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Gobe Productive GPL Release In Danger
Elliot writes "Gobe, developers of Gobe Productive, a fast and lightweight office suite initally developed for the BeOS and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage), announced in August that they would be open sourcing Gobe Productive under the GPL. Unfortunately, it appears that financial issues might prevent this from happening. A shame to see yet another wonderful piece of software [possibly] fail."
BSD is the only way to go for real freedom!
Q: Hello, I have just recently bought an Electric Blue Lobster , and I am trying to find out how to care for it better. The pet store in which I bought him at was not very helpful. I have him in a 5 gallon tank filled with water (I got the gallon sized bottled water) with some rocks, and his food, which are some shrimp (go shrinp) and a feeder fish. I got the e-care book, but it only gives refernce to Crabs. What size tank should I get, does he need heated water, a misting bottle, air pump. I don't know much from what they told me at the pet stor. What is molting also. I know this seems like a lot but, I have been everywhere for this kind of information. Please help. Thank you. Happy Holidays!!
Dear Gentle Sir--
Generally, the larger an area you can give your Electric Blue Lobster (probably actually either a procamabrus alleni or an oronectes immunis), the better. That being said, for practical purposes a 10 gallon take will suffice for the single specimen and a 20 gallon tank would be ample.
The water in the tank, which optimally should be seasoned for a few weeks before you introduce the cray, must be free of all sanitary chemicals. Chlorine and chloramine, often found in tap water, are cray-killers. A temperature of 70 degrees with a Ph of 7.0, or neutral, will make for a very stable and comfortable environment for your blue lobster. An air pump of some sort should be used in the tank, if not a substratum filter. Oxygen is important to crayfish.
As for molting, good sir, it is the natural process by which crayfish (as well as other crustaceans) shed their hard exo-skeleton in order to grow. The process is preceded by strange eating behaviors and activity patterns. The shell will split at the carapace and the cray usually escapes through the top of the tail. During this stage the lobster is vulnerable and will hide for a few days, and this is why it is important that there is plenty of space and hiding places in the tank-- predacious fish species as well as other crays will consider the molted lobster as prey! After hardening the new, larger exo-skeleton, the crayfish should begin eating normally. You may also notice that any missing or injured limbs have reappeared in some manner after the molt.
Thank you.
Hello all of you!
Richard Simmons, Peewee Herman, Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, The Backstreet Boys, NSync, Prince, Elton John, Jared From Subway, That guy on the Old Navy commercials, Nick Carter, Apple users, The Segway, Leprecahuns, Jebus, The French
NONE of these are as gay as the GPL
In Soviet Russia the trolls mod you up.
Givin' props to all my dead troll homies in #grasshoppers.
KTHXOBLIGOTORYREFERENCELINKS
link 1
link 2
~
Attention: Ekrout is a known karma-whoring Slashdot troll: Be on the lookout for this karma whoring beast.
For the uninitated, erickrout is the kid who crapflooded Kuro5hin for months on end with at least a half-dozen accounts. For a long time, he dominated the Hidden Comments page with an interminable list of racist, sexist, homophobic, and completely self-absorbed comments.
Eric Krout lives behind the protective mask of EricKrout.com but in reality is a professional slashdot troll only posting for unknown evil. Eric has been spotted on trolltalk attempting to be added to "troll back", a daily newsletter that rates how well various trolls have posted and karma-whored on slashdot.
Whatever EricKrout might tell you in his posting is not true. He merely puts on a different facade for every article attempting to rack up mod points for no other reason than the fact that he is a self-absorbed punk kid.
In conclusion, if you are moderating or replying to this comment, I caution you, it is 100% untrue.
--the eric krout troll
"revealing the unrevealed since 2002"
I bought a copy shortly after slashdot posted an article about it. It was a great software package. It was lite and quick, a hell of a lot quicker than OpenOffice and StarOffice, and the interface was just... clean.
My favorite part was the ability to export to PDF so easily.
My only complaint was the Spreadsheet program wasn't as robust as some of the other packages out there, but it still worked.
I hope everything works out for them. Personally, I think this was one of the best office packages around.
I think I read about this on about.com once.
Found this link. http://www.druglordsgame.com/index.php?ref=9737
tp?
