Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Claims OpenDocument is Too Slow
SirClicksalot writes "Microsoft claims that the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is too slow for easy use. They cite a study carried out by ZDNet.com that compared OpenOffice.org 2.0 with the XML formats in Microsoft Office 2003. This comes after the international standards body ISO approved ODF earlier this month." From the ZDNet article: "'The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory,' Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. 'The Open XML format is designed for performance. XML is fundamentally slower than binary formats so we have made sure that customers won't notice a big difference in performance.'"
But how fast a document opens is one of my last concerns here.
What I didn't see mentioned in this article was the fact that back in March, Microsoft joined a subdivision of INCITS (V1 Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface group within the International Committee for Information Technology Standards). Which is the group that kind of decides whether or not it should be widely adopted. Being ISO certified is one thing but it doesn't mean everyone's going to use it as a standard.
There was much speculation that Microsoft had joined INCITS with the intent to slowdown or stop the spreading use of ODF and insert their own standard. Sounded like another Microsoft power trip to me.
I predict that Microsoft will bitch and bitch about ODF and then release study after study suggesting some other patent laden format (probably Open XML) over ODF. This is just the first complaint against ODF--too slow. Perhaps next they'll complain that it's not documented well enough, some of their apps just can't support it, it gives their developers arthritis, it looks too ugly, etc.
My work here is dung.
If I was an MS shill (like so many in these forums seems to be), I would be deeply, deeply ashamed that the company I pimped myself out for was incapable of distinguishing between a document format and an application.
(read the 'study')
But I am sure the shills will pipe up with "easier to use", "people are used to it", "noone forces people to use MS" and other such irrelevance.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Come on. Microsoft claiming ANYTHING is "too slow" is like the pot calling the kettle black. Take a good, hard look in the mirror Bill.
It's not a game loading complex 3D worlds and sound effects, it's a load of text being displayed on screen. What difference does a few milliseconds here or there make? OpenDocument could be ten times slower and the benefits of an open document format would still vastly outweigh the effects of loading time.
Yet again, MS is blaming the format for OO.o's failings. Hell, I don't like OO.o much myself. I like ODF though.
Well, at least OpenDocument has released something within the last couple of years.
"Any performance limitations now will be resolved as Moores Law continues"
Not that I like the argument.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
You know, MS Office formats are:
- Easier to use
- People are used to them
- They don't make you stinky like those hippie formats do. You wouldn't want to smell would you?
- Osama Bin Laden uses ODF. He also stinks. Coincidence?
I don't know why you guys are so against MS products. I mean no one forces people to use MS, it's just that we want a superior product that attracts women and fights terrorism.
Perhaps it isn't relevant, but I take anyone who attacks a competitor with a grain of salt-
A better practice would be to praise your own product, and politely tell why it is better than the others. That is, if you believe in your product.
Of course MS is going to go after OpenOffice- it means lost $$$$$ to them....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Mr. Pot,.. Mr. Kettle
Mr. Kettle... Mr. Pot
It was too much good to be truth. Excuses...
And have any of your ever tried to open an MS Word document over an CIFS/SMB WAN connection that has multiple hops? Two minutes to open the file, 30 seconds per page because it doesn't read the ENTIRE file into RAM, 5 minutes to save a single character..
.. but I find 'The use of the entire Microsoft Office Suite slower to the point of not really being satisfactory.'
I don't know about all of you
Unfortunately, that seems to be what the majority of our customers use.
Really? It handles *that much slower*? Excuse me for thinking maybe they're just not spent so much time making their XML libs as efficient as they have their own propriety stuff... And besides, XML has major advantages, like there's already *loads* of libaries for it, and to an extent it's even human readable... Unlike a binary file
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
They should have tested it on vista-ready or Vista-really-ready PCs ...
...
... and thei can-do ...
Nothing is too slow there
On the other hand, I should not underestimate MS coding skills
attitude
Anytime Microsoft complains about OpenDocument, I just remember back to when they were on the Technical Committee at OASIS forming the standard. They then left that committee. If they truly cared about OpenDocument, they would have stayed on the TC and made changes to it.
I see this as an attempt by Microsoft to slander this format and try to further their own semi-OpenXML format.
--
Jason Faulkner
Eastern US Press Contact
OpenDocument Fellowship
Jay | http://oldos.org
Rather than allege how "bad" a competitor's product is, MS should simply come out with a better product themselves.
What's the point of saying "OO.o sucks"? They don't have a lot of control over that, now do they? They need to show some leadership here.
Hey, Ballmer: "Quality! Quality! Quality! Quality! Quality! Quality!"
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
hypocrite
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
I can just see Microsoft's new slogan for Office 12:
"Microsoft, saving your life, one microsecond at a time..."
Since when is a format slow? I could write an interperter for the MS format that is 3x as slow as the ODF. What are they defining as unsatisfactory and on what kind of documents?
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
ODT XML files are binary files. So are old Word 2003 .doc files. So are Microsoft's new XML files. So it's pointless to claim that a "binary" file format is faster than an XML file format. Perhaps that MS guy meant to say, "XML-based file formats are slower than non-XML-based file formats." At least this is a coherent claim, even if it's not necessarily correct.
The other big mistake: file formats aren't fast or slow. The algorithms for reading and writing them are (or aren't) slow. Marino Marcich of the ODF Alliance implicitely made this point when he said that different ODF-capable applications have different performances. Perhaps you could, in a fit of brilliant computer science analysis, prove that no reader for a particular file format could parse it as fast as Word 2000 can parse a .doc file, but no one has made that claim.
I'd like to note (from tfa) that the study cited compares OpenOffice opening ODF vs MS Office opening Excel. The study says:
"Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time [...] Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org."
So yeah, OpenOffice is slow and memory hungry. This is fud, and has not so much to do with ODF as OpenOffice. Nothing to see here.
You only need to write it to disk when you hit "save." When the document is open, and living in RAM, it doesn't even have to be kept in ODF!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Too slow you say? Oh the IRONY! Until you can get your word processor to launch quicker than it takes me to make a sandwich, kindly STFU. Until then, I'm fine with my Oo.O 2.0
ZDNet say : OpenOffice is slow (will anyone refute this)
:)
MS say: OpenDocument is slow.
Folks, watch for the bait and switch. Those two statements don't mean the same thing.
If you think OpenOffice is slow on ODF, you should see it open Word documents.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
We'll have to go right to ludicrous speed!
How large is a document? If you include pictures (a lot) it can get really large, but if you dont, even a whole book should not be more than a couple of megs... It would have been a problem in the era of 386 but these days?
The HDD is too slow to push it to the system, the memory is not large enough to hold it, or the CPU has problems doing conversations?
I think other than big chunk of fog/triangle and such GPU stuff, nothing is too slow anymore for the system. Of course rendering and calculations, finite element compulations take time, but thats a different story and certainly not the format of storing it is important.
Or maybe the document will be opened 1000 times in sec for a large office :))) - In this case think about a Database engine
In other news, Microsoft Windows is too slow compared to *nix...
Congratulations MS your OS is slow but you've made a document application faster! Hmmm which is better, slow OS and faster app or fast OS and slower app? I'd be interested in seeing some overall performance figures. I guess if you love MS you'll put up with a slow clunky OS and 'love' the faster app or if you're anti-MS you'll 'love' your faster OS and put up with a slower app. Whatever comes out on top I don't care as long as I don't get locked in to either ...
Am I the only one who noticed contrary performance to these claims. OO.o has always seemed to save faster than MSo. Especially when working with larger files. I have been impressed with OO.o's saving time and for me that is the only speed that matters since I do it often.
OO.o uses a type of incremental save where MS Word does a full save each time so OO.o is faster even with their "slow" ODF.
