> This defies belief.
>
> It has been my experience that as soon as you ask Word to do anything 
> remotely nontrivial, it slows to a crawl, produces gigantic files, and 
> eventually starts to function eratically (e.g., sections of text being 
> duplicated, random formatting changes, deleted text "moving" to other 
> parts of the document, etc.)
>
> Quite how you could produce really *large* documents with it I have no 
> idea...

Heh, I would post one here but I suspect that's not allowed :-)

Seriously, we never seem to have any problems editting these files. Maybe 
because everyone is using the same version of Word and the template files 
are not corrupted to start with :-)

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>> M$ Office 2007, full package, £350.
> 
> ...but some people do (usually if they are a company) and so companies 
> need to take advantage of this.  Notice how the "home" version of Office 
> 2007 is 60 pounds but the full version is 350 like you said.  What's the 
> difference? The 6x price increase certainly doesn't seem to be 
> justified, but I suspect that way it makes the most money for MS overall.

That's because the "home" version has most of the stuff missing. I 
actually fell into this trap myself; I was asked to obtain a copy of 
Office, so I bought the home version. When we got it, we discovered that 
it doesn't contain the required components. So then we had to go spend 
*more* money...

>> If you think that's "cheap", then good for you.
> 
> It seems completely in-line with other software available, which I 
> assume has kind of settled down to the market price.

Are you crazy?? Most of the software I see around me costs £20 - £40. 
£350 is seriously expensive!

Hell, even Apple sell their stuff for less than that, and Apple are 
legendary for being expensive.

I wouldn't mind paying vast amounts of money for something if I got a 
quality product for it. (E.g., I own several software synthesizers which 
cost almost as much as M$ Office, or even more.) What makes me angry is 
paying vast sums of money for a crap product.

>> If I paid that amount of money for something that didn't work right, 
>> I'd be *pissed*! o_O
> 
> I don't think they expect individuals to buy their software...

Well, true, but you'd think in a commercial environment, wasted time due 
to preventable software issues would be an even bigger deal...

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>> Quite how you could produce really *large* documents with it I have no 
>> idea...
> 
> Heh, I would post one here but I suspect that's not allowed :-)

Oh, I'm sure you've done it. It just seems so utterly contrary to my 
experience that it seems impossible. A bit like zero-gravity...

> Seriously, we never seem to have any problems editting these files. 
> Maybe because everyone is using the same version of Word and the 
> template files are not corrupted to start with :-)

At college and uni I wasn't using any templates. :-P Nor on my mum's PC, 
for that matter.

And maybe there are corrupted templates, but that begs the question: how 
did they *get* corrupted to start with? Maybe because of yet another 
Word crash? Hmm? :-P

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> Are you crazy?? Most of the software I see around me costs £20 - £40. £350 
> is seriously expensive!

60 pounds for a pretty complex word processor, spreadsheet and presentation 
package seems completely reasonable to me.

290 extra pounds for an email client, desktop publisher and database seems a 
bit extreme, but this is aimed at companies, not individuals, so of course 
they make the price higher.

The alternative is to charge 100 pounds for the home edition, and 200 for 
the professional edition, but I suspect they would make vastly less money 
that way.

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Invisible wrote:
> M$'s problems are because they produce poor quality products.

That's their reputation, but the OS doesn't have significantly more bugs per 
line than Linux does, according to SANS.

I'd love to see something objective to back up your assertion that MS 
products are poor quality, other than "everybody knows that."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Invisible wrote:
> unecessarily complicated, 

That kind of depends on whether you need the complicated bits, don't you 
think? The opposite of "unnecessarily complicated" is "lacking features."

> poorly documented, 

MS has some of the best documentation out there, and they teach classes in 
using their stuff. Just because you never learned it doesn't mean it isn't 
out there.

> resource-inefficient, 

Somewhat, but what are you comparing it to?  How resource-efficient *you* 
could make it if you didn't have any commercial constraints?

> insecure, 

Somewhat. Much of that is due to people not installing patches or people not 
using the system as designed.

> Let's suppose that a particular Word document is corrupted. Why should 
> that make Word crash? Shouldn't it just pop up a message saying "I can't 
> read this file, it seems to be corrupted"? Isn't that what "graceful 
> failure" is all about? But no, Word just crashes outright.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. If it's corrupted in a way that's 
hard to check, it crashes, because if it didn't, you'd be using up even 
*more* resources to be doing the checking. See?

> I opened the same file in OpenOffice, and it just opened up as if there 
> was nothing wrong with it. I saved it again, and it has worked in Word 
> ever since.

