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OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1
sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.
My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF. It's one of the reasons why I still use OO even though I almost always have access to Microsoft Office.
;-) )
That, and there's something to be said for the ability to literally unpack a saved file, look at the raw data, and get exactly what you need. (I had to do this on a spreadsheet before I installed OO again, and was able to retrieve an important CD key.
Have been running OpenOffice 1.1 under Windows a little while - only just scratching the surface. Looks like a great prog, but a bit slow to start up. But heck, so is Word..
.WRI (windows write) files, a bit of an odd ommision, considering how much else it does..
Also doesnt seem to load old
PDF export is extremely useful, worth it for that feature alone.
If all goes well I think I will be trashing Word soon..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
But why put a man in jail? Why go to all that trouble?
Oh yeah, civil forfeiture. The DEA siezed 250,000 bucks from Chong.
Law enforcement, from the DEA to yer local Sherriffs office, knows that jailing potheads doesn't do shit to reduce crime, or improve society. But they rely on the civil forfeiture as a means of funding.
It's not about putting you in jail. It's about siezing your cash, house, cars, whatever else you own, and liquidating it to pad the budget.
Although for the home your reasons are good, for the business:
1. My company pays, I do not. They get a huge discount and even if for 1000 users it only costs $100K eacg, that's only $100,000K (the price of a single senior analyst a year). Role that over the three year product lifestyle and $100K is the cost of a junior admin staff over those three years. In anorganisation of 1000 this is hardly a good thing, when all OO can do is all MSOffice can do. If OO did something extra that MSOffice did not that would be different, but it is not. Although OO has suppost for office documents, macros cannot be converted unless weeding the code (this takes time, hence money).
2. My secretary does the PDF writing if I need it, this takes less than 5 seconds for me to do and little longer for her (though she also checks various points of detail in it). If something big needs doing I'll forward to our printing department, who will ensure the layout stc is perfect - they are the best people to do the nitty picky presentational polishing, not me.
3. Business licences have already brought down cost of business software for businesses.
4. It's proprietary, and guess what... I can still change it to my needs! Yes I can write macros etc, and can integrate some VB into it and can seamlessly integrate a MS Access DB with Excel etc... but have you ever used Reuters etc??? Reuters worked with MS to reverse engineer Excel to work with live feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg did a similar thing. OO does not have this feature, and until it does will never be the spreadsheet of choice for front office finance work. In the back of a finance office a spreadsheet which cannot do pivot tables easily or work with the existing implenentation (i.e., existing macros or bespoke software) is not worth having on your hard disk.
5. The licence is cheap for a corporate, see 1.
In the end, unless the OO (or even a change over in proprietary software) offers cost savings over the costs involved in changing bespoke applications and macros AND can do all that the previous software will it be implemented by corporates. However to me, the ONLY SURE WAY FOR NEW SOFTWARE TO SUCCEED (proprietary or open source) is to offer new functionality. This is the only thing that can get over the inertia for companies to move. So come on OO, give me something new... I don't know what I want, you've got to do the development of something new and that is truely hard.
SOrry for rambling.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
- Fire it up at the beginning of the day.
- Work.
- Shut it down at the end of the day.
And if you're the type who leaves the computer on overnight, you don't even have to re-open it the next day. Let's get real, folks.Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit?
I've been bitten by leaving debugging symbols out of open-source software I've compiled. On the occasions that something crashes a program, being able to get something other than gibberish out of a core file is very helpful. It also allows people to e-mail a stack trace along with bug reports. Even though debugging symbols add bloat, I'm almost in favor of distributions leaving them in by default to aid the more-eyes-make-bugs-shallow theory.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
HOw the Hell did this get modded +3 Interesting . . this story is about OPENOFFICE not Ximian Desktiop/Evoloution or getting IMAP to work with exchange . .
There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.
The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL, while in release they're filled with random values).
I don't know that this is an issue with OO.o... just more of a generalized issue that affects many programs. Realistically, I blame the compiler for doing too much when in debug mode.
Why does "Office Compatibilty" appear to mean that you need to reduplicated the same horrid Office UI and build the same sort of bloated functionality?
Why could OS developers not take the opportunity to write a series of applications that work better, are more streamlined, have a better UI and just happen to open and save files in Office formats?
Why make people have to suffer with the same usability and UI gaffs that MS has foisted on Windows users?
Wouldnt cat'ing a whole directory during bootup take more time and resources? I know there all these stories about speeding up booting for linux, wouldnt you do this after you boot into X? Save the cache for the initial processes and X startup. Then cache all your applications, terminals, office, mozilla, xmms, etc. Thou, seems like overkill for a couple seconds off the application start time, to read the file twice. (My head hurts thinking about it)
Kinda like windows, it boots up into the login screen, the loads the services. And linux, loads all the services, then boots into the login screen.
Use Mozilla Firebird as browser.
Pine for email.
OpenOffice for "productivity".
mySQL ad database.
UltraEdit / Eclipse / WebSphere for development.
g++ to compile with make.
Sun's J2EE / J2SE to compile with ant.
Where in that setup am I required to deal with VB script?
If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script.
since cheap hacks like preloads are not the linux way, for the size of the app, the speed is sufficient.
... but it's a hack!" we might as well just admit defeat. Productivity can't be subservient to "elegance."
How is making something faster a "cheap hack?" It sounds like intelligent design to me. When I turn on the computer, the difference between 60 and 80 seconds of boot time is fairly irrelevant -- I'm doing something else anyway. When I start up an application, the difference between 5 and 25 seconds until I can start using it is immense.
If we're reduced to saying, "well, yeah, it's better
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
making office appear faster by loading tons of libs into memory...
You're wrong on this count. You're not making it appear faster; you really are making it faster. As I pointed out in my last post, preloading means less wasted time for the user. If you've got a "non-hack" way of making it faster, I'm all ears, but if program design detracts from the experience of the user, the design is flawed. A 30-second startup time is simply unacceptable.
eys, some you ahve to preload, especially system libs. but for an office suite? please.
If you haven't noticed, the word processor is the most-used application on many people's computers, and is certainly among the most complex pieces of software that the average person uses on a regular basis. I really can't think of many better candidates for preloading than office software.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script. if *this* is your WINDOWS setup, the only thing that might be stopping you from using full-time linux might be your games, since you are naming only opensource programms that are in general more optimized for linux. so if you are not a big fan of games and *this* is your windows setup, please move over to linux and your office experience will be much better.