Re: [TCLUG:10692] StarOffice

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Eric M. Hopper wrote:

> > Thankfully, there are more powerful machines to run more powerful software
> > now.
> 
> 	There's no decent reason for a word processor to crawl on a
> K6-300 with 32mb.  If it were a desktop publishing package designed for
> something like newspapers, books, or magazine layouts, yeah, I could see
> that not being quite beefy enough.  But a word processor?

I agree, except that I'll go farther. Consider TeX, which is appropriate
for even the most daunting of page layout tasks. On a 386 with 8MB of RAM,
a TeX job might take a long time, but it will finish, and the results
will be beautiful. On a faster machine, it will go faster.

StarOffice, on the other hand, will *not be usable* on a 386 with 8MB of
RAM. And something tells me it can't do all the funky stuff TeX can, even
on a super-powerful workstation.

This is not an issue of batch processing vs. interactive manipulation --
consider what early Macs running PageMaker were capable of, with less
hardware even than the 386/8MB in the example. Slow, perhaps, but not
*unusable*, like out 'modern, more powerful' StarOffice.


StarOffice is a step backward, plain and simple.


-- Chris

  Christopher Reid Palmer : www.innerfireworks.com