[plug] horrors!

[Beau Kuiper]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, The Thought Assassin wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Beau Kuiper wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Aug 2000, Scott, Simon wrote:
> > > But really, who cares? Office is bloat anyway, and Microsoft is as good as
> > I do actually!
> > Office is bloat compared to what????. I don't see anything on linux that can
> > work nearly as well as an office port could.
> > You have staroffice, but in my testing, it is far far worse than I could ever
> > imagine. It is so bloated, it makes office seem lightweight and fast.
> But if the GPL version becomes available anytime soon, it will be stripped
> back and componentized long before Microsoft could release a beta-quality
> port of MSOffice. (Mainsoft's claim of creating native Unix ports in hours
> notwithstanding.)

GPL is not a quick cure for poor design and heavy bloat. Example netscape,
need I say more! I doubt anyone has the guts to learn how staroffice works
enough to strip all the crap out of it. This includes:

	1) That pathetic web browser
	2) Desktop for crying sake
	3) Its own widget set.

Office 97 works well in 16meg of ram. Staroffice is slower on 64meg of ram, now
you tell me it will be an easy exercise to remove enough out of staroffice to
make it work well in 32 meg of ram. Staroffice is just a bloated works suite
that probably should have never become an entire office suite.

> 
> > And abiword. Abiword is fast and neat, but it only has very basic
> > functionality.
> Hopefully some cross-pollination with SO will occur.

Do you do much coding. Do you know how difficult it is to get 2 peices of
completely different code to work together? It generally isn't fun.

Beau Kuiper
kuiperba at cs.curtin.edu.au