Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 00:45, Oron Peled o...@actcom.co.il wrote: Regretfully, your noble suggestion does not give any significant protection, for various reason (IANAL): * Patents: control *use* and not implementation. So if you write patent infringing code, you have no problem as long as you don't run it. However, your users are at a risk. (as a demo, see how MS threaten OEM's for Android use and not Google) * You may think about idemnifying your users (i.e: promise to financially back their damages), but this isn't a reasonable option unless you have spare cache in the 5-6 digits range (USA, in dollars). * Copyrights: this is a lesser risk, since we know free software developers do not copy/derive code from MS. However, even in this case -- if you are sued for copyright infringment, there's nothing that protect your users from being sued also (In the USA the MPAA/RIAA reminds everybody of this fact -- they sue the end users even if they downloaded infringing content from other infringing party, like youtube/pirate-bay/etc.) Thank you for your insight. I had figured that it is the distribution making available the code which could be construed as infringing. That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code. Profit from free software is not a shame. On the contrary, the client gets the program he asked for and as a bonus it's free software -- So the client gets better value for money. That's why I'm really sorry to hit your inovative bussiness model. I wish it would be feasible. No business model, I had not intended on making any money. Quite the opposite, I had intending on taking a risk with no financial incentive. ...The true author can remain anonymous if he wishes. Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere). BB? -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere). BB? Sorry, I did not have my 1984 hat on. Big brother. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
If anyone is worried about releasing code developed from information gleaned in the MS documentation, then I can contract the work, and I release it. Therefore it is me who would be sued. I am willing to be the scapegoat and take that chance. That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code. I will be nothing more than proxy, and I will not rerelease the code under any other license. The true author can remain anonymous if he wishes. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Tuesday, 21 בFebruary 2012 17:56:15 Dotan Cohen wrote: If anyone is worried about releasing code developed from information gleaned in the MS documentation, then I can contract the work, and I release it. Therefore it is me who would be sued. I am willing to be the scapegoat and take that chance. Regretfully, your noble suggestion does not give any significant protection, for various reason (IANAL): * Patents: control *use* and not implementation. So if you write patent infringing code, you have no problem as long as you don't run it. However, your users are at a risk. (as a demo, see how MS threaten OEM's for Android use and not Google) * You may think about idemnifying your users (i.e: promise to financially back their damages), but this isn't a reasonable option unless you have spare cache in the 5-6 digits range (USA, in dollars). * Copyrights: this is a lesser risk, since we know free software developers do not copy/derive code from MS. However, even in this case -- if you are sued for copyright infringment, there's nothing that protect your users from being sued also (In the USA the MPAA/RIAA reminds everybody of this fact -- they sue the end users even if they downloaded infringing content from other infringing party, like youtube/pirate-bay/etc.) That means that the code will be released under GLP but the copyright remains with me, not you. But I think you guys know me, my intention is only to protect the real author, not to profit from the code. Profit from free software is not a shame. On the contrary, the client gets the program he asked for and as a bonus it's free software -- So the client gets better value for money. That's why I'm really sorry to hit your inovative bussiness model. I wish it would be feasible. ...The true author can remain anonymous if he wishes. Again, this isn't too practical these days (with BB anywhere). -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron God is real... unless declared an integer. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Where is the .doc format documented? I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation. The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd. What documentation do you refer to? -- Nadav Har'El|Monday, Feb 20 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I'm experiencing both amnesia and deja http://nadav.harel.org.il |vu. I think I've forgotten this before! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40:58AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Where is the .doc format documented? I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation. The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd. What documentation do you refer to? According to Wikipedia, it's partially documented. I did not follow the links inside: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOC_(computing)#Specification -- Didi ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40, Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Where is the .doc format documented? I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation. The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd. What documentation do you refer to? Here are the pre-2007 formats: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx And here are the current versions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Here are the pre-2007 formats: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx And here are the current versions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx Amazing. These didn't exist previously! The document I looked at (the .ppt format) says that This specification is provided under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.. Interesting. It appears that people may legally use these documents, and even copy them. And it seems that the document indeed contains all the information I once needed when I wrote that text extractor. Although it still would have taken me days to understand this bizarre format, at least I wouldn't have had to guess what all the strange records meant. So, I guess there's no reason to say any more that these formats are undocumented. -- Nadav Har'El|Monday, Feb 20 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Happiness isn't getting what you want, http://nadav.harel.org.il |it's wanting what you've got. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi, On Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:29:41 +0200 Yedidyah Bar-David linux...@didi.bardavid.org wrote: On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:40:58AM +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Sun, Feb 19, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Where is the .doc format documented? I once wrote a tool to extract the text in MS Office files (for a search engine). It was a really annoying reverse-engineering-like trial-and-error process, and I could hardly find any documentation. The PowerPoint format (.ppt) was particularly odd. What documentation do you refer to? According to Wikipedia, it's partially documented. I did not follow the links inside: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOC_(computing)#Specification there's also this (with a link at the top): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html The licence may be problematic. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Public Domain Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/shlomif/ Larry Wall dreams in Perl. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 16:10, Shlomi Fish shlo...@shlomifish.org wrote: there's also this (with a link at the top): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html The licence may be problematic. Thanks, Shlomi, that is a great link. If anyone knows of an available internet-facing Windows Server instance where one might translate MS Office files to PDF, I would love to know about it. I would even join a pool of people to maintain such a server for a reasonable monthly cost. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sunday, 19 בFebruary 2012 23:00:11 Dotan Cohen wrote: On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 20:22, Oron Peled o...@actcom.co.il wrote: So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file file format, or... draw your own conclusion. Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Care to point us where it is? PS: if this documentation is encapsulated in something that can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to anyone else. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron You know, someone once told me that New York has more lawyers than people. -- Warren Buffett, Fortune, 1999 ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Oron Peled wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Care to point us where it is? PS: if this documentation is encapsulated in something that can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to anyone else. Dotan gave the links earlier today: Here are the pre-2007 formats: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx And here are the current versions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx Amazingly, not only do you not have to sign any NDA, the documents (at least those I looked at) say that your are free to copy and redistiribute them. Perhaps even more amazingly, they are in PDF format, not any of Microsoft's own format. Very nice (though I still prefer OpenOffice ;-)). -- Nadav Har'El|Monday, Feb 20 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The world is coming to an end ... SAVE http://nadav.harel.org.il |YOUR BUFFERS!!! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Monday, 20 בFebruary 2012 17:24:20 Nadav Har'El wrote: On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Dotan Cohen wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Here are the pre-2007 formats: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx And here are the current versions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx Amazing. These didn't exist previously! MS released them few years ago as part of their OOXML plot. This context would explain the rest. It appears that people may legally use these documents, and even copy them. Oops, be carefull here. I just looked at one of them (Excel 97-2007) and the first sentence on the first page (after the cover page) says: This specification is provided under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. (link to MS OSP) If this doesn't ring a bell, have a look at what lawyers (not paid by MS) had to say about this: http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html ...Irrevocable but Only for Now... ...The OSP Covers Specifications, Not Code... So, I guess there's no reason to say any more that these formats are undocumented. Not really, unless I'll tell you my secrets and then sue you is some new documentation format ;-) -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
