Plan-B for Software Documentation

According to InfoWorld, Walmart discontinued selling its $200 gPC from Everex in stores.

The $200 PC loaded with Google applications will continue to be available at the Walmart.com website.

As reason, Walmart’s spokes person, O’Brien said “The idea was to see if shoppers in our stores would respond as they do online to the offering. The answer is that customers did not respond to expectations, so we decided not to restock.” This is an interesting contrast to the many reports that the low cost, low energy PC has sold out in some stores and Walmarts pride to be able to manage inventory best. Also, Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex, says “The sell-through [at Walmart stores] was brisk, I am surprised at the decision,” said Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex.

Interestingly, O’Brian felt compelled to say “We did not ‘pull’ Linux from our shelves or make any kind of ‘announcement’ on this,” she said.

Sun Microsystems wants to encourage more participation in the Open Office community. For that purpose Sun sponsors a contest for contributions to OpenOffice.org offering $175,000 in price money and public acknowledgment of achievement.

The contest asks not just for development contributions, such as source code or extensions. The contest also solicits documentation, artwork, marketing materials and methods, tools to improve the community in areas such as distribution, translation, etc. It even accepts improvements to OpenDocument Format (ODF) and other creative ideas.

There are a few conditions for entry: You must create original work free of other people’s rights and be of legal age. You also must be a member of the OpenOffice.org community (registered at OpenOffice.org). For the cash prizes you need to live or be a legal resident of certain countries and territories. You can enter the contest as an individual or a group.

If you are interested, read the rules carefully. Determine if you are eligible for cash prizes. If you live in Austria or the Philippines, you are out of luck in this category. Also make sure that what you produce does comply with the licenses of OpenOffice.org and can be contributed to the OpenOffice.org project under the Contributer Agreement (different from the licenses). You should also be willing to have Sun Microsystems use your work for publicizing the Contest and the OpenOffice.org software.

Today I had to read a proud account of Plaxo that its new Plaxo Pulse Web 2.0 networking platform has seen a traffic surge since it announced to offer the OpenSocial API.

My personal experience with Plaxo Stream is rather negative. For several weeks now Thomas Power, Chairman at Ecademy and Owner, Ecademy.com sends to my Plaxo account and my Inbox messages reading:

Thomas Power shared something with the Jon… Network group.

You can view it here: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/events/…/

Thanks!
The Plaxo team

I don’t find this funny in any way. It is plain and simple spam. I don’t know the guy and as a spammer I will certainly not network with him.

Plaxo, fix your spamming issue and while you are at it fix your broken plugin for Thunderbird, which produces duplicates, if you want to do some good for your services.

While Everex started selling its low cost PC for <$200 at WalMart, it now offers the motherboard, CPU and OS bundled for $60. Add some memory and a hard drive ($40) and salvage an old computer case, power supply, keyboard and mouse ($0) and your are up and running for $100 and a little sweat equity.

LinuxDevices.com has an in depth report about Everex’s plans for its Linux and Google applications based $200 PC. LinuxDevices reports that Everex hopes to sell 50,000 to 60,000 PC’s through WalMart. The main concern for profitability are the support costs, which Everex hopes to keep under $30 per sale.

The developer board comes with the CPU and a DVD containing the ready to install gOS Operating System. According to the article, gOS is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution with the Enlightenment Window manager for the low cost PC is called gOS like in Google OS for its inclusion of all Google online tools available and pre installed. The vision is to use online Google tools for Search, E-Mail, Calendar, Bookmarks, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, and more. If needed local applications, such as the office suite OpenOffice.org are included as well. gOS is also open source and available for download, but it appears the version delivered with the board or the PC is pre configured to the hardware and adds programs for multimedia (playing mp3, DVD, etc.). You can’t expect an abundance of performance from the Via C7 processor, however, it does a good job with web browsing and running basic applications and multi media playback.

Gee, WalMart is becoming a major outlet for Open Source PCs. It just announced a desktop PC for under $200, including mouse and keyboard and even speakers. The machine is rather green than powerful, as it uses a 1.5 Ghz VIA G7 processor, which has enough juice for homework and playing mp3s, and in turn is quite energy efficient. This machine needs just 2 Watt power on average (how ever that is measured) and is almost not to be heard, with 28db noise levels.

