Slashback: StarOffice, Antennae, Handiness

Slashback with more on paying royalties for Web standards, Sun's newest office suite, securing your 802.11 network starting with the antenna(e), and another glove.

Fewer excuses for the "memos and shopping lists" crowd. Sean Lamb writes: "Now that everyone's done slashdotting Sun's servers, I've posted an Out-Of-Box-Experience review of StarOffice 6.0 beta over at Linux Orbit."

Some things just want to be Free. Bruce Perens writes: "HP has made a public statement supporting royalty-free web standards and urging the community to write W3C with their opinion. "

A document on Perens' web site outlines Hewlett-Packard's response to the ongoing discussion of allowing technologies into W3C standards which could require patents on the so-called Reasonable and Non-Discrimatory (RAND) basis. That document reads in part:

"Agreement on royalty-free standards does not end this discussion. The licensing of patents embedded in standards must be compatible with the GPL license that is applied to the Linux operating system kernel, the MIT-derived license that is applied to the Apache web server, and a number of other software licenses. Because of the many thousands of copyright holders who have already contributed to existing products under those licenses, those software licenses can not be changed - the patent licensing mandated by W3C standards must accommodate them."

I hope other companies benefiting from software like Apache, Linux, and any other software which could be hurt by royalty-based standards make similar statements.

Wardrivers, begone. Moshe Barr may have laid out how to share a network connection with the neighborhood, but what about when you don't want to or can't afford to? trevmar writes: "BYTE.com has just published an article I wrote about WLAN antennas -- how they work and how to choose them. Hopefully I have put in all the stuff you will need to know whether you are setting up a community freenet, or just want to make your own home network harder to hack. If you are hardware inclined, I also describe some low cost hardware, and an access point that can be pulled apart very easily and resoldered at will ..."

Need an integrated keyboard here ... Adrian writes "Forget the guys with the glove from Berkeley, check out these guys -- they have a great product that interfaces with 3D Max for realtime animation generation that is on the market and won best of SIGGRAPH a couple of years back -http://www.didjiglove.com.au" While that's nice, I'd rather not forget the Berkeley guys just yet, since their seems like a more generalized concept.

Comments

Re:Information on 802.11

[Freddy Lumbago]

The IEEE is making all the 802 standards available for free on their web site. Have a look at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ for details.

The XML doesn't work that way

[AKAImBatman]

The author of the StarOffice article is a bit off base about how the XML works. Basically, the document consists of SEVERAL XML documents, images, and fonts all packed into a JAR file (a ZIP file with a maifest file). After you extract these files, you then find that each of these XML documents contains so much info that it makes them nearly impossible to be read by humans! (No VI or EMACS, sorry)

The upshot of this is that KOffice or some other suite could support these documents very easily. On top of that, the compression makes these files tremendously small. I took a 700K Word document (500 pages!) and converted it to a 100K StarOffice file. Now if that isn't cool, I dunno what is!

You can find more info at http://xml.openoffice.org/.

star office

[jilles]

I have been reading very positive reviews about SO during the past few days. So, I decided to give it a try myself. Here's an overview of my experiences.

Let me start by saying that it looks promising, despite some obvious flaws which I will detail below.

Installation

I installed it on windows 2000. The installer looks pretty and userfriendly and seems to be doing what it is supposed to be doing in a straightforward way. I haven't tried the uninstall yet (duh) but I trust that will be equally good.

Compatibility with office

I normally use framemaker to write my papers but occasionally I have to deliver word documents. Star office certainly supports word better than framemaker. However, I found that it had some trouble with the word documents I had. All of these documents are rather complex and they use tables, crossreferences, images and paragraph styles. I was impressed that the document was successfully imported. However, there were a few errors that though easy to correct would have lead to visible errors if I had just printed them without looking at them. I had a similar experience with my powerpoint documents. Near perfect but not entirely perfect. Conclusion: you will need to revise imported non trivial office documents to make sure everything is the way as intended.

User interface

From the point of view of features most of it seems to be there and functioning. However, it is far from pretty. One of the key features of office is that it offers a polished userinterface. Obviously MS has a few graphical designers who know what they are doing. I can't say the same about SO it all looks rather primitive when compared to office (far better than framemaker though :-).

In addition to the look and feel I found some of the dialogs a bit confusing. Some buttons don't have tooltips and there are slight inconsistencies, especially in the more advanced dialogs.

Features

After having played with star writer a bit I would say that I would actually prefer it over word and may even consider to use it as a replacement for framemaker in the future. As mentioned before, I use stuff like crossreferences and paragraph styles quite heavily. The prime reason I am using framemaker rather than word is because word is designed for stupid users and tends to "improve" the deisgn of your document on the fly which is a PITA if you do know what you are doing. Aside from that it's handling of graphics is really bad and you are at a constant risk of seriously messing up the layout of your document. Star office doesn't seem to suffer from these flaws and in addition has a build in literature references database!!!! That last feature (once I figure out how to use it because the GUI is a mess) might pull me over. Also I like the fact that everything is stored as XML and I am looking forward to any add on utilities that rely on this.

So in conclusion, star office looks very promising. I have only looked at star writer and compared it to word 2000. Word 2000 arguably is more polished and user friendly. In terms of features the two suits can compete even though star writer is lacking some of the popular word features (e.g. grammar checking). However, it also has features that either work better than or are not even present in word (e.g. the bibliography tool).

It looks like I am going to give it a try but it also looks like I won't be recommending as an alternative to office to less advanced users. If you know what you are doing and are equally annoyed with word as I am you might actually like it (otherwise I recommend you take a look at framemaker). It is not the office killer it is advertised to be but it certainly looks like you could use it for most of the stuff you would MS office for, especially when handling more complex documents. It's biggest problem is the user interface which just doesn't have the same quality as MS office.