StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available

Lumpish Scholar and 753 other people wrote in to let us know that Sun has released its beta of Star Office 6. CNET has a blurb about the release as well. I was hoping that Sun's site might be unclogged enough to try it out myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards today.

Comments

Office XP

[talonyx]

Shelled out a myriad of cash for Microsoft's Office XP, a few weeks ago.

Despite how much you might hate the company, this is one hell of a product. Launches in seconds, takes up scant amounts of ram, hasn't crashed yet. It's going to be a tough one to beat... especially since every area where it excels (no pun intended), Staroffice falls behind (what a hog!).

Whatever happened to it having been released open source? Where is GStarOffice with GTK+ widgets and Gnome integration? At least KOffice works well with the rest of the KDE apps...

Re:Office XP

[dsb3]

Whatever happened to it having been released open source?

See OpenOffice.org for that one.

Re:Office XP

[Steve Luzynski]

Scant amounts of ram?

Someone mod this +1, Funny, please.

I'm running Office XP right now. Outlook is currently using 23M of RAM. Word is using 28M. (Windows 2000 + Office XP)

Word doesn't even have a file open, not even a blank file.

I don't count that as 'scant amounts'.

And it loads quick because that "Microsoft Office" icon in your startup menu preloads most of the thing during your boot/login process where you think it's normal for your disk to be thrashing itself apart.

Re:Office XP

[Trelane]

Really? Interesting.

I guess, if it worked for IE, why not Office?

Make your stuff *appear* to load faster, even though the slow part is at the beginning and consumes RAM even when inactive. Whee!

Re:Office XP

[John Fulmer]

Please note that Office (any flavor) does not take "scant amounts of ram". Rather, it hides ram used in the system memory used column, and actually preloads many if not most of the Office specific DLL's on boot up, whether you want them or not. The memory that appears to be used by Office, is only the glue code that links the DLL/OLE/NET components together.

The reason that Office appears to launch almost instantanously, is that most of it was already loaded on bootup.

Just a clarification...

jf

Re:Office XP

[Hadean]

I just checked on my system, and Word XP is using 11.1 megs... And it loads in a few seconds... and NO, I don't have anything preloading for me (I hate things loading at bootup). I have a Duron 800 w/ 192 megs of RAM, too... Not that big of a system...

Re:Office XP

[Hadean]

Show me the proof of this. What DLLs/Services/Etc? I have the exact same amount of RAM used immediately after bootup without Office XP installed as I did with it... What, then, do you propose its loading? Unless, of course, you're theorizing that these so-called pre-loaded DLLs are built into Windows XP, which seems very unlikely...

Re:Office XP

[BorgDrone]

In mozilla it's an option

Re:Office XP

[John Fulmer]

Tell you what...do what I did a few years ago, when I wanted to know why my nice beefy NT workstation was eating most of my memory, with no services running:

Install NT4. Note the available memory on bootup, before doing anything.

Install Office. Note the available memory after bootup, but before doing anything.

Do the math and wonder why JUST installing Office significantly decreased the available memory on bootup.

Start Office. Wonder why the used memory doesn't increase much at all. Hmmmmm.

A black box approach to be sure, but still very interesting.

jf

Re:Office XP

[John Fulmer]

I didn't say it was a bad thing. My statement actually had no conclusion or judgement call whatsoever.

jf

Re:Office XP

[Mr. Sketch]

Actually I think it would be just as good MS Office would read/write StarOffice formats (or abiword, kword, etc). I know it'll never happen, but I also know they'll never open up their file formats either. But if they aren't going to open their formats, they could at least support our file formats, since they support Lotus and WordPerfect, and a few others. It also wouldn't be too bad to just let us know how to write a .cnv file and we could do our own conversion filters.

Re:Office XP

[Hadean]

My RAM usage has been the same before and after my installatin of Office XP ... Where are these supposed hooks going then? And why would I not want to load IE? I like it... Sure, I use Mozilla most of the time (like now), but IE is still useful/needed in some situations... (and plus, I kinda like the IE integration in WinXP and its progs... *shrug* )

Re:Office XP

[be-fan]

Please note that Office (any flavor) does not take "scant amounts of ram". Rather, it hides ram used in the system memory used column, and actually preloads many if not most of the Office specific DLL's on boot up, whether you want them or not. The memory that appears to be used by Office, is only the glue code that links the DLL/OLE/NET components together.

The reason that Office appears to launch almost instantanously, is that most of it was already loaded on bootup.

Just a clarification...
>>>>>>>>
Its all a moot point. On my computer (300MHz, 256MB), Office loads faster than KOffice, Office + Win2K uses about the same amount of RAM as KDE-2 + Linux, and Office runs a *lot* faster than KOffice. In KSpread, selecting multiple cells gets annoying because the system has to struggle to keep up with the selected area. In Excel, I can whip the selection area around all I want without the slightest "stickyness." I can resize Word or Excel as fast as I can move my mouse and the toolbars adjust to their new sizes with nary a hiccup. In KOffice (or any KDE app for that matter) I get an ugly rubber-band effect until the stupid widget set can catch up to my pointer. It drives me f**king INSANE!

BTW> While KDE-2 might be trash (speed-wise), has anyone switched to kernel 2.4.10 (with preempt patch)? It is AMAZING. Before, my mouse pointer used to stick whenever the disk was accessed or whenever Mozilla or Konq displayed a page. Now, not even compiling in the background can make it stick. Very, very nice. Props to the guys who worked on the AA patch, and also some kudos to AA for the new VM stuff!

Re:Office XP

[be-fan]

Try comparing like to like? The closest comaprison to Outlook would be Evolution. How'd you like *that* for slow and bloated?

Re:Office XP

[be-fan]

Why to Linux-types always think I have my software configured wrong? First of all, Mandrake automatically optimizes the hard drive at bootup. Second, the first thing I do when I setup a Linux distro is to optimize it. I get rid of the cruft in XftConfig, delete all the antiquated X fonts (and install nice, pretty Windows truetype fonts in their place), and set X to run at nice -1. The real reason the mouse sticks is two-fold. First, the standard (non-preemptible) Linux kernel can have terrible latencies during heavy disk I/O (look at the latency graphs on kpreempt.sourceforge.net) Second, UNIX scheduling algorithms aren't designed for desktop use and thus use the artificial distinction between CPU-bound and I/O-bound processes to distinguish background an interactive tasks. This works for the most part, but in complex (single-threaded) programs like Konq, which can use lots of CPU time, this is less than ideal. (BTW, BeOS solves this by giving higher priority to threads that are attached to windows, rather than monitoring CPU and I/O usage.)

Re:Office XP

[barneyfoo]

Why to Linux-types always think I have my software configured wrong? First of all, Mandrake automatically optimizes the hard drive at bootup.

1) You have you no idea what you're talking about.
2) You run mandrake and think that it is doing the appropriate thing with your computer.

Re:Office XP

[Jason Earl]

Yes, MS Office is the better product. Of course, for what MS Office costs, I could buy a whole new computer.

The prize, in the software world, doesn't go to the folks that have the best software. It goes to the folks that have the least expensive software that is "good enough." Even if few large organizations defect outright to Star Office, you can bet that plenty of them are using Star Office as ammunition in their negotiations with Microsoft. Some of them probably even would be willing to give StarOffice a try.

Smaller organizations, on the other hand, will probably just switch (or stick with their current version of MS Office which to Microsoft is just as damaging). This isn't particularly because Star Office just got a lot better either (although it has improved). Microsoft's new registration policy will cut down on the casual piracy that has made their Office software the de-facto standard.

And if this version of MS Office isn't the one that is overtaken by StarOffice, then what is Microsoft going to do to earn your next $400? If current development levels stay the same for StarOffice (and my guess is that they will actually increase as StarOffice gains more use) then in two years Microsoft is going to be hard pressed to justify getting paid hundreds of dollars more for the few true advances that they will add to their office suite.

MS could try and come out with a radically different incompatible format, but my guess is that at this point it would merely accelerate the shift towards StarOffice. After all, if you are faced with the choice between two incompatible office suites, and the sad prospect of migrating all of your data, you might as well pick the choice that costs less. And StarOffice costs a lot less, especially when you figure that upgrades are likely to be free.

As for your questions about the open source version of StarOffice, check out www.openoffice.org. My guess is that Gnome integration hasn't been looked into by Sun because it would require a total rewrite (and it would only be useful to a handful of Linux hackers). The Gnome hackers, on the other hand, seem pretty happy with AbiWord and Gnumeric. And who would blame them.

Personally I am betting on Star Office simply because it already runs well on Windows, making it a relatively easy migration.

Re:Office XP

[GreyPoopon]

Launches in seconds, takes up scant amounts of ram, hasn't crashed yet. It's going to be a tough one to beat...