...is impossible, due to the therblig frammisating thingumbob.
Well, actually, now that you mention it, a professor and his student did remove it, but you can't call it successful, because um, performance, sure, that's right, in our labs our very own scientific technical unbiased tests showed that because of ferthbernder sprocket-flange snap-toggle linkage, when you removed IE using the professor's techniques, it reduced Windows performance by a lot of percent. No user would accept this, any more than they would accept the reduced performance of WIndows on a year-old PC.
We will now show you just how severe this performance problem is.
Right here. In this very courtroom.
With a faked demo^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h a dramatic, animated illustration presented right on the screen of an actual PC.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
whilst I know that in Oo it takes longer to save than in word (using the respective file formats) I don't care. If we say MS Word takes 1 sec. and Oo takes 5, then word is 5 times faster, but when it comes down to it - it's only 4 seconds once an hour... no consider how long it will take someone to rewrite all the documents when the format they've saved it in ceases to be and because it's closed they're stuck... that'll be a fair few hours... so really, Oo is about 8 million times faster because the ODF format won't ever just be "stopped" without giving people the option to keep it on (because it's open source!)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
If Microsoft are saying that they can't read XML documents efficiently then I guess we have to believe them, but if that's really true it says more about their lack of programming skill than the the difference between reading a binary vs text (or XML flavor #1 vs flavor #2) document on a modern processor.
If a Windows-capable PC has enough oomph to render clippy in 3-D translucent splendor for Vista, then it's certainly fast enough to load an XML document.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
He had a humongous spreadsheet (a couple hundred megabytes) and was tracking the load time.
He whined about the memory OO takes, and didn't mention that MSOffice pre-loads its stuff on startup, so you are loafing MSOffice stuff whether you need it or not.
You mean to tell me that parsing a file at an average of 200k of data is too slow on 1.0+GHz processors?
OPTIMIZE YOUR CODE!
I know that there are many variables here, but seriously... how slow can it be? I use OpenOffice 2.0 on an Athlon64 3200+ and I have no issues, in fact, I find it much quicker than M$ Office
Vista is late and looks to be later.
Google teams with Dell.
New Jpeg format getting lukewarm responses?
All the boardroom chairs are broken?
Europe playing with software patents.
Wii looks amazing even without fizzle for your shnizzle graphics (compared to Xbox2 and PS3)
Asia loving OSS. Especially China. India probably too.
The Cancer is Spreading!!!!
Quick, get some more FUD to kill it!!!
It puts the FUD in the MFing Basket!!!!!
Sure maybe not all I said is true, but much of it is perceived to be true or borders on the truth.
And that has to suck for a company who develops mostly uninnovative crap. Crap that works but crap nonetheless.
ODT format is basically a set of XML files packed into a ZIP archive. One of them is "the biggie" (content.xml) and others are for supporting it. Images etc are saved/packed in subdirs. Now - to open it, OOo apps should unpack the whole package and parse XML keeping all its contents in memory (presumably, but highly likely). Maybe not a big deal if all you handle is two page memo but keep in mind that OOo's spreadsheet and database(!) programs work the same way. And for something like 20-30 page specs sheet on a sub-1GHz machine OOo works noticeably faster when handling DOC format documents than handling its "native" ODT documents. Saving/autosaving can be a pain too (as you should dump all you document to XML and pack it. Unlike MSOffice where storage formats work as database).
All in all - OOo's file formats are a nice and simple solution for exchanging reasonably sized documents (if you don't mind usual XML-namespace-hell structure) but for editing/working on larger documents/spreadsheets you may find yourself using MSOffice document formats (from within OOo). Pity they don't provide their own "scratch-pad/database-in-a-file" formats.
So - for once, Microsoft is kinda right here.
I guess the loyal crowd has already reeled in +5 Insightful mods by railing against MS, but it might not be a bad idea to actually read the article.
.doc definitely has a few speed advantages over a XML format, hence it'd be good to have the replacement XML schema designed for performance.
Mr.Yates says OpenXML has been designed with performance in mind, whereas ODF is not. A binary format such as
I wouldnt know if this was actually the case; however, it would be good to investigate if the claims were true. OpenOffice could very well do with a major performance boost. A lean,well-designed XML schema cannot hurt.
I mean, really. Is it such a shock that MS is trying to damage the reputation of a rival format? Actually, they're talking more about OpenOffice as an application rather than the ODF format, which is a very dishonest bit of FUD. I'm sure there will be more propaganda against ODF from the company we love to hate in the near future.
Perhaps next they'll claim that ODF is so slow that it's causing Vista to be late to market.
Transistors and Beer!!
so they've got their hands on the odt import filter for word then???
cos this is the only way to do a format parsing test... and microsoft's xml format is purely a dump of their internal binary format and wrapping the info with xml tags... microsoft's format is mind bogglingly bloated by comparison with odt...
odt concentrates on tagging up the structured information in sensible form, while microsoft's merely dumps the memory and horribly bloats out as a result... just like word does when saving to html...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This brings to mind something that Microsoft did in the mid 1990's. When MS Word was trying to wrest market share from Wordperfect, Microsoft apparently coded speed bumps into Windows that only their programmers knew how to avoid. Microsoft then claimed that MS applications were "better" becuase they were faster, though we didn't understand that it was because of intentional handicapping of their rivals' software until they'd pretty much crushed WordPerfect in the market.
It kind of makes me wonder if they'll try the same approach to make ODF look "slower," by optimizing MS apps to work with Open XML and fumble around with ODF files.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
This may seem odd but I've had to use word this week. I'm running on "windows server" attached to a nfs server. Man is it slow. Its a large document and it seems like word is accessing the disc all the time (which being a network drive is on the slower side).
I'm not impressed with Word at all.
Your Vista system will bluescreen every time you try to launch an application that supports OpenDocument, and all that rebooting is a real time killer. Better to stick with the only four programs Microsoft testers tested on Vista: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Resume Builder
--- What?
Oh noes! That document took 5.3 seconds to load and 10.2 seconds to save! Sure, I've been working on this document for 20 hours straight, but that's a LONG time to wait!!!
It's been a long time.
he's just about the most biased person I've ever had the displeasure of reading. You only notice that stuff when you're saving or opening. Working with OO.o and ODF on my linux box is a pleasure. To put it in perspective, Ou loves using the new UAP (or is it UAC now?). But he is inconvenienced when saving or opening an ODF file?! If I have to approve every little bit of activity on my computer, you can bet that waiting an extra second to save or open a document is the least of my problems. Yet his blind bias does not lead him to that conclusion.
Unless, you just don't give a shit...
How can a file format be slow? The way of opening/saving may be! Come on, since when M$ became so illiterate!
So according to MS, the key goal of an Open XML Document Standard is...performance? Specifically, speed of opening in a particular APPLICATION?
Holy Shit. It should be illegal to spew forth utter bullshit twisted crap such as this. It's disgusting. What's worse, people swallow the shit.
Not surprised, since the goal is actually to produce a standard document format that Works Consistently Always, rather than Loads Immediately But Isn't Useful Or What You Needed Or Wanted Or Saved In The First Place piece of crap.
Man I wish people were universally equipped with natural BS detectors, the world would be a much better place.
No Comment.
Look at the secret source code:
.odf here, so let's make it slower.
// BUGBUG: 640KB are not sufficient for more than 40 pages.
if (pagelength > 40){
// We don't want to open a memory hole here.
if (winVer < 2000)
showBluescreen("of Death");
}else{
crashWord(showRandomError(setReason("between monitor and chair")));
}
}
// FIX: Billy don't want users to choose
if (fileFormat == "odf"){
sleep(10);
}
The document you can open will always open faster than the one you cannot.
