Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!
-- Cemil.
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Does this open MS Office files better?
In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines? I know Excel tops out at 64,000 which for my needs sometimes is not enough. I have searched the prefs in previous versions but can't find any way to open files with that many lines. Well, the open, but the cut off anything after the max line number. I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO. I usually have to resort to perl or awk to find what I need, but spreadsheets are quicker if you need to perform a bunch of ad hoc searches and calculations.
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Dude. Try a relational database.
Examining the file is the first step towards inserting the data into a database. I work in bioinformatics. I get files from customers which often share only two common characteristics - they hold some data, and they are tab or comma delimited. Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows. Opening the file and looking at it is the first step. A spreadsheet is a handy tool for doing that. I'm not sure if you have used a text editor or used "more" or "less" to look at file with 75 columns, but it is pretty hard to decifer it that way. A spreadsheet is also handy for quick check validation of the data. I can't find the median of 75,000 numbers or search for the values of particalur identifier if the spreadsheet only reads in 32,000 lines. Sure, I could write a script to do all the various things, but a spreadsheet that could read in 100,000 lines would really ease my life. And, as I said, it is only the first step towards much more complicated calculations which do, in fact, use a relational database.
Perhaps MS Access or OOo Base is right for you? They should be able to seamlessly import and view a few hundred thousand lines, without requiring you to know about the data in advance.
-- Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
It sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database. That's a common mistake, and no doubt something that can be {rightly or wrongly} blamed on Microsoft. {Unix = a well-stocked tool box with one screwdriver for each type of screw recess: slotted, Posidriv, hex, Phillips, Torx, and those weirdy ones you get on appliances. Windows = a "magic hammer" with which you can fasten any kind of screw simply by hitting it like a nail. When raised, it uses a small camera to identify the screw recess; on the way down it automatically fits the correct screwdriving bit, and the impact is turned into rotary motion by a ratchet system.} A spreadsheet looks a bit like a table, but its real purpose is highly-parallel numerical calculations {that's why they all have names ending in *calc, or they used to before Microsoft killed them all off}.
A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
Have a Google for some introductory stuff on mysql or postgresql {you're likely to have one or the other, if not both, on your distro CDs} and see if that's what you were really trying to do in the first place. At entry level there isn't much to choose between them {the so-lightweight-it's-almost-a-toy MySQL is falling out of favour following an ill-thought-out deal with SCO; and PostgreSQL, having shaken off its reputation for slowness, is the new darling}. By the time you get onto more advanced stuff, you will know which one is for you.
If you're familiar with perl, then you won't have any trouble extracting data from a CSV. Try bunging it into an SQL database {actually, a table within a database} and searching that instead.
Perhaps MS Access or OOo Base is right for you? They should be able to seamlessly import and view a few hundred thousand lines, without requiring you to know about the data in advance.
Well, MS Access is out because I work entirely under linux and I despise any sort of emulators. If I need windows apps, I'll get a windows box. OO base is fairly new...in OO 2.0 beta, right? I might be wrong. But still, being able to open a csv or tab delimited file and quickly perform some basic searching, arithmetic or perhaps something slightly more complicated like a t-test or ANOVA is infinitely easier in a spreadsheet when the data is of unknown format. I greatly prefer a db, but 99 times out of 100, a spreadsheet rules when the sole purpose of the spreadsheet is to determine what the delimiters are and what column holds what piece of data. And once that is known grep, awk and a few other command line tools can beat a db in terms of quick calculations and data verification. I have stacks upon stacks of postits with acc = 3, intensity = 4, quality = 5, cluster = 9, title = 14 on my desk. I even have a chart with BC = 55 for converting column letters to numbers.
Re:Sweet!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
You should try Kexi, the Access replacement in KOffice. If you don't want to install all of KOffice, Kexi can be installed stand-alone as well.
it sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database.
No, as I stated, I use the spreadsheet to figure out the file format so I can pump the data into a database. The field I work in, bioinformatics and specifically microarrays, is rife with dozens upon dozens of file formats. Determinining what column holds what quickly leads to a my @data = split/\t/, $line;
my $important_values1 = $data[3]; my $important_values2 = $data[5]; my $important_values3 = $data[16];
then inserting these values into a database. After that complex calculations are performed using the data from the database, not the spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet acts only as a quick way to decifer the file format. My comment about holding 100K+ lines stems from the fact that I would maybe like to calculate the mean from both the db and the spreadsheet only to accompish a crude yet quick data validation method.
Re:Sweet!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The new design's broken one of my installed scripts though (Slashdot Live Comment Tree).
Ah. I see. I still feel a bit vindicated, though; because it still looks as though the proliferation of file formats you are seeing is due to others upstream using a spreadsheet when what they really wanted was a database. I see the same thing in my line of business..... often we get CSVs containing essentially the same sort of information, but with different column naming and ordering schemas. So I use head foo.csv to get a butchers at the field names and the general format; then a bit of Perl I wrote to turn the CSV lines into an array and poke the important bits into a database.
Oh sure, it's only 500Mb. But when you uncompress it and covert it to XML it clocks out at more than 800 MILLION lines. I know I am being snide, but I deal with files from 10 lines to 1 billion lines. What I am talking about is quick analyis of files that range from 10 lines to 100,000 lines. Microsoft and OO cut you off at 64K and 32K respectively. I am just asking for a spreedsheet that accomodates around 100,000 lines.
Re:Sweet!
by
abandonment
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've been very pleased with the stability, performance and featureset of the open office 2 beta - we've been using it internally for a month or so and it is miles better than the current 1.x codebase.
you might look into trying it out - it might be a 'beta' but it's been very stable on our range of machines - we don't open any massive sized files like what you are looking for, and for that matter i haven't tried out the db side of the new release, but overall it's worth looking into if you are simply trying to open & examine large files.
oh, and i seem to recall that the max rows limit was increased in the 2.x oo spreadsheet app as well, but can't remember how much...
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ah. I see. I still feel a bit vindicated, though; because it still looks as though the proliferation of file formats you are seeing is due to others upstream using a spreadsheet when what they really wanted was a database.
No, not really. The multitudes of software our customers use in reading their arrays always provide an export function. The export options (and mind you this is third party software) is generaly "you pick and name the columns" or "export everything". This is very advantageous to us. As long as their software can export tab delimited text, we can accomidate their data. If their software only allowed MS access or the like, it would be too hard for us to accomadate all the platforms out there. When we are able to tell our customers, "Send us a tab delimited text file of your data, we will figure it out for you" - they love it. We spend a few minutes in OO or Excel (depending on if it as developer or support staff), quickly reformat their file and load it for them. Given the compexity of most bioinformatics software platforms out there, this is like living at the ritz. We strive for excellence in customer service and my initial remark about 32 vs 64 vs 100K lines of data had to do with quick spot checking for quality of our work. If a statisical error exists, we have to solve the problem ASAP. I'll still spot check, but a spread sheet makes it easier and quicker than doing it by hand.
I was going to post a section of my perl script here, just a function which parses a single line from a CSV file into an array; but the lameness filter got in the way {for which I blame nobody except the trolls}. I even tried adding comments fore and aft, but it just wasn't having it.
Yes, it will deal correctly with things like
Smith,"John R",1980-01-01,1.8,74,"88, Acacia Avenue, Anytown AN1 2PQ",, ..... where there are quoted, unquoted and null fields, and - crucially - commas inbetween the quotes.
You should write a quick C# Program, two params (start and end) and view it that way like "Tail" or "Head" on linux. Bypass the big bads, they always autoformat your data anyway without your permission.
What I don't understand is why OO has such small limitations built into it. I understand that Excel is a very old app, with roots back in the 16 bit days. OO.o on the other hand is quite new. Why would they only allow first 32,000 and now 64,000 rows. You'd think they could make it handle at least 1,000,000 rows. Why do they build in such small limits?
--
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
And you're suggesting he use MySQL? He said he NEEDED to be ABLE to deal with null fields and weird data...
I'd try postgres and just give MySQL a miss... it won't give you any warning when it changes your data, unless they've made major changes very recently.
I'd settle for saving and opening its own files better. My team had a nightmare for several hours yesterday, after a Writer document that was created in 1.1.0 on one machine (and displayed, saved, loaded and exported to PDF fine on that machine) had completely screwed up formatting when loaded onto other machines running the same version of Writer. The same problem was evident trying to load that file into 1.1.5 or the beta of 2.0. This is not what you need when your documents were supposed to go to the print shop the day before and a deadline is looming...:-(
After trying the beta for a while, there are still some very basic formatting bugs there, so I can't see that going mainstream for a few months yet. Here's hoping 1.1.5 is a more stable platform in the meantime!
-- If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I, too, use a spreadsheet for quick spot checking of data prior to actually processing it in any more meaningful way, be that through a short script, inserted into a db for whatever reason, etc. I, too, am irritated by the row limit in Access and OO.o, and am looking for the same answer as you.
I just wanted to support your question and situation and let you know that I understand your use of the spreadsheet for quick checks of data consistency, median values, etc. If I find a good solution to your situation, of course I'll post it for all to see.
I tried to use it, but alien wasn't very successful at creating a usable.deb from the official RPMs.
There are debs in the experimental repository, which seem to run nicely for me on an "unstable" box. YMMV.
To use experimental packages, add
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free
to your sources.list. By default, experimental packages have a lower priority, so apt-get won't upgrade to them automatically. You have to specifically select them in order to get them to install. If you choose to do this, take careful note of what other packages are going to be upgraded from experimental, so you know what's going to happen to your system and then be sure you're okay with it. I find problems are fairly rare, but you do want to be careful.
-- Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I too have been using the 2.0 beta for quite a while now, probably close to 2-3 months now and it seems stable as a rock (well, I am runing it on linux...) and seems to deal with the rather complex, though not extremely huge xls spreadsheets and word docs I work with on a consistant basis. Hats off to the OO team!
-- -=JML=-
Re:Sweet!
by
Martin+Blank
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You might want to check out Gnumeric. There's a fairly simple hack to the source code (three lines? I don't recall exactly) that allows you to alter the maximum number of rows. For a while, I was opening files of 400,000 lines at work in a copy of Gnumeric that would handle up to one million rows.
And in other news, Slashdot's posting page looks... different.
-- You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Once upon a time, my mother bought me two sweatshirts for Christmas. I put one of them on -- and when she saw me wearing it, she asked me what was wrong with the other one?
If you give a database server garbage data, it has two choices. Either it can degrade gracefully {try to store as much as possible of what you gave it, even though it won't all fit}; or it can degrade non-gracefully {die horribly with an error}.
Since most people talk to a database server from a scripting language {Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, &c.}, and know in advance what the constraints are, they can make any necessary checks before passing the data to the database server, and then the mode of degradation is irrelevant.
We have been running it under about a dozen machines under WinXP and it has also been very stable. Not only thing but the new (ish?) recovery feature is worth upgrading just for that - the few times it has crashed, you simply run the recovery - it has worked every time flawlessly - even with a half-dozen files open at once.
not only thing but it opens a LOT faster as well. the 'presentation' side of the app has also gotten a major makeover, something that was sorely needed.
for the new set of school machines that i'm setting up right now (granted only a half-dozen other machines) i'm using the OO2 beta well (XP sp2) - MS Office begone:}
Can't you just open the big file in a spreadsheet, determine the column headings, and then use scripts from that point on? So what if the spreadsheet doesn't read past 64k lines or whatever.
It sounds like your requirements are actually quite simple, you just want to quickly format the first few hundred lines to get an idea about the data. Maybe even just use "head big_file.csv >/tmp/header.csv" and then import it.
And also, if this is all preliminary analysis anyway, what's wrong with beta software?
-- Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
> Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows.
With respect, I submit that a Relational Database is still the way to go. You are talking one table (per imported file) with X rows to import. You could quickly dump this into an simple table of all strings (varchars or whatnot), and have, at your fingertips, generic code to quickly turn your flat file into one simple general pupulated table. Then you could use msAccess, any number or free oracle tools, free tools like dbVisualizer, or home-grown code to do simple querys into your data for all kinds of staging purposes. And since you have much more complicated calculations to do, having it all there ready for you will be really handy.
If I heard you correctly, the structure of the data is the same other than the number of columns. The number of rows, other than hard-drive space, does not really matter. When writing import code, tab or comma delimited does not really matter so much either.
