LibreOffice 4 Released 249
Titus Andronicus writes "LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released. Some of the changes are for developers: an improved API, a new graphics stack, migrating German code comments to English, and moving from Apache 2.0 to LGPLv3 & MPLv2. Some user-facing changes are: better interoperability with other software, some functional & UI improvements, and some performance gains."
Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
I just pre-paid £140.00 for MS Office on Gnu/Linux! :(
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Re:Damn! (Score:5, Informative)
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Bull fucking shit. The day I see Microsoft release a version of office for linux is the day I'll reviel my true name and vow to never write a star trek book again.
Bullshit is say, bullshit!
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+1 Funny, Please!
MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Funny)
For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:
= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap. .NET.
= LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as
= LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
= LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me.
= LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office!
= LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Insightful)
Libreoffice uses very little Java at this point. That's one of the things that's changed since they forked from OO.org.
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It didn't use it much before that point either. It's always been predominately a C++ codebase. It was just mostly ancient and crappily-written C++. Java was only needed for the HSQLDB, accessibility/assistive features and some of the wizards. The vast majority of its users can get away without those features.
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The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of comments from German to English.
RTFA
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Informative)
That started happening as soon as they forked.
Sun made it really hard to get some changes made upstream, and some developers were unwilling to hand over copyright on their code contributions. So OpenOffice stagnated for many years.
There was a cleaner, more feature-rich version called go-oo (which many Linux distros shipped, without really telling anyone they were getting the fork). That fork because the basis of LibreOffice. Once they weren't tied to staying close to the OpenOffice base, they started cleaning cruft like mad.
In case you didn't notice, they added a bunch of new features, while the size of the installer dropped from 200 MB to 183 MB in this latest release.
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Sadly, they departed too much from their OpenOffice origins.
As a former OO user (who never really used MSO), I find LO very alienating. There are some stupid features that annoy me to a point where it becomes unusable.
Here's a really stupid, but extremely annoying example:
OO opened ".pps" files in impress, so I could quickly view attachments from my email client and quickly scroll through them.
LO attempts to imitate MSO by opening them only in a fullscreenviewer, with transitions and music (which I'd rather
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Informative)
You may not be aware, but that is correct behavior.
A PPT file is meant to open in edit mode. A PPS file is meant to auto-play a presentation when opened.
If you don't want it to auto-play, then blame the person who saved the file as a PPS file.
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While it may not write the file formats developed by the marketing teams to encourage users to upgrade, it certainly reads them quite well, and often more reliable than MS. Not in the sense that it 100% present the random formatting exactly as MS would, but in that it will, in my experience, read 100% of the files and present the text in relatively accurate manner.
In my experience, MS
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:4, Insightful)
LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
True. LibreOffice actually helped me salvage a Word 2003 file into Word 2010, as Word 2010 itself would scramble the whole darned thing. Libre is much better, in my (limited) experience.
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LibreOffice does write DOCX.
AOO doesn't yet, but they're apparently working on it for the 4.x line.
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= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
While I recognize it's perhaps not a fair judge of LibreOffice, life isn't fair. I use LibreOffice and like it, and can handle the quirks when using non-native documents. But when even faced with "it's free vs. it costs you money", even ridiculously frugal people like my father WILL NOT SWITCH. His primary concern is his clients are able to read & use the documents he provides--and that conversely, he's able to read & use the documents his clients provide--without any hassle whatsoever. Let's fac
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Insightful)
I have had better luck with LibreOffice being able to read old/odd MS Office formats better than MS Office itself.
MS often breaks compatibility with itself to force upgrades.
YMMV
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My reality using LibreOffice is that I constantly exchange MS Office files with collaborators and don't have any issues.
(Actually, I prefer to use Google Docs for collaborative work but some people are still stuck with MS Office so I am forced to exchange files.)
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If your customers need to be able to veiw your documents properly and consistently couldn't you just save the documents as a pdf which will display properly everywhere?
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There isn't a "no hassle" file format except maybe a Google docs link (as it adjusts for various browsers).
