Sure, they'll end up taking a hit financially, and will probably have to make some changes in their pricing, but they will be far from dead. Heck, all those lawsuits couldn't destroy the tobacco industry, and they kill people.
On the other hand, lawsuits did destroy the asbestos industry. What I've noticed (proposed rule of law) is that courts won't bankrupt companies in one fell swoop, but are willing to do it piecemeal through a series of smaller actions.
The tobacco litigation is a poor example, as the big bucks cases were brought by state attorney generals to recover state medical costs. One of the real numbers that went down as part of those settlements was cutting off class actions brought by victims, a questionable settlement provision that quashed an important right of parties who weren't involved in the lawsuits. Several state attorney generals deserve to be hauled up on disciplinary charges for that number.
On the other hand, I doubt if these consumer class actions are the right vehicle to completely destroy Microsoft. The plaintiffs' lawyers will have problems showing high damages and Microsoft undoubtedly has business insurance that will come into play.
But the insurance angle is important. Typically, in the process of sorting out claims against the insurers, deals get made to prevent future awards of the same type, so the insurance companies might, for example, extract conditions that Internet Exploder be unhitched from Windoze.
I'm not a fan of class actions myself. I worked on one once, and the experience convinced me that there's no way to do a class action lawsuit that protects all plaintiffs' rights, and that there's no way of doing one without violating my personal ethics. I'll never do another one.
Anyone who's spent any considerable amount of time working on radiation and toxic substance issues knows that "finding a cure for cancer" is a public relations tool for diverting public attention from the CAUSES of cancer, which are overwhelming environmental in origin, i.e., radioactive and toxic substances.
That's why the American Cancer Society has been regularly taken to task by experts for having a Board stuffed with chemical industry executives. For a superlative, well-reasoned analysis, see Dr. Samuel Epstein's Politics of Cancer.
Finding a cure for cancer diverts attention from the biggest battle in the War Against Cancer, eliminating radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals from the environment to the fullest extent possible. It also allows drug companies, many of which are owned by the same chemical companies that create carcinogenic pollutants, to profit from palliative "cures" for symptoms. Kind of like the good doctors who take to drumming up business by shooting people at night.
OK, let's assume that someone finally finds a "cure" for some form of cancer. Now how do we distribute that cure to all that need it, including the multitude of animals in the wild that suffer cancer right along with the humans exposed to the same chemicals and radiation sources?
Prevention is the only reasonable response to the cancer epidemic (and it is an epidemic that's been on the steady rise for decades). "Finding a cure for cancer" is pure quackery. Put your bucks (and CPU cycles) into a better cause, such as supporting environmental groups that are actually doing something about cancer.
Paul Merrell
co-author, No Margin of Safety, Politics of Penta
pem@casco.net
>> So I guess the real question is:
>> is linux a desktop OS yet?
Your rhetorical question hits the nail on the head, and the answer is "no," if you look at what's holding back Linux--and BSD--from significant penetration of the desktop market.
The main factors are a lack of adequate applications and the market's existing investment in Windows applications.
ADEQUACY OF APPLICATIONS: Too many open source programmers are prone to looking at applications through their own eyes rather than the eyes of the users their applications would need to serve in order to significantly penetrate the desktop market. For example, K-Office and StarOffice may provide word processors that are adequate for the needs of programmers doing their own writing, but they're abysmally inadequate for advanced word processing needs that can presently be met only with WordPerfect, MS Word, and somewhat marginally by Lotus Smartsuite. Real word processing mills may have only one in 20 users charged with using the really advanced features, but the less skilled workers have to be using the same software as the advanced user in order to feed the files to the latter.
Perhaps a good example is the table of authorities add-ons used in law offices. Tables of authorities can be generated without using the specialized software, but it's a difference between hours and a few minutes to accomplish the same task. Present table of authorities generators are available only on Windows, and will integrate only with WordPerfect and MS Word. Multiply the same problem by the number of advanced features missing from the open source competition for WordPerfect, Word, and SmartSuite, and you'll begin to get a clue.
INVESTMENT IN OTHER TECHNOLOGY: There's a formidable amount of software market inertia involved in historic commitments to applications running on the Windows platform. The major factors are technical support, training expense, and existing investment in desktop automation code.
For example, a word processing shop may have devoted years to developing workable technical support for a system that gets the work out the door with an acceptable level of technical support. Scrap the existing technical support expertise, and the whole system has to be rebuilt from the ground up, including developing new relationships with new technical support experts. The gut level response is not to fix a system that is still functioning adequately.
