As a funny follow-up to Dans post “Know your history!” there are some guys with a little too much time on their hands that put into practice the “IP over Avian Carriers” theory. For those in a hurry to find out the results: it works!
My girlfriend just pointed out the coolest fast food around. Its called “La Papa Dietetic“. This is not your traditional type of fast food it is actually pretty healthy. I recommend anyone that is watching their diet or health for that matter check out “La Papa Dietetic”. They also have a website and they deliver as well. Check them out and try the beef lasagna!
Finally from a credible source on the European market. I highly recommend reading the article.
One problem will continue to persist even with a respectable and credible source behind the study (especially on the Romanian market) and that is peoples amazing ability to make completely irrational decisions based on FUD.
I am sure that there are scenarios where you could say OpenOffice is not a solution. Yes it is not a very good solution if you are trying to edit hardcore VBA filled word documents to which I say: “this is what you get for getting yourself locked into Microsoft’s solutions”.
There is an ODF plugin from what I understand for MS Office 2007.
Below is an excerpt from the full story over at groklaw.
Here’s the relevant section with the conclusions of the study:
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12.7. Conclusions Our analysis has been performed on six organizations in different European countries. The majority of them are public bodies. The organizations have followed different types of migration on the base of their context.
We have investigated the costs of migration, and the cost of ownership of the old and the new solution differentiating them between the costs of purchasing and the costs of ownership of the software solutions. Special attention has been put on the intangible nature of the costs. Costs have been classified in categories defined trough existing studies and selected by a top down approach called Goal Question Metric. This instrument has been also used to define the questionnaires used to collect the data.
Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term – costs of ownership of the software products.
Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and mainly are budgeted in less than one year. The major factor of cost of the new solution – even in the case that the open solution is mixed with closed software – is costs for peer or ad hoc training. These are the best example of intangible costs that often are not foreseen in a transition. On the other hand not providing a specific training may cause and adverse attitude toward the new technology. Fortunately those costs are limited in time and are not strictly linked to the nature of the new software adopted.
We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization’s management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org.
12.7.1. Considerations
With our analysis we achieve a good level of understanding of the costs, benefits and productivity of a transition. The following are the considerations we have drawn upon.
1. Before buying, upgrading proprietary office software one needs consider that:
OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations
Upgrading office programs is time-consuming and expensive. It requires installation time, potential document conversions, and new training. It also poses a risk because some documents containing code or macros may not be readable anymore
OpenOffice.org is free, extremely stable, and supports the ISO Open Document Standard.
I just stumbled upon this neat piece of software while looking for something to make my desktop a bit more shiny. Qingy is a replacement for getty, uses DirectFB and provides a nice GUI without the overhead of X, according to the authors website.
Setting up was pretty straightforward since I already had framebuffer and DirectFB configured but your mileage may vary depending on your distro. I am using gentoo and the ebuild is included in portage so the following worked for me:
yaeyo ~#emerge qingy
Then I replaced the old TERMINAL entries in /etc/inittab with:
c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/qingy tty1
NOTE: I left tty6 to use goold old agetty in case something went wrong and indeed after an emerge –sync; emerge -uDn qingy started complaining about glibc double free something or another..I haven’t had the time to investigate further.
Marius Pana
I am into anything Linux/OSS and most variants of UNIX especially HPUX. Love movies, love life, love business and love working (smart)!
If you would like to get in touch with me about anything I put up here post a comment or use my contact details below.
If you feel you have something of common interest do not hesitate to contact me.
You can also find my CV CV Marius Pana (2007).
Marius Pana
mariusp at spanning dot ro
0721 09 28 28
The crisis is a crisis in consciousness. A crisis that cannot any more accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. And considering what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on. Man, he is still as he was. He is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and he has built a society along these lines.
–
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I thought it was about time I started blogging again. There are a lot of new and exciting things happening in my life, lots of personal and professional success and not to mention all the exciting tech news.
So here is to blogging again!