on 29. Sep 2003 at 06:59, Captain-Goatse wrote:
I’d refuse to work in place that does not let me have my MS Word.
I think employers should let you have MS Word if you wanted it badly enough to pay for it yourself.
If the sysadmin thinks that ms word is not safe, he should have the right to forbid it.
if there happens something like the hl2-leak in his firm, he gets fired.
btw: i would forbid ms products 
[quote]btw: i would forbid ms products
[/quote]
+1 ;D
possible if you are starting fresh (maybe this Sun Java Desktop would do the trick - bosses like big name companies and it looks like the sysadmin job would be easier). Kinda sucks when there is just too much legasy (think: Visual Basic, Access, VBA) crap that you’d be there till your hair was gray.
I was able to swich most of my office to Mozilla which is a start (I just changed the shortcut so it still showed the IE icon ;)) and managed to rid us of the insert custom expleetive here known as MS Exchange.
Will.
Yeah, I’m hoping for big things from the Java Desktop Environment. Let’s hope their team wasn’t cut in the recent cull…
In our office, MS Office is actively discouraged, and you aren’t allowed it unless you have a really good reason (e.g. the finance people have a real need for Excel). The main reason is that we have people running a variety of desktop OS’s (with good reason, not just on a whim!) and it’s almost impossible to do document exchange etc with MSO products. We’ve also been bitten quite a few times where we sent MS Word documents (written entirely in MS Word) to a customer/partner/supplier and found that it didn’t open/display properly their side.
All documentation etc is exported in XML, HTML and/or PDF - the latter for when it’s destined for printed documentation. Happily, OpenOffice has supported “print as PS” since version 1.0, and “ps2pdf” works perfectly these days, both on linux and windows. Still, several of us are really looking forward to OO 1.1 and the File menu option “Save as PDF”.
Experimentation shows that some bugs in Word are ONLY fixed when you are running windows XP - irrespective of the version of Word you’re running!
Stuff like that is just far far too expensive for us to workaround (we can’t fix it; it’s MS’s source code :() since we have less than a dozen employees. Open standards with editors/viewers that actually work are our only hope :). Although linux software still sucks, and is riddled with bugs (OpenOffice 1.0.3 is extremely unstable, for instance), with everything saved as XML/HTML, we are spoilt for choice with editors and viewers, and can very easily (thanks to all the XML parsers) write our own custom renderers and processors.
And on that front, have you heard of FOP? It’s an Apache implementation of the FO standard for formatting XML data. You should be able to write an XSL to turn your XML data into an FO document, then use FOP to render that straight to PDF.
It might be a useful thing to consider if you have a large number of documents to convert.
OO 1.1 final version has been released just a few days ago. I’m going to use it when its localization is ready. 
[quote]Experimentation shows that some bugs in Word are ONLY fixed when you are running windows XP - irrespective of the version of Word you’re running!
[/quote]
Yep, and the new “Office 2003” forces you to use Win2000-SP3 (but MS “recommends” WinXP) and if you want to use the application’s team features you also need to use a Windows 2003 server. 
However, the harder MS tries to force their customers to do what MS wants them to do, the more they go away. There are enough people who are able to see Tolkiens “One Ring to rule them all” idea also in the IT market. In several European countries, for example, several government offices switched from MS to open standards and Opensource sofware like OO and Linux, with recommendations to others to do the same. Similar things happen in Asia, where (South-) Korea, Japan and China cooperate on an Openstandard/Opensource front (they intend to develop an own operating system which bases on Linux). Etc.
This leads to the original topic. Like Javalobby’s Rick put it: [quote]I have a strong and growing sense that the era in which the Java value proposition will flourish is just about to arrive. We can see the beginnings of the fragmenting of Windows hegemony taking place already. For example, it is a big deal when several major Asian countries may decide to get together to pool resources and develop an operating system alternative that doesn’t fill the coffers at Redmond any further! One thing I have confidence in is that Java will run on those systems, and I’m betting it will run really well! Those systems will serve hundreds of millions of people, if not billions.
[/quote]
This will be good to SUN, to all Java developers - and so also to us Java game fans.
(By the way, I like the idea that Asia will show the IT world the way to go away from MS-Sauron. They, let’s say Korea and Japan, already produce the best movies, so…