I'm finding it rather hard to believe myself, but it's happening.
I suspect that at least a large part is the switch by debian from slink to potato; there have been various changes in default behavior, and the whole thing seems to have gotten *much* slower since the "upgrade". If I can get three hours free at a time that students don't need the server running, I'm ripping out debian for freebsd. I've reported it a couple of times in a couple of places, but have gotten no acknowledgement that anyone else has seen potato become a pig. THe problem is that I can't report anythign objectvively as a bug without spending a couple of days on an instal/reinstall/test cycle on a couple of different versions . ..
However, the speed difference was there before with older versions of debian and freebsd. The offensive box only has 24mb . . .
No, it's comparing the entire economy to the single good case that's a logical fallacy.
If someone steals the software, it does not mean that they would have bought it. If they pay for the software, it means they don't buy something else--other software, bananas, caonsumption in the future, whatever.
In the case of an internet sale, it means that they don't buy something else--somewhere, someplace.
The differences is that piracy involves a single industry getting/not getting money, while an internet sale displaces the same amount of *something* somewhere (at least to a first and probably second order approximation. I'm not about to get into full equilibrium analysis in this type of forum . . . but such an analysis would reveal that the internet sale probably slightly increases the size of the economy).
When someone buys something for $100 on the internet, it automatically reduces the sales tax received by the government. The $6 (or whatever) received from the internet sale replaces the $6 that would have been received from the local sale.
The response under load is the single biggest difference I've noticed under FreeBSD & debian. At even a load of 2 on this box (P120/24), I notice the lack of response under X (as in: wait several seconds for the cursor to move). Under FreeBSD on a K6-200/64, there is nearly no loss at a load of 10 (from several parallell makes). Yes, that's close to apples/oranges, but the freebsd box used to run debian, and I noticed a similar phenomenon there.
Maybe it's just configuration somewhere; both boxes are pretty much stock. However, it seems to me that I noticed something similar with macbsd and linux a couple of years ago, when the macbsd box had a slight memory/cpu disadvantage. (However, if you tried to run lyx with the default postscript fonts and not using xfs, both came to a screeching halt:)
I'm game to try another version [*shudder*], but for the moment, it needs to come precompiled. [But I file bug reports. Lots of them, and usually exotic stuff. Absoft asked me to betatest their now-current Fortran becasue of them]. Compiling is a bit beyond this current box at the office . . . in a few weeks, I'll have a larger box, but . ..[A
I don't need much from the borders; basically upper & lower lines, and a "lighter" line every five lines so they can trace across the whole sheet.
Oh, that's part of what I'm saying:) Word 5.1/Excel 4 are as far as I go in saying microsoft made anything useful. When the third hard drive on my powerbook went kaput (irony: an ibm part gave apple the worst reliability problem since the apple iii . ..), I actually went back to word 4/excel 3--I had about a 7 disk set that booted, unpacked onto the ramdisk, and still left me a few megs left.
these days, if you want mail merge, the best way to go is with my patch to lyx:) it's patterned after the old (1.0-5.1) Word interface, but has the things it "should have" had--recursion, elseif, etc. RIght now it's just a source-code patch; when I either get some free time, or teach an interdisciplinary "Economics of Free Software" class, I (or the programming contingent in the class) will convert it to a library, and add the appropriate calls to LyX to use it./end{plug}:)
I'd put word4/excel3 as the "minimum" usable wp/spreadsheet, and anything past word4/exce5 as overkill for most purposes.
As for powerpoint: It's an incredibly poor implementation of a half-way decent idea. I do better with slides from lyx . . .
I've never tried applixware, for the simple reason that when I chacked, it lacked features that I use on a daily basis. Maybe they've added more; I don't know. The same applies to Abiword. I never checked again, because lyx handles what I need in a wordprocessor more than adequately--in fact, for what I do, better than a classical model word processor *could* do. I didn't spend five full minutes bringing my dissertation into conformance with the university style guidelines. . ..
When I tried WP/linux, it was to submit an abstract for a conference. We brought the file to a secretarial machine running the same version, and it turned out that it couldn't handle the included postscript images. The downloadable version also doesn't handle equations . ..
Please don't try to turn what I wrote into any claim that office packages are useful, or that the quantity of features is in any way related to usefullnes. I didn't, can't, and won't say that. However, a spreadsheet should be able to include a line above a cell to show a sum (gnumeric fails here, as do most of the text spread sheet). It should be able to graph the data, or (better yet) it should be able to pipe arbitrary and noncontiguous blocks of data to something that can plot them. Word had useful graphs for miltplie variables in version 4; I think they were also in 3, but it's been a while. I believe that it is still the only one that can reliably handle noncontiguous data (leave out columns); I saw something else try, but it lost the information when it reloaded the file.
