XPCOM is cross-platform in the sense that it compiles on different platforms but it's not interoperable between them. Neither does one binary run on many platforms. So why is this necessarily good for Mac or Linux users? This bank would still need to build and distribute whatever it is for them too. Who says they will?
Secondly unless someone has built a SOAP bridge into Firefox, XPCOM runs strictly in-process. It's quite possible someone has built such a bridge, but XPCOM itself is mostly ignorant.
So if all they're talking about here is writing a DLL or plugin with an XPCOM scripting interface I don't see what the fuss is about. It's hardly a big deal. Personally I'd rather they stuck with HTML, JS and make it work cross-platform by default. Lots of banks manage this using plain old markup with some JS over SSL.
Browser specific code is just evil. It annoys me to see banks using Java, ActiveX, Shock or some other convoluted faff to do the same since they are invariably inferior or easy to break.
The advantage of MSDE over Postgres is at present the fact that it ships in a neat redistributable. Postgres doesn't. It has also been available for several years.
If Postgres also shipped as a neat little redistributal without artificial limitations or licence agreements I think a lot of people would use. The advantage to PostgreSQL would be the same as MSDE is to Microsoft - the database engine would be shared with the full-blown database making it very easy to move over when the time is right.
I reckon that Mono would be a good crowd to pitch this to. They probably hate MSDE and I think that Postgres would make a very good fit for luring.NET developers onto their platform, or at least not slamming the door shut.
If you've got 50 million rows I suggest you need a full blown DB, not what is a replacement for the ancient jet / MS Access database:)
Seriously though I think MSDE has a 2GB database limit and some other restrictions on replication and tools. It works extremely well though for what it is.
Developers like it because it's a full blown SQL engine and has virtually identical behaviour to its big brother. Microsoft like it because it's a foot in the door when companies consider upgrading to a proper DB (since application changes required are virtually zero).
I reckon it would be nice to see Postgres bundled in the same way for the same reasons. People could start off with a baby "PGDE" engine, but easily migrate their code up to a full blown Postgres, or to a network running somewhere else on Linux or something else. Obviously this PGDE would not be crippled but the settings might be tweaked for its most likely use - that might mean locking down network access to localhost, limiting the number of threads and other small changes. The installer would also have to be able to install multiple copies on the same box and multiple ports in case there were multiple apps but nothing too serious.
Besides these days, Postgres is very easy to setup. I use in Windows XP and it even comes with an installer, ODBC drivers, help and pgAdminIII. It works wonderfully. I even had it hooked up to the new OpenOffice 2.0 database application.
I'm certainly no power user but Postgres strikes me as an extremely well featured DB. I use MSDE / MS SQL server at work for an app with transactions, stored procedures, triggers and views and expect it would be straightforward (not trivial but straightforward) to port it to Postgres.
Sadly though, there's no incentive since MSDE is "free". Basically MSDE is a cut down SQL server which is no bad thing. But I'd love to see Postgres bundled in a similar form on XP - just the engine but nothing else. I reckon lots of apps need a database engine and Postgres fits the bill quite nicely. It would even be a smaller redistributable than MSDE too.
Sony have done this just recently. Look at the cost of UMD games & movies, especially in Europe. It's nothing short of a scam. I'm sure a little digging would reveal the usual lies about the format "being new" and "costing a lot" etc., Let's be insanely pessimistic and say each UMD costs $5 to make (which I doubt). It still doesn't explain why UMDs cost more than DVDs, especially considering their lower shipping costs and lack of features etc.
It's even worse in Europe with the PSP launch. In Ireland, a UMD movie is 25-30 Euros! The same shitty title on DVD is usually to be had in the bargain bin for 8 euros. Games fair no better with most places charging 50+ Euros for a game which should really cost 35 or less. I seriously doubt that developing for a PSP is far removed from a PS2 (probably cheaper in fact) but you wouldn't know it from the prices. UMD makes a very convenient excuse for the discrepancy.
I don't solely blame Sony for this but they're the ones who must be setting a RRP. On top of that, the stores slapping on their own price hikes. They'll do the same for XBox and PS3 too if either uses HD-DVD or Blueray.
Given the inflated prices, the dearth of titles releases and uncertainty about which console will win, I think it's insane that anyone buys a new console within 6 months of release. Doubly so, if the vaunted XBox 360 or PS3 isn't sufficiently backwards compatible. I have no idea if either would be but I don't see how the 360 could possibly be if some units don't ship with a harddrive.
