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    Good (Score:3, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:34PM (#40694129)

    Good. XP needs to be wiped out.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
    by HappyEngineer ( 888000 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:06AM (#40694331) Homepage

    Good. XP needs to be wiped out.

    Why? Do you just hate old software that works or did it run over your dog?

    Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
    by symbolset ( 646467 ) * on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:45AM (#40694563) Journal
    Old software has bits that rust. They oxidize into AOL subscriptions. You don't want that.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
    by 0ld_d0g ( 923931 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:10AM (#40694713)

    IMO its not the users, its the developers. Because of a retarded default setup, XP allowed developers to ship code assuming the user will always run as root and Vista broke that. Developers are now forced to reduce the number of - Add Admin priveledges to this process token - UAC prompts which can be jarring to the end user experience. For that alone I think novice users should be moved away from XP as soon as possible. In the enterprise I think its not so bad since the software used can be carefully chosen and you can run XP as non-admin.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
    by xQx ( 5744 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:00AM (#40694985)
    I worked at a school in the nt4 days.

    I have adored UAC since it's release, because of exactly that reason - it forces developers to develop properly.

    The amount of times I was on the phone to software companies who were flabbergasted that I wasn't running their software (and didn't see it as an acceptable solution to their software failures) as administrator.

    It was just discraseful.

    Thank you Microsoft for releasing vista. - Now mod me to hell for saying that!

        Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
        by SpooForBrains ( 771537 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:50AM (#40695831)

        You MAY be able to use directory junctions / NTFS simlinks to get round this issue.

Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
by Sir_Sri ( 199544 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:10AM (#40694709)

A home user running xp doesn't care about office 2013, and a business user on XP would reasonably move to 7 before getting office 2013 anyway.

XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'. It has compatibility and security issues that will no longer get fixed, and as time goes on new software will rely on libraries and so on that just don't exist on XP (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).

With linux these sorts of problems are simply solved by a free upgrade (which, like windows, comes with features you may not want and so on), but with MS they charge you money for it, but the core problem would still be there, you just don't get an excuse of 'oh but I can't afford Ubuntu 12 when I still have 10' the way you do with XP and 7.

That something 'works' is a moving target in the IT sector. Does it support flash? How about the latest version? Will it support HTML5 and whatever video encoding scheme your browser wants? Will anyone even want a browser without hardware acceleration in a year or two? Is there a new UI API that just doesn't exist on an old version? Etc. The world plods along, and eventually it's not practical to make your software for an old operating system, as relatively important companies start making that transition your computer will 'work' less and less, in the same way IE6 works but doesn't.

I'm not sure it's there yet, but XP clinging to life could start to cause issues as security and compatibility move past what is reasonably possible on XP.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
    by SplashMyBandit ( 1543257 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:26AM (#40694795)

    > (see the hardware acceleration on DX10 class hardware mentioned).
    Nope, that is entirely a ploy by Microsoft to mov people off WinXP. There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it. How do I know this? well OpenGL will give you DX11 effects no matter what the operating system. But Microsoft had to find ways to move users clinging on to XP (and bring in more revenue even though users won't be doing much different with Win7 that they aren't doing with WinXP) and holding back newer versions of DirectX/Direct3D was one way of milking the cow. Unfortunately the vast bulk of Windows users don't know about that and have been played (again) by Microsoft (although, most won't care I suppose, but that is up to them - the point is that Microsoft gave them no choice for their own cashflow reasons, not technical ones as you allude to).

    Once MS decided to abandon support for XP with newer DirectX versions I'm sure I gave them more technical flexibility in what they could do - but it was not technical limitations in XP that stop you having 'DirectX 11' style effects - like I said, OpenGL can do the same effects on Windows XP and many more operating systems - since OpenGL is no longer subject to the whims of any single company (unlike Microsoft and DirectX). Hence, I'm developing my modern jet combat simulator in OpenGL with GLSL shaders - just as the X-Plane developer famously did too: http://techhaze.com/2010/03/interview-with-x-plane-creator-austin-meyer/ [techhaze.com] read how chosing OpenGL over DirectX resulted in business opportunities that personally made him $US 3.5 million dollars in a few months when his OpenGL code was very easily ported to the iPad/iPhone unlike DirectX apps that are stuck on the Windows desktop [which is the whole reason Microsoft tricked developers into building workflows using DirectX, since MS knew this would make it hard for game developers to leave, which makes it hard for gamers to leave - it is all about the 'lock-in'].

    Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:56AM (#40694963)

    > $US 3.5 million dollars

    3.5 million US dollars dollars

Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
by jaymemaurice ( 2024752 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:45AM (#40695537)

It's not about weather or not they can make the DX10 API work with XP, it's weather or not they want to spend the time to do so and deal with the steaming shit it will become- there could be things like the way memory is allocated or cpu-gpu tasks are scheduled in extensions to the kernel - though they could work around them them them have made XP DX10 not as compatible or efficient if it were a seperate addon without kernel changes. Sure, maybe they could have made those kernel changes and included in a service pack. And with no profit on a decade old OS. Then again the FreeBSD guys could have made UFS completely backwards compatible between BSD4 and 5 or Linux could still allow you to run the 2.2 kernel with the latest GLIBC compiled userland.

Your points about DirectX vs. OpenGL being multi platform are valid, but I have noticed not all OpenGL graphics drivers are compatible with all OpenGL applications. As for the DirectX lock in - the sad truth is many windows developers is they often need the handholding of the IDE and Microsoft environment to be any sort of sucessful. Without them, there would be far fewer. That lock-in is lower start-up cost to see a project through to its release.

Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
by asdf7890 ( 1518587 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:07AM (#40695637)

There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.

There are technical reasons for it not being easy to support though. The driver model for the graphics sub-system in XP is quite different, and there are differences in low-level memory management that mighh be significant too. Because DX is quite tightly coupled with those areas (whether this is a good thing is another discussion) it will be affected by such differences and may need different code paths to handle them and that extra jiggery-pokery would need aggressive testing. The time (and therefore cost) of supporting DX10+ on XP would most definitely not be trivial.

Re:

"XP is approaching the end of life where you can say it 'works'."

Yet earlier today I saw a person browsing 4chan on a 75MHz Pentium running Windows 95.

Ahem, what was your point? Looks like software even older than that is 'working' just fucking fine to me.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
    by justforgetme ( 1814588 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:00AM (#40695303) Homepage

    That wasn't windows 95 it was the next iteration of kde ;-)

    Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
    by AngryDeuce ( 2205124 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:20AM (#40695697)
    Their suggestion to delete System32 worked great for speeding up my computer, too!

    Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
    by jaymemaurice ( 2024752 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:36AM (#40695781)

    My laptop and Windows installation is metric. Do I delete System25?

Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
by symbolset ( 646467 ) * on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:52AM (#40694935) Journal
The stepwise nature of the move-along is the issue here. Once you subscribe to the Office leash you are doomed to be led by it. Here boy. Heel. Sit. That's a good boy.

    Re:Better (Score:5, Funny)
    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:26AM (#40694459)

    I, on the other hand, will be using only spotted owl feather quills and writing with ink made from the blood of baby pandas. It is more expensive, but the medium is, as you know, the message.

Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
by mister2au ( 1707664 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:46AM (#40694907)

I run Office Libre on Linux.

LibreOffice !

And for a lot of us who are power users or make a living using word-processors and spreadsheets, $200 every 3-5 years is a solid investment in quality 'tools'.

And, no, just because you open/save the format doesn't mean it has the same functionality ...

        Re:You poor sap (Score:4, Insightful)
        by Jeeeb ( 1141117 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:49AM (#40695247)
        That and authors and solicitors and technical documentation writers, patent writers, translators .etc. also use the word processor as their primary tool. Since he/she mentions spreadsheets as well he could also be involved in "small-data" data-modeling, office administration or similar. Just because you lack the imagination to see otherwise doesn't mean he/she is stuck in a low level job. Although even if he/she was there would be no need to be an offensive ass about it. Typists and secretaries play a necessary role in society.

    Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
    by tehcyder ( 746570 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:42AM (#40695523) Journal

    Did you just call Excel a "quality tool"?

    It's a good spreadsheet. It's not a full blown database, it's not capable of processing TB of data from the LHC in real time, it's not a scientific textbook publishing package. It's a spreadsheet.

    I would be interested in what other spreadsheets have to offer that Excel doesn't. The one in LibreOffice is very similar to Excel. I've used GnuCalc and others which are basically lite versions of Excel and perfectly adequate, but if Excel is not a "quality tool" what is?

    Word Processing at 1GB of RAM

    Who would have thought that word processing needs 1GB of RAM?
     