I don't want lots and lots of features. However, Word 4/Excel 3 hardly qualify as bloated, yet they're both more useful than anything I've seen on windows, and anything but lyx on *nix. Word 5.1/Excel 4 added some useful things, but introduced bloat. They're also the last MS products that I think were any good at all. I bought both of them.
uh, no. If I hit the nail on the head, I apparently got your fingers while I was at it . ..
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, saying that what is available now are toys compared to the windows equivalents. Lyx, for example, is miles ahead of word for anything vaguely technical.[B
More importantly, fifteen year old microsoft products are far ahead of MS Office. It takes significantly more work to perform the same task on Word 6+ as it did with Word 4.0 and 5.1 for the mac. If you're actually trying to get work done, a Mac (or mac emulator, I suppose) and the old MS products are a far better choice.
When Word 6 came out, MS was force by the market to put 5.1 back on the market. It's *really* that much of a step back.
The linux choices for spreadsheets and wordprocessors are pretty bad. THis does *not* mean that the current MS choices are reasonable; I'd insist on the old mac versions and a mac to use them with before the newer windows things. Once upon a time, MS made good software (applications, at least). Then came Word 6/Excel 5 . . .
Let's get serious about what's out there in spreadsheets and word processors; we're not even comparable to the late 80's.
Word Processors:
WordPerfect. It works, except for the deleted features. You can't print a WP file with an embedded postscript on a non-linux machine (such as windows); it puts a warning message about unsupported features instead. Overall, though, this is a single functioning wordprocessor.
Lyx. But it's not really a wordprocessor. It flatly beats any word processor for what it does, and the use of lyx or raw latex for technical writing is really a preferences issue--my tendency would be raw latex, but lyx shows me my equations in a form I can edit directly from the keyboard, and tends to use far less keystrokes than raw latex, so I prefer it. If you want to wrap text around a table or figure, or do certain things with table formatting, lyx inherits all of latex's warts. Unfortunately, these are part of what is expected of a word processor in common business use. ALso, to print on pre-printed forms, the micro-management that is antithetical to latex in necessary; lyx never will do such things (nor should it).
Staroffice. Let's be serious. If you can live with crashes, and have enough memory, you can get by with 5.1. It's probably no worse than the current versions of Word. And then there's the missing documentation and miscelanous quirks. Don't even think of running it with less than 48Mb--and memory doesn't make everything faster--it still takes forever to load with.5G of memory. I really haven't used swriter 3.1, so can't comment on it.
The rest: let's face it; they're just plain not finished.
Word processor summary: unless latex is appropriate to your circumstances, the only choice is wordperfect. I preseme the commercial version interacts with other versions of wordperfect better than the downloadable one. You'd be better off with Word 4.0 or 5.1 for the mac than anything but LyX.
Spreadsheets:
even worse.
Gnumeric. Maybe someday it will be finished. There's more there than there used to be. Want a graph? A border on a cell? Forget it; you can't have it yet.
wingz. sure, it can be downloaded free, but its day seems to come and gone. And a single crash where it scrambles my data beyond recovery (messed with the original file rather than using a working copy, it appears) is one more than I tolerate from any application, ever. The graphing features aren't up to Excel 3.0 from the mid 80's.
Miscellaneous text-based sheets: OK, if visicalc did what you needed, I suppose.
staroffice 5.1. You better have a lot of horsepower again, and being willing to put up with the crashes. I've had files that would crash it *every* time the second time I tried to print to postscript, and sometimes the first print attempt as well. You also get the attempt to take over your entire computer with a new desktop, attempts to force you to it's own "work" folder--I have found no way to tell it to use ~ in a way it will remember; a popup box every time you try to use any format other than starcalc5, trying to get you to choose it instead (with that as the default), (did I mention lots of crashes yet?), limited graph choices, a scripting/macro facility that is presumabley documented *somewhere*. ANd you better have a minimum of 64M.
Staroffice 3.1. The closest thing to usable I have found. Isn't *as* aggressive in trying to take over your life, crashes less than 5.1, can sort of run on this 24M machine. ON the other hand, the time to paste once formula into a 200x15 region is measured in minutes (I launched lynx and was to about the end of the word processor section and it was still trying to paste). Easier to configure and adjust than 5.1, but you can get wierd results printing. Screen writes seem to be bad even for motif (as in overdone and high overhead); forget using it remotely over a cable modem that can sustain 500kbit/second
Summary: None of the contenders match up to excel 3.0 in performance, usability, stability, or features.
Financial:
Gnucash sounds like a nice step, but it also sounds like it still hasn't caught up to quicken 1.0--little things like electronic transfer still missing if I'm readng this correctly.
There are a great many different Guinness's brewed at the main brewery. Iirc, the irish version is actually lighter and lower in alcohal than most of the rest due to the way taxes work there. There are at least two distinct varieties in the US--the bottled and canned just plain aren't the same beer, even before bottling/canning. I don't know if the tap & canned are the same; they seem reasonably close.