The official closing time was in ten minutes, but Kyle was already busy wrapping up the rest of the unused processed cheese triangles so he could get outta there right quick. He was daydreaming of playing Micro$oft's "Age of Empires" against his heroes, Hemos and Rob Malda, when he heard the front door close. As he looked up, he saw a forty-something executive in Clairol Tempted Peach® hair and a navy business suit stride in.
"One Veggie-Tastic® sub with extra spicy mustard."
His eyes travelled from the "HP INVENT" brooch on her lapel down to the low-cut gauze passing as her blouse. He could see the outline of a Maidenform® just below the surface.
"The American economy is moving from commodity products to high value-add services, WITH OR WITHOUT YOU! Let's get crackin', Pointdexter!"
Kyle reached for a loaf of oven-fresh® bread, but before he could pick it up, the customer snatched it up and slapped him across his left temple. He reeled from the blow, falling to his knees.
The next instant the customer had lept the counter and got a hold of two fistfulls of his styling-gelled hair. "Sniff momma's coochie!"
Stunned, Kyle lurched forward, shoving his greasy nose into her tight dry-cleaned skirt.
"MY NAME IS CARLY FUCKIN' FIORINA AND I'M HERE TO MAKE YOU MY BITCH!"
Kyle slipped his head up her skirt and began lapping hungrily. "Age of Empires" would have to wait. Groaning, the customer leaned back onto the countertop, one hand gripping a stray cucumber, the other resting lightly upon her heaving bosoms. She clumsily fumbled at his pants with her feet, managing to get them halfway off. Kyle began to lick and nibble his way down the already moistened slit of her pussy. His tongue catching the rock hard bud of her clitoris with rapid flickering motions, making her hips jerk with pleasure in front of him. They danced vertically in this way until the customer orgasmed, her pussy quite swollen from his ministrations clenching and contracting so that he could actually feel it with his tongue as he slid it inside her.
Suddenly the customer let out an intense scream, bucked forward, and in one deft motion, crammed the cucumber as far as she could into Kyle's rectum!
damn, that's good
You Are In Danger
But if they GPL it, their competitors get to have it too. And they'd need to GPL it to not be hypocrites and to make this worthwhile.
Let's face it. Open source is nice, but its economics are not as profitable as those of closed source software. That makes things tough.
This reminds me of the collective action problem. Open source software is a public good like the environment or national defense, since it is jointly supplied and cannot be denied to any single person. If it is supplied to one person, it is supplied to everyone. But since people are selfish, they often won't want to contribute to it.
So what can we do? I say we should fix copyright law so that it only works for seven years. After those seven years we can use the source code of the program.
Perhaps they should start a fund, similar to what Blender did?
When Blender when under, they started a fund to which anyone could contribute (and I did.) Now their 3D modeling product is open source.
I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks to open the source.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
There it goes what some people already saw as future integrated Gnome Office.
Software fails because it lacks that special something that provokes everyone to switch. As of yet, there have been no office suites that offer a better experience than Microsoft Office. They've only been advantagous in pricing and openness, and that isn't such a great advantage that people are willing to switch. As a student, I'd spent a couple of years using non-Microsoft suites and always been disappointed. I first used Corel WordPerfect, then Star Office. I finally shelled out the cash and purchased Microsoft Office after being disappointed.
The GPL is good. In real life, the GPL is a recipe for failure.
At least there is nowadays an alternative to burying the software forever.
--YerSex
Sex - Find It
As Seen Here. Make some money, then release the code, everyone wins. (Yay Everyone!)
That's right. Just stick 'em in your mouth, and choke on them.
November 26, 2002 | Paul Thurrott
According to a new Aberdeen Group report, open-source solution Linux has surpassed Windows as the most vulnerable OS, contrary to the high-profile press Microsoft's security woes receive. Furthermore, the Aberdeen Group reports that more than 50 percent of all security advisories that CERT issued in the first 10 months of 2002 were for Linux and other open-source software solutions. The report muddles the argument that proprietary software such as Windows is inherently less secure than open solutions. And here's another blow to the status quo: Proprietary UNIX solutions were responsible for just as many security advisories as Linux in the same time period. Could Windows be the most secure mainstream OS available today?
