On Tue, 2005-09-20 at 16:19 -0400, Chad Smith wrote:
> Well, I don't totally agree with you on this. I don't think opendocuments > matters at all. I sincerely doubt it will ever take off. Bit like the boss of IBM who famously said the world might need maybe 4 computeres ;-) > It is, and likely > will remain, a geek-only format on two office suites, one of which is locked > on a geek-mostly very small market share operating system. Maybe I'm wrong. The UK government, the EU government and Massachusetts seem to think otherwise to name just a few influential agents. XML is important as more and more applications and their associated documents move to the Internet. If the Internet is to stay Open you need Open Document formats so even if it wasn't the OASIS one it would need to be invented. Even MS have effectively acknowledged this by proposing their own XML format claiming the OASIS one is defective which is a bit strange since they didn't say that previously and they are represented on the OASIS committee. On current evidence, governments are not going to just accept another proprietary document format from a single company effectively giving that company control of the internet. > It'd be nice if I was. But whatever, doesn't really matter to me. I think it will matter to everyone that uses the Internet even if they don't actually appreciate why. > I personally think OpenOffice.org is the important thing. And compatibility > is the thing that makes OOo work. Yes you need it as a stepping stone to get to the next stage. But after that point OOo itself will be only one set of tools that operate on the data structures. Others will arise even if many consumer users don't become aware of them. There are lots of software tools in use that most users have no idea about but which actually benefit them. > Writely is cool because it can save your > work on their server (something that is scary for some now, but will likely > become the way things work in the future) and print them out and save them > to your hard drive - in the Microsoft Word document format. This is a great > example of what I was talking about - thanks for finding it. > > I think that having a web-version of OOo (like http://www.writely.com/ - > it's free) would be awesome. You could set up KOffice like this - similiar > to how WorkSpot works - (actually WorkSpot <http://www.workspot.com/> is an > example of a pre-existing way to put OOo online - it has GnomeOffice, > KOffice, and OpenOffice.org, although the versions are very old - 1.0.2 for > OOo). > > If someone wanted to set up a server with a heck of a lot of RAM and lots of > storage and bandwidth, running a stripped-down distro of Linux (like DSL) > with OOo installed - they could host a web-based version of OOo. Some people already run thin clients like this. I know of schools here that can operate around 40 concurrent thin client sessions to students homes like this. So the computer at home can be a P100 with 32 meg of RAM and run OOo from the school's Linux blades servers. The main limit is the current broadband bandwidth. As this rises it will be possible to give whole communities thin client access to OOo at very low cost and with little support overhead. Leigh City Technology College in Kent is building the infrastructure to do this with racks of blade servers currently running over 100 thin client desktops. East Hull CLC has 120 thin clients that have been running for 3 years from 6 inexpensive servers. While this is not quite the same as web based apps the outcome is similar. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