ANd then [no, I'm not making this up] there's the Miranda Guinness, the supertanker that delivers the stuff around the world. There's details in the promotional literature from the brewery tours that my sister brought back for me.
Yes, I'll repeat that: Guinness has a supertanker to deliver their beer, and a fleet of smaller ships to shuttle it in.
So far, I've been unable to book a cruise on it.
Hmm, while I'm at it, they watered down the bottled version in '93 or so; it went from very good to so-so (the Miller Reserve stout was actually better than what they sold here in bottles after the change, believe it or not . ..)
Nah, that's not the kind of argument they have in bars that the book settles--those questions don't have clear answers that anyone but an idiot can see . . .
I don't know why it only occurred to me in the last few days instead of years ago, but . ..
Density has gotten high, but if you want to hit two or three drives at once (swap, usr, tmp, home), you still need multiple drives. What about building a drive for which the groups of platters were separately accessible for different blocks of heads? You might even make it configurable--three groups of head-steppers, and a platter could attach it's heads to any of them?
This clearly wouldn't be a solution for servers, but it would seem to offer some huge benefits for workstations.
I think it's in the jargon file; I just remember it as a bit of folklore:)
Usenet used to rely on the arpanet backbone where available, but most sites got their feed through modems. Sending email (off arpanet) required knowing not only the destination address, but the path of every machine that the message would hop along the way (but this was easy if responding to a post; just send it back from whence it came). To email me from back east you would have sent to something like
gad, it's been a while; maybe I have that in the wrong direction, and I don't remember the names of the machine, but I think that was my final address. i
Oh, and of the 30 or so newsgroups at the time, it seems to me that two were devoted to finding paths to people. Basically, a lot of posts like, "Does anyone have a path to George Jones at Olivetti in Cupertino?" If George knew your were looking for him, he would read those newsgroups until he found your message (or grep the newsspool:)--once he saw it, he could send a message right back up the same path. If he didn't, maybe you'd be lucky and someone else would see it; maybe not.
Anyway, I was saying that most sites got it through modem. Then there were the sites that didn't, which got it by tape (Australia?), leading to the observation,
"Never underestimate the bandwith of a [station wagon|747] full of nine track tapes."
OK, the largest number ever. With another 9,950 or so posts to this article, someone *really* gets the 10,000 post on the 10,000 article. The prize will be a [drum roll, please] yes, a life!:)
This will lead to new depths of behavior. Lured by the not so lurid prizes, the cellar dwellers of the web will realize that the first post nonsese was just the beginning; there's plenty of cool numbers. 10,001 will be of interest for the symmetry. But it will be hard to top 12,321 and 12,345 . . . (except, of course, by getting post 666 in a microsoft thead:)
I don't use many tables. There's a solution to that one. I think it's solved the next time you open the file. If all else fails, the.lyx file is plain text, and can be directly edited. That, and this bug may be fixed by now (I haven't read the developers list for a couple of months).
I *really* gained from the plain text file when I was stranded in a motel with a laptop containing an older version of my dissertation, and a couple of printed versions with changes to be made. I made a copy, edited a copy, and took a diff. When I got back, I used patch to apply the diff to the newer version, and was immediately in business. [B
I'm certain that there are valid uses for javascript out there. So far, though, the only uses I have seen are a) popu-up advertising b) taking control of the display away from the user in general c) creating links where a real link would have done at least as well d) forcing of automatic forwarding to an advertising site e) a single case where it was used to enable nested choices--choose the textbook then the chapter.
Only e) even vaguely benefits the user, and this is arguable. a-d all either affirmatively harm the user, or are crummy programming.
If your page requires javascript to function, unless you're doing something rather exotic with user data, it's almost certainly wrong. More than that, I'll go to one of your competitors--I used to use foxnews, but they're not enough better than CNN to put up with this.
I've rememberd a couple of other bits. File transfer betweek Lyx and Klyx is one-way--lyx can read the old format used by klyx, but not vice versa. Nothing malicious; it's just that new features required changes. There's something major with tables that klyx can't do; I forget what it is.
The biggy: tex import. Lyx can now import virtually any latex using reLyX. reLyX generates modern lyx, rather than the old dialect spoken by klyx.
The version of lyx that klyx comes from (.11.x) is at best beta (but still far more stable than any commercial word processor I've used save Word Star 2.x), while regular LyX is a complete release-grade product. The only thing I know that's anywhere near as stable is vim (and I presume other vi).
Porting to the new libraries is one thing. Porting the current version of lyx would not require an update of klyx, but an entirely new port; the klyx changes are not compatable with the current version of lyx (otherwise, it would have been merged in to the main distribution).
A new port also seems similarly futile--it will not be compatible with versions of Lyx proper coming out in a few months,due to the new device independence.
klyx was a one-time port of lyx. It was severely out of date at the time it was released, relying on lyx.11 rather than the then-current.13. The last I heard, there are absolutely no plans to ever update it.