"Open-source software, commonly used in many versions of Linux, UNIX, and network routing equipment, is now the major source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers," the report reads. "Security advisories for open-source and Linux software accounted for 16 out of the 29 security advisories--about one of every two advisories--published for the first 10 months of 2002. During this same time, vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft products numbered seven, or about one in four of all advisories."
The stunning report makes several claims that seem to fly in the face of widely accepted beliefs. First, the Aberdeen Group says that Windows-based Trojan horse attacks peaked in 2001, when CERT released six such advisories, then bottomed out this year, when CERT didn't issue any alerts. However, Trojan horse-based attacks on Linux, UNIX, and open-source projects jumped from one in 2001 to two in 2002. The Aberdeen Group says this information proves that Linux and UNIX are just as prone to Trojan horse attacks as any other OS, despite press reports to the contrary, and that Mac OS X, which is based on UNIX, is also vulnerable to such attacks. Even more troubling, perhaps, is the use of open-source software in routers, Web servers, firewalls, and other Internet-connected solutions. The Aberdeen Group says that this situation sets up these devices and software products to be "infectious carriers" that intruders can easily usurp.
According to the Aberdeen Group, the open-source community's claim that it can fix security vulnerabilities more quickly than proprietary developers can means little. The group says that the open-source software and hardware solutions need more rigorous security testing before they're released to customers. This statement is particularly problematic because many Linux distributions lack the sophisticated automatic-update technologies modern Windows versions contain.
We can rail against Microsoft and its security policies, but far more people and systems use Microsoft's software than the competition's software. I believe that we'll never know how secure Linux is, compared with Windows, until a comparable number of people and systems use Linux. But despite the fact that Linux isn't as prevalent as Windows, we're still seeing a dramatic increase in Linux security advisories today. I think the conclusion is obvious.
...because it is under, or not under, any specific license (even our beloved GPL). It's going to fail because Microsoft's "mindshare" is so phenomenal that it would take nothing short of a miracle for ANYONE to impact its 95+% of the Word Processor market.
I don't like that reality either. But, at the moment, it's true. That's why we need to keep pushing the existing suits remaining against MS. Because they DO have a huge monopoly, because they DID get it through illicit means, and because it IS making it virtually impossible for competitors (like the Gobe Productive people) to break into any of the many fields MS dominates.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Amiga des PC, euh non
Juste les carte 3D qui sont des carte PC (Et puis le PCI c'est pas un truc de PC au debut) (et la RAM, c'est des barrete EDO souvent mais bon), sinon tous le reste est special.
A la rigeur les Pegasos qui sont pas des vrai Amiga (y a même pas de 68k dedans), mais resemble plus a un Mac : CPU : G3 600MHz a 2xG4 1.13GHz, sur eux y a un port AGP (Voodoo et Radeon only pour l'instant), et un controleur son Creative Labs
Oui le CPC que de souvenir C'est le meilleur ordinateur jamais inventée !!!!!! (Et dire que le PC c'ets vraiment impose garce a Amstrad, ils ont etais a faire des PC vraiment abordable)
-------------
Athlon XP 1800+ / ATI 3D Rage Pro 4Mo + Diamond Monster 3D 2 Voodoo 2 8Mo o/c 115MHz / 256Mo SDRAM.
Vous avez dit disproportioner ?
Diakatana was awful! The graphics were really bad and the AI was pitiful.
Danger release GPL in productive gobe
It seems to me that, going beyond OpenOffice, the notion of an "integrated office suite" itself is broken. Gobe may be a little better than OpenOffice in design (I doubt it's as functional), but somehow that strikes me as just a meaner sabre tooth tiger--a better implementation of an evolutionary dead end. Even Microsoft has seen the light and claims that they will be trying to redefine what an office suite is in the future.
Unless there is some groundbreaking new functionality in Gobe that just can't be added to OpenOffice, the efforts that would go into porting Gobe to Linux and enhancing it would seem to be better spent on tuning, modularizing, and enhancing OpenOffice.
..what is stopping them from releasing the code as GPL anyway? Is the code tied up as an asset that might be seized by a bank?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Wha'd he say? Was that about me?
Now the cluster sits silent and lonely
No lights blink; no beeps issue forth from it
Beowulf, dost thou do one thing only?
Alas, crunching numbers is such bullshit.
