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StarOffice 6.0
Lawrence Teo writes "News.com,
Infoworld.com,
and
eWeek
are all reporting that Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office. Details are also available at Sun's own StarOffice 6.0 website." Sun's press release mentions the new features, although if you're familiar with openoffice.org, you've got a pretty good idea of what StarOffice has to offer. An anonymous reader also points out that Sun has effectively one-upped Microsoft's various schemes to get its software into schools by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.
A measly $75.95? Phew, surely there can't be a comparable office suite that's any cheaper than that!
An apt name change, considering the overwhelming majority of potential users under this plan.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
You can already pre-order it here
Wow. Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also planning their so called next-gen Office which is also supposedly based on XML. That zdnet article is pretty interesting.. it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm getting .NET-phobia) and StarOffice.
Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it.
Everyone does know that the only reason Sun bought StarOffice was to have something to annoy Microsoft with, right?
It's free and came from the same code as StarOffice.
http://www.openoffice.org/
Enjoy
The openoffice team has *barely* got some kind of beta mac os x support.
Last i checked, the idea any flavor of staroffice would be supported on classic mac os was a joke.
So, your choices are: Go with MSOffice, and have no support for UNIX; or go with staroffice, and have no support for Macintosh. Lovely choices here.
I realize this isn't a problem, really, since you could just put openoffice on the unix/windows machines and msoffice on the macs, and use compatible file formats always, but that's still obnoxious, and i don't think that msoffice/mac can support openoffice's XML format at all, no? Is there a plugin that would let it?
Dammit, when's this XML DocBook standard or whatever going ot be something that all the major word processors can save in?
Seriously, can somebody please tell me why anybody would by StarOffice when it's based on OpenOffice, which is free?
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
The only real problem i can see is this is going to be hard to get to the average masses. I know quite a few people who think that they need MS Office, mainly because they have an ME or XP.
If in they're advertising, say it works the same as MS Office, and supports all their documents etc etc, then they might see a little change. The problem is, MS has had such a monopoly, its hard to breakthrough to a non-technical users level.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
$7,500,000 million for the StarFire 10000 with th 10 TB of RAM now required to run Star Office.
Betcha MS will cut Office prices to compete, like they did vs. SmartSuite and PerfectOffice in the mid-'90s.
How's Office going for around $150 again sound?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Since I primarily use any office suite for word processing, I just downloaded AbiWord. Slashdot ran a story earlier, too, about this.
If you use databases, I am sure you can find some open source version DB software somewhere. Same with spreadsheets and presentations. As for scheduling, let's just say, pen and back of hand work fine.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Excuse my ignorance, but why is my above post at 2 by default? Whats changed?
Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office.
If it's not free, the only way it will be able to compete with Office is if it is 10 times as good.
While StarOffice 6.0 is cheap, the same product is available for free in openoffice 1.0 which is the base. All Sun really did here is repeat what we have already seen in the netbeans -> forte4 java relationship. I say download the software(OpenOffice that is ;) ), install it, use it, and join a mailing list if necessary. I always thought real users could better recreate program errors than tech support.
Besides OpenOffice has been perfect for me thus far.
I still say they're missing PIM functionality. Figure out a way to get Evolution to work with it seamlessly. I run Windows and would glady switch away from Office if I could read/write Word documents, Excel spreadsheets -- and duplicate my Outlook PIM/e-mail functionality (and still synchronize it to my PDA).
Hmmm... Free StarOffice for Chinese kids...
One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Does anyone know if there will be discounts for multiple purchases? Ie, if a company has 1,000 users that they want to switch to Star Office 6.0, will Sun give them a discount, say to $50 per seat? (Granted $76 is cheap, but corporations are always looking to save that extra buck.)
;)
I see that there is a Star Office Now program (here), but that looks to be for vendors.
If Sun makes it so that large companies can get an even further discount, it would seem to me that they'd get even *more* people switching, which could only be a Good Thing (tm).
libertarianswag.com
Well, mayby MS will try to turn Windows into one large office suite to compete with this new threat. Soon we may learn that an office suite is really an integral part of an operating system. Separating the two will be "impossible" and "bad for the economy".
OpenOffice.org 1.0 released sooner, has comparable features and is completely free. It's the same code base, anyway. So why would anyone want Star Office? Note that this isn't meant as a troll--I think it's a legitimate question.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
As soon as I heard about Sun charging for Star Office, I switched over to OpenOffice. I haven't noticed any loss of functionality.
What I have noticed is that on a modern(500Mhz+) machine, Open Office is fast, relatively bug-free, and can open and save MSOffice documents easily. I rather like it.
I could see paying to support the project, but I don't see people paying $75 en masse for something they could get for free with OpenOffice.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Sun's web site mentions that StarOffice 6.0 will maintain "interoperability with other desktop suites," such as Microsoft Office. Sure, they can offer this, but will Microsoft counter it by obfuscating their document formats even more? Microsoft, may not intend to do this, but because Office has the ability to put so many things (Word Art, equations, movies, strangely placed words, etc.) into documents, the parsing process becomes a nightmare.
.doc files, for example, are fairly simple to parse and import. But, when it comes to importing embedded objects like equations and Excel spreadsheets, the parsing process becomes far less trivial. I've used X-based programs, namely Abiword and StarOffice, to read from and write to Microsoft document formats, and it's not a pleasant experience. One of my more recent trials resulted in corrupted documents, in fact. Backups were made before attempting the export, of course, so this isn't meant to be a rant, but the fact remains that the number of features Microsoft Office has is proportional to the number of points at which a program that imports or exports their formats can break.
Currently, bare Word
Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.
Someone modded up one of your previous posts, putting you at the minimum karma level for the +2 bonus.
we already know china is into linux ... what's the point?
... or even any k-12 institution in the us. get users accustomed to sun software early on -> likely to buy/use it later in college/career
they *should* have donated unlimited licenses to those school districts in oregon/washington we've been reading about that are getting the audits
Star office fills a needed gap but sure doesn't compare to MS in this arena - I hate MS as much as the next guy but MS office is the shiznit.