Hmmm. I bet you buy things that are "only sold on TV" all the time. Microsoft Office preloads itself at boot time. This is an extremely annoying issue on my laptop, as I don't enjoy waiting forever for my startup to finish. If your method of checking how much RAM it uses was to wait to check RAM after startup, then load an Office application and check RAM again, you missed the boat. Since most of Office is already loaded after boot time, it's probably taking up TONS of RAM. Let's see. With nothing running at ALL on my computer, we're normally at 121 MB. Hmmm...

Maybe Sun can try a new slogan. "Don't install Microsoft's Office XP, and the REST of your applications will run faster."

Re:Office XP

[be-fan]

1) You have you no idea what you're talking about.
>>>>>>>
Care to elaborate?

2) You run mandrake and think that it is doing the appropriate thing with your computer.
>>>>>>>>
First, I run Mandrake because it is a reasonable compromise distro. I have used Slack (since 3.5), RedHat, SuSE, and Gentoo for awhile. I like Gentoo best, but can't stand having to compile all my apps myself. Second, I saw that Mandrake was running HDParm when I looked through the initscripts!

Re:Office XP

[barneyfoo]

You mean you dont use custom hdparm settings?

(bet you didn't know about `/etc/init.d/hdparm save`... chuckle)

SysV rules.

Re:Office XP

[be-fan]

Usually I do (like I said!) but there is no difference between Mandrake's settings and mine in terms of performance. If I'm that obsessed about performance, don't you think I'd check? Besides, its all a moot point anyhow. The problem got much better as soon as I applied the preempt patches, and I hadn't changed any other config options.

SO

[crumbz]

StarOffice kicks ass apart from some file interoperability problems. But that just might be me. I think I'll wait awhile before I try 6.0.

MS support...

[garcia]

from the article: The new version of StarOffice is simplified to make file exchange easier. The software has support for XML file formats; more robust Microsoft Office import and export filters, including support for Office XP; and redesigned dialog boxes, new templates and graphics.


will the "more robust support" actually be decent enough for serious transfers between my Word documents? Also an important feature would be importing WordPerfect8 files. I have 100's of papers written in WP8 and for me to switch over would require filters for that. Anyone know anything about that?

I am going to try it as soon as I see some more information (the website was lacking what I really wanted to know).

I really hope I can ditch WP8 (although it is still the best for what I need) and run something more up-to-date :)

Enjoy the download :)

Re:MS support...

[ryanw]

This is actually one of the things that kinda' upsets me also. Everyone is making a big deal at how it doesn't open Word Documents very well.... Well HECK, there isn't ANY support for opening WordPerfect documents. Being that this product is "OpenSource" wouldn't you think they'd throw in as many filters as possible to make it more competitive? I don't understand that. Could someone enlighten us, Please?

Re:MS support...

[EisPick]

Everyone is making a big deal at how it doesn't open Word Documents very well.... Well HECK, there isn't ANY support for opening WordPerfect documents.

Before folks complain about what's missing or doesn't work well, it would pay to spend a few minutes actually installing the software and checking it out.

I've only used StarOffice for about half an hour so far, but it appears that the import/export filters are actually quite extensive. There is ALL KINDS of support for opening WordPerfect documents from ver 4.1 to ver 7. No, there's no ver 8 filter, but considering the length of the filter list, I'm assuming it's just a matter of time before they write it (there are filters for Xywrite and Wordstar, ferchrissakes).

Choose "Custom Install" or to to the setup app after installing and pick from their very extensive list of filters.

As for Word support, Star Office opened a bunch of very complex (but macro-free) documents for me without a burp. I was even able to set Word (and Excel) as my default file types for saving.

I say so far so good.

Re:MS support...

[dvdeug]

Last time I checked, Wordperfect 7 could open up Wordperfect 9's documents almost perfectly, so there shouldn't be much problem with only having a Wordperfect 7 filter.

Problems with StarOffice

[dafoomie]

Well, the problems faced by many is the ability to read/write to Word 2000/XP format. Some companies tried to make the switch but couldn't share documents very well with other departments/companies. Best they did in StarOffice 5 was Word 97. It would be a lot more successful if it could do that. It's not Word or Office by a longshot but is Office really worth $400 when you can get this for nothing? It's still pretty good.

It's a hard battle

[ryanw]

The problem with StarOffice is that it hasn't completely worked to import/export word/excel documents. Until that day people will never truly be able to switch to it. I would LOVE the company I work for to switch to this software. But until it's completely MSOffice complient nobody can use it.

And just as it gets good at opening MSOffice 97 docs. They change their document just enough to screw everyone over with the release of Office2000. And just as that starts to work they screw it up enough to not work with XP.

How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work???? I haven't been involved in the project, but I would really like to hear some feedback to why nobody can open freaking word documents. The TRUTH .. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".

Re:It's a hard battle

[ceswiedler]

Because Microsoft uses incredibly proprietary formats. These days, it's not even a file format you could call as such, is a serialized COM stream. That means it's dependent on the processor type, OS, etc., and therefore extremely difficult to reverse-engineer.

Re:It's a hard battle

[aralin]

Its pretty easy. Your are not allowed to reverse engineer the format by the EULA on MS Office license. You can try to do it from the documents since you do not sign any license for these, but then you don't get the whole format. You get just some features used in every document. And its binary and intentionally obfuscated format so its even way harder. I was doing some format conversions earlier and even with DOCUMENTED formats its extremly hard task.

Re:It's a hard battle

[dpilot]

Because aside from sucking, Microsoft understands that their market grip is in proprietary file formats and protocols.

I believe it was back in the Halloween documents that they talked about "complex or subtle protocols and file formats" as a means for holding/gaining market share. You simply have to understand the goals in architecting and designing a protocol/format and parser. For most of us, it's simplicity and robustness. For Microsoft, add in the difficulty of reverse-engineering as perhaps more important than robustness, and clearly more important than simplicity. Lest you think that this is just a weapon against lil'old Linux users, don't forget that it's also a prime tool to keep their own users on the upgrade wheel. How often has it been said that the first MS Office user in an office eventually "forces" the whole office to upgrade, simply by passing around files in the latest default format.

The flip side of this is that the most robust things are generally also simple. IMHO it is inevitable that MS has had to trade off robustness in order to bring these difficult-to-reverse-engineer protocols and formats to market. In other words, it's deliberate foisting of second-rate goods counter to the customers' best interests.

Up until this Fall, the market has LOVED it, too.

Re:It's a hard battle

[zog karndon]

Sigh. The Word 2000 (and XP) file format is well documented; however, you do have to sign an NDA in order to obtain it. Further, it is *not* dependent on processor type, and so forth - MacWord reads WinWord files (and vice versa).

Re:It's a hard battle

[JahToasted]

They change their document just enough to screw everyone over with the release of Office2000. And just as that starts to work they screw it up enough to not work with XP

Would you expect Microsoft to do anything less

How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work????

Parsing isn't that hard most of the difficulty comes in getting all the different OLE objects embedded in the document to work. Star/Openoffice, Koffice, AbiWord can all format the fonts, layouts, etc, quite well. The problem comes when you have an Excel Spreadsheet embedded in the word document as a table. Then each cell of the excel table is a word document. Then you gotta think about Macros, VB, etc.

Getting these things to work right is hard even for microsoft. Where I work now I have an Access database (I should've demanded they use something else, but they already had it installed everywhere) deployed to over 20 sites. I wrote the database in Access 97, but making it work in Access 2000 can be very tricky. Not only that, but at some places some of the Visual Basic Modules won't work in 97... welcome to my hell...

Anyway the point being, Microsoft has trouble in making THEIR office read previous MS Office files. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone who doesn't have the specs to make an app capable of reading them.

Re:It's a hard battle

[jazman_777]

The problem with StarOffice is that it hasn't completely worked to import/export word/excel documents.

The problem with StarOffice is that it isn't Microsoft Office for Free [tm].

Re:It's a hard battle

[MindStalker]

How often has it been said that the first MS Office user in an office eventually "forces" the whole office to upgrade, simply by passing around files in the latest default format.

I remember one computer our office got last year, it installed 2000 by default and when I tried to remove it and install a site licensed copy of 97 it installed, but told me I had an invalid license whenever I tried to run any of its programs. I later tried to reinstall with a win98 disk. But I couldn't get the device drivers out of the install disk as it was locked to only be used as a reinstall everything disc from boot. Tried many things, never could get it working perfectly without just letting it be on office 2000. So as our site licenses offered us 2000 Prof for less then 50 dollars a peice I went ahead with the upgrade. I do like office 2000, but still embarrased that I let MS get the best of me :(

Re:It's a hard battle

[Syberghost]

The problem with StarOffice is that it hasn't completely worked to import/export word/excel documents. Until that day people will never truly be able to switch to it. I would LOVE the company I work for to switch to this software. But until it's completely MSOffice complient nobody can use it.

Yeah, I remember when people said that about Word not replacing Word Perfect.

How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work????

Hard enough that even Microsoft doesn't always get it right.

Re:It's a hard battle

[uebernewby]

Get drivers. Format C:. Reinstall from scratch. Install Office 97. Done.

But then you knew that, right?