SCO is history. If they want to toss a little money at MySQL before they expire then where's the harm? MySQL can fix a few bugs with money that would have ended up in the grubby mits of lawyers.
I don't see any win in this for SCO at all. In fact, the more open source products they incorporate, the more homogenous their platform becomes. What incentive does anyone have for using SCO if all the components run on Linux, Solaris, BSD, OS X or even Win32? Where's the value add? Where's the compelling features? This is doubly true since if I were running a DB, the very last thing I would think of running it on would be SCO. Even if I were a SCO shop (are there any?), a database living on the network could be any OS for all they care.
Besides I suspect SCO customers are the least likely to upgrade since they wouldn't be using shitty SCO at all if they were interested in the latest and greatest. Most SCO installs are probably mangy old 486/386 boxes sitting in some ancient warehouse/EPOS system that nobody dares touch.
You don't need a funded study to tell you that - any impartial comparison would do as well. MS Office is superior, it has more features, it's tested more, it's more usable, it supports.doc /.xls files better by virtue of the fact that it's Microsoft.
However OpenOffice is free, supports documented standards, has good.doc /.xls support and (at least from) 2.0 is good enough that very few people need to stay with MS Office for any reason. I am glad to see OO 2.0 is finally paying some attention to usability (and making the app familiar to MS Office), but it's still got a way to go.
Additionally Microsoft are running out of ways to improve their product that matter to most users. Recent efforts seem to about throwing in enterprise / collaborative features that require you buy other MS products to make them work. How many people are going to bother with that?
All the OpenOffice people can do is keep plugging away at the code, make it more usable and fix some of the functionality holes (e.g outline mode in word processor). It would also be nice to see OO load faster and dump either Python or Java. It's just plain strange to drag in two runtimes when one would do.
And some countries sensibly slap road taxes and engine size taxes on top of that. Which is perhaps why people in Europe tend to buy smaller cars and / or use public transportation.
I disagree that it's ideal for office use. It's meant for single, self-administered machines and not for office environments where admins want all boxes to be maintained and kept up to date from a central point. Consequently it lacks the features that you would need to do that. I'm sure an admin could roll some scripts to take the pain from administering a bunch of Linspire boxes, but why bother? You may as well buy the right tool in the first place rather than slave away trying to remove the shortcomings of something unsuitable.
Actually you can create named pipes in Win32. You use CreateFile() and pass in a filename such as "\\.\pipe\mypipe" as the name. You have to prepare it a little some special named pipe functions but then you just read and write to it like any other kind of file.
It's not POSIX but you could probably wrap it up in POSIX-esque function if you wanted.
Free NFS. Other than that it was a pigs ear. It was just various Unix bits and pieces slapped together and massively intrusive to install, requiring reboots and services to be running all the time. I tried it for a bit, noticed the huge slowdown in startup times, the poor Unix environment which was next useless and uninstalled it. Cygwin is miles better.
And if you really need a real Unix / Linux on XP then colinux can provide it running at near-native performance.
Even if Microsoft produced an absolutely perfect filter, who says they have to ship it with MS Word? They could for example stick it in their Professional / Enterprise products and not in their bundled editions. Or make it a download that people have to explicitly get. Then the simple fact is that the latest.doc still rules supreme.
But that even assumes their support was perfect. OASIS is horrific specification running to something like 700 pages. I'm sure there is plenty of scope for doing things differently, exploiting bugs in OO, extending parts or any other trickery that they felt like.
I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer (see their various efforts to create more "open" XML based formats for MS Office) and are trying to work out what to do instead.
I think much more likely is that eventuallythey might support.odt (etc.) as an import / export format but still default to their own format. They could easily pull a few tricks to make sure that.odt is inferior to their own while they were at it, such as not shipping it in the bundled / home editions of MS Office, or by only supporting certain features, or by generating broken content or content infested with their own proprietary markup.
tar and bzip2 are great if all you do is stuff and unstuff everything in one go and don't intend to do it often. It is fucking abysmal if you intend to use the archive a lot, such as to pull out a single file, or freshen some files but not others. The same goes for CAB files on Win32.
I use zip on Linux as much as I do on Win32. It's not as efficient as bzip2 but it's much more practical for everyday use. WinZip has a better compression algorithm in the latest copy but I'm holding off using it until it gets more widely adopted.
