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KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
Andreas "Dre" Pour wrote to say that KDE's long-awaited version 1.1 is out, and asks you to check the dot for some more details. He also points to this temporary fixed-for-Netscape announcement as well as the official announcement. Dre continues: "The dot link includes commentary by me (including a call for Open Source office
developers to collaborate on filters!)"
With DMCA the Microsoft filters are "effectively" protected by their refusal to share the information with the rest of the world. Find out how the filters work and you're going the Sklyarov-way.
Andreas " Dre " gießen schrieb, um zu sagen, daß langerwartete Version 1,1 KDE's heraus ist und Sie bittet, den Punkt auf mehr Details zu überprüfen. Er zeigt auch auf diese temporäre fixed-for-Netscapeansage sowie die amtliche Bekanntmachung. Dre fährt fort: " das Punktlink umfaßt Kommentar durch mich (einschließlich Aufruf, damit geöffnete Quellbüroentwickler zusammenarbeiten auf Filtern!) ",
it's come a long way, if only i can just click on setup.exe....
geek page at KY speaks
I have been using KOffice for a while now, but havnt quite mustered up enough guts to type a paper for class on it yet. It crashed a little too often for my liking. Lets hope this new version is a bit more stable.
I read the "fixed for Netscape" link. It doesn't mention Netscape at all. Is the implication that the contents of the link are fixed for Netscape? One would think that an Open Source development group would understand how to write proper HTML that would render on everything. What, did the main announcement only work on Konquerer?
www.eFax.com are spammers
...it ran on Windows too... then it could actually be usable in a typical office environment
I think there will be a big quest between Staroffice 6.0 and KOffice. Although I don't believe Staroffice will have so many nice features like KOffice.
We will have to wait a little longer to make the big compare since Staroffice 6 isn't out for what may be a "little longer" (they started speading the word about a beta version July 25 2001). People who are willing to betatest Staroffice (when a beta would be out) can leave there email address on the sun - staroffice site.
If I see the many features of KOffice, things are made easy, KOffice will be used here.
I just hope I don't have to install too many libs. (I'm on Slack.)
42 + 1 = 42
Heh. I don't think I've ever seen a KDE-related announcement, which typically includes a link to the dot site, where it hasn't been totally and completely slashdotted into the ground. Still, I admire them for trying, or something. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Screw my karma, if this was a news for nerds website they would have told the nerds that
Internet Explorer 6.0 is out. http://www.microsoft.com/ie.
It is fast, lean and can i say fast again?
Now back to the topic, Koffice 1.1 is cool, been using the CVS tree for a few weeks. i'm still waiting for the KDE 3/QT 3.0 rewrite before i deploy.
Will KOffice support OpenOffice's XML-based file format for saving and loading documents? Besides supporting DOC, it seems like establishing an OS-wide open standard for formatted documents would go a long way to make Linux-based office tools more popular. As more and more apps use it, eventually, Word would have to provide an import filter, too.
Filters, filters, filters,
is what we need!
Or actually, just two: MS-Excel import and export and MS-Word import and export. When they are ready, we are ready to take over the world!
i'm running it for a while, (i submitted the story on slashdot, but was rejected.. wonder who moderates sometimes..) and really it rocks.. new KWord is really impressive.. just hope they can manage to do an export for MSWord format, so i can get rid of vmware and win....
:))) good work guys !
it's a real office suite, contrary to 1.0 version (even wonder why it's not 2.0 ?!)
just my (for now little) experience of the thing
If I have to read email from my "office" suite, I can easily do that from any platform.
If I have to write dox, spreadsheets or presentations, I'm pretty sure I can find some common format to exchange data between platforms.
But the real problem for me (and for many likewise) is the total lack of any support for M$ Exchange server (calendar, contacts, etc...)
AFAIK there is no client available for Linux which is OpenSource or GNU (otherwise I'll stick to the original, thanks)... And this is why I still can't swap to Linux on my workstation, I am required to use Exchange by the firm I work for.
Now a feature like that would mean something is changing, i.e. that regardless of minifeatures or looks, you can have a fully integrated linux workstation in a windows network.
My Stack Overflow user
I stayed up late last night checking out the new features. Very cool stuff.
The format support is amazing, not to mention the standard-based XML support.
I would definitely expect KOffice 1.1 to lead the charge in retaking the office desktop environment out of the hands of Redmond.