This is especially useful if you are doing this process over and over again, which is seems like you are.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
HUADPE
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· Score: 5, Informative
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
-- This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
Yes, but often Beta is what is being tested for the next big release. It seems that OpenOffice is going the way of kernels and other OS apps such as apache, etc... put big changes in the beta, and backport the tried-and-true as well as bugfixes. Rather than calling 2.x beta, perhaps they should it a testing version and the 1.x a release version (much like Debian does with the stable/testing/unstable/experimental branches).
That being said, I wonder if they will continue with two lines or eventually dump the 1.x (or 1.1.x) line in favour of 2.x. It looks more like it's a transitory release to allow users to get into the new OpenDocument format to be used in the 2.x tree?
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
Except that the "bug" that's holding it up is that you need to have Java installed. Not much of a problem if you want to edit documents, only really a problem if you're a Stallman-ite with a loud voice.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They are postponing 2.0 until they have made the final decision on the name. OO.com, OO.net, and OO.info are strong contestants, but there's suspicious pressure for OO.gov, and some more marketing-driven rallying for the OO.tv and OO.xxx brand names. Niches of community developers are having a fight over "OO.ru or OO.jp?", but rumor has it these will be reserved for localised versions exclusively.
Thank you. I hate the current butt-URLy name (because it confuses or amuses non-geek users and thus embarrasses me every time) and I'll be here all week.
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
According to latest rumors, it'll be OpenOffice.bird^Wfox
(Agree about the name. Just silly. Not professional. Give the suite back it's proper name and advertise the website in the About and Credits, for chrissake.)
That's funny. I notised that/. was "down" approximately 10 hours ago, went to bed, woke up and saw the new design. The first thing I did was to view the source, expecting it to finally be XHTML. But it's still plain old HTML. When the heck will/. upgrade with all the articles and demos we've seen previously?
And yes, I spend way too much time in here:D
I've been using using the 2.0 prerelease builds for quite a while now. I've switched to 2.0 (pre) exclusively, rather than the 1.X series. It's very stable now, and the Miscrosoft document support is infinitely better.
--
-Uberhund
WHOAAAA!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Very cool new look!
Re:WHOAAAA!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't like it:( It looks fine on a large window, but if you use lots of little browser windows around 700px wide all the floats cross over lines and don't give you a side scroller. Icky CSS without minimum widths. Ah well, i'll survive i guess.
The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
jesser
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I might be impressed if it actually worked on Mac OS X. As it is, when I launch OpenOffice 1.1.5, it asks me to select my preferred X server, and then gives me an obscure error message when I hit Cancel because I don't understand WTF it is asking. I also tried 1.9 Beta and it gave me an even less useful error message earlier in the install process.
-- The shareholder is always right.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
rdwald
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then. I wish I were exaggerating.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Agarax
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· Score: 1
-- Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's a massive piece of software. Of course it's going to take hours, literally, to build. It's just a matter of OpenOffice being so massive.
It'd be like building a bridge across the English Channel. It will take longer to build such a bridge than it would to build a bridge across a 10 m wide stream.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 1
That's not a problem with the build system. That sounds like a problem with OpenOffice itself. Which, of course, is not what this particular thread is about.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
rdwald
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· Score: 1
Yea, yea, I was just trying to wryly demonstrate the flipside of the "truly fantastic beast" which the parent (now great-grandparent) was talking about. Though, it does seem to take longer to build than qt or x.org...surely those are complex programs as well.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
mr_zorg
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· Score: 2, Informative
Search for NeoOffice/J. A much better port for OS X. Of course, it's not 1.1.5, but it works great, no X server required.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
HuguesT
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· Score: 1
NeoOffice/J is very very very very very slow. It looks good, but damn it is slow. It doesn't require X, but it does require the bloody Godawful JVM. Which is slow. And start reaaally slowly. Don't even try to run it on a G3.
Did I mention it was slow? In comparison the X version is lightning fast (but ugly, for sure). Ah, and it positively gobbles up memory. On startup it REQUIRES 1GB of virtual mem on my machine.
The only reason one should use NeoOffice/J is *not* that it looks good, but that the *only* precompiled X11 version of OOo.org for MacOs/X I've managed to found on OpenOffice.org's site was version 1.1.2, whereas NeoOffice/J is based on 1.1.4.
In fact the state of OOo on OS/X is not very good.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Nutria
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· Score: 1
I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo,
Throw more hardware at it. A quad-CPU SunFire V40z w/ 8GB RAM & 10K RPM SCSI drives would make it scream. (Yes, it would have to be a a chroot, blah blah...)
-- "I don't know, therefore Aliens"
Wafflebox1
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Bert64
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· Score: 1
Only the openoffice build system is not multithreaded, so you`d not benefit from 4 cpus, and 2 wouldn`t help you much over 1. I run daily builds on a quad xeon, and it spends most of the time hogging a single cpu.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, actually I just updated this yesterday, and it only took one or two minutes. But don't worry, by the time Microsoft Vista will be released, I bet it'll make its way into Debian repository, too. Or maybe not.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
ttldkns
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· Score: 1
i use neo office/j on my G3 iBook with 640MB RAM. It runs like i would expect it to run on a 4-5 year old machine. It's usable and i regularly have pages and neo office/j open at the same time to do work for my college. Open office also needs the JVM so dont moan!
-- How many computers are too many?
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You should have a really fast machine, I grew a beard by the time it compiled last time around
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Sheridan
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· Score: 1
It is, though, by far the longest single package build on many people's gentoo systems... it certainly is on mine at just over 6 hours. Nothing else on my install comes close, although I guess the fact that (e.g.) KDE is split across many different packages may be the only thing saving it from that accolade.
-- I'm not politically incorrect, I'm just differently articulate
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
5 hours - you lucky bastard - it took 27 hours on my 600Mhz PIII with 128MB RAM (seriously)!
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
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CyricZ
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· Score: 1
Qt is nowhere near as large nor as complex as OpenOffice. Recall that OpenOffice includes its own GUI toolkit and app framework, in addition to the OpenOffice software itself.
X.org is written in C, rather than C++. C often compiles, especially with GCC, far faster than C++. Even then, X.org is miniscule in comparison to OpenOffice in terms of codebase size.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
gmake -j4 install clean
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
JediTrainer
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· Score: 1
I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then.
And I guess that's why I "emerge ccache" - only the changed files need to be compiled. Surely that would speed it up more than just a bit. Set your cache to a large size and you'd be good to go.
I don't remember spending 5 hours to compile anything after I set up the machine initially.
--
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
m50d
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· Score: 1
I can build Qt, KDE libraries, and KOffice in about half the time it takes to build OOo. Now I can't speak for 2.0, but KOffice compares very well with OOo 1.x, having more components with all the features I've ever needed, but is a lot smaller in terms of file size, builds faster, and stats up faster, even if you're not using any kde programs. To me OOo seems unnecessarily bloated.
-- I am trolling
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
scovetta
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· Score: 1
It'd be like building a bridge across the English Channel. It will take longer to build such a bridge than it would to build a bridge across a 10 m wide stream.
Ok, you're talking about the English Channel, so you're probably from England, which means that m means miles, and not meters. I still don't get it, since us poor sobs in 'merica don't know much about the English Channel
But if you studied abroad (in another European country) and learned that m means meters, then I still don't get it, because a ~30-foot wide stream doesn't seem like it would even be an issue.
On the other hand, I don't think anyone would call a 10 mile wide stream a 'stream'.
On the other other hand, I don't get what bridges have to do with OpenOffice.
-- Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Alan
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· Score: 1
... that's still way less than kdelibs, which on my xp2500/1G takes about 24 hours to compile. Luckily I'm a GNOME guy....
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
mr_zorg
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· Score: 1
NeoOffice/J is very very very very very slow. It looks good, but damn it is slow. It doesn't require X, but it does require the bloody Godawful JVM. Which is slow. And start reaaally slowly. Don't even try to run it on a G3.
I hadn't noticed on my PowerBookG4 w/2GB RAM...:-)
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
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rdwald
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· Score: 1
I didn't actually know that. Interesting.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
cmbofh
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· Score: 1
24 hours for kdelibs alone? You must be kidding.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
Alan
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· Score: 1
It was either that or kdebase, and no, not kidding, it was painful:)
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 1
OpenOffice is by far the more advanced of the two. While KOffice is comparable for the most basic tasks, it is usually unsuitable when you really push the software to the limit. Many of our secretaries found OOWriter to be far more useful than KWord. But eventually we decided on using LaTeX, as it trumped them both for document formatting. KCalc would crash mysteriously, while OOCalc would work work fine.
KOffice is a good effort, but to suggest that it is equal in some way to OpenOffice is absurd.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 1
Indeed, I'm British, but I use metric because it is the superior system of measure.
We're comparing the time needed to compile OpenOffice with that needed to compile some other app (perhaps vi, bash, or some other relatively small piece of software). The earlier poster was complaining about it taking several hours to build on their machine. Indeed, the vast time difference between compiling OOo and bash is due to the relative sizes of the two pieces of software.
Bash could be considered the 10 metre (30 foot, if you prefer) stream. It takes very little time to compile bash, just as a bridge could be built across a small stream with minimal effort using today's technology.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, is the vast English Channel. It takes hours on today's machines to compile OOo, just as it would take a very long time to construct a bridge across the English Channel, again using today's technology.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
cmbofh
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· Score: 1
Strange machine you have there. My notebook that should be slower than your computer and that has only half the memory compiles kdelibs *and* kdebase in a couple of hours.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
HuguesT
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· Score: 1
Hi,
> Open office also needs the JVM so dont moan!
Does it now? I hadn't noticed, I thought it was entirely optional. However the memory footprint of the X version is tiny compared to that of NeoOffice/J.
What the hell...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
did Slashdot try to divide by zero or something?
Re:What the hell...
by
nmb3000
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
No, no.
Taco figured why waste money on a development server or two when you can just develop it right on the live servers. "What they hell," he said. "It'll give those losers something to whine about. We'll get it right in a few days, and until then, screw them."
Though I think I like the mix of Arial and Times New Roman text. It takes me back to 1995.
-- "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib /)
Re:What the hell...
by
One+Div+Zero
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Oh? What? I was.. i was just taking a nap.
Oh! You weren't calling me. Nevermind. See you soon, I guess.
I wonder if openoffice 2.0 can export them properly too. I just tried to open an odt document that I saved from openoffice 2.0 (the latest version from SUSE 9.3, it's beta, but it's good enough for Novell) and KOffice says that it isn't a valid OASIS opendocument, then refuses to open it.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
I had to turn off lite mode in FF (been using it for years, too) because the site looks completely borked. If the owners give a shit, they should take a look at how it looks using FF (win32, 1024x786 res if that helps).
I'm using light mode on FF on Windows and it's fine. Sure it looks like ass but I wouldn't expect otherwise from/. - I can still read the content and comments without the extra fluff, so who cares about the rest.
Who uses the stable release... Beta is the way to go. Always. Real men don't do backup's, they upload their files to usenet or public ftp or bittorrent, and let the world mirror their files.
-- Gravity Sucks
Re:pssshhh stable.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Nice one, Linus.
Re:pssshhh stable.
by
leonmergen
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· Score: 2, Informative
When you're quoting Linux Torvalds, at least give him the credits he deserves...
Too bad it borks the Live Comment Tree Script for Greasemonkey(http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=137). Seriously that is the best script ever...
Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
bkazez
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Kjella
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote and Pages) and even Microsoft with Office 12 and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).
For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".
Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much:)
ed
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
linguae
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv, and presentations like Apple Keynote); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.
OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
killjoe
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· Score: 1
YOu can't win that way. Everybody will complain about re-training time. Hell the moz people had to duplicate the exact same keyboard shortcuts as IE in order to get people to use it.
Innovation is a damned if you do damned if you don't thing.
-- evil is as evil does
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
AcidArrow
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, it is a clone of Microsoft Office (even if it is a little better in my opinion), but since we just established that it has the same functionality as MSOffice and it's free, why isn't everybody using it?
Anyway, it seems that someone is actually rethinking the UI design of an office application, and strangely enough it's Microsoft! (I have no idea if it's going to be any better though..)