Re:It's a hard battle

[KidSock]

Microsoft understands that their market grip is in proprietary file formats and protocols.

Actually I use to believe that too. But surprisingly there is documentation on a lot of this stuff that's quite good. I have written a CIFS client (MSs networking proto) and I must say the spec is pretty good. People have argued it's not good enough but it's got the essentials in there. Also, there is a very nice spec on the MS Word binary file format. I started to implement a parser but got side tracked. I didn't see anything earth shatteringly complex about it. It's just a bunch of serialized tables all of which are documented pretty well IMHO. Of course there is quite a bit of MSs stuff that is not documented. What we really need is a MSRPC implementation with DCE/RPC and NDR buffer libraries ...etc. Then we need the IDL for all the different MS calls. Then you can talk to just about anything such as Exchange ..etc.

Re:It's a hard battle

[jejones]

You yourself point out one of the reasons: it's to MS's advantage to provide a moving target, precisely to keep not only other products, but older versions of their own product--once they're paid for, they're as bad as competition--from reading them.

Re:It's a hard battle

[dpilot]

If it's so well documented, I don't quite understand why good .doc filters are so hard to come by. Is it that:

1: The documentation is late, so of course filters for old versions can be done, but new versions are not publicly documented, yet.

2: The documentation has some sort of licensing provisions that are unacceptable, therefore is effectively useless for building a competitive product.

3: The only good programmers work for Microsoft. So even with documentation, nobody else can make import/export filters that work well.

Re:It's a hard battle

[KidSock]

1: The documentation is late, so of course filters for old versions can be done, but new versions are not publicly documented, yet.

No. The documentation has been around for a while (years). You can see here: http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text that there are references to the Word 6 format as well.

2: The documentation has some sort of licensing provisions that are unacceptable, therefore is effectively useless for building a competitive product.

No. There are no license restrictions to writing filters for MS Word file formats that I know of.

3: The only good programmers work for Microsoft. So even with documentation, nobody else can make import/export filters that work well.

Well, good programmers don't necessarily work for MS but it's a big format and it's not a task for a hobbyist coder. But I think the main problem is that there is a somewhat inappropriate focus on rendering the output. IMO I think that an internel representation should be chosen such that it can be traversed like a tree and output in any format. Writing a converter is then a matter of interpreting the attributes of a node in the tree (a paragraph, an image, a sequence of characters) and genereting the appropraite output wheather it be ps, html, or most importantly another internal representation of a document used by another office package such as star office.

My first question

[JesseL]

Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"? That was my single biggest grip about previous versions.

Re:My first question

[DebianDog]

YES! It is gone thank God. I always hated that desktop too!

Re:My first question

[corky6921]

Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"?

Yes. I think that was everyone's single biggest complaint about StarOffice. They have also gotten rid of the "memory hog" problem with 5.2, which was that it loaded all five applications into memory and used up about 64MB of physical RAM whenever you wanted to load it.

Their big new feature is using an open XML format for documents. I also believe they have killed the problem where StarOffice took over all of your email clients, other text editors, etc.

I think this version of StarOffice is honestly the first one that will be a real competitor to MS Office, but I think it will really only be used by small businesses and individuals. Large corporations are already dependent on Outlook/Exchange/macros to do their work, and I don't see any large corporations switching off of those anytime soon (especially since there is no real groupware solution that Sun offers that compares with Exchange.)

Re:My first question

[akula1]

Actually my corporation (Fortune 500) uses Lotus Notes for email/calendar etc.. I don't how many other large companies this is true for, but there is nothing blocking us from going to Star Office if we decide it is robust enough.
Our CIO has demanded a report on why we can't go to Star Office instead of Office XP. The asset management people showed him the figures for MS's new liscensing scam er.. scheme. Therefore he wants to go to something non-MS.
Are any other companies going this way?

Re:My first question

[nathanh]

If they use Standard XML I can't see why more people could use StarOffice in a business. As long as they tell people to send the documents in XML format. But that depends on that getting into MSOffice.

XML doesn't define a standard for word processing documents. XML is just a way to store the data. The XML Schema defines how the word processing documents are stored. MSOffice and StarOffice will probably not use the same XML Schema, so despite them both using XML I doubt they'll understand each other's documents.

Re:My first question

[Tsujigiri]

Probably unlikely, but you might want to keep an eye on hancom office 2.0. The boxed edition will come with win,linux and mac versions all in the same box. Based on koffice and theKompanies apps. Looks pretty nice, but still in the beta stages. Light weight too.

Cool!

[astroboy]

They lost the desktop, added better font handling, and do XML... this is great.

One thing I couldn't see -- and I can't get at the downloads to check -- is to see if their Presentation software, Impress, can play movies in slides now. This is actually a big thing; in the hard sciences, where a lot of people use non-Windows and give presentations, one of the major problems for people who want to switch to Linux is that if you have results you want to show in movie form, you're pretty much stuck with using PowerPoint, or exiting your presentation and starting up xanim or something...

Re:Cool!

[mz001b]

I agree with this 100%. This is the only reason that there is a windows partition on my laptop. I need to show movies of my simulations in talks, and having them inline is soo much nicer. Switching to a standalone application takes momentum away from the talk.

My recollection is that SO 6.0 does not yet have this ability. The first Linux suite that offers this is the one that I will switch to. MS Office compatibility is low on my list -- everyone I interact with uses some flavor of Unix or Linux.

Re:Cool!

[JanneM]

I use Galeon, actually. I run it in full-screen mode, and use the mouse pointer as a pointer for the talk. The presentation is normal web pages with discreet next and back links at the bottom, and an 'up' link to a start page with thumbnails of all slides, so I can pick and choose at the inevitable question phase at the end.

This also means I can run movies and such inline, as it's just to put those into the slides/webpages as usual.

A friend avoids clicking links by going through the slides beforehand, backing up, then using the 'forward' hotkey to switch, but I feel more comfortable clicking.

/Janne

Staroffice

[mindstrm]

To all those who say 'Staroffice isn't 100% compatable, so we can't switch our office'. Well.. I understand the logistics and all.. but.

To switch to staroffice, you have to instruct your staff to learn to use it, and adapt the workflow to staroffice, not the other way around. The same goes for switching to any product.

The financial benefits of using staroffice in many cases outweigh the use of OFficeXP

Re:Staroffice

[mindstrm]

OKay.

I have 100 workstations here. Each needs office, which means each needs windows.

People need office so they can a) look at some simple spreadsheets, created by some accounting staff, and b) Use a word processor for doing reports.

This costs me a great deal of money. on top of good hardware, I have to intsall Windows on them all, plus Office.. that adds up to a grand a workstation just in software.

I can use Linux + Staroffice and save myself 100 grand.. how hard is that to figure out?

Unix Screenshots?

[ceswiedler]

All of the screenshots on the Sun site are of the Windows version. What does it look like under X Windows?

Re:Unix Screenshots?

[ryanw]

It looks pretty much 99% the same under unix as windows. They built a ToolKit alot like GTK or KDE has. They comple cross platform and their toolkits make it all look the same cross platforms.

Re:Unix Screenshots?

[Webz]

Aside from the standard time-is-money argument, why don't developers use an operating system's native environments for their software, much in the way Microsoft will do for Office v. X for Mac? One could counter this by saying that Microsft almost never uses the native GUI elements of Windows and always makes proprietary versions, like for Office, but the functionality of that proprietary ToolKit meets and exceeds the accessibility of Windows. It's been my personal and I guess limited experience that programs that don't use regular GUI elements (i.e. Limewire) generally suck.

Re:Unix Screenshots?

[be-fan]

They comple cross platform and their toolkits make it all look the same cross platforms.
>>>>>>>
That's really brain-dead. People tend to use one platform consistantly, and like it when a particular app looks like the other apps on their system. Eg. no-one cares if a program looks the same on Linux and Windows, as long as all the Linux apps look the same and all the Windows apps look the same.

Re:Unix Screenshots?

[be-fan]

Doesn't fit in with the "native" feel at all, but is fast and easy to use, because the UI fits the application, rather than having the application shoehorned into some ill-fitting paradigm.
>>>>>>>>>
Intellectual types are so into paradigms its funny. Here are some facts from reality:

1) Developers are lazy. If not forced to standardize UIs, they'll simply make crappy UIs that look different. At least by standardizing the look, you get crappy UIs that look the same.

2) Developers are lazy. If they have some UI guidelines in front of them, then they might be coaxed into using them, and maybe have the hope of making a good UI. If they have no guidelines, they'll not bother to come up with their own, they'll just make a crappy UI. If you don't believe me, take a look at Mac-Land. Most Mac apps look and behave similarly, but the Mac is the home of such great UIs as Adobe's.

3) Developers are lazy. If they are given the freedom to do whatever they want with the UI, they'll go through the path of least resistance, or of personal preferences.

