Trust me on this one, I had to provide support once for a company whos two biggest apps were written using Word Macros and MS Access 2.
That's not VBA. VBA was introduced with Office 97.
At the moment we're stuck with bloody excel macros for a lot of what we do and boy do they bite.
Macros != VBA. I've seen some pretty impressive stuff written in VBA, and yes, I did see a lot of crap back in the macro days, especially in Access. But things have changed.
As for functionality, I think you'll find that Open Office offers all the functionality that your average user is going to need.
Probably true, and Office does suffer from feature bloat. But that wasn't my point.
Have you looked at Open or Star Office running on anything but Windows? It runs fine on my Linux box and Im running a PII 450.
Then why are MS-WordXP documents not compatible with MS-Word 2000?
I haven't seen an Office XP document, but that's not the point in any case. I don't see how one can expect the previous version of an application to open a file created with a newer version. Of course, you can always save in O2K format if you want.
The bad thing about COM streams is that if you change the methods of the object, you render the data incompatible with previous versions.
You don't really know much about COM, do you? First off, the core stuff stored in a compound document by Word (for example) in the WordDocument stream is not a serialized COM object. If you want to see for yourself, try to open the stream and see if it has an embedded GUID. The format doesn't work that way.
Second, Microsoft can hardly break their own code by "changing the methods of an object" because you can access the data in those compound documents with a few, well documented interfaces that have absolutely nothing to do with Office. Of course, once you get the data you need to know how to format it, which is the real problem.
Rischel said. "Right now, Microsoft can set the price of Office products based on knowing their large clients don't have an alternative." Open formats "would create a market for other products" and competitive pricing
Nope. Microsoft can set the price of Office because the applications fullfill the needs of its customers. The fact that the file format is propietary has little if nothing to do with it.
The last time I saw StarOffice running on Windows, I damn nearly puked. It's written in something that looks like Java/AWT, the apps take bloody ages to load, opening a document takes even more bloody ages, the UI looks childish and the printing sucks. And I didn't really spend much time with it.
OTOH, the Office apps load damn near instantaneously on even a PII 450, opening even ~50MB documents with hundreds of embedded images never takes more than a few seconds, the GUI is consistent and tight, and the things just work.
Sun (and everyone else) has a problem if it thinks that it can compete with Office on Windows with that stuff, and unless they provide an alternative to VBA, they'll never even make a dent. There are hundreds of thousands of people who write full-fledged bussiness applications using VBA and aggregating Office functionality, and that's not something that a company will just throw away because the file formats are now compatible. w00t.
If anything, opening the formats up will increase the popularity of office suites in Linux, because people won't have to dual boot or whatever to a) be productive; and b) read the stuff that the rest of the world produces.
So? The compound document format and APIs are well documented. You can write a 10 line C++ program that pulls the XML from it. You can do it today with all the Office file formats except Outlook (which uses the undocumented.PST format). In fact, I've written utilities that do this very same thing to catalog documents.
w00t, yes it does. It also happens in Linux, except that those seldom make it to the front page. MySQL, OpenSSH, etc., etc.
Is is Slashodt, after all. Where ignoring security holes in open source software is as fun as trumping the most recent IE vulnerability that changes your wallpaper or plays "Moonlight Sonata" at the behest of evil hackers.
This company's monopolistic and predatory practices cannot be allowed to continue!!! They represent everything that is bad today in the world of technology!! They... uh... oh, this is Nintendo??
Golly gee whiz! I don't know what hardware Akamai runs, but it sure as heck is impressive, because that's where the video is coming from!!1!! Look at the page source!!1!!
Does anyone know if there's a push to port PHP to Windows? ChiliSoft ported ASP to *nix and you can do the mod_perl thang (well, almost) with ActivePerl under IIS, so it must be possible. Eh?
I'll assume you belong to one of the geek genus. Say, a consultant. Let's say you're making $60/hr, which is common. So tickets are $3.25. If you buy four of them you're out $13.
Let's suppose then that you spent, say, two hours total on this (thinking about submitting, wording it, etc). That's comes out to about $120, based on your hourly rate.
So, during all this time, you made enough money to buy 36 tickets.
My advice? Invite 32 of your close friends and immediate family (and of course include the other three people you were buying tickets for in the first place), buy them tickets, and have them chip in $13 for soda and popcorn. That should come out to about $0.40 per person.
*chuckle* So now it's bad that they maintain backwards compatibility?