Such's the fate of all clusters, sad to tell
Built for one goal, then comes obsolescence
But do I care? Like bloody fucking hell.
A tragic loss of Beowulf's essence.
MOSIX and DaVinci are less by far
Verily, Beowulf reigns o'er the land
News of its deeds rise to the highest star
You, sir, in truth deserve to be kick-banned
To thee who thinks not that this post has class
If I ever meet you I'll kick your ass.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
Man, that's fucking brilliant!
I realize most people probably won't agree, but I'm incredibly thankful this thing didn't make it past the beta stage for linux and windows and might not be released under the gpl. I guess that might be considered a loss, as I'm sure it contains some great code that other OSS developers could use or draw from, but it will prevent anyone from finishing the port. In a software category like this (one that's so critical to broadened acceptance of linux on the desktop) I'm a firm believer that competition between products is actually a bad thing.
;)
When all of the competitors in a market are OSS*, more product choice does not equal more freedom. That's kinda what the GPL is all about -- one person (or company) can't run off with the source and deprive the OSS community of the best piece of ______ software it ever had. On the contrary -- with the need normally satisfied by inter-product competition is taken resolved in another way, more product choice equals more confusion. Users like to get comfortable with a method for accomplishing a task and stick to it. "How do I create a new spreadsheet, again?" is not a question users want to have to ask more than once every five years; if they're forced to, they'll go back to what they were already comfortable with.
*The market I'm talking about is inclusion in linux distros. I'm well aware that MS Office is not OSS.
Saturday, December 7, 2002
Professor breaks own record -- for thrill of pi
Calculation to 1.24 trillion places is 'enormous feat of computing'
By AUDREY MCAVOY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO -- To most people, it's a funny-looking Greek letter that has something to do with circles. To Professor Yasumasa Kanada, however, pi is an obsession.
Kanada and a team of researchers set a new world record by calculating the value of pi to 1.24 trillion places, project team member Makoto Kudo said yesterday. The previous record, set by Kanada in 1999, was 206.158 billion places.
Figuring out pi to much more than about 1,000 decimal places serves little purpose in math or engineering, but researchers say it helps push computing power to a new level and can test the accuracy of supercomputers.
"It's an enormous feat of computing -- not only for the sheer volume, but it's an advance in the technique he's using," said David Bailey, the chief technologist at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
Kanada and his team at the Information Technology Center at Tokyo University figured out the value for pi using a Hitachi supercomputer for 400 hours in September.
Pi, usually given as 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and has an infinite number of decimal places. The number is the subject of numerous books -- from "The Joy of Pi" to "Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi: A Math Adventure" -- and has fascinated and confounded mathematicians for centuries.
"It's been a fellow traveler in mathematical history," said Peter Borwein, a mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, who once held the record for calculating pi to about 2 billion decimal places.
"It isn't so much, 'Does anyone really care what the 1.24 trillionth decimal place is?' -- probably not -- but the stuff that's been discovered in the process."
Among the most puzzling mysteries: Mathematicians are pretty sure, but still cannot prove conclusively, that the numbers following 3.141592 occur randomly.
"I don't think we're any closer to answering this question than the Greeks were 2,500 years ago," Borwein said.
Kanada's team spent five years designing the program used in the September experiment, Kudo said. But it could be a while before the record appears in the Guinness Book of World Records.
"We would need to verify it, but it sounds like Professor Kanada has broken his own record," Guinness World Records spokesman Neil Hayes said.
In the quote Eugenia states "even if it means no open sourcing." She isn't saying that a Linux distro should fork over the $$ and then GPL it, she is saying that a Linux distro should fork over the $$ and then release it free-as-in-beer with their distro. (At least that's how I interpret her comment)
Posted by timothy on Saturday December 07, @05:27PM
I t was designed for the BeOS, which was itself fast, lightweight and clean, so what did you expect?
from the non-gift-of-gab dept.
Elliot writes "Gobe, developers of Gobe Productive, a fast and lightweight office suite initally developed for the BeOS and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage), announced in August that they would be open sourcing Gobe Productive under the GPL. Unfortunately, it appears that financial issues might prevent this from happening. A shame to see yet another wonderful piece of software [possibly] fail."
