Slashdot Mirror
Gobe Productive GPL Release In Danger
Elliot writes "Gobe, developers of Gobe Productive, a fast and lightweight office suite initally developed for the BeOS and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage), announced in August that they would be open sourcing Gobe Productive under the GPL. Unfortunately, it appears that financial issues might prevent this from happening. A shame to see yet another wonderful piece of software [possibly] fail."
I bought a copy shortly after slashdot posted an article about it. It was a great software package. It was lite and quick, a hell of a lot quicker than OpenOffice and StarOffice, and the interface was just... clean.
My favorite part was the ability to export to PDF so easily.
My only complaint was the Spreadsheet program wasn't as robust as some of the other packages out there, but it still worked.
I hope everything works out for them. Personally, I think this was one of the best office packages around.
But if they GPL it, their competitors get to have it too. And they'd need to GPL it to not be hypocrites and to make this worthwhile.
Let's face it. Open source is nice, but its economics are not as profitable as those of closed source software. That makes things tough.
This reminds me of the collective action problem. Open source software is a public good like the environment or national defense, since it is jointly supplied and cannot be denied to any single person. If it is supplied to one person, it is supplied to everyone. But since people are selfish, they often won't want to contribute to it.
So what can we do? I say we should fix copyright law so that it only works for seven years. After those seven years we can use the source code of the program.
Perhaps they should start a fund, similar to what Blender did?
When Blender when under, they started a fund to which anyone could contribute (and I did.) Now their 3D modeling product is open source.
I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks to open the source.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
There it goes what some people already saw as future integrated Gnome Office.
At least there is nowadays an alternative to burying the software forever.
--YerSex
Sex - Find It
...because it is under, or not under, any specific license (even our beloved GPL). It's going to fail because Microsoft's "mindshare" is so phenomenal that it would take nothing short of a miracle for ANYONE to impact its 95+% of the Word Processor market.
I don't like that reality either. But, at the moment, it's true. That's why we need to keep pushing the existing suits remaining against MS. Because they DO have a huge monopoly, because they DID get it through illicit means, and because it IS making it virtually impossible for competitors (like the Gobe Productive people) to break into any of the many fields MS dominates.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It seems to me that, going beyond OpenOffice, the notion of an "integrated office suite" itself is broken. Gobe may be a little better than OpenOffice in design (I doubt it's as functional), but somehow that strikes me as just a meaner sabre tooth tiger--a better implementation of an evolutionary dead end. Even Microsoft has seen the light and claims that they will be trying to redefine what an office suite is in the future.
Unless there is some groundbreaking new functionality in Gobe that just can't be added to OpenOffice, the efforts that would go into porting Gobe to Linux and enhancing it would seem to be better spent on tuning, modularizing, and enhancing OpenOffice.
..what is stopping them from releasing the code as GPL anyway? Is the code tied up as an asset that might be seized by a bank?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I realize most people probably won't agree, but I'm incredibly thankful this thing didn't make it past the beta stage for linux and windows and might not be released under the gpl. I guess that might be considered a loss, as I'm sure it contains some great code that other OSS developers could use or draw from, but it will prevent anyone from finishing the port. In a software category like this (one that's so critical to broadened acceptance of linux on the desktop) I'm a firm believer that competition between products is actually a bad thing.
;)
When all of the competitors in a market are OSS*, more product choice does not equal more freedom. That's kinda what the GPL is all about -- one person (or company) can't run off with the source and deprive the OSS community of the best piece of ______ software it ever had. On the contrary -- with the need normally satisfied by inter-product competition is taken resolved in another way, more product choice equals more confusion. Users like to get comfortable with a method for accomplishing a task and stick to it. "How do I create a new spreadsheet, again?" is not a question users want to have to ask more than once every five years; if they're forced to, they'll go back to what they were already comfortable with.
*The market I'm talking about is inclusion in linux distros. I'm well aware that MS Office is not OSS.
