But otherwise, Word has had mediocre HTML export capabilities since 2000. It's been able to export as TXT since the first version.:P
As for FrontPage, many people scoff at it for website development, but since 2002 it has really become quite a powerful editor. I've taken websites that were quite mangled by DreamWeaver and cleaned them up considerably in FrontPage 2003.
Which version? How do you embed formulas? How do you embed graphics? What archive format will you use to pack the whole mess up for distribution?
What's your point?
I hardly think you can say that any "open" standard doesn't have its issues with forking and version differences. RSS is a perfect example of an open standard that quickly got muddled with versions.
Opendocument is a standardized XML representation, so I guess Mass. agrees with you completely.
Agreed, which is why they should just stick with MS Office (which they've apparently already purchased) and save as XML instead. Problem solved. No need to have the Boston Office Party.
Sounds good! Now you just need to make free PDF editors available to all your citizenry so that they can return completed forms to you.
And preventing the public from sending the government a.DOC format, which 90% of the business are already accustomed to, is a better idea?
Please, it's OSS zealot-like comments like yours that give the OSS community a bad name. You're pushing OSS for all the wrong reasons. It's not because it's cheaper or open, it's because it's not Microsoft.
If a government entity can accomplish its tasks without spending more money, doing training, research, burdening the citizens, etc... but it happens to use MS products, then OMG how awful.
Why is this State wasting so much taxpayers' money by investing in the cost to change systems? Granted, they'll save about $200 per station by not buying an Office license, but that's hardly offset by the cost of training their staff on new software and the temporary drop of productivity.
Instead, why not just pick any of the following options:
1) Use HTML as a standard, and use the tools they've already paid for to create HTML documents (Word, FrontPage) which require no new learning. You may say Word/FP suck, but we're not talking any fancy documents here.
2) Use XML as a standard, which like #1 is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write XML just fine).
3) Use RTF as a standard. It may not be pretty, but it's open and cheap and darned quick.
4) If all else fails, buy the $20 add-on program so you can save your Office documents as a PDF file.
The State of California publishes everything in HTML or PDF format, and I don't hear anyone complaining about inabilities to open documents.
I have a small (ie: just me) consulting company and I made the effort to get my MCP and MOUS certification.
I'll be the first to tell you that it doesn't take a genious to pass the tests. And I'll also say that there are plenty of non-certified people out there that are great at computers.
For me, it all comes down to marketing.
Whenever I'm at a mixer or tradeshow or something, and I'm wearing my Microsoft Certified shirt, people see it and ask questions. Those questions turn into leads, which turn into clients.
The MS logo is a widely recognized one, and having it on your business card, stationery, website, or even your shirt, is a great marketing tool. It adds a lot of credibility to your typical small/med business owner.
While droves of geeks might opt to try out Linux instead of Vista on their next system crash, grandma and the rest of their family members are still going to stay with Windows.
How are people even going to know an alternative exists? If they goe into Best Buy or Wal-Mart, the shelves are 99% Windows and 1% "other". If they watch TV (or read a magazine, etc), they're not going to see anything mentioning Linux software.
If you think about it, there's better odds that your average person buys a Macintosh than a Linux distro.
Yes, a few of you might recommend and help someone get into Linux, but even if successful that will only affect a very small population.
As someone else pointed out, the OSS community needs to collaborate on a joint marketing effort. Packaging, advertising, distribution, etc are all key parts of getting market share, and OSS severely lacks each of these.
The last time I saw a box for Red Hat, it was certainly not intended for grandma to pick up and install.
And *that* is why Vista will not help Linux get market share. Because even if people wanted an alternative, they wouldn't know how to find it.
Maybe there's another article, but the one linked in the summary doesn't mention anything about this person being an MS employee. It only says the person was at the MS cafeteria.
I think that, as long as this new standard allows for the use of cheap adaptors on legacy products, then it'll be a Good Thing.
Right now, there are so many types of Video and Audio connectors it's insane, and some of them require special electronics to connect (ie: a VGA feed to an RCA input).
If this new standard means that my new TV or Projector or Reciever will have 5 idential inputs, and I can purchase $5 adaptors for my RCA VCR, my S-Video DVD player, and my VGA video card, then great!