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Gobe
open sourcing Gobe Productive under the GPL
might prevent this from happening
More on GNU is Not Unix
Also by timothy
on Saturday December 07, @05:38PM (#4834587)
(http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~md25)
OK, neither were fully-featured but they did everything 75% of people would ever need.
-Mark
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Yes, for one the OpenBeOS folks would most likely love to have it. It was the defacto (if there ever was such a thing) Office Suite standard on BeOS.
Help fight continental drift.
I bought Lotus SmartSuite 9.7 (9.8 was released fairly recently), and it is fast and easy to use. It doesn't have as many options as the other office suites by Corel, MS, or Sun but it gets the job done. The bad things about SmartSuite is that you have to buy the latest version to get bugs fixed, since they don't release many patches for the current version. Also, the files SmartSuite saves are pretty big, way larger than StarOffice/OpenOffices' format.
just google it...a ll.tgz
gobe productive 3.0 for linux is right here: http://www.gobe.com/downloads/gobe_linux_x86_inst
Right now I have on my Linux laptop; Applix Anywhere 2.2, HancomOffice 2, SOT Office (OpenOffice repackeged by SOT), Koffice, and what I call a "best of breed" combination suite of Gnumeric/Scribus DTB/AbiWord/HTMLDOC/Ted. Of these, Applix was the best. Unfortunatly the company has killed it. HancomOffice looks like it might have potential but it's not yet there. OO, and it's like, is very good and makes a great MS Office clone. Unfortunatly it brings with it all the baggage that that intails. gobeProductive was a hope of mine. Sadly, it seems that once again, superior technology loses out.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
and later ported to Windows and Linux (which never made it past beta stage)
Sure it's not always the most user friendly and has a lot of development ongoing but I think we can still consider Linux to be past Beta!
I stole this Sig
[Me]8====D ( ( )[CmdrTaco]
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Your comment looks too much like ascii art.
Gobe Productive is a very elegant and potent product. And the Gobe team seemed to be a very nice group of people (I exchanged emails with some of them). I used Productive on both BeOS and MS-Windows and it is a great job while being fast and very compact. The next version could have added functionalities like support for XML file format that could have really brought it the point that it meets the needs of 80% of the users. It is unfortunate that this product is going to disappear. Well, it shows once again that the impact of Microsoft behavior does not lead to more innovation (like Productive) and more choices for the consumers but to their alienation (and I am not arguing about MS-Office value but who really needs all its functionalities?).
Soon as I saw the story on the front page I knew what awaited inside. Hundreds of posts from zitty geeks trying to be punker-than-thou by coming up with ever-more-obscure namedropping to make up for their lack of real style (or to pretend that they are actually old enough to have been involved). Drop the pretension kiddos. We all know that your Blink 182 CD is older than your copy of Bollocks.
I love how a whole new level of conformity has been created by the average bozo's efforts at individuality. It might almost work if your personal definition of individuality didn't depend so heavily on how you present yourself to others. I mean, what's the sense of being into bullshit like [insert pseudo-non-mainstream hobby here] if you can't talk about it to make yourself superior to your peers?
Kinda sounds like the Linux crowd, huh? "I'm so ALTERNATIVE by patching my kernel every day while you brainwashed Windows sheep meander in unenlightened tedium." Funny to think that if you had back all the time you spent tweaking and patching (for no good reason other than to say you have the latest version), you wouldn't know what to do with the workstation on your desk.
*sigh*
excuse the rant. caffiene has yet to be digested.
you are wrong on so many levels i will not give you the dignity of an excellently evidence-supported rebuttle.. therefore: fuck you
Just what the world needs, another open source project. Open sourcers love to design and build, but not put on the finishing touches. Witness Mozzilla. Once it hit 1.0, instead of optimizing it and improving it, the dumb bastards forked it into Phoenix - Oh, we need a faster browser. 10 bucks when Phoenix hits 1.0 another fork. This is where proprietary companies shine. Boss man yells to coders clean up the fucking ui and document things, put in help, etc. The things that coders hate doing. The piddly shit they think their brains are too good for. Well, keep thinking that and watch MS own the market.
Do you honestly think GPL will succeed? GPL is doomed to fail, I give it 10 more years till we don't hear much from it anymore.. good riddance too. PAY FOR YOUR SOFTWARE YOU COMMUNISTS.
