Unfortunatly the documents in question are private internal docs that can't be shared publicly.:( I'd suspect the bulk of documents that are going to be problematic fall into this category.
Most of the documents I've had difficulty with are lengthy (30-100 pages), and this is the bulk of my and my collegues working set. If OO can't handle big docs as well as short docs then thats not going to work.
The problem is not in the content. Every single word comes through (I haven't found a case where this wasn't true). The problem is always in the formatting or OLE (I'm specifically talking about word, I've not had so many difficulties with excel).
The documents in question use heavy custom styles with custom templates. This is always what gets completely screwed up. The end result is a document that is rediculously ugly and in many cases unreadable. words run all over the margins, tables get hosed, footers are 50% of the page.
OLE documents (particularly visio) end up either missing or only partially visable on the page, and usually on top of the text.
In more then one case I've had to re-construct documents by hand copying and pasting between a new word doc in word an a OO document.
My company (a major software company featured often here on slashdot) has pushed a major OpenOffice initiative internally.
The major challange remains interoperation with Word, and to a lesser degree, PowerPoint. Although internally this is survivable, when we have to share documents with customers (which is nearly every document in my case), OpenOffice is a major hassle.
Some of our customers are enthusased and willing to get with OO just to work with us, but the vast majority at this point still do not care (or have heard of) OO and we look like fools trying to explain they need to install a new office suite to view our report.
Built-in PDF export is definitly a bonus, but the read-only nature doesn't solve the problem..doc transperancy has to get much better. OO needs to be able to function near flawlessly with.doc files, and not complain about saving files in.doc.
Today, most of the complex documents I have in both.doc and.sxw are pure garbage when OO tries to convert them, and that is a complete show-stopper.
It's getting better with each release, but it still has a long, long way to go.
God bless Douglas Adams for figuring out the secret to flying. If he had never come up with that missing the ground thingy, it's unlikely that later, Issac Newton would have been able to invent math and then where would we be. Staring at our digital watches, thats where.
How long till some uber-nerd builds a filesystem that uses GMail accounts for storage space? For each account you have your filesystem grows by 1gb, and you could raid different accounts so when google shuts you down for abuse, you don't loose your data. It just needs to do a lot of caching and email uuencoded data chunks to yourself to store the bits. I think its a winner... I should patent that idea.
This feature (persistent caching of core library classes) is in tiger (1.5). I haven't benchedmarked 1.5, but startups of some of my favorite apps are noticably faster. Debug, compile and test cycles seem to be about the same for me though...
I could swear this ask slashdot was written by me 1 years ago and is now coming back to haunt me. It describes me perfectly, even the INTP part.
First, my history:
In high school I hated school but loved learning. I was the kid that would stay late or eat lunch with the physics teacher talking about stephen hawking and light properties but still managed to flunk physics. I was taking AP chemistry collage classes my senior year but still managed to drop out of high school in '94. I think the many of US public schools are very effective at not doing much with bright but poorly disiplined/motived students. I don't blame the school for my failure, but boy, they sure didn't help.
As a drop out, I actually went to collage for a year (managed to fudge my diploma to the collage) but that was futile, I hated school and would skip class to go the library.
Luckily I ended up as a LAN consultant because in those days you could be an arrogant genious kid and still get hired. I learned the ropes and fudged around for a bit and in '99 I got hired for a major software company and became a consultant. Luckily my experience and smarts held the glue together for awhile, and during those.com days you pretty much just needed to show up to get a very well-paying good job and gain lots of experenice.
Today I've managed to survive a zillion lay off rounds and keep a great job.
However now it's 10 years later and I'm completely stuck in that great job that is also now a dead end job. Without a degree of any kind, and if someone looks close enough, without a diploma, it's tough to advance at all. Advancing in my own company to management requires a degree, and the job market, although picking up now is still tough with outsourcing an over abundance of candidates and two years of the best people afraid to move around moving around now.
For the last 10 years, not having a degree hasn't mattered. Being smart helped, but I've been lucky a lot too especially with the dot.bomb timing.
Now at 28, I'm seriously considering doing school full time again, but man, It feels like its going to be even worse now then when i was 18.
My point of all this is that the biggest fear and agony in my life, school, is more burdensome now then ever.
In my life I've learned that the longer you put off something the worse it gets, and school is worse then the dentist in this case. In addition, I lucked out with.com, you might not be so lucky.
School isn't for making you smart. It doesn't make anyone smart, that's easily illustrated every year by thousands of morons with a degree. However it proves your reliable, motivated and trainable, three traits far more important to your career then intelligence.
