Working scientist here. Ph.D. I've been working 20+ years doing scientific research, getting grants, publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals.
I haven't done ANY calculus since I was an undergrad.
I actually advocate the old adage that math teaches you more beyond the formulas and proofs of any particular area or level of math. I'm a computer programmer, and I use Calculus all the time. I don't compute derivatives or integrate anything, but I definitely use the same part of my brain to work out an algorithm that I did to determine which approach to take to solve a nasty Calculus problem. Whenever I found the solution to a math problem to be 1 = 7 or some similar impossibility, I use the same part of my brain to go back over my work and find the error that I use when debugging code.
At my engineering college, Calculus was the easy start of 4 years of hard math for Computer Science majors. It's not really the "same part of my brain" concept I just used, it's more that the math I've studied developed my abstract problem solving skills, which are extremely important in my job. I think the same skills are just as important across the spectrum of real scientists, too, at least, as far as being good at one's job goes.
Oh, and as for taking Calculus in college, just do it. You don't need to build up to it unless you don't understand the concepts of basic algebra. The professor will teach you the rest.
In the good old days, people used to manage their files by using descriptive file names and sensible directory hierarchies. Nowadays it seems like people throw all their files in some random location, and let higher level software manage it all. It does not always work, particularly because you need descriptive metadata in the first place, and the same data could just as well be in the form of a directory/file hierarchy. Now get off my lawn!
I remember those days, and I definitely didn't have between 50 and 60 GB of music back then (which, I think, is a moderate amount, with others having a lot more). The primary reason I latched onto the database library concept as early as my first encounter with a decent interface, is that directory/file hierarchies are too rigid. Songs can contain more than one artist, compilation albums may come from a famous band / dj / soundtrack / whatever and have different artists per song, albums from one band can fall into different genres, and of course music can span genres (or I might just want to group certain specific ones together).
Using a database driven library gives me the tools to not just include this information, but have it be useful and efficient. Sure, directory/file setups will always be good enough to find and listen to music, but I like browsing through a genre, or an artist, etc, and it being simple to do, even if some artists fall into multiple genres, or if an artist in question is on a soundtrack compiled by someone else. Considering the library software doesn't actually move files around, and I still have respectable directory/file organisation, I see it only as a more efficient means of dealing with music files. The standardised ID2/3 tags makes the library management I do translate to other media library programs as well (being tied to one program's way of handling the database would end things right there).
> Compiling both qt and gtk on Gentoo is a bear for every security fix.
So don't? Can't you just download the updated binary packages with Gentoo?
How much time are you spending building packages and how much time are you actually saving?
I take it you're not a Gentoo user? If we didn't get satisfaction from compiling absolutely everything, we'd have picked a different distro to start with.
Those libraries are what's keeping me away from Amarok. There are a TON of libraries that need to be installed in order to get Amarok going. I'd rather not install all the libraries for the sake of getting a music player working.
I used to obsess about that sort of thing, but at some point the resources on my Linux desktops grew to a point where such concerns suddenly felt trivial. Whereas at one point I'd compile X11 and Fluxbox and carefully watch the library dependencies for anything I wanted to install, now I have no problem with a full install of both the Gnome and KDE desktops, even if I'm not using either at that moment. Maybe I've just gotten lazy, but compared to what we had to work with 10 years ago, even budget desktops are absolute monsters, and Linux is pretty much the only place where I feel the software bloat hasn't kept up.
Don't forget the goal was to get the same player on Windows and Linux. I wonder how hard it would be to port Audacious to Windows that already has GTK installed (as it does if someone uses Pidgin already).
There's no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close
Qt will let you run a single code base on OS/X, Windows 7/etc, Linux and any platform that Qt/Embedded has been ported to. Not just trivial apps like Reversi, but also ones using multithreading, networking, etc. There's also a fair degree of cross-platform multimedia support too, although that's a work in progress. Personally I choose to use PortAudio for cross-platform audio aupport together with Qt.
Are you talking specifically about this, or is that just Nokia's implementation of it?
How flexible is it in other environments, though? The AIR app pictured is reconfiguring the UI in various ways depending on orientation, moving UI elements from a side-by-side configuration to a vertical configuration depending on orientation, etc. Whether that's clever or not probably depends on how much work the developer had to put in - if differently structured interfaces were coded up manually then that's not so impressive.
If the runtime can reconfigure a set of declared elements in sensible ways, that would be quite cool. Although the app demonstrated is relatively uncomplicated in terms of UI, it'd be interesting to see how this applied to a more complicated example. I did get the impression, from the video, that it was the ability to run flexibly on different screen configurations that they were trying to promote, not so much the fact that the code could run on different devices.
I think the video mentioned open sourcing the code in the future, at which point we'll all be able to see exactly how convenient to program they have managed to make this...
It reminds me of making a web site. You can detect the screen size and rendering engine, and move your html elements around whatever is best. I'd never call this multi-platform, though, even if the web site is as fully functional on the iPhone as it is under Windows 7, etc. The web site is written for the "browser platform", and relies on having browser implementations known to support it's functionality in order for it to work on any OS. There's nothing at all clever about it, in those terms. A single-window game that doesn't appear to rely on anything outside of what the Adobe Air implementations offer seems to be the same thing.
Show me a single codebase that you can use that produces native (or close enough) GUI elements for something a little more complex and I'll be interested.
the applications they produce aren't native to ANY platform.
Yep, this would be a terrible way of making utility apps, but this is acceptable for some types of apps, like games, that usually have unique interfaces anyway.