Similarly, a word processing shop may have a tremendous investment in training that leaves the IT folks asking why they should bring the operation to its knees while everyone becomes competent with new software. This is easily the largest expense just in migrating from word processor to another even while staying on the Windows platform. Add a new desktop manager to the mix, and you've got what may well be a show stopper.
It's also not uncommon to see shops that have more than 100 times the investment in office automation code that they have in the applictions themselves. Typical law office investment in developing custom WordPerfect PerfectScript document automation macros and merges springs to mind as an example that has stopped many law offices even from switching to MS Word, let alone switching to StarOffice running on Linux or BSD.
Add it all up, and Judge Jackson hit the right issue when he centered his Microsoft anti-trust decision on the barriers non-Windows operating systems face when attempting to wrest market share from Microsoft.
Viewed from the above standpoints, neither Linux nor BSD are adequate desktop operating systems.
"Look at windows help, it's very easy and searchable, and they are a million intro to's, classes, cdroms etc."
Please, don't set Linux documentation aspirations by reference to the Windows Help "system." It certainly falls flat in the area of searching the Help system. Yes, you can do searches, but only within the particular help file you're in. That's a weakness, because the typical user won't know what Help file they should be in unless they already know what Help file they should be in.
A decent Help system should, at minimum, allow a single search to query all Help files. It might even go further by allowing "fuzzy" searches, searches using "stemming," and other basic techniques of advanced search engines.
Going a step further, we might even see options to easily display the help screen as a reduced size window so Help is displayed along with the app being used, with a hot key for toggling between Help and the app.
A decent Help system might also force some protocols to be followed, rather than allowing Help authors to be different, which is the way the Windows Help authoring systems work. That would save users the distraction of learning the "system" employed in a given Help file. One of the big advantages of existing Linux Documentation Project systems is that they employ a common DTD, something eschewed by WinHelp. A Linux Help system needs to capitalize on the strengths of what has already been done, not repeat the errors of the WinHelp system.
WinHelp also does not recognize the extra power that could be realized if Windows had anything comparable to the LDP; e.g., the LinuxHelp system could easily extend to LDP online files. Yes, I know that WinHelp allows hyperlinks, but there is no body of Windows knowledge gathered that is comparable to the LDP.
All of this can be done now on Linux, but only through customization of default installed Help systems. That kind of customization work needs to be done at the distro level, not be left to the users who need Help the most.
"One question for anyone from Corel, when can we expect Ventura for Linux?"
I'm not from Corel, but am a close watcher of it. All of the Corel business apps were scheduled to be released on Linux by the end of the year. I haven't heard anything about change in the schedule since the staff lay-offs, but not very many of the lay-offs were engineers, so they may still be on schedule. I know the Corel Draw Linux version made it into beta two months ahead of schedule, which bolsters the suspicion that Linux Ventura may still happen this year.
Corel wouldn't make a good target of the type you suggest. All major software companies carry liability insurance policies to provide a defense to business law suits. You couldn't get someone to sit on a board of directors without it.
> This is an automatic system. A registry key containing a date is checked against the current date, and the system queries a database over the Internet and checks for upgrades.
Sounds like AOL to me. How many years was AOL doing this before Microsoft applied for its patent?
BTW, checking for file dates is a really poor way of implementing this kind of thing. Dates get changed too easily; checking both version numbers and file sizes is far better.
Word files will not open in WordPerfect or most other word processors if the Word files are fast-saved, which is the Word default setting. Fast-saved Word files are not formatted; they just throw the edits into an area near the top of the file.
Moral of the story: if you want Word files to be portable, find the Word fast-save setting and disable it.
"So my question is does anybody know if Corel is making a PPC version."
Hints, bits, and pieces suggest that Corel plans to port all of its apps to the Mac PPC, but the official word is that it's going to get the Linux x86 ports done first then see what's next.
Corel engineers are less forthcoming now, but in the early days of their involvement with the Wine Project, they openly discussed plans and their work to port Wine itself to various platforms including the PPC and StrongARM processors, to port all their apps to Wine, and then from there to compile them using Wine lib-c to run natively on the various platforms.
Since then, Corel has produced Mac PPC ports of some of their retail graphics apps, which I've assumed indicates the stage of their development of the Wine-Mac PPC port. There was a Corel press statement accompanying its decision to make Mac WordPerfect 3.5 available as a free download that was widely interpreted by the press as meaning that Corel would have no further WordPerfect releases. However, the actual language Corel used could as easily support the opposite conclusion. http://www.corel.com/news/1999/august/august_19_19 99.htm ("no further versions of WordPerfect for Macintosh will be released based on the 3.5 code base").