And while they're making a new standard, it'd be great if they gave us some other added convinience factors too. Here's a few off the top of my head:
1) Sony's S-Link concept was nice because when you turned the DVD player on, the Receiver automatically jumped to DVD. I'd like to see this enabled as an option.
2) Too many wires! Perhaps we spec can include for power as well as video signal. If done right, there won't be interference and it's one less thing I'll have to plug in.
3) Easy connectors. To date, probably the best connector I can think of is the RCA. The RCA can be insert in any rotation, is solid, hard to break, and only has one fat plug and no tiny pins to worry about. I hope the new standard will address these physical issues.
I could probably come up with more, but then they'd have to start paying me.:)
I understand that this is not a case study or white paper, but the statements that he makes in the article are very vague.
The article doesn't even mention HOW he's using Linux. Is that just his website host? Is it his file shares? Billing and CRM? Are all of his employees' workstation 100% OSS?
I would love to know how much such an organization as his spends annually on IT. What are his payroll costs? Hardware? Software? Training? Consulting? How does that compare to a company of similar size using Windows? Which one is better off?
And when Google started, someone probably said the same about search engines. With Yahoo, Altavista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Hotbot, Looksmart, and probably a few more.
Before everyone rushes out to Fry's with their $20.... I feel compelled to share my best friend's Fry's story.
He went there to purchase a hard drive and was sold a brand new drive in original packaging with at a new price.
When he got it home, he installed it ready to format, and lo-and-behold it booted up into Windows!
After some mild snooping, he found Quickbooks files and other documents from the former owner. Being a good person, he found the guy's phone number (among other things) and learned that the guy bought the hard drive about three weeks prior and returned it because it had some bad sectors on it. They assured him that they would destroy it.
Oh I forgot, it's/. so that means advertising is automatically bad.
I mean, we pay for cable TV and (with the exception of the expensive premium channels) we still see advertising.
If this means that they can help offset the cost of game development by selling in-game ad space, then that's great.
Do I want the game to be overrun with ads? No. But that's a balance the developer needs to find.
And, as for the comment about the game sending back data to the server about how long an ad was looked at... that's the kind of innovation that can really make something like this successful. Advertisers (the people who pay) love that stuff... and that feedback is 100x more useful than radio or cable, where they can barely guess how many people were tuned in -- let alone paying attention.
I didn't RTFA, but, can't you still print the thing after you download it?
And for that matter, if your little brother was taking the class, or you wanted to "sell" it to a friend, or you were retaking the class, couldn't you just use that same copy that you printed?
I don't think they are *requiring* you purchase the book.
And if not, then a 33% discount, the convinence of not having to visit a bookstore, and the environmental impact are all very great things that we should be applauding, not tearing apart because someone mentioned EULAs and DRM.
If ELUA/DRM help us get closer to digital books, saving money, and the environment, then bring it on. At least we're not stagnant.
> WSJ simply needs a smack with the ole cluestick.
You can smack people with cluesticks all you want, but it's not going to get them to change their perception about Linux.
The Linux community needs to find ways to improve their product from all angles (including marketing, documentation, professional support, etc). Until then, the CIOs of the world will continue to feel how they do about Linux.
To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
Slashdot Mirror
If that's intended to be humorous, then ha ha.
:P
But otherwise, Word has had mediocre HTML export capabilities since 2000. It's been able to export as TXT since the first version.
As for FrontPage, many people scoff at it for website development, but since 2002 it has really become quite a powerful editor. I've taken websites that were quite mangled by DreamWeaver and cleaned them up considerably in FrontPage 2003.
What's your point?
I hardly think you can say that any "open" standard doesn't have its issues with forking and version differences. RSS is a perfect example of an open standard that quickly got muddled with versions.
Opendocument is a standardized XML representation, so I guess Mass. agrees with you completely.
Agreed, which is why they should just stick with MS Office (which they've apparently already purchased) and save as XML instead. Problem solved. No need to have the Boston Office Party.
Sounds good! Now you just need to make free PDF editors available to all your citizenry so that they can return completed forms to you.
And preventing the public from sending the government a .DOC format, which 90% of the business are already accustomed to, is a better idea?