Digital watermarking and lower quality reproductions. Slap a unique identifier all over the file which identifies the library and the person who checked out the file. If it escapes into the wild, the library will have the person's name and address on file.
Secondly don't encode songs / audio at the highest quality. Encode them at a reasonable rate (e.g. 96bps), sufficient to listen to them but not sufficient that someone is likely to trade them or hang onto them.
But you might say - "what's to stop someone copying the audio and never deleting it"? Nothing. The same as there is nothing to stop someone checking out a physical CD and doing the same. Or copying a song from the radio.
Because no one, not an office, not an individual, has a stack of unstapled paper of the same size, that is unfolded, uncrumpled and fits neatly into a tray. Paper gets dogearred, stapled, torn, folded, taped. Paper comes in a variety of sizes and thicknesses - receipts, business cards, ticket stubs, envelopes, dockets, legal, sticky notes, letter, A4.
As to the alternative, the alternative is to buy a shredder which can take 10 sheets of paper at a time. I believe they can be had for quite reasonable amounts of money. Even my lowly shredder can cope with 5 sheets. It would take a massive ten minutes or so of someone's time to shred a large pile of paper - probably the same amount of time you would spend to pick all the staples out of bits of paper, unfolding corners and neatly lining them up in a tray so it goes through franken-shredder without jamming.
As to what do with a broken printer - that depends how it's broken. It's not beyond the realms of science to pick up another broken printer and cannibalize the two into one working printer. Since the article suggests you need to buy a printer from ebay anyway, that seems a considerably better idea to me. Better yet, show how an old printer could be modded up with embedded Linux / CUPs.
So all the paper you shred fits flat and exactly into paper tray? No receipts, flight tickets, staples, crumpled / folded bits, tear offs or anything else that would jam or not feed properly? Me neither.
It's a pointless project, pure and simple. The stupidest part is you need to buy shredders and gut a large laser printer in order to complete it.
Are you suggesting that this modified laser printer is not only superior to a 20 pound purpose built shredder, but is actually so good that it could actually replace secure document disposal? If not, then what are you blathering about?
Unless it can be turned into a cross-cut shredder, with paper detection switch, reverse, safety switches and paper bin for under £20 which is what such a shredder costs at Argos. I own such a shredder and it works fantastically for the price and it's well worth it.
What's in it for Linux? It's only going to say what everyone knows already - Linux is cheaper, TCO is lower but there are weaknesses in some domains such as desktops. It probably sounds fair and reasonable that Microsoft wants a chance a neutral report (instead of their usual tainted, biased, paid for reports), but you just know they're going to capitalize on the air of respectability of a joint study to report the same distortions and negative PR as they always do. So why bother?
I use Open Office instead of MS Office at home. At work I have MS Office 2002 so I'm able to compare and contrast. My experience of OO is that it works very well for home use and and probably for a lot of office use too, however the usability in 1.1.x is lousy and still patchy in some places in 2.0.
At home I use the 1.1.x word processor to write letters, and some technical documents and it's fine so long as you don't intend to use OO's drawing capability. If you do use it, you discover that drawing is extremely poor to the point of unusable. I spent hours trying to do a simple UML-esque diagram before giving up and drawing it elsewhere and importing it. The 2.x drawing module is a lot better, but I'm so scarred from 1.1.x that I haven't used it extensively.
The spreadsheet in 1.1.x was just fine for my uses. I keep tables of expenses, holiday costs, timesheets in the spreadsheet and it works just fine. I wasn't exactly stretching the thing but it worked and I can't complain.
The word processor in 1.1.x worked but it was like a comittee had sat down to decide how to make things work in as round-about way as possible. I hated using the styles, there is no outline mode, the toolbar buttons were non-obvious, the aforementioned drawing was evil. But it worked and I tended to use it even while I have MS Word on my box.
The word processor in 2.x far more closely resembles MS Word and this is no bad thing. I haven't used it extensively but I like what I see. There's still no outline mode though. The "Navigator" can be used as a poor-man's outline mode but it's not great.
I also like the new database app. It's quite primitive but it's a good start and I've hooked it up as a front-end to postgres so it serves some purpose.
I haven't used slideshow functionality much except for importing some PPT files. It hasn't had any problems and seems to work quite well.