Users should decide whether or not that package of features is worth 75 bucks.
Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
XML is just a method of storing structured data as a rooted tree. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It's become popular not becuase the technology itself is particularly revolutionary-- the technology is simple. It's become popular, rather, becuase of a number of very versatile, useful, well-done parser libraries that (for example) let you save and retrieve your structured data to and from XML without much fuss or work at all. As opposed to mucking about with file pointers and binary data and such yourself, and probably misusing a free() call somewhere and segfaulting. (There is also the associated neat ease-of-parsing technologies, like schema and XSL, but i won't get into that.) One such parser library was written by microsoft, and is part of ".NET". This is why microsoft is pushing XML right now; it's a development best practice. Or something of the sort. Not because they are moving toward XML as an "open standard".
(The fact it has a sexy acronym, and the fact that nebulous connections exist in people's minds between anything XML (no matter how useless) and the very useful technologies like SOAP and XSL that have sprung from XML, doesn't hurt.)
XML does not support interoperability in any way unless everyone agrees on common XML grammars for a specific task.
Unless Microsoft releases the XML schema for their new-office XML format, then the new MSWord format will be every bit as much unusable gibberish as the old MSWord format (except the new gibberish will contain a lot of > and < symbols, and begin with a standard tag identifying it as an XML document). Microsoft seems every bit as xenophobic as they'd ever been, and have given no indication they will release such a schema for any reason unless they are forced to as part of a court judgement terminating the current antitrust case with the states. And probably not even then, unless the court order is carried out by armed national guard members storming the Redmond compound.
The actual text from the article:
.Net My Services, would also be available separately for Office copies sold at retail or on new PCs, sources said.
For the next version of Office, the company is considering an optional subscription version tied to Web services based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). Those services, which could include some of the online calendaring and collaboration features envisioned for
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML, instead they are planning on selling a seperate add-on pack that includes Calender + collaboration features based on XML. They are also planning on selling these 'web services' as a subscription plan. The file-save format will not be XML which is what would really be a shock.
On a side note, this is kindof cool. I am half tempted to buy this from Sun - I like Open Office and use it regularly but it would be nice to have some support from sun to back it up. Not that I would probably use it but you never know. I am also wondering if they are going to offer an educational type discount.
I work for a university library and they are considering migrating over to Star Office but... I'm not holding my breath. The users just don't want to 'learn something new' and the tech people don't want to have to train them. Nonetheless with state-wide budget cuts it might become a reality since the current MS contract they have is getting more and more expensive and MS is become more and more annoying. The other day a MS representative was down in the computer offices trying to sell something or another and when he noticed that all the server-side of the library (web site, cataloging, etc) was run on Sun systems or unix boxen he became hostile. 2 weeks later the library got audited by MS. Luckily enough, they had all their shit together and nothing happens but it is this type of behavior that is driving people towards Star Office - as well as the fact that it is an excellent program.
We are the screenshots? Why don't companies that sell software put up screenshots?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
If you have seen XML documents created by MS applications you'd be be as scared as I am.
Seems that there are a lot of "Why StarOffice, and not OpenOffice.org?" posts out there. To make things easier, here's where you can find the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
Link to reputable, published, apples for apples benchmarks please? didn't think so.
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
Since you're already labeled as flamebait, there probably isn't a point in asking, but where the hell do you get the idea Star Office 6 is slower than MS Office? What "java technology" are you talking about?
> as MS office due to "java technology", so the price difference all works out in the end.
Link, please; where did you read that OO/SO was built in Java instead of C or C++?..
The very first word document I loaded and needed to work takes open office a minute to load it and even then the rendered document is unreadable(quite a few tables in the spec file). celeron 650 system with 256 megs of ram btw.
OpenOffice has a ways to go yet unfortunately. I hope StarOffice works better.
Why the f*ck we are still dealing with the commies?
Seriously, bad enough that we allow companies to import shit from commie countries, but why in the hell are we GIVING CRUD to them?
Figure the government would have passed a law looong ago forbidding it.
Betcha China would have had a much harder time doing any sort of research if they had to had have built all of their own tools just as we initially did. . . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML
Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.
XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible
It is FUD like this that slows OpenOffice and ReactOS/Wine devel. Wake up PEOPLE. M$ has a huge install base and people still code for the base win32(windows 95) Ok some write windows 98 and higher but please STOP the FUD. MS cannot change there API's overnight unless we let them. See the stupid POS mono.
(note: yes I am a ReactOS/wine developer)
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
JALALABAD -- March 26, 2002 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced a donation to the Ministry of Jihad (MOJ) of al Qaeda that will make StarOffice[tm] 6.0 (branded CrescentOffice[tm] in Islamic markets) an office suite of choice in madrassas throughout the Muslim world. Today's donation will provide unlimited access to one of the world's largest open productivity suites based on open source development. The technology will be available to be replicated and distributed to the students, teachers and administrators of the educational institutions governed by the ministry. The discussions today are a major expansion of the existing relationship between Sun and the MOJ.
"In the quest for learning and understanding, there is really no greater tool than technology," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research, Sun Microsystems. "With this contribution of software, Sun and the Ministry of Jihad will work closely with students, educators and suicide bombers to enhance their ability to compete in a global economy, while opening the door to greater productivity and achievements throughout the Islamic world. Sun Microsystems will provide al Qaeda with the office productivity tools they need to destroy all Zionists and Crusaders. Allahu Akbar!"
I think it odd but likely that charging for Star Office will facilitate it's spread. People do look gift horses in the mouth, but charge them 80$ and they go away thinking, "cheap! neat!"
-pyrrho
i'm just a bit curious with the Chinese donation.
How does free software 'work' in a communist government on a large scale. Could a private enterprise (sun) give them stuff? Does it then get classified as 'enterprise' if it's free?