Re:MS Office mewlers and shills, queue here! (Score:5, Interesting)
Except Libre office has much better functionality, even though its less on price. Better integration with Calc, better formatting, better large document handling, the ability to extend it through the language of your choice, the ability to use scripts to update presentations without ever opening them, etc. I had both Microsoft and OpenOffice years ago, and when working on large (3000 + page documents) that I didnt want to use Latex for (mostly due to sharing with my editor), I prefered OpenOffice. In the end, we all use these "office" suites for purposes that are better served in another application. How many of us fought with layout in a word processor, when we all know Illustrator or Inkscape would have been a better choice? In the end LibreOffice has functionality, particularly today, that rivals or exceeds the suites you pay for.
To address your father, he really should not be sending documents to his clients in a processing format, but rather a PDF or use an online tool for collaboration. In the business I worked for, you could get fired for sharing a document in its raw format: too great a risk of sharing redacted or edited information.
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However, the lack of interoperability with MS Office is a major sticking point. You may be correct that this is mainly because of the multitude of crappy and proprietary file formats that MS puts out, but as a practical matter, MS Office is what most people use. When I have a client or my boss that asks me to send them a few power point slides, or someone sends me some power
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Just because Office is bloated doesnt mean that LibreOffice isnt.
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Such as?
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huge spread sheets and the ability to take a ms document given to me by a customer and not totally fuck the formatting
Difference between GPL and MPLv2? (Score:2)
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GPL: the whole of a derived work, even new components, must remain under the GPL
MPL: only the code files licensed under the MPL must remain under the MPL
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And for completion:
BSD/MIT: all derived works can be relicensed as proprietary
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And for a shot at starting a "my license is freer than your license flame war":
BSD/MIT
Fixed for completion's sake. :p
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I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between GPL and MPLv2 - can anyone help explain, or link me to a resource that's more helpful than the ones I've found?
Also note that LGPL is very different from GPL...
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Essentially, MPLv2 is like the LGPL, except it only applies to the same file.
If you modify a file under MPLv2, you have to release the source code to your modifications. If you add your modifications in a separate file and combine the two, then you don't have to release your code.
With LGPL, you would have to release the source code in both cases, since both are derivative works.
Pre-fork OO (Score:3, Informative)
I have been using the last pre-fork version of OO. It works fine and mostly does what I want.
Is there any good reason to switch to the latest Libre?
Re:Pre-fork OO (Score:5, Insightful)
Why this dilution? (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenOffice is under Apache Foundation now and it is proper FOSS. This activity only dilutes the efforts to develop a FOSS alternative to MS Office. End it. Don't be childish. Thanks.
Re:Why this dilution? (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle tossed OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation after LibreOffice took-off in terms of features, bugfixes and mind-share.
OpenOffice is about 2 years behind thanks to Oracle.
Re:Why this dilution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look on the bright side: LibreOffice is about 2 years ahead, thanks to Oracle!
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LibreOffice is the office suite with the momentum at this point. So I agree in part, except it it is the Apache Foundation that should stop and let the organization created specifically for this purpose, The Document Foundation, to develop the premier FLOSS office suite.
Oracle had OpenOffice frozen in place for over a year. You can't just freeze a project and expect the community will just sit there doing nothing for that long of a time.
On another note, I find the LibreOffice name much better. Although p
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I think this is incorrect. I use OO at work remote at my home office. Work is in another state, they all use MS.
I started with LO but ran into a couple of significant issues. This was in the October-December 2012 timeframe, with the then current release.
1. My tech sent me an Excel file of data and plots. The plots were on the same sheet as the data, four columns of data, four plots. In LO one of the plots has the wrong data--it is plotting a different column than specified in the Excel file. I consider this
Re:Why this dilution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has there been any significant work on OpenOffice since the split?
I'm not crazy about having efforts diluted, but if they have to pick one and go forward with it, are there any advantages to going with OpenOffice rather than LibreOffice, aside from the less dreadful name?
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I am pleased with OpenOffice (v3.4.1). I have not seen any need to try LibreOffice personally. My take is that both are developing new features.