Overall I think OpenOffice 2.x is a worthy successor. I'm glad that it finally looks like a modern application (the old one looked like something from 1995). If the old app was sufficient for most of my home uses I believe the new one will be very pleasant. I don't like how long it takes to load up though and I wish they'd do something about that. I half suspect that the bloody thing is loading every DLL in existence in the background without regard to whether it is used or not. I have no idea of the component architecture but something seems very wrong. I also don't like the way that bits of OO are now Java and other bits are Python - pick one or the other and be done with it. This too adds to the bloat.
For me, the killer feature is not XML, or cross-platform but simply the ability to print straight to PDF (and Flash in the slideshow app). I use it all the time and it's fantastic. And that's as someone who has Adobe Distiller. Distiller adds a similar button to MS Word but it runs very slowly.
Another killer feature that is often overlooked is that OO it costs nothing. The problem is that many PCs (including mine) were "bundled" with MS Word & MS Works and so in effect they cost "nothing" too.
So free is great but it is not enough if it doesn't work properly or if the clueless / MSO indoctrinated perceive it as "hard" compared to what they got bundled with their machine. I think OO 2.x has missed an obvious opportunity to rectify this. During installation it asks if you want to associate.doc,.xls,.ppt files with OO. Why not go the whole hog and offer to make the menus, key bindings and toolbars resemble MS Office at the same time? All of those things are customizable so presumably they could have shipped two sets of menus, toolbars etc. If Microsoft could get away with the same trick to lure Wordperfect users, I think it's quite valid to do the same back to them.
By which they mean what exactly - an unfamiliar eye candy extravaganza or something which is utilitarian and sinks into the background while you get on with stuff?
I know that's a loaded question but that's why RH gave it the boot to begin with. I know some people love their eye candy but most I suspect most want something which has a passing familiarity with things they already know and are comfortable with.
Still I'll give it a go and see how far E17 has progressed.
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Secondly unless someone has built a SOAP bridge into Firefox, XPCOM runs strictly in-process. It's quite possible someone has built such a bridge, but XPCOM itself is mostly ignorant.
So if all they're talking about here is writing a DLL or plugin with an XPCOM scripting interface I don't see what the fuss is about. It's hardly a big deal. Personally I'd rather they stuck with HTML, JS and make it work cross-platform by default. Lots of banks manage this using plain old markup with some JS over SSL.
Browser specific code is just evil. It annoys me to see banks using Java, ActiveX, Shock or some other convoluted faff to do the same since they are invariably inferior or easy to break.
If Postgres also shipped as a neat little redistributal without artificial limitations or licence agreements I think a lot of people would use. The advantage to PostgreSQL would be the same as MSDE is to Microsoft - the database engine would be shared with the full-blown database making it very easy to move over when the time is right.
I reckon that Mono would be a good crowd to pitch this to. They probably hate MSDE and I think that Postgres would make a very good fit for luring
Seriously though I think MSDE has a 2GB database limit and some other restrictions on replication and tools. It works extremely well though for what it is.
Developers like it because it's a full blown SQL engine and has virtually identical behaviour to its big brother. Microsoft like it because it's a foot in the door when companies consider upgrading to a proper DB (since application changes required are virtually zero).
I reckon it would be nice to see Postgres bundled in the same way for the same reasons. People could start off with a baby "PGDE" engine, but easily migrate their code up to a full blown Postgres, or to a network running somewhere else on Linux or something else. Obviously this PGDE would not be crippled but the settings might be tweaked for its most likely use - that might mean locking down network access to localhost, limiting the number of threads and other small changes. The installer would also have to be able to install multiple copies on the same box and multiple ports in case there were multiple apps but nothing too serious.
I'm certainly no power user but Postgres strikes me as an extremely well featured DB. I use MSDE / MS SQL server at work for an app with transactions, stored procedures, triggers and views and expect it would be straightforward (not trivial but straightforward) to port it to Postgres.
Sadly though, there's no incentive since MSDE is "free". Basically MSDE is a cut down SQL server which is no bad thing. But I'd love to see Postgres bundled in a similar form on XP - just the engine but nothing else. I reckon lots of apps need a database engine and Postgres fits the bill quite nicely. It would even be a smaller redistributable than MSDE too.