Currently, lyx is moving towards toolkit independence. Some of the klyx code may be cannibalized, but the customization to change toolkits won't really carry over. It has been the intent from the time that klyx appeared that it be rolled back into the main lyx distribution.
Anyway, a klyx comparison wouldn't be nearly as useful as one for lyx iteslf . . .
In 1995, I was still hanging on to obsolete macs for the typesetting featrues in the older versions of word. Then I stumbled across lyx, which let me enter equations easily from the keyboard *and* edit the while displayed. I quickly switched over.
After a few days, I noticed how much I missed the single character insert symbol command. I sent a message to the lyx developers. Within a week, that feature was part of the mainstream distribution.
A couple of years later, I was inserting *lots* of index entries, and the command was kind of kludgy (pop-up with no default entry). I spent a couple of days relearning the c++ I'd forgotten:), then made it work the way I wanted. Within a week, this was part of the main code.
More time passed, and it was time to send *lots* of application letters for a job. I realized it would take less time to add this to lyx than it would to fight with the current moronified-wysywigified merge in lyx. This one isn't in the main distribution. It works, but needs some work (actually, I'm going to move it to a library, so that very little lands in lyx proper, and it can be used elsewhere . . . someday, when I have free time. Better yet, if I teach a seminar on the economics of free software, it could be the central project . ..)
Anyway, he might have gotten a lot more of what he wanted a lot sooner, and something like lyx still can vary into the niche project he bemoans the loss of . . .
They blink. And there aren't many places where you find larger concentrations of folks annoyed by blinking than here.
I don't block ads per se. I block anything that blinks at me . . .
That's the real line between middle and lower clas
on
Free-PC Bites the Dust
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· Score: 2
hmm, ran out of letters in the title:)
Speaking from my observations of people while practicing law for five years, the real dividing line between the middle & lower slasses is not income, but the planning horizon--and part of this comes from how you were brought up.
For the middle class, saving, grabbing the better price, and a lng planning horizon is just part of life. "impulse" purchases exist, but in smaller quantities. Buy the $100 package now (even though it means doing without something else) rather than spend $10/month for a year. Plan your income over several months, rather than paycheck to paycheck (thought this isn't necessarily possible).
I struggled taking economics (I have a Ph.D and am a professor of the subject) because of the notions of "rationality"--it just doesn't describe how a large portion of the population acts. We make models that describe how behavior changes when the interest rate changes, but for those who carry balances on credit charge, it's not the interest rate that tends to matter, or the price of the object, but the monthly payment. Taken to the extreme, $30/month forever looks better than $50 once.
About once a month, I had the same conversation about Sear's cards with prosepective bankruptcy clients (many of whom didn't understand why *I* wouldn't let them make payments). "Here's my Sears bill, but it's wrong. It's the same as when I bought it two years." "How much do you pay each month." "THe payment they show me." "That's the minimum payment. And you have a late charge every month." The minimum payment is 2%, the interest rate 1.75%. That's a 400 month amortization schedule . . . (actually longer, because the payment drops over time).
Disclaimer: I am a laywer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your state. s People are missing the most important part here. It's not the ADV, or the $10, but "joinder."
Joinder is the legal concept governing what actions and parites may be joined in a single piece of litigation. Today, a spam going to ten sepaarte individuals is actionable as trespass, but would require ten separate actions. This law allows the ISP to join them all as a single action, making it economically feasible to litigate them privately.
I'd actually prefer a narrow law just providing that actions regarding email to members of the smae ISP may be joined, and that an ISP may file a single action against multiple spammers. Leave the decisions on exactly what constitutes the tort, or which (if any) tort it is to the courts and common law, which can handle it far better than a legislature could (the only case where I've found an improvement by moving from common law to statutes is the Uniform Commercial Code [which is arguable], and URESA [interstate inforcement for child support]).
This is a task at which the courts have done well for centuries; they decide on the basis of actual cases, and look for simularities, eventually coming up with a general rule.
As far a jurisdiction, anyone committing a wrongful act that lands in another jurisdiction is subject to that jurisdiction. "I shot him on the cliff and didn't know the body would land in your state where murder is illegal" just doesn't cut it.
Bottom line: the law is already equipped to deal with spam; it's just to expensive at the moment. Letting ISP's file large actions will make it practical, and give us better rules than would come from a legislature.
It seems to me that a year or so ago, apple suggested that the same binaries would run on MacOs X and on ppc mac. I don't know if they meant it, or if they still due, but it would suggest that there's at least a possibility . ..
Then again, if I can run standard X applications at the same time, I just may ask for a Mac wherever I land next fall . ..
Slashdot Mirror
I'm finding it rather hard to believe myself, but it's happening.
.