    Especially from the "640k ought to be enough for anybody" company !
        Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
        by Higgs Bosun ( 2676655 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:42AM (#40695525)

        And (optionally I think) a DirectX 10 graphics card. I think that's even more implausible than the 1GB RAM. Did they port Office to WPF or something?

        Yeahyeah I know, Direct 2D, fancy hardware accelerated text, etc. It's still kind of funny needing a GPU for documents.

Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
by sentientbeing ( 688713 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:38PM (#40694141)
2 gig of RAM to type a letter

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:41PM (#40694157) Journal

    I wonder what the requirements for Notepad will be.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
    by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ikihsam'> on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:06AM (#40694325) Homepage

    Somewhere between 640k and hell.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:07AM (#40694683)

Same as always. Take the amount of data being worked with, multiply it by two, and then lock up the entire machine.

        Re: But you should see Clippy (Score:4, Insightful)
        by Compaqt ( 1758360 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @07:12AM (#40696499) Homepage

        The funniest thing is "DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration." Say what?

        You need hardware acceleration to write a memo? Or enter numbers into a spreadsheet?

        Is that for Clippy?

        I don't know if we can really complain. I mean, with Gnome/Ubuntu requiring 3D for the basic desktop environment anymore.

        But still.

    Re: But you should see Clippy (Score:5, Informative)
    by wmac1 ( 2478314 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @07:59AM (#40696945)

    Word processor pages are rendered similar to a web browser. We now use graphics card acceleration for browsers. Why not for publishing software?

Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ikihsam'> on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:44PM (#40694169) Homepage

Yeah, I just had to make sure here on that one. Open office... 27.3MB of ram in use with my largest technical letter open, which is 173 pages long. Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
    by Dadoo ( 899435 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:58PM (#40694259) Journal

        Okay there MS, you guys are insane.

    Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.

    The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
    by multiben ( 1916126 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:05AM (#40694315)
    For simple documents, it's good. But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. It has excellent integration between other MS stuff like excel, project etc. I have seriously tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't quite cut it yet.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:25AM (#40694457)

    If you're writing a document that complex, you probably shouldn't be using MS-office or libreoffice or any other WYSIWYG editor.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
    by multiben ( 1916126 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:29AM (#40694467)
    I'm sorry, I can only see half of your reply. I can't see the bit where you suggest an alternative?

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Informative)
    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:35AM (#40694491)

    LaTex or something that allows you to separate the content from the presentation. It's something that tends to make things a lot easier if you decide later that you want different formatting or if you need a copy for two different audiences, but where the audiences can't for one reason or another use the same formatting. Like say if you're sending one copy to somebody that always uses a mobile phone.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
    by hairyfeet ( 841228 ) <bassbeast1968 AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:28AM (#40695121) Journal

    Riiiight, that is like suggesting the replacement for Excel is buying some cluster time at CERN. LaTeX is about the most user UNFRIENDLY software that has ever been designed, a piece of software that wears obtuse and fiddly like badges of honor, so far the ONLY ones I've ever seen use it are those writing their thesis in some tech area like engineering.

    If you want to replace Office it has to be user friendly, not a royal PITA with a giant learning curve. This is why geeks don't understand why Linux never goes anywhere on the desktop, they don't mind fiddly ass CLI crap nor spending a weekend learning bash commands and can't understand the average user would rather spend the week at the DMV than deal with that shit. Make LaTeX as user friendly as MS Office and then no problem but as it is? A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than spend hours learning that mess, like actually writing what they needed a WYSIWYG word processor for in the first place!

    Re:

    A good 99% of the population will never bother, they have better things to do than study medicine, like actually healing the sick through prayer and blood-letting.
    Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
    by tehcyder ( 746570 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @05:14AM (#40695931) Journal
    I absolutely agree with you, but criticising LaTeX on slashdot is a bit like posting that the Pope's a paedophile on the Opus Dei chat forums.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @05:24AM (#40695983) Homepage Journal

So, to recap the thread:
1 openoffice (i'd say libreoffice) does office work well
2 but not for complex documents
3 but for complex document office is not good either, you would be better off with latex
4 latex? we need simpler stuff
right, so GOTO 1

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
    by DeathFromSomewhere ( 940915 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:44AM (#40694557)
    A neckbear!? Sweet jesus tell me how I can get one of those.

    Re:

    Use Lyx. I did for my thesis in an area of theoretical physics and never once needed to type arcane commands in. Other people even remarked on how my equations looked 10 times better than for anyone else.
    Re:Lol (Score:4, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:36AM (#40695167)

    Actually, LaTeX has one enormous advantage for collaborative work - you can put the document under source control and have multiple people editing it.