The fact that Linux kernel changes the APIs often and does not have backward compatibility is is well-compensated by the fact that all the interface changes are completely transparent and has the advantage of preventing drivers bit rot
You lost me there. "Transparent" usually means "continues to be compatible". So are they compatible or not?
is the time to compare 'M$' to Linux. Perhaps now all the people who argued that Microsoft "forces upgrades and breaks existing applications" with subsequent versions of Windows can get some context going. Perhaps now all those/. fanboys can grok the fact that I still run Corel 3.0 under Windows XP without a single problem.
Oh yeah, perhaps it's time. I feel vindication coming.
Perhaps this post will be modded down as flamebait or troll, and that's OK. But perhaps all the people who read at -1 will see it, and understand why Linux is no better than Microsoft (or the other way around), and why spreading FUD is something done with gusto by everyone, everywhere. Perhaps wrapping oneself in the flaming gown of "open source" and "free software" is not so effective anymore.
I don't know who has had the pleasure of having an article rejected because (and I quote an email I received from chrisd, I think) "... we posted something similar in July of '97, IIRC" or something to that effect. Now, I'm not bitching because I had a rejected article, that's not the point. But when it comes to ferreting out dupes of stuff submitted by other people, the "editors" have no match.
Mod this down as redundant, but I think the "editors" should hold themselves to the same standards they apply to everyone else.
Do they simulate driving on the wrong side of the road at rush hour, too? How about spending 2 hours parked on your neighbor's driveway trying to work a garage door that is obviously not yours?
Of course not. None of them have. It's very easy to blabber about how simple and natural it is to make money off of something that's free, until you actually try to do it.
I doubt the Windows source code has much of that. Some stuff (like zlib) is acknowledged and allowed under different licenses.
Linux wasn't really a decent OS until the mid-90s. By that time Microsoft was already working on NT4, which was a leap forward from the crappy 9x codebase. Windows 2000 was the crowning achievement of that painful period. From a technical standpoint, Linux doesn't come close to W2K. That it happens to be saddled with unsecure crap and middleware that doesn't work is irrelevant - the Windows 200 kernel is far more advanced than Linux or BSD (at least at the moment).
I expect to be modded down for this, but it's the truth. People whose '1337' linux expertise is being a sysadmin or writing Perl don't really appreciate how -I'm trying not to be dismissive here- inferior Linux is to Windows 2000. At that level. You have to write a device driver or a system-level service to do so. And yes, I've coded in Linux as well.
This doesn't mean that Linux is not a good OS. It simply means that it took Microsoft 10 or so years (with their considerable resources) to get it right. I expect it will take Linux some more years to get to that level.
How is this insightful? The article clearly states that the Russian budget was converted from rubles to dollars in order to make the comparison and is quoted as "US300 million". It's not 300M rubles vs. 15 billion dollars, eh.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not VBA. VBA was introduced with Office 97.
At the moment we're stuck with bloody excel macros for a lot of what we do and boy do they bite.
Macros != VBA. I've seen some pretty impressive stuff written in VBA, and yes, I did see a lot of crap back in the macro days, especially in Access. But things have changed.
As for functionality, I think you'll find that Open Office offers all the functionality that your average user is going to need.
Probably true, and Office does suffer from feature bloat. But that wasn't my point.
Have you looked at Open or Star Office running on anything but Windows? It runs fine on my Linux box and Im running a PII 450.
No, but I was talking about Windows =)
I haven't seen an Office XP document, but that's not the point in any case. I don't see how one can expect the previous version of an application to open a file created with a newer version. Of course, you can always save in O2K format if you want.
The bad thing about COM streams is that if you change the methods of the object, you render the data incompatible with previous versions.
You don't really know much about COM, do you? First off, the core stuff stored in a compound document by Word (for example) in the WordDocument stream is not a serialized COM object. If you want to see for yourself, try to open the stream and see if it has an embedded GUID. The format doesn't work that way.
Second, Microsoft can hardly break their own code by "changing the methods of an object" because you can access the data in those compound documents with a few, well documented interfaces that have absolutely nothing to do with Office. Of course, once you get the data you need to know how to format it, which is the real problem.
Nope. Microsoft can set the price of Office because the applications fullfill the needs of its customers. The fact that the file format is propietary has little if nothing to do with it.
The last time I saw StarOffice running on Windows, I damn nearly puked. It's written in something that looks like Java/AWT, the apps take bloody ages to load, opening a document takes even more bloody ages, the UI looks childish and the printing sucks. And I didn't really spend much time with it.