I suspect that at least a large part is the switch by debian from slink to potato; there have been various changes in default behavior, and the whole thing seems to have gotten *much* slower since the "upgrade". If I can get three hours free at a time that students don't need the server running, I'm ripping out debian for freebsd. I've reported it a couple of times in a couple of places, but have gotten no acknowledgement that anyone else has seen potato become a pig. THe problem is that I can't report anythign objectvively as a bug without spending a couple of days on an instal/reinstall/test cycle on a couple of different versions . .
However, the speed difference was there before with older versions of debian and freebsd. The offensive box only has 24mb . . .
No, it's comparing the entire economy to the single good case that's a logical fallacy.
If someone steals the software, it does not mean that they would have bought it. If they pay for the software, it means they don't buy something else--other software, bananas, caonsumption in the future, whatever.
In the case of an internet sale, it means that they don't buy something else--somewhere, someplace.
The differences is that piracy involves a single industry getting/not getting money, while an internet sale displaces the same amount of *something* somewhere (at least to a first and probably second order approximation. I'm not about to get into full equilibrium analysis in this type of forum . . . but such an analysis would reveal that the internet sale probably slightly increases the size of the economy).
When someone buys something for $100 on the internet, it automatically reduces the sales tax received by the government. The $6 (or whatever) received from the internet sale replaces the $6 that would have been received from the local sale.
The response under load is the single biggest difference I've noticed under FreeBSD & debian. At even a load of 2 on this box (P120/24), I notice the lack of response under X (as in: wait several seconds for the cursor to move). Under FreeBSD on a K6-200/64, there is nearly no loss at a load of 10 (from several parallell makes). Yes, that's close to apples/oranges, but the freebsd box used to run debian, and I noticed a similar phenomenon there.
:)
Maybe it's just configuration somewhere; both boxes are pretty much stock. However, it seems to me that I noticed something similar with macbsd and linux
a couple of years ago, when the macbsd box had a slight memory/cpu disadvantage. (However, if you tried to run lyx with the default postscript fonts and not using xfs, both came to a screeching halt
hawk
I'm game to try another version [*shudder*], but for the moment, it needs to come precompiled. [But I file bug reports. Lots of them, and usually exotic stuff. Absoft asked me to betatest their now-current Fortran becasue of them]. Compiling is a bit beyond this current box at the office . . . in a few weeks, I'll have a larger box, but . . .[A
I don't need much from the borders; basically upper & lower lines, and a "lighter" line every five lines so they can trace across the whole sheet.
Oh, that's part of what I'm saying :) Word 5.1/Excel 4 are as far as I go in saying microsoft made anything useful. When the third hard drive on my powerbook went kaput (irony: an ibm part gave apple the worst reliability problem since the apple iii . . .), I actually went back to word 4/excel 3--I had about a 7 disk set that booted, unpacked onto the ramdisk, and still left me a few megs left.
:) it's patterned after the old (1.0-5.1) Word interface, but has the things it "should have" had--recursion, elseif, etc. RIght now it's just a source-code patch; when I either get some free time, or teach an interdisciplinary "Economics of Free Software" class, I (or the programming contingent in the class) will convert it to a library, and add the appropriate calls to LyX to use it. /end{plug} :)
these days, if you want mail merge, the best way to go is with my patch to lyx
I'd put word4/excel3 as the "minimum" usable wp/spreadsheet, and anything past word4/exce5 as overkill for most purposes.
As for powerpoint: It's an incredibly poor implementation of a half-way decent idea. I do better with slides from lyx . . .
I've never tried applixware, for the simple reason that when I chacked, it lacked features that I use on a daily basis. Maybe they've added more; I don't know. The same applies to Abiword. I never checked again, because lyx handles what I need in a wordprocessor more than adequately--in fact, for what I do, better than a classical model word processor *could* do. I didn't spend five full minutes bringing my dissertation into conformance with the university style guidelines. . .
When I tried WP/linux, it was to submit an abstract for a conference. We brought the file to a secretarial machine running the same version, and it turned out that it couldn't handle the included postscript images. The downloadable version also doesn't handle equations . .
Please don't try to turn what I wrote into any claim that office packages are useful, or that the quantity of features is in any way related to usefullnes. I didn't, can't, and won't say that. However, a spreadsheet should be able to include a line above a cell to show a sum (gnumeric fails here, as do most of the text spread sheet). It should be able to graph the data, or (better yet) it should be able to pipe arbitrary and noncontiguous blocks of data to something that can plot them. Word had useful graphs for miltplie variables in version 4; I think they were also in 3, but it's been a while. I believe that it is still the only one that can reliably handle noncontiguous data (leave out columns); I saw something else try, but it lost the information when it reloaded the file.
I don't want lots and lots of features. However, Word 4/Excel 3 hardly qualify as bloated, yet they're both more useful than anything I've seen on windows, and anything but lyx on *nix. Word 5.1/Excel 4 added some useful things, but introduced bloat. They're also the last MS products that I think were any good at all. I bought both of them.
uh, no. If I hit the nail on the head, I apparently got your fingers while I was at it . . .
