der.hans wrote:
> 
> I talked to the ThizLinux team at LWE. They have a deal with mobo
> manufacturers. I guess almost all mobo manufacturers are now in Taiwan.
> Anyway, that's how they got in there. They're just now exploring working the
> .us market.
> 
> ThizLinux is Red Hat-based.
> 
> I haven't played with their dist. I had a couple of people at LWE mention
> that ThizLinux has a killer office suite, which turns out to be a highly
> optimized version of OpenOffice. Didn't get to talk to them again to find
> out if the optimizations are being turned back to OO.org.
> ciao,
> 
> der.hans

Further to der.hans' observations, I had the opportunity as well to talk 
to one of the reps at the ThizLinux booth at LWE.  They are out of Hong 
Kong, and seem to be targeting the K-12 and Asian markets 
simultaneously.  This was their first "marketing" foray into the North 
American market, and I thought they did a good job displaying their 
product to its best advantage.  As der.hans notes, the ThizOffice 
product is an optimized OO, specifically in the overt choice of all the 
main East Asian languages....and I neglected to ask if, as der.hans also 
noted, whether their modifications were being returned to the OSS 
community.

What I found exciting and intriguing, though, was the very fact that 
overall development in Asia is proceeding so rapidly.  TurboLinux may 
have had a hard time of it in the U.S. market, but they always did well 
in Japan, which was their main target anyway.  I think this parallels 
the more rapid growth of Linux deployment outside of the U.S. in 
relation to migration from Microsoft products....it is not so unusual to 
imagine at some point in the future that U.S.-based corporations and 
multinationals in general may well migrate to Linux solutions simply 
because their overseas customers demand it, much the way corporate 
America ended up defaulting to Microsoft products as a corporate 
"standard".  The very fact we have a good OSS office suite, and it's 
being modified for every language on the planet by developers in every 
country, is the most encouraging news for all of us.....a wave is often 
barely seen on the surface of the ocean as it travels thousands of miles 
across, only to rear up with immense unleashed power as it meets 
landfall.  Microsoft is fully aware of the tsunami to come...they've 
been riding the crest of their own wave, at an ever greater premium, for 
over 20 years.

In regards to the $199 boxen with ThizLinux at Fry's, I thought the 
version I saw at LWE was more "polished" than the one I saw installed at 
Fry's, but I may be wrong here because I did not take note of the 
respective version numbers.

Tom S.

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  Red Hat 7.3   Kernel 2.4.18   XFree86 4.2   KDE 3.0.0

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One Net to rule them all, One Net to find them,
One Net to bring them all, and Open Standards bind them.
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