Found this on their product page below the Corum III listing:
The only real choice for entertainment on BeOS.
Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good.
What a load! Office is the most popular because MS held back information on Windows internals that would have allowed its competition (WordPerfect and another formerly very popular word processor whose name I can't even remember now) to match the performance of Word. Thus, WP and whazzit were late to the Windows platform, and slow when they got there. And suddenly WP lost its first place position, and whazzit disappeared completely. A clear case of MS leveraging its monopoly in OSes to take over the word processor market. (Analogous things happened with spreadsheets too.)
If MS has the best office suite now (which Corel/WP users might still argue -- in fact, the ones I know would strongly disagree with this assertion), it's because they cheated. If they'd been competing on level ground, there's no way in hell that WP would have lost its former dominance of the word processor market.
I dont see the problem you are talking about. The number of office suites available is irrelevent. If they all adhere to open standard document formats You can use any office suite to open documents created in any other office suite.
If they all adhere to open standard document formats. The problem is they don't. Even if there were an open standard document format that every open source office product supported, all office suites would still need to read and write MS Office files. Sure, you could save your document in the open format and convert it using an office suite that does support MS formats, but that's more work than users are willing to do; besides, if the conversion were anything less than perfect, it wouldn't be an option for serious work. Documents can start to look pretty run down after multiple passes through an imperfect document converter.
That seems to make multiple office suites a good thing because people can pick the one that does things the way they are most comfortable with. There's no need for them to get confused trying to learn a new suite because theirs will open any standards compliant file.
What about people that are introduced to an open source office software suite at home and then switch to a different one at work because it's the new company-mandated standard? They have to re-learn basic skills. Multiple open source office software suites also fracture the support base. It's nice to be able to lean into the cubicle next to you and say, "Hey Dan, how do I do X?" You can't do this when Dan is using a different suite -- he won't be able to answer your question. Unless a company wants to double the training requirements for their support staff, the help desk won't be able to answer your question either. In addition, developer time is divided by multiple projects. If you have 4 talented developers that want to contribute to OSS and 4 office suites, each office suite gets fewer developers. With one office suite, that project can take on as many developers as it can use. I'm not saying that more developers always equals better software (sometimes the opposite is true), but it's better to be turning developers down than starving for volunteers.
On top of that, since they are all open source, if one develops a compelling feature the others need, the others can add that functionality to themselves. So again, no reason for people to switch office suites.
Just because two projects are OSS, there's no reason to think that code can be easily ported between them. OpenOffice and Productive may (and probably do) have radically different architectures.
That free software requires money to fund its production? Almost sounds like Capitalism.... the irony....
I may be totally oblivious to the answer but when and how did this "in soviet russia" shit start?
- The early worm gets eaten by the bird.
I guess I wasn't clear. I understand the Free Radical Software is trying buy it. The line in the slashdot article implied that if they failed to buy it then the software would die. I was asking why it couldn't be released as open-source "abandonware" as you put it. Like for example the company has a lein on its assets. I've never heard of the company until today.(Might explain why they are in $ trouble, Yes?)
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Linux is the most viable server OS next to Windows. Microsoft is using Linux's weakest spot - the license - as a weapon against it. If Linux were commercial software with a viable company behind it, it would be in a lot more companies, and not just running web sites.
[...] "How do I create a new spreadsheet?" (why you don't think it's File>New in OSS I'm not sure) [...]
/" philosophies have their merits and contribute to the extreme (and extremely useful) scriptability of nearly every action.
/mnt/floppy/whatever.
You're right. Bad example. I should have said: "How do I set my page margins and change my spacing settings to double globally?" That's not always in the same place.
Linux development might as well stop now then. [...] "How do I format a floppy?" or "Where's my D: drive?"