Best of all for applications that are intended to "take over" the interface. An example that comes to mind is Boxee: when running, it's not supposed to mesh well with your system's interface, it's supposed to *be* your system's interface.
All the same, I am in total agreement with the criticism of cross-platform software that fail to integrate as native applications. I also don't want to see more web technologies being used "beyond their scope" outside the web, or dragging functionality into the browser that can be done better as a desktop application. I've yet to see anything to convince me this is a good thing for users, while I do know it can be cheap and fast from the development side.
Java? It's really sluggish and non-elegant compared to AIR. I'm still not sure how the Java interpreter performs so badly on UI elements. While technically probably OK (it's been losing to.NET though), the mere fact that all Java apps feel sluggish creates a bad image for Java. That combined with the fact that.NET has been constantly instructing new features and tens of languages support it (C#, Basic, Object Pascal, ASP..)
Java does bad on GUI's. It's true. OTOH, it doesn't actually do that badly on graphics. It has OpenGL bindings, so for things like making games, it actually does just fine. I'm not personally a big fan of Java, but normal "businessy" GUI apps are really the only are where Java really falls down on performance. And, even then, it's nowhere near as bad as the Java reputation would suggest.
It's worth pointing out somewhere that the iReversi program in the article doesn't actually seem to touch the GUI at all. I see no menus, search boxes, scrollbars, etc, just whatever window decoration the OS has to offer. The game itself is only graphics, which you point out can make things a lot easier. Basically, this game seems at least on par with the least impressive demonstration of cross-platform code I can imagine. It might as well just be "Hello, World!". How about an office suite like OO.o, an image editor like GIMP, a chat client like Pidgin, or anything that requires actual use of a GUI that so complicates the cross-platform approach?
Don't show me something simple and tell me it's a demonstration of overcoming a complex and longstanding issue. I can write a web page that renders the same in Firefox 3.6 as it does in IE 5, but that doesn't mean I've created anything special; I just wrote something basic enough that avoids the big issues.
I bet Yahoo would be more than happy to provide search technology to Apple (not the powered by Bing stuff, their own capable search). Yahoo's not going to make a competing phone anytime soon, and the cost of a Yahoo deal might well be worth it against the cost of Apple developing their own (the latter obviously being more expensive, but meaning Apple gets full control).
You are the only person I've ever seen who likes iTunes and things the iPod hardware is shit.
Well, I liked iTunes a lot better when it was just a music player and library (and had programs like SonicStage to compare it against). A lot has changed over its lifespan to make it less likable, and other music player/library software has made strides. Also, the iPod was a music player, not the "multimedia, communication, and gaming device" the iPod Touch is today (where a relatively large rectangle actually makes some sense).
A DX weighs under 19oz. I have the US/domestic wireless version. The international version is listed on Amazon's site as 18.9oz. In US units, 16 ounces in a pound. It doesn't even break 1.5#, much less your claim of 2#.
Thanks for pointing this out, albeit in the form of something of a Kindle-fever rant. I stand corrected; when looking at Amazon's product page I confused the shipping weight number as the product's weight.
The iPad is heavier, but as others pointed out, still much lighter than textbooks (or programming books, for that matter).
I'd rather read the WSJ on the iPad or Kindle than the actual thing in bed or at the breakfast table.
Ah, to each his (or her) own. The wonderful core behind what new devices have to offer in real terms.
I only brought the Kindle into my post because it is successful and obviously people like it, so it's comparative weight may shed light on how well people buying the iPad will, as you say, get used to it's cumbersome aspects. I appreciate the correction, as that weight fits in better with what I expected.
A Kindle is not an iPad however, and people writing about the iPad keep talking about its potential to move computing into areas we don't tend to use computers (like the comment about doctors and nurses as they're up and about). The Kindle replaces something, a book (or a newspaper), etc. It's a reader, it had a definition or purpose before it existed. The iPad is yet to fall into its niche. Considering the many theorized uses for it, weight might well be more of an issue, just as text input is much more of an issue than it is with the Kindle.
I know people will use it and love it, I'm just more interested in how it will be used, and what it will be used to do.
Apple did with media player what Sony did with cassette player. The built to a quality specification and not a price point.
Sony made some extremely high quality portable music players. When the iPod came out, they added MP3 support of sorts to their proprietary format, coming out with new models of their extremely high quality players. Their software, however, was terrible. Both to use, and due to suffering limitations thanks to being a record label company along side as a portable music player company. In terms of hardware though, Sony didn't stop with their quality and design with the cassette or compact disc Walkman players.
While iPod sure was better than the most MP3 players, I disagree that iPod was something revolutionary. Walkman players were damn good too, and they weren't as large as iPod - a really important aspect if you want to take some music with you while jogging (so that the player doesn't weight in your pocket, and so that it doesn't either pull your earplugs out of year head). One of the Walkmans that was maybe 1cm wide and 3cm long and ultra light was perfect for this.
Another aspect to think about iPod vs Walkman or other MP3 players was that iPod had no physical feedback on controls. Only flat buttons in front of it. The other players had song scrolls that were out of the player and you could feel them - another important point when you're just putting your hand in pocket and want to change a song.
The sad, sad thing about this is the truth of it all. I have the first gen Sony Minidisc player/recorder that connected via usb and let you put MP3s onto the minidiscs (the MZ-N1, shown there in it's dock). The form factor and design of the hardware was beautiful, the remote was fantastic to use and to show off, and the player fit in my bag while the remote clipped to my bag's strap. Watching iPod users dig out their players and hold the (seemingly) giant rectangle in front of their face for a couple minutes to pick new music seemed ridiculous at the time. The MZ-N1 didn't have the song capacity the iPod did, but I enjoyed selecting music to put on discs, and decorating them. Combined with the optical input and ease of recording (just run a line from the soundboard directly into the player and hit record during a set), I loved it.
