I remembered correctly) looks notoriously like Windows XP. Several years ago Red Flag lost to MS in the bid of providing desktop OS for the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, since you know there's nothing MS can't corrupt AND the government IS corrupt. Since then I thought Red Flag was dead. It's somehow a little surprising to see they made a Slashdot front-page story. One thing good about Red Flag, though, is the Chinese language support. BTW If I had time I'd write a new OO UI that closely mimics EMACS. No toolbar/menu/ribbon/tape/etc. Use C-n and so on to navigate through the doc. All EMACS key bindings works in the expected way. Dialogue windows are invoked by M-x. ;)

Capitalism

[Z34107]

Just to nitpick, capitalism works just in a lack of scarcity. DRM and DMCA is a government and legislation thing - capitalism is an economic system.

Traditional Adam-Smith-Invisible-Hand-esque capitalist economics say MP3s should be free.

Re:Capitalism

[Fred_A]

Just to nitpick, capitalism works just in a lack of scarcity. Just what ?

I'll suppose it was supposed to be "just fine".

Well no. It cannot. Try selling breathing air on Earth and you'll find it won't get you very far. You can sell something that you can add value to. Or to rephrase, something which you can make scarce.

DRM and DMCA is a government and legislation thing - capitalism is an economic system. I suspect that you think that economics and politics have nothing to do with one another. Next you're going to say that economy is a science.

Traditional Adam-Smith-Invisible-Hand-esque capitalist economics say MP3s should be free. So ? Aren't they in the current market ? You can get them all over the networks.

Re:Capitalism

[Z34107]

I'm not sure if my school's network ate my original reply, so here goes a potentially duplicate reply:

Maybe you misunderstand the vague evil that is "capitalism." We in America do not have it, per se - we forked from the standard "unbridled capitalism" branch for our own "regulation" distro, which lets us see such improvements as clean air and water. It also permits the introduction of artificial scarcity - DRM on MP3s on our example - which, although needed by some traditional business models, is not needed by "capitalism."

Traditional economics predict that given a lack of scarcity, supply will be infinite and cost will be zero. This lack of scarcity was uninteresting to the pre-digital philosophers and economists of the 1700s, which is why classical economics focuses almost exclusively on the study and implications of scarcity.

You cite "Try selling breathing air on Earth and you'll find it won't get you very far" as a failure of capitalism? Sounds like the good ol' invisible hand's working to me.

Re:Capitalism

[Fred_A]

You cite "Try selling breathing air on Earth and you'll find it won't get you very far" as a failure of capitalism? Sounds like the good ol' invisible hand's working to me. I see...
So you failed Economy ?

Re:Capitalism

[Z34107]

I didn't fail "Economy", but I passed a related course that my school offered. ("Economics." But in Soviet Russia, the Economy fails you?)

Is English not your first language?

Re:Capitalism

[mgblst]

So ? Aren't they in the current market ? You can get them all over the networks.

No, just because you can get something does not make it free. There are costs involved, and prices to pay, just ask anyone who has got a letter from the RIAA/MPAA.

Candy from a baby is not free either. Neither are five-finger discounts free.

Re:Stop coping Micorsoft and make something new

[oahazmatt]

It is a shame because I like the Ribbon. FOSS should have come up with this years ago instead of just copying Microsoft. Okay, I'm going to throw away the mod points I already used in this thread. And I don't mean this to be flamebait.

You admit that you like the Ribbon, but you wish FOSS developed it first so they didn't have to copy Microsoft? Why?

Sites, this one specifically, will be ripe with comments begging Microsoft to actually innovate rather than follow the trends of companies that do.

If you enjoy the UI, why does it matter who adopted it first?

If Microsoft had adapted the UI from OpenOffice there would be plenty of people criticizng Microsoft for not innovating their own programs, and copying from others.

Now that the situation is reversed, it somehow becomes a problem. Why? Because if the FOSS community had developed the UI first it would be better? More efficient? Cooler?

The FOSS community does a lot of good and introduces many new and innovative ideas, but they won't create all of them.

I don't think a good idea is worth any less just because it comes from an organization that you don't openly support.

If that's not exactly what you were implying, I apologize. I just found the comment to be a bit odd.

