OT: OpenOffice not 100% compatible?

"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:OB48g.74426$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...

Perhaps a higher power has decided your car needs to be replaced ;)

Anyway, a PC should be replaced every 3 years or so. It's not designed to live much longer. The one I use now is actually quite old, about 4 years. It is sitting in my kitchen cupboard, almost no ventilation, but still going well. But as soon as it starts to go funny, I won't even *try* to fix it. By then, it has served its purpose.

Hello Frank,

Nah, I don't buy cars like that. Mine has a good old frame like they all used to have, manual shift, leaf spring suspension, no electric windows or electric anything. Hauls half a ton without a sweat. The other good news: It's way at the bottom of the "preferred list" of car thieves, meaning the insurance is quite cheap.

I try to avoid to be part of the throw-away society. The PC I am writing this on is around 10 years old and fine. It just got a larger monitor allowing CAD work without glasses. There is a very new one in the lab but quite frankly there is nothing that I can do on that one that I wouldn't be able to do on the others. None of the others is younger than

Regards, Joerg

It's not the language, it's the libraries; C++ is arguably just as easy to port between platforms as Java is -- possibly even more so. But unfortunately with standard C++ (even with the STL) there's no way to draw one single pixel, so you immediately have to start using someone's library... which, at least in the case of Office, is has zero cross-platform compatibility. (Whereas, with Java, it already knows how to draw buttons and such...)

If you go and visit the Windows programming groups, there are interesting discussions on occasion about just what tools *Microsoft* uses internally for development, since it's very clear they *don't* use the same sets they hand out for "end user" programming (e.g., MFC for GUI applications in C++). This may have changed somewhat now that they're pushing the .net languages, though.

"Compelling," of course, can be somewhat subjective. :-)

Personally I like the subscription plans that pretty much all the EDA tools have... not so much for the feature upgrades, which may or may not be useful, but for all the bug fixes. I think I've mentioned here before that unless you have an active maintenance agreement, Mentor graphics won't even let you examine the knowledgebase on their web site to help in troubleshooting a tool problem! (Much less actually let you download a service pack, of course.) To me that's the kind of corporate attitude I'd rather not deal with, but changing horses is quite expensive in re-training, translating libraries, etc... hence the usual problem where everyone agrees a particular tool really isn't all that good, but they keep on using it because -- at least on paper -- the cost of change looks too high.

I think that's the point where all the GOOD people at a company are supposed to leave and start a new company... :-)

---Joel

Really? When I look at the Dell site for example I can get the Basic version of Office (pre-installed OEM version not transferable to another computer) only by paying an extra $149. At least I didn't find a Dell system with it bundled and if I did it would still be costing $149.

--

Hello Joel,

We were pretty open with each other so that wasn't an issue there. They knew I was conservative with finances but they also knew why. We managed to bring that division into a nice and repeatable performance, and I am certainly not the only person to be credited for that because it was all one big team effort.

Guess why I never used those tools :-)

Whenever a vendor inched towards mandatory service contracts and stuff like that I usually pulled the rug from underneath them.

It's a matter of communication. If the manager has an open door all the time and really means it people won't leave. And the manager must give engineers the chance to do it their way. The toughest one to let go for me was when the SW folks wanted to convert a design from my favorite realtime OS to Windows. I was not enthused, to put it mildly. They wanted it really bad and had some good arguments. So I told them "Ok, guys, but you'll have to make it work".

Regards, Joerg

Not transferable is IMHO quite a rip-off if you have to pay extra. I haven't shopped Dell lately but last time I did about a couple years ago they had different bundle tiers. Only the upper echelon was bundled with Office. I tend to buy low end PCs since that's all we really need. At first they threw in MS-Works. Actually, on one I asked whether there'd be a price reduction if I took that out of the order. Nope. The last one didn't even have Works anymore, only WordPerfect, but it didn't matter because none of this is needed in the lab where all it has to run is compilers and some lab gear.

Regards, Joerg

I've just looked at the source code, and it's not java - it's python.

Not that one is any better than the other.

Cheers! Rich

Hello Rich,

But isn't there a big difference between a coffee and a snake...?

Regards, Joerg

one

and every OS "upgrade" requires a platform upgrade these days to achieve the same throughput under the increased weight of the OS.

"you should see DOS *fly* on this P3 platform" ;-)

The OO application is based on top of a platform independent software layer which enable it to be run on a large number of platforms (*nix, OS-X, Windows). This layer take a lot of space and startup time. The MS guys don't need this and can program as close to the OS as possible.

I used OO to fix some MS docs in the past where MS Office couldn't read their own documents any more.

Greetings Hans

Hi Joerg,

I have both PDF995 and OpenOffice.

OO works pretty well for me, I have only had one word file I cant open. its slow to start, and a bit slower to load the docs, but the price is right and I have no other complaints. Not that I write much.

Cheers Terry

On Tue, 09 May 2006 15:35:03 GMT, Joerg wrote in Msg.

Yeah, and the currently "modern" fads in software development seem to be Java and XML.

robert

In article , Nico Coesel wrote: [....]

The machine I'm typing this on has OpenOffice and no JRE. OO works just fine without it. When I try to assign a basic macro to a button in a dialog box, it whines that it wants a JRE. I tell it no, you can't have one and life goes on. That is the only effect I've seen from not having a JRE.

In article , wrote: [...]

No, WordStar is faster.

WxWidgets is a cross platform GUI library.

Hello Robert,

I remember when Java came up in the boom days. A few programmers put it on their resumes because it looked good. They had just read a little about it and figured that was good enough. Some did get hired and, gasp, began programming.

There are reasons why some web sites are really, really sluggish. Including web sites of major electronics manufacturers. When on the road and away from my broadband link I have all but given up on them.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Ken,

The fastest one I ever used was IBM-EasyWriter. Remember that one? I wrote my masters thesis on it. The resulting hyroglyphs were then hammered out by a Commodore daisy-wheel printer. You had to close the door if you wanted to carry on a conversation in the next room.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Budgie,

Commonly called the bloatware effect. You can't write "Hello World" anymore unless your PC boasts 256MB+, whereas my father was able to automate a complete cold-rolled steel factory line within 2K.

I revived some old DOS programs I bought in the early 90's, to calculate wave digital filters without wearing out the keys of the old HP11C. A slight problem emerged: Filter sequences after the transfer from the analog to the digital domain whizzed by so fast that I couldn't see. Guess that's the difference between a 4.77MHz clock and a 1.6GHz clock.

Regards, Joerg