It's buried around the house somewhere now, and I still love it, even as I use my ridiculous giant triangle iPod instead. What sold me on the iPod was not it's hardware, but it's software. iTunes (pre-store of any kind), was a breeze to use. Sony used SonicStage, and the MZ-N1 didn't really play MP3s, it used ATRAC3. SonicStage converted MP3s to ATRAC3, then transferred the music to the device. I didn't mind this, as far as I was concerned they were both just compression formats. What made it so sad, was how terrible SonicStage really was. From just looking at it, to waiting to see if the files converted and uploaded successfully or your computer had crashed horribly in the attempt (one couldn't tell because the conversion and transfer often resembled a horrible crash until it was done), that program was always by far the worst software I'd have on my computer at any time. IIRC, there was even a limit to how many times you could transfer a song to a minidisc (thanks for that, Sony's record label branch).
It got to the point where I began to favor the minidiscs that already had music on them, and the more I stayed away from making new playlists, the concept of an iPod started to seem more and more useful. It never seemed to be more attractive, physically, or more functional in terms of listening to music on the go. What it did have was a fair amount of storage on the device and software that really nailed the concept of keeping a digital library, and transferring songs from the library to a device. Apple ended up selling me on an iPod despite its design and implementation as an actual portable music player, simply because the really great portable music players at the time were backed with such crappy software and silly restrictions.
It seems as though you are not so upset at the size of the iPad, but the size of your pockets.
Will the iPad fit in a lab coat pocket? Or more generally in the pocket of clinical clothing for doctors and nurses? I think those pockets would be far more interesting than those in jeans.
Do the clipboards and manilla folders that doctors and nurses use now fit in their pockets? I don't really think those are professions that use pockets to do their jobs. Doctors will probably be more interested in whether or not they can scribble notes into documents.
What I found interesting was not the size, but the weight. About 1.5 lbs IIRC. I was even more interested to find that the Kindle DX is over 2 lbs, about a kilogram. These devices both boast superior form factor over options like laptops and cellphones when it comes to reading, especially the Kindle. I never read ebooks on my laptop, because I want to lie in different positions, often holding the book above me. I've found this to be really quite nice with my Android phone, but a kilogram isn't light, and when I think about it, neither is 1.5 lbs. What good is a tablet if you have to, over a long length of use, rest it on your lap or a table anyway?
Maybe the weight isn't an issue, I've never tried a Kindle DX, much less an iPad. At the same time, if I'm using something I have to hold (laptops may be heavier, but I'm not expected to carry it to use it), I don't want it to be heavier than whatever it's replacing. Books are really light, so are television remotes, keyboards and mouses (as one reclines with feet up next to desktop monitor), and even laptops resting on laps aren't so bad. If the iPad is supposed to mobilise content into your hands, it'd better not be the single heaviest thing in my bag.
Of course, software pirates aren't actually the pirates of yore. I agree, though, they are generally after free stuff. I know there's at least a small percentage who download a cracked game in the absence of a good demo, and have bought the game trying it out. For the most part, however, I think game pirates are like music pirates: the vast, vast majority of what they download can not be considered lost sales. It's not being downloaded as a substitute for buying the game/cd, it's being downloaded because it's there, it's free, and the pirate has at least passing interest. "Content Piracy" means there's no need to weight cost against value, so I think most pirates with a big hard drive and fast connection download for the sake of accumulating the content. If one has a terabyte+ of games, music, and movies, ever-growing in size, then consuming that content doesn't really seem like it's at the heart of that endeavor.
Second, what are you graduating from (high school, technical college, university)? With what kind of degree?
Also, where are you located? Some areas have a much higher density of the type of companies that most frequently look to college graduates for hire. Small dev shops can hire fresh grads to get untrained labour for much lower wages than someone with experience. Find companies that are looking for college students / recent grads and offering something like $10-15/hr, even if it's not fulltime. Living frugally for a year or two will not only fill out your resume for a better position later, but give you time to learn industry-relevant things that aren't taught at university.
You see, here's the big problem that Murdoch and friends have with "free-news". The newspapers and magazines, can't get any kind of useful stats on it's users if they just give it away. They use this data in a bunch of ways, one is to supply it to their advertisers.
These guys just don't sell the news, they sell this data as well. It's probably more important to them than selling the news. If you use a credit card to purchase something, this has your full name, address, purchase history through lookup on other shared db's and so much more.
Can't they get around this by striking a deal to share cookies / LSOs with sites like Facebook and Hulu (which already have collaborated in this manner). Most users don't block these, especially LSOs, and all the news site has to do it match it's visitors against a profile on a site like Facebook who then happily provides full demographic information on the user and all their friends (as part of the arrangement), and Hulu can even match that with television viewing habits for the lot.
If it takes 12 seconds to start a SoftMaker Office app, there is something seriously wrong with your setup. If you care, start it with "textmaker -debug", and it will create a log file (tmlog.txt) that protocols the launch process. Might be interesting to figure where it's idling.
With all due respect to your product, this is good user feedback, so I wouldn't sound so dismissive. If there's something wrong with his seriously wrong setup, it clearly didn't affect OpenOffice (or anything else) to the same extent. If you meant something wrong with the StarMaker Office installation process that results in a buggy startup on his functional system, then that's different.
As for the test documents, is it possible to get them? We take pride in our DOCX and XLSX filters (and their quality has been confirmed by several reviews), so I'd like to check them out.
