12 nations put on copyright piracy list

[Robor007 0]

Robert,

I used Office 2007. Takes about 30 minutes to launch the application. Nice interface, poor practicality. The features are the same as the previous versions. The difference is the usability. You can find tools easier. Plus, they used a new file format called .xdoc which is not a cross-platform friendly format. You can, however, encode your document into standard .doc as well.

I will disagree there. Open Office is slower on my work laptop in Linux than Office 2007 is in the VMWare session on the same laptop. Open Office =/= fast. Office 2007 does have new features as well. A few posts up I gave an example before of a new feature that allows a document to be viewed with different fonts on the fly. Of course it's not cross-platform friendly. Microsoft is not open source.

Everyone else,

Hmm...Yes, Linux is not for gamers. I hope you noticed I mentioned that. . Anyway, Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn (version 7.04) is in itself a lot more friendlier compared to prior versions and distros of GNU/Linux. It has easy manageable wireless settings. In fact, all I had to do was stick in my USB 802.11G wireless card and it works instantaneously without any drivers to be installed. The only wireless chipset that it's not compatible with is Broadcom since they are very secretive about releasing the code to make their chipset run.

I agree Feisty is another step in the right direction for desktop Linux but again it's not for everyone. Out of the box things like video codecs and Flash are not installed. If the video card and/or monitor aren't detected properly (not that uncommon) you're going to wind up with display problems. Wireless is still hit and miss and it's not just Broadcom chipsets. Hop over to UbuntuForums.org and check out all the posts about people with wireless troubles - add encryption to the mix and problems multiply.

OpenOffice.org is just as much a productive suite as Office. The conversion between .doc and .odt may leave some formating off, but, it's easily fixable. I can emulate any document created on Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org. I am an expert when it comes to it.

People don't want to fix things or troubleshoot or redo formatting. If it doesn't look right when they open it they will stick with Office.

On a final note, if those who want to experiment with learning Ubuntu or any GNU/Linux distro, purchase a machine from ebay for 100 dollars and play around with it. You'll find later that you can also use it with a VIA C7 2.0GHZ/EPIA miniITX computer platform that consumes about 60 watts total will save you tremendous amount of energy. As against the performance hog of a Windows machine that needs nowadays at least a 300 watt power supply to run.

Anyone who wants to experiment with Linux only needs to download (you can download it for free HERE) a 'LiveCD' and boot off of it. As long as your computer is configured to boot from the CD drive (most are by default) a LiveCD will boot your system and allow you to experiment with the operating system but makes NO changes to your hard drive. In other words, you will not hurt your existing Windows install. Keep in mind it will be *much* slower running from the CD.