I've misplaced the link, but one of the Mac community online publications claimed several months ago to have hard insider information that Corel has a new Mac version of WordPerfect in development.
Corel also released a press release a few months ago announcing a planned joint gift to charities with Rebel.com of a large number of Netwinders and WP Office 2000. With the Netwinder running on the StrongARM processor and Corel's ownership stake in Rebel.com, one might suspect that the planned gift of WP Office 2000 was intended to run on the machines rather than just sit in desk drawers, e.g., run on the StrongARM. There is also the factor that Corel kept about 50 members of the Netwinder development team when it sold the Netwinder to Rebel.com. They were assigned to the Corel Linux development team, which puts a lot of Linux StrongARM engineers under one roof.
Just before AMIGA blew up last year, Corel and Amiga announced a deal for Corel to adapt WP Office 2000 for a Linux distro AMIGA had under development. AMIGA was widely believed at the time to be developing for a Transmeta processor, so that suggests that Corel at least had the Transmeta processor line in its development path.
Corel's press release on the MetaCreations deal yesterday reinforced the perception of events such as those discussed above:
"The acquisition fits our strategic vision of offering world-class applications for multiple platforms. Corel is committed to developing new versions of the Painter, KPT and Bryce product lines[.]"
So as I said initially, lots of hints, bits, and pieces. But considering Corel's commitment to cross-platform development with Wine as the crossroads, it's almost foregone that Corel will port all of its apps to whatever platform it releases any of its major apps on.
"Have you ever used Corel WP 8? It is really terrible. The University where I work, for some time supported both Office and WordPerfect, but WordPerfect just crashes too often and is a pain for all those involved."
As someone who spends most of his time doing WP tech support, I'm invariably amused or angered when someone assumes that because they experience WP crashes the application is automatically at fault. In fact, properly patched WP 8 is one of the more stable applications on the market. If it's crashing a lot, you've got problems at the operating system level, hardware issues, a corrupt installation of WP, or the service packs haven't been applied properly.
In fact, the largest single cause of WP 7 and 8 crashes are defective DLL run times released by Microsoft with Visual Studio 6.0 and installed by some 50 Microsoft applications that were programmed using it. Applying the Microsoft Foundation Classes Library Update, that MSFT finally issued months after WP had its reputation smeared by Microsoft's Breakware DLLs, will take care of those problems.
If you'd like to do something about the problems, record the details of your error messages and triggering events, and post them to a forum that deals with WP issues like http://www.wpwin.com/talk
Hardly; type size is still expressed most commonly in "points" measurement. That's a standard that's been unchallenged worldwide for several centuries; I'm not aware of any move to revise it, with the exception of some web page and similar coding that expresses typesizes in effect as percentages of a user-selected base size, but even that base is expressed in points.
"Points" are a subdivision of a measurement unit called "picas." There are 12 points to a pica, and roughly 72-1/3 picas to a foot.
The source code for DTP originates in the first computerized newspaper typesetting systems, and before that in the teletypesetter (TTS) standard. See generally http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/DWcodes .html#A704 (;) http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/paperta pe.html (.)
Pica-point measurements are so thoroughly engrained in DTP code that other measurements presented are normally converted internally from picas and points. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
"One item that would be of great benefit to people thinking about the change over from Word to a Linux wordprocessor is a feature by feature table showing if a particular word formatting ability can be properly imported or exported from a Word Document."
Corel has done tables like that for the Win32 version of WordPerfect Office 2000. Since the forthcoming Linux version (actually running under a separate Wine session) is the Win32 code adapted to Wine, the Corel tables should still be good. I don't expect any changes in the conversion filters, but could be wrong.
You can download the Corel conversion tables at http://www.corel.com/support/downloads/wtpapers.ht m (.) Get:
WordPerfect 9 Conversions (North American and International versions) WordPerfect Office 2000: Compatible Solutions WordPerfect 9 Transition Guide
There's some overlap in these guides, which are in PDF format. One (can't remember which) compares the steps needed to invoke a procedure in MS Office and WP Office. The others compare features and spell out what converts directly, what won't convert at all, and what is converted in altered form.
"But some folks figured it would make the two companies seem more credibly like "Linux companies" to some investors who are only looking at keywords, so they let it go through."