No, I do not mean to *all* characterize developers as lazy (just most). Some of them do work quite hard to come up with good user interfaces and applications by these developers stand out, even when those apps look exactly like all the other apps on the desktop. The fundemental error that most of the "developer UI freedom" people make is that the *look* of the UI has very little to do with its efficiency/ease of use. There are many UIs on Windows (3D Studio MAX, for example, or Maya) that look like standard Windows apps, but have incredible workflow. Take StarOffice or Mozilla, for an opposing example. There is nothing special in their UIs that makes them more functional than Word or IE. They simply *look* different.

Re:Unix Screenshots?

[Gleef]

I'm happy if they're lazy about making a flexible user interface while they get the functionality correct. I don't care if it's ugly if it gets the job done.

Re:Double Standards

[RichiP]

Personally, (aside from MS's other immoral and unfair practices) I have no problem with MS giving IE away from free ... it's BUNDLING it with the OS. Most people wouldn't take the time to download other browsers because IE's already there.

Huge Improvement

[jmkaza]

When I first tried StarOffice my intent was to use it for a week to see if it was a viable alternative to MS Office. I didn't make it through the day. Kudos to Sun for finally taking the hint and creating a product that any Office user can use with little to no relearning curve. With Microsoft's new subscription licensing program, this couldn't have come at a better time. Hopefully 6.0 will prove to be a competitive product.

Mirror up

[rveety]

Here it is:
Star office 6.0 beta, linux x86, english

Simple answer: Simple text!

[jiheison]

Seriously, there are few things that annoy me more than receiving a Word document from someone. Rarely, if ever, is there any justification for not simply using a plain old ASCII text file. They are smaller, platform independant and if formatted correctly, no harder to read.

Re:Simple answer: Simple text!

[garcia]

they don't include many of the items that are VERY important to many people.

For me WP and Word documents will always include footnotes (Chicago styles are not easily converted in "text" format)

It would take me some serious time to send over a document in TXT and reformat it back to the way it needs to be to be acceptable.

I agree that people should not be sending around .DOC files for no reason (as they usually do).
What I think needs to happen (speaking of all these *fucking* recent monopolies on standards for files on the Internet -- Why not make a uniform document standard (no, not XML) that is mandated... Fuck MS and what they want to do. At least this way they will be forced to have fair competition (as no matter what document is released it will have to conform) and they basically will have to have better software to compete.

That's at least my worthless .02

Re:Simple answer: Simple text!

[anomaly]

With all due respect, doesn't it seem a bit odd that a person demanding ASCII format would have a .sig that's an ideogram?

Re:Simple answer: Simple text!

[Raul Acevedo]

I agree that the flexibility of alternate typefaces, font sizes, and basic formatting are often useful. Unfortunately, 9/10 times I see HTML used is to simply be annoying. I.e. stupid banners, flowery fonts, all sorts of bs that clutters up any real message.

I still use Emacs to read email in large part precisely for this reason. (Actually, Emacs can do HTML also, but I prefer not to.) Plain text messages are easier to read and deal with than their HTML counterparts. In fact, the only HTML-only messages I get are 100% of the time spam, and the only time someone sends me something that truly needs to be formatted, they send it as a separate Word attachment, which is easy enough to open.

Re:Simple answer: Simple text!

[greenfly]

You should have piped it through the antiword program, or many other quick .doc->.txt converters for Linux... They work well, especially for those simple text documents.

Re:Simple answer: Simple text!

[frknfrk]

i won't bother posting the ASCII character list, but there are (AFAIK) 256 ASCII characters, with codes from 0-255 (00000000-11111111), meaning an 8-bit letter code (1 byte). in your sig you use #22825, #32, #19979, #32, #28961, #32, and #19978. since #32 is the space, this means you are using #22825, #19979, #28961, and #19978. not a single one of those is ASCII. those are UTF-8 character codes. UTF-8 is a variable length multibyte character encoding, suitable for storage and transmission of unicode (read: extended character sets beyond your usual illiterate barely-speaks-english-let-alone-another-language script kiddy).

half of the arguments for plain text come from people who communicate solely in ASCII (even a small subset of ASCII at that). heck, you can even use ASCII for german, spanish, etc, languages, and currency representations for yen, etc. it is when you start talking about arabic and chinese and japanese full character sets where ASCII makes no sense.

notice i didn't say 'only when' because as the internet is a global entity, one hopes we have moved beyond the notion that ASCII is sufficient for any but the most trivial tasks.

of course, UTF-8 has its problems, but it beats the heck out of ASCII if you want to try to have a meaningful discussion with someone from another country (esp. middle/far east) who either does not speak or read english, or has something to express for which ASCII cannot suffice.

-sam

Sigh

[JediTrainer]

Any idea of we'll be seeing a compatible implementation of something that can do everything Outlook can do (including connecting to an Exchange server)? I don't mean just email, but I mean Calendar, Tasks, Contacts booking meetings etc.

As soon as I can get something that would replace this one last piece, then I can switch away from Windows in my company (as I have at home). Unfortunately, the company relies very much on Outlook's functionality, and will not move away from Exchange server, so if I want to move it's up to me to find and install a compatible alternative, but so compatible that the REST of the users can stay on Outlook if they choose to.

In my opinion, this is one thing that any true Office suite needs before MS-Office can be truly replaced. As buggy and insecure as Outlook is, it organizes the company that I work for, and it can not be removed from my desktop until a fully compatible replacement is available. It's the one last thing that ties me to Windows.

Re:Sigh

[jermz]

Try Insight from bynari[bynari.net]. They make both a client (Insight) and a server (Insight Server). The client can talk to an Exchange server, and includes calendar, addressbook, and email, just like outlook, but on Linux. The server is feature-compatible with Exchange, and is built on exim, openldap, and cyrus IMAP/POP. Outlook clients can talk to the Insight server just fine, even transparently. I am demoing it right now, and it might just replace Exchange here, and allow me to run Linux exclusively.

Re:Sigh

[SCHecklerX]

Why is this high-profile application MIA in the open source world?

Because it's a dumb idea to begin with, and there are better ways to accomplish the same thing?

Re:Sigh

[ryanvm]

Any idea of we'll be seeing a compatible implementation of something that can do everything Outlook can do (including connecting to an Exchange server)?

At the other end of the problem, the free software community is in dire need of a Samba-like clone of Exchange's MAPI abilities.

Right now, Linux still makes a better server than it does a desktop. I've replaced NT file/print servers with Samba+Linux; I've used PostgreSQL+Linux instead of MS SQL Server; but there is no way to replace an NT Exchange server with anything and still take advantage of Outlook's sweet MAPI groupware functionality.

I just don't understand why there isn't a free software Exchange clone out there. I'll tell you what - Exchange aint cheap; if a stable replacement existed for *nix, it would be one less reason for anyone to run NT Server.

Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to do it.

How's the Word format support?

[antdude]

I noticed in SO v5.2, some of my fonts, spaces, and tabs are not correctly formatted (like my resume). Is this still the same issue with v6.0 beta?

Thank you in advance for a reply. :)

Competitor

[Red Aardvark House]

StarOffice could be a strong competitor to Office if for nothing other than the price. At $479.00 a head, this adds up awfully quickly. Not to mention saving on upgrade fees in the future.

We shall see if corporations are ready to give up some functionality (admittedly, MS Office is still the one to beat there) to save on costs.

With MS raising the price, it might come to pass.

.doc format

[DrCode]

They actually had a specification for it on their website a couple years ago. But it was one of the messiest, most convoluted thing I've ever seen.

Re:.doc format

[MarkusQ]

They actually had a specification for it on their website a couple years ago. But it was one of the messiest, most convoluted thing I've ever seen.

Then I gather you've never seen the .XLS (et al) specification. We used to have a joke about not going into it without taking a buddy to guard your back & pull you out if you started acting like you were understanding it.

-- MarkusQ

Real interoperability with Office? Schweet.

[SilentChris]

The feature-touting list is actually pretty strong for this version. I used StarOffice briefly back in its 5.1 days, and while I found it to be a capable word processor, its Microsoft Office support was sorely lacking.

Now, not only does it contain the basic file filters, but it sensibly starts utilizing things like the default Outlook address book. Will all of this stuff work? It's questionable. But one of my best arguments for the Mac was "and this program can read Word files". Now, hopefully, I can say the same thing for Linux.

Limerick

[575]

Once a man up in Washington state
His competitors, how he did hate
A new Office contender
Useless it was rendered
"Change Word formats, make it obsolete!"

Mirrors and Such

[Quizme2000]

For those of us that remember how to use ftp. instructions are on the sites on how to download. Have Fun

Re:Double Standards

[mz001b]

I think part of the problem is that Microsoft's browser was free, but not open. That means that they still control the direction of the browser, and can use that to their advantage to gain market dominance. With SO or OO, you are getting an Open Source product. If you don't like the direction it is headed, you can change it.

yes

[_damnit_]

The integrated desktop was the first thing to go. You can read a lot about what has gone on with Star Office at openoffice.org. There you'll find the source, etc.

