[H-GEN] Sad day for Linux

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-05-28, Trent WADDINGTON wrote:

> StarOffice (or more precisely OpenOffice) has made my life a living hell.
> People feel absolutely no quarms about sending me xls and doc files
> anymore.  They insist that I start up OpenOffice to read/edit them and so
> every now and then I get to use the entire 96 meg on my computer + the 256
> meg swap to run a single application.

The box I use for this is a Celeron-366 with 384 M[1] and it
manages to run OpenOffice without swapping -- but it takes a
full 18 seconds to startup and there's no point in leaving it
running because it's sure to have crashed (leaving a gigantic
core dump[2]) by the time I next need it.

What I use it for is to look at Word files so that I can decide
if I want to read them or not.  If it's just junk, I ignore it
unless the sender asks me about it and then I say I couldn't
read it because it was a Word file.  If it's something I'm going
to have to deal with, I send off an immediate response claiming
that I can't read it and asking for a more friendly format.

This way, I don't encourage any more people to believe in the
ubiquity of Word-capable correspondents, but I do have the
option of considering what they send me.  And I absolutely
refuse, under all circumstances to edit or work with Word files
using OpenOffice or anything else.

Greg

[1] A bit old and clunky, but plenty fast enough for what I call
    proper software.

[2] I don't turn off core dumps because I'm a programmer and I
    generally want them, but it irritates me that the really
    bloated apps I use, Mozilla and OpenOffice, both dump core
    regularly.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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