So regardless of the speed of any particular implementation the freedom ODF gives us ensures it always will be able to be opened.
is that OOo is really slow, slow to open and slow to respond. OOo feels faster on my Fedora Core laptop (Pentium M 1.73) but really chugs on my XP Pro box (Pentium D 930). It is even slower on my Ubuntu Dapper test box (Athlon 64 3700+), almost ubearable to use. This makes no sense, but my off the cuff guess is that the Fedora packages have been optimzied better than the Ubuntu packages and the Windows version (by a wide margin). But what it comes down to for me is what feels faster when I have to make a slide show for the PHBs, and for now Office 2003 feels far speedier and responsive than OOo does (on any platform).
In fact, until this very day I didn't even realize that performance was even in Microsoft's dictionary, and like so many other words Microsoft uses I don't think it means entirely what they think it means. Newsflash, Microsoft, "innovation" does not mean "steal other people's ideas." "Security" does not mean "It'll be taken over before you can download the first update for it." And "performance" doesn't mean "the entire fucking system stops for 30 seconds when some application decides to stop handling its windows controls." Now STFU and go back to pushing your poison kool-aid on unsuspecting consumers before Apple eats your lunch.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The OpenOffice implementation might be a little slow. I my opinion this is probably due to the cross platform nature of OpenOffice itself, or it might be just slow.
The ZDNet article wasn't comparing formats, it was comparing OO.o to MS Office 2003. If they really wanted to do it right, they would add Abiword and K Office.
In my limited, subjective testing the new version K Office is much faster than either OO.o or MS Office in reading in documents.
-Matt
ZDNet is paid by Microsoft for advertising. I noticed that Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, forgot to mention that when he cited them as a source.
"...too slow for easy use."
This comes from a vendor who says you need 1/2 Gb of RAM to install their operating system???
The best part of the troll is that no one ever got around to changing the greater than sign to the less than sign.
It's OPEN, Bill. You've got a zillion programmers, feel free to speed it up!
*** Don't be dull.***
Everything that OpenOffice needs must be included with the application and loaded when the application loads. The opposite is true with Office. The majority of the application is already in the operating system. This is why OpenOffice is cross platform and Office is not.
OpenOffice has its own fonts and font engine, though it can utilize others. Office uses the OS's font engine but adds fonts to the OS during installation.
OpenOffice has its own engine to place, draw, clip... windows/forms. Office uses the OS's.
OpenOffice has its own database engine, though it can use several others. Office uses jet which is part of the OS.
The list goes on...
If the file format was supposed to be tested for perfomance then they should have used the two different formats with the same application.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
if (format(filename)="ODS") {
sleep(10);
}
opendocument(filename)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511251 44611543
/>
/>
/>
using a text editor, would you rather try to fix a bug in an odf or ms xml file?
MS XML
<w:p>
<w:r>
<w:t>This is a </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:rPr>
<w:b
</w:rPr>
<w:t>very basic</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:t> document </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:rPr>
<w:i
</w:rPr>
<w:t>with some</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r>
<w:t> formatting, and a </w:t>
</w:r>
<w:hyperlink w:rel="rId4" w:history="1">
<w:r>
<w:rPr>
<w:rStyle w:val="Hyperlink"
</w:rPr>
<w:t>hyperlink</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:hyperlink>
</w:p>
OpenDocument
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">
This is a <text:span text:style-name="T1">
very basic</text:span> document <text:span
text:style-name="T2"> with some </text:span>
formatting, and a <text:a xlink:type="simple"
xlink:href="http://example.com">hyperlink
</text:a>
</text:p>
---
There is something true in that study, indeed.
Personally I already have seen this kind of numbers, even though I've never minded to measure them.
Why? Simply put, because it matters very little.
Compared to Windows 3.11, Windows XP needs 100 times more disk space, 10 times more RAM and 10 times more time to boot.
Compared MS to Word 5.5, MS Word 2003 if slower and bigger.
Today I wouldn't revert back to Windows 3.11 and would not choose Word 5.5. What'd be the most important features expected in a document file format? In my opinion:
1. compactness
2. openness
3. flexibility
No "access performances", though.
Because the time needed to load a document, when you do real office work, weighs by far less than the time you spend on it while working.
And when someone sends you a file written with a different version of the software or even with a different software, how much time do you spend to make that file readable and printable?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Here is a fast new algorithm to compress XML in such a way that browsing and searching the tree can be done without uncompressing it. This should make Word definitely faster when handling ODF. I really think Microsoft should start implementing some of this stuff instead of whining and complaining.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
One of the reasons for this confusion might be the original design of MS Word. I heard somewhere long ago that the MS Word document format isn't a "format". It's just the order that the bits end up in when the write-to-a-file code is executed. No docs, no spec, nothing like that. That's why they had all the compatibility issues between versions.
So the document format IS the application.
Disclaimer: This is just something I heard. It's unlikely to still be the case, and it's possible it never was.
I will have to either abandon ODF in favor of MS Office, or upgrade my 386... What to do!!!
The reason they have to compare OO to Word is because the plugin for Word doesn't exist yet. Now it is my opinion that it isn't a fair fight because there are too many variables.
However formats can be slow. Binary formats > XML for speed. And even among XML formats, depending upon implementation and how you parse/cache it, speed will vary a lot by implementation. The point is completely valid, whether or not the article has the purest of intentions.
from TFA: "The documentation is so much deeper than that for the OpenDocument format -- it represents much more functionality, many more options and a deeper, richer customer experience," Yates said.
Ignoring all of the rest of the incredible FUD in this article, isn't this a very telling quote? It's only one word, but isn't that an interesting demonstration of their worldview?
I also like the name of "Open XML" - it's like North Korea calling itself the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
I mean they are trying to crush their enemy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H compete, right?
Personally, I use Linux on a relatively low-end computer (1.7 GHz Celeron, 512 MB of RAM), and I'm using OOo 2.0.2 as my office suite. I have no problems with load or save times with any of the files I use. Is MS Office faster? Perhaps. Is it "free", no.
I have all the confidence in the world that the OpenDocument format will get faster as implementations are tweaked. Either way, it won't stop me from using OOo.
No matter where you go... there you are.
The use of Microsoft Document Format documents is less compatible to the point of not really being satisfactory.
I use large spreadsheets a lot at work and I have Office XP docs, Office 2003 XML Excel docs and .ods docs. I always save as .ods because they're by far the smallest, which means I can usually email them to co-workers.
.ods => 3.0 MB .xls (Office XP) => 10.1 MB .xml (Excel 2003) => 5.2 MB
.ods can be sent from my work email account.
Here is a real-world example using a medium-sized spreadsheet (63,999 rows, > 20 columns, but little data in many of the columns).
Only the
And never even mind that Excel has terrible support for CSV files (try using a non-comma delimiter) and zero support for space-delimited files (try it with OpenOffice.org... what a great interface!)
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The International Standards Organization ISO declares Microsoft Windows too slow.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Well, ok, not anymore at least.
Most of the time it takes me to open documents at work is the time taken to download it from some distant shared drive, the spead of the actual document matters little to me compared to the actual size of the file - that's where my wasted seconds a day go!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
... Vista.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Micosoft's Office is too fast. My computer can't keep up and then freezes. Slow and easy...that's the way I like it.
What?
If Microsoft thinks it is to slow they are free to contribute to make it faster.
It is an open spec. Anyone can contribute.
The future is in beta
Here is a comparison of memory and CPU usage between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org office applications. This is with just the bare application and blank data file loaded.
I don't know about Mr. Ou, but I would be far more interested in how memory and CPU usage increases as a function of document size or complexity.