Regarding new features in OpenOffice, https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/merging_lotus_symphony_allegro_moderato [apache.org] talks about what is being merged into OpenOffice from IBM's Lotus Symphony. As long as IBM continues to develop Lotus Symphony, I think that OpenOffice will benefit earlier than LibreOffice as IBM tends to do a lot with the Apache foundation. I say ea
Re:Why this dilution? (Score:4, Informative)
I am a Java developer, love the JVM, but if you think merging the Lotus Symphony code base with OpenOffice will be a good thing, you never used Symphony. Symphony is the Eclipse platform with added plug-ins that add old OpenOffice code to it. If an office suite is already a big program, running a big JVM process with OpenOffice inside is an awful monster. In the other hand LibreOffice is removing Java dependencies where it shouldn't be used, like the embedded database and some wizards and using it for what is a good tool, Java APIs for automation and access to core LibreOffice functionality from Java programs
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Open Office is more or less playing catch up right now to LibreOffice.
And it kills me that such a good product has such a ridiculous name. It's a complete embarassment to say out loud. /rant
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And it kills me that such a good product has such a ridiculous name. It's a complete embarassment to say out loud. /rant
Hey, I didn't realize that they finally renamed OpenOffice, getting rid of the idiotic ".org" at the end of the name. Naming a piece of software after a website made it sound far stupider than "LibreOffice" ever did.
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Star Division was bought by Sun and the bits they owned were open sourced as OpenOffice. It was then renamed OpenOffice.org once they noticed someone else owned the OpenOffice trademark.
For years, Sun contributed 80% of the new code. Novell contributed about 10% and sulked that they weren't recognised as much as they felt they should be.
Novell started go-oo.org, containing their own patches to OpenOffice.org, including several things that were of dubiou
"migrating German code comments to English" (Score:2)
Great, now I will know what the function with the following comment does:
"Gott vergib mir, das ist eine schreckliche Hack!"
Re:"migrating German code comments to English" (Score:5, Funny)
Great, now I will know what the function with the following comment does:
"Gott vergib mir, das ist eine schreckliche Hack!"
And, as we already know, this should speed up builds because your US-made compiler won't have to consult the German dictionary all the time to find out what all the texts actually mean.
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posting AC since I don't have a /. account.
in fact, not "code-comments" in LibreOffice were german. Rather it were "germanisms" in the code itself. I can't remember specifics ATM, but it was naming of variables and functions that "looked akward" to native english speakers.
I'm not aiming for informative modpoints, although appreciated :)
I know the specifics because I speak english & german and considered attacking this bug 1-2 semesters ago.
Re: "migrating German code comments to English" (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who did a lot of those translations I may be able to explain the necessity for these:
First, LO's source code is old and massive. Most of the comments I translated were written somewhere in between 1999 and 2004.
Second, as anyone who has ever dealt with old, mature, complex code bases will tell you: you need as much information as possible about your code. This is due to bug fixes and quirks that evolved that code over time (=maturing a code base).
Of course, many of the comments are simple and obv
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English natives dont have a conception of masculine vs feminine words, and it honestly is a little confusing; Why must a word have a gender?
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English natives dont have a conception of masculine vs feminine words
Of course they have, it's an obligatory grammatical category in all Indo-European languages. The fact that in most sentences, the gender is degenerated, doesn't actually matter. (BTW, I'm not a native, but wouldn't "notion" be more natural than "conception"? The latter sounds like German or French English.)
Why must a word have a gender?
Because the language works that way, for many values of language. Non-IE languages often have noun classes (for "'masculine' versus 'feminine'", substitute "'round things' versus 'long, thin things'"). Yo
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The point is that grammatical gender for non-living things (and sometimes even for living ones) is assigned completely arbitrary, and is not even consistent from language to language, often even between ones in the same group. Why is "sun" masculine in French, feminine in German and neuter in Russian? (yes, I know about association with pagan gods, but from modern perspective it doesn't make any sense - and there are many things where there aren't even any mythological roots to derive the gender from)
And if
Re:"migrating German code comments to English" (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, English is a pretty strange Indo-European language. It has a lot of complexity where it doesn't really add anything, like the plethora of irregular verbs, or the many words that end with the letter e for historical reasons, despite it not being pronounced for centuries. And in other areas, the simpler rules of English come at the cost of expressive ability. Almost non-existent verb conjugation makes things simple, but it also requires 3 words to say "we will run" as opposed to a heavily conjugated verb like "correremos".