-Marvin
The typical Slashdotter doesn't hate IE because it is technically inferior. While MS, like Netscape, has a tradition of breaking existing standards with proprietary extensions (ActiveX, special CSS features, VBScript etc.), their browser functions fairly well. There are several reasons not to use it:
IE is not free. Eventually you pay with your freedom of choice and your privacy. That's why we care about the browsers -- not because we hate IE itself (if you throw that much cash at a problem, you are almost bound to come up with a solution). Using IE means signing away your rights for convenience. If that is your choice, fine, but you're on a shaky moral ground if you want the rest of the community to think the same way ("report IE releases!").
Seriously. A new KOffice (and I love the thing, I really do) is released every few months at the latest. A new major number for IE is pretty rare. I'd like to see the story (although I don't know how much I'd enjoy the ensuing flame-wars)...
Last post!
In addition to the now-Open-Sourced "TradeClient" Linux mail client (which I believe is Exchange-server compatible), they sell two products called Insight, which appear to be a client and a server that support Outlook/Exchange's (IMHO useless) calendar-and-meeting features on Linux. They say it's "not an Outlook clone!" but you might find one of these programs useful. They sure as damn aren't a total lack of any support , though.
In my shop, which uses MS Outlook / Exchange, I just run a standard POP3 client off the mail server's SMTP/POP gateway, and to the seven hells with the calendar functions. Integrated systems fail in an integrated fashion... Of course, not everyone has that option.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Because during a setup.exe-type install under Windows I can *easily* tell the program where to install itself, it'll set up icons for my gui desktop, and I usually have the ability to select and unselect specific options before the package installs itself. AFAICT, rpm and apt-get just *put* stuff certain places. I seem to recall one package I apt-getted asking me a couple questions, but I can't remember the specifics, and it seemed to be the exception to the rule.
creation science book
well put.
echo 656472616c73746f6e406d61632e636f6d0a|xxd -r -p
Get enough so that it doesn't matter. [smile]
Internet Explorer 6.0 is out
I figure that MS has enough bucks to promote their own monoploy
That said, MS always has the weirdest logic with their product names. For example, Windows CE = wince
The fact that I.E. as commonly pronounced, sounds like a scream of agony doesn't help. On the other hand, Koffice looks like you could say it "cough-ice", but that doesn't really work. And Konqueror is a decent name.
- - -
Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site based on Slash Code
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Star Office is already much more feature-rich than KOffice. The sheer amount of features is probably like 2 to 1 (or even more).
Now you might assume that I do not like KOffice, which is wrong. Microsoft Office and
Star Office actually contain FAR more features than most people ever use.
In fact, most people do not need Microsoft Office, they just buy or pirate it because they THINK they need it. The amount of features is so immense, that it scares people, and make people need COURSES to master the application. Upgrading to new versions of MS Office is for most people totally unnecessary after Office 97.
KOffice have huge potential if they keep on concentrating on making the package easy to use, well integrated with the desktop, and with an acceptable amount of features.
The analogy is almost like Linux vs. Windows. A regular Linux-distribution has an enormous amount of applications and features. Not a single Linux-user has ever needed all of them. Most distributions try to cater for absolutely everyone, and end up alienating the biggest amount of users in the process, the ones that only want to check mail, surf web and write letters.
Gaute
(peope(still)(use))(it(from)(time(to(time))))
In which way?
I've recently started using KWord for all of my wordprocessing, as I didn't really feel like wasting desk space with another box or processor time for VMWare.
The MS Office filters are definitely the last piece needed for the "enterprise" environment. If those filters worked decently well, I'd recompile koffice with those formats set as the default formats, and place it on each and every one of my users' desks. And I'm sure it's not that far away.
As is my experience, the typical office environment is also populated with people who *really* don't know the difference between one word processor and another, or one operating system or another. I swapped my manager's Windows box for a Linux-Mandrake box about 6 months ago, and it took him a week to notice the difference, which was difficulty with using StarOffice to open/create MS Word documents by default. I seriously don't think that people love Windows; they like it because it's what they know.
And as for usability, I've had more funky problems with Office not interacting properly with other applications than I would care to go into.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
If they had only put the same amount of effort into contributing to the openoffice.org, the open source community would be better off.