Free software often conveys ideas of free speech. This is frowned upon by the chinese (remember what happened in 1989?).
it's not that they couldn't use software such as this; it certainly is for a good cause. it is also certainly a welcome change to see private enterprise to begin to appear in china, just like this software, which brings up another humungous topic:
In a hard-core communist country, would the government create all software, which is required to be proprietary to the country, and keep it inside the country? What would their opinions be on free software?
and of course, after reading this post, I see why communism hasn't been successful yet.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Companines are for some unknown reason more willing to use software that comes at price than a similar free alternative and always have been. They seem to eqaute quality with price and may be deluded into thinking they will recieve support for purchased products when we all know that is a joke. Whatever, it may work well for Sun this time around. I like Open Office so far though. I like Gedit even better.
I think this is the real issue here... Would you pay for an office suite that doesn't include cute, animated assistants? I know I wouldn't! I will pay any price to have a bored kitten jump around on my screen. This may be the reason why Star is being distributed in China and not Windows Office. Those office assistants have an unchecked free-spirited character that is not acceptable in a communist society. The things that that paerclip will say!
Why does this sig rock so hard?
The best part about purchasing the single-user license is that you can install it on up to 5 workstations. This eliminates the "What do you mean I can't install Office on two computers?"
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
And you know why? because you can't download it for free! yep. this is redundant. but i find it funny.
go read George Washington's farewell address to Congress anyway.
It'll answer your question.
KFG
<ms-word format="screw-you">
</ms-word>pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
DOH!
As if XML was the cure for all evils.
The current trend of Microsoft to push XML to all layers of software, be it client or server, only make me suspect that they need it because they are unable to make the current software talk to each others.
After all, as they stated in court... they don't know how their own code works...
Cheers...
P.S.- for me... XML is nice, but take it with a grain of salt and pepper... What you do with XML is more important then the XML by itself (even if things are marketed diferently)
In this NGO where I help out from time to time, there are a few computers and I have installed OpenOffice to see how it will compare to the current solutions. Well, the reason why it's not working for us is, we have a lot of documents written and some still being written in WordPerfect for Linux. In order to use OpenOffice, we have to export to .RTF. The problem is, some Finnish characters are lost in the process. Don't ask why, I have no idea.
Anyway, you see the problem. So I am wondering if StarOffice 6.0 has the possibility of editing WordPerfect docs?
Sigged!
Wasn't that one of the vapourware features in office 2000? Converting the file format to XML?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I don't understand the difference, either.
From the Star Office web site, "A single-user license lets you load the StarOffice office suite onto as many as five individual workstations or PCs..."
Nice licensing, but it doesn't compare with Open Office's unlimited multiple-user licenses for free.
Also, from the Star Office web site, "Through the OpenOffice.org Project, Sun has made full use of feedback from highly talented open source programmers. The StarOffice 6.0 suite shares a codebase with the OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite, future enhancement to the base source code are planned to be available, providing the best of both worlds to users."
Sun has certainly done everyone in the world community a great service by open sourcing Star Office, but it has not explained the difference between its version and Open Office.
I just hate glib marketing writing like this. Certainly the web site writer knew what we wanted to know. Why not just tell us?
1/4 the price for 1/10th the functionality.
Of course the real question is -- does it have the functions you need! If it does it will work for me -- so I will check it out if it is free but I won't risk the 79 on it today....
In the grand scheme of corporate computing the cost of the software is a small amount to pay for the functionality it buys (generic office software included, server software included and even vertical market applications included -- they may be expensive but they are cost justified).
Microsoft effectively beat Netscape into unconsciousness by bundling their free browser into Windows, but even with monopoly power they would never bundle the office suite for free. Office is Microsoft's big money maker. This is going to severely piss them off!
I like it.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Very funny. Very well-written.
Can any Mandrake Club members who've used StarOffice attest? How much better is it than OpenOffice? Particularly, are the MSOffice filters better?
In any event, hoo rah to Sun for marketing this. Few would use OpenOffice because it's free. $75 is an excellent price - enough to make people consider it serious software but inexpensive enough to make the switch.
So is it one fourth as good?
Well subject says it all, just a comment on the available May 21st.
Except that Microsoft would probably obfuscate that, also.
Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
Sadly, you are probably right. Slashdot readers sit around bemoaning Microsoft's virtual ownership of the PC software market. But when some other company introduces a supported, professional, competing product, much of the discussion on Slashdot centers around:
1. Encouraging people to download free software instead of buying the new product.
2. Creating open source projects to replace the package being discussed.
3. Getting the package without paying for it.
Today was just another great example on Slashdot. First the announcement of Opera 6 for Linux. I lost count of the number of times that people suggested the use of Mozilla or some other free browser to avoid paying for Opera. At least one person posted registration codes. Others posted ways to disable the ads that pay the bills for the ad-supported version.
Now we have the announcement that StarOffice 6 will be sold for a mere $75. Are Slashdot readers celebrating the fact that Sun is going up against Microsoft in the office arena? Nope. The discussion centers around using, and extending, OpenOffice instead of purchasing StarOffice from Sun.
Microsoft management is probably thrilled by what they see here. A major competitor announces a compatible office suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It's priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. And what do readers on Slashdot, a group that should be a prime audience for the new package, do? Look for ways to avoid buying it.
I point out that XML is basically an uglier re-invention of Scheme/Lisp S-expressions. (see this link) XML isn't the cure-all end-all either as some might think.
Got friends?
Here I am, setting up an Adabas database as well as working on some StarBasic scripts to automate my eBay transactions and related e-mails, and it turns out that version 6 has no browser, e-mail client or true database application (the three things I need to make the scripts do what they're supposed to do). Heck, I'm having a hard time finding out if I need to look into translating the StarBasic into JavaScript for 6.0.
I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.
The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've heard that, but I looked in several places on their web site, and didn't find it.
I will use it as much as possible to see when/where it fails to meet my neads. I have Star Office 6 on my GNU/Linux machine via my mandrake support. That will be another nice comparison.
.....
If it meets only 90% of my needs then MS Office is dead in My Office!