It's even worse in Europe with the PSP launch. In Ireland, a UMD movie is 25-30 Euros! The same shitty title on DVD is usually to be had in the bargain bin for 8 euros. Games fair no better with most places charging 50+ Euros for a game which should really cost 35 or less. I seriously doubt that developing for a PSP is far removed from a PS2 (probably cheaper in fact) but you wouldn't know it from the prices. UMD makes a very convenient excuse for the discrepancy.
I don't solely blame Sony for this but they're the ones who must be setting a RRP. On top of that, the stores slapping on their own price hikes. They'll do the same for XBox and PS3 too if either uses HD-DVD or Blueray.
Given the inflated prices, the dearth of titles releases and uncertainty about which console will win, I think it's insane that anyone buys a new console within 6 months of release. Doubly so, if the vaunted XBox 360 or PS3 isn't sufficiently backwards compatible. I have no idea if either would be but I don't see how the 360 could possibly be if some units don't ship with a harddrive.
SCO is history. If they want to toss a little money at MySQL before they expire then where's the harm? MySQL can fix a few bugs with money that would have ended up in the grubby mits of lawyers.
I don't see any win in this for SCO at all. In fact, the more open source products they incorporate, the more homogenous their platform becomes. What incentive does anyone have for using SCO if all the components run on Linux, Solaris, BSD, OS X or even Win32? Where's the value add? Where's the compelling features? This is doubly true since if I were running a DB, the very last thing I would think of running it on would be SCO. Even if I were a SCO shop (are there any?), a database living on the network could be any OS for all they care.
Besides I suspect SCO customers are the least likely to upgrade since they wouldn't be using shitty SCO at all if they were interested in the latest and greatest. Most SCO installs are probably mangy old 486/386 boxes sitting in some ancient warehouse/EPOS system that nobody dares touch.
However OpenOffice is free, supports documented standards, has good
Additionally Microsoft are running out of ways to improve their product that matter to most users. Recent efforts seem to about throwing in enterprise / collaborative features that require you buy other MS products to make them work. How many people are going to bother with that?
All the OpenOffice people can do is keep plugging away at the code, make it more usable and fix some of the functionality holes (e.g outline mode in word processor). It would also be nice to see OO load faster and dump either Python or Java. It's just plain strange to drag in two runtimes when one would do.
And some countries sensibly slap road taxes and engine size taxes on top of that. Which is perhaps why people in Europe tend to buy smaller cars and / or use public transportation.
I disagree that it's ideal for office use. It's meant for single, self-administered machines and not for office environments where admins want all boxes to be maintained and kept up to date from a central point. Consequently it lacks the features that you would need to do that. I'm sure an admin could roll some scripts to take the pain from administering a bunch of Linspire boxes, but why bother? You may as well buy the right tool in the first place rather than slave away trying to remove the shortcomings of something unsuitable.
It runs just fine in English using Debian. I have it set up to do just that.
It's not POSIX but you could probably wrap it up in POSIX-esque function if you wanted.
And if you really need a real Unix / Linux on XP then colinux can provide it running at near-native performance.
But that even assumes their support was perfect. OASIS is horrific specification running to something like 700 pages. I'm sure there is plenty of scope for doing things differently, exploiting bugs in OO, extending parts or any other trickery that they felt like.
I think much more likely is that eventuallythey might support
I use zip on Linux as much as I do on Win32. It's not as efficient as bzip2 but it's much more practical for everyday use. WinZip has a better compression algorithm in the latest copy but I'm holding off using it until it gets more widely adopted.
And it hasn't been true for a long, long time either. Net2phone has had VOIP-landline / VOIP-VOIP connectivity for 3 or 4 years now at least.
Secondly don't encode songs / audio at the highest quality. Encode them at a reasonable rate (e.g. 96bps), sufficient to listen to them but not sufficient that someone is likely to trade them or hang onto them.
But you might say - "what's to stop someone copying the audio and never deleting it"? Nothing. The same as there is nothing to stop someone checking out a physical CD and doing the same. Or copying a song from the radio.
As to the alternative, the alternative is to buy a shredder which can take 10 sheets of paper at a time. I believe they can be had for quite reasonable amounts of money. Even my lowly shredder can cope with 5 sheets. It would take a massive ten minutes or so of someone's time to shred a large pile of paper - probably the same amount of time you would spend to pick all the staples out of bits of paper, unfolding corners and neatly lining them up in a tray so it goes through franken-shredder without jamming.