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
bloblu
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Did it ever occured to you that the current state of MS Office had been though about hard? Mod me down, but MS Office is rather near perfection. So it's a good idea for openoffice.org to copy good ideas in MS Office. I know it's fashionable to say the contrary on slashdot, nevertheless MS make real good products, sometimes.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
c.r.o.c.o
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The MS Office interface is very well established, and most (if not all) people are used to it. For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm. I am sure that MS Office implemented a similar interface to its precursors (WordPerfect et al) when it was introduced, and added new features gradually. And by the way, OOo did have a very different interface when it was still called StarOffice 5. It had a desktop manager, file browser, etc, but unfortunately, it felt cumbersome, and the suite ran slowly even on systems with reasonable specs. Moving to the current interface improved things significantly.
I have used OOo exclusively for the past two years, mostly for school work. Between taking notes in class, typing assignments, etc, I spent many hours using it. While I also have MS Office 97, 2k and XT, I stuck with OOo because of a few default behaviours and features. First, it does not bullet, tab, etc by default. You have to actvely format the text. When taking notes in class this is crucial, because I really do not have time to fuss around with how the text looks like. MS Office was driving me crazy with its auto-everything behaviour, which cannot be turned off (it can be undone on a case-by-case basis, but that is not good enough for me). Second, it can export the file as PDF. When sharing files, this is amazing. Not to mention that most people cannot edit your work if you chose not to let them. And upon completing a course I can just archive the material as PDF, without having to worry about installing OOo or MS Office in order to read it. MS Office however, does not (or at least did not) have this feature.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
IvyKing
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· Score: 1
Mod me down, but MS Office is rather near perfection.
While there are some aspects of MS-Office that are really refined, the UI for Word strikes me as being more broken the perfected. I was much happier with the UI on the old versions of Word for DOS - it was much nicer to use "keyboard only" than Word for Windoze.
Another big irritation with both MS-Word and OOo Writer is their treatment of everything on the document as being some kind of paragraph - where I find thinking in terms of frames (containers) to be much easier (e.g. Island Write - which also could be driven very nicely from the keyboard) for laying out pages. It makes more sense to me to be able to specify the frame size and location before inserting a picture, rather than having to resize and reposition the damn thing after inserting the picture/graphic/object in Word or Writer. (KWord is sort of getting there.)
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
bazorg
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· Score: 1
it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech) If this were to happen with another kind of product, a perfume, for instance... it would be called copyright infringement and dumping, right?
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
the_womble
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly, if people were willing to sue something different if it was better, they would be using Lyx (far more productive than a word processor), Gnumeric (fast start-up, built in Monte-Carlo analysis, no bugs in the stats functions) etc. They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
The choice is there, users choose not to take it.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> If this were to happen with another kind of product, a perfume, for instance... it would be called copyright infringement and dumping, right?
no. Because the equivalent with perfume would be going to your own effort of discovering what chemicals make the same smell as another perfume, and then publishing that recipe, and offering to make up the final product for people for nothing but the cost of materials.
There is certainly nothing illegal about that.
Dumping is flooding a market with a product that you're selling well below cost - using your size and ability to absorb a massive loss to drive your competitors out of the market.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
BenjyD
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· Score: 1
Because it's much slower, uglier and lacks polish in many areas. It is also, in my experience, buggier than recent versions of Office.
Don't get me wrong - I use OO.org on my Linux systems: it's amazing given the price and has some many good features. I've lost my fair share of work to MS Word pre-2000 as well. But I certainly would not recommend 1.1.x to any Windows/Mac user as an alternative to Office yet.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
grahamm
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· Score: 1
At one time almost everyone used WordPerfect and were used to its user interface. Then in a very short space of time, the majority of people moved to MS Word which had a completely different user interface. So, just because almost everyone is using a particular product and user interface does not mean another product cannot take over, sometimes very quickly, the dominant and standard position.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
TuringTest
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
They do that because users understand spreadsheets and they don't understand databases. No, really.
A spreadsheet is a good prototyping tool, it doesn't force structure on your data - you can play with it and throw it lots of data dumps, reformat them, reposition them, and the overall structure of the data emerges from all that dirty work. Contrast this with a database in which the first thing you have to do is define the schema - before even you can type in the first data instance.
So users choose not to change because they're using what works best for them. Spreadsheets are a really good metaphor for user development of datasets - its just that for the final version you should use a proper storage technology (a database), but to do that you really need an expert programmer.
-- Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
beforewisdom
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· Score: 1
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
I like your opinion.
I like it because it is the exact opposite of what I think is a good thing.
I think that is interesting.
My belief is that having a different UI is gratuitous and drives potential users away. Most computer users are users, not computer enthusiasts. As much as possible they just want to be able to sit down and get to work, without having to figure things out. Multiply this by 100 if one piece of software makes them learn something new to do something old that they can already do with another piece of roughly equivalent software.
People do not have problems with Microsoft software because of the UI arrangements. It is the company's pricing and terms.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
sydb
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· Score: 1
No. At the time you speak of, word processing was not the ubiquitous task it is now. The people who used WordPerfect were generally professional typists, or did not have typists to whom they could delegate the task.
That is why you could still find WordPerfect for DOS being used in offices up to a few years ago, maybe even still now. The people who learnt it - professional typists - were used to it, knew all the keystrokes, and could use it very efficiently.
With the arrival of GUI word processing, it became something everyone and their dog could do. Gradually Word format documents became more prevalent than WordPerfect documents, and the squeeze was put on the die-hards due to interoperability demands.
So your comparing apples and oranges, I'm afraid. Shifting the MS Word mindset is a much harder problem than shifting the WordPerfect mindset, as everyone has it.
-- Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Planesdragon
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· Score: 1
Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Remember that "innovation" and "invention" are not synonyms.
OOo has a few rather interesting features that MS Office doesn't. Word-prediction, XML file formats (that is, "really small files you can actually open and muck around in if you want to"), and a better mix of "help" and "let you do it." Not to mention more than a few I'm just thinking of at 8:30 am.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
That would be Microsoft. Most new ideas in these areas in the last few years are a result of Microsoft taking them up. On-the-fly spell checking? MS Office. Thinking that office programs should export HTML? MS Office. One of the reasons why they break so many standards is that they're always looking for a new whiz-bang feature to get folk to upgrade their office suite. (And yes, a good portion of these ideas were thought up by someone else first. Just like someone else invented the telephone before Bell.)
The new Office has some interesting bits in it--but you are right, and there is a heck of a lot of room for improvement.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"people were willing to sue something different if it was better"
You bloody Americans are as litigious as hell.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
cortana
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· Score: 1
Why bother, the result could never beat LaTex, $programming_language_of_choice and $pdf_reader_of_choice.:)
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
RetroGeek
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· Score: 1
On-the-fly spell checking? MS Office.
I used a wordprocessing app named WatchWord on my Heath/Zenith H100, using Z-DOS 1.0. This was in the mid-80's.
And guess what? It had an on-the-fly spell checker.
Most new ideas in these areas in the last few years are a result of Microsoft taking them up and a good portion of these ideas were thought up by someone else first
So which is it?
Over the years MS has, um, innovated, um, many new ideas which were actually created by other people. Most of the user population is so blinded by the MS marketing machine that they think MS created the entire software industry (or computer industry, including the Intranet).
I started with Z-DOS (Zenith) which was a licenced version of MS-DOS 1.0 built for the Z100. I read computer rags, etc. I KNOW that much of the stuff attributed to MS actually was pioneered elsewhere, as I watched the whole PC industry unfold. But you cannot convince anyone of that.
P.S. The Z100 (or the kit form H100) was a 8088 / 8085 (both Z-DOS and CP/M) dual processor machine running at 4.7 MHz. Z-DOS did NOT have a 640K limit as the video window was elswhere. I had 768K of RAM which was entirely usable. If I had had the money, I could have put 16M in that machine, all of which would have been directly accesable, without needing special libraries to squeeze memory access through a 16K hole into "upper" memory.
People jump all over MS for the 640K limit, but it was a result of the original IBM PC architecture, which placed the video and device hardware addresses between 640K and 1M.
--
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
stephenbooth
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· Score: 1
That sounds more like a DTP paradigm than a wordprocessing paradigm. With wordprocessing you're aiming to get the information onto the page and for it to look OK regardless of the output device, you're not too bothered if it doesn't look exactly the same on someone else's screen or printed on their printer compared with your screen and printer, you're not too worried if your table at the bottom of page 7 gets bumped to the top of page 8 &c. With DTP you want the output to look exactly the same regardless of where it it viewed or where it is printed, that table at the bottom of page 7 had better stay at the bottom of page 7 &c. You're comparing Word and OO.o Writer with Publisher, PagePlus and Scribus.
Stephen
-- "Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
jbolden
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· Score: 1
Because it doesn't have the same functionality. It has some of the same functionality. In almost every area it has a subset of the functionality that Office offers (or it has much less "bloat").
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
TeXMaster
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· Score: 1
Well, I don't agree that OOo is a MS Office clone.
There is obviously a humongous overlap in functionality, and that's for two reasons at least
some features are obvious components of the various components of the suite
and
unless the various components have a superset of the features MSO componets have, migration will not be possible.
What is true, however, is that as the versioning progresses, there is a "dumbing down" in features and interface to (apparently) "appeal" to the common user, and (allegedly) satisfy some "Ready for MS Windows" guidelines dictated by MS and that MS itself doesn't follow. The kind of crap you expect from a marketind-driven something.
What I do find interesting is that people are all enthusiastically jumpy about how MS "innovates" the UI from version to version, but as soon as a competitor develops a different UI it's "too different from MS to be comfortable". This is really saddening.
And finally, there is another suite that focused too much on MS-imitation, and this greatly contributed to its demise, causing it to lose its (sadly few) affectionate customers at an incresingly fast rate, and it's Corel's WordPerfect Office.
Say what you want, but "despite" all efforts from Novell first and Corel after, WordPerfect remains the best wordprocessor around, at least for Western languages. Too bad it isn't in the right hands.
Oh well, luckily, we still have TeX and friends...
-- "I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Julian+Morrison
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· Score: 1
OpenDoc wasn't confusing because it was new, it was confusing because it was a bad idea. Multiple app-private binary encodings mixed up inside a container document that only supported inclusion, not interpretation. No one app able to see or manipulate the page as a whole. No standardized data representation for any particular purpose, so you needed the exact same part binary to even view the document.
The users rejected it because it was ill concieved, unnecessary and made no sense. Being stuck in a rut had nothing to do with it.
Now, if you want to see the same idea done right, how about... Open Document, the native file format of OOo version 2. Edit your words in KOffice, your sheets in OOo Calc, and your drawings in something else entirely, then mix them all up in one common file format, which is built on XML so that all data is readable and accessible even if no app exists to manipulate it.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Planesdragon
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· Score: 1
So which is it?
Both. If you want, substitute "meme" or "change" for "idea."
I'm not surprised at all to learn that there was on-the-fly spell checking far earlier than 1995. It doesn't do a thing to counter my point though, because for some reason neither WordStar nor Wordperfect nor any major other word-processor adopted it until MS did.
I started with Z-DOS (Zenith) which was a licenced version of MS-DOS 1.0 built for the Z100. I read computer rags, etc. I KNOW that much of the stuff attributed to MS actually was pioneered elsewhere, as I watched the whole PC industry unfold. But you cannot convince anyone of that.
Here's the rub--it doesn't matter who came up with the idea first. It matters who adopted it first. Of all the industry players who made office software, Microsoft was the one who was least scared of change--and, thus, they're the one left standing today.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
RetroGeek
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· Score: 1
Microsoft was the one who was least scared of change--and, thus, they're the one left standing today.
No, that's not quite it.
They had such a marketing presence (and thus public mind-share) that they basically could rule as they wished.
Company A comes up with an idea. They develop it and start to market it. Microsoft sees this, and thinks that they want to also sell something, but of course they do not have it.
So they announce that they are also developing the same thing (without actually having done any work). Because the great Microsoft has made the announcment, sales of the Company A product dry up.
This is (now) known as vapourware. And this happened many times.
--
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
mrmeval
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· Score: 1
It has to exactly mimic MS Office out of the box or it gets deleted in favor of MS Office. Given a few months to learn new tricks and customizations only a small percentage of former MS Office users would touch the interface. Authors are the worst, sheesh such a rainman attitude you've *never* seen.
-- I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long.
--brownkitty
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
the_womble
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· Score: 1
Fine, so use spreadsheets for prototyping and have someone who can program rewrite a final version.
What I have a problem with is the use of the spreadsheet implementation as the production application. What happens is that the spreadsheet version works and no one gives a damn is it works badly, or will cause problems later on.
Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
vanka
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
You're not using 1.5b1 are you? I noticed enough rendering problems with 1.5b1 that I went back to 1.0.x. It seems to look fine to me...
From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use....just now that MS Office has totally updated its interface and made it greatly simplified and easier (I've seen the videos, and it does). I'm not MS fan, but I recognize when they do a good job in usability. This time they got it right.
It's a shame that OOo will have to start the catch-up game again, and it's a shame because FOSS should be the one leading in discovering new ways of interaction (fortunately, there are areas where it does).
-- Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Re:Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox."
Don't worry. I'm at work right now and it doesn't display correctly in IE either.
Nope, I'm running 1.0.6, I'm gonna upgrade to 1.0.7 and see if that helps.
2.0 Beta For MS Files
by
kg4gyt
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
Re:2.0 Beta For MS Files
by
DoubleRing
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· Score: 1
Well actually, Gmail's not in beta anymore. Just FYI
Still not 64-bit clean.
Why exactly is it so hard to make a 64 bit version?
Don't get me wrong, i think OO.o is a great app, i'm just curious as to why there's no AMD64 port
I'm no expert, but from what I understand, creating an app that can ported to 64 bit architectures is surprisingly difficult. There are apparently a great number of places in C/C++ code where the compiler will just assume that a function returns an integer. When you compile it for x86 where integers are stored using 32 bits, then this doesn't matter very much, because then integers are generally the same as what you were expecting to get. However, when you try to compile for a 64 bit arch, then suddenly you have hundreds of places where you are trying to fit a 64-bit integer (i.e. a square peg) into some 32-bit container (i.e. a round hole). This problem is especially clear when you realize that many of the memory allocating functions are assumed to return integers if they are not used just right.
Unless you want to have a document which uses more than about 3GB of memory, what's the point of building it 64bit?
Firstly a 64bit program will be bigger and probably slower (dispite what the zealots tell you) because of having to drag double sized data across the memory bottleneck.
Seeing as the Opteron/Athlon64/Turion64 run 32bit applications fast natively there's no actual point (other than religious) to build and run an office product (or, indeed, most other applications) in 64bit mode.
As a general comment, "64bit program will be bigger and probably slower" is generally true. Things that benefit from 64-bit (databases, encryption) will speed up but everything else will slow down. Of course, when you speak x86-64 that isn't true at all. You get several advanatages in the design (more reigsters, flat memory, assume high level processor (no compat building for a Pentium 1)) which do speed it up.
In EDA tools, I've seen SPARC 64-bit binaries go slower and the x86-64 ones go quicker. That isn't a critcism of SPARC, it is just proof of the benefits of the x86-64 mode.
Anyway in THIS case I don't see any benefits of having a 64-bit OOo as such - the problem is if OOo is 32-bit, then it needs a 32-bit userland. So on my x86-64 boxes I've got a load of duplicated libraries (GTK etc) in 32-bit mode just to support OOo. If OOo was 64-bit, I simply would need less stuff. That has to be good right?
Myself, I've not seen a great number of x86_64 binaries go quicker at all. This is both under Linux with GCC and Portland C compilers with all the optimisations I can throw at it switched on and under Solaris x86 with GCC and Studio 10 compilers.
For purely integer code on our v40z's, v20z's and W2100z machines there seems to be a 50% drop in speed, for floating point scientific code generally a bit less. This is the same for FORTRAN as well. These are all Opteron with dual channel memory.
I've tried similar on an Athlon64 machine with single channel memory and the performance drop is far greater.
All the advantages of the extra registers seems to be offset by the extra memory overhead at the moment, at least on the codes we run.
--
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Re:64?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't get that. In 32bit pointers and integers are both 32bits. In 64bit pointers and integers are both 64bits. So what's the problem? How do you get 32bit types (round holes) in a 64bit app. Plus, you shouldn't assume any size of any type at all. That's what sizeof and size_t, offset_t and so on are for.
Re:64?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I use OpenOffice programmatically (from Python) to extract text from MS Office formats. Having to deal with the OpenOffice-embedded Python being 32-bit while all other Pythons in the system are 64-bit is irritating.
Firstly a 64bit program will be bigger and probably slower (dispite what the zealots tell you) because of having to drag double sized data across the memory bottleneck.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you only dealing with double sized data when you use pointers? byte, char, int, etc. should all still be the same size, right?
(Actually I know int can vary depending on the underlying architecture, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that for compatibility, x86-64 still uses 32 bit ints.)
-- If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Yes, it's only pointers (plus the extra data transfer upon process context switch due to the extra size and number of registers) which changed size.
However, the program code itself will have a lot more 64bit addresses in it (which means that the "instruction cache" size is effectively reduced) plus as soon as you start using linked lists or function look-up tables you're into lots of pointer work, which effectively reduces the "data cache". (I'm using quotes as the cache is unified on the AMD64 processors, but the effect is to for all intents and purposes to reduce the effective cache size.)
--
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
I was expecting 2.0...
by
at_slashdot
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Why does it take so much to release it? I've been using 1.99999999999 for half a year. I hope at least will be high quality.
-- "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
-- Prof. Dumbledore
Why does it take so much to release it? I've been using 1.99999999999 for half a year.
It is exasperating. SuSE 9.3 came and went with 1.9.1. They promised an update to 2.0 real soon when SuSE 9.3 came out, but 2.0 never happened.
Now SuSE 10.0 is about to come out, again with 1.9.x. No sign of 2.0 happening in this lifetime.
REPLY:Just a Microsoft Office clone
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
But the did NOT clone the outrageous price that Microsoft charges for it!!! I installed it on 25 computers in my company and stopped paying the outrageous amounts to Microsoft for Office!;-)
"10 bucks says the great come from windows users and the shit/wtf comments comes from non windows users."
You owe ten dollars I guess. It works both fine and shit/wtf in Opera, under Windows. Refreshing a few times fixes it, but the next refresh breaks it again (although that actually has stopped now)
-- "Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Available via torrents too
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Can't find the bugs? Want mine?
by
jfengel
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· Score: 1, Informative
Really? I find it pretty darn buggy. It crashes frequently; the change-tracking feature is intolerably slow; it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
I guess it's all in the features you use. I still use it because the price is right. And "pretty darn buggy" is still "only about as buggy as Microsoft Office."
Send me your bank account information, social security number, home address (or where ever your credit card bills go to), and your mother's maiden name. You'll have your money within 24 hours.
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
And is also its Achilles heel.
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
It builds its own build tools as part of its bootstrapping process. This makes it near impossible to cross-compile without completely retooling the build system (a pain for doing any type of single-machine PPC & x86 OS X builds).
It has its own "make" equivalent that encodes module dependencies and language localizations in a custom format. To add appropriate dependencies you need to learn yet another makefile system. Don't mention trying to figure out the module build order without actually running a compile. Try it sometime if you want to lose your mind.
It uses quite a few preprocessing tools for custom file formats for processing including slots files, IDL files that generate more headers, resource compilers, and more. Custom toolchains make figuring out what generated what file even more fun to discover.
Some of the build tools have dependencies on versions of Java that do not exist on all the platforms on which the application might be able to run, preventing it from even compiling on those platforms.
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
by
mr_zorg
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· Score: 1
Allow me to commend you on the work you've done with NeoOffice. I absolutely love it. I use it only my personal PowerBook and my work one too. Despite the fact that some might complain it doesn't LOOK like a Mac app, it's much better than the standard OS X distro which requires X11 and work very well. Maybe someday OpenOffice (in general) will get better support for native look and feel. Isn't that what OOo 2.0's use of Java is all about? Or am I mistaken on that one?
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Of course you have to dis-respectfuly disagree with Mr. CyricZ who is a total idiot and seems to be spewing all his idiotic comments only for the sake of... who knows why. He is one of the most uninformed people i have ever seen and with a self importance complex to match.
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I also want to applaude your NeoOffice efforts. It is one of the applications that the Mac platform stands or falls with to me, as I need office compatibility yet do neither want to pay MS any money nor want to pirate software.
which reminds me that I really should donate to your project. Memoing myself right away now.
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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MichaelSmith
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· Score: 1
I wonder if this is indirectly linked to the notorious heaviness of oo. Could it be a case of too much code?
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just wanted to say thank you for your work, I work at an educational non-profit with Macs, WinXP and Linux boxen. Your work on Neo Office is very much appreciated helping to create a series of common FOSS applications across all platforms.
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
However, a project this size surely needs a single build system for all platforms, and that means command-line tools. XCode is nice, sure, but any work done converting OOo to use XCode is (a) work that's wasted for the vast majority of users who will never touch a Mac, and (b) work that will need to be done all over again every time the smallest change is made to the portable build system.
I speak as someone who's had to rewrite build scripts for (small) projects time and time again because the Windows ports of most open source projects seem to assume that everyone has Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, and I only have command-line compilers. Believe me: reliance on an IDE is bad. Far better to cater for the lowest common denominator, and pressurise the IDE makers to abandon their proprietary formats and use standard Makefiles and so forth instead.
Just wanted to say THANK YOU for NeoOffice (which runs happily on my iMac). I appreciate all of your hard work and talent, it's a great app. W0ot!
Re:And is also its Achilles heel.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We have yet to see the source code of MS Office, I bet it is not fundamentally different from what you are complaining of about OOo.
- Anonymous Coward
Slashdot's true motto
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CaptainPinko
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· Score: 1
Slashdot's original motto was --and is secretly-- "better late than never". How popular this motto remais with the people at 3D Realms is another issue altogether.
Definitely a fan of the new site. Frankly all I think it needs is the/. logo replaced with SVG and then you'd have a really fancy all XML site.
-- Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Spoing
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I need help.
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
-- A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
The largest regional government in Spain, Andalusia, is a heavy user of OpenOffice as are many other regional governments in Spain but to a lesser degree.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
zerblat
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Start by contacting OOo's marketing people, I'm sure they can help you. Also, the OOo Newsletter usually has a section listing high-profile success stories.
-- Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
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rastos1
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· Score: 1
Shameless plug to my own collection: OOo is specifically mentioned here and here
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You might also submit this to Ask Slashdot...!
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
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Urzumph
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· Score: 1
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
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Coeurderoy
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· Score: 2
In France (not sure its the best reference to use in the US:-) The Gendarmerie National (Militarized Police Forces) uses Open Office on all new stations and is in the process of upgrading all the old PCs. (its 70 000 PCs) The Customs Office is using OO on 16000 office.
City of Vienna, and Munich are in that process also.
The Junta de Extremadura in Spain (regional government) is using Linux/OO for everything (the Education dep only has 80 000 workstations).
Finally remember that there are three categories of CSS (Closed Source Software) supporting Public Servants: - Some are Corrupt - Many are incompetent - Some are Both.
(unfortunatelly to be truthfull, FOSS supporting Public Servants are not necesarelly Angels, it would be too simple otherwise)
So you have to find out in wich category your decision makers are:-)
Good Luck
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Spoing
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· Score: 1
Lots of excellent answers...thanks everyone for the help!
-- A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Marauder2
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· Score: 1
I face a similar issue. We have Agency "interoperability requirements" which now try to enforce Windows XP and Office 2003 (They also allow MacOS X 10.3+ and Office 2004) on the desktop. Even though I am just a technical peon, I would like to be able to push upward plenty of justification to perhaps get the people who DO write those standards to realize that adopting an open format that any application can fully impliment if it chose to would be much better for "interoperability" than forcing everyone to use a closed propriatary one that is only fully supported by one application. (with others having to reverse engineer it)
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Rgb465
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· Score: 1
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
I'm in a karma free fall right now. Let's see how much more I can lose.
No...I used Slashdot's darling browser using one of the most popular linux distros. I suppose I could install some other distros and use some more obscure browsers. But you're right, though...I'm sure they tested the new code on SeaMonkey 1.0a....whatever the hell that is.
check out the offtopic bitchslap in action
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
-1, Offtopic.
Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit:)
ed
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
BrainInAJar
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· Score: 1
Well, if the only issue is that gcc spits out some warnings, why are the gentoo amd64 docs so adament that i not compile OO?
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 1
The problem is that those warnings are really runtime errors that will result in crashes in actual application usage. Unlike a lot of gcc warnings, they really can't be ignored and need to be fixed in order to get a running app:)
ed
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, I haven't, and I don't understand why anyone else would either. One of the first things I learned when I learned C was what was guaranteed and what wasn't guaranteed about the sizes of primitive types. I make the tiny amount of effort it takes to write code that is portable across architectures. Why doesn't everyone else?