Stop copying DEFECTS

[anand78]

The reason I have still not switched with Office 2003 is the ribbon.

MOD PARENT UP

[zooblethorpe]

The GP makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that capitalism is somehow freeing, and intimates that all participants are on an equal footing:

Capitalism/Democracy == Emergent economy, and bottom up determinacy of government.

This is patently false, as anyone paying attention to the development of the US economy and US politics should be aware.

Meanwhile, the parent has correctly recognized that capitalism works on the principle of capital concentration, meaning that very few participants actually have the wherewithal to engage in a meaningful way:

This is in contrast to capitalism, in which the economy is ostensibly managed by nobody, and in practice managed by those who control the lions share of money or resources. This commonly leads to a small number of successful capitalists gaining effective centralized control of the economy.

Capitalism and democracy are actually not complementary systems. Those honestly interested in exploring this might wish to read Bowles & Gintis' book, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought.

Cheers,

Is IBM contributing the UI to OpenOffice as well?

[testerus]

What exactly is IBM's contribution to OpenOffice.org?

My opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

My opinion is that looks better than Office 2007 "Ribbon", what is crap, by my opinion. I dont get Ribbon to allow me working better or allow better usability, contrarery, it's slowing me down even I have used it now almost since when it came out. I just love the original menu idea when I can find everything fast and it does what I want.

What I like Office 2007, is it is more complete set of WYSIWYG editor and that is what should be "copied" to OpenOffice.

I'm waiting Koffice2 what seems to have better UI than these two.

That's just your wishful thinking

[hackingbear]

I have been involved with software companies in China. What you described is simply just your own wishful thinking. Chinese customers, private or government, mostly don't care if your products is OOS or MS or what. The large and rich organization will pay for the MS license (just to avoid copyright lawsuits, and yes, there are lawyers in China suing companies for copyright violation.) The poor ones just use pirated copies.

And "national security" is never in mind for most customers, nor affecting any purchase decision. In fact, I got to know an officer in the PLA army working on IT and he said they just bought Sun servers and use.

To be blunt, you are wrong.

[blueZ3]

The problem with "planning" an economy for some ridiculously long period of time (say anything over 30 days) is not a lack of democracy. They didn't get a failure of planning because people couldn't "vote" on what the plan should be.

The problem with centralized planning is much more basic than that: with current science/technology it is impossible to predict future conditions with the degree of accuracy necessary for such planning to work. A "planned" economy cannot react to crises or the unforeseen with the same speed and efficiency as capitalism.

There are many failings in the capitalist system as currently implemented in the West, but centralized planning is not a solution to any of them.

Nice frontend G`UI...

[antdude]

... However, the engine is still weak compared to Office 2007. Not even good as Office 2000's. OpenOffice v2 still has problems with simple table formattings in its Writer.

Re:Nice frontend G`UI...

[fremean]

Heh, another reason I prefer OO over MSO - I don't have to spend ages turning off all the "auto helping you" features - but yes, there are for sure some areas where it could be improved, and tables is one.

But must we steal what I consider the worst part of the latest incarnation of MSO?

Re:Nice frontend G`UI...

[antdude]

I actually didn't use Office's autoformat. I do almost everything by hand.

Cultural problem

[domatic]

There is a disconnect between the way often raucous FOSS projects run themselves and most Asian cultures. I read of an Chinese embedded system manufacturer who didn't want to submit patches or participate on the LKML because of "flaming". Indeed they do flame there but Western geeks tends to be upfront if they think something sucks. Although Western cultures have a concept of "honor", they really don't have a concept of "face" which if far more encompassing. To have one's words and works torn apart as they are on large FOSS projects entails a loss of face. The Eastern way is generally to praise in public and criticize in private. This generally isn't too compatible with how things are done in mostly Western run FOSS projects.

Far better UI!? Are you nuts!?

[GameboyRMH]

Let's see, you have this new system of giant buttons spread out over the whole width of the screen, and to select another set of giant buttons you need to click on another tab.

