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Sony To Package StarOffice On European PCs
Jahf writes "This News.com article talks about how Sony is adopting Sun's Star Office suite over Microsoft office in some areas. It's nice to see it being adopted, maybe this is the beginning of a trend. While Star Office is still not as optimized as it could be (read: it eats memory and can be a little slow even compared to MS Office), it has all the features most people need and then some at a much better price." Specifically, as reader Yacoubean points out (pointing to coverage at InfoWorld),"The PCs will be sold in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland."
I just recently got my dad one of those cheap walmart computers and installed redhat 8 and staroffice and he loves it! He only dabbles with writing a few letters but he really seems to get along fine. I think overall it is a little slow compared to Microsoft Office but it has a surprising number of features you wouldn't necessarily expect from a free software product.
Kudos to Sun and the StarOffice group for creating a true Microsoft Office killer.
It would start to be anti-competitive if Sony owned StarOffice, and had a monopoly on distributing machines. It's not much like Microsoft at all.
Per some info I located: "The Office Startup Assistant (Osa.exe or OSA) is a program that improves the performance of Office XP programs. Office Setup places a shortcut to the Osa.exe file in the Windows Startup folder; the file is named "Microsoft Office". "The Osa.exe file initializes the shared code that is used by the Office XP programs. When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster. If the Office programs, instead of Osa.exe, initialize the shared code, the programs take longer to start." Microsoft already pre-loads most of the shared code on bootup, so you're already running portions of it even when you don't want to. Under WinXP, run msconfig and you can disable it from the startup. Time how long Word now takes to load (after rebooting) - not real noticable on a P4 with lots of RAM and fast drives though.
I really don't think so. This is in Europe anyway so what does the anti-trust case have to do with it?
Microsoft will tread lightly with regards to licensing of Windows but MS Office is open game because Microsoft was able to get the US States to drop their case against MS Office and concentrate only on the Windows OS.
When you see the US OEMs bundling StarOffice, OpenOffice, or Corel Office on business systems, THEN there's something going on at Microsoft.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Last time I checked the Star/open office was built using Java, hence the slow startup performance. Also the MS Offcie is preloaded at the start time and that is why it loads almost instantly or so it seems. I remember reading some performance reviews some time ago talking specifically about that. Maybe someone here can collaborate this?
However, your zealotry is also devoid of factual content. With your cavalier attitude towards a contrary opinion, it will be hard to persuade people to try Linux or any other 'new' technology.
I'll ask you some of the same questions: What about Linux is more stable? Examples, please.
Yes, Linux is very fast on a command line - there's no UI loaded up. But comparing XP to RedHat's BlueCurve on my Athlon XP 1500+ w/ 512MB memory and GeForce 3 Ti500 - running the latest Detonator drivers in Windows, and the latest NVidia drivers in Linux - they're both pretty quick. Yeah, that's not "scientific" - but neither one is *appreciably* slower than the other. MS Office XP is fast. StarOffice is slower, however. Normal usage of the core OS is about the same.
In the early part of your comment, you made a sarcastic comment about "Yeah, all those cross-platform apps you tested." Please, post the information you've got about cross-platform applications.
Well, my Linux side does run the Codeweavers and Transgaming plugins - the plugin versions are fast enough to use, but they *do* slightly lag behind the Windows versions in their "native" environment.
Windows XP - with Windows certified drivers - is very stable. I've had ONE BSOD in 13 months - from a Beta Detonator driver. Since then, not one.
Zealotry will get us nowhere in the halls of Corporate America, the desktops of Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Joe Sixpack. It makes us look like little children who ignore reality because it's our favorite toy.
I like Linux as much as the next geek/wannabe-geek, but I'm objective enough to see where we need to go, not where we imagine we are.
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
...and maybe not. I'll give you the benifit of the doubt and respond as if you are not troling.
/etc/hosts and /etc/hostname. Make sure those entries are correct before you whine about system speed. Also take time to do 'hdparm -Tt /dev/hd[x]' You should see data transfer numbers in the range of 20MB to 50MB. Also, under KDE, take time to optimize your video driver.
I have noticed that some linux distros are slow due to DHCP problems. I think emacs was the first text editor I ever saw that took time to look up the machine's FQDN and try to match what the DHCP server returned to entries in
It was taking like 3 minutes to start emacs and 5 minutes to start KDE. Other programs were also effected by the mismatched IP addresses. After I did a few tweaks (like 10 mnutes of work), emacs starts instantly and KDE is up in 10~20 seconds. Mozilla and OpenOffice are also very responsive.
AFAIRemember, Star office was really slow because it starts it's own desktop and loads a lot of drivers at startup. OpenOffice seems comprable to MS Office in startup speeds. But try to keep in mind that 90% of the programs you install under windows will add entries to the services tab of the MMC. This alows programs to start lightning fast because they are already mostly in memory.
Try this: On a fresh install of win2k/xp, look at 'msconfig' and the services list. Then install Office, Kazaa, Visio, Winamp, MusicMatch, etc... Then go back and look at the service list agian. Winamp and MusicMatch are very open about running in the background. Office and Kazaa use services to be sneaky. But don't be fooled, they are still running all the time. Slowly eating your memory.
To be fair, Mozilla and OpenOffice under Win32 use entries in 'msconfig' (i.e., your taskbar gets bigger) to speed up load times, but both programs tell you this at install time. They have to do this in order to have the appearance of speed comparable to MS IE and MS Office.
Oh, one more KDE tip: Make sure the 'fam' daemon is running before you start KDE. Somehow, the fam daemon indexes files needed by KDE in order to speed it up.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
When I was working at Circuit City about a year and a half ago, we had these, although only sort of bundled. The Sony rep stopped by, and along with his usual propoganda about various Sony features , he had a stack of Star Office CDs in slip cover-type cases with the Sun and Sony names printed on the outside (this was a pre-printed glossy cardboard slip, not some bootleg crap he rolled himself). It wasn't really bundled, per se, but he said, "when people ask you if they come with MS Office, you tell them they come with this." Right at that point I thought, "wow, that's a great idea. Way to go Sony. People really need to get used to the idea that they don't need to pay upwards of $400 for their basic word-processing and spreadsheet needs." Still, it never amazed me that in the face of Lotus SmartSuite and Star Office with different manufacturers (namely Toshiba and Sony), people still insisted on MS Office (even after we went to the trouble of saving various .doc and .xls files to a floppy and opening them with the other programs to show that you could indeed bring work home). Oh well, you can lead a horse to water...
I'm sorry, but you mention StarOffice 5.2. Sony is using StarOffice 6.0, which is as recent as Open Office, and uses the same base set of features.
Don't click that link, it's a goat link!!!!
Please do not click on the cave troll's subtle attempt to get you fired.
I think everybody should be able to modify any post as troll, because then we wouldn't have to see these obvious attempts to get us fired.
According to this AT&T was using its monopolies in local to gain an unfair advantage in long distance, or vice versa.
Mean while, you deal with legal monopolies every day. Your local phone company, gas company, and electric company are all monopolies. Those of you in the US, EDS (who administer the GRE, SAT, etc) is a monopoly
Here it is pal, look at privilege number 2 and you'll find out. And yes this is in America
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Abiword!
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.
Your linked document doesn't spin it that way, but that's what it means.
To clarify, here's a quote from the FTC that spells things out more directly:
-ZipwowI don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.