Re:yes

[innocent_white_lamb]

You won't find the source for Star Office at openoffice.org. You'll find "much of the source", but it is missing a lot of the really good stuff unfortunately. My understanding is that is due to third-party licensing of some components and Sun can't let them out of the door in source format. Therefore, what we have is OpenOffice (a source-available most-of Star Office thingy) and Star Office, a binary-only (but free of charge) application.

Openoffice vs Staroffice

[bram.be]

What is exactly the difference (technically speaking) between staroffice and openoffice. Are there real differences or is staroffice iddentical to openoffice with some commercial features (like netscape mozilla) ?

Re:Openoffice vs Staroffice

[Eslyjah]

From the openoffice faq:

The source code available at OpenOffice.org does not consist of all of the StarOffice code. Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice that which it does not have permission to make available in OpenOffice.org. Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include:

• Spell checking
  
• Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
  
• Help
  
• The database component (Adabas D)
  
• Templates
  
• Extensive Clip Art Gallery
  
• Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
  
• Certain file filters
  

Looks like Sun is giving away everything that doesn't cost them money to give away.

Office 2000 just as good

[SilentChris]

I'm an ardent support of Office itself (one of three really good MS products nowadays, along with the latest version of IE and the service pack 2 release of Windows 2000). However, I was sorely disappointed by the "improvements" offered by Office XP.

A lot of what was in it was already offered in Office 2000 (an underrated application suite) without the messy product activation. I recommend if you can get a copy of Office 2000, do so. It's very stable and runs like a champ.

Re:Office 2000 just as good

[talonyx]

I do have a copy of office 2000. I upgraded to XP and like the new stuff - task panes are great and the new Outlook is a joy to use. Stops that VBS nonsense too.

Re:Office 2000 just as good

[geirt]

talonyxi wrote:

> Stops that VBS nonsense too.

Yeah, dream on ....

MS Word format really does suck

[mj6798]

How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work???? I haven't been involved in the project, but I would really like to hear some feedback to why nobody can open freaking word documents. The TRUTH .. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".

Word format not only is a complex binary format requiring documentation at multiple levels, it has significant undocumented portions. Worse yet, it allows executable content which can call on a lot of Windows-specific facilities. MS Word format really does suck, and that's not an accident: Microsoft likes it that way. The implications for users aren't good, though: vendor lock-in, viruses, and data that becomes inaccessible in a few years are only some of the problems resulting from the way MS Word stores its documents.

$479 for Office XP!?!?!

[sewagemaster]

$479 for Office XP!?!?! remember that's in US dollars well. the price is just insane. it's funny that a company that produces unstable bloatware 'suites' think that they are just as good as the hardware designers. because it looks like it's even more expensive than a bloody computer processor!

each year they add a few clicks here, move the menus around, change the file format a bit so no one could parse it properly and then they would sell it for sky high. well if they quality of the software justifies the cost, that's fine. but obviously but unfortunately it's not the case. now that's the cost for one person if he/she wants to buy it. if he makes (let's say) $30 an hour. it would take him 16 hours = 2 days of salary just to be wasted on this.... minus tax, minus food/shelter/money to be spent on car/insurances... that's about 3-4 days of salary just to get something like that...oh man....!

now imagine the whole company wanting to upgrade for whatever reason (yes.. it's true... just look around the labs in your college/university campus. they ALL want to spend so much money for the upgrade for whatever reason...)...

BUT afterall, i never bought a copy of office. my windows is a pirated version. so it's still free for me.... unfortunately it takes at least one person to buy it before i can burn myself a CD copy...

hope the new version of staroffice is not as bloat and can actually keep consistant formats so i can write my engeering docs and paper on it day in and day out!

Re:Real interoperability with Office? Schweet.

[drig]

You can connect into a MS Exchange addressbook with any LDAP client. I use Balsa, but Netscape/Mozilla and Evolution seem to work well also.

I believe there is something...

[OmniGeek]

Try Bynari Software, at http://www.bynari.com; IIRC, they have at least partial work-alikes for Exchange client and server, some of which code is GPL and some not-free-but-reasonably-priced. I myself use a standard SMTP/POP3 mail client rather than Outlook to access my company Exchange server's SMTP interface. Look, Ma, no viruses! Of course, I also don't use the calendar/planner cruft, a Dayrunner never crashes...

You want Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

That product was designed to do everything that Outlook
can do, from what I understand.

Another blurb

[Pac]

The Register has also noted StarOffice new version here.

They also go on to say that they find Abiword the best of the free Office suite pack.

here's an idea

[Ender Ryan]

Get a REAL calendar, and a notepad. They're very useful, they are fully supported on the Desk and Wall platform, and work just as well on other platforms. They're very cheap, and there are many companies that sell them, so you're not locked into one vendor's continued upgrade cycle forever.

Also, best of all, they are very resistant to virii. Really, the only virii than can infect them are co-workers who can't keep thier hands off things, who should really be fired anyway.

They are also very easy to find. In fact, just about any shopping center of mall will carry them.

Good luck!

Re:here's an idea

[JediTrainer]

Get a REAL calendar, and a notepad

Uhh... no. I'm assuming you haven't used Outlook's calendar, but here's what it gives me. Think large corporate environment:

-I can see anyone else's calendar without leaving my desk. Where's my boss - OH - he's in a meeting which is in meeting room 2. Ok.

-I can book a meeting, and at a glance see when everyone is free (on a chart) and choose my meeting time by that. No millions of phone calls to arrange a mutually-convenient time

-I can book a meeting room, reserve a projector and send a notice to all attendees in one step, without picking up the phone

This is why it's important that it's compatible. Everyone needs to be able to access everyone else's calendar for this to work. Outlook, despite its faults, does this very nicely.

Re:here's an idea

[blang]

This is why it's important that it's compatible. Everyone needs to be able to access everyone else's calendar for this to work. Outlook, despite its faults, does this very nicely.
No it doesn't. Outlook is compatible only with outlook. You can do all you want plus more with a free thing called WebCalendar. It works with every friggin web browser, not just a handful of braindead windows boxes.

If a company has made themself dependent on the MS platform for the sake of email and Calendar, I most seriously doubt their judgement and competence.

Re:here's an idea

[davebooth]

If a company has made themself dependent on the MS platform for the sake of email and Calendar, I most seriously doubt their judgement and competence.

Corporate workstations all running 'doze (especially the ones on the desks of the guys with the budgets to spend), lots of NT servers in the data center, no its not surprising that they should choose to standardize on outlook for corporate email. Once thats in place its also an apparent no-brainer to get everybody using the integrated calendar management. Then, once this hypothetical company has done all this, they start getting bitten firmly on the ass by the disadvantages of this solution and the IT dept can do nothing but shrug and say "we warned you, but you didnt listen...." Unfortunately having said that they still have to look for solutions that will work in the environment that exists at the time. Unless it was done comparatively recently there wasnt any real alternative to 'doze for the generic user - unix variants and other alternate OSs have come a long way in that regard real fast.

Once you've been "embraced and extended" its real hard to break loose unless you've got something thats 100% compatible to ease the migration process.

Re:here's an idea

[JediTrainer]

No it doesn't. Outlook is compatible only with outlook. You can do all you want plus more with a free thing called WebCalendar. It works with every friggin web browser, not just a handful of braindead windows boxes.

The only problem is that you're being naive. This is an established organization which has a system in place which works well for them. Forget MS for a minute. The organization has no interest in changing this system at this time, and frankly, at the time that the system was put in place few reasonable alternatives were available which were supported to the IS department's satisfaction.

But none of that is my problem. I don't care about that situation one bit. All I care about is trying to get something I can use which would be compatible with the system in place. Because I'm the one that needs it, and they have no need or interest to change the entire company's calendar and email just because one developer (me) wants to use Linux. Not that they have a problem with me using Linux (in fact, I'm getting encouragement), but I'm not getting any money to find software just so I can do email when I already have an MS-Office seat paid for for me.

If a company has made themself dependent on the MS platform for the sake of email and Calendar, I most seriously doubt their judgement and competence.

I'm judging your competence by your assumptions. I never said they made themselves dependent just because email and calendar. I said that it's a service that my company depends one (one of many). And guess what - it's not like we're the only company on the planet which uses Microsoft software in their server room. Grow up, and learn to accept the fact that companies have infrastructure in place which isn't necessarily easy or likely to change overnight, even if the desire was there. I work for a large Microsoft shop which sells Microsoft products and also handles support and service as part of our offerings (again - don't read into that, because we sell non-MS stuff too). I'm not part of that - I'm in a development group which is separate from our sales and service, which lets me use whatever platform I want... so long as I can get it working like I need it to. I use Linux for a couple of my servers, but so far my workstation is no go.

I am a big supporter and advocate of Open Source and Linux in particular, especially at work. You need to realize, as I do, that you can't make a company just drop everything and move to Joe's Open-Source Whatzat Software when there is already a setup in place which is paid for and works just fine. In order to penetrate this market, the transition needs to be painless. Earn a few users by giving them something compatible (like myself). Other users will see the goodness and follow.