This is not a problem with linux; it's a problem with desktop GUI software. You're right in that most non-geeks are more comfortable with (and I would go so far as to say prefer) viewing data storage devices (cd-roms, floppies, hard drives, usb microstorage doodads, etc...) as separate icons representing separate hardware rather than all merged into one directory tree like linux does. However, the unix "all devices are files" and "every file that the system has access to can be found under
The solution? Have the desktop GUI software query the kernel as to what data storage devices the system has access to (devfs works great for this) and present icons representing them in a "My Computer" type interface. Then simply interpret any URIs starting with floppy: (such as floppy:images/picture.png) as
Of course then you run up against the original problem I was talking about: more than one software package competing to perform the same task. What if the GNOME team decides that representing storage devices as above is a great idea (so much so that they change the standard file dialog boxes in gtk apps so that they represent data this way), but the KDE team thinks it's a silly idea? What is the user to do who really likes the change GNOME made, but needs (for example) the ability to browse tar files without unpacking them in her file manager? Use GNOME some of the time, and switch to KDE at others? Send emails begging the GNOME team to add tar browsing or pleading with the KDE team to change their minds about devices? Give up and go back to windows where she has the interface she wants and can look through tars with Easyzip?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Parent was: Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good
Your reply starts: If that was true then why is the #1 question asked about any new piece of word processing software is not "is it as good or better than MicroSoft word?"
Your reply doesn't logically rebutt the fact that Office may well be the most productive produce because it is good, it is discussing a different point altogether. IMO, Office *is* the best office suite out there and from a corporation point of view, that is what usually counts.
In soviet russia, "in soviet russia" shits on YOU!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But AppleWorks is a very good product. In fact, it's good enough for most Apple users. That's Apple and MS are having a "MS Office for $200" special. It's a ploy to increase the number of iMac MS Office users.
At our house, we didn't buy MS Office because we couldn't justify the price when AppleWorks does virtually everything we need (and it came with our Macs).
The only reason we broke down and bought MS Word is because my wife needs it for her work. If Word wasn't the de facto Word Processor, or if AppleWorks2Word file conversions were more robust, she could tell her Windows-using clients to deal with RTF files.
Frankly, we both prefer AppleWorks word processing module to Word. However, I think AppleWorks presentation module is quite sucky, especially compared to PowerPoint on Windows. Thankfully, I don't need to do presentations on my Mac. In my opinion, AppleWorks is more 'mac-like' than Office, which still feels like a well-done port of Word for Windows.
That being said, I wish that Gobe, Abiword, and OpenOffice all succeed. The more choices, especially free choices, the less likely that any one will dominate the landscape.
My father is a blogger.
Gobe Productive is meant to be a lightweight office suite, correct? Then why the %&^*$ does the Linux beta require Gnome libraries?!
There's some talk at BeUnited about raising money to get the "Be only" version of the source code. To me this makes sense, since GoBe did more for Be than any of the other platforms it ran on. If OpenBeOS really comes through it would be a great thing to see. Check out
h p? f=21&i=4&t=4
http://www.beunited.org/standards/phorum/read.p
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
I was surprised to see the original announcement, and was wondering what business reasons they could have. I can't say I'm surprised to see this.
Now I hope a way is found, so that when openBeOS achieves it's goal it has GoBe productive to distribute with it. That would be worth dual booting my machine for. But it will most likely have to be a Blender type effort.
I'm afraid Blender has given some companies a false idea of people's willingness to pay to release programs. Blender was a unique program that solved a problem no other free program did - interactive 3D modeling. It had a huge, multiplatform following willing to pay to see it survive. I know of one or two efforts by other programs which didn't succeed. It takes the right software package to do it.
That said, GoBe may be such a package. It largely depends on how many BeOS users are active and willing to contribute. That's a tough equation to compute and I honestly have no idea what would happen. BeUnited may be about to find out, though.
I hope it does get released, and OpenBeOS succeeds. I have tried BeOS briefly and found it to be clean, smooth and a nice experience. It might be just the thing for an open source business desktop. Sure it may not have the infinite flexibility that WindowMaker, fluxbox, gnome, kde, etc. offer for interfaces, but to business that may actually be a plus. Trick would be software to run on it. GoBe would be a nice carrot to offer.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Not just BeOs. gobeProductive does basically what Microsoft have been dreaming about doing with OLE for about twenty years, and have only managed to bandaid-and-string together with any success at all in about the last five.
If GoBe do go kerplonk, I hope someone's brave enough to slap `GPL' on the openable parts and kick it out the door before that door slams. It would be an excellent legacy to bequeath.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
(I am not the anonymous poster who wrote that.)