I don't normally rely on Wikipedia being an authoritative source, but this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise seems to have links that you might want to visit if you are really interested (disclaimer: I am not really interested, so I didn't do any further research), in particular regarding FLOSS/GPL/whatever compatibility. Interestingly, MS-OSP seems to be a patent license. After a very cursory glance it seems that it covers older formats (doc, ppt, etc., rather than docx, pptx, and so on), and one should indeed be careful. The way I read it is that if all you want to do is create an editor that uses the Word format it's OK, but if you want to use the technology for something else then you may get sued. Where the line is is absolutely unclear to me. IANAL. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Monday, 20 בFebruary 2012 22:30:54 Nadav Har'El wrote: On Mon, Feb 20, 2012, Oron Peled wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. Care to point us where it is? PS: if this documentation is encapsulated in something that can only be read after signing some NDA and/or other legal MS stuff -- don't bother, such documentation is equivalent to internal MS documentation -- I.e: it is not usefull to anyone else. Dotan gave the links earlier today: Here are the pre-2007 formats: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381461.aspx And here are the current versions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc313118.aspx Amazingly, not only do you not have to sign any NDA, the documents (at least those I looked at) say that your are free to copy and redistiribute them. Perhaps even more amazingly, they are in PDF format, I think you'll be less thrilled after reading my response to his mail. In short: * The documents are free, but the contained information is not. * Their appearance (e.g: PDF, etc.) is not surprising if you know they were released during the corrupted OOXML campaign. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron Q: How many NSA agents does it take to replace a lightbulb? A: dSva7DrYiY24yeTItKyyogFXD5gRuoRqPNQ9v6WCLLywZPINlu! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 20:22, Oron Peled o...@actcom.co.il wrote: So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file file format, or... draw your own conclusion. Undocumented? Which file format is that? All the .doc and .docx formats are documented, even the older binary formats. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Friday, 17 בFebruary 2012 14:56:20 Diego Iastrubni wrote: My brief conclusion of this experiment is that MSOffice 2010 supports ODF 1.1 as much as LibreOffice supports *.doc files. So either supporting a public documented ISO standard isn't harder than supporting many variants of proprietary and undocumented file file format, or... draw your own conclusion. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron Complaining that [Linux] doesn't work well with Windows is like ... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse. Daniel Dvorkin, July 28, 2003 ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
From my experience there is no problem opening in office 2007 docx written in office 2010. BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong. In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office in this respect? But we knew this would happen, didn't we? I will try it myself, before I judge. But yes, very expected. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try I installed Windows 7, and Office from MS. I also installed the latest version of LibreOffice. In MsOffice I created a test 1,2,3 document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT, and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working. Created the same document in LibreOffice, saved and tried opening it in MSWord. This failed, as probably MSOfffice 2010 supports only ODF1.1 and LibreOffice supports only 1.1. New test was downloading http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.1/OS/OpenDocument- v1.1.odt and opening it. The document opened in MSWord 2010 and LibreOffice 3.5. The document length in pages was different in both applications. I then saved the document and loaded the document in LibreOffice - now the document size in LibreOffice was different (3 different page count, yes). My brief conclusion of this experiment is that MSOffice 2010 supports ODF 1.1 as much as LibreOffice supports *.doc files. If anyone wants to send me ODF files for testing, I can send him PDF files as respond, hoping that this will satisfy your curiosity. One good thing that I can say about OSOffice, is that the loading and saving is done incrementally and faster then LibreOffice. LibreOffice felt like it was going to explode while editing the document, and MSOffice felt quite good. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 02:56:20PM +0200, Diego Iastrubni wrote: I installed Windows 7, and Office from MS. I also installed the latest version of LibreOffice. In MsOffice I created a test 1,2,3 document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT, and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working. Created the same document in LibreOffice, saved and tried opening it in MSWord. This failed, as probably MSOfffice 2010 supports only ODF1.1 and LibreOffice supports only 1.1. And LibreOffice generates ODF 1.2 files, right? Options: Load/Save = General = ODF Format version Anyway, isn't ODF 1.2 backward-compatible with older version of ODF by design? Also note that the major incompatibility mentioned in that article was in the spreadsheet format. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 14:56, Diego Iastrubni elc...@kde.org wrote: In MsOffice I created a test 1,2,3 document (in Hebrew, RTL), saved as ODT, and opened in LibreOffice. File loaded, directionality not working. That is likely an OpenOffice / LibreOffice bug: Writer saves text alignment of RTL paragraph not according to the ODF specification OOo: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=105270 LO: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37128 -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wednesday, 15 בFebruary 2012 21:47:02 Diego Iastrubni wrote: On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote: You can find an example of this (refering to ODS): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05 Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of propietary software stopped 3 years ago? Nope. It just created more incompatible formats... (MS-Office-2010 format is different from MS-Office-2007) BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong. In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office in this respect? But we knew this would happen, didn't we? -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron Linux: If you're not careful, you might actually learn something. -- Allen Wong ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On יום חמישי 16 פברואר 2012 12:19:18 you wrote: On Wednesday, 15 בFebruary 2012 21:47:02 Diego Iastrubni wrote: On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote: You can find an example of this (refering to ODS): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05 Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of propietary software stopped 3 years ago? Nope. It just created more incompatible formats... (MS-Office-2010 format is different from MS-Office-2007) From my experience there is no problem opening in office 2007 docx written in office 2010. BTW, if you think they improved ODF support you are dead wrong. In the last years all ODF supporting programs were adapting to the (now approved) ODF-1.2 -- care to check where is MS-Office in this respect? But we knew this would happen, didn't we? I will try it myself, before I judge. But yes, very expected. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote: You can find an example of this (refering to ODS): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05 Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of propietary software stopped 3 years ago? Did you check the status on modern office suits, or will you just link it forever, being ignorant and thinking what is the best for you and not reality? (crap, every time I say something rationable and smart a kitty dies, please stop). ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 02/15/2012 09:47 PM, Diego Iastrubni wrote: On Monday, February 06, 2012 02:43:16 AM Oron Peled wrote: You can find an example of this (refering to ODS): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05 Really? WTF? Linking to a document from 3 years ago? So, the wold of propietary software stopped 3 years ago? Did you check the status on modern office suits, or will you just link it forever, being ignorant and thinking what is the best for you and not reality? (crap, every time I say something rationable and smart a kitty dies, please stop). Diego, please. I think you're not doing justice to your own cause by writing that kind of meaningless flame mail. Honestly, I did not quite understand what that reply was about. The only thing I got is these blog posts are outdated. What have changed since then and how does that affect us? I think that building a case beyond throwing facts at the problem by adding some semantic connections and logic reasoning could aid in better conveying your message to us. Could you explain further in a calm and clear manner? -- Sincerely Yours, Michael Vasiliev Linux-IL Moderator ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 02/09/2012 12:54 AM, Dotan Cohen wrote: On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:09, Michael Vasilievmycr...@infoscav.net wrote: I, for one, use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors. troll I knew that I'm not the last KDE 3 lover out there! /troll Well it would be funny, but FreeBSD, for example, still ships KDE 3.5 along with 4, as quite a lot of people prefer it over the rather bloated next major. -- MV ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Etzion Bar-Noy eza...@tournament.org.il: Because most households in israel do not buy their office... It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does not assume that either. He/she knows most people just have their office installed, and they care nothing about it. Then the argument is that sending .docx files encourages piracy. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com: I bet it cannot read my teacher's document!: a table full of oversized text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as well! :-) oh boy. I had to release some steam!... :-) If that file does not open well in Open Office, then send it to me and I will file bugs on it to get OOo / LO fixed. Note that the document will be made public. Thanks. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:23, geoffrey mendelson geoffreymendel...@gmail.com wrote: It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew. I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique. Please let me know what these features are, so that we can file OOo / LO bugs on them. You can call me, though I do not claim to _speak_ English as well as I write it: 054-7881700 I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to buy niche packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform. Hebrew Open Office has some bugs, but nothing terrible. So does MS Office. I use OOo in Hebrew very often. Feel free to direct to me any OOo users that have trouble. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com: of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). Boaz, please send to me the document so that I can file OOo / LO bugs. Thanks. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org: How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit... HTML is not a file format. What would become of the images and CSS files? -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 15:52, Micha mi...@post.tau.ac.il wrote: I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return). For this you need to define a custom header / footer for the page. Is this easier / more intuitive in MS Office? How is it done there? Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa). MS Office equations are not cross-platform. Actually, when importing MSO = 2007 into older MSO products, the equations are transformed into images and are no longer editable either. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie me...@riunx.com wrote: Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to run windows in vmware,... Thanks, I just wrote to them. another site that kids have access for free if they login through ofek is brainpop. It's hard to explain to your kids to suffer their lack of access to those site for a noble purpose of using OSS. This is a perfect time to explain: 1) They cannot have everything they want 2) Life is unfair 3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and hurt others That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this situation. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Mordechai Behar mordecha.be...@mail.huji.ac.il: Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to download the software. A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application, including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the best of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer engineering students at Hebrew University. In mechanical engineering at the Technion we had access to MSDAA, but Office was not included. Everything else, including Windows 7, was. The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted software, I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS. I cannot find details about this. If you can, I would love to know. My wife is a therapist and gets some Department of Education benefits, such as a reduced interest loan at Mosad. I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not start some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up about the social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave. I've been active for years, writing to websites and other entities. Instead of organising, we are better off being disparate in my opinion. If Ofek receives a letter per week requesting Firefox support, that is more convincing than a letter from some unknown organisation complaining about freedom. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 02:43, Oron Peled o...@actcom.co.il wrote: If not there are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the OpenDocument formats. There was a Sun plugin, which was covered in the above interoperability paper, but: * It needed some registration to use (so I didn't test it) * I'm not sure if still exists after Oracle bought Sun. It now costs $99. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 8, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Dotan Cohen wrote: This is a perfect time to explain: 1) They cannot have everything they want 2) Life is unfair 3) Some people (the management of that site) are irresponsible and hurt others That is how my 5 and 3 year old daughters would hear it in this situation. I see it differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but because I am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different. I see it that they will say that they have a limited budget and the cost of providing the service to Windows users is something they must do, but to pay the extra money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as they don't know if anyone uses it, and they can use Windows (and M/S products) instead. If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would spend what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and possibly Android ones. With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things, while private schools are just not going to have the money. :-( Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 16:38, Meir Michanie me...@riunx.com wrote: Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to run windows in vmware,... The tech support representative for Ofek says that the site will soon support Firefox. Check back in a few weeks, and if it doesn't work then write to them. -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:55, geoffrey mendelson I see it differently. Not because I like it, or agree with it, but because I am a cynic and believe the Israeli mindset to be different. I see it that they will say that they have a limited budget and the cost of providing the service to Windows users is something they must do, but to pay the extra money for FOSS support is a losing bet, as they don't know if anyone uses it, and they can use Windows (and M/S products) instead. Presenting DOC/ PDF as Windows / FOSS is a false dichotomy. Presenting it DOC / PDF as works only on expensive or pirated software / works on all computers and mobile devices is the key. If they want to make their service more accessible, then they would spend what little money they have on iPod/iPhone/iPad apps and possibly Android ones. See above, PDF will support those devices already. With that in mind, I think that the place to lobby for increased FOSS accessibility is the ministry of Education who controls these things, while private schools are just not going to have the money. :-( -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 02/05/2012 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote: yuck! So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce MS/Office sales? OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too. Bad because it's dumping, a practice banned by the WTO? I'm somewhat skeptic about the validity of an argument that it gives an unfair advantage to the side that does not intend to sell their product, but to give it away for free. The side being the OO developer community. Of course, for Sun it's a tactic to undermine the MS profit stream, I agree. However, in case when, if not by intention, but by result it aligns surprisingly well with the direction large companies rarely take -- the benefit of all (literate) mankind, I don't mind at all. Before you go you must be anti FOSS on me, bear in mind there were many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice). Crushed in the same way BSD or GNU Hurd are crushed by the Linux kernel? I'm having trouble subscribing to that kind of POV. FOSS projects don't compete in the same way proprietary products do. A piece of open and free code lives as long as there is someone to maintain it. I, for one, use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors. -- MV ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 22:09, Michael Vasiliev mycr...@infoscav.net wrote: I, for one, use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors. troll I knew that I'm not the last KDE 3 lover out there! /troll -- Dotan Cohen http://gibberish.co.il http://what-is-what.com ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi,
thanks for the answer (and allow me to thank following commenters to whom I
reply soon as well).
Please see some comment below.
2012/2/5 Jonathan Ben Avraham y...@tkos.co.il
Hi Boaz,
The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek.
I disagree. *Its always the time*.
I'm not talking about converting her to FOSS and make her think about
capitalism pigs all day long and suggesting Linus Torvalds as a Nobel price
candidate.
As always, I'm going to do it* step by step*, with careful planning and
little hopes. I only want to be able to read (and print) my daughter's
weekly schedule on my computer. No more. I'm going to prepare small, easy
to digest and short statements about this to my principal. I'm not hoping
that she'll accept them at the meeting's time. I might need to check on
that later. Its a relationship and someone else already said that
everything is personal. In this case, personal matters matter a lot for
adoption or willingness to try it.
A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
either PDF or Google docs.
Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is
yet-another-corporate that even if more public friendly, not a fully
M$-Office substitute.
I lean toward talking to her about Google Docs and ODT (parse-able either
by OpenOffice or Google Docs as well). I already prepared a template weekly
schedule in google docs. Nothing is more presuasive than giving the person
a half made solution: here, just fill in here and email! Hey! you can very
easily also download as pdf and email that!.
I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
switch about three years ago when the younger students who were the early
technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the principal, and not
from the parents either, both groups being generally clueless.
I agree with your comment about adopters or better technology. Not
surprising :-)
Boaz.
- yba
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
From: Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com
To: linux-il linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi all,
I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
formats of documents the school spreads around
routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS
Word format and I don't like it as I cannot
cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
years most of them - still I prefer having a
refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at
least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Boaz.
