Re: Star Office 5.1

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>>> Is this true, can Star Office be used as a secure browser on
>>> Linux as it can on Win 98?
Al> Quite possible. I don't know whether or not so makes use of
Al> platform-specific features, such as wincrypto, but it wouldn't
Al> surprise me.
> Crypto is a problem on Linux because of my (US) government's asinine
> restrictions on crypto export.

I wouldn't have thought this would apply in this case: SSL (which I
presume is the function in question) is available in 48bit format? I was
thinking more along the lines of it being built into windows pretty much
as standard, whereas ssl on linux is not nearly as well developed.

> OLE-type features may be better on Windows for another 12--18 months.
> Havoc Pennington gave a demonstration of a well-tuned GNOME platform
> in Tokyo today; one of my buddies who was there said it _rocks_. It's
> going to be a while before the wizardry that a core GNOME developer
> can accomplish is going to be standard fare for any old app's
> programmer. But then...!

I have to say, I'm a fan of what both GNOME and KDE are doing. The
OpenParts architecture under KDE looks very nice, and the bonobo stuff
under GNOME is basically the same sort of thing. I'm personally hoping
there will be some KOM/Parts meets Bonobo crossover software, so that (for
example) I could embed a bonobo app in Konqueror. The there's also
Mozilla's COM thing which I keep hearing about?

[GNOME/KDE] 2 looks like something very special, and I personally believe
it will be better OLE than Win: sure, DCOM is *very* nice, but I think
it's going to be far more prevailant on the Linux GUI than under Windows.
Most embedding under windows takes the form of ActiveX controls; which are
generally small and quite useless, although the database capabilities are
very good..

Cheers,

Alex.

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