Everything is of course good to see, but this effort would have been better spent somewhere else.
somebody should tell these guise. don't forget to visit our GNU economy cite. We were doing a (soon_to_be_lucrative) "business" in surplus t-shirts, shovels (handy for sorting through the "bull"sh!t of the old fairytail "economy"), SUVs, yachts, mansions, chat boreds, stock market indexes, etc....., but we decided that IT was more important to have our/your say.
Actually, I think it's a win-win situation if
The "typical Slashdotter" that I see would rather preach than stick his head in the sand, although the same does not appear to be true about those that choose what gets submitted. Especially since recent statistics on a Slashdotting show that the vast majority of us use IE, and by implication other Microsoft apps, at some point during the day. It's certainly relevent, so why isn't it here?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Exchange's calendar functions are the only reason that Exchange is so popular. If it were just the email functionality, there would be no difference between Exchange and any other program. Since many of the linux users here don't seem to be in corporate environments, or at least any higher than a programmer, they don't seem to notice how much middle and upper management rely on the calendar functions in Exchange. There are people in my company who wouldn't be able to function without these features. There whole day is scheduled around their calendar. Their calendar is set by someone else's meeting schedule. All they do is approve it and they are sent reminders of where to be and when... If you can't do that in another client, then the client will never be even close to replacing Outlook/Exchange.
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
True. Saddly exchange is a horribal calander system. I want to be reminded abotu meetings 5 mintues before they start. Everyone else wants 15 minutes. Can't be done, the meeting sets the reminder time, so I get reminded about each meeting 15 minuter before, except the ones I schedual. I've givin up on changing each one, it is too much hastle.
there are many other problems with exchange that I won't get into the reminder is the just one that has annoyed me last. It doesn't work for us, yet we have to use it.
what's the use of filters for opening Word file formats if the program doesnt support the features? Fine, it's ok if KOffice doesnt have Auto-Hyphen Underlining. But lacking endnotes/footnotes? mail merge is gone? These are SERIOUS problems. It automatically means KOffice is totally useless for any professional academic or business use. What will happen if I try to open my Physics Thesis or my Business Plan word file in KOffice - will it barf when it gets to eth footnotes? mangle it beyond compare?
Features DO MATTER. It's a very sour-grapes attitude to say "sure our open source Office lacks some features, but users dont use them anyway". If all you want out of an Office suite is to type some letters, then you don't need Office, you just need Microsoft Works! but if you want to use an Office suite for true business or academic or professional uses, you need much more features than the average letter writer.
frankly, there's a REASON that Office became the behemoth it is, and that is solely due to features, not monopoly. Remember Wordperfect used to OWN the Office space, and Lotus has a really nice office suite as well. In fact I myself used to be a SAM file diehard, until one day I just realised that the things I wanted, Lotus was dragging its feet on, and Word already had (example - integrated equation editor. advanced font and layout abilities. sectioning and numbering. Automatic tables and figures indexes. list goes on). Other things like support for third party tools like EndNote and MathType. KOffice is still behind even what Lotus and Wordperfect used to have, though I do agree it has a very nice graphic UI. And yet we still accuse the Windows people of liking style over substance?
If you want to do professional business or academic work, there are only two options. TeX or Microsoft Office. Right now, KOffice is still in Microsoft-Works league. Features DO matter and we need them on teh desktop office suite (not the browser :P)
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
"IE is not free."
.NET/Passport user"; "may introduce such an extension any day")and you failed to give any relevant reason not to use it (especially if you consider that most Slashdotters already use 5.0 or 5.5). I'll stop short of calling you prejudiced or claiming you'd prefer to censor Slashdot of MS news.
Hello? He said IE 6 is free and he was right. Free as in beer. Your arguments are what is known as hyperbole. They are asumptions ("Every IE user will eventually be a
I sure as hell didn't sign any of my rights away when I downloaded it.
NOT A TROLL OR FLAMEBAIT!
We're just having a conversation.
Sham on
Why do you think MS spent millions developing IE and doesn't charge you for downloading it? Are they a charity?
"TradeClient" Linux mail client does not support exchange - actually I think that's the difference with the non GPL ($$$) version. ;-P)
I know Exchange can have a POP/SMTP gateway (in fact we use the SMTP gateway). We don't use those extensions though, because (according to my sysadmin) they suck and they are insecure. So as I say there is no "free" client for exchange... so I'm stuck with a Windows workstation... (although I do develop on Linux
Cheers
My Stack Overflow user
you are kidding?
What do you think the license fees of Windows and MS Office are used to?
