Slashdot Mirror
Sun Denies StarOffice on Mac OS X
mattworld1 writes, "MacCentral is reporting that while development of OpenOffice for Mac OS X will continue, Sun is denying that a version of StarOffice is in the works. This is unfortunate, as it would be nice for Mac OS X users to have a good alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office." Apparently it's not all bad news, as VValdo writes, "The recent announcement of a collaboration from Apple/Sun on a Java-based version of StarOffice for Mac OS X shocked and angered many of the OpenOffice developers who had been left totally in the dark. After two days of intense programming on a proof of concept, they announced a first look at Open Office in Aqua." Neat!
This was on other sites yesterday. Isn't that scary that that is considered "old" now adays?
Some reported didn't understand the difference between a "Sun Project" and a Sun employee working on the OpenOffice project. Simple as that. Good news is the publicity made by the mishap sped development along quite it bit as thousands of new users and developers tried the app for the first time.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Can they just make up their minds?!?
While they are at it, Sun should work with Apple to make a much faster JVM in OSX. Having Java 2 version 1.4 would be a big help.
Java is their crown jewel, but a cocoa-ized version of Star Office would be kick ass.
Now, before people start railing on "how much memory this takes", or "how slow it will be" because its an app in Java, may I suggest you run over to Borlands site and tryout JBuilder. Most developers think its a C++ app, when, in actuality, it is a Java app.
And no, its not slow, and no, it doesn't have a major memory footprint.
Yeah, and grandma will have a great time trying to understand that.
Lets face it, people buy Office for the userfriendliness.
From this C|Net article: "I don't want to sell StarOffice for OS X," [Tony Siress, Sun's senior director of desktop marketing solutions] said. "I want Apple to bundle it. I'll give them the code. I'd love it if I could get the team at Apple to do joint development and they distribute it at no cost--that it's their product. Nobody makes a product more beautiful on Apple than Apple." Perhaps Apple could rework AppleWorks to incorporate Sun's work.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
emacs, join, sort, grep and cut is an alternative if you go back in time to 1985.
Essentially, Star and Apple programmers have been working with the OpenOffice developers on getting out a version of OpenOffice (which the original reporter confused with StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice) for MacOS X. But it is still under the aegis of OpenOffice and will be a called OpenOffice and will not be sold by Sun. It was never an official Sun-sponsored initiative and no one was given a paid position to support a MacOS X version. But Sun employees did some work, Apple employees did some work, and the StarOffice team provided informational help on the structure of OpenOffice, when asked.
This distorted reporting has spawned a lot of scathing commentary on all sides. Shows that having the right facts in the wrong order can be as bad as having the wrong facts, as far as the community is concerned.
After all.. what company would deny (lie about) working on a project that's in early development!?
Reminds me of the Bungie denials about Microsoft only days before the buyout was announced.
Appleworks is a good alternative! Appleworks has everything I need in an office suite. Plus, it's not buggy like Star Ofice or slow like MS Office X.
There are more screenshots, but again, have patience with and mercy on the connection!
That's never a good sign on a site slashdot links to. I saw one blury screenshot (stopped the page load after a couple minutes.)
That server's toast for sure. Anyone have a higher bandwidth mirror of the screenshots?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Lets see. Mac users are supposedly better edumacated then us other lusers. Let them pay for the expensive M$ office suite. They deserve what they get.
That may be fine for the 1% of computer users out there who actually use the tools. It's far more important to let joe-average user (teacher, student, homemaker, small business owner, retiree etc...) know that there is no real reason to spend extra money on microsoft office products. There are lots of viable alternatives out there, be it StarOffice, AppleWorks or whatever.
.rtf instead of .doc we'd all be a lot better off. File convertors are a clumsy non-solution - you don't see us 'converting' e-mails written in Outlook so we can read them in .vi, so why do we continue to operate this way with text files? The proprietary features of Microsoft products (PowerPoint, complex text manipulation in Word etc...) are only really required by a small percentage of business users, in which case the money spent is a good investment.
In my view the biggest problem is the lack of standards in document formatting these days. For example, if people would simply save word processor files as
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Who the hell is pudge???