Please, it's OSS zealot-like comments like yours that give the OSS community a bad name. You're pushing OSS for all the wrong reasons. It's not because it's cheaper or open, it's because it's not Microsoft.
If a government entity can accomplish its tasks without spending more money, doing training, research, burdening the citizens, etc... but it happens to use MS products, then OMG how awful.
Why is this State wasting so much taxpayers' money by investing in the cost to change systems? Granted, they'll save about $200 per station by not buying an Office license, but that's hardly offset by the cost of training their staff on new software and the temporary drop of productivity.
Instead, why not just pick any of the following options:
1) Use HTML as a standard, and use the tools they've already paid for to create HTML documents (Word, FrontPage) which require no new learning. You may say Word/FP suck, but we're not talking any fancy documents here.
2) Use XML as a standard, which like #1 is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write XML just fine).
3) Use RTF as a standard. It may not be pretty, but it's open and cheap and darned quick.
4) If all else fails, buy the $20 add-on program so you can save your Office documents as a PDF file.
The State of California publishes everything in HTML or PDF format, and I don't hear anyone complaining about inabilities to open documents.
I have a small (ie: just me) consulting company and I made the effort to get my MCP and MOUS certification.
I'll be the first to tell you that it doesn't take a genious to pass the tests. And I'll also say that there are plenty of non-certified people out there that are great at computers.
For me, it all comes down to marketing.
Whenever I'm at a mixer or tradeshow or something, and I'm wearing my Microsoft Certified shirt, people see it and ask questions. Those questions turn into leads, which turn into clients.
The MS logo is a widely recognized one, and having it on your business card, stationery, website, or even your shirt, is a great marketing tool. It adds a lot of credibility to your typical small/med business owner.
That's because Microsoft bought OSDN and is now using Slashdot to spin stories about its largest competitors, mainly Google.
</conspiracy theory>
While droves of geeks might opt to try out Linux instead of Vista on their next system crash, grandma and the rest of their family members are still going to stay with Windows.
How are people even going to know an alternative exists? If they goe into Best Buy or Wal-Mart, the shelves are 99% Windows and 1% "other". If they watch TV (or read a magazine, etc), they're not going to see anything mentioning Linux software.
If you think about it, there's better odds that your average person buys a Macintosh than a Linux distro.
Yes, a few of you might recommend and help someone get into Linux, but even if successful that will only affect a very small population.
As someone else pointed out, the OSS community needs to collaborate on a joint marketing effort. Packaging, advertising, distribution, etc are all key parts of getting market share, and OSS severely lacks each of these.
The last time I saw a box for Red Hat, it was certainly not intended for grandma to pick up and install.
And *that* is why Vista will not help Linux get market share. Because even if people wanted an alternative, they wouldn't know how to find it.
Maybe there's another article, but the one linked in the summary doesn't mention anything about this person being an MS employee. It only says the person was at the MS cafeteria.
This is anti-Microsoft FUD at its best.
Counter-headline: "PENGUIN GETS RABIES, INFECTS FIREFOX."
... but it's got a neat name!!
This guy is a computer-science guy who knows a lot about computers -- even if he had little Linux experience he still knew what was going on.
Show me "Grandma gives Linux a test drive" and then I'll be interested.
I think that, as long as this new standard allows for the use of cheap adaptors on legacy products, then it'll be a Good Thing.
:)
Right now, there are so many types of Video and Audio connectors it's insane, and some of them require special electronics to connect (ie: a VGA feed to an RCA input).
If this new standard means that my new TV or Projector or Reciever will have 5 idential inputs, and I can purchase $5 adaptors for my RCA VCR, my S-Video DVD player, and my VGA video card, then great!
And while they're making a new standard, it'd be great if they gave us some other added convinience factors too. Here's a few off the top of my head:
1) Sony's S-Link concept was nice because when you turned the DVD player on, the Receiver automatically jumped to DVD. I'd like to see this enabled as an option.
2) Too many wires! Perhaps we spec can include for power as well as video signal. If done right, there won't be interference and it's one less thing I'll have to plug in.
3) Easy connectors. To date, probably the best connector I can think of is the RCA. The RCA can be insert in any rotation, is solid, hard to break, and only has one fat plug and no tiny pins to worry about. I hope the new standard will address these physical issues.