You've missed a few events. Corel's single deal with PC Chips to distribute 20 million copies of Corel Linux more than doubled the number of Linux OS's distributed, overnight making Corel/Debian without question and by far the largest Linux distribution. You're also overlooking where every cent of Corel's R&D budget has been going for the last two years, and a good portion of it before that developing the Netwinder. It's been Linux, and even if you don't like the idea of an easy-to-use Linux, it doesn't make it a bad idea from a financial perspective.
You're also forgetting which company was the first brand name software company to break ranks and embrace Linux, triggering the exodus of the other big software companies from Win32 to Linux.
And what's wrong with the fit between Corel and Borland/Inprise? Novell bought QuattroPro from Borland, and Corel inherited it from Novell. Corel has been licensing Paradox from Borland for years. Corel has a crying need for a powerful, networkable PIM to unify its applications and hasn't been able to put it together. (Thank Novell for keeping WordPerfect Office, now Groupwise.) A company with database expertise like Borland can do wonders for Corel, and Corel with its graphics and productivity apps can build the market for Borland's database and development tools. And Corel's ownership interests in Rebel.com and Graphon get Borland favored access to Sun's biggest Canadian SPARC/Solaris distributor and Graphon's thin-client software connectivity among Win32, Linux, Unix, and the Mac. The fit looks good from here.
The stark truth is that Corel is the only Linux company that has a realistic potential to become very large very quickly. It has the marketing channels, it has the engineers, it has the experience of going nose to nose with Microsoft. None of the other Linux plays even has the management structure to become a Linux commercial bohemoth.
I wish RedHat, VA, and the other Linux high flyers nothing but the best, but none of them have anything going other than prayer that rationalizes their current inflated market caps, not even reasonable expectations of future earnings. It's ironic to me that Corel, the only company actually poised to become a Linux giant and return value to its stockholders, has been trading at a small fraction of the other Linux play's market prices.
It's even more ironic to see people hinting that Corel is not in fact a Linux company. In fact, Corel/Borland easily has more engineers developing Linux products than any other software company. Their commitment to the platform is real.
Paul Merrell, pem@televar.com http://www.qwkscreen.com/WPLinuxLinks.html
Please moderate this one up. That is an extremely important question. E.g., does Corel plan to port Corel Linux and Corel's applications to the StrongARM and PPC processors? How about the Transmeta?
WordPerfect has its own internal scripting language, plus PerfectScript. Ensuring that PerfectScript remains at the forefront of WordPerfect's scripting capabilities is extremely important to the existing user base, many of whom like myself have tens of thousands of dollars invested in PerfectScript macros. Many of us were dismayed recently when Corel added VBA to WordPerfect Office 2000 at the seeming expense of PerfectScript integration with new features. With 35 million present WordPerfect users dependent on the existing scripting languages implemented in the suite, I for one hope that Corel does NOT sacrifice our loyalty and commitment to the platform by scrapping PerfectScript in favor of more trendy programming languages.
I don't know about the graphics end, but much of the WordPerfect package is technology licensed from other companies. That really creates some problems for going open source.
It's also easy to confuse the forest with the trees. The WP package is largely a platform for building customized office applications, as opposed to just being a word processor, and to that extent is already open source; e.g., the included macro and merge languages, templating features, etc.
Corel also isn't super secretive to begin with. If you want an example, check out http://www.wpwin.com in the user forums, where the topic of the month is an ongoing exchange with the Corel lead developer of the Corel PerfectScript programming language.
As a lawyer, I'd have to say that the lawyers win this contest if techies understanding of law is reflected by the posts in this thread.
First, "the law" is not nearly as monolithic as people seem to assume. Most posters seem to equate "lawyers" with "trial lawyers," when the latter is only a subset of the former.
But even within the much more limited field of trial law, folks just aren't getting it. They equate "law" with "rules" as though they were one and the same.
They aren't the same. The fact is that court decisions are made by people subject to human frailties, and "rules" tend to be the after-the-fact justification for decisions that are made at a much more emotional level. In other words, "law" is the aesthetic of social control; the real only rule is, "it depends on who's asking."
Trial work really isn't about rules. It's about persuasion, whether the decision is made by a judge or a jury. Which client and which witnesses are more appealing to the decision-maker? How should people dress? What order of proof tells the best story? And study after study has found that most jurors make up their minds based on the first few minutes of opening argument, rather than on the presentation of evidence.
A friend once explained that he found out after he got out into practice that he had wasted three years of his life going to "law" school because he learned that it was facts that won cases, not law, but there was no "fact school" to go to. There's a lot of truth in his observation.
As a champion of unpopular causes, this isn't the way I'd like it to be; however, it is beyond question the way it is. But until techies wake up to the fact that the rules are far less important than who's making the decisions, I'd have to say that lawyers understand far more about tech issues than techies understand about "the law."
Slashdot Mirror
The tobacco litigation is a poor example, as the big bucks cases were brought by state attorney generals to recover state medical costs. One of the real numbers that went down as part of those settlements was cutting off class actions brought by victims, a questionable settlement provision that quashed an important right of parties who weren't involved in the lawsuits. Several state attorney generals deserve to be hauled up on disciplinary charges for that number.
On the other hand, I doubt if these consumer class actions are the right vehicle to completely destroy Microsoft. The plaintiffs' lawyers will have problems showing high damages and Microsoft undoubtedly has business insurance that will come into play.
But the insurance angle is important. Typically, in the process of sorting out claims against the insurers, deals get made to prevent future awards of the same type, so the insurance companies might, for example, extract conditions that Internet Exploder be unhitched from Windoze.
I'm not a fan of class actions myself. I worked on one once, and the experience convinced me that there's no way to do a class action lawsuit that protects all plaintiffs' rights, and that there's no way of doing one without violating my personal ethics. I'll never do another one.
Anyone who's spent any considerable amount of time working on radiation and toxic substance issues knows that "finding a cure for cancer" is a public relations tool for diverting public attention from the CAUSES of cancer, which are overwhelming environmental in origin, i.e., radioactive and toxic substances. That's why the American Cancer Society has been regularly taken to task by experts for having a Board stuffed with chemical industry executives. For a superlative, well-reasoned analysis, see Dr. Samuel Epstein's Politics of Cancer. Finding a cure for cancer diverts attention from the biggest battle in the War Against Cancer, eliminating radioactive and carcinogenic chemicals from the environment to the fullest extent possible. It also allows drug companies, many of which are owned by the same chemical companies that create carcinogenic pollutants, to profit from palliative "cures" for symptoms. Kind of like the good doctors who take to drumming up business by shooting people at night. OK, let's assume that someone finally finds a "cure" for some form of cancer. Now how do we distribute that cure to all that need it, including the multitude of animals in the wild that suffer cancer right along with the humans exposed to the same chemicals and radiation sources? Prevention is the only reasonable response to the cancer epidemic (and it is an epidemic that's been on the steady rise for decades). "Finding a cure for cancer" is pure quackery. Put your bucks (and CPU cycles) into a better cause, such as supporting environmental groups that are actually doing something about cancer. Paul Merrell co-author, No Margin of Safety, Politics of Penta pem@casco.net
>> So I guess the real question is:
>> is linux a desktop OS yet?
Your rhetorical question hits the nail on the head, and the answer is "no," if you look at what's holding back Linux--and BSD--from significant penetration of the desktop market.
The main factors are a lack of adequate applications and the market's existing investment in Windows applications.
ADEQUACY OF APPLICATIONS: Too many open source programmers are prone to looking at applications through their own eyes rather than the eyes of the users their applications would need to serve in order to significantly penetrate the desktop market. For example, K-Office and StarOffice may provide word processors that are adequate for the needs of programmers doing their own writing, but they're abysmally inadequate for advanced word processing needs that can presently be met only with WordPerfect, MS Word, and somewhat marginally by Lotus Smartsuite. Real word processing mills may have only one in 20 users charged with using the really advanced features, but the less skilled workers have to be using the same software as the advanced user in order to feed the files to the latter.
Perhaps a good example is the table of authorities add-ons used in law offices. Tables of authorities can be generated without using the specialized software, but it's a difference between hours and a few minutes to accomplish the same task. Present table of authorities generators are available only on Windows, and will integrate only with WordPerfect and MS Word. Multiply the same problem by the number of advanced features missing from the open source competition for WordPerfect, Word, and SmartSuite, and you'll begin to get a clue.
INVESTMENT IN OTHER TECHNOLOGY: There's a formidable amount of software market inertia involved in historic commitments to applications running on the Windows platform. The major factors are technical support, training expense, and existing investment in desktop automation code.
For example, a word processing shop may have devoted years to developing workable technical support for a system that gets the work out the door with an acceptable level of technical support. Scrap the existing technical support expertise, and the whole system has to be rebuilt from the ground up, including developing new relationships with new technical support experts. The gut level response is not to fix a system that is still functioning adequately.