That announcing a "First Look" at something "Neat" for geeks will result in an instantaneous Slashdotting.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Is that if Apple bundled OpenOffice with OSX. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. This would make OSX even more compelling. It would also allow Apple to tell MS to shove that carrot they dangle over Apple where the sun don't shine. They are already overcharging their customers already, why not charge $10 more per machine to cover tech support costs for OpenOffice. They by this fall with Redhat and Apple including OpenOffice we would actually start to see some market share. If we are ever going to get out from under MS's thumb we have to start somewhere. Next is to port Evolution to windows, and Mac and get a free exchange plugin going.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
They had a quartz version of open office before this mess came out (alpha mind you based pre 1.0). Nothing new on that front other than it now has an aqua theme.
you forgot to add LaTeX, some people actually have to format their work.
Sure, some folks are trying to port it over to the Mac, but let's face facts, the port won't be any good. The better Open Source programmers concentrate on creating programs for Linux platforms with a much larger market share than Macintosh (take away the number of machines they've dumped into schools and they must have less that a 1% market share).
This project, due to the second team programmers attracted to it, will fall apart quicker than the average teenage boy's SourceForge game.
The whole "problem" here has nothing to do with Sun or Apple, but it has everything to do with CNET running an inaccurate story that was picked up by the other "news" sites like Newsforge and Slashdot, thus furthering the rumors. This in turn created quite a fuss with the OpenOffice programmers who thought it would have been nice for Sun to tell them directly rather than getting the word through a news story.
The really interesting part of this little mixup is how quickly misinformation travels. While this episode might not be all that serious in the grand scale of things, I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up (ie- online news sites reporting some rumor story that spreads like fire through blogs and other online portals) will create a real problem or crisis. You watch. Information (thankfully) travels much faster and more freely these days, but that means the consumer of the information must pay more attention to filter out fact from fiction.
For those looking for more facts, check out the FAQ at
OpenOffice.org about the OS X port.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
While not free (as in beer or speech) ThinkFree Office is an alternative to Office.X. And it's only US$50. Of course, it's quite slow (Java-based) but it supports the MS file formats that I've thrown at it (Word and Excel v.X) and is quite stable. Of course, I've already sold my soul to Office.X but ThinkFree Office *is* a decent alternative.
It's just that it's going to come in 78 3 1/2 inch floppies.
Of course, since Mac's do not come with floppies any more, this is going to be quite a challange to get it installed on a non-networked system. <snicker>
---
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
Follow the $$ trail. Its in M$'s best intrestes to hamper development of Office alternatives.
They have been unhappy about poor OfficeX sales which leads me to suspect they are pressuring Apple to stop cooperating with Sun developers.
Just say 'NO' to intellectual property
Down with Crapitali$m. Anarchy NOW!
For more information, check out the NewFactor article at : http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18805.html
0 15675.htm
Also check out this GeekNews story: http://geek.com/news/geeknews/2002Jul/gee20020731
(Don't need the Karma, I just want people to get the facts straight. I hate misinformation being spread around...)
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Maybe they are denying this news because in truth SUN AND APPLE ARE MERGING!!!
Wouldn't that make a great little conspiracy story? Come on, think about it. Sun has positioned themselves such that they need desktop software and Apple SHOULD be looking to G4/5 alternatives, particulary 64 bit options if they want to maintain any customers in the movie industry. The sparc wouldn't be a poor choice, since it seems like its roadmap goes farther than the vanilla powerpc chips.
Okay, it would be pretty un-applish to want to port Aqua to solaris rather than darwin, but you never know. Or the apple/sun conglomerate could maintain 3 difference unixes (don't forget that Sun has a linux distro coming out). It should would strengthen both companies pitch to the business sector since the whole office could come from one vendor (server, clients and office software). You can even picture what the new logo would be: a purple apple with sunbeams gracing one side, casting a shadow northward... no, farther north... yeah, past Oregon.. yeah, that far northward.
Come on silicon valley! Mount a RISC offensive against Redmond!
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
I saw this demo'd at the NY Macworld and it looked pretty good...
...And low cost too!
http://www.thinkfree.com
42
I suggest that instead of first posting, that you guys start a FIRST LOOK. Be the first to check out a slashdot link before it gets slashdoted. The proof on how you'd be first? Mirror the sitee and put it up. Then come heere and say FIRST LOOOOK!
I agree, the average joe does need to be educated that they don't need fancy $500 MS Software.