It sounded like they were pretty basic documents, and they were described in his post. I'd suggest contacting him directly about gaining access to the files, since, as a closed source product, not everyone will see an incentive to selflessly contribute in the same way they might in the OSS community.
On 32 bit systems, SoftMaker Office inherits the colors and fonts from the system (if you are running KDE or Gnome). On 64 bit systems, this doesn't work yet.
Given the saturation of amd64 and x86_64 cpus on the market, 64-bit systems should be a major concern, if only when ensuring your 32bit release runs smoothly on them. This runs extra for Linux users, where there's no cost obstacle to downloading the 64bit version of a distribution in addition to the 32bit release. So it's not such a stretch to expect that of the many Linux users that have 64bit chips, basically all of them will be running 64 bit operating systems.
Thank you for the interesting and informative comparison.
The only flaw I see it in is fonts. If you don't have the font loaded on the target machine, it doesn't matter what software you use, it will not render/load it, because it doesn't exist. Almost no "office" program embeds fonts. So that cannot be a valid factor when comparing compatibility.
If you have an MS-Windows machine running MS-Office and create a document with a specific font, then try to load that document on an IDENTICAL machine in the IDENTICAL software that lacks the font, you won't see that font- it will have to substitute some other font.
I believe that was known, and the primary reason for using such a font in the test. It let us see how the two programs compared when it comes to handling a font that doesn't exist on the machine, and see if it substitutes correctly and keeps any formatting, or does something unexpected and buggy.
I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see.
Formatting. When you're sending out resumes businesses expect it to be in Microsoft Office (I don't know, PDF seems better to me) and so if you've got poor formatting then it reflects poorly on you for your employer. If they're getting dozens if not hundreds of job applications, poor formatting is enough to get your resume dismissed straight out the door.
Companies are more interested in finding a fit for the job than if the header styles line up properly. If you are sending a basic, professional resume (and not using a template in your word processor), there won't be any issues anyway, as you don't need anything more than rich text formatting to do it. If you need something with more "pizazz" to impress (perhaps you're a graphic designer), then using a word processor at all seems limiting.
I don't like sending resumes as Word doc files, but I'm not 100% happy with PDF either. If they're using Windows, they probably rely on Adobe for PDF, and the last thing I'd wish on anyone is to make Acrobat fire up when they open my attachment.
Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
I agree that there are far more issues with OO opening PowerPoint files than with MS-Word or Excel files (I know because I use OO every single day), but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
To take it even further, if we're talking about someone lecturing with slides that are provided to students after a lecture, it seems pretty silly to distribute it in a slideshow / presentation format at all. The slideshow is there for the lecture, so one can rely on revealing the next bullet point on cue, which will vary lecture to lecture. Students have no need whatsoever for that, they just need the information. The best solution would be to give the lecture using slides, then distribute something like a PDF with everything that's in the slides, only formatted like notes useful for review (sidestepping compatibility issues in slideshow formatting that is completely useless to students anyway).
On a separate issue: professors, please stop using slideshows in lectures.
Noticeable? Really? I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see.
A quick Google search will tell you that you're the lucky one.
Maybe he meant noticing problems importing MS files that qualify as above and beyond the problems that Word itself has importing certain versions of it's own Word files. I mean, fonts can mess up even using the same version of Word on both ends, if the initial creator uses non-universal fonts and doesn't include them when sharing the document.
To sum it up: if you don't see any problems with OO.org, and are content with it as it is, then this thing is probably not for you (I find it hard to believe anyone could possibly justify a $100 price tag for, at best, a moderate speed improvement). If you have problems with OO, though, I don't even need to explain you what they are, and how this thing can help you there.
I agree with you here; if you don't see problems with OO.org, then you have nothing to try to fix (and certainly no reason to spend money). However, if you do have problems with OO.org, there may well be simple file handling practices to look at adopting first, before investing the time and money in switching.
All applications, free or not, ultimately compete in the "get the job done" market. For some, Google Docs does that. For others, OO.org does that. And others yet might not be content with OO.org, either for performance or compatibility reasons - in which case this thing may be the only one they can get for their platform for any price.
And it's worth pointing out, that for some, a good rich text editor is all that's required. An office might use Word all the time, but that doesn't mean every job in that office needs to do word processing. On the development/engineering side of things, when asked to review a section of a document, if you don't need the document, just the text in some readable form.
Also, if you have multiple desktop OSes in an enterprise setting, having same software for them is going to be the least of your worry - UI will still be different enough to cause major headaches with user training etc.
I haven't found this to be the case. For example, Adobe's Creative Suite is almost identical on Mac or Windows, with minor differences that don't affect the core interface. MS Office is more divergent, but still works in basically the same way. Firefox is basically the same across platforms.
Open Office is a great example of this. Run it on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc; a user who is familiar with it on one platform should be perfectly at home on the others. For jobs that just use the OS to run software, it's not the OS that matters -- it's the application. That's one of the reasons Mac OS has survived; they always managed to attract developers who produced good quality software for the professional user in one field or another.
There are jobs where the OS does matter, such as using OSX's superior integration (vs Windows) of bash, ssh, along with it's ability to install so many Linux tools (via MacPorts and whatnot). So, when the central applications can run over multiple platforms and maintain the same user experiences, then OS choice becomes more about user specific needs and what software is needed for the specific job or department. In many cases where applications that everyone in the business must have installed, OSX can be a welcome alternative to a Linux user in an office that's Windows-centric. They can run the native applications and have a native terminal at the same time, all in a company-approved package (such as a company laptop).