I'm not saying I regret my past, because I still feel the total anxiety of formal education at my door now (so I remember what it was then), but boy, how much better shape the rest of my life would be in now if I had even a crappy diploma from a piss-ant party school.
I would go on more about how your intelligence won't help you in life, but it actually will. It will help you land on your feet more often then not. But it will also make you lazy.
You know for a fact that if your really that smart, that there's no reason you CANT get 4.0's. It has much to do with the concept that your a perfectionist and feel unsatisfied doing less then perfect work, so better not to do it at all. It has much to do with the concept that you already know it so why bother doing the activity. These are habits of thinking that will ruin your life.
I would, seriously, recommend therapy or sessions with a psychologist. They won't help so much as it will force you to explain yourself to someone who knows better on a periodic bases so that you can't do what really smart people are good at: fooling themselves!
Look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!
I for one welcome our new unemployment office overloards......
I saw three people with bluetooth headsets this morning walking to work. I told them their headsets were dead but they just looked at me funny and walked away.
The #1 use for Internet must work as well on linux on as windows before widespread adoption. Weather this is cause or effect isn't clear to me, but this is the sign.
When joe sixpack can operate a pc drunk and get download the linux equivelent of activeX viru^h^h^h^h extensions to view the website of the moment, then linux is the mainstream.
Porn drove the movie industry, home videos, the internet. It'll drive linux too.
Accidently re-partitioning a 500gb SAN volume with the centralized corporate email system on it instead of the local hard drive in server attached to said SAN.
Slashdot Mirror
Voud u like to touch my zombie?
This stuff is way over hyped. All you need to know to deal with such an event I learned in elementry school.
Just watch the vid.
Duck and Cover
DOOM and WoW craft together?!?!? I won't leave my house for a month!
In soviet russia, the browser opens YOU!
I particularly enjoy subscribing users to inappropriate mailing lists:
- BSDM/Beastiality Mailing Lists
- Homosexual Lists
- Cult religious/political groups
For truly obnoxious users, snail mail is even better. I once had free samples of depends undergarments delivered to a (l)user.
For more inspiration, consult the BOFH.
Unfortunatly the documents in question are private internal docs that can't be shared publicly. :( I'd suspect the bulk of documents that are going to be problematic fall into this category.
Most of the documents I've had difficulty with are lengthy (30-100 pages), and this is the bulk of my and my collegues working set. If OO can't handle big docs as well as short docs then thats not going to work.
The problem is not in the content. Every single word comes through (I haven't found a case where this wasn't true). The problem is always in the formatting or OLE (I'm specifically talking about word, I've not had so many difficulties with excel).
The documents in question use heavy custom styles with custom templates. This is always what gets completely screwed up. The end result is a document that is rediculously ugly and in many cases unreadable. words run all over the margins, tables get hosed, footers are 50% of the page.
OLE documents (particularly visio) end up either missing or only partially visable on the page, and usually on top of the text.
In more then one case I've had to re-construct documents by hand copying and pasting between a new word doc in word an a OO document.
My company (a major software company featured often here on slashdot) has pushed a major OpenOffice initiative internally.
.doc transperancy has to get much better. OO needs to be able to function near flawlessly with .doc files, and not complain about saving files in .doc.
.doc and .sxw are pure garbage when OO tries to convert them, and that is a complete show-stopper.
The major challange remains interoperation with Word, and to a lesser degree, PowerPoint. Although internally this is survivable, when we have to share documents with customers (which is nearly every document in my case), OpenOffice is a major hassle.
Some of our customers are enthusased and willing to get with OO just to work with us, but the vast majority at this point still do not care (or have heard of) OO and we look like fools trying to explain they need to install a new office suite to view our report.
Built-in PDF export is definitly a bonus, but the read-only nature doesn't solve the problem.
Today, most of the complex documents I have in both
It's getting better with each release, but it still has a long, long way to go.
All you have to do is set it so those asteriky things pop up when you type your password. No one can figure that stuff out.
*yawn*
It's been around at least since 2002. Looks like they've added some flavor holes to the front now. MMmm smell that google goodness.
The damn things are designed to go 18,000 miles an hour. If 140mph wind caused problems, I'd want my money back.
C (23%), C++ (23%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 21%, which is java)
God bless Douglas Adams for figuring out the secret to flying. If he had never come up with that missing the ground thingy, it's unlikely that later, Issac Newton would have been able to invent math and then where would we be. Staring at our digital watches, thats where.
How long till some uber-nerd builds a filesystem that uses GMail accounts for storage space? For each account you have your filesystem grows by 1gb, and you could raid different accounts so when google shuts you down for abuse, you don't loose your data. It just needs to do a lot of caching and email uuencoded data chunks to yourself to store the bits. I think its a winner... I should patent that idea.
This feature (persistent caching of core library classes) is in tiger (1.5). I haven't benchedmarked 1.5, but startups of some of my favorite apps are noticably faster. Debug, compile and test cycles seem to be about the same for me though...
Read about it here.
I could swear this ask slashdot was written by me 1 years ago and is now coming back to haunt me. It describes me perfectly, even the INTP part.
.com days you pretty much just needed to show up to get a very well-paying good job and gain lots of experenice.
.com, you might not be so lucky.
First, my history:
In high school I hated school but loved learning. I was the kid that would stay late or eat lunch with the physics teacher talking about stephen hawking and light properties but still managed to flunk physics. I was taking AP chemistry collage classes my senior year but still managed to drop out of high school in '94. I think the many of US public schools are very effective at not doing much with bright but poorly disiplined/motived students. I don't blame the school for my failure, but boy, they sure didn't help.
As a drop out, I actually went to collage for a year (managed to fudge my diploma to the collage) but that was futile, I hated school and would skip class to go the library.
Luckily I ended up as a LAN consultant because in those days you could be an arrogant genious kid and still get hired. I learned the ropes and fudged around for a bit and in '99 I got hired for a major software company and became a consultant. Luckily my experience and smarts held the glue together for awhile, and during those
Today I've managed to survive a zillion lay off rounds and keep a great job.
However now it's 10 years later and I'm completely stuck in that great job that is also now a dead end job. Without a degree of any kind, and if someone looks close enough, without a diploma, it's tough to advance at all. Advancing in my own company to management requires a degree, and the job market, although picking up now is still tough with outsourcing an over abundance of candidates and two years of the best people afraid to move around moving around now.
For the last 10 years, not having a degree hasn't mattered. Being smart helped, but I've been lucky a lot too especially with the dot.bomb timing.
Now at 28, I'm seriously considering doing school full time again, but man, It feels like its going to be even worse now then when i was 18.
My point of all this is that the biggest fear and agony in my life, school, is more burdensome now then ever.
In my life I've learned that the longer you put off something the worse it gets, and school is worse then the dentist in this case. In addition, I lucked out with
School isn't for making you smart. It doesn't make anyone smart, that's easily illustrated every year by thousands of morons with a degree. However it proves your reliable, motivated and trainable, three traits far more important to your career then intelligence.
I'm not saying I regret my past, because I still feel the total anxiety of formal education at my door now (so I remember what it was then), but boy, how much better shape the rest of my life would be in now if I had even a crappy diploma from a piss-ant party school.
I would go on more about how your intelligence won't help you in life, but it actually will. It will help you land on your feet more often then not. But it will also make you lazy.
You know for a fact that if your really that smart, that there's no reason you CANT get 4.0's. It has much to do with the concept that your a perfectionist and feel unsatisfied doing less then perfect work, so better not to do it at all. It has much to do with the concept that you already know it so why bother doing the activity. These are habits of thinking that will ruin your life.
I would, seriously, recommend therapy or sessions with a psychologist. They won't help so much as it will force you to explain yourself to someone who knows better on a periodic bases so that you can't do what really smart people are good at: fooling themselves!
INTP's have a tough road.
How to pray
Look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!
I for one welcome our new unemployment office overloards......
A great site. And you can download in game recordings so you can actually see the game run through in real time.
http://www.planetquake.com/qdq/
I saw three people with bluetooth headsets this morning walking to work. I told them their headsets were dead but they just looked at me funny and walked away.
The icon for this story gives me the heebie-jeebies.
The #1 use for Internet must work as well on linux on as windows before widespread adoption. Weather this is cause or effect isn't clear to me, but this is the sign.
When joe sixpack can operate a pc drunk and get download the linux equivelent of activeX viru^h^h^h^h extensions to view the website of the moment, then linux is the mainstream.
Porn drove the movie industry, home videos, the internet. It'll drive linux too.
here
reference.com is a gem. Where else could you discover words like gonkulator and .
boy, that mpaa sure is precise.
Accidently re-partitioning a 500gb SAN volume with the centralized corporate email system on it instead of the local hard drive in server attached to said SAN.