Compulsive linguistic fetishist chiming in here:
The "irregular verbs" are not irregular in English (at least, not if you're referring to the stem changers; there are some true irregulars but not many). Swim-swam-swum, sing-sang-sung, etc. (and several other varieties of stem-changers) are ALL regular. They were mislabeled as irregular by 19th century prescriptivist grammarians who didn't know what they're talking about (and who thought that Latin was "perfect" and that any deviation from Latin represented grammatical corruption). The "irregular" verbs are Anglo-Saxon strong verbs. They follow clear, regular patterns and pre-date the influence of Norman French.
Spelling peculiarities are a product of the (relative) freezing of orthography with the invention of the printing press. This is not a linguistic issue, it's one of editorial culture. We COULD have changed spellings as pronunciations changed (and other Indo-European cultures did change their orthography as pronunciation changed in the centuries since the invention of the printing press), but for political reasons have not. It has nothing to do with the language itself (other than the fact that freezing orthography tends to retard language change).
Verb conjugation was not nonexistent in Anglo-saxon words (your "irregular verbs"), and its slow disappearance is the result of Norman influence. Conjugation in Anglo-Saxon was a stem-change, not an inflection. Initially, the only nonconjugating words were borrowed from Latin and Norman French. Over time, because of the prestige status of Norman French, those words became the new normal in English, and old strong verbs begun to lose their conjugations. As an example, it used to be Climb-clamb-clumb, not Climb-climbed-climbed.
Your "we will run" vs "correremos" point about the Spanish being shorter is silly. The English version is 3 syllables and the Spanish is 4. So which is actually shorter to say?
English is weird for an Indo-European language because it is actually a hybrid of the Germanic and Romance branches. This hybridization stripped out incompatible features between the two source families.
Still some basic issues (Score:2)
I use LO as my main tool but there's a few things it can't do it should be able to do:
Embed an OLE object as an ICON
Paste a spreadsheet table where I put it not where LO anchors it
Have the same bullets as the document viewed in MSO
Save ODP -> PPTX better and cleaner than ODP -> PPT
Show how export to PDF is different from print to PDF, since they are
Markup-Redline in DOC/DOCX saved as ODF still doesn't work
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Until Java can be exorcised, this project is a non-starter.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:4, Funny)
Goddamn idiot mods can't handle the truth! The fact is, java must go. It's a toy 'language' to teach little kids about computers. It was never meant to do real computational work. For that you need assembly, or straight up binary.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:4, Insightful)
...or straight up binary.
Unless you're keying the bits with a set of telegraph keys attached to your CPU's data bus, it's cheating!
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Ezekiel 23:20
ancient porn ?
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You had two rocks?
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Goddam idiot AC,
Dude, did you actually read the original post?
It was never meant to do real computational work. For that you need assembly, or straight up binary.
If that's not an obvious (and actually quite amusing) troll, then I don't know what is.
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Go back to coding in VB6, asswipe.
False dichotomy alert!
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You dont etch magnetized disks, unless you wish them to cease functioning.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Evidence please? Java is alive, kicking and screaming. Java 8 is coming down the turnpike. Java isn't going away anytime soon.
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But last time i checked, LibreOffice still complained about missing java runtime (on my OSX) although i have switched it off in LibreOffice prefs.
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Java is optional in modern LO/OO (I seem to remember Star Office being enirely in Java ~2001). I was making a remark at the OP about Java in general.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Funny)
write once, infect anywhere?
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh look heres one from 4 weeks ago.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57563567-263/new-malware-exploiting-java-7-in-windows-and-unix-systems/ [cnet.com]
Its worth noting that there have been 3 new iterations of Java in the last 4 weeks, each fixing security holes that the last left. All software has security flaws, but Im beginning to think that all security flaws had their genesis in JRE; it certainly seems like an endless source of them.
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Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenOffice/LibreOffice is like 90+% C++. The Java bits are mostly irrelevant.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Informative)
And you do not need the JRE to run LibreOffice.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenOffice/LibreOffice is like 90+% C++. The Java bits are mostly irrelevant.