Yes, I think that is exactly what we need. I've believed we should have almost exactly that change for years. I think seven years is a period of time long enough to be reasonably profitable (contrary to what another respondent claimed). Go to a surplus store and compare the selling price of seven year old software with recently released software. Nevertheless, everyone I know who buys software at all buys the latest versions of software in spite of the price difference. If you update in a timely manner, your brand of software should be profitable indifinitely this way. Also, publishing cycle times have shrunk both for physical packaging and, of course, by the addition of distribution over the internet.
If your software solves such a fixed and narrowly defined problem that there really is nothing to update, then it's the sort of software that would be cloned after about seven years anyway. Also, if people know that your software is going to be released in seven years, it may actually discourage cloning.
Under your proposal, right now the source code to Windows 95 would have just been released and I imagine people would be starting to beta free binary distributions of it.
I'd still like to try this for same reasons as Applixware.
- do I have to purchase the full Office suite?
Often Word compatibility is seen as a big plus in terms of import/export, but,
- can it work the other way, using Word to export/import, possibly using VBS or something? Can Word export a document to an OpenSource format or is that against company policy (competitive nature)?
If not we could do with a drag+drop/similarily easy program that converts and makes the market a bit less anti-competitive. I could see me use this program at work with permission.
Also:-
- isn't it annoyance when proprietory companies go bust and all thier knowledge etc dies with them?
This is why I chose a Zaurus - I know that when the company abandon it I can keep it useful. I can't say the same for my Amiga, how easy is it to still find software for that since most of it wasn't actually free?
A blog I run for the wealth
+5: Funny
I've seen a few threads on other sites (sorry, I wouldn't want them to get /. 'ed) with a general consensus from former users and others willing to contribute $20 to $50 in varying currencies to support GPL'ing GOBE. There have only been at most a few hundred replys and, truthfully, I don't think the $100 Grand plus the former developers are estimating it will cost will not be met. My alternative: Ask the Open Source community (that's right, you /. 'ers ) to donate $5 - $10 through a PayPal system, for example, that as yet not been organised.
The benefit: Another production quality Office Suite portable across many operating systems, a small code base and binary, enough features for most everyone and a spreadsheet and other office apps integrated in one. As limited as the speadsheet and presentation might be, I'm sure it will meet the needs of corporations, students and home users throughout.
As an aside: With quite a few popular Open Source office suites, why not standardise on one file format? It would have the added benefit of everyone being able to share files across different office applications with ease. I would hope that wether or not Gobe is GPL'D, a standard file format should be created.
I'm still wondering why people are calling this a recession economy. (I'm assuming you're refering to the US here - if not, then disregard this post)
Despite all the tech sector layoffs, unemployment is still very low. A record number of people have cell phones and high-speed internet access to their homes (neither of which is "required" to live.)
The higher priced (and higher quality) euro car brands are selling like hotcakes and posting record sales quarters. Check MB, Land Rover, Audi, or BMW's sales in the past 11 months.
And real-estate prices are SKY high. A small 2 bedroom home in my neighborhood sells for over half a million US dollars! Expect to spend 1 or 2 million+ if you want a medium or large home and you want a yard. The condo building across the street sells their cheapest model for $400,000 - their most expensive 3 bedroom condo is over $2,000,000. I just bought my first home - a $675,000 "fixer-upper" as they called it. Sheesh.
The NASDAQ and the NYSE are in the toilet, but that's due to those bastard large company CEO's taking insider loans and falsifying financial records.
It's true that prior to WWII, the stock market WAS the econonmy. Not so any more. The stock market is just a fraction of what makes up the economy.
If we go to war with Iraq and oust the bastard Saddam, everyone knows that war = more government spending = more money in peoples pockets.
To hell with the so-called financial experts on TV who claim the economy is shit. These fools are usually recent college grads who don't know a thing, or they are people who were fired from large financial institutions for their incompetence. They wouldn't know a screw driver from a bus driver.
Just telling it like it is....
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Let's face it. Open source is nice, but its economics are not as profitable as those of closed source software.
No let's *really* face it: we are talking about a closed source consumer software product that like all others (except Apple) is unprofitable and uncompetitive faced with Microsoft. Closed source is nice but let's face it, its economics are not that profitable compared to monopolism.
All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too,
provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe
to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the
cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief
Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you
going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?"
-- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
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