Official Luthiers Forum!

You're right Hesh...I was thinking about MS Office 2007 .docx and .xlsx files

Sorry,
Cecil

One more comment about copyright laws...

I have lived in Asia for almost 14 years; Thailand, China and now Vietnam. I have seen such rapid development it is almost unbelievable. Children here in Vietnam are moving from the rice paddies to school learning English and then using computers. It used to be only the rich kids had opportunities but now it is spreading to more and more of the population.

Almost all of this has been accomplished by people copying texbooks they cannot afford, learning about the western world using bootleg music, movies and using ilegal software including Windows, MS Office, Photoshop, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

America has become hugely admired and respected (regardless of some of their questionable international) policies due the use of ilegal products.

This all gets added into the totals of worldwide theft of these products but possibly has been one of the most useful (foreign aid) efforts in this decade.

Producing ilegal medicines is another subject that has helped the 3rd world become more civilized but not really relevant to this thread.

Anyway, if you are talking about charity add the contribution of ilegal modern technology to the list.

Examples:

Most computer software and movie DVDs are less than $2 per disc.

CDs are about 40 cents.

Some medicines that are produced and sold for 50 cents here cost more than $12 in America.

It can be a tough decision between the laws of profit and raising the standard of living, education and health of all the people on this planet.

I don't pretend to have a good answer.



      

Cecil,

To see what is actually in a .docx or .xlsx to see what Open XML is doing just open a .docx or .xlsx file in a program like winzip or any other zip program. An open XML file is actually a zip folder that contains a number of XML files that contain the data in one file, the style sheet in another, the macro in another and so worth. To a Office 2007 user it looks and acts just like a regular doc or xls file but in reality by saving to the new open xml standard anyone can read the data, style sheet, etc without having to own the right viewer or Microsoft application.

A couple of things that Microsoft is doing specifically in South East Asia is doing like creating simpler versions of Windows that have reduced functions but that will run on much older less capable hardware, as this is a common in third world countries. These versions are written in native languages and available only in those Asian countries. We are also doing the same with Office and other applications. One of the keys to these versions is pricing them proportional to the economy of the average per capita as some of the poorest countries will still have people that are very wealthy while many others live in absolute poverty.

I am aware of our having released the Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Thai versions...I am not sure of our timeframe for the Vietnamese version but I know that is also planned.

The other thing that was just announced this week is a thing called MultiPoint which is a mouse driver that allows an entire classroom of children to use separate mice in the same application with each mouse cursor in a different color. In remote villages they are fortunate if they even have a single used PC and this is used in the school. By having way for a number of mice to be used against the same application on that single computer it will give larger amounts of children the ability to be able to learn in new ways not possible before.

These are small efforts but are things that can only help.

Shawn,

Good ideas. This planet keeps getting smaller and smaller every day.