There's a Waikato Linux Users Group meeting on Monday:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
7:30pm MS4.G.02 (http://www.waikato.ac.nz/contacts/map?MS4)
Bruce Kingsbury - What's new in Hardy Heron
Similar to last year there are a couple of good notebook deals:
Acer AS5315-100508Mi - Celeron M 1.86, 512 MB, 80 GB, DVD, Vista
Basic, Looks like it has webcam but doesn't mention it - $648 before
cashback, $499 - only 20 on Saturday
Asus Eee PC 701 - $399 - only 20 on Friday.
If you want these I would suggest you queue hours before hand. We
bought an Acer last year of slightly lower spec and it has been great
and runs Ubuntu well. Obivously the Eee PC already runs Linux.
--
Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4/
Blog: http://iansblog.jandi.co.nz
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Langasek <steve.langasek(a)ubuntu.com>
Date: 26 Mar 2008 09:04
Subject: Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008
Ubuntu announced the release of 6.10 almost 18 months ago, on October
26, 2006. As with the earlier releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing
security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months. The support
period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 6.10 will reach end of life
on Friday April 25th, 2008. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will
no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 6.10.
The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 6.10 is via Ubuntu 7.04.
Instructions and caveats for the upgrade may be found at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FeistyUpgrades. Note that upgrades
to version 7.10 and beyond are only supported in multiple steps, via
an upgrade first to 7.04, then to 7.10. Both Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10
continue to be actively supported with security updates and select
high-impact bug fixes. All announcements of official security updates for
Ubuntu releases are sent to the ubuntu-security-announce mailing list,
information about which may be found at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-announce.
Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most
highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users in homes,
schools, businesses and governments around the world. Ubuntu is Open
Source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to
customise or alter their software in order to meet their needs.
OK, fine... here's my 'rant'
Why, if OOXML has been roundly rejected as a standard, and ODF has been accepted (due in large by M$'s non-adherence to the W3C's standards), do companies in NZ INSIST on accepting only M$ formats, but not PDF or ODF? Especially the large ITC recruiters, who really should be in the know (mind you, I've come across who do not know what 'SDLC' means)
I find it common practice for organisations to say one thing (openness, transparency, accountability), and do exactly the opposite.
Same reasoning goes for much of the technologies used. It seems to be application-oriented, and not solution-oriented.
Citrix, Active Directory, IIS, MSSQL and other M$/Windows-only products, whereas there are plenty of other OSS solutions that will do the job just as well, if not better & cheaper. Granted, many of these platforms have their merits, and use them where their use is merited, but not out of habit or a knee-jerk reaction.
Just my gripe...seems myopic
> From: wlug-request(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
> Subject: wlug Digest, Vol 201, Issue 22
> To: wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
> Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:00:04 +1300
>
> Send wlug mailing list submissions to
> wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
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>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of wlug digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: Openoffice 3 (Graham Lauder)
> 2. ANNOUNCE: WLUG meeting is one week away (Meeting Reminder Bot)
> 3. Re: Openoffice 3 (Ian McDonald)
> 4. Re: Openoffice 3 (Craig Box)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:28:13 +1300
> From: Graham Lauder <yorick_(a)openoffice.org>
> Subject: Re: [wlug] Openoffice 3
> To: Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>
> Message-ID: <200803232328.14262.yorick_(a)openoffice.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Saturday 22 March 2008 10:03:48 Ian McDonald wrote:
> > Update on what is in this:
> > http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
> >
> > To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
> >
> > Many opensource projects innovate and I think it is time they did this
> > rather than copy.
>
>
> Many times we get these comments on the lists and because of my "position"
> within OOo I have to bite my lip. Here though I'll take the moment to have a
> good old rant.
>
> <rant>
>
> Frankly Ian, I expected better of you.
>
> One day I'd like to count up the number of times that some one comes onto the
> OOo lists and _demands_ that the developers, who are in their eyes a bunch
> of morons for not thinking of this themselves, put in some feature because
> that's the way Word or Excel or Powerpoint or some other similar coded
> excrement does it.