Bravo. It's important that people realize that Microsoft Office does not-- well, usually doesn't, anyway-- come bundled with new computers. If you want Office, you have to buy a copy. People use Office because they choose to.
Let me say that just one more time. People are not using Office because it's already installed on their new computers. And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use Office because they choose to.
Until one or another of the various free office products gets to the point where it's at least as good as Office, most people will choose Microsoft's product.
The "it's good enough" mentality will not result in a successful office productivity package.
I write in my journal
Yes, for one the OpenBeOS folks would most likely love to have it. It was the defacto (if there ever was such a thing) Office Suite standard on BeOS.
Help fight continental drift.
just google it...a ll.tgz
gobe productive 3.0 for linux is right here: http://www.gobe.com/downloads/gobe_linux_x86_inst
Right now I have on my Linux laptop; Applix Anywhere 2.2, HancomOffice 2, SOT Office (OpenOffice repackeged by SOT), Koffice, and what I call a "best of breed" combination suite of Gnumeric/Scribus DTB/AbiWord/HTMLDOC/Ted. Of these, Applix was the best. Unfortunatly the company has killed it. HancomOffice looks like it might have potential but it's not yet there. OO, and it's like, is very good and makes a great MS Office clone. Unfortunatly it brings with it all the baggage that that intails. gobeProductive was a hope of mine. Sadly, it seems that once again, superior technology loses out.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage)
Sure it's not always the most user friendly and has a lot of development ongoing but I think we can still consider Linux to be past Beta!
I stole this Sig
Gobe Productive is a very elegant and potent product. And the Gobe team seemed to be a very nice group of people (I exchanged emails with some of them). I used Productive on both BeOS and MS-Windows and it is a great job while being fast and very compact. The next version could have added functionalities like support for XML file format that could have really brought it the point that it meets the needs of 80% of the users. It is unfortunate that this product is going to disappear. Well, it shows once again that the impact of Microsoft behavior does not lead to more innovation (like Productive) and more choices for the consumers but to their alienation (and I am not arguing about MS-Office value but who really needs all its functionalities?).
We have MS office at uni. (We also have staroffice, but nobody uses it)
People are lazy, dumb, senile and stupid. They will write their essay (all in 10 point times new roman, might as well save it as a text file!), save as Word 2000, and take it home. They then ask their computer "savvy" neighbour how to edit the essay. The neighbour installs a pirate copy of word XP on their machine, and they use it.
This doesnt gain MS any money though. However as the installed base of word is so high on students machines, and more up-to-date (and incompatable) then the uni machines, the uni has to upgrade.
Uncrackable product activation et. al. in microsoft's products will stop this, however the mindset (think Word Processor, think Word, think Microsoft) that is drilled into people from age 8 will take a lot to change.
Are you kidding?
Who says the GPL failed/is failing?
Linux is still a big worldwide competitor, so much so that Microsoft has deemed it the "Enemy".
This is a volunteer-designed operating system with a few corporate elements working to bring Linux to the mainstream public, and it's a prime concern for Microsoft to be worrying about... Microsoft being one of the biggest Blue-Chips on the market today. To get that kind of recognition, I'd call Linux a success.
The fact that I run Linux on my home box is just another symptom of that. I'm a computer-literate person with some programming knowledge, and playing around with Mandrake is bloody EASY. Only complaint I've had with my box is shit resolution, but I just today figured out that my problem was actually that my video card had only 2M memory (Never seen the specs before today).
GPL's not a failure. To have acheived what it has today is quite a landmark.
Karma: Non-Heinous
It resulted in a successful OS, Windows.
Look at the evolution of Windows over the past decade: Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, with a sidestep to Windows NT, then bringing the two together with Windows 2000, and then improving it here and there with Windows XP. It's not a perfect OS, but you can't exactly accuse Microsoft of resting on its laurels, either. They work very hard on Windows, if for no other reason than to make Windows N+1 enough of an improvement over Windows N to get people to buy the new version.