So far looking good opening my old Word docs. But I use Word mostly for creating documentation so actually I expect OO to do just fine. I'll be putting a note in my doc's that if anyone has problems reading them that I will provide a PDF
ouch! I hear a Squeal! Is thata pig?
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Look at Preferences/Your Info. Your karma has probably just reached 30.
So, is StarOffice going to die a slow death because of the free alternatives, or might we luck out and see Applixware more heavily marketed again?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
According to the OpenOffice web site, one of the main differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice6 is fonts, in particular, Asian fonts. Perhaps the reasoning is that OpenOffice is not as usable by Asian students because of the lack of Asian fonts. Western students, however, can use OpenOffice, which is already free.
If you use FTP, try FileZilla. It's open source and better than commercial products.
First we give encryption technology to Afghan-trained terrorists and now we hand productivity suites to the Red Chinese. Are we going to be donating nuclear plans to European skinheads next?
In order to compete with MS-Office in the Enterprise arena, sorry guys, they're going to have to offer an acceptable alternative to Outlook which can work with existing Exchange servers.
A company like mine, for example, which has approx 500 employees, would probably jump at the chance to get something equivalent at a cheaper price, but only if it can replace the whole thing.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Too bad it's such a buggy piece of junk.
It takes several times as long as MS's office
software to load.
Go Open-Office.
Or hope k-office actually supports rtf.
gnumeric and abiword could be cool, if the fonts
didn't look so ugly, and saving to ms file formats
was not so annoyingly bad.
I've read a couple post'ers comment on font issues in Linux. Here's how to solve the one I had, sacrificing a bit of startup time; I assume this will fix similar behavior in other Linux installs of OOo 1.0:
:-)
-----
Find user/psprint/pspfontcache from whatever directory your soffice binary is in
either delete this file or rename it
make a new, empty "pspfontcache" file and make it READ-ONLY ("touch pspfontcache && chmod 444 pspfontcache")
-----
The issue has something to do w/ font caching; I got this fix from OOo's IssueZilla.
There, OOo is now that much more useful for Linux users.
For the record, I'd look into SO 6.0 if it had a *usable* database component (I hate to admit it, but, like M$ Access).
I bet thats only x86 linux. How about my linux-sparc64?
If they truly supported linux, they would support linux on their on damn hardware AND software.
-
If you cannot convince them, confuse them. - Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972)
I've thought about this before... When you save gnumeric files, they are in XML format, but compressed with gzip. All Microsoft has to do is to compress/encrypt the XML with their own proprietary format and no-one can access it.
Why not compare to the price of MS Works, rather than Office? Seems to me that that is a fairer comparison.
Yes, I'm serious. I'd take WordPerfect 5.1 over Star Office. Star Office has a looooong way to go.
Yes, StarOffice 6.0 includes a filter for WordPerfect 8 documents according to the technical FAQ. According to the general FAQ (and somewhere else that I can't find right now), the WordPerfect filter is licensed from another company, so it won't appear in OpenOffice. I won't be holding my breath waiting for a WordPerfect filter in OpenOffice, because I gather that it is quite difficult to convert WordPerfect files to other formats.
I've been hoping to see Corel do some big stuff before long.
I think that Sun really had the right idea by starting their projects opensource. That way they got people interested, they got free code from people, and they gave something back to all the people they helped out by allowing the open-office branch.
Now the thing I don't understand is... If it started as open-source, how can they turn it back into closed source? Can the creator of any work do that?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
According to Sun's FAQ: Schools and educational institutions can receive StarOffice 6.0 office suite for the cost of media and shipping. For more details visit Sun's StarOffice Education Web site. Perhaps the article should have said "including China".
Don't attempt to be an smartass reading the above backward, because by doing so you are violating DMAC.
Excuse me while I get the door. Someone out there is knocking my door real hard.....DOH!
The monetary value of this gift was estimated to be 10,000,000,000 jihadies, the jihadai is the al qaeda's main currency. The value in dollars was about $1.39 u.s. It is believed that the one al qaeda computer was taken away along with osama bin ladens's fax machine. A local resident was quoted as saying "Babba gook, zin, zin, wallop", which translates to "How do you fit a whole office in that small metal box". Multiple phone calls to inside sources, where not returned, because in addition to no computers, there are no phones. Coming up next, should the new parking lot in the middle east have white or yellow stripes.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
It doesn't seem like much, does it? If you need a database, use Postgres. I've never used clipart, and I have a library of 14 CDs of clipart. I don't need Asian fonts, or Asian sorting. And, "certain file filters" is "uncertain file filters" until it is explained. (I understand that there are WP8 filters.) That's it? That's the only differences?
The LGPL. Will please please read the licenses they advocate. The LesserGPL allows Sun to take openoffice, use it and add closed source code. All the stuff they take from OpenOffice must have it's sorce readily available - and it does. But closed code can exist in the same project as LGPL code.
A friend who works at the University of Houston has said that Microsoft is going to be selling select software for $7.00 each. That's right - $7.00 a pop this coming fall season. I'm not holding my breath over this but it does sound rather interesting.
This may sound kind of lame, but it's true - one of the main reasons why Microsoft software sells well is they always have very market-friendly box designs.
I went over to Sun's Staroffice website, and lo and behold, is a jpg of Staroffice 6's box - with children's toys on the cover. What the!? Many people are going to be put off buying a piece of office software with an age 2-3 theme on the outside.
People in computing understand computers, not people. Full stop.
$75 isn't that high considering kids spend $50 on a single video game for their PS2 or Xbox. To me anything over $100 is a bit pricey for software. I won't even think about buying Microsoft Office... the $400+ is just unfathomable for me to shell out for what is essentially just a license and a 20 cent piece of plastic. Maybe for a motherboard, CPU, case, and a graphics card put together.. but one piece of software?? They have to be kidding. Now, they're not half as bad as some of the more proprietary niche market software out there that cater only to businesses which can run tens of thousands of dollars per license. Those guys are just smoking crack.
Three buzzwords for the business world and software:
1) Support
2) Support
3) Support
If you buy staroffice, you have support. If you download openoffice for your business, you have to contract in support, which is probably as much per seat as staroffice.