As a Star Office 5.2 user...

[dpilot]

Just last week, I reinstalled to put RedHat 7.1 on a new hard drive. On the old install, I had Star Office 5.2, mostly for the kids to do homework, but have thrown away the download file.

So now to get access to their old data, I have to re-fetch *something*, either 5.2 or the 6.0 beta. Most people will not be in this precise situation, but I'm sure many will want to know about the interoperability and quality of the beta.

So before I get started on either/any big download, should I just skip 5.2 and go for 6.0?

Microsoft will not allow perfect importing

[nuetrino]

If there is one thing we know, M$ thrives on subtle incompatibility, even within their own product lines. It is these incompatibilities that drive the upgrade process and allow them to retain market share. It is the subtleness of these incompatibilities that allow the claim of fair competition even if they are purposefully sabotaging other people's products.

For instance, if I give someone a M$ Word document created on the Macintosh, the opening of that document will sometimes crash a windows machine. There is no reason for this as I am simply transferring a document from MS Word to MS Word. I suppose that such problems are tolerated because it limit the appeal of MacOS machines, and may indicate that I need to upgrade to the latest Office.

So, naive folks, do not wait for the day when MS Office documents will seamlessly integrate with Star Office. And do not blame Star Office for the problems. History provides nearly 20 years of evidence, all the way back to incomplete specifications for system calls in DOS, that M$ will do whatever it can to insure that integration does not occur.

MSOffice & XML

[ryanw]

Here's Microsoft's Plans for XML. I think it's very interesting how they word things:

http://www.microsoft.com/Office/developer/platform /xmloffice.htm

Because of the many benefits associated with the use of XML, customers have demanded easy, robust support for XML, and Microsoft has answered them. Currently, Microsoft is concentrating on Microsoft Access and Excel--the applications in which XML can have the biggest impact.

Access and EXCEL? They just want to keep Word as proprietary as possible. Word is the one people can't get in or out of. Of course they don't want to focus on XML for Word. Jeash .. People have been able to export Access & Excel documents to tab deliminated files for years now. Thats why they're not worried about XLM for those apps. People can already do whatever they want to spreadsheet files, etc.. Customers need to be more pissed off at Microsoft so they force Word to use XML.

Re:MSOffice & XML

[MintSlice]

Actually, if I understand XML properly, then Microsoft moving to XML format won't actually have any real affect on the format lock in.

The XML file still needs a DTD to show how the xml content should render, and this can be used to maintain the file lock in.

XML is a great way of standardizing data exchange, but in reality it doesn't open up the entire file format.

Yes, it's called Ximian Evolution

[Raul Acevedo]

Ximian is coming out with Evolution, which is essentially an open source Outlook replacement. It's still in beta but should be reaching 1.0 before the end of the year (I think).

So far, Evolution's main shortcoming is it doesn't understand Exchange protocols, so Linux clients can't use it to talk to Exchange for shared calendaring. I realize that is one of the main points you need. I believe it is a fatal flaw for evolution, but Ximian apparently doesn't think it's such a big deal, saying that such support will come "eventually, but not high priority". Nonetheless, it can do IMAP, POP, LDAP, and a bunch of other open protocols.

Oh, now this is priceless

[AKAImBatman]

It uses the same amount of RAM, eh? And how do you judge this? I'm betting with the task manager, right? You do realize that WinNT/2000/XP all pre-allocate about 2/3s of the memory don't you? That's why you can have 512MB of RAM and see 300 used on boot. To be perfectly honest, taskman is not really useful for tracking memory usage because of this and the fact that it does not show preloaded DLLs. Can you see a list of DLLs from taskman? No, you can't. You need special tools to do that.

Previous versions of Office (Office 97) were pretty obvious due to the "office quickstart" icon that it places in the "startup" group. Later versions of Windows however, have a DLL cache which allows DLLs to be stored for preloading on bootup. That of course is why Windows machines take so *$%^#$ long to boot to a usable state and why 70% of a program's memory usage is not reported. Now to be fair, Unix TOP isn't much better. In order to get a reasonable view, you NEED some form of kernel hooks.

Re:Oh, now this is priceless

[John Fulmer]

>Previous versions of Office (Office 97) were >pretty obvious due to the "office quickstart"
>icon that it places in the "startup" group.
>Later versions of Windows however, have a
>DLL cache which allows DLLs to be stored for
>preloading on bootup.

It seems to me that this was what I describing. Task Manager can really only be counted to tell you total system memory allocated

Your post appears to agree with what I was saying. Maybe you should re-read it?

jf

Re:Oh, now this is priceless

[Hadean]

Er, okay... So the same amount of RAM is pre-allocated then... What's your point? I haven't lost actual memory... Sure, it's bad that Windows (supposedly) does this pre-allocating, but since the same amount is allocated before and after Office, what exactly is my loss? I have always prefered Office over Star Office, so what is the argument against Office? And plus, again, show me PROOF. I'm getting annoyed by all of these attacks against Windows without any proof whatsoever... Name me some DLLs, give me a program that I can test this out myself (since you disbelieve any MS programs from displaying things accurately), etc.

Re:Oh, now this is priceless

[scrytch]

Name me some DLLs, give me a program that I can test this out myself (since you disbelieve any MS programs from displaying things accurately), etc.

If you want to poke around and see what resources running programs are using (and do real neato things like futz with the ACL's and break handles), try process explorer (formerly handleEx) from sysinternals.com. Can't get it to sum up sizes of all these objects, but it'll still give you a rough idea.

Re:Oh, now this is priceless

[Hadean]

Nice program... but I'm having a hard time pinning down any actual pre-allocated Office DLLs here... none seem to be connected with Office at all... I guess I'll just have to take people's words for it then eh? It's like God... can't prove nor disprove the existence of these miscreant DLLs...

But considering there's DLLs with the description of "MS Database Support DLL for Oracle", why is it wrong to pre-load DLLs of other things as well as Office? I'd like to not have it loaded, but hey, that's the price I pay for having Windows XP, right? If I were using Linux, I'd have to pay with having a hard set-up time and hardly any useful (to me) programs... give and take...

Staroffice 6.0 has a quickstart component

[AKAImBatman]

The newest versions of StarOffice/OpenOffice come with a small program the starts when your machine boots. This program preloads all the necessary DLLs into memory to decrease load time. You should see launch times similar to those of MS Office with it installed.

While we're on new features...

[Rothfuss]

Does anyone know if they have expanded the dimensions of the spreadsheet? Problem with M$O XP also... 65536 Rows is usually enough, but I have hit the 256th Column more times than I can count. There really isn't a good program out there (that I know of) for working with very large data sets. If they wanted to put themselves ahead of M$, here is an opportunity. There is no reason that the worksheet can't be re-dimensionalized by the user if s/he needs increased space. I realize this would disallow full compatibility with M$ Excel, but I'd be more than happy with less than 100% compatibility if it is due to shortcomings in M$ and I have to "opt-in" to the incompatibility.

-Rothfuss

Re:Double Standards

[cr0sh]

Personally, I wouldn't even say bundling is the issue with me - for me it is their shoddy business practices (rolls back to 1994 or so):

1. The internet is slowly being brought to the masses. Windows 3.1 exists, but need the WinSock TCP/IP stack to get in the net - fortunately, a free version is available, and is included by ISPs. Mosaic is also included...

2. Netscape builds and releases a much improved "Mosaic", called Navigator. Microsoft yawns, sees it all as a "fad", that the consumer won't embrace.

3. 1995 rolls around, and the consumer is raving mad for the net - Bill looks around and screams WTF!? Netscape is raking in money from sales of Navigator, creates Communicator which adds email, news, and web site creation tools.

4. In a mad dash, Bill throws out Windows 95, which had been worked on for a while, but had no internet capability (AFAIK). Rushes to make a TCP/IP stack (probably bought WinSock, knowing him).

5. Bill then sees that the internet explosion isn't a fad, and that he must "posess" it - rapidly IE is created, and is released for free to the masses.

At this point, things go crazy - because while Netscape isn't free - it is, sorta - but people for some reason are too stupid (or honest?) to figure it out: Netscape is "free" for students - simply check the student box on the download form, and you can download it for free - no authentication or anything required. Still, most people see it as expensive, and the marketing/FUD is done for IE to point out how expensive Netscape was (which it really wasn't that expensive - $70.00 or so for the deluxe version).

6. MS then "bundles" IE with later copies of 95, then fully integrates it into 98 - thus sealing the fate of Netscape, which went on to become a footnote (yes, I know it still exists, etc - but in the whole scheme of things, Netscape is just the tool, and not the company it was any longer).

It is this major undercutting that is a bad business practice - they saw that such software was cheap and easy to make, and thus had no "real" value, unlike an office package. But that doing so would leverage them into a whole new market, a much larger possible market - to market that office software to.

Now, Sun is doing the same thing - who knows if it is for revenge over Java or what - or if _they_ have some ulterior motive (which they probably do), which would allow them to leverage into another market...