With the old menus, you only needed to click on one menu and move the mouse a short distance to the button you wanted, and you only needed to slide the mouse a short distance across the screen to choose another menu. Also there was space to display the keyboard shortcuts at all times. Now you have to hover your mouse over a button to get the tooltip which displays the shortcut, or press Alt for the Alt-Combos (still SOL with the Ctrl-combos)

So, I would say the new ribbon system would be good if you're not very accurate with your mouse, or if you're drunk or visually impaired, and the old menu system is good if you like working quickly and eliminating unnecessary mousework.

Eaugh - Must we?

[fremean]

Seriously, I loathe the damn menus in office 2007. Must we copy them? At least tell me we can/will be able to revert.

I'm not the only person - even some of my less 'open source friendly' co-workers and friends switched to open office right after discovering the new office menu system.

I find it unintuitive and cumbersome.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Stop coping Micorsoft and make something new

[vosester]

Nothing is really new theses days but instead off OOo of playing catch up with Microsoft they should have gone in a new direction but 10 years later someone is doing it again.
It does not mater who invented it first, I just wish that FOSS would look beyond was Microsoft is doing. Take other FOSS programs for instants.

Compiz
Was no were near the first to bring desktop effects, but they took it light years ahead than anyone else.

Firefox
Again it looks much the same as IE , but the extensions give it so much more power, and it when beyond just for looking at web pages.

I hold my hand up and say I don't know all the features in OOo but I guess they are just clone of Office.

They are so many was to display information and tools (Pie menu,ZUI,Stacks) why just stick to one.

And that's my main point every time I used OOo it bring nothing new to the table, but just clones of old features

I really hope OOo becomes a good alternative to Office because it will help with Linux adoption.

Put it this way I can say to my customers here's OOo and it does the same as Office they will ask me two thing is it really Free and will I have to retrain my employes.

I would say yes it is free and no you will not have to retrain you employes and they would have a look, I would get "This is brilliant"
So I would install it and two days later I would get a phone call saying where's this feature and the print out's don't look the same. So I would have to revert them back to Office

For me to sell something I need it to be better than what's they are using now because they are not going to leave for freedom they will leave when it brings better features

Emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone need more than emacs?

Any system "works great" when there is abundance

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only under scarcity that the fundamental stability of a system is tested.

No IBM Symphony article on Slashdot?

[Provocateur]

At least give us a http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/buzzentry!default.jspa?threadID=4872link

Theming?

[RiotingPacifist]

Given that many people use their office suites as much as their web browsers isn't it about time that the interfaces became as themeable & easily customisable as web browsers?

One size doesn't fit all.

Invisible Hands and Public Goods

[duyn]

Just to nitpick, capitalism works just [sic] in a lack of scarcity.

Depends on what you mean by "works". Sure, you can apply the principles of private ownership to situations of lack of scarcity. It's just that the outcomes tend to not be so great.

Traditional Adam-Smith-Invisible-Hand-esque capitalist economics say MP3s should be free.

And that's a problem. If they were free, how are you ever going to make back the costs in going from nothing to the final MP3? If you can only sell MP3s at marginal cost, how will you make back the recording band's wages, the studio hire and the cost of lunch for the crew?

The problem with software and music lies in the ease with which they can be copied by others. Traditional economics (Adam Smith's Invisible Hand) doesn't like people using your stuff without permission. When it comes across non-excludable goods (like ideas) or goods which are easily copied (like MP3s), traditional economics fails miserably. You get an under-supply of non-excludable goods because not everyone who's going to use them will chip in to the cost of producing them. You get a lack of innovation where goods are too easily copied because the innovators can't make back the costs of creating new products.

The only solution people have come up with to deal with these situations is remove the problematic characteristics of these goods. With non-excludable goods, the solution tends to be a liberal sprinkling of property rights to make them excludable (eg. patents). With easily copied goods, the solution tends to be measures which curb copying (copyright law, DRM).

Neither of these is optimal, but at the end of the day someone has to pay the costs of coming up with an idea. If nobody pays, the original creator won't have any incentive to develop these ideas. If only some people pay, the response will always be "why me?". If everybody pays, the price will be above the marginal cost and thus not optimal. The traditional view, as reflected by the institutions in our current society, tends to be that it is better that some people miss out because of high prices than everybody missing out because there is no incentive to create such products.

That's not to say that communism is better, just that capitalism with its private ownership has problems with these classes of goods.