:-)
I don't believe that the tools I mentioned are hard to learn. The average home user isn't using spread sheets and database software, but you could do all of that with the tools I mentioned any way.
People feel they need super office apps, I just want to point out that if they don't
Ever wondered what slashdot trolls look like? Well here is a pic of the Wipo troll.
I'd missed the original article, so I don't know the whole story. But if there IS any truth to the Java port, I feel the need to point out Corel's failed venture to port the Wordperfect suite over to Java.
Why would it be any better to try such a thing now?
Have you painted a shed today?
Cute. That's a nice solution if you don't need anything like tables or fonts or any of the rest of "that fru-fru crap." While you're at it, maybe you'd like to suggest a replacement for replace Excel and Powerpoint too.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why is it that the Macintosh is always haveing rumors about it? Apple in general. What is it about Apple folk that makes them need to start/spread them? This isn't supposed to be a troll, honestly. It just seems that Apple has developed a cult that (most) other computer companies have not (slaves don't count).
I believe the original poster stated that the Sun and Apple programmers that worked on it were volunteering time (not getting paid).
I don't know who works for who on the dayjob side but it wouldn't particularly surprise me if employees from Apple and Sun were contributing.
If you look at The about page It's clear there is participation from at least Sun employees.
I think it's cool. I like OpenOffice. If people are looking for an alternative to MS Office, that's one of your better bets.
-- The unsig...
I've installed OpenOffice on the Win2K hard drive I have at school to show people that yes there is an alternative to MS Office. I installed it even though I had access to a liscenced version of Office XP. The learning curve was negligible and it opened all the existing Word docs I had.
;)
I'm looking very forward to OpenOffice on the Mac. I have AppleWorks which is fine however after using OpenOffice I was hooked.
Now if I could only look at the "First Look"
It's like telling a graphic artist who relys on Photoshop to just "Gimp" their next project...
Besides, most Mac users barely use the command line...
Telling my Grandma to "emacs, join, sort, grep and cut" when all she wants to do is WRITE A LETTER will probably require a change of her adult diapers.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Who in the hell modded this "interesting"?
Now, if Star Office was open source, you might have a point. It's Open Office that is open source. Star Office is a closed source commercial product.
So would they call the new company Snapple?
that can't happen. I mean apple is using a BSD unix base, while Solaris is now SysV
:)
Sun has a rich BSD history. A Sun founder was one of the writers of the original BSD. The old SunOS was BSD based. NetBSD & OpenBSD have Sparc ports. Porting Darwin over to Sparc would probrably be relatively simple (by kernel hacker standards).
Or they could port Aqua over to the old SunOS
are here.. :) very nice
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Bill? Is that you? Where's that $20 you owe me?
I'm not sure if people can't read or what, but I've heard many times now that the OS X port is being done by just 2 people. And I believe that neither of them work at Apple or Sun. OpenOffice itself IS being developed in part by Sun employees, but not the OS X port. I wouldn't be surprised if that changed in the near future though, especially with the interest in the product that this reporting error has caused.
I think the problem here is people seem to be confusing the whole OpenOffice product (which has been in development for years and hit 1.0 not long ago) and the OS X port of OpenOffice (which just began recently and is a long ways from 1.0 quality). I've heard a few people who think that OpenOffice as a whole won't hit 1.0 for years now, just because they read that this port could take that long. Someone should get the word our that OpenOffice already is at 1.0 on most platforms.
Breakfast served all day!
I don't know. I look at lots and lots of "joe average user" docs. I've seen lots of OLE. I'm seeing lots of using of versioning and automatic document merging. I assume the rather good grammer and spell checking features are getting used when I compare to email. I'm not sure joe average user isn't getting quite a bit out of advanced features.
Even before word was popular why was everyone using WordPerfect 4.2 or 5.1? There were much easier to use (and cheaper) word processors and the WP format was easily convertable.
I have a question for folks that know more than me. If trends continue, we can expect Apple processors to become more powerful, meaning OS X will run faster on the newest Apple hardware. We can also expect more and more software, like OpenOffice, to be ported to OS X.