If no money exchanges hands, especially when it comes to the almighty GPL, there is absolutely NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER that the software works. Sun stakes its very life and reputation on the fact that StarOffice will work perfectly. True, the open source community produces good code, but there's no GUARANTEE of good code. Sun spent 8 months in semi-public beta of this baby (I've been using it since September).
Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free, for precisely this reason. Remember, the market for office suites is corporate, not personal, especially for Sun.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
Don't wait for any Open Source stuff from Corel in the near future. They have enough problems just staying afloat.
Of the three main Ottawa, Canada vendors, only Cognos seems to be getting by. The other company is Nortel and it seems to be a shadow of it's pre-1998 self.
I don't think so. For a start it isn't $75 for a student. They simply pay media costs ... whatever that may be. It is well udner half what is paid for MS Office, and there a bulk discounts, bringing the price down to about $20-30, depending on the amount of licences purchased.
So where's the OS X version? Or Classic Mac OS for that matter. I've got at least 10 machines that would run this instead of warezed versions of Orifice if it was available for Mac. If they can make it available for a 2 other Unices (leenooks and eyeriks), why not OS X, arguably the UNIX w/ the largest installed desktop user base?
Seriously, I'd buy 2 or 3 licenses for this if I could run them on my machines.
--
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
So the thing to watch is: will Microsoft let vendors ship with StarOffice and not MSOffice, or will they add a new Microsoft-Office tax?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
what? charge loyal Linux users $75(US), but give the suite away to the fscking Commies?
f*ck Sun... i'll stick with ASCII text (vi and pico) before i'll pay to support a company with misguided political aims...
There is an old joke:
Gorbachev, Castro, and Deng Xiaoping were all in a taxi one day and approached an intersection. The driver asked which way to go, and Gorbachev said, "Turn Right!" Castro stomped his foot and said "No! No! Go Left!" Deng calmly interjected, "Signal left, turn right."
This is essentially what China has done more or less consistently since 1978 -- keep Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought alive to justify the continued rule by the CCP, while adopting a pragmatic policy towards economics.
Consequently, the CCP leadership has allowed a greater 'zone of indifference' around every day activities and have allowed an odd hodgepodge of private, public-private joint ventures, township & village owned enterprises, etc to compete with the traditional state owned enterprises (which the state is seeking to privatize).
Basically the only thing the CCP isn't allowing is contestation from outside the party. Inside, it's a really fascinating game of factions, power struggles, and old men trying to keep themselves on top of the social pyramid.
My understanding is that Linux StarOffice is severely marred (basically THE thing people find lacking) by its GUI which is neither KDE nor Gnome, and basically rather underdeveloped.
This primary shortcoming doesn't apply to the Windows Staroffice, where its graphics are windows standard (ie same as MS Office).
People on Windows aren't expecting GUI better than windows standard. If all you've seen is SO on linux, then don't be surprised when you start hearing about windows users being impressed by SO.
He says the UI is badly designed, the MSOffice importing is badly flawed, it resorts to heavy techie jargon too often, and it's just plain buggy.
Microsoft made a very large investment in Corel about a year or so ago. Corel almost immediately stopped working on Linux related software and sold off what it had. Without a roadmap for the future their stock price has fallen dramatically. Investors aren't stupid. You can't compete with a monopoly holder on its own turf.
More like semi-XML-like garbage in a HTML file. It seems to work (you can save as 'HTML' and get the formatting back into Word), but yeah calling it XML was an overstatement.
to nitpick...
<ms-word format="screw-you">
<![CDATA[
l;wekras'epfu]9rj]-w34rmgq]4 5u]`mwmu
-345u1vu3bm405m-uq[w4rkv=wr,v3,rvir=\aaoifj[0u5
[0uigjmlvn'sdlku[0qrt94tu0349'rgja'ergj'
q49u]1349tjg'oalrjg'90ut][340tpojer'porgj093
4u51]04jg'aorjg'q394u51340tuj4nmg'eut[034
]]>
</ms-word>
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
They have the collective business sense of a two year old. Price alone does not account for marketshare, not nearly as much as quality. Both of these are drawfed by marketing. Other factors, such as product support and integration with existing systems are high on a company's wish list. Most medium to large companies will not even consider the price; and a smaller company would have to weigh if the savings in cost was worth learning a new system and having to move all their old stuff to the new system.
Finally, while giving away an unlimited number of copies to China may seem like a good idea, because the Chinese students may prefer this software when they are older, just remember how easy it is to get illegally pirated software in China. Who would pony up $75 when they could buy it on the streets for $5? This is like giving candy to child shoplifters in the hopes that when they get older they'll stop shoplifting and buy your candy.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Read the article
It's free for all education institutions anyway, period. You just have to buy the media. It's the same deal for solaris. We usually pay about twenty-something bucks I believe for the media. Plus not everyone is going to need the media. And you may even be able to distribute backups internally in your educational instition ( read the licence ).
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
SteelX wrote:
.NET-phobia)
.Net's crown jewel (and the bane of privacy organizations everywhere). Hailstorm (supprise, supprise) has fallen flat on its face, and now Microsoft announces that it too will be joining Office. Also joining Office will be the subscription fees to pay for Hailstorm (and while you are at it, Microsoft hopes you will pay for Office over and over again too).
> Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also
> planning their so called next-gen Office
Actually, that was Microsoft being caught with nothing to offer when a new competitor had a new version. They can't let a competitor be in the news without blabing about themselves, so they mumbled some things about their next Office version (due in another six months to a year at the earliest). Of course they are still trying to get people to upgrade to Office XP, when many are still running Office 97, and I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.
> it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm
> getting
Here's a nice story that might make you feel better. Once upon a time, Microsoft spent much time and money researching a brilliant new idea. They brought it to market, and named it Bob. Poor Bob fell flat on his face and immediately died (I believe the cause was terminal stupidity, but I could be wrong). (Un)fortunately, the cute cudly assistants from Bobland were rescued and went to live in Office, where they lived happily ever after (until Microsoft recently made them disabled by default).