Similarly, a word processing shop may have a tremendous investment in training that leaves the IT folks asking why they should bring the operation to its knees while everyone becomes competent with new software. This is easily the largest expense just in migrating from word processor to another even while staying on the Windows platform. Add a new desktop manager to the mix, and you've got what may well be a show stopper.
It's also not uncommon to see shops that have more than 100 times the investment in office automation code that they have in the applictions themselves. Typical law office investment in developing custom WordPerfect PerfectScript document automation macros and merges springs to mind as an example that has stopped many law offices even from switching to MS Word, let alone switching to StarOffice running on Linux or BSD.
Add it all up, and Judge Jackson hit the right issue when he centered his Microsoft anti-trust decision on the barriers non-Windows operating systems face when attempting to wrest market share from Microsoft.
Viewed from the above standpoints, neither Linux nor BSD are adequate desktop operating systems.
"Look at windows help, it's very easy and searchable, and they are a million intro to's, classes, cdroms etc."
Please, don't set Linux documentation aspirations by reference to the Windows Help "system." It certainly falls flat in the area of searching the Help system. Yes, you can do searches, but only within the particular help file you're in. That's a weakness, because the typical user won't know what Help file they should be in unless they already know what Help file they should be in.
A decent Help system should, at minimum, allow a single search to query all Help files. It might even go further by allowing "fuzzy" searches, searches using "stemming," and other basic techniques of advanced search engines.
Going a step further, we might even see options to easily display the help screen as a reduced size window so Help is displayed along with the app being used, with a hot key for toggling between Help and the app.
A decent Help system might also force some protocols to be followed, rather than allowing Help authors to be different, which is the way the Windows Help authoring systems work. That would save users the distraction of learning the "system" employed in a given Help file. One of the big advantages of existing Linux Documentation Project systems is that they employ a common DTD, something eschewed by WinHelp. A Linux Help system needs to capitalize on the strengths of what has already been done, not repeat the errors of the WinHelp system.
WinHelp also does not recognize the extra power that could be realized if Windows had anything comparable to the LDP; e.g., the LinuxHelp system could easily extend to LDP online files. Yes, I know that WinHelp allows hyperlinks, but there is no body of Windows knowledge gathered that is comparable to the LDP.
All of this can be done now on Linux, but only through customization of default installed Help systems. That kind of customization work needs to be done at the distro level, not be left to the users who need Help the most.
"One question for anyone from Corel, when can we expect Ventura for Linux?"
I'm not from Corel, but am a close watcher of it. All of the Corel business apps were scheduled to be released on Linux by the end of the year. I haven't heard anything about change in the schedule since the staff lay-offs, but not very many of the lay-offs were engineers, so they may still be on schedule. I know the Corel Draw Linux version made it into beta two months ahead of schedule, which bolsters the suspicion that Linux Ventura may still happen this year.
Corel wouldn't make a good target of the type you suggest. All major software companies carry liability insurance policies to provide a defense to business law suits. You couldn't get someone to sit on a board of directors without it.
> This is an automatic system. A registry key containing a date is checked against the current date, and the system queries a database over the Internet and checks for upgrades.
Sounds like AOL to me. How many years was AOL doing this before Microsoft applied for its patent?
BTW, checking for file dates is a really poor way of implementing this kind of thing. Dates get changed too easily; checking both version numbers and file sizes is far better.
Word files will not open in WordPerfect or most other word processors if the Word files are fast-saved, which is the Word default setting. Fast-saved Word files are not formatted; they just throw the edits into an area near the top of the file.
Moral of the story: if you want Word files to be portable, find the Word fast-save setting and disable it.
Corel engineers are less forthcoming now, but in the early days of their involvement with the Wine Project, they openly discussed plans and their work to port Wine itself to various platforms including the PPC and StrongARM processors, to port all their apps to Wine, and then from there to compile them using Wine lib-c to run natively on the various platforms.
Since then, Corel has produced Mac PPC ports of some of their retail graphics apps, which I've assumed indicates the stage of their development of the Wine-Mac PPC port. There was a Corel press statement accompanying its decision to make Mac WordPerfect 3.5 available as a free download that was widely interpreted by the press as meaning that Corel would have no further WordPerfect releases. However, the actual language Corel used could as easily support the opposite conclusion. http://www.corel.com/news/1999/august/august_19_1
I've misplaced the link, but one of the Mac community online publications claimed several months ago to have hard insider information that Corel has a new Mac version of WordPerfect in development.