    LaTeX has a a horrible learning curve, but I now wouldn't use anything else for anything serious - particularly if there is math included.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
by backwardMechanic ( 959818 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:36AM (#40695173) Homepage
Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites. If you write you document in an office suite, and then move it to LaTeX, you miss out on most of the benefit. Equations are one (no, the equation editor in MS Word is not sufficient). Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Re:Lol (Score:4, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:27AM (#40695443)

I just submitted my PhD thesis which I wrote using LaTeX. Two of my friends just submitted their thesis as well, written in MS Word. They probably spent half their time fixing incorrect figure numbers, footnotes and problems in the table of contents. And forget about adding an MS Word file to a versioning system in any meaningful way, or easily breaking up the document into smaller files.

What is more, I submitted my examination copy of the thesis in single-spaced format (to save paper). For the final copy one-half or double-spaced is required. In LaTeX this is as difficult as changing one line in the pre-amble of the document. In MS Word this is likely going to be a week of getting all the figures positioned "just right" again.

I can understand that people outside of comp sci aren't particularly taken to LaTeX, but I'd rather shoot myself than having to write my thesis in MS Word.

LaTeX is anything but past its expiry date, especially in academia. Properly used LaTeX will always produce superior typesetting than any office suite.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Informative)
by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:06AM (#40695633) Journal

LaTeX is one of those things that has clung to life long past its expiry date.

No.

We still see it in academia a lot,

Almost everyone in academia has a mcahine capable or running Office. The rest have machines capable of running openoffice. Many universities are site-licensed with Office. Yet LaTeX persists because people in academia find that it fits their needs better.

and at this point the advice I give people is write your document in some sort of 'office' suite with a half assed effort at formatting, and then put it into LaTeX at the end (or paragraph by paragraph if you need things like equations for the content to make sense).

Then you're a total lunatic.

The office suites are poor editors, and they don't support version control in any meaningful manner. Yes, I have struggled through change tracking and document merging. Compared to writing a document with several co-authors at different locations and using something sane, like git, the tools you advocate are essentially non-functional.

It's much easier to check spelling/grammar,

Now I know you're making shit up. Even vim has spell checking built in these days. And I've never met a grammar checker which didn't suck.

have revisions made by other people (with comments and suggested corrections and so on), in one of the office suits than it is with LaTeX.

LaTeX doesn't do revisions. Those are much better served by a revision control system. I've used CVS, git, SVN, Darcs, Mercurial and possibly others. I've also worked with the versioning features of a word processor. Once you have more than 2 authors and/or the authors are working at the same time, you need a proper VCS. The half-asses word processor ones suck.

Anfd you know you can write comments in LaTeX, right?

office suites are so much better.

You have actually failed to give any coherent argument as to how.

And good luck getting something like ArXiv to work with a word processor.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
by justforgetme ( 1814588 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:15AM (#40695375) Homepage

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.

Ohh, dear people please listen to this man! Please listen and give an end to the madness of the 2GB .doc file!

        Re:
        My spouse and I use LibreOffice daily for serious stuff -- it is fast and reliable, even on a machine from 2001. There is nothing major to complain about, except for MS monopoly on doc and docx formats, but that is not really a LibreOffice's fault. We convert everything to Adobe PDF, and the documents are guaranteed to look exactly the same on all systems, unlike MS docs, which are always a line or two off when opened on another computer. Where a .doc/.ppt is needed we export to Office 2003, because docx ex
                Re:

                Acrobat has had an option "fit to page" in its printing dialogue for at least 10 years. It'll scale the page by a few percent. Exactly the same pagination. No problem unless you have some critically sized diagrams.

                I'm in country that almost universally uses A4 paper. Yet most of the digital documents I get are sized "Letter" because that's the fucking default in Microsoft software and most people just accept that when installing. Also with American spelling (we use British) and American MDY date formats
        Re:
        I admire you for having document processing needs far above those of common folk like me. Hopefully someday I might be so powerful and influential that I must succumb to the needs of Microsoft to get my work done.

Re:
I think they use the same method our company does to set requirements: the specs of whatever desktop our dev director happens to have on his desk the day he signs off on the final build. "Seems to work fine for me on this one guys"

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Informative)
    by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:54AM (#40694609)

    The question though in this case isn't "what does it take to run office" so much as "what does it take to run any application in Windows 7 or Windows 8?"