I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, saying that what is available now are toys compared to the windows equivalents. Lyx, for example, is miles ahead of word for anything vaguely technical.[B
More importantly, fifteen year old microsoft products are far ahead of MS Office. It takes significantly more work to perform the same task on Word 6+ as it did with Word 4.0 and 5.1 for the mac. If you're actually trying to get work done, a Mac (or mac emulator, I suppose) and the old MS products are a far better choice.
When Word 6 came out, MS was force by the market to put 5.1 back on the market. It's *really* that much of a step back.
The linux choices for spreadsheets and wordprocessors are pretty bad. THis does *not* mean that the current MS choices are reasonable; I'd insist on the old mac versions and a mac to use them with before the newer windows things. Once upon a time, MS made good software (applications, at least). Then came Word 6/Excel 5 . . .
Let's get serious about what's out there in spreadsheets and word processors; we're not even comparable to the late 80's.
.5G of memory. I really haven't used swriter 3.1, so can't comment on it.
Word Processors:
WordPerfect. It works, except for the deleted features. You can't print a WP file with an embedded postscript on a non-linux machine (such as windows); it puts a warning message about unsupported features instead. Overall, though, this is a single functioning wordprocessor.
Lyx. But it's not really a wordprocessor. It flatly beats any word processor for what it does, and the use of lyx or raw latex for technical writing is really a preferences issue--my tendency would be raw latex, but lyx shows me my equations in a form I can edit directly from the keyboard, and tends to use far less
keystrokes than raw latex, so I prefer it. If you want to wrap text around a table or figure, or do certain things with table formatting, lyx inherits all of latex's warts. Unfortunately, these are part of what is expected of a word processor in common business use. ALso, to print on pre-printed forms, the micro-management that is antithetical to latex in necessary; lyx never will do such things (nor should it).
Staroffice. Let's be serious. If you can live with crashes, and have enough memory, you can get by with 5.1. It's probably no worse than the current versions of Word. And then there's the missing documentation and miscelanous quirks. Don't even think of running it with less than 48Mb--and memory doesn't make everything faster--it still takes forever to load with
The rest: let's face it; they're just plain not finished.
Word processor summary: unless latex is appropriate to your circumstances, the only choice is wordperfect. I preseme the commercial version interacts with other versions of wordperfect better than the downloadable one. You'd be better off with Word 4.0 or 5.1 for the mac than anything but LyX.
Spreadsheets:
even worse.
Gnumeric. Maybe someday it will be finished. There's more there than there used to be. Want a graph? A border on a cell? Forget it; you can't have it yet.
wingz. sure, it can be downloaded free, but its day seems to come and gone. And a single crash where it scrambles my data beyond recovery (messed with the original file rather than using a working copy, it appears) is one more than I tolerate from any application, ever. The graphing features aren't up to Excel 3.0 from the mid 80's.
Miscellaneous text-based sheets: OK, if visicalc did what you needed, I suppose.
staroffice 5.1. You better have a lot of horsepower again, and being willing to put up with the crashes. I've had files that would crash it *every* time the second time I tried to print to postscript, and sometimes the first print attempt as well. You also get the attempt to take over your entire computer with a new desktop, attempts to force you to it's own "work" folder--I have found no way to tell it to use ~ in a way it will remember; a popup box every time you try to use any format other than starcalc5, trying to get you to choose it instead (with that as the default), (did I mention lots of crashes yet?), limited graph choices, a scripting/macro facility that is presumabley documented *somewhere*. ANd you better have a minimum of 64M.
Staroffice 3.1. The closest thing to usable I have found. Isn't *as* aggressive in trying to take over your life, crashes less than 5.1, can sort of run on this 24M machine. ON the other hand, the time to paste once formula into a 200x15 region is measured in minutes (I launched lynx and was to about the end of the
word processor section and it was still trying to paste). Easier to configure and adjust than 5.1, but you can get wierd results printing. Screen writes seem to be bad even for motif (as in overdone and high overhead); forget using it remotely over a cable modem that can sustain 500kbit/second
Summary: None of the contenders match up to excel 3.0 in performance, usability, stability, or features.
Financial:
Gnucash sounds like a nice step, but it also sounds like it still hasn't
caught up to quicken 1.0--little things like electronic transfer still missing if I'm readng this correctly.
hawk
My oatmeal stout has (more than) a full bowl of oatmeal in every glass. It's not just for breakfast any more.
Thick enough that you might use a fork, but you use a spoon to get every drop . . .
and 15 gallons to be brewed next weekend . . .
There are a great many different Guinness's brewed at the main brewery. Iirc, the irish version is actually lighter and lower in alcohal than most of the rest due to the way taxes work there. There are at least two distinct varieties in the US--the bottled and canned just plain aren't the same beer, even before bottling/canning. I don't know if the tap & canned are the same; they seem reasonably close.
.)