Could the Macintosh reach the point of becoming a viable alternative to the traditional UNIX workstation (like a Sun or an SGI)? I know that the old-school workstations are popular for scientific and mathematical work, but OS X could provide the convenience of a regular desktop OS and still let folks run their custom UNIX software. Do you think Sun is worried about losing market share to Apple?
Steve
" I assume the rather good grammer and spell checking features are getting used when I compare to email"
Don't you think we approach email and letters/docs differently? Much as we speak differently in different situations?
The work exactly like we think they should.
The interface simply fits.
Us Mac users just think different (tm), I guess.
Actually, I think it's the convergence of two factors: 1) The Apple corporate ("Insanely Great") culture, and 2) a user base which is a definite minority that is dominated by a unique mixture of artists and geeks.
MS' culture is smash-mouth business domination, which is attractive to some, but not conducive to rumors. And the others in the Windows camp, such as Dell, are all about surviving in the Intel-based toaster market, so don't have the time/energy/budget/desire/clue to buy a culture. (Not to mention that their customers, almost by definition, don't give a rip about style or radical innovation.)
Linux -- speaking as an outside observer -- has the geek subculture and is also a minority, like Apple users. But it doesn't have the depth of artist influence and it doesn't have the "Insanely Great" corporate culture.
And after all, how could there be Linux rumors? No flashy spokesperson, no big announcements, and everything out in the open for any programmer to take a look at. Not much grist for the rumor mill.
(I.e. to have rumors, you must have secrets and these secrets must be about something imaginative/exciting.)
Yes I do. But lots of users have naturally bad spelling and grammar . I'm a good example of this, I didn't check that last post and spelled grammar with an "er". That wasn't a typo it was an error of knowledge. Given the levels of errors of knowledge revealed by email it is clear that Word is clearly allowing people to perform better in the areas of spelling and grammar than their underlying knowledge would allow them to.
Well, I'm sorry to say your wrong. I do consider my self a pro, I use
/.? No? well than I wasn't talking to her. Shit, I
to use all of the MS office applications (excel, access, word). I have
no joke, replaced them with Emacs, join, sort, grep, and cut.
I realize that most Mac users barely use the command line, but I also
realize that Mac users are intelligent people. If they wanted to they
could figure those commands out. Its really not that hard after you
learn the basics of the command line. Its even easier to learn if you
tell yourself its easy. In fact go open a terminal in OS X right now, its in the applications directory. Mess around with it, look up some commands on the net.
Now, as far as you Grandma goes.. Well to be quite frank does your
Grandma read
would even want to try and teach my Grandmother how to use MS word.
If she wants to write a letter she can pick up a pen and paper,
nothing wrong with that.
I totally agree. I get very pissed off when people try to write productivity applications with languages like java. A lot of these new languages are very useful and powerful but they also make programmers lazy and lower the bar for programming.
It's a real joy when I get a negative karma on slashdot. That means I hit the nail on the head with extreme accuracy.
I have no joke, replaced them with Emacs, join, sort, grep, and cut.
hope you don't mind me asking but what exactly is it that you do with your computer? As a student i can't imagine myself giving up ms office although i think it's slow as hell and i have a list of bugs i want fixed. explain how you would write a lab report or something like it with just those tools.
This is unfortunate, as it would be nice for Mac OS X users to have a good alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office
Wheres that good alternative? haven't seen any good alternative for Linux yet. Perhaps the linux community should accept that MS Office is the best office suite around and try to make something competetive, at least for once.
There's not such a thing that deserves to be called a good office suite for linux.
I'm not trolling, but I really do not like Star/Open Office. I really dislike the way it works. I've tried several versions and they all just annoy the crap out of me.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Only idiots use words like "edumacated".
wicked.
so this should be the alternative to ms office ?
be honest!
Well, written with Emacs it wouldn't be very pretty, unless you have LaTeX. Then it should look better than what you can do with Office.
It looks like crap and I doubt it will ever behave like a Mac app. Has this person even READ the human interface guidelines?
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Apple owed Claris, which was renamed "FileMaker" after Jobs brought most of the Claris apps back under Apple. Just look at the copyright notice on every FileMaker page.
What are the proprietary features of Microsoft Office, anyway? The paperclip? By necessity I use a lot of Word and Excel at the office and I can't imagine that most of what I use them for isn't so logical a function that it could be patented (and I work at a patent law firm). I know I probably won't get many answers buried way down here, but I'm curious.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, install OO on a Windows 2000 box, then log on as a regular user and try to run it... doesn't work at all. Maybe someday it'll work out of the box, and I'll be thrilled to make the switch.