No MS product is free. They need to make money, and are quite succesful at this. They just charge the cost on other products
When L*nux can finally get to the simplicity of Windows or MacOS then and only then will we ever have a REAL desktop shift. All of the apt-get and rpm -i is all a mystery to the users who will turn the tide. Get a grip and develop to them or else be forver banished to the server, which, as fun as they are, servers are NOT going to move linux past the honeymoon to the family.
ActiveX is a concrete example of "May introduce such an extension any day". ActiveX controls in an IE web browser is an alternative to Java Applets in a web browser. I work in the industrial automation industry. Allen-Bradley/Rockwell Software has a product called ViewAnywhere that is a web browser extension of their RSView32 Human Machine Interface (HMI) software. It is only available as an ActiveX control, not as a Java Applet. They wrote it as an ActiveX because "80% of the users are IE users anyway".
This precluded us from suggesting the wireless web pad device from SonicBlue called the ProGrear as a wireless, take it with you, HMI for the factory floor. The ProGear used to be a Linux only, Netscape 4.7/6.0 browser based web tablet. It does not run ActiveX controls, hence it does not support products like Rockwell's ViewAnywhere.
Every time you choose a Microsoft product you're slowly being pulled more and more into a Microsoft only world. Visual Interdev makes it easy to build web apps that include Active X controls. These ActiveX controls only run on a Microsoft browser, and the easiest way to communicate back to a server from ActiveX is, arguably DCOM, which only works on a Microsoft server operating system. InterDev also supports project uploading and remote project debugging using FrontPage extensions and other hooks. Some of this works on Apache, but it works best against IIS on NT Server. ActiveX controls can be written in Microsoft Java (Visual J++), but again, they're best supported when written in Visual Basic or Visual C++.
Every product of Microsoft's you choose to use produces greater incentive for you to use even more Microsoft products. This slippery slope is one of the most annoying and dangerous aspects of working with Microsoft products, and it all starts with something as "trivial" as choosing IE as your corporate standard web browser.
Jeff
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
I've been using the CVS tree of Koffice, and I absolutely love it. But I was under the impression, as stated here, that KOffice was actually changing their name, for a reason similar to the Killustrator name change. Perhaps we should start using the real name.
Use the words "rest of the community" carefully. True, there are a large number of open source mavens on Slashdot, but they are an equal number (if not far greater) that simply like good technology and don't care where it comes from or its possible underlying "grassroots" crusades. I'm not an inherent fan of Microsoft, but I certainly like Windows 2000 for example, the same as I like Linux. For me, a member of the "community", it's not whether it's "free" or not that's important, but whether it is functional, usable and stable. Windows 2000 is the first OS from MS that really fits these bills.
Same way, I think IE 4.0 revolutionized a lot of what we consider the "operating system" and "applications", whether "the community" likes it or not. It brought a lot of this to the masses, and I was impressed with it.
Plus, you make a few mistakes in your arguments:
- Every IE user is not an inherent Passport user. I'm not, and I've been using Windows XP since the first beta release. In addition, Smart Tags are almost officially gone from the XP roster. These are truly optional features, and Windows/IE runs just fine without them.
- Digital Rights Management, like Smart Tags, is a feature that is not enabled by default and is very easy to change. In Windows Media Player, for example, one can easily turn off the copyright protection on WMA files with a checkbox. I'm assuming you have never used Windows Media Player 7.0 and above?
- PICS is hardly used on the internet, and the use is dictated by web developers. If you don't have it on a web page, IE assumes the content is "clean", not dirty, as your argument seems to make. The PICS standard is also fairly robust, and allows a large number of flags and modifications.
- I agree with your fourth point, except for the term "security specialists". To be honest, a lot of the community simply doesn't look for bugs, it just makes the fixes when they're published. Some don't have the time, while others simply don't have the technical ability. To liken the open source community to a security team is a real misnomer.
- I agree partly with your fifth statement, but I'll bring up a point that earned me an "interesting" before: MS has spent a great deal of time in the past year renovating IE for the Mac, making it a solid broswer with little connection to the Windows operating system. In fact, there have been a good number of improvements in IE for the Mac that simply haven't been made to IE in Windows. If they were working towards OS monoculture, wouldn't they be trying to remove functionality from Mac IE?
"KOffice is confusingly similar to Microsoft Office".