ANd then [no, I'm not making this up] there's the Miranda Guinness, the supertanker that delivers the stuff around the world. There's details in the promotional literature from the brewery tours that my sister brought back for me.
Yes, I'll repeat that: Guinness has a supertanker to deliver their beer, and a fleet of smaller ships to shuttle it in.
So far, I've been unable to book a cruise on it.
Hmm, while I'm at it, they watered down the bottled version in '93 or so; it went from very good to so-so (the Miller Reserve stout was actually better than what they sold here in bottles after the change, believe it or not . .
hawk
>- kinda like discussions of Apache vs IIS or
Nah, that's not the kind of argument they have in bars that the book settles--those questions don't have clear answers that anyone but an idiot can see . . .
:)
I don't know why it only occurred to me in the last few days instead of years ago, but . . .
Density has gotten high, but if you want to hit two or three drives at once (swap, usr, tmp, home), you still need multiple drives. What about building a drive for which the groups of platters were separately accessible for different blocks of heads? You might even make it configurable--three groups of head-steppers, and a platter could attach it's heads to any of them?
This clearly wouldn't be a solution for servers, but it would seem to offer some huge benefits for workstations.
I think it's in the jargon file; I just remember it as a bit of folklore :)
... !berkley!prime3!hawk@olivetti.atc
:)--once he saw it, he could send a message right back up the same path. If he didn't, maybe you'd be lucky and someone else would see it; maybe not.
Usenet used to rely on the arpanet backbone where available, but most sites got their feed through modems. Sending email (off arpanet) required knowing not only the destination address, but the path of every machine that the message would hop along the way (but this was easy if responding to a post; just send it back from whence it came). To email me from back east you would have sent to
something like
!lilcompanyvax!decvax1!decvax5!
gad, it's been a while; maybe I have that in the wrong direction,
and I don't remember the names of the machine, but I think that
was my final address. i
Oh, and of the 30 or so newsgroups at the time, it seems to me that two were devoted to finding paths to people. Basically, a lot of posts like, "Does anyone have a path to George Jones at Olivetti in Cupertino?" If George knew your were looking for him, he would read those newsgroups until he found your message (or grep the newsspool
Anyway, I was saying that most sites got it through modem. Then there
were the sites that didn't, which got it by tape (Australia?), leading
to the observation,
"Never underestimate the bandwith of a [station wagon|747] full of
nine track tapes."
or something like that.
/end{reminisce}
OK, the largest number ever. With another 9,950 or so posts to this article, someone *really* gets the 10,000 post on the 10,000 article. The prize will be a [drum roll, please] yes, a life! :)
:)
This will lead to new depths of behavior. Lured by the not so lurid prizes, the cellar dwellers of the web will realize that the first post nonsese was just the beginning; there's plenty of cool numbers.
10,001 will be of interest for the symmetry. But it will be hard to top 12,321 and 12,345 . . . (except, of course, by getting post 666 in a microsoft thead
hawk, who should really know better . . .
I don't use many tables. There's a solution to that one. I think it's solved the next time you open the file. If all else fails, the .lyx file is plain text, and can be directly edited. That, and this bug may be fixed by now (I haven't read the developers list for a couple of months).
I *really* gained from the plain text file when I was stranded in a motel with a laptop containing an older version of my dissertation, and a couple of printed versions with changes to be made.
I made a copy, edited a copy, and took a diff. When I got back, I used patch to apply the diff to the newer version, and was immediately in business. [B
I'm certain that there are valid uses for javascript out there. So far, though, the only uses I have seen are
a) popu-up advertising
b) taking control of the display away from the user in general
c) creating links where a real link would have done at least as well
d) forcing of automatic forwarding to an advertising site
e) a single case where it was used to enable nested choices--choose the textbook then the chapter.
Only e) even vaguely benefits the user, and this is arguable. a-d all either affirmatively harm the user, or are crummy programming.
If your page requires javascript to function, unless you're doing something rather exotic with user data, it's almost certainly wrong. More than that, I'll go to one of your competitors--I used to use foxnews, but they're not enough better than CNN to put up with this.
hawk
I've rememberd a couple of other bits. File transfer betweek Lyx and Klyx is one-way--lyx can read the old format used by klyx, but not vice versa. Nothing malicious; it's just that new features required changes. There's something major with tables that klyx can't do; I forget what it is.
The biggy: tex import. Lyx can now import virtually any latex using reLyX. reLyX generates modern lyx, rather than the old dialect spoken by klyx.
The version of lyx that klyx comes from (.11.x) is at best beta (but still far more stable than any commercial word processor I've used save Word Star 2.x), while regular LyX is a complete release-grade product. The only thing I know that's anywhere near as stable is vim (and I presume other vi).
Porting to the new libraries is one thing. Porting the current version of lyx would not require an update of klyx, but an entirely new port; the klyx changes are not compatable with the current version of lyx (otherwise, it would have been merged in to the main distribution).
