as redbear already mentioned, this standard has been available for quite some time - and what is even more interesting, at the start microsoft was participating in committee... they withdrew. so not only they had a chance to implement opendocument, but also to give their input on it and influence final result. guess that was not enough.
actually, oo.org works fine for most of documents i receive. maybe you can try out your documents with latest 1.9 snapshot (m104, http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html) and see wether there still are some problems. if there are, you could try to specify them and file issues at http://contributing.openoffice.org/qa.html (you have to register first)
crap. don't know why it's so hard to find with google/freshmeat (and sf search does not work right now) - but maybe you should check out http://wpkg.sourceforge.net/
i could not understand from pictures how exactly are you supposed to position your hand - with standard mouses you can relieve your hand by holding elbow or wrist on table or some mousepad extension. it seems that with this pistolmouse it is not possible to support your wrist and elbow also should move, because otherwise it would be very hard to make moves up/down (forward/backward).
doesn't this put big strain on your shoulder ? or can you actually base some part of your hand ?
that would be true if that more expensive thing would last longer.
there are cases when 5 times cheaper product lasts 3 times longer than the expensive one. how can you be sure that after 5 years you will have all needed papers, that company still will be in business and that they won't turn you away for some imaginery reason ?
you should have some warranty and assurance that an entity is there (and will be for foreseeable future) that will take responsibility after those 5 or 10 years for your wrench.
capitalism is extremly inefective in long run, unfortunately humans are not motivated to do anything else.
actually, he probably intentionally avoided another, better question : when will microsoft _really_ start doing something to increase interoperability instead of trying to make it as hard as possible for everybody else ?
stop using some half-assed closed crap (active-x), add support for opendocument, document native msoffic formats, smb etc - but that would make you compete on real benefits, not lock-in. oh no, we can't afford that.
stupid and corrupted politicians are everywhere...
for example, in latvia tax for cd media is more than 100% of the media itself. as a result sales of cd blanks have decreased twice and most sane persons buy their goods from lithuania/estonia.
oh, and by the way, all this tax is administered by a private company that supposedly keeps 20% for their services. unfortunately nobody knows for sure. and many latvian musicians are very disappointed with them - but hell, you just have to know whom to pay...
there have been suggestions (for braindead - people are making jokes about politicians), that heavy tax should be put on blank paper and pens - somebody could !horror! rewrite a book by hand !
of course, toilet paper must be taxed as well.
and let's tax everybody who can hear and speak - they can illegally reproduce music. and everybody who can see can reproduce pictures.
The fact is Linux experts still cost more than Windows experts in many areas, because they are in short supply - especially in rural areas like mine.
well, i know a couple of linux experts that live in one country and support several small companies in other countries. this way cheaper labour (for example, from ex-ussr countries) is easily exported to ones where support usually costs 3-10 times more. actually good windows support person will cost you the same if not more than a good linux support person... it's just that "point-click-whoops-reinstall" kind of "admins" have overrun windows support market:)
and as soon as first real problem show up, costs of lost productivity can easily surpass costs of qualified personnel.
Sorry - I alreay have a favorite Linux distro. It's called FreeBSD.:)
hh:) yes, some hp education materials also mentioned freebsd as a linux distribution.
i mentioned debian only because of their famous long release cycle - i'm running slackware, and mostly -current. i've been upgrading my workstations since version 8, i think - have run just a couple times in some small glitches with x - underlying base has been really stable. i guess if you want both bleeding edge and long upgradeability, this is one of the best solutions.
Your right, but it's generally easier to find people to work on Windows than it is to work on Linux.
depends. lately it's easier to find qualified linux support person than windows - and you know why ? because they do most of their job remotely. reboots (which might result in some thing required for networking not coming up) are very rare, everything else you do from any other location. as a result supporting linux systems is a lot easier. You misunderstood what I said. I meant for how long will the autoupdate work on the particular distro that youa re isntalling. Almost all distros have very short EOL support cycles for their releases. Can you install version x.x of distro A and have it autoupdate itself for say...four years?
as other posters already mentioned, most distros have reasonable life cycles - and you can choose ones that definitely will be supported for a long period of time and will require little patching (debian & friends). additionally, most distros can be upgraded between releases without much hassle (for example, it's possible to upgrade slackware through releases - or just stick with current all the time:) )
That's nice, but again - how long do they support a release for? 1 year, 18 months, 2.5 years? IMO,the rapid release cycle of Linux is not a good thing.