Corel also released a press release a few months ago announcing a planned joint gift to charities with Rebel.com of a large number of Netwinders and WP Office 2000. With the Netwinder running on the StrongARM processor and Corel's ownership stake in Rebel.com, one might suspect that the planned gift of WP Office 2000 was intended to run on the machines rather than just sit in desk drawers, e.g., run on the StrongARM. There is also the factor that Corel kept about 50 members of the Netwinder development team when it sold the Netwinder to Rebel.com. They were assigned to the Corel Linux development team, which puts a lot of Linux StrongARM engineers under one roof.
Just before AMIGA blew up last year, Corel and Amiga announced a deal for Corel to adapt WP Office 2000 for a Linux distro AMIGA had under development. AMIGA was widely believed at the time to be developing for a Transmeta processor, so that suggests that Corel at least had the Transmeta processor line in its development path.
Corel's press release on the MetaCreations deal yesterday reinforced the perception of events such as those discussed above:
http://www.corel.com/news/2000/april/april_10_200
So as I said initially, lots of hints, bits, and pieces. But considering Corel's commitment to cross-platform development with Wine as the crossroads, it's almost foregone that Corel will port all of its apps to whatever platform it releases any of its major apps on.
In fact, the largest single cause of WP 7 and 8 crashes are defective DLL run times released by Microsoft with Visual Studio 6.0 and installed by some 50 Microsoft applications that were programmed using it. Applying the Microsoft Foundation Classes Library Update, that MSFT finally issued months after WP had its reputation smeared by Microsoft's Breakware DLLs, will take care of those problems.
If you'd like to do something about the problems, record the details of your error messages and triggering events, and post them to a forum that deals with WP issues like http://www.wpwin.com/talk
>
s .html#A704 (;) http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/paperta pe.html (.)
Hardly; type size is still expressed most commonly in "points" measurement. That's a standard that's been unchallenged worldwide for several centuries; I'm not aware of any move to revise it, with the exception of some web page and similar coding that expresses typesizes in effect as percentages of a user-selected base size, but even that base is expressed in points.
"Points" are a subdivision of a measurement unit called "picas." There are 12 points to a pica, and roughly 72-1/3 picas to a foot.
The source code for DTP originates in the first computerized newspaper typesetting systems, and before that in the teletypesetter (TTS) standard. See generally http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/DWcode
Pica-point measurements are so thoroughly engrained in DTP code that other measurements presented are normally converted internally from picas and points. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
"One item that would be of great benefit to people thinking about the change over from Word to a Linux wordprocessor is a feature by feature table showing if a particular word formatting ability can be properly imported or exported from a Word Document."
t m (.) Get:
Corel has done tables like that for the Win32 version of WordPerfect Office 2000. Since the forthcoming Linux version (actually running under a separate Wine session) is the Win32 code adapted to Wine, the Corel tables should still be good. I don't expect any changes in the conversion filters, but could be wrong.
You can download the Corel conversion tables at http://www.corel.com/support/downloads/wtpapers.h
WordPerfect 9 Conversions (North American and International versions)
WordPerfect Office 2000: Compatible Solutions
WordPerfect 9 Transition Guide
There's some overlap in these guides, which are in PDF format. One (can't remember which) compares the steps needed to invoke a procedure in MS Office and WP Office. The others compare features and spell out what converts directly, what won't convert at all, and what is converted in altered form.
See http://www.rodsbooks.com/wpfonts/ (.) For other WordPerfect Linux links, see http://www.qwkscreen.com/WPLinuxLinks.html (.)
"But some folks figured it would make the two companies seem more credibly like "Linux companies" to some investors who are only looking at keywords, so they let it go through."
You've missed a few events. Corel's single deal with PC Chips to distribute 20 million copies of Corel Linux more than doubled the number of Linux OS's distributed, overnight making Corel/Debian without question and by far the largest Linux distribution. You're also overlooking where every cent of Corel's R&D budget has been going for the last two years, and a good portion of it before that developing the Netwinder. It's been Linux, and even if you don't like the idea of an easy-to-use Linux, it doesn't make it a bad idea from a financial perspective.
You're also forgetting which company was the first brand name software company to break ranks and embrace Linux, triggering the exodus of the other big software companies from Win32 to Linux.