This reminded me of this paper, "The Psychology of Learning". In it the writer describes the act of people who don't want to learn new things: "As long as everybody around them use tools, techniques, and methods that they themselves know, they can count on outperforming these other people. But when the people around them start learning different, perhaps better, ways, they must defend themselves. Other people having other knowledge might require learning to keep up with performance, and learning, as we pointed out, increases the risk of failure. One possibility for these people is to discredit other people's knowledge. If done well, it would eliminate the need for the extra effort to learn, which would fit very well with their objectives."
This issue is about Microsoft defending their turf rather than not wanting to learn something new. But it's basically the same motive at work: find ways to undermine the new to benefit the old.
It goes on, "This model of learning also explains other surprising behavior that I frequently observe. I have seen novices in software development with knowledge of a single programming language explain to experienced expert developers why their choice of programming language was a particularly bad one. In one case, I talked to a student of computer science who told me why a particular programming language was bad. In fact he told me it was so bad that he had moved to a different university in order to avoid courses that used that particular language. When asked, he admitted he had never written a single program in that language. He simply did not know what he was talking about. And he was willing to fight for it. With respect to programming languages, negative opinions about a language that a person does not know, are usually based on very superficial aspects of it. To people obsessed with performance lack of such in a programming language is a favorite reason to advocate its eradication (even though performance is not a quality of a language, but of a particular implementation)."
The positive lesson to take away from this is the MS is undoing itself. It's turning to cheap, nasty, suit-driven mentalities to defend its turf rather than the old days when it would just go out and write something new and nasty. It's become an unwieldy beast. I read about the Vista delays yesterday and briefly thought "Will anyone notice - who uses Windows these days". To an extent it shows what a bubble I live in. But it's true - *all* of my regular contacts use linux, freebsd or mac os x. As they should. After all - friends don't let friends use Windows.
Believe with me, my saplings.
OpenOffice uses 200MB RAM to load a 200MB file!
280M 2005-09-14 06:17 content.xml
Also it's interesting to compare the original files created by OO.o and Excel:
3.6M 2006-05-26 10:15 200264-l.sxc
189M 2005-09-08 02:50 200264-l.xml
I guess Office 2003 users don't care about using harddrive space.
"Now I've been to one World's Fair, a picnic and a rodeo and that't the stupiest thing I've ever heard..."
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
XML is XML is XML - This sounds more like a complaint about the XML Parsers and DOM manipulators to me. Those will probably improve as XML becomes the format of choice.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Thread the saving code. "Oh, you guys using Word have to wait for it to save?". Sure, it's complex and it's complexity at a place where you don't want it, but it can be done. Even something simple as making the document read only while saving, but allowing navigation, might be good enough to smooth things over.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If they are using a thing like this to try to hurt OpenDocument, it means they are honestly worried that they may not be able to compete.
OpenOffice IS a little slower -- primarily because it compresses the data (which Office does not do.) Then again, the resulting file tends to be smaller. Honestly, I think I would rather it didn't compress automatically so I could just manually compress with a better non-free tool (IMHO RAR gets better compression with most of the stuff I've thrown at it versus, say 7-zip, but, I think they are just using plain old gzip or something like that anyway.)
Nonetheless, it's a pretty small matter. I must say, Microsoft must have done their testing on some pretty darned slow systems to even be able to NOTICE. My system is already getting pretty outdated (heck, Socket 939 is going out of production this year, and this isn't even an X2 or even a high end single core, though it is overclocked a little, but, then again, many overclock a lot more) and I really haven't ever noticed any major difference in the loading/saving of files in OOo. What little I did notice I noticed because I knew what to look for after reading an article on the OOo forums.
Microsoft also tricked me into thinking Java was "too slow". Too slow for what? I have no idea...
Whenever Microsoft comes out and says that (pick whatever open standard) is not as good as their product I tend to get interested in whatever they have come out against.
I switched an old Microsoft server over to linux and I love it. I have tried Openoffice on several platforms and found it to be as good or better than Microsoft Office for about 90 percent of what people do with office programs. I am sure there are a few instances where Microsoft Office is better than Openoffice for a few people. Of course I have seen people use Microsoft Office when they should have moved to a program like QuarkXpress or Indesign.
Microsoft has always had a problem with formats and how they are implemented. Such as Microsoft Office not being able to open a Microsoft Works document. Making pre-corrupted document with the Mac version of Word 6. Having large amount of information being included in the word document from sectors on the hard drive.
It is a same that people are so biased with Windows that they won't even try openoffice. I think that many people who buy Microsoft office or even pirate it would be better served with the free openoffice. I think even some small offices would be better served with Linux computers running KDE and OpenOffice.
I read this article a couple of months ago that compare M$ XML and OpenDocument
1 44611543
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051125
For those who are too lazy to read, here's a brief summary of the main differences between the two formats:
- m$ tags are 2-3 letters long and not readble
- m$ format looks more like a dump of the binary structure, and makes no attempt to separate content and style
The author was already feeling the size argument coming for m$ format, which is nonsense because both formats are compressed anyway and a XML should be readable.. but somehow, he was not expecting the "speed" issue.
Come on. If you wish something "efficient", use a binary format. If you start having a textual XML + compression, then obviously speed is not your concern. What's your concern then? Readability, processing by third party tools. In that case separation of content and style is more important. Who cares that "stuff" is written in Helvetica 12 black. I personally prefer to know it's a "title". And so on..
As for the speed, on today's computer which are virtually 1000x faster than required for typesetting document, this is laughafable. In addition, for large documents, I know many "word" addicts who separate documents in 100pages portions or so, because it become impossible to handle...
What I think about m$ XML, is that. well. it's not that bad. Even though not really "open", it's still better than before. But comon. This was done in a "rush", to fight back open document initiative. And in that case, dumping dummily the "internal binary structure" into a XML document was making more sense for them. There's nearly no development cost involved (no reasearch whatsoever) and it could be implemented very quckly.
Then Yates come and talk about "customer experience" (cf ZDNET article).. This is laughfable.
Regarding "customer experience", when will word support a real vector image format (no WMF crap please). like let's say EPS/PS/PDF... ? I personally hate having to make a raster of my images and make the word document explode in size (when i'm FORCED to use word).
2030?
The FUD is attacking a valid point that seems to be missed by the comments I have seen. That is, someone just giving OO a try will notice it is slow, especially if they do not disable java for macros, which the average user probably will not even know about. Thus the perception is established, that it is slow, which is bad. I know I was dissapointed by the slow startup time of OO until I read about disabling java. It would be great if OO addressed this somehow, perhaps by disabling java by default then prompting the user to enable when it detects a macro or some such technique. It doesn't have to be a performance improvement just a percieved improvement. Perception matters.
... that maybe it's Microsoft office that's too FAST! Huh? Did they? Ha!
This is just another typical rabid dog attack on the part of Redmond.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Word documents obviously have some serious problems.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Because "free" still means more to me than an additional 1.7 seconds.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Many languages only have a single implementation, or at least only a single working implementation (Java, PHP, Perl...), and then this distinction means little. Still, to use runtime performance as the sole, unqualified criterion for judging a language's worth is beyond stoopid.
Another thing: I'm not sure MS are self-destructing just yet - from where I'm standing their despicable business practices seem to still be working. Now, if we could just ramp up the cluebat production enough to give the general population a good thumping...
This signature is not in the public domain.
Wait a minute. What about the OS itself. While ODF speed may be a concern for those of us who still run Linux on a PII (quite happily), If you've got the hardware to run XP or Vista comfortablly, won't it probablly plow through either format?