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
- Apple would merge and have only "one" suite - which would be Appleworks + Staroffice as a blend. This would translate into less choice, not more for the OSX user.
- If Apple took it over, I forsee that 99.9% of the development would be by Apple itself. Yes Apple gives back to the community, but then the Star/Openoffice.org group would see that as a chance to slack off. What OSX needs more than Apple working on things is *other people* working on things. Diversity breeds innnovation. Apple is good, but they shouldn't have to do everything.
Appleworks has come ("free") with every iBook/G4 Powermac I've bought at our company since OSX 10.1 came out. It's default loaded in the dock even. That's the best exposure any Mac office suite can get.I think what you mean is, I'm used to MS-Word, I've never used anything else, and I want to defend my choice since I've already made it.
Ceci n'est pas un post
I'm sorry, I was distracted by your blue screen of death. And my copy of Office for Mac OS X.
What were you saying?
Karma? Screw that noise. Burn it to the ground.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
explain how you would write a lab report or something like it with just those tools.
Get a good book about LaTeX and give it a try. It will be a bit odd at the beginning but soon you will see that it is faster then Word processor and of course instantly you will see far superior output on a paper comparing to anything else you can and cannot afford to buy. There is also nice GUI frontend called klyx, don't know if it available for MacOS X.
From the official "Instructions for Installing and Setting Up OpenOffice.org 1.0"
/net". For example, if you unzipped the files to "C:\OpenOffice Setup\" you would type C:\OpenOffice Setup\install\setup /net followed by Return. ... make a note of the folder in which OpenOffice.org 1.0 is installed onto your computer.
"If you have multiple users set up on your machine, then each user who wishes to use OpenOffice.org 1.0 will need to install separately. This uses up a lot of disk space. As an alternative, you can use the multi-user option instead, though installation is a little more complicated:
Unzip the downloaded file into its own folder. If you have Compressed Folders installed, the easiest way to do this is to right click on the file and then choose Extract All...
Open Command Prompt (if you have Windows NT, 2000 or XP) or MS-DOS prompt (for other versions of Windows). You should find this on the Start Menu somewhere under Programs (on some versions of Windows, it is in the Accessories folder).
You should then type the location of the folder followed by "install\setup
Then follow the on screen prompts
This will install a shared version of OpenOffice.org 1.0 on your computer. Now each user who wishes to use the program can double click on the program setup.exe that was created in the folder you have made a note of in step 4 above - this will install the files necessary for that user and use only a few additional megabytes of disk space."
Wasn't that hard, was it?
Cheers,
-max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I know you're not supposed to "grouse about rejected submissions" but I can't help it this time. I submitted this half an hour after it was posted on maccentral at 7:30 AM eastern. What to you have to do, pay that Taco guy to get your story posted!? No thanks :-P
No it's not. StarOffice is a commercial distribution of OpenOffice.org, just like Red Hat is a commercial distribution of Linux.
What would happen if MS was two companies - an Office company and an OS company? I think we'd have MS Office on Linux OS - MS's worst nightmare. I think the reason they sell MS Office for Mac OS is they know a Mac OS can't hurt their Windows OS market share - it's too simple and it's restricted to Mac hardware. Linux could - it's free - like IE. IE killed Netscape. Can Linux kill Windows? Maybe some day - maybe soon. There was a time when Word Perfect, Corel, or Novell's Office was a contender - it wasn't that long ago. I've heard many complaints about Microsoft's software assurance license switch. Is anyone willing to take a risk and run Linux? What about a free office suite? Too much risk, for now.
Replacing Microsoft Word with LaTeX and Emacs - possible I believe, after you spend time learning all the markup in LaTeX. I actually prefer Vim but that's not the point, and I used to use LaTeX to do all my reports and thesis awhile ago when I was still in uni. However I don't even know how to get my document skeleton right in LaTeX now, since I have not been using it for a few years! You see - something that takes time to pick up, you can loose it easily as well. Whereas I can fire up OpenOffice/MS Word anyday and use it without much prior knowledge.
