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OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released With New Templates
Journal written by stoolpigeon (454276) and posted by
kdawson
on Tue Dec 12, 2006 06:10 PM
from the ooh-shiny dept.
from the ooh-shiny dept.
Several readers wrote in to mention the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1. It includes support for 64-bit Linux and a number of other improvements, including multiple monitor support for Impress, improved Calc HTML export, and automatic notification of updates. Also, all of the templates and clip-art that were submitted for the template contest are available to download.
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My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Make native binaries on Linux AMD64 and Mac OSX.
3. Increase compatibility with all version of MSOffice.
4. Make it less memory hungry.
5. Make it speedier.
Everything else can wait.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have only one suggestion: stop trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office (which OO never will be, for several unavoidable reasons) and start trying to provide key functionality better than MS Office does, with a different interface if necessary. Seriously, it's not that hard a target!
Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
The OO development is driven by a community, as far as I know. It means that the community actually sees merit in having a free (as in freedom) MS Office clone. In my opinion, they are right. There are already free products which provide different functionality, like AbiWord, Gnumeric, LaTeX and etc. (I, for instance, stopped using word processors altogether after I've discovered LaTeX; does it mean that everyone would benefit from making such a move? I don't think so.) These are all excellent products, but their existence does not alleviate the perceived need for core MSO functionality, and hence we have OO.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly, Ledger [newartisans.com] doesn't try to beat Quicken or MS Money at their own game. It uses a completely different paradigm (the command line, and a plain text data file) and does it very well. Gnucash, on the other hand, plays the Quicken and MS Money game and, I would argue, does not measure up.
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Maybe open-source is doomed to try to emulate Excel?
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Excel was trying to emulate quattro pro and lotus 123, lotus 123 was trying to emulate visicalc.
What else do you want from a spreadsheet?
Personally I think spreadsheets are the most dangerous software on the market. At my last company we routinely lost millions of dollars because know nothing sales people used spreadsheets without understanding the math or the relationships between the data and gave wrong prices to customers. Eventually (I am not kidding) the CIO forbade the use of spreadsheets by the sales people and made them go through accounting instead. Eventually he had the IT staff write a custom app to do the pricing so that business rules could be enforced properly.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Funny)
Did this company happen to be Verizon [blogspot.com]?
- RG>
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Spreadsheet 2000 [wikipedia.org] is certainly a different concept in the realm of spreadsheets.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Three big pluses.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right when you say that Gnumeric is a clone of Excel. But my original point was that it is not a clone of MSO, because it tries to accomplish a slightly different goal (what the root poster wanted OO to do, with no good justification).
I also agree with you if you are implying that Excel kicks ass, and there does not seem to be a better way to program a spreadsheet application. That may well be true, but there is no shame in trying to emulate it. Who cares if Microsoft came up with an idea first? I
Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Insightful)
But I think it's futile to try to create an Excel knockoff. No one is going to beat Excel at its own game. Look at all the top-notch Linux and open-source software:
* text editors, like Vim and Emacs. These both come from a long Unix tradition. They're not trying to mimic a proprietary app. Both have unique features you can't find anywhere else.
* Firefox. It didn't try to mimic IE. It introduced tabbed browsing (before IE did, anyway--yes, Opera had it first) and has a thriving extensions scene (which Opera and IE do not.)
* Apache. There was and is nothing comparable.
* text procesing, like LaTeX. Has a long Unix tradition; isn't trying to mimic anything.
* X. I know of nothing else that has its robust network transparency. That certainly isn't mimicking Windows.
Now, what top-shelf open source programs got there by trying to emulate a dominant proprietary application? Maybe Samba. Any others?
If Gnumeric, OOo, and Kspread are any indication, cloning Excel is a futile exercise.
I think the best thing that might happen to all these programs is the new MS Office ribbons. If open source doesn't try to emulate ribbons, but instead goes off in a new direction, there might be hope. If they try to clone ribbons, we're doomed.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Funny)
<Boring RMS voice>
This exercise is not futile because using a free application is better than using a non-free one, even if the latter is functionally superior. Excel is going the way of the dodo, if only because it is a non-free commodity application. On economic grouds only, it has no chance of beating free software in the marketplace (give it some time). And when it finally fizzles, the free alternative will be much better than anything that could be possibly produced by Microsoft. In fact, this is one of the reasons why it will finally go away.