    Those system specs are nearly identical to Windows 7's system recommendations.

    Essentially all the recommended system specs are saying is. "Your computer needs to run Windows 7, after that Office will be fine with whatever." If your OS is crapping out without any apps running (min OS specs) then you won't be running office smoothly either.

    And that's how specs should be done (Score:5, Insightful)
    by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:36AM (#40694843)

    It is stupid to relate just what the program needs. That doesn't tell an average user anything. If a program said "Requires 10MB of RAM, 50MB optimal," people would be confused, and might try it on ultra low spec systems. It should spec in terms of what the whole system, with OS and all, should have to run well.

    For example a number of modern games recommend 4GB of RAM. Now they are all 32-bit apps and anyone who knows about the Windows memory model knows this means they won't be designed to use more than 2GB of RAM themselves under normal circumstances. So why the recommendation then? Well they are counting on using most of that 2GB, so they want to make sure there's plenty left over for the OS, virus scanner, IM, Steam, and other things people might have running. The program itself may only need 2GB allocated to it to run ideally, but it won't get 2GB of memory unless the system has a good bit more.

    So makes sense to me you do things like Office in the same way. Also it makes sense to not be stingy on recommendations. Something I always hated back in the day was games that were under on their recommendations. They'd say something like "386 20MHz 1MB minimum, 486 25MHz 2MB recommended, 486 33MHz 2MB optimal." Now to me "optimal" means "runs really well cranked up" and "minimum" means "minimum to run reasonable." However what they really mean was "minimum to run the program at all, you can't really play at this level," and optimal meant "Runs reasonably well with this but you'll need a good bit more to crank it up. Said game would need like a 486 50MHz and 4MB to really run properly.

    Well we shouldn't do that. It should be spec'd in terms of a reasonable usable minimum, and a recommended that is actually good performance. Well, for 64-bit 7 I'd say 2GB is a realistic minimum. With that, you can run the OS and an app or two reasonably well.

    It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days. I have 16GB in my laptop just because why not? It bumped the cost hardly at all over 8GB.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Informative)
by Z34107 ( 925136 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:38AM (#40694507)

It's not that bad. Word 2010 uses ~95 MB of memory for an 11,461 page document [dropbox.com]. I sincerely doubt Word 2013 is much worse.

    Re:Lol (Score:4, Informative)
    by yuhong ( 1378501 ) <yuhongbao_386@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:05AM (#40694677) Homepage

    Yea, the minimum requirements listed include the RAM consumed by the OS.

        Re:
        Try Libre Office, this is one of the many improvements they have made.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:45PM (#40694177)

256k to write a letter, 1.99gb to display that letter with the Metro interface.

    Re:Lol (Score:5, Funny)
    by GigaplexNZ ( 1233886 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:10AM (#40694361)
    Except it doesn't work with the Metro interface.

Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:46PM (#40694187) Homepage

And yet, it doesn't seem to do all that much more than the old WYSIWYG office apps that ran on DOS and used 2 megabytes of RAM.

MS Office is like the Madden games -- every couple years we fork over money for an updated version, but football itself didn't change in the interim.

Re:
Maybe now people will stop giving me heat about the memory footprint I have from using EMACS as my mail client.

        Re:Wait a second! (Score:5, Funny)
        by c0lo ( 1497653 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:20AM (#40694435)

        I saw a Windows tablet at Staples the other day when I was picking up my Nexus 7. It's about twice as thick as any other tablet on display. I wonder why that is.

        My guess: thermal insulation... you see, it's bad when the components overheat because of the strain Office 2013 put on them, but is worse when the customers suffer burns because of it.

Re:Wait a second! (Score:5, Funny)
by symbolset ( 646467 ) * on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:47AM (#40694579) Journal
They need the extra thickness for the patent licenses.

Re:Wait a second! (Score:5, Interesting)
by hairyfeet ( 841228 ) <bassbeast1968 AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:19AM (#40695061) Journal

If its like the one I saw they are using some lame ass CPUs in them which means they need extra room to get the heat out through pipes and fans. why hasn't anybody put one of the AMD C or E series chips into a tablet? Those are nice chips, full 1080P video through HDMI thanks to the Radeon GPU and pretty low on battery suckage. I have one of the E350 netbooks and I get around 6 hours playing 720P and more if I'm just surfing and don't need bluetooth. It seems like it'd be perfect for a tablet and would let you run all your X86 programs, add a transformer style keyboard with extra battery and you'd have a tablet that turns into an all day laptop with full X86 compatibility, sounds sweet to me.