OTOH, the Office apps load damn near instantaneously on even a PII 450, opening even ~50MB documents with hundreds of embedded images never takes more than a few seconds, the GUI is consistent and tight, and the things just work.
Sun (and everyone else) has a problem if it thinks that it can compete with Office on Windows with that stuff, and unless they provide an alternative to VBA, they'll never even make a dent. There are hundreds of thousands of people who write full-fledged bussiness applications using VBA and aggregating Office functionality, and that's not something that a company will just throw away because the file formats are now compatible. w00t.
If anything, opening the formats up will increase the popularity of office suites in Linux, because people won't have to dual boot or whatever to a) be productive; and b) read the stuff that the rest of the world produces.
So? The compound document format and APIs are well documented. You can write a 10 line C++ program that pulls the XML from it. You can do it today with all the Office file formats except Outlook (which uses the undocumented .PST format). In fact, I've written utilities that do this very same thing to catalog documents.
Is is Slashodt, after all. Where ignoring security holes in open source software is as fun as trumping the most recent IE vulnerability that changes your wallpaper or plays "Moonlight Sonata" at the behest of evil hackers.
I don't know how you would go about it, but I can offer you some advise - don't let your work end up like this or this!
Korean telecomm == SPAM
Well, I really like their games.
Is anyone not yet embarrassed by this post?
The first completely off-topic 'Micro$soft' mash of this article. Mad propz to you sir!
Doh. Must RTFM before posting.
Does anyone know if there's a push to port PHP to Windows? ChiliSoft ported ASP to *nix and you can do the mod_perl thang (well, almost) with ActivePerl under IIS, so it must be possible. Eh?
6) ?
7) Profit!!!
Incidentally, I submitted a similar Ask/. story a few months ago. I got suckered with two tickets to a movie. Long story.
But the movie was Divine Sectrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
See? It makes a world of difference. <snort>
Let's suppose then that you spent, say, two hours total on this (thinking about submitting, wording it, etc). That's comes out to about $120, based on your hourly rate.
So, during all this time, you made enough money to buy 36 tickets.
My advice? Invite 32 of your close friends and immediate family (and of course include the other three people you were buying tickets for in the first place), buy them tickets, and have them chip in $13 for soda and popcorn. That should come out to about $0.40 per person.
There, problem solved. Next!
The fact that Linux kernel changes the APIs often and does not have backward compatibility is is well-compensated by the fact that all the interface changes are completely transparent and has the advantage of preventing drivers bit rot
You lost me there. "Transparent" usually means "continues to be compatible". So are they compatible or not?
Oh yeah, perhaps it's time. I feel vindication coming.
Perhaps this post will be modded down as flamebait or troll, and that's OK. But perhaps all the people who read at -1 will see it, and understand why Linux is no better than Microsoft (or the other way around), and why spreading FUD is something done with gusto by everyone, everywhere. Perhaps wrapping oneself in the flaming gown of "open source" and "free software" is not so effective anymore.
Mod this down as redundant, but I think the "editors" should hold themselves to the same standards they apply to everyone else.
Breaking compatibility with what? Please, do enlighten us.
No realism!
Of course not. None of them have. It's very easy to blabber about how simple and natural it is to make money off of something that's free, until you actually try to do it.
Share != Force Down Your Throat (Take It Nicely Or Face Eternal Perdition), eh.
Linux wasn't really a decent OS until the mid-90s. By that time Microsoft was already working on NT4, which was a leap forward from the crappy 9x codebase. Windows 2000 was the crowning achievement of that painful period. From a technical standpoint, Linux doesn't come close to W2K. That it happens to be saddled with unsecure crap and middleware that doesn't work is irrelevant - the Windows 200 kernel is far more advanced than Linux or BSD (at least at the moment).
I expect to be modded down for this, but it's the truth. People whose '1337' linux expertise is being a sysadmin or writing Perl don't really appreciate how -I'm trying not to be dismissive here- inferior Linux is to Windows 2000. At that level. You have to write a device driver or a system-level service to do so. And yes, I've coded in Linux as well.
This doesn't mean that Linux is not a good OS. It simply means that it took Microsoft 10 or so years (with their considerable resources) to get it right. I expect it will take Linux some more years to get to that level.
How is this insightful? The article clearly states that the Russian budget was converted from rubles to dollars in order to make the comparison and is quoted as "US300 million". It's not 300M rubles vs. 15 billion dollars, eh.