Cmon, guys. I mean, we may agree amongst ourselves that such things are BS, but why keep setting yourselves up for them? Call it KFooBar if you have to, but at least TRY to protect yourselves from lawsuits... sheesh...
It may make no sense that people can "take" a name and not let anyone else use it, but in this case MS has the muscle to enforce ownership of "Office".
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I've been using the CVS tree of Koffice, and I absolutely adore the software, however, I was under the impression that the name was being changed, as stated here. Perhaps we should start using the new name, yes?
I remember a tagline from around 5 years ago announcing that the internet had been hijacked by the 'point and click slumlords'
.spec files and take a list of files, and run through and install them in order based on some config file.
nonetheless, I'll acknowledge that we want to invite everyone into linux, but it's never going to be windows - and shouldn't
Any GUI install needs to be an *OPTION*, not the default and only install method.
I do most of my work in an xterm, and don't want GUI's launching all over. I also want more control.
Perhaps the best solution is to have some sort of GUI for autoconf that does the same thing you can do from cmdline, but is also able to read rpm
An example would be: a gui that uses wget, lynx or something similar to download the latest kde packages, uses autoconf to check some default vaules, comes back with some config boxes -- it could look 'windows-install-ish', and then these values are passed to all of the configure scripts as tarball after tarball is built and installed and results are logged.
But... I don't want some heavy setup.exe that uses java or something that takes over my whole screen. Just something simple, and it has to work with *SOURCE* distributions.
But a well written package manager with appropriate options at the command line can be easily adapted to fit into something as simple as a Tk GUI, with the Tk code simply making system calls to the package manager CLI version.
I don't expect either rpm or dpkg to head in that direction, so this may be a non-concern.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Not if they think
Then again, Ruffin would probably tell me I've got it all wrong.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
MandrakeUpdate or Package Manager are GUI tools that work with rpms to do this type of thing. They call urpmi, a command line tool, to get the work done... You'll also notice that urpmi uses wget to fetch package dependencies... It all works quite well, but as most things in Linux, it still requires work.
What I like of LyX:
Things that I would like added to LyX:
Ciao
----
FB
Can someone explain to me why KDE makes their announcement of availability pointing to packages that do not exist?
.tar.gz, & that's fine - but their announcements (which appear to be fairly standard after the initial copy) always have links to 'currently available binaries', yet when you follow the link - nothing there.
I can see putting it out as good old
If it's like the 2.2 release, then the packages will show up in the next week or so. But come on, guys - is it really that big a deal to change your initial release form to reflect this fact? An additional benfit would be that you get to announce the binaries later, after the initial release is last week's news.
....on what you're trying to do with it.
I've used StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2 numerous times, but have *never* successfully taken any Office document and converted it to a useable format. Things *always* got munched up (missing text, disappearing equations, really awful formatting, etc..). If the Office docs have formatting or features that other programs can't handle, the conversion will get very messy.
For me, StarOffice was perfect for creating *new* documents, and I enjoyed using it. I think the key is to get people to *create* their documents in an alternative office suite.
Cheers,
Vic
Did you all ever try KConfigure? It does what the name says, i.e. configure [options], make, make install. It also does make uninstall, can read from tar.gz & tgz files and allows to install packages as root or not. It adds a mime type so you can click on a "configure" script in Konqueror and it starts up. Support for rpms and debs is planned, I think. I just recently found this program and I love it. Here are the links:
Project Homepage
Also check out apps.kde.com
BTW, I am _NOT_ involved in the project, I just like it.
Um... I didn't do it!
Especially since recent statistics on a Slashdotting show that the vast majority of us use IE
Well, right now Slashdot thinks my Mozilla web browser is really IE 5.5. It's pretty hard to say how many people like me there are.
2001-08-28 17:00:30 Internet Explorer 6 is released. (articles,news) (rejected)
I use Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. It has its quirks, but it is very powerful indeed and puts StarOffice to shame, features-wise.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Perhaps it could be argued that Microsoft's macro languages are just bad implementations, but the fact is that they are a huge gigantic awful security hole.
Yes, they can be useful, but when they can also knock a company totally off-line for days, it makes them a lot less useful.
Another problem is that Microsoft's macro language keeps changing with each new release, so if you build something advanced with it, it will probably be broken by the next upgrade. Ask me how I know.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Regarding security, it is true that only a small minority of users examine code. This percentage is much larger on Linux, and not only because Linux has bigger appeal to technical users -- also because it comes with all the necessary development tools. The only development tools that Microsoft bundles with Windows are QBASIC and VBScript. Coincidence?