>
> Do these same people ever ask MS to include PDF export, PDF forms, a truly
> powerful stylist or perhaps give them a full cross platform office suite. Of
> course not! Because they know they'll get roundly ignored. What they want is
> MS Office for free because they're too damn lazy to take off their blinkers
> and see OOo for what it is. A better product in a lot of cases.
>
> For instance, why is it that people will spend hours generating a form in word
> with fields, protecting this bit and that when they can do the same in OOo in
> a tenth of time using PDF forms.
>
> Business is saying "F**k innovation let me do work faster and more
> efficiently" and in the majority of business cases OOo will allow you to do
> just that. Give me any group of Office staffers for a day and I will prove
> it. Will they change? Some will, some won't, some believe they have to get
> their boss to spend thousands of licensing dollars to get a product that will
> do the job for them and that something for free can't be any good so they
> don't give it a second glance. Others want their bosses to spend thousands
> on them because it makes them feel valued so using a zero license cost
> product is a nono. Others are open to change and are amazed when they see
> what OOo can do for them.
>
> OOo 3.0 will support Office "Open" xml, point out to me, if you will, where
> MS Office supports ODF.
>
> OOo 3 is a free upgrade from 2.X or even 1.X, has MS taken hold of this
> innovation.
>
> Introduce to me if you will to a simple enduser who got a feature included in
> MS Office, I can do that easily for OOo.
>
> There is innovation all through OOo that people simply ignore. It was OOo and
> it's corporate partners that launched and promoted the idea of a fully open
> Document Format that anyone could use. It was OOo and the corporate partners
> that got that adopted as an ISO standard, something that MS is desperately
> trying to emulate (and badly I might add)
>
> X forms
> PDF Editor,
> Hybrid PDF
> Styles
> UNO
> Extensions
> and so on, there is innovation within a necessarily conservative environment.
>
> Our biggest problem is that the constant trumpeting is about "Compatibility"
> OOo developers spend far too much time, as far as I'm concerned, on so called
> compatibility. MS is NOT required to spend ANY time on compatibility, has
> anyone asked? MS developers seem incapable of ODF compliance to the point of
> having to farm that responsibility out to third parties and yet Sun, Novell
> and the OOo community have developed OOXML filters. IMO All of this
> developer time is wasted when it could have been used on more pressing
> enhancements in OOo.
>
> If you want some innovative feature create an extension. Plenty of info on how
> to do that at extensions.openoffice.org.
>
> If you come up with some innovative feature and you can't code it yourself,
> then feel free to pay a developer to hack at the OOo source code and
> contribute it to the community.
>
> And if you want to talk about the biggest innovation of all, that in itself is
> the greatest which so many seem happy to ignore. It is after all Open
> Source.
>
> </rant>
>
> Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. :) At the Sydney LCA I talked
> with Joe Brockmeier about marketing OOo and he made the point that in terms
> of the Linux market OOo is at saturation and there is a level of negative
> feeling toward the "Big Kid" in the sand pit and it's true that I constantly
> find myself defending OOo from people in the Linux community who should be
> core support.
>
> We have a problem finding developers because of the sheer size of the beast
> and the sometimes complex relationship between the corporate partners and the
> larger community. (If anyone knows the Kohei's Solver Soap Opera you'll know
> what I mean) It is easy for a developer to disappear amongst the sheer mass
> of code which is why there has been such a thrust behind UNO and extension
> development.
>
> We have a problem being No2, no matter how hard we try to do otherwise, we
> have to spend far too much developer time on unproductive compatibility
> issues and feature copying while the truly great enhancements get ignored.
>
> This donkey work stuff gets done by the paid developers at SUN, Novell and so
> forth. The whole idea behind UNO and extensions development is to let the
> community contribute the innovation. Have a look at what is available at
> http://extensions.openoffice.org and you'll see what I mean, the extensions
> project is fairly new but some of what is coming out of there is great.
>
> It's no good saying that OOo doesn't innovate unless you have made an effort
> to do something about that, because you in fact are the community, we all are
> that consider ourselves part of Open Source.