I write in my journal
And they're not suffering along with Office because there are no alternatives. People buy and use [Microsoft] Office because they choose to.
The single complaint I've heard the most about OpenOffice and friends? That it doesn't support Microsoft Office file formats well enough. The fact is, I have a half-dozen programs on my computer to read Microsoft Word (I don't care to install OpenOffice, as I don't need it); furthermore, I end up unable to read a number of files on the web and occasionally sent to me because they're in PowerPoint.
Is Microsoft Office a good program? Yes. But for a lot of people, the reason they don't use simpler, cheaper, more portable alternatives is because of Office's proprietary file-formats, not because Office is better for them.
Absolutely.. the problem is that a lot of times they should have thought about making the OS faster and safe.
Instead they kept putting in their OS features nobody asked for, increasing CPU speed demand and RAM hunger...
They think in terms of "the Next Product to sell to the customer", instead of trying to make it "really" good.
I don't mean that's just a Microsoft problem.. but since they're a sort of monopoly, people are going to suffer a lot more from Microsoft mistakes than from the mistakes of the rest of IT industry..
This message doesn't need a sig
When shopping around for laptops for example, I could not find one that did not require me to pay for both Windows XP and Office.
That's funny. When you said this, I went looking for a laptop on the web. The very first one I picked-- the Dell Inspiron 8200, chosen for no other reason that because it came up first on the Dell web site-- is available with Microsoft Works instead of Office. Sounds like you didn't look hard enough.
I write in my journal
But for a lot of people, the reason they don't use simpler, cheaper, more portable alternatives is because of Office's proprietary file-formats, not because Office is better for them.
Well, with all due respect, we're kind of getting into a semantic argument, here. If you need to exchange files with your friends or co-workers or whatever, you're going to need software that produces files that those people can use. That's a necessary feature. If Microsoft Office fits that bill, then Microsoft Office is a good choice for you.
It's important to point out, though, that lots of programs can read and write the various Office file formats. AppleWorks, for example, reads and writes Word and Excel files with virtually no problems. Of course, if a file takes advantage of a feature that only Word or Excel has, you're going to have problems moving it into another program. But that kinda goes without saying.
Since interoperability is important, it should be obvious that any product that competes with Office must be able to read and write Office file formats. If Microsoft changes the format and doesn't release the specification, well, hard cheese. They've got the right to do that. Competitors will be back to competing solely on the basis of price and features.
I write in my journal
Found this on their product page below the Corum III listing:
The only real choice for entertainment on BeOS.
Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good.
What a load! Office is the most popular because MS held back information on Windows internals that would have allowed its competition (WordPerfect and another formerly very popular word processor whose name I can't even remember now) to match the performance of Word. Thus, WP and whazzit were late to the Windows platform, and slow when they got there. And suddenly WP lost its first place position, and whazzit disappeared completely. A clear case of MS leveraging its monopoly in OSes to take over the word processor market. (Analogous things happened with spreadsheets too.)
If MS has the best office suite now (which Corel/WP users might still argue -- in fact, the ones I know would strongly disagree with this assertion), it's because they cheated. If they'd been competing on level ground, there's no way in hell that WP would have lost its former dominance of the word processor market.
They think in terms of "the Next Product to sell to the customer", instead of trying to make it "really" good.
Monday-morning quarterback. When you own your own multinational software corporation, you can make your own decisions about what features to implement. Until then, saying "Microsoft did it wrong" is kind of a cheap way out, isn't it?
I write in my journal
It doesnt matter how good a competing office productivity suite is if it doesnt fully and completely support all of microsoft's proprietary document formats. The document formats are what create the barrier to entry for non-microsoft products in the office productivity area.
or did you think the document formats were rewritten with every release because they were adding a new feature to them?
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
If you want Office, you have to buy a copy.