And I just cannot understand how people can replace Excel/OpenOffice Calc with join(1), sort(1) and grep(1)!! I am working with some financial advisers who have spreadsheets of a few thousand cells with lots of interdependency and different data sources. The re-calculation of the sheet itself might take a few minutes (maybe because it is in Excel). However, people don't just use spreadsheet to represent data in simple tabular format! People don't just use spreadsheet as a simple 2 dimentional database! There are lots of different uses of spreadsheet that just cannot be replaced with command line utilities.
There is no technical reason why OSX couldn't support, in addition to Carbon and Cococa, access to the graphics system through the X11 protocol. The amount of code required on Apple's side would be small (a few hundred kbytes of binary), and users would not be able to tell whether an application talks to Quartz through Carbon or the X11 protocol.
Of course, efforts like OpenOffice would still have to work on implementing Apple GUI guidelines, but they would have to do that even if they use native widgets.
Many of Apple's new users picked the Mac because it is UNIX; Apple should support graphical UNIX applications fully and out of the box rather than insisting that other people spend large amounts of time unnecessarily on ports.
Wouldn't be as good. Apple has a (short) history of damaging Apple-based software businesses by including functionality for free. This happened with CD burning software (Toast used to be much more important...) and some smaller multimedia utils such as Winamp (there was an alpha version for OS X - it won't be cont'd probably due to iTunes).
It's essentially the same strategy MS persued when "integrating" IE into Windows.
Of course, those Apple applications are neat and a huge added-value. But at some point, Apple will hurt its industry partners - that's bad because the OS X platform needs new software and new ports.
They can't support Solaris 9 on Intel, an existing product for the most part, let alone branch out in to MacOS land
Basically, when I run out of toilet paper I have been wiping my ass with Sun stock certifcates as of late...
[So lets say that Apple ships OpenOffice with OSX. Microsoft could then stop or greatly slow development for I.E., Outlook, and Office for the Mac. This would force quite a few comopanies to switch off of the Macintosh platform. Or at lest take a long look at how a Windows XP machine would perform instead of a Macintosh.]
.doc's) so I doubt bundling OpenOffice would change much from MS's Mac division's point of view.
.doc formats every year or two. *ah*, we can all dream.
Apple's already developing and supporting AppleWorks (once ClarisWorks, and it's always, even if you had to use MacLinkPlus, opened and saved Word
And if Apple could take the effort spent on AppleWorks and give it to OpenOffice.org we'd have a better product all around. I've been using OpenOffice this week, and it's better than AppleWorks imo.
Though I'd still prefer they'd just stopped at MacWrite 2.0 and got M$ to stop pushing new
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Ok, I'll give the LaTeX argument. I can see how people after not using it for a while would much rather open up word or something. - good point.
:-). and I deal in LARGE amounts of data in which I use to use Access and Excel. I now use the linux tools to manipulate data. Now, it does happen from time to time that things get sooo complicated that I may use Perl, but that is super rare when it comes to that.
However, I work for an online emcomerce company. Not saying wich one
When its all done, the person that needs my data can easily import it into excel if they want to.
With the tools I mentioned I can grep out data, sort it by different collums in different ways, yada yadda yada.
Now, I believe this whole conversation started talking about the "joe user". Which is why I mentioned those tools in the first place.
I do agree with you that things get so complicated you need databases (obviously). But the average user probably isn't going need to use a db.
I honestly believe they can get away with the tools I mentioned.
People like visuals, different pretty fonts and all that.. I know, like I said I use to do all the stuff I do now in access, and excel because I didn't relize it was possible another way.
I'm sorry, can you submit that to me in PDF or Excel format?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
StarOffice is the BIGGEST POS BloatWare I've ever used. Ha! I would NEVER install it on any of my Linux machines, much less my Mac. In the immortal words of Python: "Piss Off"
Looking at this shot: http://www.iceni.org/~peterlin/full_sdraw.jpg
brings up a few questions:
Why does the OpenOffice application have the focus, but the menu bar says that Terminal does.
Interesting set of applications running. What does Photoshop have to do with this?
Now I haven't done any development under OS X, and the terminal windows looks like legit. What's up?
What, me worry?