>
> Cheers
> GL
>
> --
> Graham Lauder,
> OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
>
> http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
>
> INGOTs Moderator New Zealand
> www.theingots.org.nz
>
> GET DRESSED : GET OOOGEAR
> Gear for the well dressed OOo Advocate
> www.ooogear.co.nz
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:26:45 +1300
> From: Meeting Reminder Bot <bot(a)wlug.org.nz>
> Subject: [wlug] ANNOUNCE: WLUG meeting is one week away
> To: Waikato Linux Users Group <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>
> Cc: nzlug-announce <nzlug-announce(a)linux.net.nz>, nzlug
> <nzlug(a)linux.net.nz>
> Message-ID: <E1JdTy1-0000qu-1p(a)db.wlug.org.nz>
>
> The Waikato Linux Users Group have a meeting in one week from today:
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 7:30pm MS4.G.02 (http://www.waikato.ac.nz/contacts/map?MS4)
>
> Topic to be announced.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:06:33 +1300
> From: "Ian McDonald" <ian.mcdonald(a)jandi.co.nz>
> Subject: Re: [wlug] Openoffice 3
> To: "Waikato Linux Users Group" <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>
> Message-ID:
> <5640c7e00803231406i447ad25dp5a5586424a70f98e(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> <flame><rant>
>
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Graham Lauder <yorick_(a)openoffice.org> wrote:
> > On Saturday 22 March 2008 10:03:48 Ian McDonald wrote:
> > > Update on what is in this:
> > > http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
> > >
> > > To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
> > >
> > > Many opensource projects innovate and I think it is time they did this
> > > rather than copy.
> >
> >
> > Many times we get these comments on the lists and because of my "position"
> > within OOo I have to bite my lip. Here though I'll take the moment to have a
> > good old rant.
>
> And I'll take the chance to respond as well. My statement was short
> and was a generalisation but I still stand by it. It was referring to
> the "major" new features in OO 3 - and those features have been in MS
> Office for a while mostly and are almost identical.
> >
> > <rant>
> >
> > Frankly Ian, I expected better of you.
>
> Why do you expect better of me? Is it because:
> - I have been president of WLUG?
> - because I have code merged in the Linux kernel and several other projects?
> - because I am advocating open source software (include OO) to CIOs
> who run around 40,000 desktops and large number of servers? And I have
> converted some of these already - including OO.
> - because I have been playing with open source office tools such as
> Abiword, Gnumeric, Koffice, Staroffice since the 1990s?
> - because I have been setting open standards by being on working
> groups on the IETF?
>
> So even though I am passionate about open source I should not express
> my opinions?
> >
> > One day I'd like to count up the number of times that some one comes onto the
> > OOo lists and _demands_ that the developers, who are in their eyes a bunch
> > of morons for not thinking of this themselves, put in some feature because
> > that's the way Word or Excel or Powerpoint or some other similar coded
> > excrement does it.
> >
> > Do these same people ever ask MS to include PDF export, PDF forms, a truly
> > powerful stylist or perhaps give them a full cross platform office suite. Of
> > course not! Because they know they'll get roundly ignored. What they want is
> > MS Office for free because they're too damn lazy to take off their blinkers
> > and see OOo for what it is. A better product in a lot of cases.
> >
> MS have PDF export, forms support (not PDF but in many ways better)
> and cross platform for the two big platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux is
> not yet big unfortunately...).
>
> Most of those are because users asked for them and Microsoft has been
> consistent about listening to user feedback and also about innovating.
> They may not do what people want when they want but neither do
> opensource projects. Yes with opensource people can do it themselves,
> which is a major advantage, but not many people do this.
>
>
> > For instance, why is it that people will spend hours generating a form in word
> > with fields, protecting this bit and that when they can do the same in OOo in
> > a tenth of time using PDF forms.
> >
> Because they don't understand that there are better ways to do it -
> both is MS Office and OO.
