Italian Military To Switch To LibreOffice and ODF 106
jrepin writes: The Italian military is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF). The Ministry of Defense will over the next year-and-a-half install this suite of office productivity tools on some 150,000 PC workstations — making it Europe's second largest LibreOffice implementation.
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He like the Italians, and learned to speak Italian quite well, so that he could order wine for his unit. His take was that Italians pretty much wanted everyone to go home, they generally had no interest in fighting.
His view may have been coloured by the fact that his unit, (the New Zealand Division Signal Corps, so not front line troops) took a lot of Italian prisoners during the Middle East campaign.
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I had a friend who claimed the the Italians had never lost a war, even if it meant they had to change sides to make sure of it.
He was Italian, BTW.
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Italy had a powerful military when Americans were crapping on the ground and worshiping buffalo.
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Italy had a powerful military when Americans were crapping on the ground and worshiping buffalo.
What, Florence and Venice?
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Re:Italy has a military? (Score:5, Insightful)
Way before Florence and Venice. You know, there was this thing called Roman Empire, which basically amounted to 90% of the civilized world 2K years ago. If we look at more recent times, Italy was part of 3 wars over the last century, it won two of them (one against the Ottoman Empire and WWI). It lost WWII only because it was driven by an idiotic dictator who entered the war after a 3 month preparation. As for the US, the last three wars it was part of were in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the recent "proxy war" with Russia in the Donbass region: the brilliant results speak for themselves.
But probably in US high schools History is not cool enough to be taught, they teach you "courses" like rollerblading and "home economics" instead, and at night you might enjoy the katrashians.
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You know, there was this thing called Roman Empire, which basically amounted to 90% of the civilized world 2K years ago.
If you somehow failed to know about China.
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Roughly the same period as the Jin dynasty (265–420) in China.
Population around 22 million, maybe a third of the population of the Roman empire at its greatest.
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Britannia and Egypt were both part of the Roman Empire. And London itself was literally founded by the Romans. Finally, the Persian dynasties lost many of their western territories to the Romans, especially in the 2nd century AD.
You must have attended elementary schools either in the USA or in the fourth world.
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There are 16 countries [wikipedia.org] without a military, and Italy is not one of them. There are about 175,000 people in the Italian Armed Forces [wikipedia.org], and according to TFA, 150,000 of them produce documents. I believe that the last time they won a war, was their invasion of Albania [wikipedia.org].
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1939. Which was just 6 years before the US won its last war, in 1945.
Unless you consider what happened in Iraq a "victory" (is ISIS your ally?), let alone Afghanistan, that is still today largely controlled by the Talibans.
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Go ahead and walk right into Iraq and Afghanistan and show us all how it's done
Why should I? And why should Italy? Saddam Hussein didn't do anything wrong to Italy, he was a pretty good leader, he kept its country stable, I don't remember any refugees coming here when he was in power. I wouldn't have attacked him in the first place, just like Khadafi in Lybia, just like Assad in Syria, two other pretty good leaders. And there wouldn't be massive amounts of refugees coming to Italy and several other european countries as a result. As for the Talibans, sorry, but Bin Laden was harbored
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As for the Talibans, sorry, but Bin Laden was harbored by Pakistan, not Afghanistan, as events eventually proved.
He was harbored by both. In the ten years before he was caught, he had a lot of time to move around. He was in Tora Bora when the US invaded Afghanistan, but managed to evade capture, at which point intelligence agencies lost track of him.
But Pakistan has nukes, so you were afraid to bomb it, right?
You may have missed the part where once the US tracked down Bin Laden, they invaded without telling the Pakistani government. Caused a bit of a stir.
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Oh, reality bites, huh? So why was the Afghan war fought even after Bin Laden was killed?
Because the United States was not at war with Bin Laden, it was at war with Al Qaeda, of whom Bin Laden was the head. Killing Bin Laden does not kill his terrorist networks.
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Well if your army is so great and superior to the US then by all means show us how to do it. Go ahead and walk right into Iraq and Afghanistan and show us all how it's done.
History tells us that "walking into Afghanistan" is how it is not done
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Indeed. One does not simply "walk" into Afghanistan.
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How to do it is to not do it. Simple. It is not possible to conquer a complex country like Afghanistan. If you really want the territory where the Afghans are living, than you have to kill them all, just like the Romans did in their prime time when tribes didn't want to join the empire. But a war to spread democracy and liberty in Afghanistan? It can't be done.
Iraq? It's easy to kill a dictator, but it was not the solution to the non existing problem. It was a dictator with blood on his hands, that is some
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What do do, guard against an invasion from the Visigoths?
That was gonna be my question as well. Ever since the end of the Cold War and the open-border approach of all European countries, it's a wonder that any of them have militaries at all. In Italy's case, who do they defend themselves against? Austria? France? Switzerland? Croatia? The only people invading them are refugees from Libya, and they don't even have the balls to turn them away w/o needing a military. So what good does it do Italy to have a military?
Confusion Intensifies (Score:1)
Truthfully, I wasn't entirely cognizant of the existence of an Italian military.
It's kind of like the Canadian Navy. If you think about it; well sure they would exist. But did you actually realize that they exist?
Of course they have an army... (Score:2)
Of course Italy has an army. It gives the Italian designers something to practice on.
Apparently even Armani has had a hand in their uniform designs.
http://www.styleite.com/news/r... [styleite.com]
Kind of. Coast Guard. Same size as 1 carrier group (Score:2)
> It's kind of like the Canadian Navy. If you think about it; well sure they would exist.