As for TFA...damn, can Ballmer and Sinofsky torpedo this company a little more? Why don't they just send a page to the XP and Vista users offering Libre Office or Google docs while they are at it? Between fracturing IE all to hell, followed by keeping many games on DX9 because they refused to backport to XP, to making sure all those Vista users (Yeah i know the number is dropping but there is still millions of them and they ARE supported until 2017 as far as EOL goes) won't buy their Office suite I swear MSFT couldn't be run any worse if the team leads were picked by Cook over at Apple. Its like watching the PHB at Dilbert just bumble a company straight into the ground.

OfficeMetro and WinMetro can DIAF (Score:3)
by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:49PM (#40694207)

From all indications, Office 2013 is just more metro UI devolution insanity from Microsoft.

Corporate IT will not have a problem skipping this upgrade cycle, and will be richer for it. No upgraded licenses to pay for to Microsoft, no new training required for users, and everybody is happier (except for the Microsoft people, of course).

    Re:
    I've actually been given the green light to try and make our apps work on WINE in Linux because of the Metro. interface. We either upgrade to Windows 7 and do it after then, or I get the apps working and we do it sooner. Either way, MS is dead here.

    Big problem for MS is that I work in education; We have no money and aging hardware as the norm. If Linux works here, they stand to lose BIG.

DirectX? (Score:3)
by Globe199 ( 442245 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:49PM (#40694213)

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?

    Re:DirectX? (Score:4, Interesting)
    by Jeeeb ( 1141117 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:01AM (#40694287)
    From the linked page:

    A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 Preview or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013 Preview. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 Preview requires a Microsoft DirectX 10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. However, if you or your users do not have a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013 Preview.

    Also it would seem the requirements are rounded to the nearest 0.5gb and probably are for extremely heavy usage cases.

Re:DirectX? (Score:5, Funny)
by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:01AM (#40694291)

Precisely why would Microsoft Office need DirectX? a 3D spreadsheet maybe? Maybe a really awesome animated book report?

Clippy3D.

    Re:

    It's because they had to rewrite the UI to deliver a high framerate with almost no latency. (No seriously.) And it actually is rational. When you're scrolling in something for instance with a mouse wheel it just moves in increments and you don't detect any lag. If however you attempt to scroll through a list with your finger and it trails behind a half second it will feel sluggish and weird. There are a number of phone and tablet apps I've used that have this lag and it's really annoying. If they wa
        Re:
        Alpha-blending, gradients and fonts can all be hardware accelerated by 2D accelerated cards (for example, Java2D does this for all Java drawing since JVM 1.6.0 u10 years ago). These are not 3D operations. No, the reason Microsoft are doing this is to move people off XP when those folks don't actually need to for functionality. Please don't confuse 2D acceleration with 3D acceleration (it is ridiculous!).

Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista (Score:3)
by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:51PM (#40694223)
Fine, have neither XP nor Vista. No mention of Ubuntu 12.04... meaning that's compatible probably?

    Re:Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista (Score:5, Funny)
    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:06AM (#40694321) Homepage Journal
    The box says "Windows 7 or better", so it should run in Ubuntu and MacOSX

        Re:

        Ubuntu seems to be doing their best to take the worst "features" of windows, macOs and linux and combine them into something worse than any of them. Ugh. If I look back from 2007 to now, I can only shake my head in disbelief.

        I've since moved on to arch linux and am happier for it.

Piracy? (Score:3, Insightful)
by xyzzyman ( 811669 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:52PM (#40694231)
Vista not being compatible is suprising to me, but XP support being dropped is acceptable. Who still running XP would actually be paying for Office 2013?

    Re:

    Oh please. XP is going to turn 11 when that thing comes out. It is time to move on and it is rediculous to keep supporting it. It is not a simple matter of a recompile either. Businesses will stop using it if no one writes software just like we still would be using IE 6 if Google didn't refuse to support it for docs and youtube. Then afterwards facebook and others chimed in and poof the users went away kicking and screaming but upgraded to Firefox or IE 7 or later.

