Open Office is free. Why not just download a copy and see how it works for your specific workload?
For many people (maybe even for you), Open Office is more than good enough for what they do.
For others (maybe even for you), the fact that Open<->MS office translations not being perfect can ruin your day -- but whether or not that's the case, is going to be something that you're gonna have to figure out on your own.
Things that I can suggest (in no particular order):
If you mostly generate and use documents internally then OO is likely to be just fine for you.
If you have a boatload of specialized (VB) macros that are critical to your workload, you might have to have to (at the least) hire someone for a bit to do the translation for you. This may also be a reason to use the Novell extensions.
If you have really precise needs for formatting and spacing, and do your document formatting in the 'dumb' way (hard-code line ends, and page ends, and use spaces where you should be using tab stops, etc., etc., etc., then moving to OO might hurt your brain.
If your documents are done relatively sanely, and you're not going to have a fit if one page has 3 words that spill over to the next page in OO where it didn't in MSO then OO is probably a great fit for you.
Convincing your normal correspondents to install a copy of OO, rather than always bouncing back and forth between OO and MSO formats will make your life easier.
For the previous point, you might want to burn yourself a handful (or a crate full, depending on the size of your business) of OO install CDs. ... While you're at it, you might also want to includes copies of things like Gimp and Firefox, and any other Free software you'd like to see other people use.
Given that OO is more OS agnostic than it's MS alternate, and it's easier to get mission critical fixes done (i.e. you can hire someone to do them for you) you might find that OO is your better choice in the long term, even if you determine that you could have some short-term problems with it.
Backward compatibility shouldn't enter the specification at all. Backward compatibility isn't, per se, a bad thing -- as long as it's done cleanly and well documented. MS OXML fails on those last two points which is part of what IMO makes this proposed standard a bit stinky.
There was a time when US companies and corporate leaders felt that it was worthwhile to care about the communities in which they exist. Er, um. No. There was simply a time when (with the US being the prime destination for goods as well as a prime source of raw gods), it didn't make much sense to do things like move out of the country.
Back then you had companies dumping hazardous chemicals into aquifers, and exploiting workers as well as the Union contracts (or lack of a union), and labour market allowed. I talked to one lady who worked in an office environment in the early '70s.... When an important executive came into town, they'd pick a random receptionist to 'take care of his needs'. It was a case of 'put up or get out' and, for a young woman with few other prospects and the likelihood of a bad reference if she said 'no', there were some very hard choices to be made.
It's long been case that your average large conglomerate was focused on making a profit -- by hook or croock. The difference was that -- roughly from the 60s to the 80s the electorate had a reasonable control of the government, which responded by setting laws and regulations which generally worked for the average citizen. Nowadays, big business has gotten their claws (back) into the heart of government.
Instead of setting the rules and laws such that a corporation hellbent on making money would act in a way that (generally) worked for the populace, now the laws are increasingly being set so that a corporation hellbent on making a profit will be able to set the rules so that they work for the greater profit rather than the greater good.
They are the standard and the largest software company in the world so their stuff has to work. If it fails it was because IT messed up. Not quite -- If Microsoft's shit stinks, then IT will get blamed for it because "obviously a company like Microsoft wouldn't do anything that stupid....".
I'd just tell him: "Novell, IBM, Google, HP and Time/Warner (among others) use it is that serious enough for you?".
He'll probably call you on the Novell name-dropping, so I'd have some extra documention on what Novell is doing with Samba.
If that's not enough for him, then I'd ask (publicly, but politely) for what sort of use would satisfy him. Tell him that if there's something he knows about Samba that you don't you need to know about it so that you can respond to it.
It really had nothing to do with MS Office for the Mac. Remember that this was back when MS was trying to 'cut of Netscape's air supply'. MS wanted something that they could hold to Apple's throat to get them to drop Netscape in favor of IE -- and they got a patent license and some cheap shares to boot out of the threat.
(( Then, once netscape was effectively dead, Microsoft killed support for IE on the Mac, and forced Apple to develop Safari)).
Killing Office for the Mac would have cost Microsoft millions of dollars -- and that's profig, not income. The thing is that it would have hurt Apple even more, and -- given that they had spent over a billion dollars trying to kill Netscape, tossing a few hundred million more trashing their Mac Office market was quite believable to Apple's executives... Evidence of that is that, shortly thereafter, Jobs bit his tongue and went on stage at macworld to eat crow and play nice with Microsoft in front of a shocked and disgusted crowd of Mac lovers.
I'd say that DRM is more like having a limiter on your car that presumes that:
It knows what the speed limit is, and:
it is illegal to go either over the speed limit or more than 15MPH below the speed limit.
In other words:
once you hit a highway with a speed limit of 65MPH, you would be forced to go between 50MPH and 65MPH. If traffic forced you to go below 50MPH, your only option would be to come to a complete and immediate stop.
Note that in the city (where speeds near 30MPH are more common), this will mean that you will be allowed to go betwwen 15MPH and 30MPH.
If weather, road conditions and/or visibility problems would otherwise require that you drive below the normal, stated speed, it would still prevent you from 'breaking the law' (read: drive at a safe speed).
Once you chose the 0MPH option out of the 50/0 option, it would immediately slam on the brakes and bring you within the law (i.e. stopped) as quickly as possible. (If you are towing a trailer, it had better have good brakes or you're gonna be fishtailing all over the road... the RIAA's solution to this will probably be to ban all trailers [[ which will cause serious problems for the trucking industry]]).
When you decide to resume a "legal" speed, the governor will floor the gas, and attempt to (once again) bring you in compliance with (it's interpretation of) the law. If you do not achieve 50MPH within 15 seconds (e.g. towing a heavy load up a hill), it will then slam on the brakes again.
The movie studios encrypted discs with CSS. They then gave the DVDCCA the power to grant authorizations to decrypt and access those movies. The DVDCCA in turn authorized the player manufacturers to build players that could handle that decryption, provided that they conformed to certain requirements (e.g. respect region codes, add macrovison to the outputs). The permission is granted, therefore, to the disc-playing machine, not the owner or user of the machine, nor the owner or user of the disc itself. My understanding is that the DVDCCA licenses to the studios the technology to encrypt their movies with CSS, and it licenses the DVD players the technology to decrypt the same.
I would say (and IANAL) that when a customer buys a DVD (s)he also obtains the implicit right to view it. It's not the consumer's issue how that technology is licensed.
From the programmers' point of view, as long as the code that they write isn't taken from a licensed user of the software, they're not violating copyright -- and as long as the primary purpose of the code is simply to view the DVD, then I think that that (at least arguably) keeps them on the good side of the DMCA.
Well, there were a couple of camps:
For the Liberals (who passed the law in the first place, and begrudgingly included the sunset clause):
It hasn't been used in the time it's been in place.
Other laws have turned out to be enough even to deal with the terrorists we've found (once we placed a focus there).
The law has a huge potential to be misused. It needs some heavy-duty checks and balances (which the conservatives weren't willing to put into place until the last minute when it was clear that they weren't going to win the fight to get it passed as-is.)
For The Conservatives (currently in power, and fawning at the feet of GB Jr.):
Just because it hasn't been used doesn't mean that it won't be.
Just because it hasn't been misused means that it won't be. [[ I kid you not]].
Not voting for it means that you're (a friend of) terrorists. (they've actually publicly accused the liberals of having their agenda steered by 'extremists'.
Then, of course, there are the NDP (uh, to the left of anything you normally see in the US), and the Block Quebecois (slightly to the left of the NDP, except that they want to separate Quebec into it's own country) who have always railed against the civil rights aspects of the law. (you can guess how they're voting).
Because this is a minority government, the conservatives needed the support of at least one other party to renew this law. They've spent so much time and energy browbeating and insulting people over this issue that it looks like nobody's gonna want to talk to them for quite some time.
Since MS was silent in the technical stage of the ODF standards process, it would have been far too obvious what they were doing if they, at the last minute, piped up with complaints about ODF that they'd been sitting on for the duration of the whole process.
If MS had suddenly piped up with (real or imaginary) complaints about ODF, then it would have been open season on OXML -- and OXML has way less to protect itself from any serious complaints.
MS was probably waiting for this opportunity to paint itself as the aggrieved member of this drama.
OXML really does have serious problems -- among them, undocumented blobs that -- if a vendor manged to implement a reader for (for example) the MS document formats mentioned but not used in the 'standard) ((e.g. the Windows-95 format), then MS might have had the ability to sue those programmers over the infringed patents in the undisclosed part of the "standard". (they might not do it today, but what about 5 years from now when they've re-established their monopoly hold on the office suites.
This subpoena is issued in the Novell case, which is still in discovery. Discovery is closed in the IBM case, which is why they probably didn't issue the subpoena there.
Personally, I don't see any reason for Novell to issue a subpoena to PJ in the Novell case. In all probability, anything that she has that relates to Novell is already on Groklaw. Given that SCO, and it's agents have already tried to stalk PJ, I'd say that she's got good reason to avoid any possible subpoena from them, unless they show that they actually have real questions to ask her that relate properly to the Novell case, and that SCO couldn't get from their own (or Novell's) files.
Fire investigators are pretty good at recognizing fires that result from wiring faluts -- it usually results in the wire near the spark point melted into balls. It's a common enough source of fires for a very long time that fire investigators would probably be able to recognize that kind of fire source pretty quickly, and not try to blame the laptop.
It's actually a PPAR-gamma Modulator, not PPAR-gamma, itself. The Poster messed up, and the editors didn't catch it. In other words, this really is still a story. (and for people not into molecular biology, it would have probably been a story anyways)
Fourth, it's astonishing that hours after the fire the have such a detailed explanation of events. "Laptop failed." That kind of forensics process takes a lot longer than a handful of hours. Fire investigators are pretty good at figuring out where a fire started. If they concluded that the fire started at location X, and at location X, they find the melted bits of a 2" hard drive and P4 CPU, it's gonna be pretty obvious to ask the homeowner if they had a laptop.
Now, I can agree that it's probably going to be a week or ten before the final report on this fire, but I'm not at all surprised that they came to a working theory of 'laptop flameout' within a few hours of the house cooling down enough for them to investigate.
The easy solutions to the courts' worries about the pictures getting out is that, if another person intercepted the pictures and, realizing what they were, kept a copy for 'personal use' those pictures would then be the child pornography that they shouldn't be classified as if they stayed in the possession of the young lovers.
In other words, it's the possessor of the images which would make them child pornography.
As this ruling stands, it's not just pictures what would be illegal. If (as is the case in Canada) written stories can be considered pornographic, even love letters between these two could be considered child pornography. A Diary entry could also be considered child pornography because it's possible that their parents could check up on what their children are writing.
No. Both were at fault. It's not like Turner doesn't have money to afford renting space on the side of a billboard, etc. The probable intent of this whole setup was to jar people and make them thing that something strange was up. "Oh, my God, it's a bomb" wasn't an entirely unforseen reaction. If the device was attached to a billboard (or some other private property), however, it would have probably worried people a lot less than a strange device bolted to a freaking bridge.
(not to mention that -- if you bolt enough random things to a bridge (which requires that you dig into the concrete), you're going to start weakening the structure, and affecting it's MTBF. )
On the other hand, if Boston authorities had taken 30 seconds to look at what these stupid boxes were doing, they would have realized that it was simply some ghit using public structures as an advertising prop, hunted down the company responsible and charged a couple of executives with public mischief. -- rather than shutting down a bunch of major roadways.
This overreaction shit is stupid. Even with all the bombings in Iraq, drunk drivers are still killing way more people than terrorism, and the tobacco industry is on an entirely different scale.
The reason why the airways are safer has nothing to do with airport security confiscating my jeweler's screwdriver and everything to do with the fact that the next idiot who pulls a weapon in an airliner is gonna do a faceplant after a 6000 foot free-fall.. . Even a clipfull of bullets isn't gonna do you much good when you have 75 passengers taking responsibility for the safety of their aircraft while it's in the air.
If you want America perfectly safe from all terrorist attacks, you're going to have to encase the entire country in a 600 foot thick concrete tomb. Good luck.
The only reason she looks surprised is because her eyes are open so wide. That's precisely the effect that she seems to be complaining about. Apparently, it's a side-effect of the surgery, and not something that she's feigning.
Doctor confidentiality is not a one-way street. The profession also uses it to hide complaints from the public. The result is that a doctor with serious complaints against him/her can sometimes move to another state and start with a 'clean slate'. It is very rare that complaints to a medical board are made public (similarly for Lawyers, etc.).
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For many people (maybe even for you), Open Office is more than good enough for what they do.
For others (maybe even for you), the fact that Open<->MS office translations not being perfect can ruin your day -- but whether or not that's the case, is going to be something that you're gonna have to figure out on your own.
Things that I can suggest (in no particular order):
Back then you had companies dumping hazardous chemicals into aquifers, and exploiting workers as well as the Union contracts (or lack of a union), and labour market allowed. I talked to one lady who worked in an office environment in the early '70s.... When an important executive came into town, they'd pick a random receptionist to 'take care of his needs'. It was a case of 'put up or get out' and, for a young woman with few other prospects and the likelihood of a bad reference if she said 'no', there were some very hard choices to be made.
It's long been case that your average large conglomerate was focused on making a profit -- by hook or croock. The difference was that -- roughly from the 60s to the 80s the electorate had a reasonable control of the government, which responded by setting laws and regulations which generally worked for the average citizen. Nowadays, big business has gotten their claws (back) into the heart of government.
Instead of setting the rules and laws such that a corporation hellbent on making money would act in a way that (generally) worked for the populace, now the laws are increasingly being set so that a corporation hellbent on making a profit will be able to set the rules so that they work for the greater profit rather than the greater good.
That, if they get a useful idea from the public, that they patent it (at least, in the US, where business method patents are allowed).
I'd just tell him: "Novell, IBM, Google, HP and Time/Warner (among others) use it is that serious enough for you?".
He'll probably call you on the Novell name-dropping, so I'd have some extra documention on what Novell is doing with Samba.
If that's not enough for him, then I'd ask (publicly, but politely) for what sort of use would satisfy him. Tell him that if there's something he knows about Samba that you don't you need to know about it so that you can respond to it.
like DRM cares about what the real law is?
(( Then, once netscape was effectively dead, Microsoft killed support for IE on the Mac, and forced Apple to develop Safari)).
Killing Office for the Mac would have cost Microsoft millions of dollars -- and that's profig, not income. The thing is that it would have hurt Apple even more, and -- given that they had spent over a billion dollars trying to kill Netscape, tossing a few hundred million more trashing their Mac Office market was quite believable to Apple's executives... Evidence of that is that, shortly thereafter, Jobs bit his tongue and went on stage at macworld to eat crow and play nice with Microsoft in front of a shocked and disgusted crowd of Mac lovers.
Hearing this, the stewardess runs into the cockpit and turns off the flight recorder.
- It knows what the speed limit is, and:
- it is illegal to go either over the speed limit or more than 15MPH below the speed limit.
In other words:-
once you hit a highway with a speed limit of 65MPH, you would be forced to go between 50MPH and 65MPH. If traffic forced you to go below 50MPH, your only option would be to come to a complete and immediate stop.
- Note that in the city (where speeds near 30MPH are more common), this will mean that you will be allowed to go betwwen 15MPH and 30MPH.
- If weather, road conditions and/or visibility problems would otherwise require that you drive below the normal, stated speed, it would still prevent you from 'breaking the law' (read: drive at a safe speed).
- Once you chose the 0MPH option out of the 50/0 option, it would immediately slam on the brakes and bring you within the law (i.e. stopped) as quickly as possible. (If you are towing a trailer, it had better have good brakes or you're gonna be fishtailing all over the road
... the RIAA's solution to this will probably be to ban all trailers [[ which will cause serious problems for the trucking industry]]).
- When you decide to resume a "legal" speed, the governor will floor the gas, and attempt to (once again) bring you in compliance with (it's interpretation of) the law. If you do not achieve 50MPH within 15 seconds (e.g. towing a heavy load up a hill), it will then slam on the brakes again.
Some results:My understanding is that the DVDCCA licenses to the studios the technology to encrypt their movies with CSS, and it licenses the DVD players the technology to decrypt the same.
I would say (and IANAL) that when a customer buys a DVD (s)he also obtains the implicit right to view it. It's not the consumer's issue how that technology is licensed.
From the programmers' point of view, as long as the code that they write isn't taken from a licensed user of the software, they're not violating copyright -- and as long as the primary purpose of the code is simply to view the DVD, then I think that that (at least arguably) keeps them on the good side of the DMCA.
