0.99 bottles of wine on the wall

Holy fuck. Wine hit 1.0.

What does 1.0 mean? Not too much apparently. I take it to mean "hey, none of the apps that you actually want to use work, but you know, at least this will get you to try it for a few minutes."

Yep. I tried it for a few minutes. It still sucks. Mission accomplished. Thanks for toiling a way for 15 years and creating something that I still don't care about. You've shown me that without a doubt, there could have been no better use of those 15 years.

But no really. I tried installing Office 2003, and it actually installed. Outlook doesn't start though. And I can't launch the SP1 or SP2 installer. Awesome. But you know, this is great, since like, the rest of the world is moving on to Office 2007. Way to strive for relevancy guys. It's really impressive.

Actually, as far as I could tell, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint seem to start and work kinda OK. I still wouldn't trust anything to it, but you know, you might be able to convince some European city council members that it totally works.

Oh wait, or I could just run Office in a virtual machine. For free.

But the saddest part of it all is that, even in its half-working state, this shit is still more useful to me than I-almost-look-the-same OpenOffice. Even if it crashes once in a while, what PowerPoint on Wine manages to show me is way more useful than Impress showing me a mentally challenged child's drawing that kinda looks like the slides I spent hours on. And apps on Wine start faster than their OO equivalents which totally makes up for the fact that they crash all the time.

Y'all seem to want me to rant about OpenOffice. There's not much to say, I mean, I don't really use it. I can't remember the last time someone sent me an SXW, so why the fuck would I use something different? Especially something that doesn't work as well as the original. Because it's free? Because all your other examples of fantastic open source software should make me blindly trust this one too? well I actually like to pay money for my sanity. Obviously y'all don't value it as much.

Besides, real programmers don't use office suites. And fo shizzle, real programmers on Linux definitely don't use office suites. No, they just annoy the world by telling everyone re-send their shit in PDF. I'm sure Adobe's laughing all the way to the bank.

Actually, now that I think about it, I do have one adecdote. I have a lady friend, who uses Excel for a living, to whom I offered to install OO on her new Windows machine because she needed something to do her work. A week later, she came back and took a big shit on my lap. And then slapped me across the face with it. Now I know that kind of thing might get some of you kinktards off, but that pretty much taught me my lesson.

But you know, I still somehow keep wishing that a random group of volunteer programmers can magically recreate the work done by thousands of Microsoft engineers. I mean, that would be totally awesome. So would having Jessica Alba as a sex slave. Maybe if I work for the next 15 years, I too could end up with a bugly look-alike.

Actually, I dunno, maybe it could really be done. Many times I've thought that if all of y'all actually cooperated and built one office suite, then maybe it might be better, or at least as good. Then I looked around and saw OO, Gnumeric/Abiword, and KOffice, and concluded that you guys didn't get the memo about what the "co" in cooperate means. But you know, ODF will save us all. Or something.