That's true enough, but you'll often find Microsoft Works bundled with new PCs (e.g. the one I bought a couple of weeks ago), and that comes with Word. To a lot of people, Word *is* Office, as they almost never use Powerpoint or Excel, don't think of Outlook as part of Office, and wouldn't even know what Access is.
Also, if you look around enough, you will find Office bundled with new PCs. They'll be the sort that cost a fortune, and come with a printer, scanner, etc, but you can find them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I think they use it because schools and universities get pulled in by Microsoft, and it becomes the default office product on school and campus.
Isn't it much more likely that Office is the default product on campuses because it's the most popular product in the marketplace? A school that taught only obscure tools while ignoring the most popular tools wouldn't be doing its students much of a service, would it?
If people stopped using Office more than any other tool-- indeed, if proficiency with Office were no longer an effective requirement for employment in most industries-- the schools would stop teaching it.
I write in my journal
OK, I second you on this. If I wanted to buy a new IBM Thinkpad T30, I can easily get it without Microsoft Office. No, I can not get it without Windows 2000 or Windows XP. With a 40gb hard disk, I may as well dual boot anyway.
For the record, I use Abiword for writing documents. I am well aware that it is, to put it mildly, not as feature rich as other offerings (and is somewhat buggy, to boot) [1]; however it is good enough, lightweight, and, most importantly, free.
As an aside, I do not think one of your earlier comments should have been moderated down. You said that file sharing takes money away from people who make content and were modded down for saying so.
- Sam
[1] Problem with inserting greyscale PNGs (in their bugzilla); problem with spelling suggestins going off of the screen when misspelled word is near bottom of the screen (I need to check bugzilla); problem with headers being too high to be printed (again, I need to check their bugzilla); and a problem with their ability to export documents to Word which have non-standard spacing (again, I need to check their bugzilla; I can't help them with this because a machine with Word on it is not handy).
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I dont see the problem you are talking about. The number of office suites available is irrelevent. If they all adhere to open standard document formats You can use any office suite to open documents created in any other office suite.
If they all adhere to open standard document formats. The problem is they don't. Even if there were an open standard document format that every open source office product supported, all office suites would still need to read and write MS Office files. Sure, you could save your document in the open format and convert it using an office suite that does support MS formats, but that's more work than users are willing to do; besides, if the conversion were anything less than perfect, it wouldn't be an option for serious work. Documents can start to look pretty run down after multiple passes through an imperfect document converter.
That seems to make multiple office suites a good thing because people can pick the one that does things the way they are most comfortable with. There's no need for them to get confused trying to learn a new suite because theirs will open any standards compliant file.
What about people that are introduced to an open source office software suite at home and then switch to a different one at work because it's the new company-mandated standard? They have to re-learn basic skills. Multiple open source office software suites also fracture the support base. It's nice to be able to lean into the cubicle next to you and say, "Hey Dan, how do I do X?" You can't do this when Dan is using a different suite -- he won't be able to answer your question. Unless a company wants to double the training requirements for their support staff, the help desk won't be able to answer your question either. In addition, developer time is divided by multiple projects. If you have 4 talented developers that want to contribute to OSS and 4 office suites, each office suite gets fewer developers. With one office suite, that project can take on as many developers as it can use. I'm not saying that more developers always equals better software (sometimes the opposite is true), but it's better to be turning developers down than starving for volunteers.
On top of that, since they are all open source, if one develops a compelling feature the others need, the others can add that functionality to themselves. So again, no reason for people to switch office suites.
Just because two projects are OSS, there's no reason to think that code can be easily ported between them. OpenOffice and Productive may (and probably do) have radically different architectures.
[...] "How do I create a new spreadsheet?" (why you don't think it's File>New in OSS I'm not sure) [...]
/" philosophies have their merits and contribute to the extreme (and extremely useful) scriptability of nearly every action.
/mnt/floppy/whatever.