The kicker is this is a PC with lots of open source software and w/o MS Windows. It runs a Debian based Linux distribution called gOS, including OpenOffice 2.2 and uses lots of Google, YouTube, Facebook and other web applications pre-installed. Some might see the Google web applications as bloatware, but at last they are not try & buy versions.

You have to buy an extra monitor or use one of those that are discarded in perfect working order. I know a few people who have dumped their nice 19″ tubes for flat screens. So if you have more space than money, ask around their might be a good monitor for free in some garage. Did anybody say Craig’s List?

OpenDocument Format (ODF), the standard accepted as ISO 26300 norm, has been mired in some controversy. The OpenDocument Foundation, a group formed to promote the standard format across different applications and platforms, has now denounced its support for ODF. The reasons cited is that Sun Microsystems, in control of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice the largest application supporting ODF, does not allow more compatibility to legacy formats such as .doc or MS OOXML. Sun favors supporting legacy document formats in the application, with appropriate import/export filters, while the ODF Foundation thinks it should become part of the format itself.

Recently, Sun has come under scrutiny for its policies surrounding OpenOffice.org and ODF. Some have even speculated if Novel instituted a fork of the OpenOffice.org project. It should come at no surprise that standards, as open as they may be, are a business tool. The ODF standard and the fact that it offers transparency which enables safety in archiving documents and having access centuries into the future forced Microsoft to rethink its own document formats. Now the ODF Foundation is surprised that Sun does want to keep out direct compatibility with the rival format(s).

However, having witnessed the discussions of ODFoundation members on some mailing lists, there also seem to be some strong personalities at work. Or is it the rivalry between MS Office Plug-in developments from the ODFoundation and Sun Microsystems that is causing all the bad blood?

The sad fallout of this is that the ODFoundation wants to morph itself into a CDF Foundation, CDF being another document format proposed by the influential standard body W3C. It will stop developing its MS Office plugin to seemlessly read and write ODF documents.

Apple releases tomorrow its latest version of Mac OS X called Leopard. It’s build-in text editor TextEdit now supports ODF and MS OOXML. This means it can exchange text documents with OpenOffice.org Writer, NeoOffice Writer and also with MS Word 2007.

Many Mac OS X fans now hope that Apple will soon support the ISO standard ODF in the iApplications such as iWork.

Siemens jsut annouced its latest offering in small business VOIP solutions and called it “HiPath OpenOffice ME”.

This has abolutely nothing to do with the free open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite for individuals, small and larg businesses as well as education or government.

While OpenOffice.org Release 2.3 is just out the door, Developers like Carsten Driesner, Liang Weike and the OpenOffice team from RedFlag 2000, prepare new features for Open Office Release 2.4

One feature is the ability to create and store your permanant image list, which can be used to change the icons of the appliction w/o going through the build process. In combination with the OOo extensions I expect this to become the facility for different skins for Open Office.

The other feature mentioned is an enhanced help tip text for the print button in the standard toolbar. The new feature shows the name of the printer in the help tip text, just to remind you where your document will be printed. Sounds rather useful in an office environment, where multiple printers are available.

Liang Weike works for RedFlag 2000 the project that adapts OpenOffice for the Chineese market and helps develop new features as well.

Sun Microsystems updated its Microsoft Office® plugin for ODF. This plugin allows users of the leading office suite to read and write ISO 26300 compliant documents. It is not the only plugin available for MS Office, but it appears to be the most feature rich implementation of such filters to date, based on the Open Office/Star Office implementation of the ODF Toolkit.

The newly released Sun ODF Plugin 1.1 for Micrososft Office improves installation and fixes many bugs over release 1.0. It also does support now 15 languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, Iberian Portuguese, Hungarian, Russian, Polis, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean.

Sun’s ODF plugin for MS Office supports Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2000. The latest version Office 2007 is not yet supported. The plugin supports the three leading applications in Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It integrates seemlessly and allows to set ODF (ISO 26300) as the standard file format to save when you hit Ctrl+S.