    Same is true with XP. XP can't do HTML 5 in

I can see why they'd drop support for XP, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
by NervousNerd ( 1190935 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:55PM (#40694249) Journal
I can see why they'd drop support for XP, being that it's 11 years old now and that it's been succeeded by 3 versions now? But Vista? Really? Vista and 7 are very, very similar. They even back ported some of the 7 stuff to Vista around the time 7 was released with the "platform update". This is a marketing reason, not a technical reason

    I dunno (Score:4, Insightful)
    by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:38AM (#40694861)

    I can see two sides.

    On the one hand it does sound marketing based on account of the fact that 7 and Vista are similar so you are right, little technical difference.

    On the other hand it still requires support. If you officially support it you have to go and test everything on another two platforms (32-bit and 64-bit). This means regression testing on all the patches and all that jazz with it. It adds a non-trivial cost. Given that Vista never achieved much market penetration and most Vista users went to 7 when it came out, I can see just thinking it isn't worth the money and hassle to support it.

    Remember that for MS support can't mean "Will probably run but might have problems or break shit we haven't tested it." Support has to mean full support and testing.

    So I can't say what it was and it may have been purely marketing, but I can see a valid reason as well.

Ho hum (Score:3)
by sylvandb ( 308927 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:56PM (#40694253) Homepage Journal

I am a little bit surprised that Vista will not be supported. I expect Vista just never had the market penetration to be worth the aggravation.

But really, who cares? Open Office (actually I prefer Libre Office since 3.5 came out) does everything I need, and everything everyone else I know needs. The only reason for Microsoft Office is cross compatibility with other MS Office users but it has been a few years since Open Office failed me in that regard. And even then, the sender did not actually need anything that Open Office didn't do. They used MS Office "just because."

LibreOffice will work on older Windows installs (Score:5, Informative)
by Qubit ( 100461 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:00AM (#40694279) Homepage Journal

I'd suggest that people run a more modern operating system than Win XP, but LibreOffice will even run on Windows 2000!

LibreOffice system requirements [libreoffice.org]:

    - Microsoft Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4 or higher), XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8;
    - Pentium-compatible PC (Pentium III, Athlon or more-recent system recommended);
    - 256 Mb RAM (512 Mb RAM recommended);

Computers (Score:4, Funny)
by MicroSlut ( 2478760 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:01AM (#40694651)
Gosh darn it all, I purchased a USB device but my 486 DX2 66 doesn't have a USB port, so I purchased a USB card so I could use my USB device and wouldn't you know it the USB card is PCI and I only have ISA slots. Then I puchased one of these new fangled LCD displays but my Trident video card couldn't push 1440x900 so I purchased a NVidia graphics card and wouldn't you know it the graphics card is PCIe and I don't even have an AGP slot! Then I purchased the new Office 2013 and put in my CD-ROM and wouldn't you know that Office 2013 is on a DVD! Sumabitch.

Upgrades? What are those? (Score:4, Insightful)
by SlashDev ( 627697 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:44AM (#40694897) Homepage
What is this compatibility thing all about anyway? Who cares? Most people who use word processors don't upgrade their software or OS to that matter. People don't upgrade, they buy a new PC with a newly installed OS. That's my opinion and observations.

still using Office 2000... no point in newer... (Score:3, Interesting)
by neurocutie ( 677249 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:54AM (#40694953)
Most folks at our institution (including myself) are still using Office 2000 and get annoyed with any .DOCX files that we get.

Honestly, although I have access to newer versions of Office, I don't see the point. Not a single thing I want from a newer version of Office, and the bloating hardware requirements makes it that much easier to just say NO...

most folks still sending out .DOC files as well, only those with no clue are saving Word files as .DOCX.

    Re:still using Office 2000... no point in newer... (Score:4, Insightful)
    by tehcyder ( 746570 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @06:46AM (#40696343) Journal

    only those with no clue are saving Word files as .DOCX.

    I thought the new docx/xlsx files were quite a bit smaller than the old doc/cls formats? So it would be entirely reasonable to use the new default format for saving files.

Shoot self in foot and then to top it off: (Score:3)
by Vskye ( 9079 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:03AM (#40695319)

Complain about lost profits.

Monopolist forcing an upgrade (Score:3)
by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @04:01AM (#40695607)
MS is using their monopoly to force the whole world to upgrade again. If you run a business and a partner sends you a document in the latest fscking MS Office format, then you have little choice about the matter.

    Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
    by statusbar ( 314703 ) <jeffk@statusbar.com> on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:47PM (#40694193) Homepage Journal

    No, that is incorrect. They are perfectly capable.

    They have no business reason to support people who do not purchase the new operating system.

    Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
    by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @11:58PM (#40694261) Homepage Journal

    Nobody complains that the new Chevy Volt isn't compatible with their set of tools they bought just last year to work on cars.

    Nobody complains that the HE dishwasher they bought wont except regular dishwashing crystals.

    Nobody complains that the new bike they bought can't use all the old tires they have from the last bike.

    Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.

    Why is that? Face it people, progress happens and sometimes you've got to let go of the old and invest in the new.

    Luckily there is eBay and Craigslist where you can sell your old stuff to someone who can't afford the new shiny yet. Give them a break and sell it to them.

    Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
    by Garble Snarky ( 715674 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:03AM (#40694307)
    Exactly what progress have they made in the office application field that justifies this argument?

    Re:Let me get this straight (Score:4, Funny)
    by masternerdguy ( 2468142 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:06AM (#40694323)
    But but but TEH RIBBON!

Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
by Seraphim_72 ( 622457 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:05AM (#40694671)

Many,
            Pivot Tables to name one. One click charting. HUGE spreadsheets.

I am not even an MS apologist, but even I can see that.

Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @01:49AM (#40694927) Homepage Journal

Nobody complains that the new Chevy Volt isn't compatible with their set of tools they bought just last year to work on cars.

Actually they would complain bitterly and use plenty of expletives. I haven't heard of any incompatibilities.

Nobody complains that the HE dishwasher they bought wont except regular dishwashing crystals.

Probably because HS detergents cost the same as regular and it's an expendable resource. If it cost them a few hundred extra dollars, they'd complain loudly.

Nobody complains that the new bike they bought can't use all the old tires they have from the last bike.

Probably because the new bike came with tires. Of course, they usually CAN use the same ones if it's the same type of bike. Nobody wants to use 10 speed racing tires off road.

Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.

Mine has RCA inputs. It added HDMI and VGA. What's to complain about?

Luckily there is eBay and Craigslist where you can sell your old stuff to someone who can't afford the new shiny yet. Give them a break and sell it to them.

MS claims that Windows is non-transferable. You guessed it, people have complained.

        Re:

        Actually, they do. Microsoft might wish to avoid being prosecuted for a Clayton Act Violation [thefreedictionary.com]. (Tying.)
                    Re:
                    I can explain it to you, but I think you already know.

                    They will not support OS versions prior to Win 7 for two real reasons (one of which is a major one):
                    > They don't want to deal with a new set of bugs / support (however this is a very minor reason given immediate gains)
                    > Vendor lock-in. You do everything in Office, you want the latest Office, but oh-lookey-here, first you'll need to buy this, this 'n this before you can use the newest Office. More money in their pockets and more lock-in for t
                        Re:

                        So ... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."

                        A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.

                        Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a b
                            Re:
                            I'd still happily bitch to anyone about proprietary document formats - not because I used Linux in the 00's though, but because its illogical to support them.
                            Re:

                            Aside from a few niche areas, support contracts generally aren't as valuable as you seem to think...
                            The vast majority of organisations i've been to pay ridiculous sums for the software and still don't get any support... Those that do pay extra for support never seem to use it, or if they do they still don't get a satisfactory response.. In most cases the "support" seems to be no better than what your own IT department provides and just allows them to slack off instead of doing what they're supposed to.

                            And i
    Re:

    It's not about "can", it's about not wanting to.

    Similarly, I don't see many apps that are written against Gtk 1.2 in Linux land these days. Why is that? I mean, surely it ain't all that hard, and if you do it, it'll run on ten year old Linux distros!

    Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
    by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @12:01AM (#40694285) Homepage Journal

    Makes you wonder if there isn't a strategy in there somewhere.

    Windows 7: Corporate
    Windows 8: Beta testing new stuff on Home users
    Windows 9: Corporate

    Re:
    Maybe my vim-fu is weak but remind me how I can check my email and schedule a meeting with vim? Other then writing a shell script to wipe the drive and install windows/office of course.
        Re:VIM (Score:5, Funny)
        by spauldo ( 118058 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @02:00AM (#40694989)

        Ah, you want emacs then.

    Re:

    How so? I'm using the latest iWork on both Snow Leopard and Lion based machines. I expect it to still work when Mountain Lion is released too.
    Re:Everyone freaks out, but Apple already did this (Score:3)
    by igb ( 28052 ) on Thursday July 19, 2012 @03:07AM (#40695339)
    Nonsense. iWork runs on 10.4 on a PPC machine [apple.com].