Comparing apples to apples, the/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004 folder on my Mac takes up 404.4 MB with absolutely everything installed -- including Entourage, a mail client. I don't know how many mibbledybytes that is, but it's a lot. At least Microsoft Office for Mac lets you load each application individually, unlike OpenOffice.org which occupies untold hectomebibytes of memory when you just want one application. (The Mac version of OOo doesn't even give you different icons to make you think you're just loading OOCalc, for example.)
It's not just the 256 columns that are stifling in Excel. Another limit is 2^14 rows -- some really long reports can benefit from the 2^20 rows/sheet limit in Excel 2007.
That would be cool. I look forward to the days of cacheable applications that, like mail clients and other such applications, can "go online." Too bad Microsoft has to lead the way yet again...
The game is called Rising Force Online, but from the description I thought it might have been Radio Frequency Online or something. Is it so hard to expand the abbreviations the first time you use them? Not everyone on IMBs knows what an MMOG is, for the QPFth time.
Outlook supports integration with CRM tools (like Salesforce) that geeks hate but salespeople use very frequently. Because geeks lash out against CRM instead of creating open alternatives, Outlook wins by default.
Outlook also connects to an Exchange server to do file and calendar sharing more readily than Evolution does. Evolution's Exchange connector, when last I checked, uses an interface which mimics a web browser clicking through Outlook Web Access. Outlook uses the proprietary Exchange protocol and so is faster. Unfortunately, because geeks get all huffy about "groupware," work on an open alternative to Exchange proceeds at a glacial pace.
Outlook is seriously flawed in all the ways that you describe, but frankly I haven't found an open solution that is mature or feature-rich enough to replace it yet.
--- Original Message --- Re:I'd say more like
(Score:1) by AKAImBatman (238306) on 08:01 AM February 22nd, 2006 (#14775719) (http://akaimbatman.blogspot.com/) How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive.
You, sir, have failed it. Given that OOo does a COMPLETE save to disk every time it saves a file, JavaScriptOffice (assuming it sent updates in a fashion similar to what I described) would be WAY faster than OOo.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
Did you figure out HTAs yet? Let me know when you hear that popping noise.
There are better languages than JavaScript. Stop with this AJAX/DHTML buzzword wankery. You're talking about rewriting an office suite, an enormous platform used by millions of people daily to integrate with all order of business practices and third-party applications, in JavaScript. You're talking about running this business-critical application in a web browser, a program which is so hyperextended that even "good" browsers crash and burn under the weight of 10-year-old bugs.
I really think you need to buddy up with someone who uses an office suite on a daily basis. I've used spreadsheets since the days of Lotus 1-2-3 and there isn't a web browser in this world I would trust to be any faster or more reliable than a 386 running 1-2-3 in DOS.
You haven't shown that JavaScriptOffice would be any cheaper for mobile access ($500+ per year for an internet connection just so you can edit static documents wherever you go? MS Office is cheaper than that). You have only shown me that JavaScript can be used to do all sorts of distracting shit in a web browser -- good for you. Oh, it supports keyboard shortcuts sometimes! Fantastic. Tell me, when does it support automation? How about JavaScriptOffice interoperability with third-party products using a published API? How long is it going to take for JavaScriptOffice to match even one tiny portion of Microsoft Office's functionality?
I can tell that you're getting ready to blogback your flashpost to your delicious, and so all I can say to the Web 2.0 master is: won't you think of the wikiwikiediting?
(End of JavaScript love-fest thread; it's been a pleasure.)
How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive. It really is fantastic. The best part is that when my local hard drive dies, my data doesn't die with it; I back up my hard drive regularly.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
* Not a Lufthansa or ANA plane, where they offer inflight wifi for $30+/flight
HTA? HTML Applications (that run locally on your machine)? Health Technology Assessment? Horticultural Trades Association? If you know how to get Internet connectivity for $500 a year you have to tell me.
Unless you're willing to spend $700 per employee per year on Verizon Wireless data subscriptions, "application availability from any location" is not true. I'll stick with my laptop which I back up weekly and can use without an Internet connection.
Open two Firefox windows: one with your really important document and one with a page that crashes Firefox. (I recommend a myspace profile with Adblock and Flashblock turned completely off.) Poof: no more important document editing for you. As an alternative, turn back the clock 10+ years to when "Crash Protection" was an awesome feature in such new operating systems as OS/2 2.0. When will someone invent the world's first crash-protected web browser? (Hint: Double-click that IE icon on your Windows desktop three times, crash one of the instances, and notice that the other two still work.)
OpenOffice.org is enormous. I have the Mac version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 and it's 341.5 MB large. NeoOffice/J, the "more Mac-like" version, exceeds 500 MB in size. Both take forever to start and look hideous, even more so than Microsoft Office for Mac.
Where did you get the 70 MB figure from -- the installer? Once you actually unpack and install OpenOffice.org, it rivals Microsoft Office for raw bloat. Its Excel clone is absolutely awful, barely playing catch-up to Excel's worksheet storage limits (which are about to increase again) and saving Excel files in formats so arcane even GPLed Excel readers can't parse them. OpenOffice.org doesn't support importing Excel files with automation or third-party add-ins.
Microsoft Word is not the killer app for MS Office. Excel is way up there, and Outlook is too. I don't like it any more than the next Linux user, but there isn't a free product out there that provides all the features long-time Outlook users have come to demand. I blame the Linux zealots who scoff condescendingly on the Outlook-using masses.
I find it completely insane that people consider Firefox, a browser where memory leaks are classified as "features," to be a viable application deployment platform. A web browser is only as strong as its weakest open window. The vast majority of browsers-with-no-extensions-installed have no protection against crashes at all. The only cure to this problem is auto-saving of documents.
Linux, Mac OS X, and even recent Windows releases are actually quite stable if you use good drivers. Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?
Because Linux users don't have any decent office suites* and this would be a "cross-platform" solution**.
* OpenOffice.org, a hugely-bloated fork of an old closed-source imitation of Microsoft Office, doesn't count.
** Assuming that your "valid" XHTML and scriptaculous JavaScript works equally well on all web browsers, which it won't, forcing you to make various forks of scripts.
Disney doesn't own the local ABC affiliate. It just so happens to be "sweeps" month so local news companies are running as much sensationalist stuff as possible to pump up their ratings. Two examples from Pittsburgh:
WPXI-TV showed a group of women in silhouette. "We're not showing you these women's faces... not because they get paid to shop!" (What's better is that WPXI separately advertised bringing you the news "without fluff.")
Camino is written in Cocoa so it uses Mac OS X native widgets for nearly everything, supports system services, and supports accessibility features moreso than Firefox (but less than Safari). Firefox uses XUL with a Mac-like skin for its entire GUI, so it doesn't behave at all like a Mac application.
Google makes a ton of money from AdSense ads on other web pages as well. According to their 2004 annual report (warning: tiny fonts and huge amounts of text) page 26, in 2004 Google made 48% of its overall revenues from web sites outside its own domain ("Google Network web sites") versus 52% of its overall revenues from AdWords on its own domain. OK, I exaggerated when I said it "does nothing for Google's bottom line," but advertising on Google's own properties might not grow as much when you compare their sites to the rest of the AdSense-using Internet.
Turn on Spotlight, launch a few Java applets, and install a dozen Dashboard widgets with the dev mode on (so you can have them on the regular desktop). You'll be back to "slow" in no time.:)
Yahoo! is offering tools to add all sorts of funky JavaScript shit to your web site. How you design your site is up to you. You can have a minimalist interface or a maximalist interface, or something in between. You seem to be making the conclusion that Yahoo! is advising you on the proper layout, CSS, and advertising format for your web site; that is not the case.
Thank you for marking me as a "foe," though. I look forward to not reading your reply.
You're judging a massive company by the way its end-user home page looks. Other people are trying to explain that Yahoo! offers other interfaces and techniques for accessing search. You're ignoring them and continuing to whine about yahoo.com, which you don't have to use to get to their search engine. Did someone set your homepage to yahoo.com as a prank or something?
I'm on the verge of switching to Verizon because they just rolled out a GPS navigation service. For $3/day or $10/month your phone* acts as a navigation device to get from where you are to point B. Even with the cost of the phone, it's much cheaper than buying a GPS device and annual updates to the maps.
So, yes, we do need more stuff in our phones. For every 100 useless features there's one I actually want and would pay for.
* By "your phone" I of course mean the Motorola v325, which is not your phone
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing apples to apples, the /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004 folder on my Mac takes up 404.4 MB with absolutely everything installed -- including Entourage, a mail client. I don't know how many mibbledybytes that is, but it's a lot. At least Microsoft Office for Mac lets you load each application individually, unlike OpenOffice.org which occupies untold hectomebibytes of memory when you just want one application. (The Mac version of OOo doesn't even give you different icons to make you think you're just loading OOCalc, for example.)