You're right. Bad example. I should have said: "How do I set my page margins and change my spacing settings to double globally?" That's not always in the same place.
Linux development might as well stop now then. [...] "How do I format a floppy?" or "Where's my D: drive?"
This is not a problem with linux; it's a problem with desktop GUI software. You're right in that most non-geeks are more comfortable with (and I would go so far as to say prefer) viewing data storage devices (cd-roms, floppies, hard drives, usb microstorage doodads, etc...) as separate icons representing separate hardware rather than all merged into one directory tree like linux does. However, the unix "all devices are files" and "every file that the system has access to can be found under
The solution? Have the desktop GUI software query the kernel as to what data storage devices the system has access to (devfs works great for this) and present icons representing them in a "My Computer" type interface. Then simply interpret any URIs starting with floppy: (such as floppy:images/picture.png) as
Of course then you run up against the original problem I was talking about: more than one software package competing to perform the same task. What if the GNOME team decides that representing storage devices as above is a great idea (so much so that they change the standard file dialog boxes in gtk apps so that they represent data this way), but the KDE team thinks it's a silly idea? What is the user to do who really likes the change GNOME made, but needs (for example) the ability to browse tar files without unpacking them in her file manager? Use GNOME some of the time, and switch to KDE at others? Send emails begging the GNOME team to add tar browsing or pleading with the KDE team to change their minds about devices? Give up and go back to windows where she has the interface she wants and can look through tars with Easyzip?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Parent was: Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good
Your reply starts: If that was true then why is the #1 question asked about any new piece of word processing software is not "is it as good or better than MicroSoft word?"
Your reply doesn't logically rebutt the fact that Office may well be the most productive produce because it is good, it is discussing a different point altogether. IMO, Office *is* the best office suite out there and from a corporation point of view, that is what usually counts.
Office saves to ASCII. Everything made in the last 20 years for Word Processing accepts ASCII input in some form.
The trick is that this is less than feature rich.
That's almost as bad as taking screenshots; in many case, I can get a screenshot in with more information than ASCII.
That's not really the problem, though; Word outputs RTF which will preserve most details. The problem is that the world of Office users don't bother to export, and send out Word docs and Powerpoint presentations without hesitation. The problem is input, not output.
Everyone buying Office has known exactly what level of interoperability is avaialable,
Yes, the majority of the people buying Word bought it with full knowledge of interoperability and understanding of the implications, instead of just buying what they used at work or using what came with their computer or upgrading their version of Works.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you are pissed with Office, its your own fault. Likewise, the problem isn't with MS, its with users.
Human nature is human nature; it's futile for me to complain about it. People who take advantage of human nature, those people I can and will complain about.
But AppleWorks is a very good product. In fact, it's good enough for most Apple users. That's Apple and MS are having a "MS Office for $200" special. It's a ploy to increase the number of iMac MS Office users.
At our house, we didn't buy MS Office because we couldn't justify the price when AppleWorks does virtually everything we need (and it came with our Macs).
The only reason we broke down and bought MS Word is because my wife needs it for her work. If Word wasn't the de facto Word Processor, or if AppleWorks2Word file conversions were more robust, she could tell her Windows-using clients to deal with RTF files.
Frankly, we both prefer AppleWorks word processing module to Word. However, I think AppleWorks presentation module is quite sucky, especially compared to PowerPoint on Windows. Thankfully, I don't need to do presentations on my Mac. In my opinion, AppleWorks is more 'mac-like' than Office, which still feels like a well-done port of Word for Windows.
That being said, I wish that Gobe, Abiword, and OpenOffice all succeed. The more choices, especially free choices, the less likely that any one will dominate the landscape.
My father is a blogger.
Gobe Productive is meant to be a lightweight office suite, correct? Then why the %&^*$ does the Linux beta require Gnome libraries?!
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself what your personal investment is in Microsoft Office.
