Re: tlug: Corel Office Java

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Craig" == C Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> Surprisingly Corel Office Java works fine under linux with
    Craig> no modifications.  Wow, what an applet.  Amazing that it
    Craig> works.

Isn't this what java is intended to do?  :-)

    Craig> document and I'm not sure if Quattro can graph a selected
    Craig> area of numbers the way that Excel can do it.  If any knows

In the DOS version of Quattro from many moons ago, you selected graph
from the menu bar (or maybe tools), then the type (bar, line, etc).
Then you selected "series" by selecting regions of the spreadsheet.
Each axis had its own series (or it could be generated automatically,
eg, for time), and the graphs themseleves each have a series.  The
series are defined as blocks in the usual way.

    Craig> Office suite takes up huge amounts of RAM (I have 32meg)
    Craig> and is a little sluggish on a Pentium 166mhz. ... Is
    Craig> there any strategy to get an Office suite like COJ working
    Craig> on a machine with say 8 megs of RAM?

Bwahahahaha!

They were just kidding about those network computers; everybody
already knew that.  The last incarnation was called "diskless
workstation", and it works for some applications and not others.  The
business motive for Sun and Oracle was that they were hoping to
swindle some not-too-bright consumers and firms into upgrading from
useless cheap network computers to comparably (to PCs) priced useful
ones, thus getting 2 sales for the effort of one.  (That's what it
would look like in hindsight, Sun and Oracle really believe their own
PR I think; they'd be swindling their own reputations too.)

"Network computers" aren't going to work unless you put the entire
cost savings on the hard disk etc into RAM and CPU and coprocessors.
Then you have to finance the fast connection, and pay premium rates
for a provider who can keep up with the demand.

This is great for existing consumers of diskless workstations; done
right to a half-decent set of standards, it will work better and be
cheaper than the current hodgepodge of Unix + TCP/IP + X Windows + NFS
etc. although not as much fun for us hacker types.

"Network computers" will come, though, because of what's his face's
law, that hardware halves price/performance every six months.  Right
now I have about 5GB, 75% full, under my direct control on several
different machines, and it will be a bit of work to get the
redundancies (4 copies of /usr/local/share/emacs/19.34/lisp/ I don't
need!) under control; network computing would do this automatically,
and maybe somebody else would do the work!

What's needed now is not a way to put office suites on machines less
than a P6/166MHz with 32MB of RAM, it's cheap fast connections and
info management.  In a year or two P6/166+32MB will be about US$1500,
if there's no HDD on it....  If instead of spending another $1000 on
2GB, you could get a T1 for a year (dream on), that's the network
computer we want.

Remember, not so long ago those Sparcs at the TLUG meeting on Saturday 
were state of the art....  Now, they're slow dinosaurs....

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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