My only beef with OO is that they only distribute it in RPM's. Not every linux user is running a system that uses RPM package management! For petes sake just co-release a tarball with the source so I can just compile it myself. I though it was OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE, not CLOSED TO NON REDHAT DISTROS.
But we always ran everything in vt100 mode to make sure you could connect easily. The terminals I usually saw were monochrome green.
The last one I used was in 2000 attached to a headless Sun server by a serial cable (so I guess it was not headless anymore).
I think if they are going to compare wich opens faster, then they should test the boot speeds between windows and FreeBSD or Linux. In my opinion my BSD boots much faster than my windows machine, so with that time saved, i have a lot of extra time to open my docs, and I dont really think my doc speed is to important anyway.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
Except that in this application, the user data is never going to be fixed length. Font names aren't fixed length. Sentences, paragraphs and lines aren't fixed length. Style names aren't fixed length. Even if your encapsulation uses fixed length delimiters, there's inherently going to be a lot of scanning and interpreting of variable length data.
Plus, think about the OS platform as a whole. Microsoft need to have an XML reader in the OS, for things like web feeds, web page parsing, and so on. If they're smart, they'll throw a bunch of engineers at that XML parser and optimize the hell out of it. With OpenDocument, they can use that highly optimized parser for their office documents too.
But no, they seem to be saying that it's better to write, maintain and optimize a second parser just for Office documents. Well, I don't buy it.
The main reason I don't is that XML parsing is damn fast. I took a copy of Ulysses in HTML, and parsed the entire thing. It takes about 1 second per MB, and that's for an XML parser written in one of the slower purely interpreted languages. A C language parser like Expat is about 50-100x faster (based on other people's benchmarks). So for a bloated presentation file, we're talking about maybe 1 second of parsing. That's simply not a performance bottleneck.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
... and i would go even further:
- ODF is so slow, so slow that when saving finishes you find the storage media has decomposed due to atomic decay
- OpenXML is so fast, so fast that saving finishes before is actually starts. Furthermore, this technology puts us half-way to showing how an infinite number of monkeys with in an infinite amount of time could create all possible literary works, since time is not a problem anymore.
In my opinion, the only way one could ever say that saving of an ODF document goes fast is if you throw the PC from the top of a tall building after you start the save.
If it it were technically true, so what?
Why the hell does a text editor need to block the UI while writing to disk?
Were that I say, pancakes?
At tech-ed 2005 here in Brazil I saw one of MS evangelists showing a table comparing speeds for MS office (don't remember the version) and openoffices showing diferences od 20x or more...
I use both offices suites at work and at home and the speed difference is in the order of 2x at most for the first loading of the program and almost no difference after this (anything below 1 second is just "fast enougth" for me). And my computer is rather outdated.
I think ms Office a fair software, not worth the price, that's really expensive in Brasil, but they don't need to lie this way to sell it...
This is funny, genuinely funny for a couple of reasons. It's a shame the announcement is just about 2 months late. (typical for MS) It would've made a great April Fools day joke.
;-) Of course, it would run any one of several Linux distros just fine... My point is, most documents I work with load just about instantly already, even on this system. Even if they took twice as long to load, I probably wouldn't notice.
I have been using MS software, operating systems, applications, development tools, etc. (and non-MS too) since the days of MS-DOS 1.25... IMHO MS has no, zero, zip, nada room to bash anyone or anything else as being "too slow." To me, MS bloat-ware defines slow. But consider, this is the company that gives us the hour glass, the searching flashlight, BSOD, mandatory reboots, and numerous other examples of making the user wait.
A second reason this is funny is consider the context. Sure, some people may regularly use multi-megabyte documents. A quick check of my doc directory shows that my largest one is just over 1MB at about 20 pages. But the vast majority are in the 30KB to 60KB range. Now, at work I have a fairly old Dell Optiplex with a Celeron at a blistering 1.2GHz, 512MB of memory, and already burdened with XP Pro. In other words, it isn't cutting edge, more like the backside of the knife, maybe even the handle...
So who cares? MS cares. MS found an objective measure to try to beat up on the open movement and to defend it's proprietary format with. Never mind that in my area anyway, no-one would notice or care. What I really want is an OS that boots faster. Applications that load faster or are slim enough to be left in memory. A UI that doesn't hang for 10 to 20 seconds every time I open/close an application (particularly with IE).
Yes I'm biased. I use MS products at work because I have to -- I don't control the environment. I have Linux/Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice at home by *my* choice. One system at home runs OpenOffice on a Pentium-II at 450MHz, 720M of RAM, a pair of old 5400 RPM HDD, Suse 10.0... (a junker I just play with) and subjectively, it feels as fast as my work machine with more resources. A MS software load on that machine would be just about unusable.
So go ahead MS, talk it up, bash away. I never knew you had such a sense of humor. For anyone else that wants to speed up their compute experience I'd say forget document formats and look deeper - as in your choice of OS and application...
I have two thoughts about ZDnet's methodology. First, I thought I remembered reading that MS earlier modified windows to preload parts of their applications to reduce load time. I wonder if this was taken into account (probably not). Second, I wonder if there is something about the way the Office apps are structured where major parts of the application execution time are not showing up on ZDnet's radar. MS is famous for making DLL hell. I wonder if all the time really registered. /jjk
I wished that instead of zip files, a text based container like a http-sequence-like mime content or chunked data segments was used:
... ...
....
Content-type: text/xml
Content-length: 2000
Content-type: image/jpeg
Content-length: 600
This way, the text differnces could be easily seen, with meld, xxdiff,
Even if it was text/xml followed by therest.zip, that would be ok too.
As it stands, to do simple differencing, application specific knowledge is needed.
Often, with source code or documents, using diff to verify changes is very useful
Even though ooffice uses xml, putting it in a zip container makes it similar to binary formats, as it becomes harder to compare.
Oh shit, it's too slow. I won't use that. I have to surf the net, create a greeting card and email our family tree to my grandmother. You can clearly see that I can't spare a single process.
Also, I believe retooling a factory to make interchangeable parts has no benefit. I do not think adopting standards can help in any way. Because I'm ignorant and live in the 18th century.
"You're just jealous Napolean because I've been online all day chatting with babes."
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
If open document support was added to the latest MS office, wouldn't that be good justification for people to upgrade to the latest version? It would force users on older versions to shell-out money for the upgrade.
I'm sure that keeping the DOC format closed has more advantages in the long run, but hopefully their customers will "grow a pair" and demand support for an open format.
United Kingdom calls America too small.
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
"[The Gartner analysis] was very surprising and ill-informed," he said. "We've encouraged the analysts to gather more data and understand the depth of the situation."
Translation: We don't like your conclusions, go back and do it again until you get the results we want!
What if they use a standard binary format, similar to how binary attachments are sent in e-mails? I doubt that's what they're doing, but it seems possible to encode binary in xml without using proprietary formats.
OO seems a lot like HTML to me. It's an XML document that links to external binary files. And I don't know about you guys, but Firefox will open a large HTML document from my local machine pretty fast. I guess it could be faster if HTML was instead a binary format, but I doubt I would even notice.
The reason it was marked as troll is because it's just posted repeatedly in every discussion about Linux. Hence your sibling post laughing that the trolls haven't yet fixed the typo.
As far as the merits of the troll, some of the newer distros have made great strides in user-friendlyness (Ubuntu, Mepis, and Linspire to name a few) that the troll completely ignores. In Linspire, for example, installing programs is as easy as going to the Linspire CNR website (there's a link on your desktop) and clicking "install" on webpage when you find a program you want. Unlike Windows, you don't have to find the install file, click on it, and then next-next-next-finish, it automatically downloads and installs itself, you just wait and it appears in your Launch (Start) menu. In many ways some Linux distros are already easier than Windows, and they're just going to get easier.