I don't know what your deal is, but you should ask yourself why you're so biased against Microsoft. Microsoft is deeply flawed, and some of their business practices are both unethical and illegal. But that doesn't mean that they're evil to the core. I'm just trying to get you to have a little perspective, and to give credit where it's due.
In your post, you basically said that Microsoft developed their products wrong. You think they should have focused on A, B, and C, while they were actually focused on X, Y, and Z. The fact that Microsoft has produced good products and sold them by the boatload seems to contradict this fact. Or are you one of those who claims that all Microsoft products are pure crap? Microsoft has produced more than their fair share of crap. Their software is generally pretty needlessly complex, and their user interfaces are awful. But the worst piece of software Microsoft has ever produced is still better than 90% of the stuff listed on Freshmeat. I've said it before: credit where it's due.
Oh, and as to your remarks about my livelihood: I'm a chef. I work in a restaurant for a living. I don't even have a computer at my place of business, unless you count the cash registers our waiters use. I couldn't really give a tinker's dam about Microsoft Office, except in the purely abstract sense. People who hop up and down on one leg yelling about how Microsoft is rotten to the core and how they never produced any decent software are just as bad as people who say Microsoft is perfect and Windows is the epitome of user friendliness. Balance in all things, especially in one's opinions.
The _Fire Upon the Deep_ nick shows you're intelligent.
The what?
(Just kidding. But since we're both intelligent, why can't we see each others' point of view? I'm saying Microsoft isn't completely bad, and that they've done some excellent work in developing Office. You're saying "quit defending Microsoft." I don't think you're being fair, or reasonable.)
I write in my journal
Vinge would kick your ass for this kind of crap.
Um. So? That page describes a programming course, "Computer Networks and Distributed Systems." Why would you expect to learn Microsoft Office in a programming course? Now, a business productivity class, on the other hand... there I would expect them to teach Microsoft Office. Along with how to use a fax machine, and how to make photocopies, and how to compose a proper business letter.
As you can see, we're talking about two completely different contexts. Maybe this is why you and I are clashing so dramatically on this subject.
I write in my journal
There's some talk at BeUnited about raising money to get the "Be only" version of the source code. To me this makes sense, since GoBe did more for Be than any of the other platforms it ran on. If OpenBeOS really comes through it would be a great thing to see. Check out
h p? f=21&i=4&t=4
http://www.beunited.org/standards/phorum/read.p
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I was surprised to see the original announcement, and was wondering what business reasons they could have. I can't say I'm surprised to see this.
Now I hope a way is found, so that when openBeOS achieves it's goal it has GoBe productive to distribute with it. That would be worth dual booting my machine for. But it will most likely have to be a Blender type effort.
I'm afraid Blender has given some companies a false idea of people's willingness to pay to release programs. Blender was a unique program that solved a problem no other free program did - interactive 3D modeling. It had a huge, multiplatform following willing to pay to see it survive. I know of one or two efforts by other programs which didn't succeed. It takes the right software package to do it.
That said, GoBe may be such a package. It largely depends on how many BeOS users are active and willing to contribute. That's a tough equation to compute and I honestly have no idea what would happen. BeUnited may be about to find out, though.
I hope it does get released, and OpenBeOS succeeds. I have tried BeOS briefly and found it to be clean, smooth and a nice experience. It might be just the thing for an open source business desktop. Sure it may not have the infinite flexibility that WindowMaker, fluxbox, gnome, kde, etc. offer for interfaces, but to business that may actually be a plus. Trick would be software to run on it. GoBe would be a nice carrot to offer.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Not just BeOs. gobeProductive does basically what Microsoft have been dreaming about doing with OLE for about twenty years, and have only managed to bandaid-and-string together with any success at all in about the last five.
If GoBe do go kerplonk, I hope someone's brave enough to slap `GPL' on the openable parts and kick it out the door before that door slams. It would be an excellent legacy to bequeath.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Software fails because it lacks that special something that provokes everyone to switch.