again - choose debian. look at their stable version. some... most call it slightly outdated;) (though for servers that might be just what you want). remember also the possibility to upgrade to next release if you are not satisfied with that 5 years old one (or if it reaches eol). YOu're partially right. I don't use Linux - havn't used it in over three years, but I do know enough about it to know that it isn't a magic bullet, like the parent poster describes. I happen to be an avid user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I moved to the BSD's long ago, not because I didn't like Linux - just because I really took a liking to the BSD's. Even though I don't spend day after day installing every new Linux distro on the block, my association with the verious *nix communities keeps my updated on what's going on with Linux. there's no such thing as magic bullet:) but fast development pace (that you seem to dislike though) means that there have been a lot of changes in last 3 years (especially as more and more companies use linux, it improves more rapidly. and everybody benefits from the progress).
do they really _load_ all those modules or just check for that kind of hardware (and in case nothing is found, nothing is loaded) ?
i belive most modern distributions have kernels that automatically load required modules depending on attached hardware - so there actually is no problem here.
oh, talking about ca - this must be the most stupid statement today. or this week.
i've never seen 'luna' you refer to, but plastik is available in kde 3.3.2, too. actually, it's funny - a couple of weeks ago my brother set plastik on his computer. i saw that, thought "ohh, nice, i'll use this one from now on". now i see that kde has defaulted to my choice. nnnnice:)
yes, you can use other software - but it's pretty handy when that feature is integrated;)
additionally, those pdf creators that work as printers probably do not preserve links, bookmarks etc. this should work ok in oo.org 2.0 (but there might be other creators that do preserve these things - so you must evaluate them and choose the one that fills your needs).
the look - it's subjective =) i don't think it's ugly, it might look a bit outdateg, though. actually, i think windows xp default theme is ugly;)
about your last point - that's what i meant with "better displaying of comments/changes;" - comments and changes are displayed besides text, so it's easier to track changes and you don't have to position your mouse on that little yellow rectangle to read a comment (and they are printed out alongside with the text, not at the end of the page or docuemnt, so that you don't know the exact position of the change/comment.
i think they both have good features and in some areas one will be better, in some - other. you just have tu evaluate the your needs and price/performace.
my friend had to create a precise layout so that objects are positioned at precise distances from page margins and other objects. of course, that's not exactly what word processors should be used for, but...
as i recall, he had problems in word so that objects were actually placed a few mm off the position he specified and sometimes they shifted off their initial positions. it was some time ago and with openoffice.org 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 he did his job blazingly fast - and he used oo.org for the first time in his life. he had used word since version that was working on windows 3.x (was it 5 ?).
and for this beta version you don't have to have a spare machine - at least i haven;t heard of any case when oo.org would have destroyed os or data:).
about claims that one of these suites is better - it depends again:)
the only way to have some firm arguments would be to list features/problems that one of them has (or has a better implementation). for example:
+oo.org
free and opensource; crossplatform; better compatibility with older word docuemnts (!); pdf output; doesn't include potentially confidential information in documents; open document format; smaller filesize...
+mso better displaying of comments/changes; starts faster on windows...
etc. so after you have such a list you can evaluate each factor and determine it's importance - and then weight overall feature/bug/price factor for your particular scenario.
1. it seems so. but i have not done any measurements =)
2. depends, i think. they look smoother than in 1.1 for me - but you have to check to make sore (it could depend on your version/configuration of x, truetype and other components)
1. what do you mean by "Looks like they still haven't gotten the white page centered on the screen yet" ? i believe it's agood thing - there's a room to the right for toolbars etc. or there is some problem with sucha an aproach i have missed ?
2. cluutered interface with tiny icons ? could you please be more specific ? or was this intended to be a trolling ? if you have suggestions - oo.org team will be glad to hear them.
3. useless. stylist. eh ? either troll, either you haven't tried editing a document longer than a couple of pages. check out tutorials - http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/styles.html styles are invaluable if you don't populate your reports with "reformatted document - 3 days" entries.
Slashdot Mirror
as redbear already mentioned, this standard has been available for quite some time - and what is even more interesting, at the start microsoft was participating in committee... they withdrew. so not only they had a chance to implement opendocument, but also to give their input on it and influence final result. guess that was not enough.
actually, oo.org works fine for most of documents i receive. maybe you can try out your documents with latest 1.9 snapshot (m104, http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html) and see wether there still are some problems. if there are, you could try to specify them and file issues at http://contributing.openoffice.org/qa.html (you have to register first)
They can't really stop microsoft products being sold in the EU, there would be a europe-wide riot.
it's called festivity
oo.org definitely was opensourced when base (the component that relies on java) was developed.
i'm not sure about it's code up to year 2000 though.