Regarding IE on the Mac, Microsoft sees the Mac as a "Rolls Royce" PC, and so does Apple -- no serious competition to Windows, a high-end system for a small margin of users. MS invested $150M in Apple when Apple was down -- in order to make sure that Microsoft's standards and applications would also run on the Apple platform. From this point, they can ignore Apple. They may have a silent or secret agreement that Apple doesn't port to x86, but that isn't even necessary -- if Apple gets cheeky, MS will simply withdraw all support from the OS. So yes, when MS controls everything that is relevant, they don't need an OS monoculture. In fact, they can use the Apple product line to easily test new features for their market acceptance, and it strengthens their position in court.
Microsoft is not a charity. They have a sophisticated business strategy that is focused on completely dominating all aspects of PC technology. This is NOT a conspiracy. Microsoft acts solely in the interests of its shareholders -- if they wouldn't do everything to maximize profits, they could even be sued. Microsoft is not evil, it is, like any corporation, amoral. To give another example: The insurance industry is the largest lobbying group for car security -- not out of altruism, but out of pure business interest. At the same time, the insurance industry is also a large motor of the erosion of privacy -- to exclude those from health insurance coverage who need it. Highly immoral and highly moral behavior can both be very profitable. It is only the government (with reasonable democratic control) that can make this distinction.
Probably the nastiest extention to the standards has been IE's client-side data-bound HTML elements, which allow you to specify a data source in the HTML and have IE make a ODBC reqeust to the server to get the data and populate the table or form or what-have-you. Big security hole on the server too.
Fortunately for the world, Interdev is such a POS that it's usually ignored. What's a little more scary is ASP.NET's HTML generation library. Right now it seems to produce straight-forward HTML, but looking at the API which simulates client-side events on the server (something like btnSubmit.onClick()), you could see how they could maybe move the thing wholesale over to an ActiveX applet and not break any code.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm sure a lot of Word docs are very simple internally, but a filter that can't deal with the more complex ones is likely to have acceptance problems.
Finally, is there any possiblility of the StarOffice/OpenOffice filters being used as the basis for more widely available filters? I wasn't all that impressed with them a couple years ago when I tried StarOffice, but if nothing else they might serve as a starting point.
fencepost
just a little off
So, will it ignore copyright tags in files you get from other places. Sure it won't include them in stuff you create, but how about in other files? Even if it does, what's to say this feature won't go away, and the original software stop working at some point in the future?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You don't *NEED* outlook for a calendaring function like this. you can do it with a web page. Yes, the backend could even send you reminders. Imagine that.
Simple little tools. Not one big monstrous one. Use a mail server to forward mail. Use a mail client to retrieve it. Use a centralized database with a nice front end for data that needs to be shared (your calendar).
For small offices, it may be nice to have exchange with calendaring, since the small offices probably don't have people on staff with the skills to put together another (even customized to their processes...imagine that!) solution. But in big companies that already have IT staff dedicated to providing solutions taylored to that company? What's the problem?
The problem is that EVERYONE is using exchange now, not just those (small offices) that need it. There are better solutions, you just have to find one that fits with your company's way of doing things, or write one in an afternoon using MySQL and Embedded perl.
Also of interest may be LAOLA, which is "a collection of documentations and perl programs dealing with binary file formats of Windows program documents." The link to that came from Wotsit's as well.
fencepost
just a little off
It's pretty easy to trash someone's software while it's still in development, and it's easy to point out the faults of someone's software because hey, we're used to finding fault in everything.
I'd like everyone to take a moment and find what's good about KOffice. I know the authors put in a lot of time and a lot of energy since 1.0 into squashing bugs, adding better support for MS filetypes, making it all around more stable, etc. Instead of bashing it, ask yourself if you've ever written a word processor. If you haven't, then don't comment. Have you ever written a spreadsheet editor? Thing is, you can find fault with someone else's software and yell and scream about it. But if you don't like it, fix it. If you can't do that, use Word or Excel and shut up. :)
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
I would point you to this, where Joel Spolsky talks about what some would call "feature bloat". It's not. Different people use different features. Some people in accounting need certain features, some people in academia need other features, and leaving some of those features out alienates *somebody*. And if you want to write the most used piece of software in the world (read: MS Office), you don't alienate anybody.