It probably deleted whatever it was that was confusing Office.

> Why is it that Word, a premium product designed and produced by the 
> richest software company on earth, cannot do something that OpenOffice 
> can? 

Why is it that OpenOffice can't do something that Word can?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Invisible wrote:
> desired. (E.g., I managed to find a KB article explaining how to use the 
> Recovery Console. Except that, actually, it just duplicates, word for 
> word, the terse command help built into the Recovery Console...)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

First link on "use recovery console" at msdn.microsoft.com.

You *are* searching MSDN, right?

What did you expect it to tell you? It's a command line interpreter. Looking 
for how to use it is going to give you the list of command lines it interprets.

I suspect what you're really saying is "I had a specific problem I didn't 
know how to solve, and I couldn't find a specific piece of documentation 
telling me how to solve that except for the ones that required me to learn 
more general priciples"?

> trying to do anything moderately nontrivial, the documentation tends to 
> not help at all... 

I disagree. Plus, if you're trying to do something *really* sophisticated, 
like run a company's infrastructure, you go to a class to learn how to do 
it, just like with every other major piece of software or hardware.

It sounds like you have specific problems you want solved, like "my backup 
tape doesn't rewind before it tries to verify the backup", and you're 
looking for documentation to solve that exact problem. Such documentation 
*never* exists, for any product.

Gee, ya know, the owner's manual of my car doesn't tell me how to drive *or* 
how to fix it! What do ya know?

> I don't know, but you'd think they could at least install an exception 
> handler around the load routine so that if it fails, it doesn't crash 
> all of Word, just the document load engine. Or *something*...

When you say "crash", what do you mean?  It just exits with a GPF or 
something?  Guess what: that's the exception handler. :-)

> OTOH, OO is developed by a bunch of bored boffins in their spare time, 

No it's not. It was developed by Sun so they could sell office software that 
doesn't need to run on Intel hardware.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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scott wrote:
> which tells me that you can use bootcfg without the /scan to avoid 
> spending hours scanning all your drives.

Hours scanning your drives? bootcfg /scan is the equivalent of building 
boot.ini, or the GRUB menu. It's not chkdsk.

> Maybe the load routine works fine, it just loads some corrupted data so 
> when another part of the program comes to use it that bit crashes?

Welcome to unsafe languages. :-)

> I think you overestimate how many people MS has working on such things.  

And how much money they have. They just laid off a few thousand people, too.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Invisible wrote:
> The command descriptions given here are a word-for-word reproduction of 
> the interactive command help. It does not explain anywhere, for example, 
> that bootcfg is merely a programatic way of editing BOOT.INI.

Given the description of the name and options, what did you *think* it was for?

 > (Also, it
> seems that /scan, /add and /rebuild *all* scan your disks for hours - 
> I've tried it.)

Really? I can't imagine why it would take hours to scan for Windows 
installations.  Mine never took more than maybe three or four seconds. Maybe 
if your disks are screwed up enough you need to scan them, it takes longer.

> *This* article explains it properly:
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980

But, you know, MS documentation never covers the stuff you need.

> Thinking about it, the load routine probably does just dump a bunch of 
> pointers directly into Word, which probably then trips the rendering 
> engine over or something. (I've seen Word go into in infinite loop 
> instead of crashing also. That, at least, you'd think would be 
> detectable quite easily.)

Doing so would require time and resources, both programming and end-user. 
*You* had this problem, so *you* think the bloat in this instance is OK. But 
you complain the program takes too many resources, because it's doing things 
*you* don't personally need.

> Uh... they're the largest software corporation on the face of the Earth? 

And they do a bunch more than just working on Office.

> Well, if M$ doesn't consider "making our products work properly" to be a 
> "profitable" thing to do, then there's your answer. :-}

Nobody considers "making our products work properly" a profitable thing, if 
you count "solving every last bug that someone somewhere might encounter" to 
be "working properly."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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Invisible wrote:
> Fixing every tiny bug might be infeasible, but you'd think they could at 
> least fix the huge ones.

Like what? That you had *one* document that was corrupt and couldn't be opened?

> Anyway, somebody asked why people hate M$. And I gave an answer: because 
> M$ does not consider performance or reliability to be "important" enough 
> to make any attempt to improve them.

Your hyperbole is amusing. "I hit a bug in Word. Therefore, neither 
performance nor reliability is worth spending *any* time working on."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Ouch ouch ouch!"
   "What's wrong? Noodles too hot?"
   "No, I have Chopstick Tunnel Syndrome."

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