crap. don't know why it's so hard to find with google/freshmeat (and sf search does not work right now) - but maybe you should check out
http://wpkg.sourceforge.net/
i could not understand from pictures how exactly are you supposed to position your hand - with standard mouses you can relieve your hand by holding elbow or wrist on table or some mousepad extension. it seems that with this pistolmouse it is not possible to support your wrist and elbow also should move, because otherwise it would be very hard to make moves up/down (forward/backward).
doesn't this put big strain on your shoulder ? or can you actually base some part of your hand ?
computer software manufacturers have successfully lowered the expectations of most users to the point that there is no demand for quality software
:)
i'l print this out and stick somewhere. just have to find the best place
that would be true if that more expensive thing would last longer.
there are cases when 5 times cheaper product lasts 3 times longer than the expensive one. how can you be sure that after 5 years you will have all needed papers, that company still will be in business and that they won't turn you away for some imaginery reason ?
you should have some warranty and assurance that an entity is there (and will be for foreseeable future) that will take responsibility after those 5 or 10 years for your wrench.
capitalism is extremly inefective in long run, unfortunately humans are not motivated to do anything else.
and they don't count updating as a download (read this some time ago on mozillazine)
actually, he probably intentionally avoided another, better question : when will microsoft _really_ start doing something to increase interoperability instead of trying to make it as hard as possible for everybody else ?
stop using some half-assed closed crap (active-x), add support for opendocument, document native msoffic formats, smb etc - but that would make you compete on real benefits, not lock-in. oh no, we can't afford that.
stupid and corrupted politicians are everywhere...
for example, in latvia tax for cd media is more than 100% of the media itself. as a result sales of cd blanks have decreased twice and most sane persons buy their goods from lithuania/estonia.
oh, and by the way, all this tax is administered by a private company that supposedly keeps 20% for their services. unfortunately nobody knows for sure. and many latvian musicians are very disappointed with them - but hell, you just have to know whom to pay...
there have been suggestions (for braindead - people are making jokes about politicians), that heavy tax should be put on blank paper and pens - somebody could !horror! rewrite a book by hand !
of course, toilet paper must be taxed as well.
and let's tax everybody who can hear and speak - they can illegally reproduce music. and everybody who can see can reproduce pictures.
it's not sun singlehandedly who cerated this format.
. ph p?wg_abbrev=office
:)2 0_02 .php
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership
also koffice and other project actively participated in creation of this format (i think corel was mentioned, too, but i might be wrong on this)
ps. ok, i'm not totally wrong
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis_news_11_
it's OpenDocument since it was finished. actually microsoft at first participated in oasis workgroup but withdrew. wonder why :)
The fact is Linux experts still cost more than Windows experts in many areas, because they are in short supply - especially in rural areas like mine.
:)
:)
:)
well, i know a couple of linux experts that live in one country and support several small companies in other countries. this way cheaper labour (for example, from ex-ussr countries) is easily exported to ones where support usually costs 3-10 times more.
actually good windows support person will cost you the same if not more than a good linux support person... it's just that "point-click-whoops-reinstall" kind of "admins" have overrun windows support market
and as soon as first real problem show up, costs of lost productivity can easily surpass costs of qualified personnel.
Sorry - I alreay have a favorite Linux distro. It's called FreeBSD.
hh
yes, some hp education materials also mentioned freebsd as a linux distribution.
i mentioned debian only because of their famous long release cycle - i'm running slackware, and mostly -current. i've been upgrading my workstations since version 8, i think - have run just a couple times in some small glitches with x - underlying base has been really stable. i guess if you want both bleeding edge and long upgradeability, this is one of the best solutions.
Your right, but it's generally easier to find people to work on Windows than it is to work on Linux.
:) )
;) (though for servers that might be just what you want). remember also the possibility to upgrade to next release if you are not satisfied with that 5 years old one (or if it reaches eol).
:)
depends. lately it's easier to find qualified linux support person than windows - and you know why ? because they do most of their job remotely. reboots (which might result in some thing required for networking not coming up) are very rare, everything else you do from any other location. as a result supporting linux systems is a lot easier.