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
burnetd
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, storing a pointer in anything other than a pointer sounds an incredibly stupid thing to do to me.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Bert64
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· Score: 1
It`s not about being 64bit per se, it`s about running it on pure 64bit systems without the need to keep a load of 32bit backwards compatibility libs sitting around.. Also to load it on a pure 64bit architecture such as IA64 or Alpha which has no 32bit backwards compatibility mode it`s necessary to be 64bit clean. The usage of 64bit machines is only going to increase.. Also, there was a version of openoffice (1.1.3) which was ported to alpha, but i`m not sure if the changes got rolled back in.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Welcome to the Win32 API.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
jesterzog
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· Score: 1
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...
As someone else pointed out, I think it's more about cleanly compiling on 64-bit systems than about accessing more memory. That aside, though, what about the following?
Very large spreadsheets. It wouldn't be common, but there could certainly be times when someone wants to store large grids of numbers in big spreadsheets.
Third party extensions. This is quite specialist, but people do tend to do all sorts of specialist things when writing third party extensions. Preventing 64-bit memory access seems like just another thing that'd cause problems for someone trying to write them.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
fnj
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· Score: 1
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory
I thought 640KB should be enough for anybody.
Seriously, I knew from the beginning that the Z-80's 64KB was a joke; I was one of the first who noticed that 640KB wasn't going to cut it; THE first who realized 16MB was a straitjacket; now let me be the one to clue people in that 2GB (or 4GB if you will) is not going to be a shining mansion that lasts forever. Actually, it's starting to get grungy already.
Get real. It's comin', baby. The future.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I was one of the first who noticed that 640KB wasn't going to cut it; THE first who realized 16MB was a straitjacket;
That's nice. Is there a "Guinness book of people who recognized memory limits first"? I'll be sure to look for you in the 16MB section.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
swillden
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, I haven't, and I don't understand why anyone else would either.
It's pretty easy to understand why people do this, actually, although it's really not a good idea.
The reason is "callbacks". If you're writing a library that needs to be extended by other developers with plugin-like structures, it's very nice to be able to allow the plugins to register callbacks... basically function pointers that the plugin code hands to your library and which your library calls when certain things happen and the plugin code needs to be notified. But what if the author of the called-back function wants to register that function multiple times, in different contexts? Some way is needed for the called-back code to determine the context, and to find non-global data. The solution is to hand the library a piece of data in addition to the function pointer and to have the library hand the piece of data back as a parameter when it invokes the callback.
So what kind of data? The library author has no idea what might be useful to the plugin author. In C, there are two obvious solutions: A void* or a large integer type. Either way, the data is opaque to the library and has to be casted/converted/interpreted by the callback code. To a programmer who doesn't do cross-platform development, but is intimately familiar with his target platform and toolset, and who knows deep in his bones that, for example, both an unsigned long and a void* are just 32-bit values that can be interpreted in whatever way is convenient, it makes a lot of sense to use the long. See, for plugin authors who just need a little bit of integer data back, like some file descriptor, or an index into a table or something, the long is very convenient because there's no scary type conversion required. For those who require more context, they can malloc some space, cast the resulting pointer to a long and send that. They're more sophisticated and will know that's okay. In addition, the fact that it's a long is a strong hint to the plugin author that whatever they pass in, the library code is not going to try to dereference it as a pointer.
It's okay as long as it works, I suppose, but it creates great challenges to portability. It's much better to use a void* and let those who only need to pass a couple of bytes allocate some space somewhere. Theoretically, if I have an integer I want the callback to send back, I could just cast it to a void*, but that would make most people nervous that the lib might decide to try dereferencing it.
Another nice approach for a C library is to take an instance of a union passed in by value. Then the plugin author can choose whichever data type is closest, and although there may be some "wasted" stack space if one of the elements of the union suddenly gets a lot bigger, the code will run correctly. I've never seen this approach used anywhere other than my own code, though.
The best solution for a C++ app is for the lib author to write a plugin base class that contains nothing but pure virtual functions which will be called back. Then the context is provided by the "this" pointer, the plugin author can easily add whatever data elements are useful to the derived class, the compiler can do some basic typechecking on the callback registrations and, effectively, on the callback signatures, and the portability problems disappear. As long as the plugin base class doesn't contain any data elements, none of the supposedly-thorny problems with multiple inheritance rear their heads (though I've never had trouble with them anyway... in practice the sort of diamond-shaped inheritance trees that create them are rare).
-- Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
m50d
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
Why can't the compiler just make long 64 bits on 64-bit systems? 4-byte longs are a minimum size, not the size they have to be.
-- I am trolling
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
some+guy+I+know
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
I did when I was first starting to code in C, but I don't do it any more, because I know better now. I find it somewhat disturbing that people still write such defective code these days, especially for an important project like this. (OK, there may be one or two places (e.g., accessing hardware registers in device drivers) where such code is necessary, but definitely not "happen[ing] quite a bit".)
Just because it's "valid C", it doesn't mean that it's good programming.
-- Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Usually it is okay to store it in a long because a long is at least the size of a pointer on all architectures that I know of. Not so for an 'int'.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Citizen+of+Earth
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
Not that I think it's a good idea to swap the two, but a 'long' and a 'void*' are both 64 bits on a 64-bit box. I think it's a safe bet in the future that a 'long' will continue to be the natural word size of the machine. Perhaps you mean 'int', and anyone who uses 'int' for memory-countable objects deserves to be bitten.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
IcePic
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· Score: 1
I've heard Win64 has 32bit longs but 64bits pointers.
-- --
I'm as unique as everyone else.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Geoffreyerffoeg
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· Score: 1
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size?
No, at least not for real work (but maybe when I'm amusing myself by stress-testing the compiler). Why would you do this? A long isn't a pointer type. Just use a void*. Why would you need a long? To pass it in a badly-defined callback? Windows' callbacks, for example, use LPARAM, HRESULT, etc. as macros, so they should recompile nicely on 64-bit machines.
Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out?
Uh, no. Can't you keep the pointers somewhere and the window references somewhere else? If you need a variable to store something, why don't you declare it as the right type?
This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code.
Why, for the love of God (oops, can't use His name, Moses and Slashdot will both get on my case), why do you need this? It's just an office suite. It doesn't even do enough graphics or math to have those crazy optimizations. It needs to handle input, display, and output of several types, and that's it. OOo is writable in Java or VB (emphasis on the -able; it'd probably take a few years to do so). So why is it doing crazy C nonportable nonstandard pointer arithmetic?
Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long.
You should be using C++, or checking your C code better. Reinterpret casts are evil and nonportable. Casts between number types are acceptable as long as you have a routine to handle overflows (if it's a downcast). Casts between pointer types are rarely acceptable, except in malloc() and other generic pointer functions. Casts that use operator type() in C++ are quite acceptable, because you define the cast function. If at all you have to turn a pointer into a non-pointer type, turn it into a class that encapsulates a pointer. If it can't have a pointer as a member, it should have a char[sizeof(void*]] member.
Re:Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
A compiler must usually match the conventions of the OS environment and other compilers on a given platform if you have any hope of linking and interacting with code outside of your program.
Witty comments with submission
by
gringer
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· Score: 3, Funny
What happened to the in-depth analysis from the poster. "X has been released, download it here" seems a bit empty to me.
I was expecting something like the following:
Although version 1.1.5 is a bit less of a jump than the upcoming 2.0, there have been a few impressive improvements. None of which I'm sure of, but not knowing those guys who work on the product, I'm sure it'll be great. I'm thinking of downloading this update in a couple of weeks, so what suggestions do you have for software to support this massive leap into the unknown?
Y'know, I really liked the idea of Lyx, but I found using it like trying to run with my shoelaces tied together. Partly this is just an unpolished user interface, but I think there is a basic conceptual problem with Lyx.
The time to use a WYSIWY* tool is when you are concerned with what you are seeing, not what you are saying. Otherwise, it is a distraction. The very heart of a GUI is direct manipulation of visual representations, which is the very thing that WYSIWYM is against.
Of course people are different, and if it works for you it works for you. Personally, I do most of my writing in a plain old text editor, or in some cases an outliner. I'd like to use WikiPad, but it's HTML export is littered with presentation gunk. I think it makes more sense just to write in some kind of structured text and then transform and mark it up later for presentation purposes than to use a visual tool.
-- Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lyx is just a GUI for LaTeX, so you certainly don't have to use that program to get the benefits. It's simply much easier to ease people into a system like LaTeX by using a program like Lyx.
If you put together your document in Lyx or LaTeX, you can easily transform it into whatever format you want. It sounds exactly like what you like, and you're already a good way to it.
That said, I looked into LyX. At least, I looked through the graphical tour. It's an interesting piece of software. However, I'm not sure how it's rethinking word processing. Word also allows you to mark sections of text for formating purposes. I've never used the ability, but it's there.
To rethink the idea of an office suite, I'd need to think about what I use it for and how I use it. A lot of times I just want to jot down some notes. Maybe I just found some interesting Linux tidbit or I have a story idea I want to write down. I've found KDE's Kate perfect for this, though ispell sucks... I keep a personal journal. I'd love to find an application that puts the date a page was started in the header. I could probaly write a macro in OpenOffice for this, but I haven't yet. My resume made use of formated sections. However, I wrote that in Notepad and saved it as HTML. HTML is the only format I've found that is guaranteed to be readable on any desktop system. I keep my check register in Calc (OpenOffice). I should keep it in a database, but I don't want to have to learn how to start and configure a database backend just for a check register.
All of my uses so far have been personal. Work offers a multitude of different uses. I'd say e-mail is the heaviest use. I've found the editor in Evolution to work well. It has all of the basic function needed to make your point, even some nice stationary. Next, I'd say, are forms. Every action requires a form it seems. Excel is a good form generator. Lists would be next. I'm always receiving lists in Excel format via e-mail. Cost changes, inventory received, etc. Excel makes a good database when you just want to get the data where it needs to go. Printing labels is a daily task. Every package needs a sku number attached to it. Word just asks for the Avery product number and what I want on them. Mail merge gets used a lot when I need to bulk e-mail vendors, customers, or departments. Every once in a while I need to generate simple manuals and pamphlets to be included with produsts. This is the only time I print anything (other than the labels).
Now, there are an amazing number of applications that can handle one or two of the functions I require. However, I don't want to have a completely different command set everytime I do something different. Thus, I want an office suite. This holds over to home use as well. As I said, I use Kate for simple things. However, when I need something that's a bit more complex, like my home budget, I use what I know.
It's really hard to rethink the office suite. It's just used in too many different ways. People group actions together. They want to deal with everything in a group the same way. Office suites group secraterial actions together. Granted, OpenOffice doesn't get me coffee, but come to think of it, neither does my secratary.
-- Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux
by
MarkWatson
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of/opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in/opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.
I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.
I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.
If you know what WPARAM and LPARAM then you know that any Windows programmer
does this sort of thing as a matter of course.
But back to spread-sheets... the limitation that always gets me is the 256 column
limit! Der!
Back to OOo... the thing that REALLY annoys me is that the default formatting
for number truncates to two decimal places (visually, not numerically thank Gordo) , and if you want any more decimal places you have to enter a custom format.
That's why I always end up going back to Excel. As a former scientist that was the main reason I kept on Windows rather than switch to Linux (or BSD or...)
----
-- return 0;
}
I blame Microsoft!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
^^^ what it said ^^^
Dumping
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Dumping is flooding a market with a product that you're selling well below cost - using your size and ability to absorb a massive loss to drive your competitors out of the market.
Is it like what Sun does by dumping massive developer resources into SO/OOo? Not that they stand any chance succeeding:P
Thank you OOo for giving me a new argument
by
Reemi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm in the process of introducing OOo in my company and have been allowed to start a trial half a year ago. We mostly write technical documentation and OOo has held up quite well. Some of the guys even refuse to move back to other tools.
But now, I can show management that OOo is already FORWARD compatible with a file format that they did not even release (except the beta). No FORCED upgrades, this might be the best argument I'll have. Upgrading a large company that uses Solaris, Linux and Windows is not a cheap operation.
MacOS X Version
by
tranquillity
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· Score: 3, Informative
Of course you'll still need X11 to run those applications, but 1.1.5 works fine and stable for me (havn't tried 2.0 yet) on tiger with Apple's X11.
the looks of slasdot
by
N3wsByt3
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· Score: 2, Funny
"By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me."