However, Linux's greatest weakness (and it's greatest strength, but for different reasons) is that it's so diverse. If you choose the right distro a newbie can easily figure out how to do basic things like email, internet, installing the odd puzzle game with only minimal instructions, but if you choose the wrong distro, the newbie will just wind up crying. I personally love the diversity (there's something for everyone) but how is a newbie to figure out which distro is right for him or her? I think that's the biggest problem when it comes to Linux user-friendlyness.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Of course it takes longer to open OpenDocument files on MS Office than MS Office files.
Open MS Office file:
1. Start Word.
2. Load MS Office File.
Open OpenDocument file:
1. Start OpenOffice.
2. Load ODF File.
3. Save as MS Office File.
4. Close OpenOffice.
5. Start MS Office
6. Load Converted File.
On a serious note; is this brain fart of history seriously arguing that parsing even multi-megabyte XML files (of which most documents are not) will take more than a few seconds on modern system? Or even more than 1 second?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The reality, based on reports read as a former investor in Microsoft, is that Office and related products are the bulk of Microsoft's cash flow, after earnings from the vast cash horde and holdings in other companies.
Right now China pirates 98 percent of all Microsoft software - including 80 percent of all such software in Chinese government and military offices. As do Cambodia, Thailand, and other countries.
Microsoft would make more money going after those pirates, instead of trying to force new Office formats on us, but we're easier marks.
Now, having said all that, I'm buying about 400 shares of Microsoft on June 10th or thereabouts.
You can fight the 5,000,000 kilo gorilla, or you can ask it for a ride.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The startup time for the newest version of MS Office on all but the newest systems is usally quite slow. Chop that time down and use the better document standard, and it would match quite well. I've been using iWork for a little while now, and there's a slight load time between converting a ppt file to a Keynote file. You know what though? I don't really care. It isn't that much of a problem.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Pot, meet Kettle.
Unbelievably slow, meet excruciatingly slow.
Of course, for OpenOffice it's conceivable that speed improvements might take precedence over introducing new features in future versions. And you don't actually have to pay for OpenOffice software if you don't want to. And you get OS and format independence.
Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me, when's the last time a company went out of business because their word processor was too slow?
Ok let me get this right. We have machines that are all above 1Ghz. Documents are a small a few kb to a few MB. If documents are larger than that there is something not right. To load that file into memory should take 0.1-0.05 seconds to then decode it to a structure within the software should take another 0.1 seconds, then to present it to the user takes another 0.1. So we are looking at opening times of of less that 1 second.
Where do these people come up with these painfully slow loading times and what not.
A load of bullshit I say.
Lord knows I don't want anything that'll make Word any slower than it already is!
#DeleteChrome
Everybody knows that OO is slow and bloated. Yet Microsoft is willing to completely abandon an obvious and true comparison because they are so scared and desperate to do something about ODF.
.doc is not slower, I recommend that OO add some code to the translater so that it is, this technique has worked for Microsoft.
Basically they are saying "OpenOffice software is *just as good as Word*, everything you see wrong with it is due to it using ODF". They are literally lying in saying that a competitor is better than it really is, because they are so desperate to fud ODF.
What they are scared of is *real* competion, in the form of word processors (quite possibley closed source and/or Windows-only) which are so obviously better and faster than Word that it is blatently obvious even to casual observers. ODF will allow this.
Also, really, somebody should just time Open Office opening an ODF and a doc file. This comparison would be more valid, as at least it is really a timing of the file formats. Of course if the
It's comparing the bloatedness of Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice. The results are pretty much what you'd expect if you've ever used OO: OpenOffice is a bigger hog than Microsoft Office. To measure the actual speed of the format difference for Microsoft Office (the relevant study), we would need a high speed import and export plugin for Office and a set of documents of various sizes. Performance of first-open, subsequent open, export, and stuff like that would need to be measured.
What we're seeing here is none of that. If Microsoft wants to show people that the ODF format is unacceptably slow for the average document - or even the pathological case - all they need to do is have some guy from the Office team play with the ODF export plugin, measure the performance of it, and tac those results onto their press release as preliminary data supporting their position. If they are bad enough to warrant their concerns, it won't matter that they're only preliminary results, they'll have made their point.
It disappoints me that companies rarely put their money where there mouth is and instead rely on other people to do bogus studies for them, then claim the study shows something it doesn't. It also strikes me as odd that the ZDNET folks actually knew how to get the useful memory metrics, but weren't able to generate data germaine to the discussion.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, however, since one of the ZD folks recently suggested that to make UAC in Vista more tolerable, users who need to modify files should alter the ACL's on the file so that their user token has explicit write access - never you-mind that this gives every program they run the ability to play hockey with that file. [http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?page_id=49].
I'd like to see this discussion go somewhere meaningful and people to start throwing around the right numbers.
Trivia question of the day: What did the "AT" stand for at the time?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It doesn't take a genius to see that this is just a veiled press release: "Microsoft to Users: Fuck you, we own your ass, so you can whinge all you want, you're just screwed."
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
When interpreting it provably requires an algorithm with higher order polynomial of complexity, or (hypothetically) a polynomial of equivalent order but provably higher constant. Not that I'm sure if either is the case in this instance, but it seems plausible.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
OpenOffice.org = $0
MS Office = $500+ for the professional version.
I think losing a few seconds here and there is worth saving $500.
This is exactly what they're doing with their JPG alternative. They blow non-issues out of proportion and come up with "solutions" for them. If anyone from MS is reading this, please, get back to writing software and quit trying to mess with stable, well-accepted standards. Maybe you should try coming up with something on your own instead of buying it and retrofitting it to work with your broken operating system.
All in all - OOo's file formats are a nice and simple solution for exchanging reasonably sized documents.
That's a beautifully written insult. Pleasant, yet condescending without a single fact.
(if you don't mind usual XML-namespace-hell structure)
I'm sorry, what? I save docs to myfile.odt. I double-click on that file and just like magic it opens!! I can edit it. Better still, my grand-daughter will be able to view it 100 years from now. Amazing...
I am nowhere near your level of persuasion with politically correct language. I tip my hat to you sir.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
that XML, the technology they have tried to push through ASP, .NET & Web (all v2.0) and other gimmicks that survive for only a day is all of a sudden too slow and has to be converted into BINARY XML for crying out loud for better performance.
That means in my latest Ajax application, I have to get my server convert my data to a binary format, send it to the client who has to unconvert it into real text and a decent XML. I don't understand but imho are open things (documents, actually any representation of data) in plain text handled better with less overhead than binary data that is impossible to alter without a Hex editor.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Microsoft's marketing machine is apparently again picking their messages from their standard Chinese menu of FUD. Come on, guys, you get paid well enough: try to come up with something original for a change.
This has a really desperate feel to it.
Historically microsoft would be the first to go ahead and implement something too slow or too large assuming that hardware will catch up.
Now, to implement a good structure like this ODF, okay so the current implementation of the READER tested a little slow, couldn't the READER be improved by some combination of caching and improved indexing?
Heck, if necessary I doubt there is anything out there saying that a different, more readable format couldn't also be saved--one that could open the first few pages instantly while the rest is parsed in the background.
Since Microsoft has gotten around this problem repeatedly, they MUST know that they are taking a last swing--to accost the format and not the algorithm that reads it is just too ignorant, even for them, to do by accident.
MS did this right again.
They deliberately confuse the application with the file format.
Psycologically reinforcing the perception that everything in a computer is vertically oriented and "incompatible" unless it comes from our application.
They understand the immense threat that a viable alterative (file format in this case) presents. PHB gets idea, "If this is iteroperable, gee I wonder what else is?"
