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Linux and OpenOffice save Microsoft Presentation
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue May 24, 2005 12:18 PM
from the now-thats-just-silly dept.
from the now-thats-just-silly dept.
EvilGrinUK writes "A presentation about Shared Source (SSI) by the head of Microsoft Ukraine was almost ruined when the Windows machine (a Tablet PC) linked to the projector developed problems. The solution was to adopt OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 and ALT Linux Compact 2.3, which was already running on the presenter's laptop (an IBM Thinkpad). Here's a picture."
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Linux and OpenOffice save Microsoft Presentation
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Ha-Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
<speech>
<voice>Nelson Muntz</voice>
<voiceArtist>Nancy Cartwright</voiceArtist>
<text>Ha-Ha!</text>
</speech>
Re:oh my (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/)
Powerpoint presentations usually look pretty mangled anyway. I had endless problems with NeoOffice/J [planamesa.com] seemingly scrambling the formatting of work-related presentations, documents and so on, until I borrowed a Windows machine with Microsoft Office and discovered that was how the documents were supposed to look...
Re:oh my (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's right.
Shame on Microsoft. And how rude that Office 2003 doesn't implement and utilize the wonderful and open OASIS file format that was ratified 3 days ago.
I don't expect much from Microsoft these days (god knows I'd be constantly disappointed if I did) but I somehow feel time travel is probably asking a bit much - even for them.
How funny.. Cache slower than original... (Score:5, Informative)
http://paq.osdn.org.ua/~mike/img/MS-uses-OOo/hpim
kind of more full text (Get The Facts, heh) (Score:4, Informative)
(http://paq.osdn.org....uses-OOo/README.html)
Facts (below)
As for the facts:
You bet there was some debate afterwards but no tomatoes flying (which was quite the fear of Mr. Lanovenko's coworkers) :-)
Shameless plugs
BTW, there's going to be 4th such conference this autumn (first weekend of October), you're welcome! (details at the conference site, see above)
Hi from Kiev -- we're OK, and it's old but fact ;) (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://paq.osdn.org....uses-OOo/README.html)
The bottleneck ATM is the shaper, we enjoy sponsored colocation and hardware (by WNet [wnet.ua] ISP) and current outbound traffic is around 512Kbps.
Otherwise, our ALT Linux server that's serving you now is perfectly OK, given it's 4-way Xeon with a meg cache per CPU with a gig of RAM and SmartArray. So load average is more like: 0.19, 0.14, 0.12.
Here's a postcard from Apache (no nginx on top of it even ;-) -- 167 requests currently being processed, 8 idle servers (I've upped MaxClients from 150 to 250, hope it's enough for some time -- seen 180+ max today).
and here's top's top:
CPU0 states: 1.1% user, 4.4% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 93.3% idle
CPU1 states: 0.2% user, 0.2% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.1% idle
CPU2 states: 0.3% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.2% idle
CPU3 states: 0.0% user, 0.1% system, 0.0% nice, 0.0% iowait, 99.4% idle
Mem: 1033300k av, 680024k used, 353276k free, 0k shrd, 4168k buff
346864k active, 246712k inactive
Swap: 522072k av, 2240k used, 519832k free 482032k cached
PS: we'll be doing 4th conference like that this October, feel free to contact me during next weeks if you're eager to travel to Kiev and roll a speech on Free Software!
Is it true? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://tcx.ro/~seba)
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.lilmikey.com/)
Maybe you need to turn off the improbability drive of your laptop.
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Informative)
PS: yes, I read Russian.
In Soviet Russia, documents save you! (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 25, @06:21PM)
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 01 2005, @07:08PM)
I was working at an almost all MS office as a bookkeeper. Most of the accounting was done with Exel, good backups were kept, and the server had UPS. Still, one day a major spreadsheet got corrupted, as did all it's back ups. All the office was in freak out mode, except for me, I downloaded and installed Open Office (I think it was ver 1.0.1) and opened the corrupted spreadsheet. Cut the data out, pasted it into a new Excel spreadsheet and saved the day!
Ironically I was spoken to about installing non approved software...
Re:Is it true? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://home.happyface.net/)
Open a brand new spreadsheet and link cell A1 to the A1 in your corrupted sheet (you'll have to type the formula in manually). Then drag that A1 to all corners of the spreadsheet, and more often than not you'll get your data back -- sans formatting.