I could probably come up with more, but then they'd have to start paying me.
> uses Linux and open-source office applications on desktops
For all we know, that could mean he's got FireFox running on his IT desktops, and that's it.
I understand that this is not a case study or white paper, but the statements that he makes in the article are very vague.
The article doesn't even mention HOW he's using Linux. Is that just his website host? Is it his file shares? Billing and CRM? Are all of his employees' workstation 100% OSS?
I would love to know how much such an organization as his spends annually on IT. What are his payroll costs? Hardware? Software? Training? Consulting? How does that compare to a company of similar size using Windows? Which one is better off?
Mark me off-topic, but...
When the heck is Ghost going to be released?
And when Google started, someone probably said the same about search engines. With Yahoo, Altavista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Hotbot, Looksmart, and probably a few more.
> What the hell is she supposed to do? Punt?
I hope she sues the city (or county, whoever suspended her) for the wages she lost, plus a few extra bucks for stress.
Before everyone rushes out to Fry's with their $20.... I feel compelled to share my best friend's Fry's story.
He went there to purchase a hard drive and was sold a brand new drive in original packaging with at a new price.
When he got it home, he installed it ready to format, and lo-and-behold it booted up into Windows!
After some mild snooping, he found Quickbooks files and other documents from the former owner. Being a good person, he found the guy's phone number (among other things) and learned that the guy bought the hard drive about three weeks prior and returned it because it had some bad sectors on it. They assured him that they would destroy it.
Oh I forgot, it's /. so that means advertising is automatically bad.
I mean, we pay for cable TV and (with the exception of the expensive premium channels) we still see advertising.
If this means that they can help offset the cost of game development by selling in-game ad space, then that's great.
Do I want the game to be overrun with ads? No. But that's a balance the developer needs to find.
And, as for the comment about the game sending back data to the server about how long an ad was looked at... that's the kind of innovation that can really make something like this successful. Advertisers (the people who pay) love that stuff... and that feedback is 100x more useful than radio or cable, where they can barely guess how many people were tuned in -- let alone paying attention.
I think every profession is full of people who freely give advice, such as what you were given about your mother's surgery.
I know I've given tons of computer-related advise to people without expecting anything in return. My barber, the guy at the grocery store, etc.
But if I'm going to take the time to write a full-featured application, especially one that others will profit from using, I expect to be paid for it.
I didn't RTFA, but, can't you still print the thing after you download it?
And for that matter, if your little brother was taking the class, or you wanted to "sell" it to a friend, or you were retaking the class, couldn't you just use that same copy that you printed?
I don't think they are *requiring* you purchase the book.
And if not, then a 33% discount, the convinence of not having to visit a bookstore, and the environmental impact are all very great things that we should be applauding, not tearing apart because someone mentioned EULAs and DRM.
If ELUA/DRM help us get closer to digital books, saving money, and the environment, then bring it on. At least we're not stagnant.
IANADoctor, but I would imagine that most doctors who share their research and knowledge do so because:
a) They are paid to do so through grants.
b) They want the ego/recognition/opportunties that come from being published in a journal.
Just my hunch though.
Perhaps they just have a limit on the number of rows a query will return?
I mean, if I were Google and Yahoo let me query all 20b websites, that'd be an easy way to play catch up.
Does this mean that the other 9,000,000,000 pages on the internet don't have the letter 'a' in them?
I tried searching for "a OR e OR i OR o OR u OR y" but actually got about 1/3 less results on each. How does that happen?
> WSJ simply needs a smack with the ole cluestick.
You can smack people with cluesticks all you want, but it's not going to get them to change their perception about Linux.
The Linux community needs to find ways to improve their product from all angles (including marketing, documentation, professional support, etc). Until then, the CIOs of the world will continue to feel how they do about Linux.
Uh oh, the product description on their website uses the phrase "best-of-breed technology".
Stay away!! Stay far away!!
But seriously, doesn't Netgear and Linksys make a very similar product that retails for about $125?
From http://www.google.com/remove.html
To remove your site from Google only and prevent just Googlebot from crawling your site in the future, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /