Wordworth on the Amiga had realtime spell checking, but it was very cumbersome if you were running the app from a floppy (yes, floppies) since it didn't have enough memory to buffer the entire dictionary, it had to search for each word you typed.
Well, the first x86 machine i bought came with windows and office on it, i felt i had been ripped off.. Coming from amiga and mac, this just wasn't good enough for me and i didn't use the machine for anything other than games until someone gave me a linux cd..
You could try 1.9.95, the latest development build.. As for startup speed, comparing the speed on windows isn't really fair, since ms controls both the os and office and can ensure that components are already loaded... Try comparing the mac version, word takes ages to load here, about the same as the mac openoffice
But with openoffice you can give the kids a copy of it to install at home, you can't give them a copy of msoffice to run at home if they don't have it. Consider that msoffice costs a considerable amount of money and many computers ship with something like works or wordperfect.. Then theres the kids with old computers that can't run the latest versions of msoffice..
I'm sure the codebase of msoffice is equally bloated, if not more so.. only we can't see it. as for development coming to a standstill, i've been downloading the OOo 2.0 betas for a few weeks now and each one seems to progress nicely.. And i have used multi level section numbers, and it was easier to get working than word.. As for the TOC being hyperlinked, thats an optional setting that you can turn on or off in the properties dialog for the TOC.. it actually keeps the hyperlinks when you export as a PDF too (again, if you turn the appropriate option on)
When your document gets over about 500 pages long, images no longer work properly and the spell checker stops working.. This annoys me, how do i turn it off? Also when your trying to count lines with a macro, it ignores lines with bullet points... this annoys me too, how do i turn it off? these bugs have existed for many years and have not been fixed.. if you find similar bugs with openoffice report them and see how long it takes before they get fixed..
word is terrible for technical documents too, it's totally unsuitable infact.. I'm not saying that openoffice is any better, i think both apps are equally poor for this task.. But saying that, having tried recent openoffice beta's it looks to be progressing a lot faster than word, and the open xml format is much easier to parse with external tools..
Word processors are designed for letter writing, they are NOT designed for technical document writing, that's why they suck.
Well, some people learn to use apps by repetition, same way dogs are taught tricks, they get stuck when they're presented with something that looks slightly different.. and then theres the people who got used to working around nasty bugs in word, and wonder why other apps don't exhibit the same buggy behavior
But word links against a lot of libs which are already resident as part of the os, while openoffice loads all it's own stuff (out of necessity) if you want a fairer comparison, try the mac version, word uses 44.3mb here.. Also theres the output files, open a word document in openoffice and save it out again in the openoffice format, every time i have done this the resulting file has been smaller, and going back the other way creates a bigger file again.
Theres another plus point for OOo, when you report bugs they get fixed, i'm still waiting for microsoft to fix the bug with macro's not counting lines properly when you use bullet points that was first noticed in office 97, it's still present in 2003 with no signs of ever being fixed.
One thing where cups excels (tho i doubt it's terribly secure) If you turn on printer sharing on the mac, cups will broadcast its printers to the network.. Other systems running cups detect the printers automatically and don't require any configuration or drivers.. So if you have a mac, you can configure the printer on there and all your unix systems on the lan can use it.. The cups interface isn't too bad either, it's all web based and perfectly reasonable... It work works with lynx.
I use something called turck-mmcache as a php accelerator, would this also work with mod_fastcgi ? php runs very slowly without this accelerator active..
Where did i state that the malicious records would be sending x86 shellcode? I just said it may exploit a bug, it's possible a bug would involve command execution and be platform agnostic. And regardless of what platform you're using, i'm sure there exists some shellcode for it somewhere. And who says script kiddies only exploit x86 systems? i happen to know a of lot of script kiddies who exploit IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC.
Well named (bind) is rather too large and complex if all you want is a caching nameserver, consider dnscache (http://cr.yp.to), it's a lot simpler to setup and doesn't provide features other than caching..
Not atall, migrations come in small steps.. If all the apps people run on windows can also be used on other platforms, then the next time they come to upgrade their machine there is very little incentive for them to buy another copy of windows when they can obtain linux or bsd for free and run the same apps.
There is such a format, OpenDocument, it is supported by the upcoming openoffice 2.0 and the next version of staroffice and is listed on oasis-open.org, now if only other opensource apps would start to use it.. And perhaps commercial vendors like wordperfect and apple.
Most modern compilers will do that too, they evaluate if the result from a loop is actually used, and if it isn't, dont bother running it.. Also, if the result is always the same, they will precompute it and remove the loop.
It only does it when idle, so it's prefetching while you're reading the search results and deciding which one to visit, all going well it will have prefetched the one you visit and it will load instantly when you select it.
Only media player has been bundled with windows for YEARS, back in the 3.11 days it was a no nonsense player for anything you had the necessary codec installed for.. Infact, the older versions were good for what they did. Since version 7, it's become bloated, much slower, intrusive and it heavily aims to promote ms's media format
Then what will they use? MS Office is even less open. If they then use abiword or koffice etc, then that's a good thing.. More competition is good for the market, and will promote interoperable standards.
Or the fact that a lot of modern apps refuse to install once they see the version, not that they wouldn't be able to run, they just see the version and freak.
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Wordworth on the Amiga had realtime spell checking, but it was very cumbersome if you were running the app from a floppy (yes, floppies) since it didn't have enough memory to buffer the entire dictionary, it had to search for each word you typed.
Well, the first x86 machine i bought came with windows and office on it, i felt i had been ripped off.. Coming from amiga and mac, this just wasn't good enough for me and i didn't use the machine for anything other than games until someone gave me a linux cd..
You could try 1.9.95, the latest development build..
As for startup speed, comparing the speed on windows isn't really fair, since ms controls both the os and office and can ensure that components are already loaded... Try comparing the mac version, word takes ages to load here, about the same as the mac openoffice
But with openoffice you can give the kids a copy of it to install at home, you can't give them a copy of msoffice to run at home if they don't have it. Consider that msoffice costs a considerable amount of money and many computers ship with something like works or wordperfect.. Then theres the kids with old computers that can't run the latest versions of msoffice..
I'm sure the codebase of msoffice is equally bloated, if not more so.. only we can't see it.
as for development coming to a standstill, i've been downloading the OOo 2.0 betas for a few weeks now and each one seems to progress nicely..
And i have used multi level section numbers, and it was easier to get working than word..
As for the TOC being hyperlinked, thats an optional setting that you can turn on or off in the properties dialog for the TOC.. it actually keeps the hyperlinks when you export as a PDF too (again, if you turn the appropriate option on)
When your document gets over about 500 pages long, images no longer work properly and the spell checker stops working.. This annoys me, how do i turn it off?
Also when your trying to count lines with a macro, it ignores lines with bullet points... this annoys me too, how do i turn it off?
these bugs have existed for many years and have not been fixed.. if you find similar bugs with openoffice report them and see how long it takes before they get fixed..
word is terrible for technical documents too, it's totally unsuitable infact.. I'm not saying that openoffice is any better, i think both apps are equally poor for this task..
But saying that, having tried recent openoffice beta's it looks to be progressing a lot faster than word, and the open xml format is much easier to parse with external tools..
Word processors are designed for letter writing, they are NOT designed for technical document writing, that's why they suck.
Well, some people learn to use apps by repetition, same way dogs are taught tricks, they get stuck when they're presented with something that looks slightly different..
and then theres the people who got used to working around nasty bugs in word, and wonder why other apps don't exhibit the same buggy behavior
But word links against a lot of libs which are already resident as part of the os, while openoffice loads all it's own stuff (out of necessity)
if you want a fairer comparison, try the mac version, word uses 44.3mb here..
Also theres the output files, open a word document in openoffice and save it out again in the openoffice format, every time i have done this the resulting file has been smaller, and going back the other way creates a bigger file again.
Theres another plus point for OOo, when you report bugs they get fixed, i'm still waiting for microsoft to fix the bug with macro's not counting lines properly when you use bullet points that was first noticed in office 97, it's still present in 2003 with no signs of ever being fixed.
But this is a school, the whole purpose of the organisation is training.. If the school isn't training it's students then what the hell is it doing?
One thing where cups excels (tho i doubt it's terribly secure) If you turn on printer sharing on the mac, cups will broadcast its printers to the network.. Other systems running cups detect the printers automatically and don't require any configuration or drivers.. So if you have a mac, you can configure the printer on there and all your unix systems on the lan can use it.. The cups interface isn't too bad either, it's all web based and perfectly reasonable... It work works with lynx.
I use something called turck-mmcache as a php accelerator, would this also work with mod_fastcgi ? php runs very slowly without this accelerator active..
Where did i state that the malicious records would be sending x86 shellcode?
I just said it may exploit a bug, it's possible a bug would involve command execution and be platform agnostic.
And regardless of what platform you're using, i'm sure there exists some shellcode for it somewhere. And who says script kiddies only exploit x86 systems? i happen to know a of lot of script kiddies who exploit IRIX/MIPS and Solaris/SPARC.
Well named (bind) is rather too large and complex if all you want is a caching nameserver, consider dnscache (http://cr.yp.to), it's a lot simpler to setup and doesn't provide features other than caching..
Not atall, migrations come in small steps.. If all the apps people run on windows can also be used on other platforms, then the next time they come to upgrade their machine there is very little incentive for them to buy another copy of windows when they can obtain linux or bsd for free and run the same apps.
And what if the domain you looked up had malicious dns records designed to exploit a bug in dig?
There is such a format, OpenDocument, it is supported by the upcoming openoffice 2.0 and the next version of staroffice and is listed on oasis-open.org, now if only other opensource apps would start to use it.. And perhaps commercial vendors like wordperfect and apple.
Or you can do mouseovers using CSS, http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspira l/demo.html does it for instance and looks quite impressive..
Also i use css mouseovers on www.ev6.net
A red circle on a white background? That's far too plain, why not invert it and then draw a black swastika inside the white circle, much better.
Most modern compilers will do that too, they evaluate if the result from a loop is actually used, and if it isn't, dont bother running it..
Also, if the result is always the same, they will precompute it and remove the loop.
It only does it when idle, so it's prefetching while you're reading the search results and deciding which one to visit, all going well it will have prefetched the one you visit and it will load instantly when you select it.
Only media player has been bundled with windows for YEARS, back in the 3.11 days it was a no nonsense player for anything you had the necessary codec installed for.. Infact, the older versions were good for what they did. Since version 7, it's become bloated, much slower, intrusive and it heavily aims to promote ms's media format
Then what will they use? MS Office is even less open. If they then use abiword or koffice etc, then that's a good thing.. More competition is good for the market, and will promote interoperable standards.
Or the fact that a lot of modern apps refuse to install once they see the version, not that they wouldn't be able to run, they just see the version and freak.