Not working correctly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not working correctly (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.toonamiarsenal.com/)
Yes, but they called it ifo9960-1 back then.
It's always nice when Open Source can lend a hand (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.users.qwest.net/~waffleck-asch/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @04:46PM)
Yeah! Linux saved the day... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://mjpaci.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday December 10 2004, @07:31PM)
How many Slashdotters now have to change their shorts?
--bitter
Re:Yeah! Linux saved the day... (Score:5, Funny)
Big deal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://tvt.blogspot.com/)
Microsoft demonstrating that Linux and OO.o can be the right tool for such a job? That is a big deal.
Re:Big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/)
I spend a good chunk of time dealing with laptops and projectors and I can tell you wil certainty that display drivers are getting harder and harder to get working with projectors.
There was a time when you could press fn-F4 and flip to the external display. Now, there's a control panel on the system dock (or whatever that thing with all the icons is called). You might get an extended desktop, you might have to go through four dialogs to find a setting, you might never find it. Mercy on your soul if you have a wide-screen display.
My new tablet refuses to drive the external display at resolution >800x600, even though the built-in display and projector both have a native resolution of 1024x768. Even that takes multiple-clicks to get turned on. It works exactly right under Linux (fn-F4 and Bob's your uncle at 1024x768), but the Windows drivers get in the way.
My guess is the presenter had a new laptop with such a display driver. OO-guy had an older laptop, or had this stuff stored out already.
uh oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahahaha (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.emer.net/)
Not to be a partypooper but... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~Spy+der+Mann/journal/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 15, @12:57AM)
Re:Not to be a partypooper but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, let's review: a Ukrainian Microsoft rep had a laptop problem, so they showed his presentation on someone else's Linux laptop.
Why on earth would "common people" (charming phrasing, BTW) care? This is only "news" in the sense that it's fuel for today's anti-Microsoft raving.
We Powerbook owners pull some Windows user's fat out of the fire on a weekly basis -- it's not really news.
Re:Not to be a partypooper but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Powerpoint Crash (Score:3, Interesting)
Pardon? (Score:3, Informative)
laughed out loud at that picture (Score:3, Interesting)
what is it with slashdot running all these captchas lately ? "To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image:" I did this yesterday, shouldn't there be a period of grace for logged in users ?
Re:laughed out loud at that picture (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday July 06 2005, @07:37AM)
Apparently, the Slashdot editors think our comments are so stupid that we HAVE to be bots. Sorry, Taco, we really are that stupid. At least I am. No wait. I mean, my posts are. I mean, I'm not a bot. I'm sure I'm smarter than a bot, even though I keep typing the captcha thing wrong. Maybe it's an IQ test, like a minimum height requirement on a Roller Coaster. I got it on my third try. What I'm trying to say is... uh, I forgot.
Dammit IQ Captcha, what are you trying to tell me!?!?!?
======================
Re:laughed out loud at that picture (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.bdpnetworks.com/)
Intersting. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.edespot.com/~amackenz/)
Re:Intersting. (Score:5, Funny)
Not to be cynical but... (Score:4, Insightful)
If this is supposed to be proof of something, I want confirmation. Then I'll really start laughing.
Because honestly, who is to ay it wasn't just one guy putting up a slide and snapping a photo?
Embarassing... (Score:5, Informative)
Better Photograph (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.cypherxero.net/)
http://www.collegechixors.com/images/hpim2544.siz
Happens the other way too (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://home.ica.net/~leifb/)
i.e. For myself, back when trying to install Red Hat 8.0 on my machine at home, I had to constantly reboot back into Win2K to download patches/rpms, or read up about bugs and errata, get network drivers, configuration minutae, etc.
It's stable now, but having a working (out of the box) Win2K install to fall back on was crucial to "save" my Linux installation.
Let's not be too smug here, would this have been news if they'd been bailed out by a different Windows version?
That's rich (Score:5, Funny)
[lin-laptop]"I can save the day."
[MSFT-Tablet]"I will never be saved by riff-raff the likes of you. You are open source and therefore evil. I was created using millions of dollars in r&d capitol. You were made from donations, and other open source contributors, and are therefore an inferior product."
[lin-laptop]"Yeah, but I can do something you can't right now."
[MSFT-Tablet]"What's that?"
[lin-laptop]"Run your presentation."