</Boring RMS voice>
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
At present, it appears as though the free software community has little in original ideas when it comes to a commodity application. Even Firefox has its roots in a non-free world. But I am convinced that it is caused by the circumstances, and not by the nature of communal software development process. Many ideas were generated by the private interests, and they are good ideas, and we need free implementations of those. As the free software movement gains momentum, we will see it winning in all areas where i
Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Interesting)
Or just that the groupthink and/or drive from Sun (who pay for the vast majority of OOo development) currently tend towards emulating Microsoft.
I look at it this way: the biggest OSS success stories, IMHO, are Linux and Firefox. They have successfully displaced a worthwhile amount of market share from an established, commercial competitor, something few other big name OSS projects can claim to have achieved so far. And they didn't do it by trying to be Windows and IE, they did it by trying to be a good OS package and a good web browser. I didn't switch to Firefox because of its similarities to IE, I switched because of the differences, from the overall design philosophy (simple main app, plug-in culture) to the subtle UI touches (unobtrusive find bar when I hit Ctrl+F).
Word, in particular, is crying out to be overtaken by a piece of software that provides WYSIWYG cuteness for the masses but makes it easier to create serious documents. Word should have no market: it should be being beaten for those who only write letters and to-do lists by simpler and cheaper tools, for those doing basic DTP by the low-end DTP packages, for those writing heavyweight long documents like books by typesetting packages or high-end DTP, and for the countless users writing diverse documents with a bit of structure and formatting by... an application that no-one's written yet, which is why we still use Word at the office.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who programs, writes lots of different kinds of document, and has had many ideas for alternative document creation tools. IME only, the main activities for a word processor user in a typical office are:
Other activities common among more knowledgable users are:
and
Power users also do things like:
I have never yet seen a business taking anything like full advantage of the automation interfaces of any word processor, nor any effective use of abominations like WordArt and not much of Equation Editor.
From my own experiences, then, I might guess that a good writing tool (in the sense of being quick and easy for users, and producing high-quality documents) would focus on letting power users set up document structure and formatting, and then presenting a vastly simpler interface to actually edit the document: almost a "fill in the blanks", with simple commands for things like checking spelling and word count. Let people apply predefined formatting and structure (based on things like what power users would call stylesheets, not randomly applying bold, all caps, double-underlined, centred, hand-typed numbering, etc.). Let them insert cross-references, again with predefined appearance. Have the software automatically reuse key text, so typing something in the "title" area on the front page automatically updates the headers as well, and changing a heading automatically updates the table of contents; this is one of the most common "unprofessionalisms" I see in documents, and it's not like it's rocket science!
Basically, put the focus on what the user is writing, with simple interfaces for the common tasks everyone needs. Then leave things like the details of formatting and document structure to the power users who can
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Here's your business case (Score:5, Interesting)
Your conclusion is fundamentally flawed: it does not follow that there exist a community of programmers working on something just because a lot of people would benefit from it. For a start, that would require a significant number of programmers (a) to appreciate the need, (b) to collaborate in order to produce a solution, and (c) to be willing to do so for little or no compensation if you think they're going to write it as OSS, and (d) to be willing to do so in an apparently crowded market with a dominant commercial player, established OSS projects as competition, and a user base who have been demonstrated for the most part to prefer paying Microsoft for their offering year-on-year rather than investigate alternatives that might suit them better.
Of course there is. A gazillion people use Word in this role every day. Word isn't very good at it, but most people don't appreciate that because they have little experience of anything else in recent times.
That doesn't change the fact that at a videoconference last week, with several relatively senior members of staff from all around the world and with very limited time available, we wasted upwards of five minutes while the expensive external consultant leading the presentation tried to get his bullet lists in Word to look consistent using Format Painter (which kept turning his text into Greek). He did the same thing the week before, too. Leaving aside the opportunity cost of that time, the cost to the business just to pay all those people to sit around and watch the consultant getting his document in a mess a couple of times was probably $500. In a smart document editor, his new bullet point would have just dropped into the list and formatted itself nicely the moment he typed it, or at worst required a click or two to say "this paragraph is a new item extending the list above it".
At the same company the week before, I spent most of an hour swapping e-mails and calls with a colleague on the same team who couldn't work out why a document with an included image looked fine on her machine but didn't work when uploaded onto the network for others in the team to see; this turned out to be a linking vs. embedding problem. The cost to the business for the time for two of us to fix that and the resources we used in the process was probably $200, and again that excludes the opportunity cost for our time, the time lost as I got back to my own work after the interruption, and so on.
These little things punctuate the daily lives of countless office workers around the world, wasting $100 here or $1,000 there. Those two anecdotes come from just my personal observations of one team at work over the past couple of weeks, and probably total $700 of loss to the business. This is more than enough to send the culprits on a basic training course, or to buy a couple of licences for better software. As the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. Likewise, a smart craftsman with good tools will tend to get better results faster than a low-skilled worker with inadequate tools, even if the latter doesn't realise what he's missing.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But what you describe is a management problem. If management (a) hires dummies, (b) doesn't train the dummies, and then (c) gives the dummies tools that aren't making them any more productive (but do look pretty) then.... Ooooh, shiny!
Alternatively, management could bring in tools that will actually help staff to do their jobs, and ignore whingers who want to play instead of doing useful work. Yes, that might just do it! :-)
Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen to that! No more new features. No more wizziness. Stop it freezing and crashing (especially base on Linux which is close to unusable), and make it work. It may not be as exciting as adding on another widget, but it is what OO really, really needs.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, here's an immediate reply, right off the top of my head after reading your post. What's more, I'll only refer to the word processing component. I bet I get to ten within two minutes.
I think that's ten, and I basically haven't stopped typing for more than a few seconds between each.
As for how I'd fix them, well, I gave some description of how I'd organise a document preparation tool above. I wouldn't try to fix them with OOo Writer in its current form, because it has too much baggage: IMHO, you need a fundamental change in approach and UI priorities.
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like that's a small list that doesn't encompass much. I don't know, though... I don't really have huge problems with stability. MSOffice compatibility is pretty good, and seems to be getting better all the time. Plus, I somewhat blame Microsoft for the problem, so no point in telling the developers about it-- they know.
By your complaint about OSX-native binaries, I assume you mean a version which doesn't require X11? If that's the case, you should at least check out NeoOffice [neooffice.org], which is an attempt to bring a native port of OOo to OSX (including Aqua-fying the interface). It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good considering their lack of resources. Last I heard, it was a two-man operation. Still, it would be nice if the OOo people would either support the NeoOffice guys, help out, or make some effort toward bringing their own port to OSX.
So I guess we're really left with making it faster and lighter. I can't say I disagree, but it does seem like that might be a difficult task. Someone involved in the project might be able to tell me, would it make the whole thing run faster and use less RAM if you broke the thing out into separate applications? Personally, I can deal with the increase hard drive space, as well as the increased overhead of running multiple concurrent executables, if it means that any given executable can be launched more quickly and with less overhead. But maybe that's just me.
Either way, yes, I'd like to see OOo faster. Also, if I could add to your list, I'd really like to see the whole thing be prettier. I know, it seems like a minor thing, but it's easier to sell people on an application if it's pretty, and I do occasionally try to convert people to using OOo. I guess it'd be more accurate to say, it'd be nice if the Windows and OSX versions of OOo were to blend in better with their perspective operating systems. Running on X11 in OSX is a bit silly, and the icons and toolbars tend to look a little "off" in Windows. They just don't quite fit in with native applications. In Windows, it's a very minor complaint, but a complaint none the less.
Otherwise, I wouldn't want to end the post without being thankful and happy at OpenOffice's continued development. It's a fantastic application, keeping me free from needing Microsoft for most of my day-to-day tasks. And you really can't beat the price! So, if any OOo developers managed to read through all this, and didn't feel like beating the crap out of me for my nit-picking, thank you very much!
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Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers (Score:4, Informative)
My response, point by point:
Good question. To be fair, I can understand if Apple doesn't want to do it, given that NeoOffice competes with both Apple's iWork suite and Microsoft Office for OSX. Apple want to sell iWork, and they're afraid of losing MS Office, so giving a whole lot of support for NeoOffice might be a bit dicey. You might argue that Apple should ditch iWork and start over with OpenOffice as a base, but Apple would likely feel that they'd need to make too many changes for that project to be worthwhile, create a permanent fork of OOo, and finally rebuild Pages and Keynote on someone else's terms. It doesn't sound probable.
However, as an Apple customer, I would be in favor of any support Apple would be willing to provide to the guys at NeoOffice.
I think it's worth noting that you could make the same argument about the Windows port of OOo. No one will benefit except Windows users, so why doesn't Microsoft do it? Of course, the truth is that we all benefit from having cross-platform support for the applications we use. It means we can move between platforms with a minimal learning curve, and rely on common formats and features.
Well, yeah, what do you think NeoOffice is, if not Mac users doing it themselves?
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Public domain clip arts (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.openclipart.org/ [openclipart.org]
http://www.wpclipart.com/ [wpclipart.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Clip_Art_Librar
My 10 minutes search on the Internet two weeks ago gave no that much interesting results. Only now I can understand how OpenOffice must also, somewhere amongst the priorities, continue to add clip arts and templates.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The trickle of power used to keep its RAM warm doesn't compare to the amount of power (and cash) saved by running such an old laptop.
Cash maybe, power almost certainly not. Unless your Pentium 3 processor sips less than 31 watts of power. That's all the Core Duo requires. [hardwarecentral.com]Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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First of all, NeoOffice lags behind OpenOffice. Second of all, NeoOffice just isn't "OpenOffice." I realize it's irrational, but it's important for public perception that there be an "official" native Mac version (i.e., one named OpenOffice).
Does OpenOffice 2.1 have the MSFT Word bug? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know if it also existed for:
a. exported WinXP/2000/98 DOC files from Open Office (since I use Open Office on my Win XP laptop and frequently export in DOC for other people);
b. imported Word DOC files (in other words, was there a vulnerability if you only had Open Office and imported a DOC file to then save as ODT)?
c. specifically WindowsXP machines - in other words, was it patched in the Open Office 2.1 for WinXP version?
Thanks! I've pretty much stopped using Word except at work in favor of Open Office, but recent news has been concerning me on these aspects, and I can't figure out if they were real concerns or not.
Re:Does OpenOffice 2.1 have the MSFT Word bug? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered submitting a Feedback/Feature Request to support the latest ZeroDays?
Other than that, you'll just have to wait since, unfortunately, OpenOffice is not yet sufficiently compatible with Microsoft Office to replicate the latter's vulnerabilities in their entirety. But we are working on it!
Parent
.torrent (Score:5, Informative)
only a bit better than linking to their direct download links...
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ [openoffice.org] torrents for Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
A Mac OS X version of 2.1 does not seem to be available yet.
my failed attempt to evangelize (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach physics lab courses at a community college. In the past, we'd had a lot of problems where students made a graph in Excel at school, took it home, and were unable to open it in Excel at home because it was an older version. I figured this was a natural situation in which to evangelize for open source. I got OOo installed on all the Windows computers in the labs, added instructions in the lab manual, and urged my students to use it, explaining the reasons.
Well, basically it was a failure. Given the choice, they all use Excel. In fact, even the ones who don't know how to use a spreadsheet already have generally chosen to use Excel rather than learning OOo. It doesn't matter that I go out of my way to try to help them if they show interest in OOo. In fact, many of them seem to read the OOo instructions, but apply them to Excel -- which works, most of the time, since OOo is such a total monkey copy of Office.
I would like to be able to say that their behavior was just irrational, but honestly I don't think it is. Actually there are at least two common graphing tasks that are extremely difficult to do in OOo. (1) Adjusting the scales on the axes. Sometimes it works, and sometimes, no matter how many times I click on the right place, it doesn't work. (2) Fitting a line and displaying the equation. This is dead easy in Excel, but unless they've improved OOo recently, it requires a mystic incantation (typing two different non-obvious, complicated formulas).
My wife's reaction when I suggested trying OOo was that she wasn't interested, because she'd tried importing complex Word documents, and sometimes it lost some of the formatting. Well, actually, this is an extremely rational reason not to switch to OOo.
Re:my failed attempt to evangelize (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually based on my experience with even the latest version of OOo, importing very simple MS Word documents almost always never works in terms of formatting. And that's enough of a reason for me to not switch. Not saying that OOo should aim to support MS Office formats entirely, but people I work with use MS Word and send me MS Word documents. I have better things to do than encourage them all to switch to OOo.
Also, I have used MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel for years. I know how to do what I need to do in them, and I am too lazy to learn how to do the equivalent in OOo. I have a version of MS Office 2000 that works fine for everything I need to do, and I see no reason to use anything else. Heck, I'm reluctant to switch to newer versions of MS Office just because I don't want to learn a new interface.
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I TAed several undergrad physics labs and we had this problem especially in the classes for non-majors. A lot of the analysis they had to do was reasonably complex and couldn't have been done with Excel or any spreadsheet app in any reasonable amount of time. We had Kalie
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you still want to use OpenOffice, and need to do fancy charting, you can use Graph on Windows, or gnuplot on anythi
Release Notes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Release Notes (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
OSX: not available (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, whatever. I think maybe I'll just wait a while -- maybe a year or a decade -- until it has a normal OSX interface and it's actually available and (one hopes) working.
Meantime, MSWord is really quite compatible with MSWord, so I'll continue to use that. And LaTeX is still here, for technical writing.
Menu ribbon? (Score:3, Insightful)
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OO's point is to COMPETE with MS, not outright copy them. I think the lack of the menu ribbon will actually persuade some people to stick with OO.
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It does not fully emulate Office on a Mac... (Score:3, Interesting)
For too long I have had to put up with very unstable software (I mainly use Word and PowerPoint, though now I use Keynote for presentations and love it). Word does not seem to like working with tables, footnotes and graphs. Nor does it seem to like documents longer than 30 pages, or paste and copy within a document, or work nicely between it and Excel (almost 100% crashes on my machines and I have tried all kinds of remedies... not looking how to fix it, don't even suggest it as I don't have it installed anymore).
My writing is rather boring, Times New Roman, 12 pt. double spaced, an occasional simple table and an image or two. I try not to use footnotes, but do so once in a while. The documents are nothing extra ordinary, yet Office consistantly crashes, not only on one machine, but on three. I have used both 2004 and Vx--same thing.
OpenOffice finally is to the point where I can use it and not miss much (wish it had better EndNote integration, but I am ok with it as is as long as it does not crash and wipe out my document). So far it has proven to be very stable and I have been using 2.04 on a Mac for several weeks.
While I can understand the reluctance to switch, Word in its last few major revisions was never too stable and very few technical writers (of which I was one for several years) would use it for anything but the simplest of tasks. Back then (and still today, though it is showing its age... Adobe are you reading this?) FrameMaker, even with its archaic UI, was the choice based on its stability and the fact that it could handle very large documents without much problems (something I would never consider on Word... and hopefully never have to again--Good riddence to Microsoft!! And thanks all of those who have made OpenOffice what it is today).
Finally 100% free of Microsoft!! (Mac OSX 10.4.8, and Kubuntu on PIII laptop)
Criticism Where Due - But Appreciation is Due (Score:5, Insightful)
For free.
What's the benefit? It's FREE people! You don't have to spend a dime on it.
It'd be nice to hear a kind word or two in appreciation every once in a while instead of a bunch of ingrate whiney bitches.
widescreen presentations (Score:3, Insightful)
Also common is 16:10. Some displays can rotate, so we need also need that: 3:4, 9:16, 10:16.
Arbitrary support would be good.
Let me say how to deal with mismatch: letterbox, letterbox-like but shifted up or left, letterbox-like but shifted down or right, stretched (with or w/o maintaining aspect ratio for images), cropped...
Also, don't crash when I try to force this via badly editing the XML.
Summary of the most damning OO complaints thus far (Score:4, Funny)
"OpenOffice sucks because of a serious bug that those commie hippies haven't fixed yet! At least when I file a bug with Microsot, they get right on it! Sometimes, they will even patch the bug 10 times. THAT, my friends, is professional service!"
"OO sucks because it doesn't appeal to my aesthetic values at all! I'm going back to EMACS for all my office needs!"
"The curse word 'Java' appears somewhere in the installation! I want to be free, I'm going back to Microsot Woid!"
"OO sucks because it takes so long to compile! How in the world do those Windohs users find the patience?!"
"OO is grotesquely bloated! I installed it and it used more than 0.02% of my hard disk, forcing me to move some crucial porn and tunes to my NAS box!"
Re:64bit? (Score:5, Funny)
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I think that basically, there isn't all that much room for real innovation if the software's tasks are that clearly set. Maybe some interface
Re:OpenOffice could use some innovation. (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree about the need for innovation. I just recently started using Office 2007 and, though I thought I wouldn't like it at first, the new UI really is a breath of fresh air. But as far as feature creep is concerned, I think you're looking at the wrong problem. Joel Spolsky maybe said it best [joelonsoftware.com]...
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs [launchpad.net]
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