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Hi,
Working scientist here. Ph.D. I've been working 20+ years doing scientific research, getting grants, publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals.
I haven't done ANY calculus since I was an undergrad.
I actually advocate the old adage that math teaches you more beyond the formulas and proofs of any particular area or level of math. I'm a computer programmer, and I use Calculus all the time. I don't compute derivatives or integrate anything, but I definitely use the same part of my brain to work out an algorithm that I did to determine which approach to take to solve a nasty Calculus problem. Whenever I found the solution to a math problem to be 1 = 7 or some similar impossibility, I use the same part of my brain to go back over my work and find the error that I use when debugging code.
At my engineering college, Calculus was the easy start of 4 years of hard math for Computer Science majors. It's not really the "same part of my brain" concept I just used, it's more that the math I've studied developed my abstract problem solving skills, which are extremely important in my job. I think the same skills are just as important across the spectrum of real scientists, too, at least, as far as being good at one's job goes.
Oh, and as for taking Calculus in college, just do it. You don't need to build up to it unless you don't understand the concepts of basic algebra. The professor will teach you the rest.
In the good old days, people used to manage their files by using descriptive file names and sensible directory hierarchies. Nowadays it seems like people throw all their files in some random location, and let higher level software manage it all. It does not always work, particularly because you need descriptive metadata in the first place, and the same data could just as well be in the form of a directory/file hierarchy. Now get off my lawn!
I remember those days, and I definitely didn't have between 50 and 60 GB of music back then (which, I think, is a moderate amount, with others having a lot more). The primary reason I latched onto the database library concept as early as my first encounter with a decent interface, is that directory/file hierarchies are too rigid. Songs can contain more than one artist, compilation albums may come from a famous band / dj / soundtrack / whatever and have different artists per song, albums from one band can fall into different genres, and of course music can span genres (or I might just want to group certain specific ones together).
Using a database driven library gives me the tools to not just include this information, but have it be useful and efficient. Sure, directory/file setups will always be good enough to find and listen to music, but I like browsing through a genre, or an artist, etc, and it being simple to do, even if some artists fall into multiple genres, or if an artist in question is on a soundtrack compiled by someone else. Considering the library software doesn't actually move files around, and I still have respectable directory/file organisation, I see it only as a more efficient means of dealing with music files. The standardised ID2/3 tags makes the library management I do translate to other media library programs as well (being tied to one program's way of handling the database would end things right there).
> Compiling both qt and gtk on Gentoo is a bear for every security fix.
So don't? Can't you just download the updated binary packages with Gentoo?
How much time are you spending building packages and how much time are you actually saving?
I take it you're not a Gentoo user? If we didn't get satisfaction from compiling absolutely everything, we'd have picked a different distro to start with.
Those libraries are what's keeping me away from Amarok. There are a TON of libraries that need to be installed in order to get Amarok going. I'd rather not install all the libraries for the sake of getting a music player working.
I used to obsess about that sort of thing, but at some point the resources on my Linux desktops grew to a point where such concerns suddenly felt trivial. Whereas at one point I'd compile X11 and Fluxbox and carefully watch the library dependencies for anything I wanted to install, now I have no problem with a full install of both the Gnome and KDE desktops, even if I'm not using either at that moment. Maybe I've just gotten lazy, but compared to what we had to work with 10 years ago, even budget desktops are absolute monsters, and Linux is pretty much the only place where I feel the software bloat hasn't kept up.
>In the end I've never found anything I've liked quite as much as Winamp 2.95.
Then you will probably be quite happy with xmms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmms ) or audacious ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_Media_Player ). I know *I* am :)
If you want a heavyweight, feature-packed, system and not just a simple player, check out Amarok ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(software) ) or Rhythmbox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmbox )
Don't forget the goal was to get the same player on Windows and Linux. I wonder how hard it would be to port Audacious to Windows that already has GTK installed (as it does if someone uses Pidgin already).
There's no other platform in the world that can boast this level of flexibility -- not even close
Qt will let you run a single code base on OS/X, Windows 7/etc, Linux and any platform that Qt/Embedded has been ported to. Not just trivial apps like Reversi, but also ones using multithreading, networking, etc. There's also a fair degree of cross-platform multimedia support too, although that's a work in progress. Personally I choose to use PortAudio for cross-platform audio aupport together with Qt.
Are you talking specifically about this, or is that just Nokia's implementation of it?
How flexible is it in other environments, though? The AIR app pictured is reconfiguring the UI in various ways depending on orientation, moving UI elements from a side-by-side configuration to a vertical configuration depending on orientation, etc. Whether that's clever or not probably depends on how much work the developer had to put in - if differently structured interfaces were coded up manually then that's not so impressive.
If the runtime can reconfigure a set of declared elements in sensible ways, that would be quite cool. Although the app demonstrated is relatively uncomplicated in terms of UI, it'd be interesting to see how this applied to a more complicated example. I did get the impression, from the video, that it was the ability to run flexibly on different screen configurations that they were trying to promote, not so much the fact that the code could run on different devices.
I think the video mentioned open sourcing the code in the future, at which point we'll all be able to see exactly how convenient to program they have managed to make this...
It reminds me of making a web site. You can detect the screen size and rendering engine, and move your html elements around whatever is best. I'd never call this multi-platform, though, even if the web site is as fully functional on the iPhone as it is under Windows 7, etc. The web site is written for the "browser platform", and relies on having browser implementations known to support it's functionality in order for it to work on any OS. There's nothing at all clever about it, in those terms. A single-window game that doesn't appear to rely on anything outside of what the Adobe Air implementations offer seems to be the same thing.