Beautiful.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
OK, hotshot, which do you prefer?
> </row>> </row>
c ell><table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="2"><text:p>2</text:p></table:table-c ell><table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="3"> <text:p>3</text:p></table:table-cell></table:table -row>c ell><table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="5"><text:p>5</text:p></table:table-c ell> <table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="6"><text:p>6</text:p></table:table-c ell></table:table-row>
n t_work/Ecma%20TC45%20OOXML%20Standard%20-%20Draft% 201.3.pdf. That's the PDF version of the draft as saved by Word 2007.
Example 1:
<row><c><v>1</v></c><c><v>2</v></c><c><v>3</v></c
<row><c><v>4</v></c><c><v>5</v></c><c><v>6</v></c
Example 2:
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1"><table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="1"><text:p>1</text:p></table:table-
<table:table-row table:style-name="ro1"><table:table-cell office:value-type="float" office:value="4"><text:p>4</text:p></table:table-
I'll let you figure out which one is ODF and which is the MS format.
Face it, Microsoft has decades of experience in writing and parsing document formats. They understand that the format has to be optimized for actual users, the bulk of whom don't care to poke around inside the files, as opposed to the hobbyist who makes up a tiny fraction of the Office user base.
If you look at the George Ou experiment, his spreadsheet (when saved as OpenXML) has 7 million tags, with over 9M attributes. While it is larger than normal for a spreadsheet, it is by far not the largest. Parsing those 16M strings is just naturally going to take an ODF parser 7 times as long as an OpenXML parser because the strings are 7 times as long. People are used to opening and saving their files in a few seconds, not a few minutes. Microsoft knows that people won't use the XML format if it takes 100 times longer to do anything with it. Maybe people won't notice 10 times slower, but 100 times is like going back to floppies!
And the XML does not contain any binary. The Office team created hierarchical file formats 15 years ago (like single-file FAT filesystems); why would they go back now? The ZIP file format allows them to include the images as separate files, and they make use of that. You can verify for yourself by reading http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curre
dom
What a pointless comparison. Who cares! I'm using XML daily, I even have to write XML Parsers for embedded applications from scratch. XML is all about standards and readability (otherwise we would all still be using comma delimited files) you make an XML standard that is neither readable nor makes use of existing standards and technologies, I don't care how much faster it is (which nothing in the article proves it is), I don't want it. Microsoft should first make a proper XML Office standard and then worry whether theirs is better than others. If ISO has any sense they will reject OpenXML.
Use an OpenDocument office package on a *nix operating system. Any loss of speed incurred by using OpenDocument will be more than compensated for by the gain in speed from ditching Windows :-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
When Vista gets out, the computers you buy at your local computer store will be a lot faster than what they are today, and will most likely be able to open ODF as well as Microsoft XML based documents at resonable speed. Even my current 1.4 GHz laptop opens business documents of 10 pages or so in less than a second.
The difference in speed could of course be annoying at very long documents, but then you have to ask yourself is really OpenOffice or MS-Office really the right tools for such things. FrameMaker, LaTeX, or DocBook comes to mind as better alternatives for cases like that. If the large document happens to be an overgrown spreadsheet there are plenty of free and propriatory database engines that would be much better suited to do the heavy lifting.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
LOL
Save urself bucks next time you upgrade - use OOo and apply part of the savings to a faster CPU. STFU, M$.
Even better savings:
CPU upgrade About $500
NOT Windows About -$200 (don't know exactly)
NOT Office About -$500
NOT M$ server apps About -$500
Rethink CPU upgrade About $300
Savings over M$ upgrade About $400
All just guesswork, my numbers may be completely wrong, ymmv, etc.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Yet too little of them proved to be true.
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oh the sweet irony.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I seem to remember a rather depressing benchmark with respect to how fast OOo was able to save and re-open a large spreadsheet- and how much memory was required to do so. The results were not pretty, and would have definitely qualified as something that goes into the "must improve asap" category. I use primarily open source apps, but I have to admit that this performance benchmark was a little disappointing. Here's a to a related ZDNet article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=119
How quickly can Office 97 open a document that was made with Office 2003?
Not very fast I'd wager.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
> What difference does a few milliseconds here or there make?
Look at the study being referred to:
Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes
It's not "a few milliseconds" - it's a factor of a hundred that turns a nearly-instant operation into a go-get-coffee one.
Now, don't get me wrong - I realize that the study compares OO/MSW and not ODF/MSXML, and I know that there are definite benefits to having an open document format being adapted (especially for public data), but this is not a small difference. Your post makes pro-open-format people look like shrill, clueless zealots who can be safely ignored, and that is potentially as damaging as the sheer lack of performance shown in the study.
So, please, RTFA. Or at least STFU if you can't be bothered - you're generating your own damn FUD.
Suck it!
I usually understand and tolerate code bloat, but with hard disks running at 50Mb/s, memory at 5000MB/s and processors at >5000MIPS, some code should really receive performance tuning. By the way, I use LaTeX and it can easily render more than a 100 pages to print-quality (not screen quality) in very few seconds. Then again, I don't expect the guys at MS to beat Knuth.
P.
Coke annouces Pepsi kills babies, citing a study published by the Coca-Cola Bottlers of America.
I would imagine that OpenOffice.org is actually slower at importing and saving to the MS format than ODF, which would be a more fair comparison that using a different suite entirely.
However it is also possible that MS Office with the ODF filter is slower with ODF documents than with the MS format. So not much can be proven either way.
Maybe they should see how fast documents open up in KWord or AbiWord for a more fair comparison of formats. KWord might open ODF faster than any of the alternatives. AbiWord doesn't use either format as a native format, so it should be more "neutral". The quality of the filter code will probably still be as bigger factor than the document format itself though.
It is really sad to see such nonsense studies and clutching at straws going on, but I guess it is nothing new. Nobody is excited about MS anymore, including most of their own employees. Compare that with the atmosphere around Apple and Google, where both the employees and users anxiously anticipate the next release. MS is doomed to become as big and boring as IBM it seems.
As a developer I think you are wrong! What the hell does what you say have to do with ODF?
There's only one file load benchmark, supposedly comparing load times for a large speadsheet. No word processor files, no presentations, no other data types.
There isn't even a variety of spreadsheets, just one file, which gives me a suspicious feeling its contents may have been carefully chosen to bias the results.
But most suspious of all is the data is a SXC file. Not ODF at all. That's right, its in the older openoffice 1.0 format, which is also XML-based, but not at all "ODF" format.
There's a big table of startup times too, which show MS office loads faster. No mention is made of pre-loaded windows components, or if open office quick launcher is used. Why such a big table of startup times in an article supposedly about file load/save times? Well, my suspisious feeling is saying it's likely a diversionary tactic, to hide the ugly fact that this article really only presents a single test case.
I'm not calling George Ou (and Ziff Davis) Mircosoft shills. But, George (or ZD editors), if you're reading this, you could have done SO much better. Rather than a big table of load times, your effort (if it was unbaised) could have been much better spent actually testing a few word processor files and a couple presentations. You could have used actual widely published files from various sources, to avoid the impression of a contrived/biased sample file. You could have even sought data originally authored in each application and converted to the other, to see if that makes a difference.
Maybe someone else will do some real, well conducted tests, with good methodology, and without the need to pad their results (and word count) with big table of unrelated benckmarks.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Seriously, on average a document with the same contents is up to 50% smaller with OpenOffice. And yes, the ODT opens faster than MS office opens its word documents.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
The speed of opening the document depends on the location related to the process opening it. If you have to retrieve this document over a slow network link to open it... Word falls on it's face. A two page document is 100k in .doc and is 18k in .odt.