To be precise, as computed by sloccount [dwheeler.com], libreoffice-4.0.0.3.tar.xz contains:
cpp: 3990644 (87.04%)
java: 400958 (8.75%)
ansic: 91036 (1.99%)
perl: 42456 (0.93%)
python: 17392 (0.38%)
sh: 17256 (0.38%)
yacc: 8228 (0.18%)
cs: 6648 (0.15%)
asm: 3269 (0.07%)
objc: 2602 (0.06%)
lex: 2030 (0.04%)
awk: 907 (0.02%)
pascal: 800 (0.02%)
csh: 235 (0.01%)
lisp: 115 (0.00%)
php: 104 (0.00%)
sed: 7 (0.00%)
However, as Desler said, the Java bits are actually optional.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:4, Funny)
Why didn't they write a little Fortran, Cobol and D to round the number of languages to an even twenty?
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No brainfuck? Can that tool even recognize Whitespace? Hmph...
On a more serious note, why the hell are there 6 kloc of C# and a hundred lines of PHP in there??
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what the heck are the 115 lines of lisp for?
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what the heck are the 115 lines of lisp for?
Funny that you worry about Lisp, while the PHP code leaves you unfazed. :-)
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Funny)
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The last 5 years introduced 2 enterprise Java standards enhancements which were in fact very big deals. The JVM and the language itself are getting rather slow, but its not the job of a language to constantly adapt to a changing world. That's why Java has thousands of potentially competing libraries that sit on top of the base implementation. The same could be said for C/C++, or most other languages. The innovation will come from the communities driving them.
Does Java have a vibrant development community? I
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It's here to stay and for last 5 years it has not introduced anything new significant - nothing wrong with that - there is nothing wrong with a stable language (it's something C++ people don't seem to get).
It's not so much stable as it is slow-moving. It's getting most of the same features that e.g. C# does, it just takes twice as long.
But as far as "anything new significant" goes... did you see the current drafts of Project Lambda? That's supposed to be a part of Java 8...
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, you had better tell that to Google since it is the core language for all Android apps. You seem to be confusing a few vulnerabilities in Oracle's Java Runtime Environment with the entire Java software ecosystem. In general, Linux systems running Libre Office tend to not even use Oracles JRE. Java isn't going anywhere.
Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Informative)
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It also trades back and forth with C as the single most popular programming language in the world, on which huge amounts of server software is written-- almost twice as popular as C++, which is what most of LibreOffice is actually written in and three times more popular than C#, its biggest competitor in the bytecode-on-virtual-machine environment.
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Re:But what if Java is the next WAIS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Java is dead?
Last time I checked, enterprise shops are still hiring more Java developers than any other kind. There are a lot of reasons I don't care for Java, but I would never in a million years say Java is dead.
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In twenty years, it will be the COBOL of the time... except of course COBOL will probably still be around then too.
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That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even C may die
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Grammar checking is always fuzzy in a computer algorithm. And because people do not understand grammar (especially in pure English) they rely on word processor nonsense.
That is why it is always crap, and perhaps also explains why (especially young) people cannot do correct grammar (i,e, correct grammar is a bit hard to learn, like it takes work - but letting the computer do it [wrongly] is easy).
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"This here grammar check don't work none
"This here grammar check don't work any."
"This here grammar checks don’t work any." (MS Office says this is correct)
Clearly, LibreOffice sucks donkey balls.
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"This here grammar checks don’t work any." (MS Office says this are correct)
FTFY, MS style.
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Because it's a spelling checker not a grammar checker.
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Strange, given that the site recommends OpenOffice and Gnumeric as alternative spreadsheet applications.
Sorry about that (Score:3)
I can't speak for everyone else, but I was answering questions and testing bugs until 11am. Then I was very tired and got a couple of hours of sleep.
The Infrastructure team was trying to migrate several of the websites over to a new server about the same time as 4.0 was released. After some brief downtime, everything pulled through. Due to a perfect storm of problems during the previous two days, the server upgrades were delayed all the way until release day (oops!)
If you grabbed 3.6.5 this morning, you did