You misunderstood what I said. I meant for how long will the autoupdate work on the particular distro that youa re isntalling. Almost all distros have very short EOL support cycles for their releases. Can you install version x.x of distro A and have it autoupdate itself for say...four years?
as other posters already mentioned, most distros have reasonable life cycles - and you can choose ones that definitely will be supported for a long period of time and will require little patching (debian & friends). additionally, most distros can be upgraded between releases without much hassle (for example, it's possible to upgrade slackware through releases - or just stick with current all the time
That's nice, but again - how long do they support a release for? 1 year, 18 months, 2.5 years? IMO,the rapid release cycle of Linux is not a good thing.
again - choose debian. look at their stable version. some... most call it slightly outdated
YOu're partially right. I don't use Linux - havn't used it in over three years, but I do know enough about it to know that it isn't a magic bullet, like the parent poster describes. I happen to be an avid user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I moved to the BSD's long ago, not because I didn't like Linux - just because I really took a liking to the BSD's. Even though I don't spend day after day installing every new Linux distro on the block, my association with the verious *nix communities keeps my updated on what's going on with Linux.
there's no such thing as magic bullet
but fast development pace (that you seem to dislike though) means that there have been a lot of changes in last 3 years (especially as more and more companies use linux, it improves more rapidly. and everybody benefits from the progress).
do they really _load_ all those modules or just check for that kind of hardware (and in case nothing is found, nothing is loaded) ?
i belive most modern distributions have kernels that automatically load required modules depending on attached hardware - so there actually is no problem here.
oh, talking about ca - this must be the most stupid statement today. or this week.
maybe check out widelands - they seem to be in the need for artists :)
according to this screenshot it's plastik.e lease=265&slide=44
:)
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?r
i've never seen 'luna' you refer to, but plastik is available in kde 3.3.2, too. actually, it's funny - a couple of weeks ago my brother set plastik on his computer. i saw that, thought "ohh, nice, i'll use this one from now on". now i see that kde has defaulted to my choice. nnnnice
yes, you can use other software - but it's pretty handy when that feature is integrated ;)
;)
additionally, those pdf creators that work as printers probably do not preserve links, bookmarks etc. this should work ok in oo.org 2.0 (but there might be other creators that do preserve these things - so you must evaluate them and choose the one that fills your needs).
the look - it's subjective =)
i don't think it's ugly, it might look a bit outdateg, though. actually, i think windows xp default theme is ugly
about your last point - that's what i meant with "better displaying of comments/changes;" - comments and changes are displayed besides text, so it's easier to track changes and you don't have to position your mouse on that little yellow rectangle to read a comment (and they are printed out alongside with the text, not at the end of the page or docuemnt, so that you don't know the exact position of the change/comment.
i think they both have good features and in some areas one will be better, in some - other. you just have tu evaluate the your needs and price/performace.
my friend had to create a precise layout so that objects are positioned at precise distances from page margins and other objects. of course, that's not exactly what word processors should be used for, but...
:).
:)
:
as i recall, he had problems in word so that objects were actually placed a few mm off the position he specified and sometimes they shifted off their initial positions. it was some time ago and with openoffice.org 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 he did his job blazingly fast - and he used oo.org for the first time in his life. he had used word since version that was working on windows 3.x (was it 5 ?).
and for this beta version you don't have to have a spare machine - at least i haven;t heard of any case when oo.org would have destroyed os or data
about claims that one of these suites is better - it depends again
the only way to have some firm arguments would be to list features/problems that one of them has (or has a better implementation). for example
+oo.org
free and opensource;
crossplatform;
better compatibility with older word docuemnts (!);
pdf output;
doesn't include potentially confidential information in documents;
open document format;
smaller filesize...
+mso
better displaying of comments/changes;
starts faster on windows...
etc. so after you have such a list you can evaluate each factor and determine it's importance - and then weight overall feature/bug/price factor for your particular scenario.
1. it seems so. but i have not done any measurements =)
2. depends, i think. they look smoother than in 1.1 for me - but you have to check to make sore (it could depend on your version/configuration of x, truetype and other components)
it installs ok with rpm (provided by slackware but with that "unsupported" warning :) )
;)
of course, --nodeps is required
i've used/tested it on slack since it first came as rpm (1.95-something, i think)
and the correct version only shows up if you have english (us) selected - with uk version it doesn't porpose that one...
"styles that work (at least to Word users it seems innovative)"
i've heard that msword has no "page styles" - if this is true, you could call that as a minor innovation. although i would call it "a must" feature...
1. what do you mean by "Looks like they still haven't gotten the white page centered on the screen yet" ? i believe it's agood thing - there's a room to the right for toolbars etc. or there is some problem with sucha an aproach i have missed ?
2. cluutered interface with tiny icons ? could you please be more specific ? or was this intended to be a trolling ? if you have suggestions - oo.org team will be glad to hear them.
3. useless. stylist. eh ? either troll, either you haven't tried editing a document longer than a couple of pages. check out tutorials - http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/styles.html
styles are invaluable if you don't populate your reports with "reformatted document - 3 days" entries.