>
> > Business is saying "F**k innovation let me do work faster and more
> > efficiently" and in the majority of business cases OOo will allow you to do
> > just that. Give me any group of Office staffers for a day and I will prove
> > it. Will they change? Some will, some won't, some believe they have to get
> > their boss to spend thousands of licensing dollars to get a product that will
> > do the job for them and that something for free can't be any good so they
> > don't give it a second glance. Others want their bosses to spend thousands
> > on them because it makes them feel valued so using a zero license cost
> > product is a nono. Others are open to change and are amazed when they see
> > what OOo can do for them.
> >
> And in this regards OO actually has a major advantage as there is less
> training going from Office 2003 to OO then from Office 2003 to Office
> 2007. However if you get away from looking at what is easiest for the
> user in the short term there are major benefits in Office 2007 or OO.
>
> > OOo 3.0 will support Office "Open" xml, point out to me, if you will, where
> > MS Office supports ODF.
> >
> > OOo 3 is a free upgrade from 2.X or even 1.X, has MS taken hold of this
> > innovation.
> >
> > Introduce to me if you will to a simple enduser who got a feature included in
> > MS Office, I can do that easily for OOo.
>
> Yes I do know of instances.
> >
> > There is innovation all through OOo that people simply ignore. It was OOo and
> > it's corporate partners that launched and promoted the idea of a fully open
> > Document Format that anyone could use. It was OOo and the corporate partners
> > that got that adopted as an ISO standard, something that MS is desperately
> > trying to emulate (and badly I might add)
> >
> And I think Microsoft is trying to do the same with OOXML although not
> so well in some areas, but better in other areas. Microsoft moved down
> this path also due to market and technological pressures just as OO
> did.
>
> > X forms
> > PDF Editor,
> > Hybrid PDF
> > Styles
> > UNO
> > Extensions
> > and so on, there is innovation within a necessarily conservative environment.
> >
> > Our biggest problem is that the constant trumpeting is about "Compatibility"
> > OOo developers spend far too much time, as far as I'm concerned, on so called
> > compatibility. MS is NOT required to spend ANY time on compatibility, has
> > anyone asked? MS developers seem incapable of ODF compliance to the point of
> > having to farm that responsibility out to third parties and yet Sun, Novell
> > and the OOo community have developed OOXML filters. IMO All of this
> > developer time is wasted when it could have been used on more pressing
> > enhancements in OOo.
> >
> > If you want some innovative feature create an extension. Plenty of info on how
> > to do that at extensions.openoffice.org.
> >
> > If you come up with some innovative feature and you can't code it yourself,
> > then feel free to pay a developer to hack at the OOo source code and
> > contribute it to the community.
> >
> > And if you want to talk about the biggest innovation of all, that in itself is
> > the greatest which so many seem happy to ignore. It is after all Open
> > Source.
>
> I think Open Source is a huge innovation and a better way of doing
> things. I do hope Microsoft will move further down this than their
> tentative steps. I do believe that Microsoft has innovated more than
> most other players though. The exception to this is probably in the
> areas of security, reliability and performance on the server where
> GNU/Linux has led the way for quite some time.
> >
> > </rant>
> >
> > Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. :) At the Sydney LCA I talked
> > with Joe Brockmeier about marketing OOo and he made the point that in terms
> > of the Linux market OOo is at saturation and there is a level of negative
> > feeling toward the "Big Kid" in the sand pit and it's true that I constantly
> > find myself defending OOo from people in the Linux community who should be
> > core support.
>
> The reason for attacks on OO is that it is big and ugly and cumbersome
> - both in footprint and codebase. KOffice seems far more the innovator
> and maybe Gnome will get there as well. My feeling about OO is that it
> still hasn't been tidied up from it's original propiertary code base
> and will suffer until it does so. Mozilla had the same issue for many
> years with the Netscape codebase and I hope OO gets there too.
>
> I think the other reason for attacks is that people see the potential
> and yet despite the many $s poured in by Novell, Sun, IBM that it is
> yet to reap the dividends it should. I think this springs from lack of
> strong leadership personally - quite different from the Linux kernel,
> KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu etc.