A new port also seems similarly futile--it will not be compatible with versions of Lyx proper coming out in a few months,due to the new device independence.
hawk
klyx was a one-time port of lyx. It was severely out of date at the time it was released, relying on lyx .11 rather than the then-current .13. The last I heard, there are absolutely no plans to ever update it.
Currently, lyx is moving towards toolkit independence. Some of the klyx code may be cannibalized, but the customization to change toolkits won't really carry over. It has been the intent from the time that klyx appeared that it be rolled back into the main lyx distribution.
Anyway, a klyx comparison wouldn't be nearly as useful as one for lyx iteslf . . .
In 1995, I was still hanging on to obsolete macs for the typesetting featrues in the older versions of word. Then I stumbled across lyx, which let me enter equations easily from the keyboard *and* edit the while displayed. I quickly switched over.
:), then made it work the way I wanted. Within a week, this was part of the main code.
.)
After a few days, I noticed how much I missed the single character insert symbol command. I sent a message to the lyx developers. Within a week, that feature was part of the mainstream distribution.
A couple of years later, I was inserting *lots* of index entries, and the command was kind of kludgy (pop-up with no default entry). I spent a couple of days relearning the c++ I'd forgotten
More time passed, and it was time to send *lots* of application letters for a job. I realized it would take less time to add this to lyx than it would to fight with the current moronified-wysywigified merge in lyx. This one isn't in the main distribution. It works, but needs some work (actually, I'm going to move it to a library, so that very little lands in lyx proper, and it can be used elsewhere . . . someday, when I have free time. Better yet, if I teach a seminar on the economics of free software, it could be the central project . .
Anyway, he might have gotten a lot more of what he wanted a lot sooner, and something like lyx still can vary into the niche project he bemoans the loss of . . .
They blink. And there aren't many places where you find larger concentrations of folks annoyed by blinking than here.
I don't block ads per se. I block anything that blinks at me . . .
hmm, ran out of letters in the title :)
Speaking from my observations of people while practicing law for five years, the real dividing line between the middle & lower slasses is not income, but the planning horizon--and part of this comes from how you were brought up.
For the middle class, saving, grabbing the better price, and a lng planning horizon is just part of life. "impulse" purchases exist, but in smaller quantities. Buy the $100 package now (even though it means doing without something else) rather than spend $10/month for a year. Plan your income over several months, rather than paycheck to paycheck (thought this isn't necessarily possible).
I struggled taking economics (I have a Ph.D and am a professor of the subject) because of the notions of "rationality"--it just doesn't describe how a large portion of the population acts. We make models that describe how behavior changes when the interest rate changes, but for those who carry balances on credit charge, it's not the interest rate that tends to matter, or the price of the object, but the monthly payment. Taken to the extreme, $30/month forever looks better than $50 once.
About once a month, I had the same conversation about Sear's cards with prosepective bankruptcy clients (many of whom didn't understand why *I* wouldn't let them make payments).
"Here's my Sears bill, but it's wrong. It's the same as when I bought it two years."
"How much do you pay each month."
"THe payment they show me."
"That's the minimum payment. And you have a late charge every month."
The minimum payment is 2%, the interest rate 1.75%. That's a 400 month amortization schedule . . . (actually longer, because the payment drops over time).
Disclaimer: I am a laywer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your state.
s
People are missing the most important part here. It's not the ADV, or
the $10, but "joinder."
Joinder is the legal concept governing what actions and parites may be joined in a single piece of litigation. Today, a spam going to ten sepaarte individuals is actionable as trespass, but would require ten separate actions. This law allows the ISP to join them all as a single action, making it economically feasible to litigate them privately.
I'd actually prefer a narrow law just providing that actions regarding email to members of the smae ISP may be joined, and that an ISP may file a single action against multiple spammers. Leave the decisions on exactly what constitutes the tort, or which (if any) tort it is to the courts and common law, which can handle it far better than a legislature could (the only case where I've found an improvement by moving from common law to statutes is the Uniform Commercial Code [which is arguable], and URESA [interstate inforcement for child support]).
This is a task at which the courts have done well for centuries; they decide
on the basis of actual cases, and look for simularities, eventually coming up with a general rule.
As far a jurisdiction, anyone committing a wrongful act that lands in another jurisdiction is subject to that jurisdiction. "I shot him on the cliff and didn't know the body would land in your state where murder is illegal" just doesn't cut it.
Bottom line: the law is already equipped to deal with spam; it's just to expensive at the moment. Letting ISP's file large actions will make it practical, and give us better rules than would come from a legislature.
hawk, esq.
It seems to me that a year or so ago, apple suggested that the same binaries .
.
would run on MacOs X and on ppc mac. I don't know if they meant it,
or if they still due, but it would suggest that there's at least
a possibility . .
Then again, if I can run standard X applications at the same time,
I just may ask for a Mac wherever I land next fall . .
But there's no way I'm giving up LyX . . .