Was his PowerPoint patched (Score:3, Informative)
I thought I was hosed, but I tried opening it in OpenOffice and it worked fine. Then a friend suggested I run "Office Update". Once I did this, PowerPoint opened the file without problems.
Did this dude bother to update his PowerPoint?
Reminds me of something that just happened to me (Score:5, Interesting)
First I tried Bart PE, a Windows XP bootable CD. It allowed me to see the hard drive, but the file sizes were all wrong. I tried to connect it to the network but it wouldn't recognize the network card. I tried plugging in a USB flash drive but it wouldn't recognize that either.
DOS was out of the question as the drive was NTFS. Then it hit me, I had a copy of Knoppix 3.8 on me. I booted it up and it saw the network and thumbdrive instantly. I saved the boss's files and he was very impressed. While I was setting him up on a spare notebook he was playing with the menus in KDE and we made small talk about governments and businesses saving tons of cash by switching to Linux, Open Office, and other free software.
So Linux saved the day for his poor broken Windows box, just a little ironic. Now this sysadmin is never leaving without a copy of Knoppix again.
old story, but still (Score:5, Informative)
(http://sourcery.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday March 27 2006, @12:54AM)
------------------
From the README on the site:
Intro
[...]
1. This is old news: the event happened on October 9, 2004.
2. Microsoft rep in Ukraine had to use free software to get on with a presentation on a free software conference since his munition failed to cooperate with projector.
3. See below (also posted to the places I could track down).
[...]
As for the facts:
* it was not Master but ALT Linux Compact 2.3 (page|ISO|ML)
* it was Third Ukrainian Free Software Developers' and Users' Conference
* it was sponsored by IBM, Novell and EMT (yeah, I work for
* it is the head of Microsoft Ukraine, Mr. Valery Lanovenko
* it is the Tablet PC which failed to feed the projector on the secondary head properly to blame
* and indeed it's OpenOffice.org on our Linux/ThinkPad running their PowerPoint presentation
* IMG_0395 has Mr. Lanovenko's personal comment -- he tries to make an impression that it was PDF (we as the conference staff recommended to keep those at hand) but all of us know OOo doesn't display PDFs
[...]
--
Michael Shigorin
mike at osdn dot org dot ua
EMT.Com.UA * OSDN.Org.UA * Linux.Kiev.UA * ALTLinux.ORG
Well, what would *you* have done? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.neopoleon.com/)
But, if you've ever given a presenation, then you *know* how tough it can be. Demos and talks which have been working fine for days, weeks, and months have a way of suddenly breaking down when you need them most. Don't know why this is.
So, this guy (if this is true) did what he had to so that the presentation could continue.
Is that really something worth laughing at?
Plus, it just goes to show that not everybody at Microsoft feels the same way about certain... "other" technologies. Yeah, it might be a fine "ha ha" for other people at the company, but those of you who are pushing the OSS agenda should really be congratulating this guy for sticking his neck out.
And, had this been a presentation on some Linux subject and something had gone wrong with the presentation machine (Linux machines *do* crash, too, you know), then what would the presenter have done?
People are laughing, but many of us on the Windows side of things have no problem firing up an alternative operating system. We have our loyalties, but it doesn't mean we're all totally pig-headed.
Re:Well, what would *you* have done? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/...=109&tid=149&tid=201)
There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening.
I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters if you tolerate the attitude that "[anything] which has been working for days, weeks, and months [could] have a way of suddenly breaking down whhen you need it most".
It's fine if he's demoing a pre-release-prototype or something; but this was a supposedly "released" non-beta product that was screwing up whatever he was trying to accomplish.
Yes, I've given many many presentations before. What would I have done? Had a backup of the presentation on a CD or USB device so regardless of what failed in my laptop, I could have given it successfully by borrowing someone else's laptop.
It's F9 baby (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.iki.fi/magi/ | Last Journal: Friday September 27 2002, @04:31AM)
In Acroread, it's Ctrl+L. I learned this only after a two-hour presentation in windowed mode.
Disappointinly, you apparently can't get full screen mode at all in xpdf nor gv. I've seen a lecturer do his entire course with windowed xpdf under Linux.
Mod Submitter Up! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.jb.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @10:17PM)
World... ending... pigs flying
(-1: Silly)
Re:haha (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.cursor.org/)