History, thankfully, repeats itself (because Microsoft never seems to learn). In the late 90's, Microsoft spent much more time and money researching the Millenium Project (yep, Millenium also starred as the alien that Godzilla nuked in "Godzilla 2000 Millenium"). Millenium used Java (and a JVM named "Borg") instead of C#, but it was basically the same thing that Microsoft is bringing to market under the name of ".Net". Hailstorm was to be
Sooner or later, every product of Microsoft's that people hate will be bundled with either their OS or their office suite. With any luck, both Windows and Office will become so universally hated that people will switch to all the better alternatives that are out there (and more will come the more people want them).
What happens when you embrace and extend Godzilla? Nuclear heartburn!
See "Godzilla 2000" (released in Japan as "Godzilla 2000 Millenium") for details.
I know it's asking much, but many students can obtain cheap copies of Microsoft Office from their universities for $25-100. I'm personally interested in helping out Sun's development and sales of Star Office (being able to install on 5 computers is very gracious of them), but I'd rather not pay 3x what I can get Microsoft Office for.
I'm sure students like myself would snatch up Star Office (download version only, to save on boxed-set material costs) for $25. It's hard for me to justify a $75 purchase for features I'd only occasionally use just in the name of my support of Star Office/Open Office. I'd rather spend $25 on SO, then spend that $50 on some other open source software or donation to my favorite distro - Debian.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
The commercial version includes a talking paper clip.
I agree, a volume price break to around $50 would make this a totally reasonable choice for businesses of 10+.... Offer a 10-pack for $500, and you'll get a lot of attention. That's about $20 more than the off the shelf price for Office XP pro for just one person. To be fair, though, I don't know how much MS discounts Office to its biggest customers/victims.
Great hint for Sun (if they're reading) is to setup a promotion where the user gets a coupon on the box for a $25 instant rebate. Instead of $75, it's 50, and that's a very reasonable price indeed for software that can accomplish what 85-90% of the $400+ suite use their software for: Document generation and word processing.
I would like to point out that users who get Office with an OEM machine are paying extra for it somewhere--it's never free.
I also encourage Macintosh users who are interested in non MS word processors to check out either Appleworks or the AbiWord beta for OS X (which requires XDarwin.) Obviously, those wanting support from an "established vendor" will pick Appleworks. Those wanting to participate in an open source project should get AbiWord...
Who did what now?
I would be more than surprized if the next version
of Office is all about locking you in and locking
all other office suites ( well, at least their
file formats) out.
It will be all about trying to maintain their
chokehold on the desktop and nada about empowering
the user.
Grease is not the Word.
Sleaze is the Word.
[no text]
But the lameness filter doesn't like that.
deus does not exist but if he does
Does anybody else get the symbolism yet? 76? As in 1776, Declaration of Independence, freedom (in this case freedom from Microsoft).
$76 isn't dirt cheap, but it's pretty cheap considering its liberal licensing terms. According to the press release, the $76 single user license can be installed on up to FIVE computers. Enterprise licensing is about $50 per seat. The only catch for the low price is bare bones support. You get online support (not a bad deal if it's as good as the Sunsolve Solaris support website) and one free support call. Presumably they'd charge more for higher level support contracts. The sad part is, Microsoft's support for a $700 retail Office XP isn't any better than Sun's lowest level support on $76 Staroffice. Do you even get a free support call with retail Office XP?
Help me out here (foggy memory) but wasn't IBM
considering Star Office just before they bought Lotus?
1000 SlashDot sigs
{meta name="MSOfficeApplication" value="Microsoft Word for Windows XP v 10.5"}6 5"}
{document author="os2fan2" author_grandmother="granny" authorAuntPetDog="Spike" authorBankAccount="blah blah blah"}{section orientation="landscape" pagewidth=11918 padgeheight=16854 pagesize="A4"}
{page number="1" facing="right"}{para font="Venderra" size="12" colour="ffffff"}Hello world!{/para}{para font="Venderra" size="12" colour="ffffff"}A second line.{/para}{/page}{/section}{/document}
{meta name="OperatingSystemVersion" value="Microsoft Windows XP Subscription"} {meta name="Expires" value="2003.07.05"} {meta name="Account" value="1284568-255466987-1125584-2145411156-25461
Output is:
Hello world!
This is a second line.
Leave any punctuation out, and word will show the source code like this, after briefly showing your document how it would have looked if it had worked properly. Word 97 does that :(
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Like 2 peas in a pod ...
Getting them ready for the Ministry of Java, I suppose.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Given Sun's history of starting out from BSD, I think it's only logical they do a FreeBSD port.
FUD Part 1:
:)
"Companies considering a switch to StarOffice or a competing product won't find the move cheap. Gartner estimates that the average cost per user would be about $1,200, which works out to about $800 for labor and $400 for productivity. In contrast, companies upgrading to Office every two years would spend about $550 per user, or $700 every four years. That means many businesses would take eight years to recover their initial investment.
" (note: Was Gartner the company that made some pro MS statements in a report, and forgot to clean the MS-signed footnotes? Can't recall but i think it was them)
FUD Part 2:
"Whenever you put StarOffice on the desktop, you're taking a risk," Smith said. "You're moving to something that's not tried and supported...There's no guarantee that file compatibility won't be a problem."
Are we happy now?
unfinished: (adj.)
The DMCA specifically allows for reverse engineering for interoperability reasons. This would seem to be a pretty clear-cut case of that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
So you are suggesting we make a donation to Sun Microsystems? I already did that, I bought some of their %^%## stock.
But seriously, if Microsoft products really are such scheise (could be, don't use em myself) then a competitor with a good product should not have to really on idealogically motivated sympathy.
The original "open source business model" was that we could have it both ways: someone to support us, for $, and the source, to modify, or compile for whatever weird ass platform we happen to be interested in.
Whether this is a good business model will be decided by the holy markets, but it certainly is attractive to a savvy consumer. Personally the main reason I don't like proprietary software is that I find it to be an adminstrative pain in the ass.