WOW

[mbyte]

Their new file format ROCKS :)

Basicly its a pkzip encoded directory tree with a pictures folder, XML metadata and content, really looks nice !

Why not do it like OpenDWG?

[mikael]

I don't understand why the makers of Office-like applications haven't done like the CAD-business. They created the OpenDWG alliance in order to reverse-engineer Autodesk's proprietary .dwg-format for storing CAD-drawings and succeeded with the task. Mabye an OpenDOC (no pun intended, Apple) alliance would speed up the acceptance and usability of open alternatives to MS-Office.

Mikael

and your point is?

[nyet]

.wma, .asf and .ram are also very well documented. Doesn't mean you are allowed to write a program that can read them. So what use are they to me?

Re:mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

I set one up at:
http://borft.student.utwente.nl/openoffice/StarO f ice60/so-6_0-beta-bin-linux-en.bin
or
ftp://borft.student.utwente.nl/StarOffice60
Mike

Re:a modest proposal

[innocent_white_lamb]

The problem is, if you're trying to move away from needing MS Office because you want to switch platforms or save $$, you can't use Word for translation. ----> Sure you can. Set it up as a server app. "MS Word Translating Server". One Winders box sitting off in the dusty corner. Got a Word file? Just tell your box to blast it over to the translating server, The translating server will send it back to you in a moment and off you go.

Net cost: One Windows computer, one copy of Office-whatever. And a few hours/days of fiddling around with Word macros.

Everyone in your office can be running whatever you want.

An easy doc - txt filter

[Starship Trooper]

Hey, this filter even comes bundled with every Unix distribution! Check it out:

$ strings WordFile.doc > WordFile.txt
$ less WordFile.txt

almost there...

[xeno]

It's nice to see some reasonable competition for MS Office. I alternate between Office2K and Openoffice (633) with reasonable success, but there are a few things left to complete the puzzle:

1. Where's the Mac OSX version? OS10.1 is getting great reviews, but this is even more critical from a general marketing standpoint than from a Mac-head view. Why? Cross-platform compatibility is a great marketing lever, not because of a possible massive platform shift (unlikely) but because of uncertainty about platforms and compatiblity over the long term. (See #4 below.)

2. Some major features are not quite there: imho outlining is the biggest hole; people who write large documents or like structure really need it. Instead of just copying the MS interface, perhaps the existing SO/Navigator tool could be extended to provide a killer structure interface similar to Framemaker+SGML. That would be pretty compelling. Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.

3. Sun/OpenOffice needs migration documentation & tools. For example, it would be nice to have a short whitepaper from Sun that describes (or better yet, provides a one-click tool) that reconfigures MS Office to save in known cross-compatible formats. Word files should be saved in RTF or a reasonably-documented .DOC/95/97 format. Picking XLS/97 wouldn't be that difficult, but it's important to nail down the multitude of inconsistent PPT formats in a way that retains all content.

4. Marketing!! Star/OpenOffice has such potential, and if handled properly, can deliver a very compelling message. I'm no marketing guru, but imagine turning some heads with these advert leaders:

• "StarOffice: Full-featured software for free. You pay for the support you use. You control when and how you upgrade. Isn't that how it should be?"
• "The software license for Microsoft Office XP says you're prohibited from figuring out the .DOC format your own documents are stored in. Do you think you should pay a license for your own data? Try StarOffice - open formats, full compatibility, and lower costs."
• "StarOffice is compatible with 99.xxx% of all systems worldwide. Freedom to choose."
• "StarOffice is available on every major operating system in your company, from the systems guru to the graphics geek, and the secretary to the CEO. Shouldn't your company communicate like this?"
• "The arrival of MS Office XP forces you to pay more for your licenses, and forces company-wide upgrades by introducing yet another data format. StarOffice reduces TCO by allowing you the flexibility of running any desktop OS you choose (even the free ones), and doesn't commit you to costly upgrades in the future."
• "Running Office XP? That's great, as long as renew your licenses to the new, more expensive program, can support the increased hardware requirements, upgrade everyone in your organization at the same time, or are willing to take the productivity hit by introducing yet another document format. Oh, and you can't take it back for a refund. Try StarOffice for free."

Jon (insertmyslashdotname@jetcity.com)

Re:almost there...

[NutscrapeSucks]

From what I've heard, Sun doesn't feel that SO is a real MSO competitor yet (on a features level), so they are resisting marketing it very heavily. and instead letting it spread by word of mouth or have it be discovered by cost conscious purchasers. Ultimately they are doing this to fuck with MS and not to make any real money, so it's understandable that you won't see a heavy marketing campaign.

Note that WordPerfect and Lotus have 100x the name recognition of StarOffice and competitive products and they've failed to compete on price. It's good to see Sun not fall into the same trap and not embarrass themselves by pushing SO before it's ready.

Also, at this point there is no plan for a Mac port. That gives MSO "99.xxx%" market coverage and StarOffice only 95% or so. :)

Re:almost there...

[Ami Ganguli]

I dont know how much sense it makes to spend money marketing a product youre giving away. For Sun this is a strategic play against MS, but its probably not worth marketing $$.

The obvious way to get the product out without a lot of $ is get to get AOL to include it with the coasters they ship out. And get Sony to load it on their laptops and include copies with the PlayStation. These are two companies that need to eat into the MS warchest just as much as Sun does, and it doesn't really cost anything.

Re:almost there...

[Jason Earl]

I can't help but think that the folks at Sun are geniuses. Microsoft is spending billions trying to break into Sun's business with Windows. Sun, on the other hand, with a few millions, is aiming a dagger right at Microsoft's cash cow. And because of the OpenOffice connection, they don't even have to pay all of the developer costs, and they certainly are getting more than their fair share of free marketing.

WordPerfect and Lotus have failed to compete with MS Office simply because MS Office was quite literally free to most home users. They simply borrowed a copy from work. Why pay for Perfect Office for your home computer when you can have a copy of the de-facto standard for the price of a blank CD. Small businesses generally have a similar practice of purchasing one copy and sharing it.

The new versions of Office will stop this sort of casual piracy, and home users, and many small businesses will take a long hard look at Perfect Office, but Star Office has many of the same features, and it is essentially free.

Re:almost there...

[EisPick]

Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.

Star Office 6 does have a "quickstarter" which installs by default and lives in the system tray. You can turn it off if you don't like it.

Re:almost there...

[xeno]

I think it's worth a lot to Sun. They're not giving SO away just as a malicious jab at MS; there's a constructive angle to it as well.

A quick look at Sun's website shows six different base platforms that they are selling as "desktop" systems. I don't need to go into the depth of their server platforms. They've made significant (if sometimes clumsy) investments towards server-based office applications. Imho, I think IBM's mainframe-partitioned-linux solution kicks Sun's collective ass and would support the distributed office-app scenario much more efficiently, but that's not to say that Sun isn't trying to make a go of distributed/server-based office software. Any server-based software drives sales of OS software, high-end hardware, and networking infrastructure.

I like the idea about Sony and AOL. How about a giveaway CD with a JVM, Sun/Sony/AOL-branded copy of Mozilla, StarOffice, and a free copy of Forte (with J2EE network game components & samples) tucked in the extras folder for the kids? Now that would cause some righteous commotion.

Re:almost there...

[Jason Earl]

Perhaps you are right, but that seems nearly suicidal to me. Microsoft has made billions controlling the desktop, and they are poised to control it for as long as they are willing to give their customers some breathing room.

What's more, Microsoft needs to retain its control of the client software so that they can dictate terms for their backend enterprise software. If Microsoft isn't careful they will find that by the time they get their enterprise software in place, and they are finally in a position to charge their customers each time they use their software, that their competitors will have jumped into the gap with inexpensive replacements for both the client and server software that Microsoft is peddling. Microsoft is going to have a hard time convincing their customers to go to a software leasing model, a credible, free as in free beer, competitor will give them a lot of trouble.

Giving away Internet Explorer has been a positive thing for Microsoft. And yet when faced with a low cost alternative to MS Office that is at least a somewhat credible replacement Microsoft raises prices and turns the screws on their customers to guarantee that they get paid every last cent (and then some). What are they thinking? No one would pay two seconds of attention to Star Office if Microsoft played a little nicer.

More troubling I don't see a single Microsoft business that has even the faintest hope of maintaining current revenue levels without their maintenance of the desktop lock in. Intel based servers are going to remain a commodity market no matter who wins. Linux will drive down server software prices even if it doesn't gain any more market share. Already it is almost impossible to find someone willing to pay a premium price for a Windows server for file and print services. It's simply too easy to use Linux for these tasks (either roll your own, or as part of some device). I have been migrating to PostgreSQL from MS SQL Server, and I imagine that in the next year or so that is likewise going to be a common refrain. That leaves Exchange, but that's replaceable on the backend as well (not with Free Software, but that will come as well). Microsoft's only edge is to use their desktop monopoly to force their customers towards their more expensive services.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, "the tighter they squeeze the more star systems will slip through their fingers." Up until now the threat to switch to Star Office (or worse, to Linux on the desktop) wasn't a very credible threat. It couldn't credibly be done. It's much closer to being possible now. Microsoft's timing couldn't hardly be worse. If Windows XP fails to bring PC buyers to the table then even the OEMs are likely to rethink their Star Office strategy.