Show me a single codebase that you can use that produces native (or close enough) GUI elements for something a little more complex and I'll be interested.
the applications they produce aren't native to ANY platform.
Yep, this would be a terrible way of making utility apps, but this is acceptable for some types of apps, like games, that usually have unique interfaces anyway.
Best of all for applications that are intended to "take over" the interface. An example that comes to mind is Boxee: when running, it's not supposed to mesh well with your system's interface, it's supposed to *be* your system's interface.
All the same, I am in total agreement with the criticism of cross-platform software that fail to integrate as native applications. I also don't want to see more web technologies being used "beyond their scope" outside the web, or dragging functionality into the browser that can be done better as a desktop application. I've yet to see anything to convince me this is a good thing for users, while I do know it can be cheap and fast from the development side.
Java does bad on GUI's. It's true. OTOH, it doesn't actually do that badly on graphics. It has OpenGL bindings, so for things like making games, it actually does just fine. I'm not personally a big fan of Java, but normal "businessy" GUI apps are really the only are where Java really falls down on performance. And, even then, it's nowhere near as bad as the Java reputation would suggest.
It's worth pointing out somewhere that the iReversi program in the article doesn't actually seem to touch the GUI at all. I see no menus, search boxes, scrollbars, etc, just whatever window decoration the OS has to offer. The game itself is only graphics, which you point out can make things a lot easier. Basically, this game seems at least on par with the least impressive demonstration of cross-platform code I can imagine. It might as well just be "Hello, World!". How about an office suite like OO.o, an image editor like GIMP, a chat client like Pidgin, or anything that requires actual use of a GUI that so complicates the cross-platform approach?
Don't show me something simple and tell me it's a demonstration of overcoming a complex and longstanding issue. I can write a web page that renders the same in Firefox 3.6 as it does in IE 5, but that doesn't mean I've created anything special; I just wrote something basic enough that avoids the big issues.
I bet Yahoo would be more than happy to provide search technology to Apple (not the powered by Bing stuff, their own capable search). Yahoo's not going to make a competing phone anytime soon, and the cost of a Yahoo deal might well be worth it against the cost of Apple developing their own (the latter obviously being more expensive, but meaning Apple gets full control).
You are the only person I've ever seen who likes iTunes and things the iPod hardware is shit.
Well, I liked iTunes a lot better when it was just a music player and library (and had programs like SonicStage to compare it against). A lot has changed over its lifespan to make it less likable, and other music player/library software has made strides. Also, the iPod was a music player, not the "multimedia, communication, and gaming device" the iPod Touch is today (where a relatively large rectangle actually makes some sense).
A DX weighs under 19oz. I have the US/domestic wireless version. The international version is listed on Amazon's site as 18.9oz. In US units, 16 ounces in a pound. It doesn't even break 1.5#, much less your claim of 2#.
Thanks for pointing this out, albeit in the form of something of a Kindle-fever rant. I stand corrected; when looking at Amazon's product page I confused the shipping weight number as the product's weight.
The iPad is heavier, but as others pointed out, still much lighter than textbooks (or programming books, for that matter).
I'd rather read the WSJ on the iPad or Kindle than the actual thing in bed or at the breakfast table.
Ah, to each his (or her) own. The wonderful core behind what new devices have to offer in real terms.
I only brought the Kindle into my post because it is successful and obviously people like it, so it's comparative weight may shed light on how well people buying the iPad will, as you say, get used to it's cumbersome aspects. I appreciate the correction, as that weight fits in better with what I expected.
A Kindle is not an iPad however, and people writing about the iPad keep talking about its potential to move computing into areas we don't tend to use computers (like the comment about doctors and nurses as they're up and about). The Kindle replaces something, a book (or a newspaper), etc. It's a reader, it had a definition or purpose before it existed. The iPad is yet to fall into its niche. Considering the many theorized uses for it, weight might well be more of an issue, just as text input is much more of an issue than it is with the Kindle.
I know people will use it and love it, I'm just more interested in how it will be used, and what it will be used to do.
Apple did with media player what Sony did with cassette player. The built to a quality specification and not a price point.
Sony made some extremely high quality portable music players. When the iPod came out, they added MP3 support of sorts to their proprietary format, coming out with new models of their extremely high quality players. Their software, however, was terrible. Both to use, and due to suffering limitations thanks to being a record label company along side as a portable music player company. In terms of hardware though, Sony didn't stop with their quality and design with the cassette or compact disc Walkman players.
While iPod sure was better than the most MP3 players, I disagree that iPod was something revolutionary. Walkman players were damn good too, and they weren't as large as iPod - a really important aspect if you want to take some music with you while jogging (so that the player doesn't weight in your pocket, and so that it doesn't either pull your earplugs out of year head). One of the Walkmans that was maybe 1cm wide and 3cm long and ultra light was perfect for this.
Another aspect to think about iPod vs Walkman or other MP3 players was that iPod had no physical feedback on controls. Only flat buttons in front of it. The other players had song scrolls that were out of the player and you could feel them - another important point when you're just putting your hand in pocket and want to change a song.
The sad, sad thing about this is the truth of it all. I have the first gen Sony Minidisc player/recorder that connected via usb and let you put MP3s onto the minidiscs (the MZ-N1, shown there in it's dock). The form factor and design of the hardware was beautiful, the remote was fantastic to use and to show off, and the player fit in my bag while the remote clipped to my bag's strap. Watching iPod users dig out their players and hold the (seemingly) giant rectangle in front of their face for a couple minutes to pick new music seemed ridiculous at the time. The MZ-N1 didn't have the song capacity the iPod did, but I enjoyed selecting music to put on discs, and decorating them. Combined with the optical input and ease of recording (just run a line from the soundboard directly into the player and hit record during a set), I loved it.