- License managers?
- Purchase orders?
- Support on non-intel platforms?
- Dependance on red hat 6.2? or windows '95
versus, sit down at a computer, install the tools I need, and start working.Your mileage may vary, and probably does. For those of you who skipped to the end looking for "the point", here it is
What do I get in my $75.95 product purchase that I don't get in the free project?
Of course, if you're content with openoffice.org, then download and burn for free.
Stop the brainwash
Sun has broken the mold by gifting the code to openoffice.org. There are now only threats from Microsoft standing in the way of there being OO based products like Dell Office, Office HP and Big Blue Office. This is a chance for IBM to finally extract revenge against MS. With no office revenue MS cash reserves will quickly start eroding.
I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.
While the rest of us were happily using word 6 and access 2 until we switched to openoffice (or in my case, LaTeX)
Thanks. I heard/read somewhere that WordPerfect document format is, actually, publicly available?
It was mentioned with regards to the fact that there have been several WordPerfect document "reanimators", which were able to reconstruct deleted WP documents by searching the disk, and knowing the structure of these files.
Sigged!
That's the one thing you always get with StarOffice that you can't get with OpenOffice.
I wonder how many corporation will buy StarOffice and use OpenOffice. It's not really as crazy as it sounds.
I bought a copy in...probably '95, and I still have the CD.
I think Office 95 is great for use with older laptops. Its disk requirements are very small compared with '97, 2000, and XP/2002, and it seems to be quick and fast.
If you can track down a copy at a hamfest, its a good product.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I *know* I'm gonna get flamed for this, but the last several releases of Star Office have absolutely SUCKED. We've been running them on our Sparc/Sunrays for the past few years. They still have no concept of formatting or tables. Their image foramtting is non-existant, and their exports are STILL incompatible with M$. For Unix-flavors, I'd much rather stick with wordperfect, or writing the document in HTML (which is about as cross-platform as it gets). And about that pathetic price: Most people don't know this, but you can buy MS Office Professional OEM (no manuals) for about $99 (but you have to know an authorized seller) They aren't *supposed* to sell you their copies for pre-installing on PC's, but many of them will if you're polite. I think that Star Office is a good start, but it should still be free because in my opinion it's still beta-quality. If Star does manage to start getting market-share, I am sure the M$ will drop their prices, and maybe even release a Unix-flavor - which shouldn't be too difficult since they *steal* code from BSD as it stands - I am sure that UNIX ports are in the future for M$ - They are just squeezing every little penny from the market that they can.
I didn't mean to say that Star Office exports are *incompatible* I meant to say that they are not 100% as they claim.
This must be really scaring MS. The astroturfers are out in force on this thread.
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
"Fork" always seemed to me to have the idea that someone took code and changed it to make it do something different. In this case, they're taking the openoffice.org codebase and adding extra pieces before they package/ship it.
Taking a project and adding extra graphics, templates and a manual doesn't feel like a 'fork' to me. From what I understand, as code changes in the openoffice.org project, that'll make it's way into future star offices too. 'Fork' would imply that they would only be doing their own development on that entire codebase from now on, and I don't think that's the case.
creation science book
To complete the irony, the $80.00 StarOffice is a much better product with the free OpenOffice running around. Seems like Tech Support is designed to handle "user error" not things like bug fixes.
by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.
-
China doesn't pay for software. For all intents and purposes, MS has done the same thing. They just don't know it.
OK, there is no pirating in China. I made it up.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Yes. It is one of the added features in the Star Office comparison list.
What about the StarOffice api? I can't find much usefull information regarding that.
Sure at openoffice you can find a bunch of information, but what about simple tutorials en extended examples. And what about interfacing with other programs. I have a hard time finding information about this.
In my opinion Staroffice's StarBasic should be developed much further to be a real competitor for VBA for Microsoft Office. Without this many companies won't switch to StarOffice.
Form the FAQ:
StarOffice 6.0 softwre is a commercial product aimed at organizations and consumers while OpenOffice.org 1.0 is aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community.
I really like this attitude, I wish more companies would take it on. Most of all I'm hoping that educational establishments are going to snap it up. I may write a letter to the head of my computer and maths department suggesting the change. There is now no need for Office anymore.
Yes, there're lots of children in China, but:
1) not every one can go to school
2) not every school has computer
Abi is free and fast. It doesn't have all the perty features of the other two but it takes about a second to load.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
As soon as I heard about Sun charging for Star Office, I switched over to OpenOffice. I haven't noticed any loss of functionality.
:-)
What I have noticed is that on a modern(500Mhz+) machine, Open Office is fast, relatively bug-free, and can open and save MSOffice documents easily. I rather like it.
I could see paying to support the project, but I don't see people paying $75 en masse for something they could get for free with OpenOffice.
So you've noticed that Open Office is fast on your 500MHz machine, and you rather like it. After a while you'll get used to it and any of its little quirks. When it comes around to renewing Office licenses at work you'll be able to say, "hey save 75% of the cost and get me an Star Office license because that's what I'm used to using anyway". Your company saves money, Sun gets their $75, part of that money goes back into improving your free Open Office that you use at home. I can't see anyone important that loses out in the deal
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
mailing list application in Applixware. The
data access tool is way beyond the OO one,
and it allows updates.
The underlying language (ELF) is open-source
(SHELF) and supports networking and talks
nice to other languages (using a well-documented
compact nested array data structure).
I use it to open the
cut/paste the records into a PostgreSQL database,
and then open a couple of spreadsheets with running
balanc calculations and category breakdowns.
Check it out Here
-- ac at home
Applix Wins
Open Office Wins
- Much better drawing tool - lines stay connected to the boxes!!!
- Better (by a little) MS Office import.
- Better quality of presentations.
- Real Microsoft
.doc file export (I think).
- Windows version.
I'm going to give OO another month and then make a real decision. So far it looks pretty good.-- ac at home
If I were you I'd try to find myself an old junker Pentium 200Mhz or more (as long as the thing can boot off of a CD).