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Ori, While technically you might be correct - I'll take your word for it - this argument is hardly a relevant or helping to convince her. If I say that to her, in the best case she'll reply what the hell are you talking about Boaz? The system currently works, everyone are getting their weekly schedule and nobody is complaining but you. In the worst case, she'll think the same but wont say it. At that time, I'm more or less done with her as far as she is concerned and it will be much harder to further talk to her about such issues. On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Ori Idan o...@helicontech.co.il wrote: Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format. Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the documents that was sent to him in this format. I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a version of MS-word could not open. -- Ori Idan 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Because most households in israel do not buy their office... It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does not assume that either. He/she knows most people just have their office installed, and they care nothing about it. Ez On Feb 5, 2012 9:12 AM, Nadav Harapos;El n...@math.technion.ac.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Hi Boaz, The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek. I am not sure about the time not being ripe. In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise Windows+OpenOffice). They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look perfect. And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked). I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more for the legal Microsoft Windows). A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need either PDF or Google docs. I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around, Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be coming to an end. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.ilwrote: I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around, Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be coming to an end. I bet it cannot read my teacher's document!: a table full of oversized text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as well! :-) oh boy. I had to release some steam!... :-) -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
What are the school's arguments for not accepting a PDF? The unsurmountable difficulty of installing acroread on the teachers' computers? Or is acroread so hopelessly behind the times that it does not allow marking and annotating? If the latter, then OOO... I think the principal should agree that requiring the parents to buy a computer with Office just for homework is quite unreasonable. I'd try thos argument before anything else, and maybe instead of everything else. -- Oleg GoldshmidtOn Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Hi Boaz, The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek. I am not sure about the time not being ripe. In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise Windows+OpenOffice). They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look perfect. And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked). I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more for the legal Microsoft Windows). A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need either PDF or Google docs. I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around, Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be coming to an end. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Etzion Bar-Noy wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Because most households in israel do not buy their office... I was hoping that even if this is true, and everybody knows this is true, no school principal would dare raise this in his argument... I am hoping that no principal could condone such illegal activity. And as a matter of fact, unskilled people who go to a legitimate computer store to buy their computer (e.g., Ivory where I bought the computers which I mentioned), do *not* get offered a free, pirated, copy of MS-Office. If they do ask for MS-Windows and MS-Office, nobody will volunteer to help them break the law; Rather they will get their price quote jacked by almost 1,000 shekels - the combined price of both Microsoft products. To be fair, the total price of a computer and a screen and these two Microsoft products is now around 2,500 shekels, which might not seem a lot to most Israelis (who pay more than that on a new phone...), but if a poor person could actually save 1,000 on that total, or just 500 (with Windows but not Office), it's an outrage not to encourage him to. Yes, it's posssible that most people are savvy enough to know that if they need Microsoft office, they shouldn't buy it at the store, and rather ask their kid (or the neighbor's kid) to install it for them for free. But knowing this does take some information, which poor people might not have. And we can end up with the lousy (but unfortunately) common situation where poor people pay more than rich people for the same service. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My greatest fear is that no-one will http://nadav.harel.org.il |remember me after I'm dead - some dead guy ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 10:04:07 +0200
From: Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org
To: Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.il
Cc: linux-il linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il, Jonathan Ben Avraham y...@tkos.co.il
Subject: Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
What are the school's arguments for not accepting a PDF? The unsurmountable
difficulty of installing acroread on the
teachers' computers? Or is acroread so hopelessly behind the times that it does
not allow marking and annotating? If the
latter, then OOO...
It is not reasonable to ask everyone to install Acroread, or anything else
that is not available by default when you buy a computer from Office
Depot. You would have to send out an instruction sheet and call a parents
meeting to explain why this is necessary. You think that they will do this
just for you?
I think the principal should agree that requiring the parents to buy a computer
with Office just for homework is quite
unreasonable. I'd try thos argument before anything else, and maybe instead of
everything else.
No. The principal correctly assumes that most parents have a computer with
MS Office. This is a reasonable assumption. There is absolutely no
requirement to buy something that everyone already has, because you
already have it anyway an no one buys it so it doesn't cost anything in
any event.
- yba
--
Oleg GoldshmidtOn Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about Re:
Preparing to convince to shift to
non-propriety documents formats:
Hi Boaz,
The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
hopeless geek.
I am not sure about the time not being ripe.
In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).
They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.
And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).
A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
you need either PDF or Google docs.
I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.
--
Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Feb 5 2012,
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without
http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all!
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
It is not reasonable to ask everyone to install Acroread, or anything else that is not available by default when you buy a computer from Office Depot. You would have to send out an instruction sheet and call a parents meeting to explain why this is necessary. You think that they will do this just for you? Well, I think I misread the OP. I thought the issue was submitting homework. In that case the only one who needs a PDF reader is the teacher... I returned to the original post now - my mistake. I have had very little problem *reading* not terribly complicated Word docs in OOO in the last ten years or so. The formatting may be screwed up a little, but you generally don't miss stuff. As the latest example I had to go over a legal contract in the last few days, and LibreOffice did it wonderfully, tracking changes and all. Are home assignments much more complicated than that? I am sure you know infinitely more about OOO than I do, so I'll defer. ;-) No. The principal correctly assumes that most parents have a computer with MS Office. This is a reasonable assumption. Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)? Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments on the web? Should be much easier than to email them? -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Etzion Bar-Noy wrote: Because most households in israel do not buy their office... It would be stupid to assume they do. Moreover - the school headmaster does not assume that either. He/she knows most people just have their office installed, and they care nothing about it. It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew. I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique. I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to buy niche packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform. On the other hand, my youngest son who is a different student in a different school, who does much less sophisticated writing, has been using OpenOffice since elementary school, and almost, if not all, public schools in Jerusalem have been using it for at least 5 years. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: I bet it cannot read my teacher's document! Before you go and complain about some supposed facts, I think you should verify that they are really correct facts. Is OpenOffice *really* unable to read these files (usually it can)? Is Android really not able to read it? If you import this document into Google Docs (or equivalently, get it by mail to gmail), can't you preview it? a table full of oversized text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as well! People doing ugly formatting and wasting ink isn't specific to Microsoft Word :( Even if you get them to send you ODF or PDF, they can still send you these ugly pieces of crap :( My wife recently got a paper, in PDF format. It turns out it wasn't a normal PDF as you might expect - someone scanned a photocopied printou, and sent that as a PDF. The scan was up-side-down (!), and the photocopy process turned out a large black ink-sucking margin around the page. But hey, at least it was an open format :-) -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Boat: A hole in the water surrounded by http://nadav.harel.org.il |wood into which one pours money. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:40 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)? It's almost irrelevant. Most Macs come with an Apple Office suite (Pages, etc) which has little to no Hebrew support. MS/Office for the Mac supports Hebrew at a very basic level but it is expensive. However, there are so few Macs around that no one really cares about what they support. In the world, the majority of UNIX systems are Macs. In the US around 12% of the computers on desktops are Macs, and in Israel a few percent of them are Macs. With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled and get the student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments on the web? Should be much easier than to email them? No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.ilwrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: I bet it cannot read my teacher's document! Before you go and complain about some supposed facts, I think you should verify that they are really correct facts. Is OpenOffice *really* unable to read these files (usually it can)? Is Android really not able to read it? If you import this document into Google Docs (or equivalently, get it by mail to gmail), can't you preview it? of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users. a table full of oversized text, but mostly - toner/ink eating, useless, stupid^H^H^H^H^H images that never, and I mean never, really align in the needed cells but rather appear somewhere else in the document. That's true also on a recent M$ Word as well! People doing ugly formatting and wasting ink isn't specific to Microsoft Word :( Even if you get them to send you ODF or PDF, they can still send you these ugly pieces of crap :( Right :-) I do think that there's a valid point here nevertheless - saving ink on rather useless images, even if sometimes appropriate, is a good practice. Kids should be taught the same as well. Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