And what's wrong with the fit between Corel and Borland/Inprise? Novell bought QuattroPro from Borland, and Corel inherited it from Novell. Corel has been licensing Paradox from Borland for years. Corel has a crying need for a powerful, networkable PIM to unify its applications and hasn't been able to put it together. (Thank Novell for keeping WordPerfect Office, now Groupwise.) A company with database expertise like Borland can do wonders for Corel, and Corel with its graphics and productivity apps can build the market for Borland's database and development tools. And Corel's ownership interests in Rebel.com and Graphon get Borland favored access to Sun's biggest Canadian SPARC/Solaris distributor and Graphon's thin-client software connectivity among Win32, Linux, Unix, and the Mac. The fit looks good from here.
The stark truth is that Corel is the only Linux company that has a realistic potential to become very large very quickly. It has the marketing channels, it has the engineers, it has the experience of going nose to nose with Microsoft. None of the other Linux plays even has the management structure to become a Linux commercial bohemoth.
I wish RedHat, VA, and the other Linux high flyers nothing but the best, but none of them have anything going other than prayer that rationalizes their current inflated market caps, not even reasonable expectations of future earnings. It's ironic to me that Corel, the only company actually poised to become a Linux giant and return value to its stockholders, has been trading at a small fraction of the other Linux play's market prices.
It's even more ironic to see people hinting that Corel is not in fact a Linux company. In fact, Corel/Borland easily has more engineers developing Linux products than any other software company. Their commitment to the platform is real.
Paul Merrell, pem@televar.com http://www.qwkscreen.com/WPLinuxLinks.html
Corel has a white paper on XML implementation in WordPerfect 9 (PDF, about 500Kb). http://www.corel.com/Office2000/evaluation_essenti als.htm
Basically, WP 9 allows you to compose natively in XML, as opposed to Microsoft Office's limited XML export capability that uses proprietary tags.
That was Caldera, not Corel.
Please moderate this one up. That is an extremely important question. E.g., does Corel plan to port Corel Linux and Corel's applications to the StrongARM and PPC processors? How about the Transmeta?
WordPerfect has its own internal scripting language, plus PerfectScript. Ensuring that PerfectScript remains at the forefront of WordPerfect's scripting capabilities is extremely important to the existing user base, many of whom like myself have tens of thousands of dollars invested in PerfectScript macros. Many of us were dismayed recently when Corel added VBA to WordPerfect Office 2000 at the seeming expense of PerfectScript integration with new features. With 35 million present WordPerfect users dependent on the existing scripting languages implemented in the suite, I for one hope that Corel does NOT sacrifice our loyalty and commitment to the platform by scrapping PerfectScript in favor of more trendy programming languages.
Corel doesn't own Paradox. It's licensed from Inprise.
I don't know about the graphics end, but much of the WordPerfect package is technology licensed from other companies. That really creates some problems for going open source.
It's also easy to confuse the forest with the trees. The WP package is largely a platform for building customized office applications, as opposed to just being a word processor, and to that extent is already open source; e.g., the included macro and merge languages, templating features, etc.
Corel also isn't super secretive to begin with. If you want an example, check out http://www.wpwin.com in the user forums, where the topic of the month is an ongoing exchange with the Corel lead developer of the Corel PerfectScript programming language.
As a lawyer, I'd have to say that the lawyers win this contest if techies understanding of law is reflected by the posts in this thread.
First, "the law" is not nearly as monolithic as people seem to assume. Most posters seem to equate "lawyers" with "trial lawyers," when the latter is only a subset of the former.
But even within the much more limited field of trial law, folks just aren't getting it. They equate "law" with "rules" as though they were one and the same.
They aren't the same. The fact is that court decisions are made by people subject to human frailties, and "rules" tend to be the after-the-fact justification for decisions that are made at a much more emotional level. In other words, "law" is the aesthetic of social control; the real only rule is, "it depends on who's asking."
Trial work really isn't about rules. It's about persuasion, whether the decision is made by a judge or a jury. Which client and which witnesses are more appealing to the decision-maker? How should people dress? What order of proof tells the best story? And study after study has found that most jurors make up their minds based on the first few minutes of opening argument, rather than on the presentation of evidence.
A friend once explained that he found out after he got out into practice that he had wasted three years of his life going to "law" school because he learned that it was facts that won cases, not law, but there was no "fact school" to go to. There's a lot of truth in his observation.
As a champion of unpopular causes, this isn't the way I'd like it to be; however, it is beyond question the way it is. But until techies wake up to the fact that the rules are far less important than who's making the decisions, I'd have to say that lawyers understand far more about tech issues than techies understand about "the law."