- It hasn't been used in the time it's been in place.
- Other laws have turned out to be enough even to deal with the terrorists we've found (once we placed a focus there).
- The law has a huge potential to be misused. It needs some heavy-duty checks and balances (which the conservatives weren't willing to put into place until the last minute when it was clear that they weren't going to win the fight to get it passed as-is.)
For The Conservatives (currently in power, and fawning at the feet of GB Jr.):- Just because it hasn't been used doesn't mean that it won't be.
- Just because it hasn't been misused means that it won't be. [[ I kid you not]].
- Not voting for it means that you're (a friend of) terrorists. (they've actually publicly accused the liberals of having their agenda steered by 'extremists'.
Then, of course, there are the NDP (uh, to the left of anything you normally see in the US), and the Block Quebecois (slightly to the left of the NDP, except that they want to separate Quebec into it's own country) who have always railed against the civil rights aspects of the law. (you can guess how they're voting).Because this is a minority government, the conservatives needed the support of at least one other party to renew this law. They've spent so much time and energy browbeating and insulting people over this issue that it looks like nobody's gonna want to talk to them for quite some time.
Then, (if you're really brave, or just stupid), boot back into Windows.
At that point You may also have to delete references to symantec from the registry. (but hopefully not)
Actually, now that I think of it, that should probably be step 3.
Everybody knows that PJ took the tapes, and she's attempting to index them right now.
Personally, I don't see any reason for Novell to issue a subpoena to PJ in the Novell case. In all probability, anything that she has that relates to Novell is already on Groklaw. Given that SCO, and it's agents have already tried to stalk PJ, I'd say that she's got good reason to avoid any possible subpoena from them, unless they show that they actually have real questions to ask her that relate properly to the Novell case, and that SCO couldn't get from their own (or Novell's) files.
Of course,
Fire investigators are pretty good at recognizing fires that result from wiring faluts -- it usually results in the wire near the spark point melted into balls. It's a common enough source of fires for a very long time that fire investigators would probably be able to recognize that kind of fire source pretty quickly, and not try to blame the laptop.
It's actually a PPAR-gamma Modulator, not PPAR-gamma, itself. The Poster messed up, and the editors didn't catch it. In other words, this really is still a story. (and for people not into molecular biology, it would have probably been a story anyways)
Anybody have a stack of Edubuntu disks that start up using Russian that they can send to this guy?
Now, I can agree that it's probably going to be a week or ten before the final report on this fire, but I'm not at all surprised that they came to a working theory of 'laptop flameout' within a few hours of the house cooling down enough for them to investigate.
In other words, it's the possessor of the images which would make them child pornography.
As this ruling stands, it's not just pictures what would be illegal. If (as is the case in Canada) written stories can be considered pornographic, even love letters between these two could be considered child pornography. A Diary entry could also be considered child pornography because it's possible that their parents could check up on what their children are writing.
(not to mention that -- if you bolt enough random things to a bridge (which requires that you dig into the concrete), you're going to start weakening the structure, and affecting it's MTBF. )
On the other hand, if Boston authorities had taken 30 seconds to look at what these stupid boxes were doing, they would have realized that it was simply some ghit using public structures as an advertising prop, hunted down the company responsible and charged a couple of executives with public mischief. -- rather than shutting down a bunch of major roadways.
This overreaction shit is stupid. Even with all the bombings in Iraq, drunk drivers are still killing way more people than terrorism, and the tobacco industry is on an entirely different scale.
The reason why the airways are safer has nothing to do with airport security confiscating my jeweler's screwdriver and everything to do with the fact that the next idiot who pulls a weapon in an airliner is gonna do a faceplant after a 6000 foot free-fall.. . Even a clipfull of bullets isn't gonna do you much good when you have 75 passengers taking responsibility for the safety of their aircraft while it's in the air.
If you want America perfectly safe from all terrorist attacks, you're going to have to encase the entire country in a 600 foot thick concrete tomb. Good luck.
Doctor confidentiality is not a one-way street. The profession also uses it to hide complaints from the public. The result is that a doctor with serious complaints against him/her can sometimes move to another state and start with a 'clean slate'. It is very rare that complaints to a medical board are made public (similarly for Lawyers, etc.).