Aqua is not only a look but also a feel. Is the plan to just change the widgets to use the Aqua graphical style, or will they also be re-laying out the interface to conform with the Aqua UI guidelines?
slashdot!=valid HTML
One interesting thing about OS X is that Microsoft is an important figure in the world of OS X; without Microsoft, OS X won't be able to run Internet Explorer and Office X. Although OS X is a great software with its Aqua interface and BSD level stability, I don't think anybody will be willing to use it without decent web browser and word processor.
:)
Therefore, one handy strategy for MS when Apple *bravely* tries to break the alliances is to stop support for IE and Office for OS X. Thus, it may follow that there will be no Aqua desktop ported to x86 hardware nor any attempts to provide substitues for IE and MS Office.
In this respect, Sun's decision to not support StarOffice for OS X can be a good strategy; you don't need to convert Microsoft into an enemy by explicitely supporting StarOffice for OS X. Rather, supporting OpenOffice would be a better choice, building the potential for Open Office as a competitive substitute for MS Office. Moreover, Apple is in the worse situation than Sun when competing against Microsoft. For Apple, supporting StarOffice will mean the massive attack from Microsoft. Apple won't like to see it realized in a near future.
Hey, at least I don't have to beg Sun to publish an Office Suite for me.
Not that I'd want to because MS Office is so perfect!
Who cares about that proprietary OSX? OpenOffice works perfectly fine on Linux/PPC (i.e. YDL). Do you want alternative to M$ office suite on Mac? Just make a right choice about OS to install.
Less is more !
Stallman is a programmer, but not just any programmer. Probably more than anyone else, he created the foundation for a software genre--and a movement--that is one of the last buttresses against the monopolists who want to capture perfect control of the technology business and the money that flows through it.
His creation became known as 'free software,' the notion that users of computers need and deserve the ability to freely use and modify the crucial programs that make these machines work. Proprietary software abridges those freedoms.
Stallman's GNU project helped spark the Finnish software genius, Linus Torvalds, to create a crucial piece, the crucial component, of what is now called the Linux operating system. Stallman calls it GNU/Linux. He has a point.
The desktop picture in the way back is britney spears on a tree swing.
ed peterlin
Kevin's completed the port to LinuxPPC and it's excellently stable under several LinuxPPC distributions. Another great example of what community developers bring to OpenOffice.org.
Don't forget that we're supporting DarwinPPC as well! The OS X team's Darwin port already in a few distributions like the GNU Darwin distribution. They also have screenshots of it running on Darwin, something that I've never seen in person!
ed peterlin
"Word is clearly allowing people to perform better in the areas of spelling and grammar"
Fair point but, do you not think we are rapidly reaching (perhaps have reached) a stage where we vastly over-value spelling/grammar?
Intially there was some return on the effort - phonetic spelling at time of widely divergent dialects was unrecognisable outside its dialect pocket.(I regularly speak to people with irish accents but I have to concentrate to SLOWLY read Finnegans Wake.)
Whether you spell grammar er or ar is unimportant. I know what you mean. Language is after all first and formost about communication - getting the message across. Spelling varies slightly between UK and US english, and between regions of each but to an english speaker gray/grey are the same word as are jail/gaol or color/colour. When a convention of spelling becomes valued over tone and content we have a problem.
Our "underlying knowledge" is of a spoken language, writing is but speech writ down and speaking for myself, I not only find Word's grammar checking intrusive, I find it absurd that a machine should be judged to have a better understanding of the possible constructions of the English language than a native speaker.
ever tried doing the same thing with Micro$oft Office 97? It doesn't work without making the users all Administrators, or doing a registry hack!!
Don't know about Office 2000, but probably the same problems apply
Well first off let's not forget that we were talking about why I believed the "joe average user" was getting some genuine value from Word. We both agree that society attaches a great deal of importance to spelling and grammar and that Word is assisting people with better spelling and grammar than they would otherwise have.
As for your general point regarding overvaluing: My opinion is that grammar evolves very rapidly to achieve a good balance between:
a) reducing complexity of the rules of grammar
b) allowing people to understand vague constructions within the language
c) maintaining consistency across time
In other words I'm Pollyannaish about the whole thing the level of grammar in use is probably pretty close to the level of grammar that needs to be in use to handle the rest of the language. Take for example word order, English is very strict about where words can appear and you have very little freedom to choose the position of your words inside your sentence. The rules regarding word order are not terrible complex and they have remained highly consistent though time so I can easily understand the parts of speech for various words even reading say Chaucer.