As to what do with a broken printer - that depends how it's broken. It's not beyond the realms of science to pick up another broken printer and cannibalize the two into one working printer. Since the article suggests you need to buy a printer from ebay anyway, that seems a considerably better idea to me. Better yet, show how an old printer could be modded up with embedded Linux / CUPs.
No, it's a pointless project full stop. That you get so upset about it and resort to namecalling is neither here nor there.
It's a pointless project, pure and simple. The stupidest part is you need to buy shredders and gut a large laser printer in order to complete it.
Are you suggesting that this modified laser printer is not only superior to a 20 pound purpose built shredder, but is actually so good that it could actually replace secure document disposal? If not, then what are you blathering about?
Unless it can be turned into a cross-cut shredder, with paper detection switch, reverse, safety switches and paper bin for under £20 which is what such a shredder costs at Argos. I own such a shredder and it works fantastically for the price and it's well worth it.
What's in it for Linux? It's only going to say what everyone knows already - Linux is cheaper, TCO is lower but there are weaknesses in some domains such as desktops. It probably sounds fair and reasonable that Microsoft wants a chance a neutral report (instead of their usual tainted, biased, paid for reports), but you just know they're going to capitalize on the air of respectability of a joint study to report the same distortions and negative PR as they always do. So why bother?
At home I use the 1.1.x word processor to write letters, and some technical documents and it's fine so long as you don't intend to use OO's drawing capability. If you do use it, you discover that drawing is extremely poor to the point of unusable. I spent hours trying to do a simple UML-esque diagram before giving up and drawing it elsewhere and importing it. The 2.x drawing module is a lot better, but I'm so scarred from 1.1.x that I haven't used it extensively.
The spreadsheet in 1.1.x was just fine for my uses. I keep tables of expenses, holiday costs, timesheets in the spreadsheet and it works just fine. I wasn't exactly stretching the thing but it worked and I can't complain.
The word processor in 1.1.x worked but it was like a comittee had sat down to decide how to make things work in as round-about way as possible. I hated using the styles, there is no outline mode, the toolbar buttons were non-obvious, the aforementioned drawing was evil. But it worked and I tended to use it even while I have MS Word on my box.
The word processor in 2.x far more closely resembles MS Word and this is no bad thing. I haven't used it extensively but I like what I see. There's still no outline mode though. The "Navigator" can be used as a poor-man's outline mode but it's not great.
I also like the new database app. It's quite primitive but it's a good start and I've hooked it up as a front-end to postgres so it serves some purpose.
I haven't used slideshow functionality much except for importing some PPT files. It hasn't had any problems and seems to work quite well.
Overall I think OpenOffice 2.x is a worthy successor. I'm glad that it finally looks like a modern application (the old one looked like something from 1995). If the old app was sufficient for most of my home uses I believe the new one will be very pleasant. I don't like how long it takes to load up though and I wish they'd do something about that. I half suspect that the bloody thing is loading every DLL in existence in the background without regard to whether it is used or not. I have no idea of the component architecture but something seems very wrong. I also don't like the way that bits of OO are now Java and other bits are Python - pick one or the other and be done with it. This too adds to the bloat.
For me, the killer feature is not XML, or cross-platform but simply the ability to print straight to PDF (and Flash in the slideshow app). I use it all the time and it's fantastic. And that's as someone who has Adobe Distiller. Distiller adds a similar button to MS Word but it runs very slowly.
Another killer feature that is often overlooked is that OO it costs nothing. The problem is that many PCs (including mine) were "bundled" with MS Word & MS Works and so in effect they cost "nothing" too.
So free is great but it is not enough if it doesn't work properly or if the clueless / MSO indoctrinated perceive it as "hard" compared to what they got bundled with their machine. I think OO 2.x has missed an obvious opportunity to rectify this. During installation it asks if you want to associate .doc, .xls, .ppt files with OO. Why not go the whole hog and offer to make the menus, key bindings and toolbars resemble MS Office at the same time? All of those things are customizable so presumably they could have shipped two sets of menus, toolbars etc. If Microsoft could get away with the same trick to lure Wordperfect users, I think it's quite valid to do the same back to them.
I know that's a loaded question but that's why RH gave it the boot to begin with. I know some people love their eye candy but most I suspect most want something which has a passing familiarity with things they already know and are comfortable with.
Still I'll give it a go and see how far E17 has progressed.