The same is true of Linux distros. Some people need the server services provided (email, FTP, web), but I never did. Does that mean they should disappear? Certainly not! All of the things that are in the distros are there because somebody, somewhere uses them, and is a big part of Linux's soaring popularity.
Apple's continued existance has been one of their main points in the anti-trust defense. Hell, they've even propped up Apple in order to keep a high-profile "competitor" in the marketplace.
See reference:
Making Lemonade
My fucking god moderators are stupid.
This post is neither on topic, nor informative to anyone actually able to use IE6. I mean Christ man, it's being posted under a real user ID, yet begins with "Screw my karma...". Did it ever occur to you that if the poster actually thought the post would be modded down he would have posted anonymously or not at all?
He said IE 6 is free and he was right. Free as in beer.
Hmm, let's see, I'll go to www.microsoft.com/ie and download it for my Linux box. What's that? It doesn't run on Linux? Oh, what platforms does it run on? Windows and Mac? But I have to pay money for those platforms!
Now do you understand?
Mozilla is (of course) Free as in speech, but it's definitely free as in beer since all you have to do on Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. is download the installer and go. !BLAM! You have a nice broswer for free. You don't have to spend any money.
If I want IE6, I have to first spend some money for Windows, or lots of money for a Mac. It's sort of like those commercials where they say, "Buy these knives for $29.95 and we'll send you this potato peeler FREE!!" I always want to call and say, "Nah, I'll just take the free potato peeler", but that would be childish, so I don't do it.
I think this is hilarious...
from the bottom of the page:
If you want to continue to use existing Netscape-style plug-ins on Internet Explorer 6 you should:
1...
2. Rewrite existing Netscape-style plug-ins using ActiveX (or dual author to support both Netscape-style plug-ins and ActiveX controls).
My grandmother uses ie. I guess she'd better get
busy re-writing her Netscape plugins!
He hates these cans!!!
Give me something that works as well and I will use it (and yes, I've used every browser available to man within the last month for the development of a new site I've been working on). Until then, shut up.
--- Linux R00lz!
Oh please, writing your own meeting/conferce room scheduling applicaiton is foolhardy when you can buy one on the shelf. It's certainly more than an afternoon's worth of work.
And on the contrary, I find that smaller offices tend to do thing more the old fashion way. The scheduling features really come into play in the larger shops where getting a room is sometimes difficult and there's loads of middle managers that do nothing but schedule meetings with one another. (And I tend to think that the Exchange scheduling is rather rinky-dink, with the exception of the client UI. The Lotus Notes process is much nicer.)
Microsoft has a massive PR machine getting that information out - all those who really want to know probably already heard from 2-3 different sources (plus you - boy am I fed up with the microsoft greek chorus on /.) KOfficve on the other hand is a bunch of OS hackers working hard for our own good - they CAN'T afford PR flunkies
Suprisingly enough, the only essential function for a word processor is to produce readable, reproducible output.
Everything else is a frill - like power windows on a car, "features" as you call them are essentially non-essential functions.
There are an infinite number of potential features. For example, my word processor could activate a mechanical arm to wipe my butt when I get off the toilet - what a timesaver!! Obviously, nobody will ever buy an office suite again that doesn't have this incredibly useful feature.
The things you are saying are "essential features" that "DO matter" are those things you are used to using. Most of them are available in StarOffice, but you are not sufficiently experienced in SO to understand the different methods used to achieve the same ends.
So, maybe you should choose your tools on their cost-effectiveness - an evaluation that should include reliability, maintainability, as well as any other factors unique to your goals - rather than just the features you've become addicted to. If you don't care about cost, or efficiency, you don't need a word processor, you need a ghostwriter/secretary.
I'm not saying KDE is right for you (maybe you really need Professional Write) but the "features features features" mantra by itself means little.
--Charlie
...but when I look at the screenshots for KWord, I see typo after typo. I don't want to think about the code if even the sample text is wrong.
FYI, I use WordPerfect and have since 1986. I got started in Linux as soon as there was a WordPerfect for Linux. However, since Corel seems to be selling its Linux division, and not selling WordPerfect along with it, I'm nervous about whether any future upgrade path exists. For that reason, a good wordprocessor (as contrasted with vi or emacs, god bless'em) would be nice to have in the GPL world equivalent in functionality to WordPerfect.