On the other hand we haven't had enough Asian languages yet to need rules governing verb-noun compound words, Walkman -- the portable tape players from the 1980's, being the only example of a verb-noun compound we borrowed that comes to mind. It's highly likely though during my lifetime these rules will be introduced into English as our level of contact with Asia keeps increasing. To see the importance of this does "Walkmen" mean:
a) More than one Walkman tape player
b) A variety of different types of Walkman tape players
What about "Walkmans" does that mean (a) or (b). Which should mean which? How would you understand which I meant given that we don't have a rule of grammar?
As for computers doing a better job than native speakers: they don't though they are taught to pick up certain types of common mistakes and that is useful. OTOH I see no reason that a computer in this day and age shouldn't have the whole "11th English book" down cold and be able to correct every single grammar error better than a professional editor. I certainly would consider that valuable. Why not throw style on top of that have the computer mention the fact that in this post I changed voice and ask which voice I want and unify the voice throughout the post?
"Well first off let's not forget that we were talking about why I believed the "joe average user" was getting some genuine value from Word"
You're 100% right, its just overstrict spelling/grammar is a pet bugbear of mine, apologies for drifting off topic.
"My opinion is that grammar evolves very rapidly"
I agree, which is why the idea of rules for it cast in stone in a grammar checker seems so wrong. Grammar is fluid and there are shades of grey.
"English is very strict about where words can appear and you have very little freedom to choose the position of your words inside your sentence"
I think this is true until it isn't - my mother's family are in S.Wales and sentence structure among the Welsh seems to follow its own logic - though its meaning is still plain to a native english speaker.
"On the other hand we haven't had enough Asian languages yet to need rules governing verb-noun compound words, Walkman"
To slightly distort your point here its the notion of having laid down rules which I feel is so wrong. The french might well have used walkman then been instucted, "non, c'est le petitmusique". I don't think you can wall in a language you just end up with an abstract "correct english" and then the language that people actually use - and the poor old BBC will get all sorts of stick about going boldy too bally far.
But that all said, I fully see your point and can accept the logic. I just sometimes feel that our frozen spelling reduces an alphabet to pictograms and that rules of grammar tend to be artificial - the spoken language is after all the "trial by jury".
But once again, this is just a pet bugbear of mine and I've no doubt I'd be shouted down in any sane gathering. Many thanks for letting rave.
That's why Sun bought Star Division in the first place. I'ts called portal server (or somesuch) and enables you to access staroffice from a browser.
Not released yet, or maybe even buried by now.
Maybe Sun just took some pieces from this port.
Well two points:
1 - I'm using grammar to mean the rules governing language people use. This may a difference between the US tradition, Webster -- words mean what people think they mean and England.
2 - As for spelling that clearly isn't changing fast enough. A great deal of English spelling is based on 17th century pronunciation. From what I know roughly 25% of the words that aren't spelled the way they sound totally change spelling with each generation. Our problem is that pronunciation seems to be changing very quickly. While you can read 17th century English easily understanding spoken 17th century English would be very difficult.
Klyx is majorly out of date. Lyx, from which is spun off, is still being activly developed. I use it for all my acedemic writing. Check it out: http://www.lyx.org
anyone would dirty their osx with an ugly product like openoffice. I don't like it and won't use it due to the large # of bugs not even to mention the other inherant problems (xserver - which btw I think it is ludicrous for you to claim apple should support it.. uhhh hello? Native aqua is really starting to kick ass! Jaguar is going to rock even more, and then next release after that is going to be even more advanced, better looking and faster.) I mean all you have to do is look at the other 'news' about the new Quartz api .. 3D icons... 3D windows... don't you think apple can make a better suite than openoffice is? I sure as hell do :p Go ahead and use your ancient emacs or whatever it is you like, but trying to force that garbage on the masses is not going to get apple anywhere! Sad for you, but true to all. Oh, and about that post whoever put up concerning marketshare - obviously you don't know jack. Less than %1 for apple yet linux is more than that? LOL, uh no.. actually linux is ONE-HALF of %1. It's not that difficult to find these generalised, yet mostly correct statistics. And what is with all these trolls in here? Go and get a life you evil bastards!