Well, that says it all, doesn't it? I mean; it looks normal in Lynx! What more proof of the highly skewed and distorted layout do you need?;-)
-- ---
"To pee or not to pee, that is the question."
---
Re:Can't find the bugs? Want mine?
by
lahvak
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· Score: 1
it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
These two are not bugs, they are features. You see, they are trying to emulate MS Word.
-- AccountKiller
Re:Can't find the bugs? Want mine?
by
Bert64
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· Score: 1
It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems.. Also, when loading word files openoffice seems to emulate word 2000, when loading files from 2003 it seems to exhibit the same problems that word 2000 does loading the same files.
And then there's the tricky file format problem
by
MROD
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· Score: 1
Of course, when you port the application to a 64bit environment you have to start worrying about data type sizes and the way the application reads and writes the files stored on disk.
There's always the problem of having to do type conversions so as to make sure that the data types in the files are the same size as the other architectures produce. Admittedly, it helps that GCC on x86 and x86_64 both use the same sizes for native integer types (short, int, long) but this isn't always the case. (DEC Alpha OSF/1 used 64 bit longs which messed up a lot of programs.) However, there is still the problem of data alignment and padding in structures.
--
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Re:And then there's the tricky file format problem
by
Just+Some+Guy
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· Score: 1
Of course, when you port the application to a 64bit environment you have to start worrying about data type sizes and the way the application reads and writes the files stored on disk.
Unless, of course, you've standardized on a widely used text-based format, which is the approach OpenOffice took. That also neatly sidesteps the whole problem of endianness differences between platforms; store the values internally however you want, but exchange them in a set, portable format.
-- Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Re:Looks like ass in Safari!
by
Deadguy2322
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· Score: 0
Have you considered knowing what is being spoken about before making an ass of yourself lately?
-- Check out my foes list to see who is so retarded that they can't use the signature line!!!
I have yet to lose any work or have an unrecoverable error as a result of using 2.0 beta. Myself, I avoid producing hugely formatted badly designed documents (coming from an engineering background). I frequently need to read bloatware from people who confuse Word with a DTP system and think that putting a short article into hugely complicated PowerPoint helps get the message across, and I have never failed to get out the information I actually needed even if occasionally there were minor issues like mislocated images.
In any case, my final output is PDFs, which means that by the time I have generated a document and finalised it, Office compatibility is not an issue.
-- Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It doesn't look that bad. The only green on green was visited links in the menu on the left, and it was a bright green on dark green, which isn't hard to see at all. The blue on dark green was more annoying to me, but the white on greenish-background of the main content of each page was easily visible. It avoids the stuff I dislike most about ugly web pages: movement/change.
Oh right, because they are producing scientific papers and have to use LaTeX. WYSIWYM is better than using notepad...
Personally, I prefer vim for my LaTeX formatting needs, though I've been meaning to give LyX a try.
That's a pretty harsh thing to say about all the people you know. Yikes.
It's in the universe repository
by
so1omon
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· Score: 1
OOo 2 is included by default in the next release of Ubuntu. I am writing this from the preview release of Breezy. However, OOo 2 should be in the universe repository for Hoary. Try enabling the universe repository, and apt-get install openoffice.org2.
--
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
MS Foxpro
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
MS Access is never a viable option/ If you absolutely must have an MS product then MS Foxpro is what you are looking for. It is much more powerful and flexible than MS Access.
OO Base might be a more practical option even.
But how else can you do portable?
by
steve_l
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
RAMMS+EIN
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· Score: 1
First, I'd like to apologize if the below sounds like a personal attack. It's not. It's me having issues seeing the benefit in replacing make by something else. If you can enlighten me, I'll be a happy man.
``As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool''
That sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. Ant may be gaining traction, but it's nowhere near a standard yet, and I think its dependence on Java will prevent it from ever becoming one.
``But how else can you do portable?''
You said it right there:
``-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)''
To compile software at all, you'll need a compiler for the language that software is written in. That compiler alone is already a common toolchain of sorts. So you already have this requirement. Also, make, even when it needs extras like a POSIX shell and some POSIX commands, is absolutely dwarfed by the size of a typical compiler, and it's not uncommon for a single software project to be larger, either. So the impact of requiring make + shell + with commands is not very large.
What Ant (and a number of other projects) are doing is trying to replace one common toolchain (make and friends) by another (in Ant's case, Ant itself and Java). I fail to see how that helps the situation at all.
In fact, I'm convinced that projects like Ant do more harm than good; they break with the standard, leading to compatibility problems and forcing people to lead multiple systems, they are usually tied to other non-standard technologies (in Ant's case: Java - I can go into that further if anyone wishes), and they haven't had the time to mature that make has had.
The one thing I never understand about these make replacements is: What fundamental, unfixable flaw is there in make, that makes these people feel they have to burden the world with a completely new and incompatible system? And no, make's pickiness about tabs is not a good reason; it can easily be fixed without rewriting make, and is arguably a flaw in editors.
Not that there's anything wrong with writing make replacements without any good reason for it. Heck, something good might even come of it.But so far, I don't see that this has happened.
-- Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I helped evaluate both Ant and SCons several months ago for a large C++ project where we needed to support different versions of compilers from various vendors.
They're nice tools but we ended up choosing something else: Boost Build v2.
Boost Build v2 Milestone 10 (bbv2-m10) currently uses the bjam tool/language and support for Python is being added. NOTE: The "development status" page hasn't been updated in years but other website pages, docs, and tool are kept up-to-date and the newsgroup is very active.
We can literally have one set of build files that correctly and automatically handle builds for gcc, msvc-6, msvc-7, etc. for debug and release builds.
One of the reasons bbv2 is so effective is that compiler and linker settings are specified using generic specifiers instead of vendor-specific flags. And the use of bjam combined with this and other features make for a powerful combination.
Anyone using make should consider using bjam (it simplifies both helloworld and huge c++ apps). And anyone using bjam should consider using bbv2.
Other build tools worth mentioning include rake (for people who prefer Ruby). I love Ruby and prefer to code in that language but bbv2 with bjam simply blows away all the build tools right now--with SCons (Python-based) close on its heals with its superior documentation and possibly larger marketshare.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
m50d
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· Score: 1
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
But these tools do exist. Why not just use scons? Sure, it's another dependency, but they don't seem to mind depending on Java.
-- I am trolling
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
Bob+Uhl
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· Score: 1
What does Ant do that make doesn't? The only bad thing about make that I can see is that tabs are meaningful.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
jbolden
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· Score: 1
The flaw in make is that it is file based not class based. There is no reason that there should be some sort of tie between the datafile containing source code and what gets compiled together. A more natural organization for an object oriented language would be one based on classes. Also make assumes an underlying Unix like OS as it has shell like commands.
Make works well for C on Unix but I don't see how it is really the best solution for OSes that are very unlike Unix or for languages very unlike C.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
RAMMS+EIN
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· Score: 1
``The flaw in make is that it is file based not class based.''
Hmmm. I think files are a whole lot more general than classes. Almost everything I can imagine doing with a computer involves files, whereas classes are a concept specific to certain programming languages.
If anything, this makes specialized build tools a better fit for class-based languages. IMO, calling it ``the flaw in make'' is stretching it.
``There is no reason that there should be some sort of tie between the datafile containing source code and what gets compiled together.''
You mean, besides the obvious one that the compiled code comes from the source code? Also, note that make (at least GNU make and BSD make) can deal with any number of input files creating any number of output files; you're definitely not limited to one file per target or somesuch.
``Also make assumes an underlying Unix like OS as it has shell like commands.''
Well, Unix was ported to so many different architectures exactly so that a common base was provided. The POSIX standard extends this common base to non-Unix systems. My (admittedly extremist) position on the issue is that if your OS doesn't provide this base, using that OS is purposefully making things difficult for yourself.
It's also not just make that suffers portability problems. No software exists in a vacuum. Any system you build is going to have certain dependencies. Make is actually rather light on dependencies, as I already remarked in my original post.
-- Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
jbolden
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· Score: 1
You asked a question originally about what the problems with make were, "It's me having issues seeing the benefit in replacing make by something else. If you can enlighten me"
I gave you a list. Once you assume a class based language files are just an artifact of how you choose to divvy up the work between programmers while classes are intrinsic to the design. The fact that you consider files natural and classes just a minor issue comes from a procedural / file orientation which is precisely what ant is trying to get away from. To try and see it from their perspecive assume that make took commands based on the data associated with source files but not their names or directory locations. Thus you were forced to group files based on when you happened to write them and not the more natural what they are / where they are that make uses. That is many ways is a fair analogy to how Java programmers see make's reliance on filename/path rather than classes.
As for OSes not having Unix like capabilities I think here you are simply lacking experience in alternatives to the Unix philosophy. For example in the mainframe world one doesn't just casuall open a file pipe stuff around, etc... While that sort of I/O is possible it doesn't take advantage of the much more intellegent hardware you have available to you. PC's have all the smarts in the CPU so the hardware doesn't need to understand what is actually going on at any deep level, not the case at all with a mainframe. Using a Unix style of I/O would kill performance. They are Posix compliant but no programmer in their right mind would want to use the Posix subsystem for anything important if they could avoid it.
On the other extreme think Windows and Visual Studio. Here the command arguments need to be part of GUI since the core responsibility is that low skilled programmers are able to perform complex tasks.
On VMS operators not programs are often reponsible for the build so you want the build process to take into account operator type concerns and not simply what file links to what.
What fundamental, unfixable flaw is there in make, that makes these people feel they have to burden the world with a completely new and incompatible system?
So I've tried again. The fundamental unfixable flaw is that make assumes a C/Unix world, with C/Unix like computers C/Unix like languages and C/Unix like ideas about how a system should work. Ant was designed to address the problem for classeses rather than files which is an important distinction between C and Java.
In your answer you are assuming that what C and Unix do is natural and what other people do should not be the default.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
steve_l
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· Score: 1
Ant is more java-centric; it understands more about testing and deployment. It is also designed to be portable.
C/C++ build processes are all about complile-link-(test)-release. compilation takes forever, so you have to minimise rebuilds through all the dependency declarations. Then linking is so painful because of all the compiler options.
In java compilation is fast; a complete rebuild of a project takes under a minute, leaving you plenty of time to run tests. One thing that really has taken off in java-land (but not everywhere; too many projects still need to look at it), is junit-based unit testing. Ant manages testing and report generation as part of the build process.
IMO, test-driven-development, which in java mostly means junit, is the most important transformation in dev processes of recent years.
Where autoconf+make+the Gnu toolchain is great at is for compiling down C/C++ apps to native code. That is hard, and autoconf and gcc do wonders there. You also need the full suite of gnu tools for a big project, if you start doing things like sed editing of code, piping results of a command into a grep and then mail. Given that the unix command set is essentially infinite, make+unix is inherently more powerful than ant, which has sacrificed power for portability.
Now, if you move to languages that dont have any compilation -python, perl and ruby- for example, the build process changes once again. Compilation? Gone. Linking? gone. all you need is testing, distribution and deployment.
In a world like that, both the dev process -and the build tools that reflect that process- are transformed once again. you still need ubquitous testing and automating that is excellent, but much of the classic build is over.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
steve_l
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· Score: 1
hey, if you are happy with make, stick with it. Use the time you have saved by migrating to write unit tests. CppUnit, for example, although you'll find that the first test that fails probably corrupts memory so badly you need to ignore the rest of the results.
In the little niche that is Java, Ant has managed to replace make. Yes, it is a little niche, but it has become so common that you assume projects have build files, people know how to write them to different levels of competence, and ides handle it. Indeed, the latest IDEs have ant debuggers. I dont know if that constitutes a success or a failure:(
The underlying problems we are trying to solve? Scale. Change. Complexity. The common ones of software engineering. In this respect, the next generation systems like Maven/maven2 may do even better, even though they are much less mainstream. Maven will happily pull down maven modules and the libraries your app needs from the big repositories out there (ibiblio.org and cvs.apache.org), so you can declare your library dependencies in a little xML file, the tools will pull them down, build your app, run your tests and then publish the built artifacts with the dependency files (.pom files). When someone else builds with your artifact, they get the things you built with too. I'm personally against such transitive logic, but it interests me.
the other interesting thing that all this stuff has enabled is apache gump: http://gump.apache.org/
it checks out and builds all the OSS java projects, in one giant dependency graph. My projects are generating failure mail today, because some other project has done a backwards incompatible change between their release and SVN head. hopefully they will fix that before they ship; the automated blame mail will help motivate them.