I'd recommend trying to find an IBM PC365. It's a pretty common machine on eBay with a PPro 200 and a 2 gig drive. I got mine for about 30 dollars, if I recall correctly. It even supports a second processor if you want to play around with SMP.
--saint
I can almost see the big ad campaign next July: "Spirit of $76!"
Maybe they can hire Mel Gibson?
extremely well said, it's a shame this comment is currently just at +2 ( ). It's been said before but it's important to keep on saying it as long as people accept corporate propaganda without question (which, let's face it, the vast majority of us do.) Someone here used to have a sig quote (from The Usual Suspects, I think?) along the lines of: "The cleverest thing the devil ever did was to convince the world he didn't exist." Well the smartest thing Disney (corp.) ever did was to boil the frog so that gradually the idea that we might have intellectual freedom has become an outlandish, bizarre idea that most people just don't Get without a lot of careful explaining.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
System Requirements
StarOffice 6.0 runs on Solaris, Linux and Windows:
So, in other words, Sun is just like MS, only different. "Just support our own OSes, because we don't want to give anyone an opportunity to switch."
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Perhaps I'm naive, but I was curious if I could get a free eval of StarOffice to test for my company. I also thought it would be interesting to run it side by side with OpenOffice to see how they work differently.
First I noted that there's no 'contact the StarOffice dev. team' button or something like it on the Sun StarOffice page. I ended up following Sun's "Contact Us" trail until I found myself staring at a page of toll free numbers (rather than a more efficient IMO email address). I called and explained what I wanted. The guy who answered the phone explained that it is included with Solaris. I explained (reading from their site) that I wanted the Windows version (yes I work in a windows shop, oddly enough). So, he called me back and explained that I could download it for free, by following the download link.
Well, I said, "It doesn't say anything about a free download, but it does say it costs $75, but I'll give it a whack". We followed the links, until I could to the credit card/purchase order/etc. page.
"Hmmm", he said, "the engineer said you could download it for free. I guess he was wrong." So, my compaint isn't so much that I can't get a free eval copy, that's their call. My complaint is that they don't really seem to want to support it with any sort of dedicated customer support people.
Too bad. I had high hopes for moving my office away from MS Office and on to StarOffice. We would only have purchased maybe 100 copies if we'd liked it.
Slurms.
-----
Pretty Bad Privacy (PBP) Public Key
6
This is cool: according to Sun, when you buy StarOffice, you get versions for Linux, Windows, and Solaris. That means I can run it on my Linux laptop, my two Windows machines, and my Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris 8.
All for only $75. Where's that 'add to my cart' button....
Sun has got to take a page out of the Amazon book and create an affiliate program for StarOffice purchases ... we can all post the link/promo on our web sites and get $5 or something per copy sold ... $5 that would have gone to Microsoft!
Perhaps a better question is whether or not OpenOffice 1.0 is a close enough approximation to not even care about pirating the "real thing".
Schnapple
I have the utmost respect for Sun, but if you're going to spend ~80$ then you may be better off waiting for Gobe Productive to come out. Which is here. I have been following these guys since the Beos days, and v 3.0 looks like hot shit. And Ars Technica seems to think so too. The Linux version is coming out soon, and if you buy the Windows version at its introductory price(~80$) they will send you the Linux version for free when it comes out.
According to this, WordPerfect filters for OpenOffice are coming soon thanks to a project with the City of Largo, Fla. AbiWord already reads WordPerfect documents (can't say how well, I don't have many WP docs), and I believe this project is porting their filter to OpenOffice.
Please e-mail Josh Berkus, josh@agliodbs.com , to contribute or pledge support. I've already sent in my pledge :)
sigfault (core dumped)
Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free
It used to be said about some people that they knew the cost of eveerything and the value of nothing. I think the coroprate types who will only accept something if they can pay for it are morons.
The reason that M$ office is so widely used is that it was forced upon companies by "professional suit wearers" who knew remarkably little about actually using it. I am still carped at by older secretaries for forcing them away from Wordperfect for DOS and into MS Word for Windows. I am told that the productivity of Word is far lower than WP. Pehaps some of them are just annoyed because Windows BSODed again, but DOS didn't do that often...
At least, if SO becomes popular it will mean that I have some idea what the applications I am supposed to support is actually doing. If there is a big enough move away from MS, maybe these managers will start to wonder about their fixation on paying huge sums of money to unresponsive and irresponsible Microsoft.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Funny you should mention the 9th Century...
That was around the high point of Islamic civilisation, when they were *centuries* ahead of the West, which was then literally in the Dark Ages. We owe them an enormous debt; namely our numerical system, much advanced mathematics (notably algebra, an Arabic word), navigation, the preservation of much Roman knowledge and elements of Chinese.
The rot started I gather with the Crusades (speaking of war-like religious zealots...) when the threat from them was used by the ratbag element of Islam to clamp down on scientific enquiry and go back to a fundamentalist direction. Sort of what the Religious Right wants to do in the US...
I gather a lot of more thoughtful Moslems (and there's plenty more of those than the extremist nutters) are seriously looking back at this golden age of Islamic civilisation and seeing how that great time and its spirit of enquiry could be revived.
I wonder if anyone still reads this thread. Anyway, here's a pretty insightful
ZDNet article that talks about why somebody would want to pay $76 for StarOffice instead of downloading OpenOffice.org for free. One interesting part is where the author mentions that since the codebase for StarOffice and OOo are sync'ed daily, a company can actually just buy one copy of StarOffice for $76 (to get Sun's support) and deploy OOo company-wide.
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=MATT+10&l anguage=english&version=KJV&showfn=on&showxref=on
Why stop at verse 14?
34Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
35For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
36And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
37He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
38And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.
39He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.
That sounds pretty much like a rationale for suicide bombing if I really wanted to interpret it that way. But in any case, this is a small part of the New Testament, which also embraces a "love thy enemy" philosophy. No wonder Christianity was the religion of choice for missionaries wanting to pave the way for imperial expansion.