It's buried around the house somewhere now, and I still love it, even as I use my ridiculous giant triangle iPod instead. What sold me on the iPod was not it's hardware, but it's software. iTunes (pre-store of any kind), was a breeze to use. Sony used SonicStage, and the MZ-N1 didn't really play MP3s, it used ATRAC3. SonicStage converted MP3s to ATRAC3, then transferred the music to the device. I didn't mind this, as far as I was concerned they were both just compression formats. What made it so sad, was how terrible SonicStage really was. From just looking at it, to waiting to see if the files converted and uploaded successfully or your computer had crashed horribly in the attempt (one couldn't tell because the conversion and transfer often resembled a horrible crash until it was done), that program was always by far the worst software I'd have on my computer at any time. IIRC, there was even a limit to how many times you could transfer a song to a minidisc (thanks for that, Sony's record label branch).
It got to the point where I began to favor the minidiscs that already had music on them, and the more I stayed away from making new playlists, the concept of an iPod started to seem more and more useful. It never seemed to be more attractive, physically, or more functional in terms of listening to music on the go. What it did have was a fair amount of storage on the device and software that really nailed the concept of keeping a digital library, and transferring songs from the library to a device. Apple ended up selling me on an iPod despite its design and implementation as an actual portable music player, simply because the really great portable music players at the time were backed with such crappy software and silly restrictions.
It seems as though you are not so upset at the size of the iPad, but the size of your pockets.
Will the iPad fit in a lab coat pocket? Or more generally in the pocket of clinical clothing for doctors and nurses? I think those pockets would be far more interesting than those in jeans.
Do the clipboards and manilla folders that doctors and nurses use now fit in their pockets? I don't really think those are professions that use pockets to do their jobs. Doctors will probably be more interested in whether or not they can scribble notes into documents.
What I found interesting was not the size, but the weight. About 1.5 lbs IIRC. I was even more interested to find that the Kindle DX is over 2 lbs, about a kilogram. These devices both boast superior form factor over options like laptops and cellphones when it comes to reading, especially the Kindle. I never read ebooks on my laptop, because I want to lie in different positions, often holding the book above me. I've found this to be really quite nice with my Android phone, but a kilogram isn't light, and when I think about it, neither is 1.5 lbs. What good is a tablet if you have to, over a long length of use, rest it on your lap or a table anyway?
Maybe the weight isn't an issue, I've never tried a Kindle DX, much less an iPad. At the same time, if I'm using something I have to hold (laptops may be heavier, but I'm not expected to carry it to use it), I don't want it to be heavier than whatever it's replacing. Books are really light, so are television remotes, keyboards and mouses (as one reclines with feet up next to desktop monitor), and even laptops resting on laps aren't so bad. If the iPad is supposed to mobilise content into your hands, it'd better not be the single heaviest thing in my bag.
Of course, software pirates aren't actually the pirates of yore. I agree, though, they are generally after free stuff. I know there's at least a small percentage who download a cracked game in the absence of a good demo, and have bought the game trying it out. For the most part, however, I think game pirates are like music pirates: the vast, vast majority of what they download can not be considered lost sales. It's not being downloaded as a substitute for buying the game/cd, it's being downloaded because it's there, it's free, and the pirate has at least passing interest. "Content Piracy" means there's no need to weight cost against value, so I think most pirates with a big hard drive and fast connection download for the sake of accumulating the content. If one has a terabyte+ of games, music, and movies, ever-growing in size, then consuming that content doesn't really seem like it's at the heart of that endeavor.
Second, what are you graduating from (high school, technical college, university)? With what kind of degree?
Also, where are you located? Some areas have a much higher density of the type of companies that most frequently look to college graduates for hire. Small dev shops can hire fresh grads to get untrained labour for much lower wages than someone with experience. Find companies that are looking for college students / recent grads and offering something like $10-15/hr, even if it's not fulltime. Living frugally for a year or two will not only fill out your resume for a better position later, but give you time to learn industry-relevant things that aren't taught at university.
No
You see, here's the big problem that Murdoch and friends have with "free-news". The newspapers and magazines, can't get any kind of useful stats on it's users if they just give it away. They use this data in a bunch of ways, one is to supply it to their advertisers.
These guys just don't sell the news, they sell this data as well. It's probably more important to them than selling the news. If you use a credit card to purchase something, this has your full name, address, purchase history through lookup on other shared db's and so much more.
Can't they get around this by striking a deal to share cookies / LSOs with sites like Facebook and Hulu (which already have collaborated in this manner). Most users don't block these, especially LSOs, and all the news site has to do it match it's visitors against a profile on a site like Facebook who then happily provides full demographic information on the user and all their friends (as part of the arrangement), and Hulu can even match that with television viewing habits for the lot.
If it takes 12 seconds to start a SoftMaker Office app, there is something seriously wrong with your setup. If you care, start it with "textmaker -debug", and it will create a log file (tmlog.txt) that protocols the launch process. Might be interesting to figure where it's idling.
With all due respect to your product, this is good user feedback, so I wouldn't sound so dismissive. If there's something wrong with his seriously wrong setup, it clearly didn't affect OpenOffice (or anything else) to the same extent. If you meant something wrong with the StarMaker Office installation process that results in a buggy startup on his functional system, then that's different.
As for the test documents, is it possible to get them? We take pride in our DOCX and XLSX filters (and their quality has been confirmed by several reviews), so I'd like to check them out.