It's not just the 256 columns that are stifling in Excel. Another limit is 2^14 rows -- some really long reports can benefit from the 2^20 rows/sheet limit in Excel 2007.
That would be cool. I look forward to the days of cacheable applications that, like mail clients and other such applications, can "go online." Too bad Microsoft has to lead the way yet again...
The game is called Rising Force Online, but from the description I thought it might have been Radio Frequency Online or something. Is it so hard to expand the abbreviations the first time you use them? Not everyone on IMBs knows what an MMOG is, for the QPFth time.
Katamari Damacy sold for $20 because they figured you were going to spend the other $30 on acid and mushrooms to really enjoy the game.
Then everyone got addicted to Katamari as a mind-altering substance so they raised the price 50% on the sequel. Bastards.
Outlook supports integration with CRM tools (like Salesforce) that geeks hate but salespeople use very frequently. Because geeks lash out against CRM instead of creating open alternatives, Outlook wins by default.
Outlook also connects to an Exchange server to do file and calendar sharing more readily than Evolution does. Evolution's Exchange connector, when last I checked, uses an interface which mimics a web browser clicking through Outlook Web Access. Outlook uses the proprietary Exchange protocol and so is faster. Unfortunately, because geeks get all huffy about "groupware," work on an open alternative to Exchange proceeds at a glacial pace.
Outlook is seriously flawed in all the ways that you describe, but frankly I haven't found an open solution that is mature or feature-rich enough to replace it yet.
What's an HTA?
--- Original Message ---
Re:I'd say more like
(Score:1)
by AKAImBatman (238306) on 08:01 AM February 22nd, 2006 (#14775719)
(http://akaimbatman.blogspot.com/)
How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive.
You, sir, have failed it. Given that OOo does a COMPLETE save to disk every time it saves a file, JavaScriptOffice (assuming it sent updates in a fashion similar to what I described) would be WAY faster than OOo.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
Did you figure out HTAs yet? Let me know when you hear that popping noise.
There are better languages than JavaScript. Stop with this AJAX/DHTML buzzword wankery. You're talking about rewriting an office suite, an enormous platform used by millions of people daily to integrate with all order of business practices and third-party applications, in JavaScript. You're talking about running this business-critical application in a web browser, a program which is so hyperextended that even "good" browsers crash and burn under the weight of 10-year-old bugs.
I really think you need to buddy up with someone who uses an office suite on a daily basis. I've used spreadsheets since the days of Lotus 1-2-3 and there isn't a web browser in this world I would trust to be any faster or more reliable than a 386 running 1-2-3 in DOS.
You haven't shown that JavaScriptOffice would be any cheaper for mobile access ($500+ per year for an internet connection just so you can edit static documents wherever you go? MS Office is cheaper than that). You have only shown me that JavaScript can be used to do all sorts of distracting shit in a web browser -- good for you. Oh, it supports keyboard shortcuts sometimes! Fantastic. Tell me, when does it support automation? How about JavaScriptOffice interoperability with third-party products using a published API? How long is it going to take for JavaScriptOffice to match even one tiny portion of Microsoft Office's functionality?
I can tell that you're getting ready to blogback your flashpost to your delicious, and so all I can say to the Web 2.0 master is: won't you think of the wikiwikiediting?
(End of JavaScript love-fest thread; it's been a pleasure.)
How does OpenOffice save its files so much faster than JavaScriptOffice? It uses fantastic technology known as the local hard drive. It really is fantastic. The best part is that when my local hard drive dies, my data doesn't die with it; I back up my hard drive regularly.
Once again, no network-based version of Office will ever take off so long as you need to maintain an Internet connection at all times. Why should I be sitting on a plane* unable to compose a letter to grandma because the JavaScriptOffice server isn't accessible?
* Not a Lufthansa or ANA plane, where they offer inflight wifi for $30+/flight
HTA? HTML Applications (that run locally on your machine)? Health Technology Assessment? Horticultural Trades Association? If you know how to get Internet connectivity for $500 a year you have to tell me.
You can get Lemmings for the Game Boy. By your logic, that means that an office suite should run on the Game Boy as well.
(I wonder how OpenOffice.org for Game Boy Advance Linux is coming along...)
OpenOffice.org is enormous. I have the Mac version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 and it's 341.5 MB large. NeoOffice/J, the "more Mac-like" version, exceeds 500 MB in size. Both take forever to start and look hideous, even more so than Microsoft Office for Mac.
Where did you get the 70 MB figure from -- the installer? Once you actually unpack and install OpenOffice.org, it rivals Microsoft Office for raw bloat. Its Excel clone is absolutely awful, barely playing catch-up to Excel's worksheet storage limits (which are about to increase again) and saving Excel files in formats so arcane even GPLed Excel readers can't parse them. OpenOffice.org doesn't support importing Excel files with automation or third-party add-ins.
Microsoft Word is not the killer app for MS Office. Excel is way up there, and Outlook is too. I don't like it any more than the next Linux user, but there isn't a free product out there that provides all the features long-time Outlook users have come to demand. I blame the Linux zealots who scoff condescendingly on the Outlook-using masses.
Oh boy! Beta! Now the company can be both unprofitable and can wash its hands of liability if anything bad happens!
Alpha is the new beta, I see. Call me back in 2010 when wikiCalc actually considers itself ready for production use.
Web 2.0 business plan
I find it completely insane that people consider Firefox, a browser where memory leaks are classified as "features," to be a viable application deployment platform. A web browser is only as strong as its weakest open window. The vast majority of browsers-with-no-extensions-installed have no protection against crashes at all. The only cure to this problem is auto-saving of documents.
Linux, Mac OS X, and even recent Windows releases are actually quite stable if you use good drivers. Why tie an important application to the weakest link in any system (the network) and a foundation that was clearly not made to handle such demands (a web browser)?
Because Linux users don't have any decent office suites* and this would be a "cross-platform" solution**.
* OpenOffice.org, a hugely-bloated fork of an old closed-source imitation of Microsoft Office, doesn't count.
** Assuming that your "valid" XHTML and scriptaculous JavaScript works equally well on all web browsers, which it won't, forcing you to make various forks of scripts.
Hicksville is pretty well-served by Optimum Online, the fastest cable modem provider I've ever seen.
Disney doesn't own the local ABC affiliate. It just so happens to be "sweeps" month so local news companies are running as much sensationalist stuff as possible to pump up their ratings. Two examples from Pittsburgh:
How can you get free cable? WTAE-TV suggests calling Comcast and providing one of several codes, all of which happen to contain the station's call letters.
WPXI-TV showed a group of women in silhouette. "We're not showing you these women's faces... not because they get paid to shop!" (What's better is that WPXI separately advertised bringing you the news "without fluff.")
Camino is written in Cocoa so it uses Mac OS X native widgets for nearly everything, supports system services, and supports accessibility features moreso than Firefox (but less than Safari). Firefox uses XUL with a Mac-like skin for its entire GUI, so it doesn't behave at all like a Mac application.
Google makes a ton of money from AdSense ads on other web pages as well. According to their 2004 annual report (warning: tiny fonts and huge amounts of text) page 26, in 2004 Google made 48% of its overall revenues from web sites outside its own domain ("Google Network web sites") versus 52% of its overall revenues from AdWords on its own domain. OK, I exaggerated when I said it "does nothing for Google's bottom line," but advertising on Google's own properties might not grow as much when you compare their sites to the rest of the AdSense-using Internet.
Turn on Spotlight, launch a few Java applets, and install a dozen Dashboard widgets with the dev mode on (so you can have them on the regular desktop). You'll be back to "slow" in no time. :)
Yahoo! is offering tools to add all sorts of funky JavaScript shit to your web site. How you design your site is up to you. You can have a minimalist interface or a maximalist interface, or something in between. You seem to be making the conclusion that Yahoo! is advising you on the proper layout, CSS, and advertising format for your web site; that is not the case.
Thank you for marking me as a "foe," though. I look forward to not reading your reply.
You're judging a massive company by the way its end-user home page looks. Other people are trying to explain that Yahoo! offers other interfaces and techniques for accessing search. You're ignoring them and continuing to whine about yahoo.com, which you don't have to use to get to their search engine. Did someone set your homepage to yahoo.com as a prank or something?
I'm on the verge of switching to Verizon because they just rolled out a GPS navigation service. For $3/day or $10/month your phone* acts as a navigation device to get from where you are to point B. Even with the cost of the phone, it's much cheaper than buying a GPS device and annual updates to the maps.
So, yes, we do need more stuff in our phones. For every 100 useless features there's one I actually want and would pay for.
* By "your phone" I of course mean the Motorola v325, which is not your phone