I had a similar experience. I recently switched to a different college in a renewed attempt to gain my undergraduate in Compsci. Much to my chagrin I discovered that this college, which bills itself as being a technological college, is firmly entrenched in the Microsoft field. I tried talking to each and every professor and TA in turn, about why it is so difficult for them to click the Save As PDF button in MS Word so that people like me would be able to read the homework, not to mention the class material. And don't ask about the arguments I had about forcing people to use Visual Studio and the Microsoft compilers instead of the gcc. Much frustration. The thing is, they keep coming back to the same old this is what everybody uses argument. And when I point out that clearly this isn't so, since I don't use MS, apparently it is my own fault for being a non-conformist. And so, in order to be able to complete my courses I am forced to either shell out for proprietary software or come up with creative solutions. One such solution was to remotely connect to the college's servers and use the software available there on the Windows 2003 server. Which works best for converting documents to PDF, but not so good with programming. Apparently programs that compile in VS 2008 don't necessarily compile in VS 2010. Who'd have thought? I don't want dissuade you you, and wish you the best of luck, but I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. This harps back to a similar, recent thread about Israeli websites being designed for IE6, the people in charge are behind the times, and firmly convinced that the rest of us are at fault for it. 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:14 PM, geoffrey mendelson geoffreymendel...@gmail.com wrote: With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled Well, whatever the bar chart of different HW/OS sightings may be in Israel, this IMHO utterly fails as an argument that a particular family *must* buy an Windows computer - inexpensive as it may be - if it does not have one, just to be able to view/print school assignments. I wonder if it is even legal on the part of a school to demand this. and get the student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Again, I may be naive but it seems to me that there is something basically wrong with the idea that public school education should depend on the parents' ability to find second-hand SW of uncertain provenance on a garage sale or wherever. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. This is a lot of money, and again, from the sound of it this is not what is normally called generally available. Now, I would assume that most on the parents in this discussion are qualified professionals with reasonably well paying jobs, and I would not be surprised if most had multiple computers at home, etc. Let's face it, it's not a representative sample of the general population. IMHO, it's not that expensive just doesn't cut it. No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. Good point. I assumed a school that requires pupils to have computers would have IT staff and a website. It ain't necessarily so (to quote the Gershwins). I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to your homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual? Or write down your homework at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is necessary? -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
I wouldn't say Linux as it confused people (worked in university, don't think that it would work at school). But you can to with tablet (iPad/android). Those cost money to open word and still have a lot of issues if they do. PDF works but is not editable. Not sure if there is an editable solution though that is portable enough. Maybe Google docs, of it's not too geeky. Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org wrote: I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to your homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual? Or write down your homework at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is necessary? Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem is not with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such as weekly schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a computer requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1% - of families to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a schedule is totally unacceptable on financial grounds only. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: Now, I would assume that most on the parents in this discussion are qualified professionals with reasonably well paying jobs, and I would not be surprised if most had multiple computers at home, etc. Let's face it, it's not a representative sample of the general population. IMHO, it's not that expensive just doesn't cut it. It's not necessary to own a computer. Almost every school in the country has computers in the classroom and a computer room for the overflow. Student's are given study periods to do their homework. There are also plenty of programs out there to provide new and used computers to poor people. I constantly see adds for people selling used computers and people asking for gifts/donations of them. I even see adds on the English language lists for people looking for the latest laptops free, or even a basic laptop which to them includes Windows and Word and Wifi. I don't know if they get them or not, my requests for something older, e.g. a 386/486/Pentium(I) have gone unanswered. When my youngest son was 4 (he's 13 now) I bought him a microsoft trackball (the one the size of a grapefruit) to try to get him to use a computer. He was at the time in a school specializing in educating students with physical limitations. It was a waste of money because he had been given lessons on using a regular mouse as part of his regular instruction. As for emailed homework, Oleg, when you were in school, part of the instruction was to be able to pay attention in class, and write down your homework assignments so that you could do them at home. These days part of the classwork is to be able to get an email with instructions and follow them. It also saves duplicating costs, and you can't say that you left your book at school or you were out sick that day. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is yet-another-corporate that even if more public friendly, not a fully M$-Office substitute. In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact with school. [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file, which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 1:22 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem is not with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such as weekly schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a computer requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1% - of families to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a schedule is totally unacceptable on financial grounds only. In our case, the schools provide printed versions of the schedule. They also email it to make sure the parents get it, instead of it sitting forever in the student's book bag and then thrown on. My wife uses Outlook (the commercial version, not the bundled email program) for scheduling and she can highlight and click items to put them into her schedule. It's really a courtesy for the parents, not a requirement. I do a lot of email back and forth with my youngest son's teacher because she uses terms like next week, or soon, etc, and I want exact dates. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi, On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew. I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you, in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker (of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF export, etc. Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago. Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in OpenOffice? I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique. Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him trouble. Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are superfluous anyway ;-) I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to buy niche packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform. OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my experience. Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying Hebrew doc or docx files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I saw a book titled Die Microsoft http://nadav.harel.org.il |Windows. Turns out it was in German... ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels, and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more than one machine anyway). The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels. So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the cheapest brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow. I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly) discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense, given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal. No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever they can. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I want to be a human being, not a human http://nadav.harel.org.il |doing -- Scatman John ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users. How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit... I do think that there's a valid point here nevertheless - saving ink on rather useless images, even if sometimes appropriate, is a good practice. Kids should be taught the same as well. A war story: some years ago I was teaching at Haifa U, and before each lecture I would post the slides on a website. After a couple of lectures some students approached me and asked to remove the university logo from the slides - it turned out that it was heavy and slow to print even in black and white, on a university (let alone home) printer. I complied, of course, and my slides remained logoless for years. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012 12:14, geoffrey mendelson wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:40 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)? It's almost irrelevant. Most Macs come with an Apple Office suite (Pages, etc) which has little to no Hebrew support. MS/Office for the Mac supports Hebrew at a very basic level but it is expensive. However, there are so few Macs around that no one really cares about what they support. That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.) In the world, the majority of UNIX systems are Macs. In the US around 12% of the computers on desktops are Macs, and in Israel a few percent of them are Macs. With the high price of Macs here many parents just buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled and get the student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments on the web? Should be much easier than to email them? No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. Geoff. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
I fully agree. Having *whatever* percentage of distributed material requiring *whatever* percentage of students to spend hundreds (or even tens) of NIS on HW/SW in order to cooperate is *totally unacceptable*especially in light of no-cost alternatives (SW only of course. HW will still be needed). 2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.orgwrote: I am ignorant of today's school procedures - whatever happened to your homework is exercises 15.1 through 15.8 in your manual? Or write down your homework at the end of the class? Or handouts? Why emailing is necessary? Eh, reading comprehension failure on my part again: the OP's problem is not with home assignments but with school-wide distribution such as weekly schedule. This renders the Word requirement - or even a computer requirement - even less reasonable, IMHO. Making 5% - or 1% - of families to buy a computer and/or specialized SW just to view a schedule is totally unacceptable on financial grounds only. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org wrote: 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users. How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit... I think that's not the best solution. I'd rather have the teacher spread documents as either links to google docs documents, ODT documents, or PDF, exported from those documents. I tend to think that the order described above is the desired order of preference, at least to my taste and line of thought. Google docs is the easiest and is portable anytime when google will change something on their side. ODT is more cumbersome (requires installation of OO on the systems used by the teachers) but is truly open format, lasting solution. PDF is i think more comfortable to transport than exported HTML. I think that asking the staff to export to html, check in your browser, then possibly create a zip with the file + directory that contains the images,etc is too clumsy and will result in the initiative to drop dead too soon. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012 12:45, Mordechai Behar wrote: I had a similar experience. I recently switched to a different college in a renewed attempt to gain my undergraduate in Compsci. Much to my chagrin I discovered that this college, which bills itself as being a technological college, is firmly entrenched in the Microsoft field. I tried talking to each and every professor and TA in turn, about why it is so difficult for them to click the Save As PDF button in MS Word so that people like me would be able to read the homework, not to mention the class material. And don't ask about the arguments I had about forcing people to use Visual Studio and the Microsoft compilers instead of the gcc. Much frustration. The thing is, they keep coming back to the same old this is what everybody uses argument. And when I point out that clearly this isn't so, since I don't use MS, apparently it is my own fault for being a non-conformist. And so, in order to be able to complete my courses I am forced to either shell out for proprietary software or come up with creative solutions. One such solution was to remotely connect to the college's servers and use the software available there on the Windows 2003 server. Which works best for converting documents to PDF, but not so good with programming. Apparently programs that compile in VS 2008 don't necessarily compile in VS 2010. Who'd have thought? 2008 vs 2010 compatibility is even much worse than you think. By the way, you can add gcc to the mix, although you can usually get away with building your project with gcc and in the end wrapping it up with visual for submission (unless you need windows interface). I don't want dissuade you you, and wish you the best of luck, but I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. This harps back to a similar, recent thread about Israeli websites being designed for IE6, the people in charge are behind the times, and firmly convinced that the rest of us are at fault for it. In Tel-Aviv university, at least the math department, things are better. As a TA I refused microsoft documents from anyone, including official university ones. It's not just due to me, but now almost everything official is sent in PDF or PDF plus word. Even my students had to find other ways to send information. I even refused to upload exercises to the official virtual site until it started supporting linux + firefox. On the other hand, large parts of the faculty are either mac or linux so it helps. The advantage with University is that most scientific journals will only accept latex submission so it keeps the faculty more open to alternative formats. 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com mailto:boaz.ryml...@gmail.com Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il mailto:Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012 13:57, Nadav Har'El wrote: Hi, On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did not provide for Hebrew. I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you, in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker (of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF export, etc. I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return). Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa). Personally I use latex (mostly via lyx), but that is hardly for everyone, or even most. Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago. Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in OpenOffice? I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not unique. Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him trouble. Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are superfluous anyway ;-) I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew formatting. Mac users have to buy niche packages which do, but they do not run on any other platform. OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my experience. Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying Hebrew doc or docx files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is yet-another-corporate that even if more public friendly, not a fully M$-Office substitute. In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact with school. [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file, which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea. right, but don't forget that to in order to read only a document, you don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier marketing job to do. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012 14:14, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels, and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more than one machine anyway). The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels. So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the cheapest brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow. I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly) discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense, given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal. No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever they can. I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and tablets (android, ipad). Not sure if it's this link or something else: https://www.dreamspark.com/ Although this seems to be just developer tools. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012, at 03:40, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)? Microsoft publishes a full Office suite for Mac. Unfortunately its Hebrew capability is literally unusable. sambo ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Micha wrote: That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.) Is that half of them have (a Mac OR an iOS device) or half of them have (a Mac AND and iOS device)? Two very different things. Just about everyone I know has some sort of iPod or iPad, but almost all of them have Windows computers. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On 05/02/2012 16:20, geoffrey mendelson wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Micha wrote: That is not so true any more with today's kids. I don't have a kid at that age yet, but good friends of ours do and I think that about half their class are using macs (and iPods and ipads). Their child actually has to use the mother's computer half the time as the mac doesn't support word in Hebrew or their homework system or the parents message system (to let parents know of grades, tardiness etc.) Is that half of them have (a Mac OR an iOS device) or half of them have (a Mac AND and iOS device)? Two very different things. Just about everyone I know has some sort of iPod or iPad, but almost all of them have Windows computers. Geoff. About half have a mac laptop. Probably a lot more also have an iPhone and/or ipad. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Another issue is that at schools the kids are asked to use a site named 'ofek' which it doesn't run under linux and my kids are force to run windows in vmware,... another site that kids have access for free if they login through ofek is brainpop. It's hard to explain to your kids to suffer their lack of access to those site for a noble purpose of using OSS. 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com: Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Even if true my point is different: my computer cannot be installed with that claimed free software from MS. My laptop runs linux and that's not somthing that is going to change, even if offered free windoze and office. Sent from my mobile phone I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and tablets (android, ipad). Not sure if it's this link or something else: https://www.dreamspark.com/ Although this seems to be just developer tools. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file, which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea. I think okular handles it (RW) without a hitch. Unless you mean something different from what I think you mean (I put my foot into my mounth more than once in this thread already). I just added a note in Adobe on Win7 and opened the doc in okular on linux. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com on Word-HTML I think that's not the best solution. I agree. I use the opposite (HTML-doc) suggestion when i need to send something to someone who absolutely must have a Word doc, that's why i thought of it. What I didn't realize when I typed my suggestion was that Word 2010 now has Save As PDF built in. I don't think it was the case in the previous versions - I remember IT people setting up a fake PDF printer, etc. Mordechai's post made me double-check... This is bound to be better than Word-HTML. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 03:52:18PM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is yet-another-corporate that even if more public friendly, not a fully M$-Office substitute. In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact with school. [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file, which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea. right, but don't forget that to in order to read only a document, you don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier marketing job to do. Are you interested in a read-only or read-write format? While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with another. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Micha mi...@post.tau.ac.il wrote: On 05/02/2012 14:14, Nadav Har'El wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: student/home version of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS for a three computer license. Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year, there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places like Machsani Chasmal. I looked now at ivory.co.il and saw that the cheapest Microsoft Office cost there 385 shekels. It's a bit cheaper than the 500 shekels I quoted, but not much cheaper. The 3-user version (I have no idea if this actually allows you to use it on 3 separate machines) cost 550 shekels, and won't make any sense to poor people (who are not likely to have more than one machine anyway). The cheapest Windows 7 on that site is 430 shekels. So together, these cost 815 shekels - about the same price as the cheapest brand new desktop machine from the same seller. Wow. I'm sure that you can find some deal if you're member of some pressure group, e.g., the teachers themselves get (if I remember correctly) discounted Microsoft products. But I don't think the school children themselves or their parents get any deals. It would make little sense, given that virtually everybody in the country is a parent to a child at school (or knows one), so everyone would be entitled to such a deal. No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings. And given that the teachers are probably not even paid for the time they spend on these mails (not to mention the cost to buy the computer, and connect to the Internet), we should be thankful that they do whatever they can. I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax that is hard to avoid ... but it still leaves the question of macs and tablets (android, ipad). Not sure if it's this link or something else: https://www.dreamspark.com/ Although this seems to be just developer tools. Those are just developer tools, and even then, only a few institutions in Israel are accepted as viable places of study that will allow a student to download the software. A better system is the MSDAA (Microsoft Developers Academic Alliance) which allows a student who is registered for specific courses in specific institutions to download and use nearly every Microsoft application, including the actual operating system and office suite. However, to the best of my knowledge this is only available to compsci and computer engineering students at Hebrew University. The Teacher's Union allows a member to purchase heavily discounted software, I think MS Office 2010 goes for 100 NIS. But when we bought Windows 7 from them (for our home computer since my mother, a teacher, needs to use a program that will only run on Windows in order to submit grades) it came only as an upgrade, not a full license. That was also 100 NIS. I think there are other organizations and institutions that provide such large, or larger, discounts on MS software, but that just makes it worse IMO. It sort of broadens the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Although in this case it's those that have or have not kombinot. I think that the length and speed of growth of this thread points to just how frustrated we all are at the current situation. So why don't we change it? We happen to have Hamakor, a registered nonprofit organization to promote the use of free and open source software in Israel. So why not start some kind of campaign? A public message? People are still riled up about the social protests of the past summer, we could ride that wave. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
2012/2/5 Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com on Word-HTML I think that's not the best solution. I agree. I use the opposite (HTML-doc) suggestion when i need to send something to someone who absolutely must have a Word doc, that's why i thought of it. What I didn't realize when I typed my suggestion was that Word 2010 now has Save As PDF built in. I don't think it was the case in the previous versions - I remember IT people setting up a fake PDF printer, etc. Mordechai's post made me double-check... This is bound to be better than Word-HTML. AFAIK Word 2007 had it too, and 2003 had an available, downloadable plugin. But still, people insist on not using it. We are indeed a stiff-necked people. :P -- Oleg Goldshmidt | o...@goldshmidt.org ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 16:14:09 + Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 03:52:18PM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:44:21AM +0200, Boaz Rymland wrote: Google docs is a good but not the best alternative. Google is yet-another-corporate that even if more public friendly, not a fully M$-Office substitute. In other words: while an account at Google does not cost money,Google Docs is just as proprietary as MS-Office and Acrobat Reader[1]. I would not have wanted to be forced to have an account there in order to interact with school. [1] PDF itself is not bad as it has some other good alternatives implementations. However relying on in-line remarks in the PDF file, which is, AFAIK, supported only by the Adobe reader, is not a good idea. right, but don't forget that to in order to read only a document, you don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier marketing job to do. Are you interested in a read-only or read-write format? I believe public Google Documents can be downloaded in OpenDocument format without registration (did not try that), and they certainly can be placed under licences that can be modified under certain conditions (e.g: Creative Commons licences). Anyway, even Lawrence Lessig in http://remix.lessig.org/ does not advocate the abolishment of read-only culture. There's a lot of content on the Web out there that's not in wikis/etc., and that's OK because it's still usable. Regards, Shlomi Fish While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with another. -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Optimising Code for Speed - http://shlom.in/optimise Chuck Norris doesn’t commit changes, the changes commit for him. — Araujo Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Tzafrir Cohen tzaf...@cohens.org.il wrote: right, but don't forget that to in order to read only a document, you don't need a google account - just a publicly readable document who's link you've got, AFAIK. That's of course hardly a full solution but I'm going to take it step by step. My daughter has yet to receive assignments so its only about the weekly schedule documented distributed every week. While using Google Docs to distribute it, the staff can become accustomed to Google Docs and maybe even appreciate its comfortableness (the latter is a NTH). At the same time, I'll have a more easier marketing job to do. Are you interested in a read-only or read-write format? Well, it depends: if I see good cooperation, openess and willingness to hear more, I'll introduce OO suite, as a more full solution that could be used elsewhere in the school, that could be used by students to fill in their exercises, etc. If I wont feel such openness I'll try to push a minimal solution - just replace that read only format to one that I can read (I lean toward Google Docs and on second place PDF). While it's your fight to pick and not mine, I'm not sure I'd be happy if a result would be the replacement of one proprietary format with another. This is not a fight. Fighting will not achieve anything. Achieving something with arm power is my last resort and I think I wont get there. At worst, I'll try again sometime in the near future or re-think again (don't forget - fighting is always possible and should be avoided as much as possible). Boaz ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Micha wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so who *won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal? Last time I checked, there were deals for *teachers*, but not for kids or their families. So the teachers find it very convenient (and cheap) to use MS, and who cares that the kids' families need to buy all this expensive software, or alternatively break the law. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Writing software is like sex: One mistake http://nadav.harel.org.il |and you have to support it forever. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 9:35 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote: This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so who *won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal? Why does that not make sense? The licenses are for student/home use not commercial use. It's actually good marketing because if everyone knows how to use Microsoft products they will want to use them at work. If they use them at work, they will want to use them at home. The idea is to make the most profit, not sell the most copies. The most profit is made by having business buy a site license based upon the number of computers, not encouraging people to only buy one license for their home because it cost so much. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012 15:40:05 +0200 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Oleg Goldshmidt p...@goldshmidt.org wrote: 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com of course the whole reason to this thread and me contacting the principal is the fsck'ed up document. The document appears badly in LibreOffice and Google docs (imported). I verified this since sept. 1st till now, on a weekly basis. Yes, OO does read the document and sort of presents the data within, including ok hebrew but I don't want and deserve to do guess work or work harder to try to read a basic document I need to get. I want it to be perfectly accessible to me, at least it is for M$ Office users. How about suggesting that such docs should be exported into HTML (which Word is capable of doing, IIRC) before emailing? It would be nice if the creator could look at the HTML in a browser to verify that it looks OK. of course, the browser is likely to be IE 32-bit... I think that's not the best solution. I'd rather have the teacher spread documents as either links to google docs documents, ODT documents, or PDF, exported from those documents. I tend to think that the order described above is the desired order of preference, at least to my taste and line of thought. Google docs is the easiest and is portable anytime when google will change something on their side. ODT is more cumbersome (requires installation of OO on the systems used by the teachers) but is truly open format, lasting solution. I believe recent versions of Microsoft Office support ODT (I don't know how perfectly). At least I saw it in their file formats' drop box. If not there are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the OpenDocument formats. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Star Trek: We, the Living Dead - http://shlom.in/st-wtld Logic sucks. Morality sucks. Reality sucks. Deal with it! Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 9:35 PM, Nadav Har'El n...