.doc faster when the document is already on the drive, .odt catches up as soon as you move the document onto a file server and if you accessing over a dialup or vpn link odt will open the doc nearly 10 times faster.
Now given word opens the
XML - internally Unicode, externally normally UTF-8 Which for "latin" characters looks like ASCII.. but isn't
You see, XML supports non-latin characters which don't exist in ASCII
Offtopic I know, sorry.
But, could somebody tell me how a file format can be 'slow'? I can see the hardware or the application reading it as being slow. I can see where the format may be inefficient at storing data and causing performance issues, but those issues could be overcome through brute force, i.e., better parsing algorithms and faster hardware, a la what MS has done for years to hide badly written software. I think this is CLEARLY a case of the pot calling the kettle black! F**K Microsoft, F**K them right in the ear! Whiny little bitches!
"We'd support it but it's too slow"
:(
This means they'll cut off Vista support?
There have been posts here saying that ODF isn't less efficient than Microsoft's formats, it's just that OO.o is less efficent thatn MS Office.
OO.o is indeed less efficient than MS Office, but the fact is, Microsoft's file formats are more efficient than ODF by design.
I won't even deal with Microsoft's binary format or their previous XML format (which are also both faster than ODF), I'll just deal with ODF vs OpenXML (Office 2007's default format).
First, ODF chose human readability over machine efficiency. This is a mistake in my opinion, because programs are going to be manupulating these documents orders of magnitude more often than a human is going to be eyeballing the XML.
Check out this blog entry from Brian Jones' Open XML blog (Brian Jones is Microsoft's main Open XML guy):
Does [tag] Size Matter?
This blog entry describes the benefits of OpenXML's terse tags vs ODF's verbose tags. The blog entry includes a comparison of OpenXML's representation of the spreadsheet:
1 2 3
4 5 6
OpenXML's representation of that spreadsheet requires ~110 characters, while ODF's requires ~780.
It doesn't take a genious to know which would be more quickly parsable by a machine.
There are many other points made by the blog entry tha I encourage you to read.
Another of Brian Jones' blog entries is here: Design Goals Behind SpreadsheetML [OpenXML's spreadheet format]
Among other things, this blog entry discusses the performance goals of OpenXML's spreadsheet format. Microsoft didn't want a huge peformance hit by going from binary to XML. For spreadsheets, they use things like shared string tables to speed things up. I encourage you to read this blog entry for more details.
OpenXML is "faster" than ODF by design, that's just the way it is.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
> What possible reason could anybody have for defending Microsoft unless they're on the payroll?
Truth.
Period, full-stop, that's the reason for half the things I post on the Internet. Whether or not someone is on "my side"---in fact, especially if they're on "my side"---I very much expect people to tell the truth. If they don't, I consider it shameful, and will often make an effort to correct it. Whether the bogus assertion is anti-Microsoft or not is irrelevant.
Does that mean I agree with all of Microsoft's actions? Of course not. But it does mean that I will shoot down any false assertions that I see, regardless of whether those assertions agree with my own preferences.
Spouting lies to "fight the good fight" doesn't make you noble; it just makes you a liar. If reality doesn't agree with your beliefs, it ain't reality that's due for a change.
You're comparing Apps to Opendocuments. That's inappropriate.
Sure, write the app code to be maintainable. You can optimize it later if it turns out to be slow. You can rewrite the whole app if needed.
Document formats are different. They are standardized, both officially and in practice. If the format impedes fast operations, tough luck. You're screwed unless you design a new format and get EVERYTHING to support the new format.
Then we have one more, perhaps rarely seen: break up the parts of a Microsoft DOC into separate file streams, using the features of NTFS to make them individually accessible. BTW,this could work well on Linux with some Reiserfs4 hacks.
Anyway... duh, wasn't this obvious?
People write 500-page books in Microsoft Word.
No kidding. Chew on that one for a while. Some publishers only accept Microsoft Word *.doc files. No, they don't do TeX, *roff, DVI, PDF, or PostScript. Even if the publishers would all take those formats, the authors actually like using a word processor to... process words!
With ODF, the whole damn file must be read from beginning to end. You can't skip to the desired page. It's a damn big file too.
What would you call a ridiculously massive document?
People write 500-page books in Microsoft Word. There are book publishers that only accept *.doc files, and many authors who like using Microsoft Word.
If that's unreasonable, then you are uninterested in solving the problem.
Both my desktop and my laptop running XP have similar issues with hanging on word (and other applications).
Saving to HD, not to floppy or network. Should be fast, but it is not.
This coming from the makers of Windows.
Besides, with optimisation to the loader, and hardware advances in the next 6 months, it will surely speed up.
Also, the many thousands of people currently using it don't seem to feel that it's "too slow".
History has proved that speed is not the be all and end all of computing - otherwise we'd all still be coding in assembler and writing our documents in plain ASCII text.
The benefits of an open format far outweigh any speed shortcomings I've experienced with it.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
i would want to see multiple formats that are open and competing with one another. the rest of the users will have freedom to choose which will be better.
i think that if everyone were to only agree on *only one*, then it wouldn't be free (as in speech) at all.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Microsoft TELLS CONSUMERS how fast their computers are. Since when they have any interest in performance?
What is the point of your sig?
I just find the article funny. Someone from microsoft calling something not from microsoft slow. Kind of like George Bush saying he's smarter than Dan Quayle.
Chris McElroy aka NameCritic http://www.blogs.pn
but how is a newbie to figure out which distro is right for him or her?
Ask a nerdy friend. Duh. Most people do not stand alone.
As a bloatware vendor we all know and love, since when Microsoft has been concerned with performance? Office 6 readily comes to mind, among others. This is a poor excuse IMHO. Next please..
First off: I think Microsoft must be desperate if they're trying *this* ridiculous tactic to denigrate ODF. What's next, "The colour scheme of ODF clashes with the Luna WinXP theme"?
Having said that, I think this is one more reason that the slow speed of OOo is a significant issue. It's not just a matter of user convenience. (sigh) If KWord could save files in MS Word format, I could be free of OOo.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Ask a nerdy friend. Duh. Most people do not stand alone.
Not even nerds know all the different distros. My non-technical friend, who is happily using Mepis right now, was originally recommended Fedora Core, a distro that (no offense Red Hat fans) would have made her cry. Many long-time Linux users on slashdot have stated they've never even heard of Mepis, and the last time I saw someone list some good newbie distros (Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Kanotix) the general response was "Yeah, and which one of those plays flash/mp3s right out of the box" and the comments of "Yeah, I hate Linux for not supporting that stuff" pretty much drowned out the correct responses of "ALL OF THEM". If even nerds don't understand which distros are for newbies and why, then how the hell are newbies supposed to figure it out?
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
This isn't hard to understand - you can get a college intern to write that code and ship it out the door and most people won't ever notice, except to occasionally complain that their files are "so big these days".
Either that or write your formatting into a tree and prune the unnecessary leaf nodes. This would get you smaller files obviously but the code is slower to write and more likely to need debugging. You'd expect an open source project to take that approach when somebody gets annoyed at the filesizes. Inside Microsoft, that kind of activity isn't helping to generate profits.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Then I would look at similarities between those systems. Do they both run anti-virus or similar tools? What other apps are running the background, etc? Like I said, millions of people don't have this problem. While we cannot say for sure that it isn't an inherent problem with Word, it would seem that a problem with your systems is a much more likely cause.
Now OpenOffice will get faster.
Just like the 2.4 kernel was designed to beat benchmarks against NT/2k, this article will rally all of the open source developers around OOo to make it faster and use less memory.
We all know software companies listen more to the media than their customers who have been complaining about this from the begining.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.