> >
> > We have a problem finding developers because of the sheer size of the beast
> > and the sometimes complex relationship between the corporate partners and the
> > larger community. (If anyone knows the Kohei's Solver Soap Opera you'll know
> > what I mean) It is easy for a developer to disappear amongst the sheer mass
> > of code which is why there has been such a thrust behind UNO and extension
> > development.
> >
> > We have a problem being No2, no matter how hard we try to do otherwise, we
> > have to spend far too much developer time on unproductive compatibility
> > issues and feature copying while the truly great enhancements get ignored.
> >
> While GNU/Linux, Firefox, Apache etc manage to cope well with this...
> And now others are trying to be compatiable with them e.g. IE8
>
> > This donkey work stuff gets done by the paid developers at SUN, Novell and so
> > forth. The whole idea behind UNO and extensions development is to let the
> > community contribute the innovation. Have a look at what is available at
> > http://extensions.openoffice.org and you'll see what I mean, the extensions
> > project is fairly new but some of what is coming out of there is great.
> >
> Yes and Sun, Novell and IBM end up with quite different codebases due
> to the code structure. Novell OO is not the same as Sun OO and IBM
> have bastardised it and called it Symphony.
>
> > It's no good saying that OOo doesn't innovate unless you have made an effort
> > to do something about that, because you in fact are the community, we all are
> > that consider ourselves part of Open Source.
> >
> Yes I have done my part - including promoting OO, bug
> reporting/testing OO. I also have opinions which I think are worth
> expressing.
>
> > Cheers
> > GL
> >
> > --
> > Graham Lauder,
> > OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
> >
> > http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
> >
> Regards,
>
> Ian
>
> </rant></flame>
>
> NB opionions are my own only etc
>
>
> --
> Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4/
> Blog: http://iansblog.jandi.co.nz
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:56:09 -0400
> From: "Craig Box" <craig(a)dubculture.co.nz>
> Subject: Re: [wlug] Openoffice 3
> To: "Waikato Linux Users Group" <wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz>
> Message-ID:
> <cc742fe0803231456u730be46fs961333b2ebc302ac(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> > Update on what is in this:
> > http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
> >
> > To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
>
> This isn't really a response to either Graham or Ian directly, but
> something to consider. I'm going to borrow a quote from Joel Spolsky,
> though I'm sure the idea predates him:
>
> | "There's a famous fallacy that people learn in business school called
> | the 80/20 rule. It's false, but it seduces a lot of dumb software
> | startups. It seems to make sense. 80% of the people use 20% of the
> | features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20%
> | of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. The trouble
> | here, of course, is that it's _never the same 20%_. Everybody uses a
> | different set of features. When you start marketing your "lite" product,
> | and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very
> | happy, then they ask you if it has word counts, or spell checking, or
> | little rubber feet, or whatever obscure thing they can't live without,
> | and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product."
>
> When making any comparison to a Microsoft Office product, you have to
> consider this 80/20 fallacy. For some people, the new features added
> to this might be the final tipping point that they need for their
> enterprise to change.
>
> OO.o is sometimes seen by the open source community as a mixed
> blessing - the donation of code all but stopped development of GNOME
> Office, for example, because it didn't really seem worth the effort
> any more. It's definitely criticized for being legacy code - but
> wisdom says you should never throw legacy code away.
>
> The people that want agile innovation will keep doing it, in different
> ways. Since the advent of the wiki, I tend to keep information in
> those that would previously have been in word processing documents.
> Office suites are not "sexy" and it will probably continue to fall to
> the corporates to fund their development: I remember seeing a graph
> once that suggested commercial contributions to OO.o made up 95%+ of
> even new code. I guess all they can do is be as open as possible about
> accepting the contributions that outsiders do want to make.
>
> Craig
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> wlug mailing list
> wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz
> http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug
>
>
> End of wlug Digest, Vol 201, Issue 22
> *************************************
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The Waikato Linux Users Group have a meeting in one week from today:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
7:30pm MS4.G.02 (http://www.waikato.ac.nz/contacts/map?MS4)
Topic to be announced.
