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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?"
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...
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..."
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.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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. ;)
Some of us like FOSS because of its capitalist and free market ideas.
Seriously? This China related alarmism on Slashdot is really saddening
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
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.
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.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
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).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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?
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
"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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
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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.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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.
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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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.