[NTLUG:Discuss] OT - maybe not

[Terry Hancock]

On Thursday 06 March 2003 05:28 pm, Wayne Dahl wrote:
> Would you elaborate on that?  I have both Star Office 5.2 and Open
> Office 1.0 on my machine and I have to say, after using both, I prefer
> Open Office. 

Well, I consider OOo to be a descendant of SO, which is what I meant by 
"still" -- though I acknowledge that it has improved.

> What do you mean it brings every computer you've tried it
> on to its knees?  It works fine on mine...466MHz Intel Celeron
> processor, 256 Megs P133 mem, RH 8.0 OS.

Well, okay, maybe I'm way out of date, but it "crawls and crashes" on both my 
Debian "Woody" Pentium-90/64MB system at home and the Solaris Sun Blade 
100/256MB I use at work, for modest sized documents.  After a few tests on 
sample files, we decided it was simply too demanding to use generally, though.

Which is weird, since (for example) Gnome and KDE office apps run fine on 
both of these machines. Their problem is that they are apparently still 
pretty incomplete.

(Understanding of course, that there's some lag between the latest version 
available and the ones I tested with for all these packages -- I'm not 
certain, but I think I was testing "build 642" of OOo and KDE 2.2.2, I'm not 
sure what version of Gnome apps I've used).

The "hardware is cheap, just throw more at it" argument is not very 
satisfying to me -- I can't help but think that these problems are really due 
to very high inefficiency, especially considering that other programs can 
handle the job.  It is just possible of course that it is actually because of 
the extra features that the program is so slow, but it seems disproportionate 
to me.  There's also the question of how the performance scales with document 
size/complexity.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com