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Working as an Engineer as I, before my Technical Support specialist job, was a verry full-filling and difficult job. Engineers are the persons innovating new technology, while the pseudo-Engineers with MCSE certification are the persons implementing or slandering the fruits of your labors by holding false-authority. Can you imagine how much techology some corporations run through and have utterly destroyed because they didn't comprehend the profit increase (that means saving money too). It makes many people wonder how Microsoft profits with having the highest specialized Technical Support inter-company employment per capita for its Operating System and Application software against other companies whos products don't need many technical support agents because their product serves its purpose as stated on their retail box.

You mean, er... StarOffice?

You probably just forgot to mention it, but surely there is a fairly big company that has a supported office suite based on OOo. So should someone choose to pay for the product and support, there is a viable option. Now, OOo and SO are reasonably compatible (Mozilla vs. Netscape 7 kind of situation), most importantly of course having same file format and core codebase... so switching between the two is fairly painless.

Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?

IE6 has the ability to navigate msnbc.com in the way it was meant to be navigated. I don't know why: The menus at foxnews.com work just fine, but msnbc.com displays nothing where menus should be. windowsupdate.microsoft.com? Forget it.

Visit www.voa.gov in Mozilla and wonder why the page looks different in IE6. Simple, the comments on the page are screwy, and vim highlighting will show that. I'm thankful that voanews.com is just fine.

staroffice.com specifically does not support Netscape 6+ and will give you a message to that effect. That said, I haven't noticed any breakage. Expect more such hostility in the future from people who are happy with the one-browser market.

I can't get the RealAudio plugin to work with Mozilla. Maybe I need to install Netscape, deal with the cheesy commercial crap and special offers long enough to install the plugin, copy it to my Mozilla folder, then uninstall Netscape. A minor problem to be sure, but I'm sick of staring at that "you need a plug-in" icon for embedded objects, and I wish the Netscape plug-in finder would recognize my frustration.

I love Mozilla, but it lags behind IE6 on quite a few sites that I visit. These are just some of the sites that I visit, and I stay away from most overdone sites, especially Flash sites. I can't imagine what it's like for people who surf the web for all of its tacky glory. Mozilla has a great foundation. It just isn't there yet for the sites I visit, even less ready than the 0.9.7 moniker would suggest.

For example, with Corel Draw (Linux Version) you hade to run a special version of Wine to get it to work. At least on my machine, that really bogged down resources and made the application (and my system in general when the app was running) run very poorly.

If they had made an actual Linux version, then the story might have been different. The same reasoning applies to all the Corel applications for Linux that I tried. If I want to run a Windows application, I'll hop onto a Windows box. I realize that they took this approach to increase the ease and speed at which applications could be ported, but if it makes the community that much less likely to use your product (and especially in the face of alternatives such as GIMP or StarOffice) then what's the point? There is, of course, also the matter of Corel's somewhat less than whole-hearted embrace of the Open Source theory, but that has been adequately covered in other posts

-B
benjones@superutility.net