It sounded like they were pretty basic documents, and they were described in his post. I'd suggest contacting him directly about gaining access to the files, since, as a closed source product, not everyone will see an incentive to selflessly contribute in the same way they might in the OSS community.
On 32 bit systems, SoftMaker Office inherits the colors and fonts from the system (if you are running KDE or Gnome). On 64 bit systems, this doesn't work yet.
Given the saturation of amd64 and x86_64 cpus on the market, 64-bit systems should be a major concern, if only when ensuring your 32bit release runs smoothly on them. This runs extra for Linux users, where there's no cost obstacle to downloading the 64bit version of a distribution in addition to the 32bit release. So it's not such a stretch to expect that of the many Linux users that have 64bit chips, basically all of them will be running 64 bit operating systems.
Thank you for the interesting and informative comparison.
The only flaw I see it in is fonts. If you don't have the font loaded on the target machine, it doesn't matter what software you use, it will not render/load it, because it doesn't exist. Almost no "office" program embeds fonts. So that cannot be a valid factor when comparing compatibility.
If you have an MS-Windows machine running MS-Office and create a document with a specific font, then try to load that document on an IDENTICAL machine in the IDENTICAL software that lacks the font, you won't see that font- it will have to substitute some other font.
I believe that was known, and the primary reason for using such a font in the test. It let us see how the two programs compared when it comes to handling a font that doesn't exist on the machine, and see if it substitutes correctly and keeps any formatting, or does something unexpected and buggy.
I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see.
Formatting. When you're sending out resumes businesses expect it to be in Microsoft Office (I don't know, PDF seems better to me) and so if you've got poor formatting then it reflects poorly on you for your employer. If they're getting dozens if not hundreds of job applications, poor formatting is enough to get your resume dismissed straight out the door.
Companies are more interested in finding a fit for the job than if the header styles line up properly. If you are sending a basic, professional resume (and not using a template in your word processor), there won't be any issues anyway, as you don't need anything more than rich text formatting to do it. If you need something with more "pizazz" to impress (perhaps you're a graphic designer), then using a word processor at all seems limiting.
I don't like sending resumes as Word doc files, but I'm not 100% happy with PDF either. If they're using Windows, they probably rely on Adobe for PDF, and the last thing I'd wish on anyone is to make Acrobat fire up when they open my attachment.
Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
I agree that there are far more issues with OO opening PowerPoint files than with MS-Word or Excel files (I know because I use OO every single day), but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
To take it even further, if we're talking about someone lecturing with slides that are provided to students after a lecture, it seems pretty silly to distribute it in a slideshow / presentation format at all. The slideshow is there for the lecture, so one can rely on revealing the next bullet point on cue, which will vary lecture to lecture. Students have no need whatsoever for that, they just need the information. The best solution would be to give the lecture using slides, then distribute something like a PDF with everything that's in the slides, only formatted like notes useful for review (sidestepping compatibility issues in slideshow formatting that is completely useless to students anyway).
On a separate issue: professors, please stop using slideshows in lectures.
Noticeable? Really? I have yet to notice any problems importing MS files to OO so that's hard to see.
A quick Google search will tell you that you're the lucky one.
Maybe he meant noticing problems importing MS files that qualify as above and beyond the problems that Word itself has importing certain versions of it's own Word files. I mean, fonts can mess up even using the same version of Word on both ends, if the initial creator uses non-universal fonts and doesn't include them when sharing the document.
To sum it up: if you don't see any problems with OO.org, and are content with it as it is, then this thing is probably not for you (I find it hard to believe anyone could possibly justify a $100 price tag for, at best, a moderate speed improvement). If you have problems with OO, though, I don't even need to explain you what they are, and how this thing can help you there.
I agree with you here; if you don't see problems with OO.org, then you have nothing to try to fix (and certainly no reason to spend money). However, if you do have problems with OO.org, there may well be simple file handling practices to look at adopting first, before investing the time and money in switching.
All applications, free or not, ultimately compete in the "get the job done" market. For some, Google Docs does that. For others, OO.org does that. And others yet might not be content with OO.org, either for performance or compatibility reasons - in which case this thing may be the only one they can get for their platform for any price.
And it's worth pointing out, that for some, a good rich text editor is all that's required. An office might use Word all the time, but that doesn't mean every job in that office needs to do word processing. On the development/engineering side of things, when asked to review a section of a document, if you don't need the document, just the text in some readable form.
Also, if you have multiple desktop OSes in an enterprise setting, having same software for them is going to be the least of your worry - UI will still be different enough to cause major headaches with user training etc.
I haven't found this to be the case. For example, Adobe's Creative Suite is almost identical on Mac or Windows, with minor differences that don't affect the core interface. MS Office is more divergent, but still works in basically the same way. Firefox is basically the same across platforms.
Open Office is a great example of this. Run it on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc; a user who is familiar with it on one platform should be perfectly at home on the others. For jobs that just use the OS to run software, it's not the OS that matters -- it's the application. That's one of the reasons Mac OS has survived; they always managed to attract developers who produced good quality software for the professional user in one field or another.
There are jobs where the OS does matter, such as using OSX's superior integration (vs Windows) of bash, ssh, along with it's ability to install so many Linux tools (via MacPorts and whatnot). So, when the central applications can run over multiple platforms and maintain the same user experiences, then OS choice becomes more about user specific needs and what software is needed for the specific job or department. In many cases where applications that everyone in the business must have installed, OSX can be a welcome alternative to a Linux user in an office that's Windows-centric. They can run the native applications and have a native terminal at the same time, all in a company-approved package (such as a company laptop).