You pretend to explain success with suceess itself? Oh yes, the software is successfull if everyone starts using it, but it does not help us see why software fails.
So what we need to understand is how to make people switch. And people switch mostly because everyone else is switching. Or the inverse. So nobody switchs. Individuals sense "heard movement". So to be sucessfull you people to sense the "heard movement" for a sustained time. In any other case, the "heard" does not move.
unfinished: (adj.)
(I am not the anonymous poster who wrote that.)
Yes, I think that is exactly what we need. I've believed we should have almost exactly that change for years. I think seven years is a period of time long enough to be reasonably profitable (contrary to what another respondent claimed). Go to a surplus store and compare the selling price of seven year old software with recently released software. Nevertheless, everyone I know who buys software at all buys the latest versions of software in spite of the price difference. If you update in a timely manner, your brand of software should be profitable indifinitely this way. Also, publishing cycle times have shrunk both for physical packaging and, of course, by the addition of distribution over the internet.
If your software solves such a fixed and narrowly defined problem that there really is nothing to update, then it's the sort of software that would be cloned after about seven years anyway. Also, if people know that your software is going to be released in seven years, it may actually discourage cloning.
Under your proposal, right now the source code to Windows 95 would have just been released and I imagine people would be starting to beta free binary distributions of it.
OK, so you're a chef, and your knowledge is limited to personal desktop computing. That's your context, correct?
Not precisely. Before the bubble burst, I spent about 15 years in the computer industry. I was a field engineer, an operator, a system admin, a consultant, an engineer, a manager, and finally an executive. But the last business venture burned me out so hard I decided to just take a pass on the whole thing and open a restaurant. That was earlier this year.
Reading back through your posts is sickening.
I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
My wife wrote her dissertation in Word because I couldn't simplify SGML enough
My girlfriend wrote hers, in molecular genetics, in Word too, but not for the same reason. She did it because she liked Word just fine. I don't remember how many pages hers was-- something in the 300 range, like yours-- but she didn't have anything like the problems you described. Citations, tables of contents and figures, pagination; all worked perfectly.
Perhaps you guys were doing something wrong?
ask yourself how many people really want to get their computer advice from a chef?
I don't recall offering any advice. Just opinion. And my opinion is that Office would never have become the dominant product in its market if it were as bad as you say it is. The conclusion, therefore, is that it's nowhere near as bad as you say it is. The only outstanding question, then, is why you think so poorly of it.
I write in my journal
You're either lying or stupid.
And you, sir, are ugly, and your mother dresses you funny. Are we done calling each other names now?
The restaurant business has always been the harshest start-up environment.
Yes, it's very tough, particularly in the city where I live. The difference between my last startup venture and my present one is that I love what I'm doing now. That's why I've done it. Long hours, hardly any money, but an overwhelming passion for the work. (As opposed to my other business venture, which involved long hours, hardly any money, and unbelievable boredom.) That's why we opened a restaurant in the middle of a recession. (Of course, we're not technically in the middle of a recession, but that's neither here nor there.) Fortunately, I've got a hell of a partner who acts as the business manager, and a positive review last month has sent bookings way up. I think we'll be okay.
Thanks for your concern, though.
Oh, and _your_ girlfriend is a PhD, too, who also wrote her dissertation in Word--even the same page count.
I pulled her thesis and checked, just for you. It's 224 pages of text, counting citations, and about 30 pages of charts, graphs, and other figures. So the total is 254 pages. I overestimated a bit, but I knew it was in that area.
And yes, she's a Ph.D., and an M.D. UT Southwestern Medical Center, MSTP program, class of 2002. She's a first-year resident in general surgery now. What of it?
Anyone who's used Word knows that something always gets fucked up.
So your argument is so strong that you believe anybody who has had a different experience from yours must be a liar? That's mature.
The only reason I'm still responding to you is that with every post you make yourself look like a bigger ass. It's entertaining, to say the least.
I write in my journal