Oh REALLY? And it's a trojan by the way, not a self propagating worm or a virus. That is to say, you have to run it intentionally.
If I send 'rm -fr / ' to you in a spam email which I also send out to thousands of others and tell you to paste it and execute it in a rootshell, that "certainly isn't good" to quote the original poster, but the chances of any people doing as I instruct and hosing their systems is minuscule bordering on infintesimal (and those people were already going to destroy their systems anyway through one way or another because they are truly idiots).
This trojan, without a means to autoexecute through Outlook-style email clients which just don't exist on Linux, without the hope of being saved from email automatically as an executable file, which just doesn't happen on any Linux email clients I've seen, and without an assurance of root access, like it would have on windows, on all the systems run by people who are dim enough to somehow become infected, has all in all about as good a chance as my random email idea at becoming a nuisance on the internet. IOW: next to none. There just isn't going to be enough of a medium for it to grow on its own.
The antivirus company --er, I meant to say-- the virus writer was wasting his time when he created it.
I hope he had a good excuse like being home sick from work with nothing better to do.
If you really believe that "this makes every download untrustworthy" then copy the next paragraph below to a file on your PATH, chown to root.root and change the mode to 7555. Now find it in your file manager and double click it. Man, it makes your system really FLY! WHOO-AHH !! You should have no trouble believing that one either.
I would love to read an article --maybe in OS-Opinion or something like that--where you describe the process of migration and followup with the users a few months after they have fully acclimated. Not because I doubt your word but because stories like this need to be circulated.
I like the sig, btw, I've been thinking of a similar one, like:
MS Windows/ IIS --if you were in jail, would you bet your ass on it?
StarOffice is more than good enough for anything that students in K-12 will need to do. Buying MS_Office for schools is a criminal waste of public funds. And since MS Office is not needed, the license for the petri dish OS is an unnecessary and negligent waste as well.
For the love of Khrist already.
On a few applications it isn't so bad and helps to keep the enduser aware of the origin of an app. I'm not sure that's worth anything to the enduser, unless he's in the process of expunging all KDE packages from a system. If 'ls/usr/bin/k*' shows a long list then he hasn't got them all.
But if it's innoccuous and even "unifying" on the kind of applications you expect to find built-in to a desktop environment like kedit or kpm, when used to prefix dozens of add-on applications the leading "K" becomes rather stupid sounding and I feel sure gives many newcomers an impression that Linux/KDE is bush league & unprofessional. A joKe.
Koffice, Kword, Killustrator --not only are some of these flirting with trademark infringement, they are as names kwite krappy. The hard work going into this software deserves much better.
Imagine yourself doing tech support over the phone and having to put "K" in front of every third word. Kwhat? Many "K" applications begin to confuse the user: is it K-this or k-that? This has already reached the point where it is worse than the legacy of x-this x-that for program names (begun I suppose when it was such a novelty for an application to be written with a xlib GUI that the author just had to insist on the distinction for his program's name -- now it's no distinction at all is it?)
PLease use your imagination when naming your applications, and if you haven't got any, ask a friend. Hopefully there will be 5x the number of kde/qt applications in the near future. Now if they all begin with "K" autocompletion in bash (or Krun) is going to rapidly lose its usefulness for invoking them by name. In other words, NOW is the time to break this bad trend.
You are speaking in generalities, and confusing your limited experience for a universal principle.
On your moinitor, maybe, AA fonts look blurry. On any monitor with a deccently high resolution, = <.26mm pixel height for example, they are a godsend. Hell, they are even a godsend on almost any decent TFT, especially using rgb for subpixel rendering instead of grays. The better your monitor the more AA fonts resemble good quality printing on paper. Even in small point sizes.
And I will do some generalization myself: the better the fonts look in many applications, such as word processors like OpenOffice which now automatically uses AA if available, and document layout programs like Quark Xpress, the more confident and comfortable most people feel about using those applications. The resemblance to printed output removes the need to imagine the look of the final document while working on it. Now that AA has been standard for so long on those platforms where such applications are most used, few of the typesetters, office workers, and none of the designers would ever consider a platform without this ability as minimally acceptable.
AA is most definitely *a* solution for Linux on the desktop. In fact it is an essential solution without any substitute. It is not the only display related feature that has needed improvement on the Linux desktop. But at last we are putting lack of AA behind us.
Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway. But it is completely mistaking the nature of the problem to say that "hinting is important and Anti-aliasing is not at all important, and worse, it is a bad thing".
Re:The only chance the industry has against micros
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 1
You are not mistaken. I have sampled s few of OpenOffice builds, including build 638 which is the latest. For several iterations now the "do everything in one place" pseudo desktop has been abolished in favor of separate applications. The latest build also has antialiased fonts, and basically it's looking really good.
I was worrying about what I'd have to do to get my fonts antialiased after hearing that openoffice638 supported them. I was surprised to discover that OpenOffice requires no fiddling to enable the AA fonts --for all of the fonts on my system. StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice are going to be more than just adequate software, they will finally make reports enjoyable on Unix, not to mention FREE on Windows, Unix and hopefully Mac OS-X as well.
you might want to check out the software of ThinkNIC. Using basic stripped down Linux/ Xfree building blocks and Netscape 4.76 they have made a "browser-only" kiosk from PC hardware. In other words X starts automatically with no login necessary and with Netscape already running.There is no menu based access to other programs or terminal emulators and no taskbar. (Those things are all available to you if you hack a custom cd) It comes with java and plugins, SSL, ssh client, VNC client, helper apps etc, so it imposes no compromise on the web experience. If you were looking for excitement you could try dropping in Mozilla 0.9.x in place of Netscape.
You can download the iso for the ThinkNIC system free of charge from their site and see how they do it.
They also sell really inexpensive hardware ( $199 US) to run all that but it sounds like you already have the hardware.
Thinknic.com has a $199 Xterminal. The software (like appropriate kernel image) you need to run it is included on the stock cdrom. Ltsp.org has details on just this application for the thinkNIC.
It also happens to very close to the general requirements you state: runs Linux/Xfree out of box. Without any hw mods or hacking, the ThinkNIC will run your X apps remotely. Unmodified it will print to your LPD or CUPS based printer hosts across the LAN. It includes XFree86, of course, but also includes the VNC client for Linux, SSH client, telnet, and for the not-quite-with-it crowd, Citrix ICA. If you really want it quiet and used as an Xterminal you could underclock the CPU and disable the case fan. Some people convert them to full PCs with laptop harddrives but that's going the opposite direction of your Xterminal ideal.
You will need a monitor. I scored a $300 13." tft flatscreen for my folks on ebay. Obviously used crts, or new 15" crts are much less.
I can make a $50 - $65 total Xterminal from a used PC using netbooting ethernet cards from disklessworkstations.com, but personally I have no place where I would put up with the size of the old PC I can get for 20 or 35 dollars. They're all stinkin huge.
I believe the thing you speak of exists. It's called N|C.
Costs next to nothing. Has no reset button -it's turned on from the power button and off from the power button. It only runs a browser. Send "quit" to the browser and it automatically respawns. There are plugins and some apps accessed from the browser itself, but no other user interface exists besides the browser (no start menus, no panels, no taskbar) The OS and browser are loaded from a cdrom. It includes onboard 100mbit ethernet. it does not require an ISP contract. There is no harddrive.
It's perfect for libraries, hotels, schools, and some of the other places you mentioned right out of the box --and that's where many of them have gone so far.
I'm amazed that relatively few people seem to be aware of N|C. Ziff Davis / Cnet certainly have done a sterling service for Microsoft keeping this thing quiet.
Well, most of the so-called web appliances are too expensive, under-featured and so forth.
However, the ThinkNIC is knocking on the door of perfection. It's small enough, flexible enough, powerful enough, and last but not least, cheap enough at $199 to fit in almost anyone's plans.
I put one in my parents' kitchen. With it my mother can view web pages, view and hear realmedia clips, streamed mp3s, chat online through irc,and java chat, use AIM instant messaging and exchange email with kids, grandkids and friends*. It prints remotely to her main system's HP printer, surfs through a shared DSL link to her usual ISP instead of dialup connection thanks its onboard 100/10 bast-t nic.And that since the ThinkNIC is based on X11 any application on her main pc --even win32 apps accessed through win4lin-- can be easily accessed now from the NIC. Exactly like owning another powerful PC and having the same applications on it, only without the cost and maintenance headache. This makes the Nic one half of the only ASP/ web-services provider I'll ever be interested in: mine!
