[geeks] From a local mailing list

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Tue, 3 May 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
>>> Sure.  I can buy a brand new Office -upgrade- for about $200, but not a
>>> full version.
>>
>>
>> The new versions, yes.  He said the 2003 version, which I've seen at
>> computer shows for $100.
> 
> 
> It's only AD 2005, and there's a -new version- after 2003?  Wasn't the
> XP (2002) -> 2003 lifecycle short enough?  Wow.

Well, I could have sword they made a bunch of noise about "Office XP", 
which I assumed was different from Office 2003.

Am I wrong?

> I'm still running Office '97 and loving it.  It's the last version that
> doesn't wholly suck.

'97 was still a steaming mound of crap, but as Word goes, it was the 
best version I remember.

The newer versions seem to have magnified some of the bugs instead of 
fixing them.

> Generally, no, but, as much as I dislike most[0] things Microsoft, I
> dislike the BSA showing up even more.  They're thugs, and relatively
> inexpensive thugs to keep away if you stay a version behind "current".

You know... quite a few local companies have been sued by the BSA and 
the SPA, and outside of a couple of settlements, they have not been very 
successful.

I talked to a lawyer involved in one of the settlements, and he said
the only reason they settled was because the settlement terms were more 
generous than actually complying with the licenses.

He also said that BSA/SPA lawsuits have hurt the industry more than any 
piracy, and a frequent result of lawsuits, successful or otherwise, is 
that the targeted company dumps the software in question.

I'm personally not worried.

I copy Win2k without guilt because I've paid hundreds of $$$ for Windows 
over the years, and 2000 was the first version that actually worked at 
what I would consider a minimal level.

IMHO, I *have* paid for it.  Through the nose, for years and years.

> I'm partial to Word 6 for Windows (which was they only good (if bloated)
> release for Win16) and Word 5.1 for the Macintosh (which is possibly the
> best GUI word processor in the history of the concept).  Given Win32,
> I'll take Office '97 sans Outhouse.

I found 6.0 buggy, and it ran really slow on the machines I had at the time.

> I've toyed with the idea of writing a WP51 for DOS clone for Unix that
> spits out TeX documents.  It'd be fun, but I have so many more
> productive projects on which I could spend time.

It would be nice to have a decent text mode word processor for UNIX. 
None of the ones out there are that good.

> Indeed.  I've not done much besides man pages with *roff, but TeX
> (especially coupled with LaTeX) scale really well with obscenely large
> documents; you just abstract them away into smaller chunks!

nroff is the same way, though TeX has slightly better output.

Both do output much nicer than something like Word.  The kerning and 
everything is just so much nicer.

Big documents suck in Word.

I've heard horror stories from local military personnel and contractors 
who have been through conversions of documents from nroff, TeX, and 
other typesetters into Word.

It just doesn't work.

NASA uses Word, but when I was there, I couldn't help but notice really 
big documents were still done with Maker.