Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 29, 2005 09:43 AM
Office 97 is more than capable. I would suggest that its not clear at all that an upgrade was needed.
Indeed until recently I was still using office 97, and my brother, who is a financial analyst working for weight-watchers, is still using Office 97 (Excel, to be precise).
And why give up the deliciously slick usability of MS software for the clunky, slow, awkward OpenOffice offering? Do you want to wait half an hour for OpenOffice to start up? With old machines that's what you can expect. With Office 97 on a 300Mhz PII Word and Excel open almost instantly (all things being well: defragged drive etc).
Until the recent betas OpenOffice didn't even have support for word-counts of text selections! Outrageous!
I like the free software thing, but it has its limits. See my website for all my free software (you'll have to scroll manually as I bodged the links recently : <a href="http://www.lorriman.com/" title="lorriman.com">http://www.lorriman.com/</a lorriman.com> ). Even in a communist society you don't get something for nothing (ultimately), unless you are a criminal, and even thats debatable. this is also true of software. There's plenty of crap commercial software, but there's an awful lot more more crap free software; its the only way crap software can perpetuate (like linux 2.6; have you noticed how web hosts won't touch it). Commercial software, however, eventually disappears if its crap.
The only reason that free software exists is because of :
a)the glory/recognition of your efforts being used by so many b)programming being so infernally addictive (and there are a lot of addicts out there looking for a more meaningful fix than writing another image re-sizer).
Take away a man's motivation and you'd better start offering money or good food <a href="http://www.lorriman.com/misc/chickenlivers/" title="lorriman.com">http://www.lorriman.com/misc/chickenlivers/</a lorriman.com> .
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 29, 2005 09:43 AMIndeed until recently I was still using office 97, and my brother, who is a financial analyst working for weight-watchers, is still using Office 97 (Excel, to be precise).
And why give up the deliciously slick usability of MS software for the clunky, slow, awkward OpenOffice offering? Do you want to wait half an hour for OpenOffice to start up? With old machines that's what you can expect. With Office 97 on a 300Mhz PII Word and Excel open almost instantly (all things being well: defragged drive etc).
Until the recent betas OpenOffice didn't even have support for word-counts of text selections! Outrageous!
I like the free software thing, but it has its limits. See my website for all my free software (you'll have to scroll manually as I bodged the links recently : <a href="http://www.lorriman.com/" title="lorriman.com">http://www.lorriman.com/</a lorriman.com> ). Even in a communist society you don't get something for nothing (ultimately), unless you are a criminal, and even thats debatable. this is also true of software. There's plenty of crap commercial software, but there's an awful lot more more crap free software; its the only way crap software can perpetuate (like linux 2.6; have you noticed how web hosts won't touch it). Commercial software, however, eventually disappears if its crap.
The only reason that free software exists is because of :
a)the glory/recognition of your efforts being used by so many
b)programming being so infernally addictive (and there are a lot of addicts out there looking for a more meaningful fix than writing another image re-sizer).
Take away a man's motivation and you'd better start offering money or good food <a href="http://www.lorriman.com/misc/chickenlivers/" title="lorriman.com">http://www.lorriman.com/misc/chickenlivers/</a lorriman.com> .
Ultimately this article is bogus.
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