Technically they exist, and they do serve a role, a role similar in some ways to the US Coast Guard.
Canada's navy operates 1 destroyer, 12 frigates, 4 patrol submarines, 12 coastal defense vessels and 8 unarmed patrol/training vessels. They have about 8,000 sailors.
Each US carrier battle group includes about eight surface warships like those of the RCN, and typically two submarines. Plus a carrier. With 70 planes on
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wouldn't canada (or anybody) be safer without a friend who goes around the world stirring shit at every possible opportunity?
i.e. if they had United States of South Canada for a neighbor, i'd imagine the south canadian (mounted) navy wouldn't just run around the world rattling guns and meddling in people's shit.
Tested. Canada invaded? Needed a Navy? (Score:2)
> wouldn't canada (or anybody) be safer
Well, we've seen the results . Has Canada been invaded since the US Navy was formed? Have they had any need for their own Navy? (Other than for Coast Guard type operations).
Liberal:
One who is full of their own ideas, and refuses to learn from historical facts about those ideas.
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Yes, they were invaded by the US.
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"wouldn't canada (or anybody) be safer without a friend who goes around the world stirring shit at every possible opportunity?"
Well, it depends. Our current world is only big enough for a limited set of military bullies, and it can be argued that the current set has a cardinality of one. So, if you happen not to be friend of the bully... what do you think is the alternative?
Satya: (Score:5, Funny)
Handing a black briefcase to Clippy, "Get these free Office licenses to the Italian Ministry of Defense by any means necessary."
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Clippy: "I see you are about to buy some persuading services from the Italian mafia. Would you like some help formulating an offer they can't refuse?"
Erm....what? (Score:2)
Wasn't there just a slashdot article a couple weeks ago about how Italian government is switching from LibreOffice back to MS?
Not exactly... (Score:3)
The article was about how the city of Pesaro, Italy was switching back to MS.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Hmm, maybe the next step'll be... (Score:4, Funny)
...Sabayon Linux, baby! (And if you don't like it, vaffanculo!!)
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Let's see how it works out (Score:2)
I thought I would post something, you know, on topic .... as strange and possibly inappropriate as that concept might sound.
It appears that when something like this happens, Microsoft picks its moment, finds the moment of maximum chaos (all radical transitions have such moments) and offers a "deal" like cheap Office 365 (or is it 360, or 666, or some other number?) licenses, and some panic-stricken execs go for it rather than wait until the chaos dies down and a stable operating state is achieved.
I'm as ant
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As one anecdotal case, I use LibreOffice in my office while literally everyone else uses MS Office 2010. I'm constantly running into formatting inconsistencies and straight incompatibility with complex spreadsheets. I muddle through it as I have the technical expertise and ideological philosophy that allows, and demands, that I do so; but I wouldn't w
Re:Let's see how it works out (Score:4, Interesting)
Anecdotally as well, I have had the opposite experience.
Admittedly, I don't see complex spreadsheets or macro-heavy documents in my library, but patrons bring in old doc, docx, MS Works or WordPerfect documents, as well as a variety of simple spreadsheets and presentations--LibreOffice opens them all, with only minor formatting problems. Libreoffice will even open a large number of Office templates.
The only persistent problem I have is that whenever I do a LibreOffice upgrade, Windows switches all the open/save preferences from Libreoffice back to MS Office.
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Anecdotally, I have the opposite to report.
Where Excel 2003 would fail to load an complex file, OpenOffice (didn't try LibreOffice at that time) would load the same file just fine.
Complex in the sense of lot's of cells used ( a few hundred rows with about 50 columns - not that much actually), with only basic arithmetic- no funky math or functions used.
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AFAIK, the Scottish police and the French police (or was it the Gendarmerie?) are still using Open/Libre Office, and have been doing so for quite some time. Haven't heard anything about if for quite some time, so I guess they're happy with it.
And actually, Microsoft isn't very good at marketing. They are good at corruption and on playing on peoples fear and ignorance, which might explain why they are having some problems with convincing the police. : >
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I should have been more clear. When I said "marketing" I meant to include Machiavellian meanings. Perhaps saying "Microsoft is good at selling" would have been better --- selling, whether through persuasion, coercion, etc. .... or, heaven forbid, offering value if there's no other way.
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"And actually, Microsoft isn't very good at marketing. They are good at corruption and on playing on peoples fear and ignorance"
Why do you think corruption and FUD are not marketing tools along many others?
And given current corporate ethos, as dignified as any other, I should add.
Goof for them! (Score:2)
Va bene cosi.
Understand your needs and pick the right solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Company CTOs or equivalent need to understand the needs of their company before they pick a product. Here's a list that shows the products side by side:
https://wiki.documentfoundatio... [documentfoundation.org]
Guessing they didn't like MS's spyware as an OS (Score:1)
This is going to quickly become a trend as more and more foreign governments realize MS can't be trusted.
LibreOffice 5.x is a big improvement (Score:3)
I've slated LibreOffice in the past for constant crashes and formatting problems.
They've done a great job of fixing bugs, it no longer crashes regularly and I haven't noticed any formatting issues with 5.0.x
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I've found God to be fairly useable, but you have to do things his way. Same way with LO too, I guess. I don't know what's so "unuseable" about it. I only use 2% of its capabilities.
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I knew I was missing a trick, life is too hard, how do I use God? Is there a trick to opening some console?
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Yes. RTFM!
Who Cares? (Score:1)
What I really want to know is what kind of toilet paper they use.