That kind of collaborative development is something that platform neutral languages and build tools enable. Ant works in Java land because it self contained: everyone downloading and using Java apps has the underlying software needed to do a build. If you could only build OSS Java apps on a single platform, say Linux, the number of contributors would be that much less.
if you are only targeting a single platform, specifically linux/unix, and are targeting C++, then yes, native build tools make more sense. I just wish we could move beyond make.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
RAMMS+EIN
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· Score: 1
``You asked a question originally about what the problems with make were, "It's me having issues seeing the benefit in replacing make by something else. If you can enlighten me"
I gave you a list.''
Yes, I'm grateful for that. Your post was actually a lot more insighful than what I had heard so far, and I have the feeling I'm slowly starting to understand things. So far, what had been happening is that people would complain about make not being available on all systems, or make having some flaw (often stemming from the complainer's lack of understanding of make), and then they would go on to write their own program for compiling source files into object files. What you're saying is that sometimes, you don't want to use files at all. In that case, indeed, make would be a poor choice.
I still have on issue with that, though. It seems to me that once you move away from the generic (on Unix, but also on many other systems) concept of files, you get into a programming language specific realm. In that case, building a language specific tool for building purposes seems the most sensible solution. Is that what the Ant project is doing?
``As for OSes not having Unix like capabilities I think here you are simply lacking experience in alternatives to the Unix philosophy.''
Very true. In my experience, when a system does not do things the Unix way, it's usually for no good reason. You make some (probably good) points about mainframes and VMS. Unfortunately, I cannot picture how one would compile software on such systems. Maybe you could point me to some reading material?
-- Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
jbolden
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· Score: 1
I still have on issue with that, though. It seems to me that once you move away from the generic (on Unix, but also on many other systems) concept of files, you get into a programming language specific realm. In that case, building a language specific tool for building purposes seems the most sensible solution. Is that what the Ant project is doing?
Ant is specific to java as much as make is specific to C. Make works well for languages like Fortran, Pascal and C but doesn't work well for strongly object oriented languages. Most large C++ shops use some other build system for this reason. C assumes Unix like, Java is much more cross platform in its orientation and thus ant is more cross platform than make.
There are good books for mainframe programmers who want to write unix code but very few people go in the other direction. Chapter 7 and 8 of Introduction to mainframes would get you started. The key thing is to look for differences in attitude, the book itself doesn't contain a lot of the deeper "whys" so assume if they do something differently there is a good reason this book just isn't telling you what that reason is. Anyway its a first book on the topic. From there you could read other redbooks pretty easily.
Re:But how else can you do portable?
by
RAMMS+EIN
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· Score: 1
Thanks a lot!
-- Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Slashdot, you unscrupulous whore
by
anglozaxxon
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· Score: 0
So what? We're getting a story for every minor update to every opensource project now?
Move along.
Novell ships 2.0 since beginning of the year
by
alarch
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· Score: 1
Some vendors, for example Novell, ship and support 2.0 (beta) as a stable release. OO.o 2.0 Novell edition was included in winter in SUSE Linux 9.3, and it is included in the current SUSE Linux 10 (aka openSUSE). I use it the whole year 2005 and I hadnt any problem with it. It is rock solid and much better than the 1.x line.
-- Deliriant isti Americani.
Pointers in longs OK; other problems...
by
Lemming+Mark
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· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure that storing void * pointers in (unsigned) longs is OK according to the spec (Kernel code does it all the time). Doing arithmetic on them is portable *if you're careful*.
Things get thornier if you do pointer arithmetic with a void * directly (on gcc, AFAIK it'll *probably* do what you meant and treat it like a char *). If you're storing void *'s in an int that's also a problem: it'll work on 32-bit x86 but not on other platforms which have ints narrower than pointers.
Re:Ummm?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To me it looks identical in IE, Opera, Firefox on Windows, and Firefox on Linux. And it looks fine on all of them. Maybe you're just picky and/or stupid.
(Well, the fonts look like ass in Firefox on Linux, but that's just how it's always been - fonts in Linux always look like ass.)
It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems..
I'm sorry, but from direct personal experience over the past week, you are really, really wrong.
I can't believe I'm seeing so many posts to this thread about how stable the beta of 2.0 is. We've seen pretty fundamental bugs in the formatting code: save a document... reload it... half your character styles are applied to some random stretch of text nowhere near where you applied them before!
As noted in my post at the start of this thread, we've been very disappointed with the robustness of 1.1.0 in our latest project too -- it failed to read a file saved by the same version of Writer on a different machine -- so we're hoping 1.1.5 will bring some much-needed stability.
-- If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Somewhat disappointed with /.
by
martinultima
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· Score: 0
The 1.1.5 version's been out quite a while, a couple weeks in fact. I could have sworn that it would have been announced long before now... in fact, right when this was posted I had just finished an Ultima Linuxpackage for the new version.
I'm pretty sure that storing void * pointers in (unsigned) longs is OK according to the spec
I'm not sure what you mean by "storing" there, but if you're talking about standard C and C++, you're almost certainly wrong in any case.
The sort of hackery you're talking about, assuming size equivalence between unrelated types and doing pointer arithmetic on a void*, might work in some predictable way on a particular platform. However, it's neither standard (the standards give very few guarantees about sizeof whatever_type, particularly where pointers are concerned), nor portable, nor a smart way to write your code.
-- If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Re:Pointers in longs *not* OK!
by
Lemming+Mark
·
· Score: 1
Like the user name btw;-)
> I'm not sure what you mean by "storing" there, but if you're talking > about standard C and C++, you're almost certainly wrong in any case. > The sort of hackery you're talking about, assuming size equivalence > between unrelated types
I was under the impression it was permitted by the standards but looking more closely at the C99 spec draft (http://dev.unicals.com/papers/c99-draft.html) suggests instead that the uintptr_t type is provided for storing a pointer in an integer type. (It's an optional type, though, so for some platforms you may need to provide your own.)
Assigning pointers to a unsigned long is AFAIK a supported part of the GNU C standards though; it's necessary for kernel code. (assigning to an ordinary int is naughty though - kernel developers will chase you with pitchforks)
>and doing pointer arithmetic on a void*,
Now that *is* evil, I wouldn't advocate that:-)
> might work in some predictable >way on a particular platform. However, it's neither standard (the >standards give very few guarantees about sizeof whatever_type, >particularly where pointers are concerned), nor portable, nor a smart >way to write your code.
Assigning pointers to longs is useful for interfaces between subsystems (particularly in kernel-type code when you're using C and have no encapsulation). It's not something you'd do *within* a subsystem but it provides a useful storage for opaque data that may or may not be a pointer, depending on implementation.
Re:Pointers in longs *not* OK!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How would storing a pointer value in a long work on LLP64 platforms like Windows (vs. Unix's more usual LP64)? LLP64 means that long longs and pointers are 64-bits, while longs remain 32-bit.
For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm.
Changing the UI afterwards will probably not work. Look at Gnome for example. It was first (in the 1.x days) mostly a "Windows clone" (start menu, Explorer-like filemanager, etc etc etc). These things were changed in the 2.x series. Mostly the changes (like new dialogs, better desktop/app launcher menus, spatial Nautilus in 2.6 etc) really improved usability a lot. Still there were (and probably still are) users who were most annoyed by these changes and probably many people switched to KDE which is more Windows and Gnome 1.x like system than Gnome 2.x.
My point is that once your users come to expect certain type of UI it is very difficult to introduce different UI afterwards. One thing that I have learned reading complaints about Gnome 2.x and also by observing some users moving from Windows 98 to Windows XP is this: Users hate changes. It does not matter how small or large the differences are. People are just going to complain: "Why did the developers have to change this? Why can't OO/Gnome/Windows/Foo version N work and look just like version N-1?"
That will never work. Hehehe, for one thing, I don't see Exchange happening with the Slashdot crew. I'm not even going to go into what a decent MTA is, but I will say Exchange still isn't carrier grade. What is to keep trolls from signing up for multiple accounts on the Slashdot server? If they're willing to set up mutliple hotmail.com accounts, I don't see why they wouldn't sign up for multiple slashdot.com user mail accounts. Is there something I'm missing here? How does Slashdot know that someone has already signed up before? What do you propose for authoritative ID? Their IP address? That obviously won't work. A snail mail address? What about privacy concerns? I suppose if you did use snail mail, it could work unless you're dealing with a real estate investor who happens to be a Slashdot troll which is probably a VERY rare thing. But would you feel comfortable with an online forum having your REAL address in a database? Especially a forum that doesn't have the threat of huge lawsuits over its head if they carelessly handle your personal info like, say, a bank? I think your plan will not work.
-- -"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Eww! What about quoting?
by
Grendel+Drago
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Handling CSV files is a solved problem; there's no need to roll your own, since it will wind up breaking on strange corner cases...
use DBI; my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:CSV:f_dir=data")
or die "couldn't connect"; my $sth = 'SELECT * FROM bigfile LIMIT ?';
$sth->execute(50) or die; my @r; while (@r = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
% do something brilliant }
Or whatever. DBI works something like that.
-- Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Did it use the DBI interface?
by
Grendel+Drago
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· Score: 1
Did it use the Perl DBI interface, like so? I don't know if DBD::CSV is smart enough to not read more of the file than it has to---I'd assume so, but I've never used it for heavy-duty data churning.
-- Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Re:Did it use the DBI interface?
by
ajs318
·
· Score: 1
No, I just used plain old regular expressions; and I only defined one my for the subroutine {I always use strict and -w}. So it's not surprising Slashdot barfed, really..... perl has a kind of implicit Zip compression built in, where the most-often-used functions have the briefest notation. Anyway, the gist of my CSV parsing, in more or less plain English with a little bit of PCRE for clarity, was as follows;
Initialise an array
Get the CSV line
Replace all \r and \n characters with null strings
As long as there is anything left on the line:
Strip off any leading whitespace
If the line starts with a speech mark (['"]), and has (a section that ends with something other than a backslash) followed by another matching speech mark \1 and a comma, add (what was between the speech marks) to the array and truncate the line to whatever, if anything, was after the comma.
Elsif the line starts with a comma, add an empty string to the array and truncate the line to whatever, if anything, was after the comma.
Elsif the line starts with anything other than a speech mark [^'"], and has (a section with no commas in it) followed by a comma, add everything before the comma to the array and truncate the line to whatever was after the comma.
Else
If the line starts with a speech mark (['"]), and has (a section that ends with something other than a backslash) followed by another matching speech mark \1, then set the line to be just the bit between the speech marks.
Add the entire remainder of the line to the array, and truncate the line to the empty string.
Return the array
This is actually the third iteration. Of course, just because I haven't found a case that will break this one, doesn't mean that there isn't one..... but it handles the usual special cases {commas between quotes, surely the biggest killer of homebrew CSV parsers; backslash-escaped quotes between quotes, probably the second-biggest killer; and empty values anywhere on the line} correctly.
-- Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Did you encounter this known issue
by
Reemi
·
· Score: 1
Suse 9.3 is using OpenOffice 1.9.79 so it seems you hit an old bug.
If they started today, perahps. But remember, OpenOffice is hardly new software. It's roots go back to the end of 1994. Qt and wxWidgets/wxWindows were in their infancy then. Motif, MFC, Athena, etc., were/are either expensive, ugly, and/or non-portable. Indeed, the infrastructure they needed was just not available a decade ago, but is quite prevalent now. The effort needed to transition over now may be many times greater than the benefit they'd actually receive.
I thought StarOffice 7.0 (isn't that were OO.o got it's roots? 7.0?) was nearly a from scratch endevour. I had always thought when they removed all of the StarOffice Desktop stuff they had also updated things like this...
OOo Calc from version 2 (currently in beta) will handle 65K rows. The only electronic worksheet I know of that supports more than that is QuattroPro from the Corel Office suite. It's not free in any sense of the word, though.
-- "I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
sizeof long == size of pointer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long."
What are you smoking dude? ILP32, LP64, or ILP64. No matter what way you slice it, unsigned longs will fit pointers. AMD64 is LP64.
It's only ints you need to worry about. Never cast a pointer to/from an int.
Great for opening corrupt Excel files
by
JJRRutgers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Best resource I can find for fixing corrupted Excel files.