@math.technion.ac.ilwrote: On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Micha wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: I didn't check it and don't know how it applies to school children, but I was told that as a student with a valid student ID you can get a free license for MS software, renewed yearly. Combine that with the MS tax This doesn't make any sense. Like I said, virtually everyone in the country either has school-aged children, or can easily find one - so who *won't* get a free MS license if this was the deal? Last time I checked, there were deals for *teachers*, but not for kids or their families. So the teachers find it very convenient (and cheap) to use MS, and who cares that the kids' families need to buy all this expensive software, or alternatively break the law. I happen to have more than 1 teacher in my family. That's exactly M$ tactics for raising the young generation to their interest: give the * teachers* extremely cheap M$ licenses and that way enforce the right educations for their students, who'll grow knowing as little as possible about alternatives. About the price, I'm aware of an offer maybe 3-4 years old - teachers got the latest Windows license at that time + full office that cost back then more than 2K NIS, at... drum rollsmake your bets!.../drum rolls - a little over 200nis. That's right! About a magnitude of the real market price. On that note its worth mentioning that its been said on Microsoft that its a marketing company that happens to sell software. yuck! Boaz. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Writing software is like sex: One mistake http://nadav.harel.org.il |and you have to support it forever. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote: yuck! So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce MS/Office sales? OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too. Before you go you must be anti FOSS on me, bear in mind there were many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice). Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Nobody said that M$ is the root of evil and Sun is the source of all good. Even if the tactics and ways of M$ and Sun are equally ugly, and I really can't answer on that, the key difference is that Sun is pushing a product that first and foremost promotes open standards and that is *good*. As longs as their biz ways are not truly sickening, I think that its better than the same approach taken by M$ - but to push a closed source, irreplaceable product that further enhance their dominance not due to technological supremacy. I have absolutely no warm feelings about Sun. Its just that open standards (ODT in this case) is in the right direction, and it happens that Sun is pushing in that direction as well. On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson geoffreymendel...@gmail.com wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote: yuck! So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce MS/Office sales? OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too. Before you go you must be anti FOSS on me, bear in mind there were many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice). Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-( ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 10:26:51PM +0200, geoffrey mendelson wrote: On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote: yuck! So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to reduce MS/Office sales? OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too. Before you go you must be anti FOSS on me, bear in mind there were many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice). Nope. AbiSuite never made anything more that Abiword. The GNOME Office has indeed lost steam due to OpenOffice's availability (but that was only after the free (as in OpenOffice.org) version has become available. KOffice carried on and still does (through recently forked/execed as Caligra Office). SiagOffice was probably never a real contender and has only managed to gain some popularity because nothing else was available. On the other hand, Applixware and CorelOffice have fallen on the wayside (for Corel: the Linux port). There are still rumoured to be one or two reasonable proprietary office suites for Linux not based on OO.o . -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il || a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il || best tzaf...@debian.org|| friend ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sunday, 5 בFebruary 2012 15:52:45 Micha wrote: I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return). Huh? Page-styles are your friends. You can defined separate page-styles (e.g: cover-page, regular page, landscape page, etc.) and apply these styles to any page range you want. Generally, OOo style handling is very good and used to be a lot better then MS-word. It's been years I haven't use MS-word, so I cannot say if they closed the gap in this space. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron MCSE: Must Consult Someone Experienced ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sunday, 5 בFebruary 2012 19:37:05 Shlomi Fish wrote: I believe recent versions of Microsoft Office support ODT (I don't know how perfectly). At least I saw it in their file formats' drop box. Stay away from this, it's a trap. Their implementation (unsurprisingly) generates ODF that isn't readable by any other ODF application. You can find an example of this (refering to ODS): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05 If not there are some free-as-in-beer plugins available for MS Office to support the OpenDocument formats. There was a Sun plugin, which was covered in the above interoperability paper, but: * It needed some registration to use (so I didn't test it) * I'm not sure if still exists after Oracle bought Sun. -- Oron Peled Voice: +972-4-8228492 o...@actcom.co.il http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Grace Murray Hopper ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format. Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the documents that was sent to him in this format. I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a version of MS-word could not open. -- Ori Idan 2012/2/5 Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com Hi all, I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats of documents the school spreads around routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word format and I don't like it as I cannot cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu). Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years most of them - still I prefer having a refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats. Any pointers/text will be appreciated. Thanks, Boaz. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi Boaz,
The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless
geek.
A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
either PDF or Google docs.
I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
switch about three years ago when the younger students who were
the early technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the
principal, and not from the parents either, both groups being generally
clueless.
- yba
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
From: Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com
To: linux-il linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi all,
I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the formats
of documents the school spreads around
routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS Word
format and I don't like it as I cannot
cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the years
most of them - still I prefer having a
refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at least
affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Boaz.
--
EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5 83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA~. .~ Tk Open Systems
=}ooO--U--Ooo{=
- y...@tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -___
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Ori Idan wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Another point to notice is that there is no such format as MS word format. Each version has a different format and sometimes one can not open the documents that was sent to him in this format. I have seen many cases where OpenOffice opened files that people who had a version of MS-word could not open. Be careful not to rely on arguments that can easily be refuted... I saw someone with an old version of MS-Word receive a newer (docx) document. His Word popped up a message saying something like This document comes from a newer version of Word, you need to download a converter for this format. He clicked OK, and in a couple of minutes he was able to read this document, and see it just like Microsoft intended. I tried to read the same document on my OpenOffice, and it was kind of visible, I guess, but it was quite far from what the document was intended to look like :( -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Politics, n: from Greek, poly=many, http://nadav.harel.org.il |ticks=blood sucking parasites. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
I agree with the notion. At best - the school headmaster will ask you what
to open it with, and how would the students with ms office would handle it.
This is hopeless, unfortunately.
Ez
On Feb 5, 2012 8:48 AM, Jonathan Ben Avraham y...@tkos.co.il wrote:
Hi Boaz,
The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will
not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek.
A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer
using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need
either PDF or Google docs.
I found that this approach, mobile devices, works. For example, at the
American School in Even Yehuda it helped convince teachers to accept and
give assignments in PDF or via Google docs. The techers made this head
switch about three years ago when the younger students who were the early
technology adopters demanded it. It didn't come from the principal, and not
from the parents either, both groups being generally clueless.
- yba
On Sun, 5 Feb 2012, Boaz Rymland wrote:
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 07:20:39 +0200
From: Boaz Rymland boaz.ryml...@gmail.com
To: linux-il linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il
Subject: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
Hi all,
I'm about to meet my daughter's school principal on the subject of the
formats of documents the school spreads around
routinely, like the weekly schedule. In short - they are using .DOC MS
Word format and I don't like it as I cannot
cleanly open those documents on my computer (which runs Ubuntu).
Although I'm quite old in the Linux world and probably heard over the
years most of them - still I prefer having a
refreshment of all the arguments in favor of moving to more open or at
least affordable (e.g. PDF) document formats.
Any pointers/text will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Boaz.
--
EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5 83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA~. .~ Tk Open
Systems
=}**ooO--U--**
Ooo{=
- y...@tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
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Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats
On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats: Hi Boaz, The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a hopeless geek. I am not sure about the time not being ripe. In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise Windows+OpenOffice). They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look perfect. And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked). I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more for the legal Microsoft Windows). A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these you need either PDF or Google docs. I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around, Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be coming to an end. -- Nadav Har'El| Sunday, Feb 5 2012, n...@math.technion.ac.il |- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without http://nadav.harel.org.il |it I would have no luck at all! ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