If Star Office came bundled, matter of course, on most PCs, then Microsoft really would be hard pressed to sell MS Office. Times are likely to get tough in the PC market, and a preloaded Star Office would give the PC manufacturer a powerful incentive at a dynamite price.

Re:almost there...

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, that was my first thought, right down to the starsystems line.

But then I remembered my underlying theory to never count Microsoft down -- They are effectively doubling prices (according to a Slashdot post), so they come out ahead if they can retain at least 50% of their userbase, which they surely will for the next few years. Furthermore, the accounts that they keep are in the largest organizaions with the most momentium and the greatest ability to buy their enterprise products.

Basically, from MS's perspective, there's been lots of users getting a free (ha) ride on
Windows/Office. If they're not buying all sorts of MS software and services (and they will be in services in a big way), they aren't good customers, in the big picture. They (or Ballmer specifically) basically want to be a sorta consumer version of IBM, and they're willing break a lot of eggs to get there.

This is a huge change - MS has been the commodity vendor for a long time, underselling everyone. They've nickled and dimed their way into gazillions of dollars and rode their Windows/Office monopoly for 10 years. But those products are finished, technically, and eventually someone like Sun or RedHat is going to be successful giving away free stuff to their customers.

Will they succeed? I dunno -- they've pulled off a lot of crazy strategy shifts in the past. Hell, if I was Gates, I would have sold out to IBM in 1989 and would be sitting on an island right now. But he's going to live by the big gamble and die by the big gamble.

anyway, way too long of a post for what was supposed to be a troll account. MSFT is certainly cheap too.

How long before free CD's appear

[rleyton]

Oh, don't you just hate it:

* Day 1 - You must register to download product, but server overloaded due to demand and /. effect.

* Day 2 - You must still register to download product, but server takes ages to allow you to download. Give up.

* Day 3 - You've forgotten your password, re-register, to find that server's been misconfigured by some Sun intern SA who doesn't know his apache rewrites from his linux rawrite.

* Day 4 - You get registered, get the software, and find the file got corrupted in the download.

* Day 5 - Internet connection down, so nothing to do but work.

* Day 6 - Internet connection up, remembered password, downloaded product, ran of out of disk space.

* Day 7 - Having mentioned the product was out to your colleagues, a week ago now (without having seen it), you are ridiculed when they realise
you're still using MS-Office on the sly.

* Day 8 - Hurrah! Downloaded, installed and running. Success. Treat yourself to visit a conference that's on in town. Some bloke hands you a "special edition CD", featuring beta of staroffice 6. Go home to weep.

*WHY* is there this damn registration. *WHY* aren't there loads of mirrors (sunsite!!!!). You know they'll be dishing out the damn CD's eventually.

And they say the network is the computer....

and after all that, my downloads working, on day one.

strange things are afoot at the circle-k.

(no, i don't work weekends these days)

Multiuser installation?

[Lethyos]

Why is it that Star/Open Office wants to be installed on a per user basis, instead of a system wide location where everyone can use it. I've never had any luck getting it to work unless I installed it in my home directory. Does anyone know of a way that I can make it available to everyone?

Re:Multiuser installation?

[cowbutt]

Why is it that Star/Open Office wants to be installed on a per user basis, instead of a system wide location where everyone can use it. I've never had any luck getting it to work unless I installed it in my home directory. Does anyone know of a way that I can make it available to everyone?

RTFM. Basically, you run 'setup -net' as root and install under /opt or /usr/local or something, then as each user run setup from the installed tree, and it'll copy about 2MB of stuff into your home directory. It's all documented.

Re:Multiuser installation?

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Do a /net install. Has been that way with SO since version 4.0 on linux (the first I used).

And it is pointed out several times in the detailed installation guide.

Sometimes I think the difference between computer gurus and guys like Lehtyos and other normal computer users is the ability and willingness to read a manual....

Gobe Productive

[Anonymous Coward]

It may not be open source, it may not have originally come from Linux ... it's Gobe Productive 3.0 and I think it deserves a little advertising here.

Productive 1.0 started as a product of the team who created ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks), but for BeOS. With it's wonderful interface, and the backing of the great but now dwindling BeOS community, Gobe stayed alive and released a 2.0 version a year or two before Be began to go under.

Productive is a great product, and I suggest you all look here to find a great alternative to Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice. Now for both Windows, Linux and BeOS.

You must mean LaTeX.

[TeknoHog]

With all due respect, LyX's primary function is to provide a gentle migration path from GUI typewriters like Word, to a real document production system called [La]TeX.

When I started using Linux, I first used LyX for a couple of projects. Fortunately I tried out 'pure' LaTeX (itself a set of macros for TeX) and found it so much better.

There are several GUI frontends to LaTeX, one being LyX, and you can only harness so much power of the actual system via those interfaces. It's like coding C++ via a point n' click interface. You will only realize the point of LaTeX when using it natively.

Re:You must mean LaTeX.

[TeknoHog]

I am a scientist whose job it is to do my research and publish it.

So am I (final year of M.Sc. Physics [Cantab]). As a matter of fact I now find it a lot easier to use pure LaTeX than any GUI tools. It is a matter of elementary scripting to directly include results from a program / experiment into the LaTeX source.

The same goes for other scientific tools like gnuplot. With a little scripting it can work automatically with LaTeX and the program results / experimental data to produce a neat report without any repeated cutting and pasting. And there are lots more scientific tools for UNIX which I have yet to try out.

Re:Still not up to par...

[DGolden]

Just wondering, are the fonts antialiased because OpenOffice switched to XFree's/ Xft/Xrender infrastructure as the underlying engine, or did they roll their own AA solution?

Rules for Monopolies

[Bilbo]

This is exactly the point. Simple fact:

It is perfectly legal to have a monopoly. However, once you have one, the rules you have to play by are very different from the rules everyone else has to follow.

In other words, it's perfectly legal to give away a product in order to gain market share. However, once you've created a monopoly, it is no longer legal to give away, or more properly, to bundle that same product for "free" in order to leverage that monopoly into another market area

In other words, YES, there is a double standard, and yes, it still makes sense.

Re:Double Standards

[tiny69]

You forgot to mention the part about Microsoft not releasing the information on the API's that would allow Netscape to run on Windows 95 until long after the Christmas buying season was over.

Re:They still ALL lack something CRITICAL

[Quila]

You could write a plugin for Adobe InDesign. It has a completely open programming architecture allowing you to change almost anything.

It would be a bit overkill on the design end, but it does have the BEST text justification engine in the world.

You can help!

[Per Abrahamsen]

OpenOffice is free software, so if you are a programmer, you can help with #1 and #2.

Since you obviously can write, you can help help with #3 as well.

I guess you are already helping with #4.

Put it where the Sun don't shine

[gelfling]

Exactly who do I have to fuck and/or kill to get this code bundle?

It's Free Software, dummy!

Register register register register register.

Is there any other information you'd like like cocksize or eyecolor or the number of blades of grass in my lawn?

You can't accept the address I use which is fine for the USPS - why is that?

And then the download doesn't kick off - hangs hangs hangs hangs.

Great PR for the "The Company that runs the Internet" - assholes !

SO/OO for OSX on the way

[xeno]

Actually there is a Mac OSX port underway, under the OpenOffice projects. It's not there yet, but hopefully when SO is feature-complete, the OSX port will be in hand. My statement assumed such a fruitful end. Currently you're right, MS holds the interop crown.

OTOH, MS Office XP does not support Windows 95, which is still a major (~10-15%) portion of desktop users. (There's your stealth forced-upgrade...) That severely limits their coverage. Between this and the online-activation BS that essentially kills the Office-compatibility growth undercurrent thru illicit home installs, it opens an opportunity for actual major traction of SO/OO in the home-user market.

Word format documentation

[dpilot]

>No. The documentation has been around for a while (years). You can see here: http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text [wotsit.org] that there are
>references to the Word 6 format as well.

I think part of the problem here is that I see Word6 and Word8 (Word97) formats documented, but we're having to cope with Word2000 and soon WordXP. At any rate, I've downloade both Word8 zip files, and want to at least take a look at them. I should proabably grab the Word6 zip files too, to see the nature/need of the changes.

Re:Word format documentation

[KidSock]

Heads up, a Word document (at least 97) is wrapped in OLE streams. This is something these documents fails to mention (common Windoze knowledge). There are libraries for decoding the streams (libole). One you do that you can start decoding the FIB and beyond. Good luck.

Works on FreeBSD

[mbadolato]

If anyone cares, the linux .bin file installed without a hitch on my FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE machine (which has linux compatibility enabled).