What are other people's experience with Linux wordprocessors, GPL or otherwise?
... they can't trademark the use of the word "office". It must have existed and been in common use when Bill G was a mere twinkle in his dad's eye. It's a generic english word, not MS property.
Macka
...and "Illustrator" was in common use back when Adobe was only something you made bricks out of.
Wise up. Just because it makes no sense doesn't mean corporate muscle can't make it happen.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Does it have spell check?
~jeff
http://vainstall.sourceforge.net/
/tobe
Please. That's BS, you know. :)
The DMCA forbids you to circumvent IP protection schemes. While in a MS Word doc you've written, the content belongs to YOU. No way the DMCA could be applied here.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
s/IE/cocaine
e.g., it's good now, but in the long run, you'll be fucked.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
It is fast, lean and can i say fast again?
I got a noticeable slowdown from IE 5.5 that I was running. My desktop O/S is NT4 Workstation with SP6a. I'll give IE 6 a few more days testing but so far I think it's a bit slower.
Just figured I'd ask - for me, the compile is bombing out with a bunch of errors in kscript_locale.cc.
I'm GUESSING it's because I'm running a bleeding-edge cvs version of kdelibs/kdebase (Konqueror now tells me it's version "pre2.9"), but figured I'd check to see if anyone using "normal" libraries is running into a problem...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
There were ways to print footnotes on micro word processors that I'd used prior to that, but they took significant work. For word, you just hit cmd-e and filled in the box. Most of the time it would get the pagination correct (though sometimes, with plenty of room [= 1/2 page] it would still skip to the next page for the line with the footnote. As of whatever the current version was in Fall of '99, this bug was still there--I saw it bite someone two offices down.)
hawk
obvious M$ astroturfing.
I sure as hell didn't sign any of my rights away when I downloaded it.
You maybe didn't sign any rights away at that point, but he was saying was that you will if/when you use it, implicitly, by using a product one shouldn't trust. There is a subtle but significant difference here; laws and licences vs. straight-jacket implementations. De jure vs. de facto.
Hmmh, come to think of it... when downloading it you probably did click on "Accept" button under a huge piece of text, too, waiving a huge chunk of common sense rights, but that's your typical shrink-wrap thing, possibly being meaningless, possibly not.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Well, right now Slashdot thinks my Mozilla web browser is really IE 5.5. It's pretty hard to say how many people like me there are.
I wouldn't think many - using IE as a user agent indicates to content producers you use IE. If everyone using Netscape, Mozilla, Koffice, etc used IE as a user agent, nobody would ever bother testing against anything else, and IE will have won the web forever. If you need a user agent that will get you everywhere, pick Netscape 4.7x on Win98.
Or if its nto a problem, don't change it at all.
Lout is also a good batch document layout system. It's similar in style to LaTeX. The whole program is extremely lightweight, less than 1.5 meg i think. More info is here:
:-)
lout homepage
Not many people know about Lout, so have a look.
On a side note, while slashdot made a huge deal about the filing of the lawsuit, slashdot didn't even mention it when the verdict came in (even though I submitted it).
IANAL, but I play one on
If they were working towards OS monoculture, wouldn't they be trying to remove functionality from Mac IE?
If I remember correctly, Bill Gates owns a nice sized piece of Apple. Yes, its not windows, but M$ still gets a piece of the action from Apple, so it is in their financial best interest to develop for Mac.
Otherwise, it's a lovely word processor.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
If you're looking for a baisc MS-Office compatible word Processor, Ted beats everything else I've tried.
a rt icle123.shtml
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/
A review can be found at:
http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/November2000/
I've not installed the new KOffice because of the dense web of dependencies on upgraded KDE libraries. I don't want to break my KDE just to install a "Wordpad" class text editor! Ted is small, slick, and very self-contained. Way to go, Mark de Does!
I didn't now about this one until today, but there
is a company called HancomLinux which apparently has an office suite for KDE. It's not free software though. Has anyone tried it? Version 2.0 screenshots look impressive (it must be good it's got loads of buttons!). Comments anyone?
return 0; }
I have to say that LyX has saved my ass more than one doing academic papers.
Anyone who uses anything else for serious documents is smoking crack. If you are writing a thesis or a book, you will NOT lose data. Period. LyX saves pretty much after every keystroke it seems.
After using LyX to do footnotes you will agree that footnotes suck everwhere else.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca