[geeks] From a local mailing list

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

>> 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.

Office XP was "Office 2002".  Today was the first I'd heard of 2003.

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

"No, really, we'll fix it in a service pack!  Buy a license!"

> 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.

Of course not, but who wants to go through all that hassle.

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

I was using it on a 25MHz 486 with 6MB of memory.  I guess I was
patient. ;)

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

Likewise 1-2-3 clones.  Occasionally, I -need- a spreadsheet for doing
tabulation and figuring, but I don't want to shell into a box that has
OpenOffice or what-not.  sc and the like are a good start, but pretty
crappy.

> Big documents suck in Word.

Especially if you go the master-document and your subdocuments get out
of sync.

> 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.

No.  Because a Word isn't that great a document processor.  It tries to
straddle "desktop publishing" and "word processor" and halfway does each
job.

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

Dumping FrameMaker for Word would be like dumping a Peterbilt tractor
and box for a wheelbarrow.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "It's alright for someone to sleep past noon every
Elgin, TX         (   once in a while.  That's what it means to be a
USA                )  free human being."       --Roger Smith, The Big O