IMHO OOo 2.0 Beta (1.9.xxxxxxxx?) is both a heck of a lot more stable than any "stable" 1.1.x.x build, and interoperates with Microsuck Office better as well.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts... Mass.Gov?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Different slogans for different sections
by
SeanDuggan
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· Score: 1
The major sections have their own slogans. I can only assume that the top-left corner is now being updated under the new CSS-etc code they added. To be honest, I never really paid attention to it before.
-- This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!
Cemil.
I thought OO.o was on version 2.0?
"As you say - certain behaviors minimize the HIV risk and writing Slashdot tripe on Friday night is by far the most secu
Very cool new look!
The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
At least the effort is getting made. I can wait a couple days for everything to settle down. Thanks, Taco.
Try shift-refresh, there is probably CSS stuck in your cache.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
did Slashdot try to divide by zero or something?
Er ... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.
Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
Who uses the stable release... Beta is the way to go. Always. Real men don't do backup's, they upload their files to usenet or public ftp or bittorrent, and let the world mirror their files.
Gravity Sucks
Too bad it borks the Live Comment Tree Script for Greasemonkey(http://www.allpeers.com/blog/?p=137). Seriously that is the best script ever...
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
...made of wood and full of horseshit?
Still not 64-bit clean. Why exactly is it so hard to make a 64 bit version? Don't get me wrong, i think OO.o is a great app, i'm just curious as to why there's no AMD64 port
Why does it take so much to release it? I've been using 1.99999999999 for half a year. I hope at least will be high quality.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
But the did NOT clone the outrageous price that Microsoft charges for it!!! I installed it on 25 computers in my company and stopped paying the outrageous amounts to Microsoft for Office! ;-)
Carlos
"10 bucks says the great come from windows users and the shit/wtf comments comes from non windows users."
You owe ten dollars I guess. It works both fine and shit/wtf in Opera, under Windows. Refreshing a few times fixes it, but the next refresh breaks it again (although that actually has stopped now)
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml
Really? I find it pretty darn buggy. It crashes frequently; the change-tracking feature is intolerably slow; it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
I guess it's all in the features you use. I still use it because the price is right. And "pretty darn buggy" is still "only about as buggy as Microsoft Office."
Send me your bank account information, social security number, home address (or where ever your credit card bills go to), and your mother's maiden name. You'll have your money within 24 hours.
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
Slashdot's original motto was --and is secretly-- "better late than never". How popular this motto remais with the people at 3D Realms is another issue altogether. Definitely a fan of the new site. Frankly all I think it needs is the /. logo replaced with SVG and then you'd have a really fancy all XML site.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.
What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.
So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
I'm in a karma free fall right now. Let's see how much more I can lose.
No...I used Slashdot's darling browser using one of the most popular linux distros. I suppose I could install some other distros and use some more obscure browsers. But you're right, though...I'm sure they tested the new code on SeaMonkey 1.0a....whatever the hell that is.
-1, Offtopic.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.
I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit :)
ed
Here, let me help you land safely.
Try using Slashdots darling search engine
http://www.google.com/search?q=seamonkey
and you could see how Slashdot thinks about SeaMonkey, just to make sure you have the group-think thing on your side.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=seamonkey
What happened to the in-depth analysis from the poster. "X has been released, download it here" seems a bit empty to me.
I was expecting something like the following:
Although version 1.1.5 is a bit less of a jump than the upcoming 2.0, there have been a few impressive improvements. None of which I'm sure of, but not knowing those guys who work on the product, I'm sure it'll be great. I'm thinking of downloading this update in a couple of weeks, so what suggestions do you have for software to support this massive leap into the unknown?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Used my mod points 4 hours ago =(
WYSIWYM ?
Working for necessity's mother.
It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.
I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.
I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.
* Healthier hacking: http://cjskitchen.com/
If you know what WPARAM and LPARAM then you know that any Windows programmer does this sort of thing as a matter of course.
But back to spread-sheets... the limitation that always gets me is the 256 column limit! Der!
Back to OOo... the thing that REALLY annoys me is that the default formatting for number truncates to two decimal places (visually, not numerically thank Gordo) , and if you want any more decimal places you have to enter a custom format.
That's why I always end up going back to Excel. As a former scientist that was the main reason I kept on Windows rather than switch to Linux (or BSD or...)
----return 0; }
^^^ what it said ^^^
I'm in the process of introducing OOo in my company and have been allowed to start a trial half a year ago. We mostly write technical documentation and OOo has held up quite well. Some of the guys even refuse to move back to other tools.
But now, I can show management that OOo is already FORWARD compatible with a file format that they did not even release (except the beta). No FORCED upgrades, this might be the best argument I'll have. Upgrading a large company that uses Solaris, Linux and Windows is not a cheap operation.
For those who cannot find a 1.1.5 version for MacOS X (that also works on tiger) on www.openoffice.org try this link: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/1.1.5/
There ist also a 2.0 beta version available: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/2.0/
Of course you'll still need X11 to run those applications, but 1.1.5 works fine and stable for me (havn't tried 2.0 yet) on tiger with Apple's X11.
"By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me."
;-)
Well, that says it all, doesn't it? I mean; it looks normal in Lynx! What more proof of the highly skewed and distorted layout do you need?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.
These two are not bugs, they are features. You see, they are trying to emulate MS Word.
AccountKiller
It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems..
Also, when loading word files openoffice seems to emulate word 2000, when loading files from 2003 it seems to exhibit the same problems that word 2000 does loading the same files.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Of course, when you port the application to a 64bit environment you have to start worrying about data type sizes and the way the application reads and writes the files stored on disk.
There's always the problem of having to do type conversions so as to make sure that the data types in the files are the same size as the other architectures produce. Admittedly, it helps that GCC on x86 and x86_64 both use the same sizes for native integer types (short, int, long) but this isn't always the case. (DEC Alpha OSF/1 used 64 bit longs which messed up a lot of programs.) However, there is still the problem of data alignment and padding in structures.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Have you considered knowing what is being spoken about before making an ass of yourself lately?
Check out my foes list to see who is so retarded that they can't use the signature line!!!
In any case, my final output is PDFs, which means that by the time I have generated a document and finalised it, Office compatibility is not an issue.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Gosh, that's an ugly site. And hard to read too, with the background image, green-on-green font, and so on.
Why would someone who cares about attractive presentation use an application put together by these people?
Oh right, because they are producing scientific papers and have to use LaTeX. WYSIWYM is better than using notepad...
OOo 2 is included by default in the next release of Ubuntu. I am writing this from the preview release of Breezy. However, OOo 2 should be in the universe repository for Hoary. Try enabling the universe repository, and apt-get install openoffice.org2.
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
I could have sworn that it released the new version at least a week ago on other sites.
My new blog
OO Base might be a more practical option even.
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.
So what? We're getting a story for every minor update to every opensource project now? Move along.
Some vendors, for example Novell, ship and support 2.0 (beta) as a stable release. OO.o 2.0 Novell edition was included in winter in SUSE Linux 9.3, and it is included in the current SUSE Linux 10 (aka openSUSE). I use it the whole year 2005 and I hadnt any problem with it. It is rock solid and much better than the 1.x line.
Deliriant isti Americani.
I'm pretty sure that storing void * pointers in (unsigned) longs is OK according to the spec (Kernel code does it all the time). Doing arithmetic on them is portable *if you're careful*.
Things get thornier if you do pointer arithmetic with a void * directly (on gcc, AFAIK it'll *probably* do what you meant and treat it like a char *). If you're storing void *'s in an int that's also a problem: it'll work on 32-bit x86 but not on other platforms which have ints narrower than pointers.
To me it looks identical in IE, Opera, Firefox on Windows, and Firefox on Linux. And it looks fine on all of them. Maybe you're just picky and/or stupid.
(Well, the fonts look like ass in Firefox on Linux, but that's just how it's always been - fonts in Linux always look like ass.)
Has a valid point.
I'm sorry, but from direct personal experience over the past week, you are really, really wrong.
I can't believe I'm seeing so many posts to this thread about how stable the beta of 2.0 is. We've seen pretty fundamental bugs in the formatting code: save a document... reload it... half your character styles are applied to some random stretch of text nowhere near where you applied them before!
As noted in my post at the start of this thread, we've been very disappointed with the robustness of 1.1.0 in our latest project too -- it failed to read a file saved by the same version of Writer on a different machine -- so we're hoping 1.1.5 will bring some much-needed stability.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The 1.1.5 version's been out quite a while, a couple weeks in fact. I could have sworn that it would have been announced long before now... in fact, right when this was posted I had just finished an Ultima Linux package for the new version.
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I'm not sure what you mean by "storing" there, but if you're talking about standard C and C++, you're almost certainly wrong in any case.
The sort of hackery you're talking about, assuming size equivalence between unrelated types and doing pointer arithmetic on a void*, might work in some predictable way on a particular platform. However, it's neither standard (the standards give very few guarantees about sizeof whatever_type, particularly where pointers are concerned), nor portable, nor a smart way to write your code.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm.
Changing the UI afterwards will probably not work. Look at Gnome for example. It was first (in the 1.x days) mostly a "Windows clone" (start menu, Explorer-like filemanager, etc etc etc). These things were changed in the 2.x series. Mostly the changes (like new dialogs, better desktop/app launcher menus, spatial Nautilus in 2.6 etc) really improved usability a lot. Still there were (and probably still are) users who were most annoyed by these changes and probably many people switched to KDE which is more Windows and Gnome 1.x like system than Gnome 2.x.
My point is that once your users come to expect certain type of UI it is very difficult to introduce different UI afterwards. One thing that I have learned reading complaints about Gnome 2.x and also by observing some users moving from Windows 98 to Windows XP is this: Users hate changes. It does not matter how small or large the differences are. People are just going to complain: "Why did the developers have to change this? Why can't OO/Gnome/Windows/Foo version N work and look just like version N-1?"
They need to bump up the version to OpenOffice 12.
This is totally off-topic, but for lack of a better place to post it:
I really like the new face of Slashdot. CSS, cleaner HTML, and it looks lighter (as in, less heavy). Thanks!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That will never work. Hehehe, for one thing, I don't see Exchange happening with the Slashdot crew. I'm not even going to go into what a decent MTA is, but I will say Exchange still isn't carrier grade. What is to keep trolls from signing up for multiple accounts on the Slashdot server? If they're willing to set up mutliple hotmail.com accounts, I don't see why they wouldn't sign up for multiple slashdot.com user mail accounts. Is there something I'm missing here? How does Slashdot know that someone has already signed up before? What do you propose for authoritative ID? Their IP address? That obviously won't work. A snail mail address? What about privacy concerns? I suppose if you did use snail mail, it could work unless you're dealing with a real estate investor who happens to be a Slashdot troll which is probably a VERY rare thing. But would you feel comfortable with an online forum having your REAL address in a database? Especially a forum that doesn't have the threat of huge lawsuits over its head if they carelessly handle your personal info like, say, a bank? I think your plan will not work.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
1.1.5 has been out for a week now.
Did it use the Perl DBI interface, like so? I don't know if DBD::CSV is smart enough to not read more of the file than it has to---I'd assume so, but I've never used it for heavy-duty data churning.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Suse 9.3 is using OpenOffice 1.9.79 so it seems you hit an old bug.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105083
Update OpenOffice.org and it will most probably work.
Just a quick note from a NeoOffice user to say many thanks for taking the time and trouble to produce such good software.
Recall that OpenOffice includes its own GUI toolkit and app framework
Wouldn't they save a lot of time if they didn't code their own middleware?
--
Don't fight Firefox! Let FireFox fight YOU!
OOo Calc from version 2 (currently in beta) will handle 65K rows. The only electronic worksheet I know of that supports more than that is QuattroPro from the Corel Office suite. It's not free in any sense of the word, though.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
"they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long."
What are you smoking dude? ILP32, LP64, or ILP64. No matter what way you slice it, unsigned longs will fit pointers. AMD64 is LP64.
It's only ints you need to worry about. Never cast a pointer to/from an int.
Best resource I can find for fixing corrupted Excel files.
IMHO OOo 2.0 Beta (1.9.xxxxxxxx?) is both a heck of a lot more stable than any "stable" 1.1.x.x build, and interoperates with Microsuck Office better as well.
http://www.mass.gov/portal/index.jsp?pageID=itdsu
The major sections have their own slogans. I can only assume that the top-left corner is now being updated under the new CSS-etc code they added. To be honest, I never really paid attention to it before.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.