It presents virtually no maintenance worries since there is no writeable fs on a harddrive and minimal security worries, as there is no means to login to it remotely and no space for cracking tools to be stored in case someone was able to break in through some other means. Short of physically replacing the cdrom it runs from, there is no possibility of changing the root passwd or adding rootkit accounts.
I'm buying another for myself since its also an instant netbooting Xerminal box with a tiny shelf footprint.(I have used PCs converted to Xterminals but they are as large as the server they boot from -not what I want in my den) The Nic cdrom includes an appropriate NFS-root kernel image and modules to install on a linux terminal server, making this conversion almost a no-brainer.
Most of the web appliances have insisted that you pay for their own branded ISP. NIC does not and makes integrating the ThinkNIC into your existing LAN as easy as signing up for their ISP.
Most web appliances have required extensive hacking in order to use in any way other than the manufacturer planned. NIC does not require hardware modifications to be retasked. Just change the software on the Cdrom. The Nic software is good old Linux, pared down but still completely transparent to the enduser, and still modular and fully customizable. Adding a harddrive to convert the Nic from NC to PC in case you just have to for some reason, is easy enough too --there are several sites out there describing this-- but of course that voids the manufacturer's warranty.
Most of the better web appliance products have used somewhat unusual parts like giant flash devices. This can make for a nice, physically small system, but it's also directly responsible for the insanely high pricetags those products carry. It also leads the makers to insist on the customer subscribing to their ISP service/partners. The NIC has some flash ram for storing settings and configs and such, but the design sticks to using commodity bin parts and so its cost is kept down to the area where it compares to the price of a used PC. It is not as small as it could be if it was based on StrongARM or PPC cpu and the storeage was all flash instead of mainly cdrom based, but it 's definitely small enough to fit on a kitchen counter. It's noticeably smaller than a "BookPC" system for example and all "desktops" are massive compared to it. In fact my mother has a few cookbooks on the same counter top that are larger than her "computer". No one actually sees the ThinkNIC as it hides behind a 13" tft screen.
(*) I easily burned a replacement cdrom for my parent's NIC that substituted Netscape Communicator for the standalone Navigator the ThinkNIC comes with, so certain email options would be possible for us.
Some people are in the habit of saying that internet appliances are a useless solution in search of a nonexistent problem that the PC has already solved. This is a deeply ignorant and unimaginative view. Many internet appliances are fatally flawed products. The ThinkNIC, however, shows that the appliance idea is not just desireable but technically and econmically workable in brilliant fashion.
The critical difference being that PostScript is an openly documented formatting standard. Openly and completely documented--which is why PostScript printer support in Linux has been generally much better than its support of PCL inkjet printers and why there are many postscript and PDF viewers and utilities for XFree86 and free OSen. Without GNU Ghostscript, a free clone based on the Adobe Postscript standard, PCL inkjet printer support for Linux would be basically non-existent.
I hope Adobe realizes that eventually, inevitably Microsoft is going to expand beyond the lowend of the home and small office graphics applications market, which Adobe has already lost to them, and begin to invade their core markets in printing and web content. It would be extremely foolish of Adobe managment not to anticipate this, but if they have figured this out it's not clear yet that they understand the gravity of their situation. They really have nowhere else to go. And they haven't really done anything to make Adobe preferable to an "integrated, bundled solution" from Microsoft when that appears. Eventually Microsoft demands control over all standards that affect any of their products; a shark cannot stop swimming and eating; a pyramid-scheme stock swindle like MSFT must continue leveraging itself into related markets or its seemingly endless appreciation will contract violently. In the absence of law enforcement, Adobe is just a juicy filet mignon on Microsoft's table. Sooner or later, the diner will turn his attention to them.
Of course I believe that Adobe's long term hope is to take advantage of the cost savings of the Linux platform. This is a saleable counter to MS integration and bundling. But Adobe seems to think they are somehow special and that they don't have to evolve and change, and that what has happened to all other major ISVs on the PC platform will not happen to them too. Probably this mental lapse is an effect of being a monopoly for so long.
However, I would not be surprised to discover, in the fullness of time, that there is a Rick Belluzzo type situation at work in Adobe's upper managment. It's just hard to believe that people could reach these kinds of positions and be so clueless as not to see the looming dangers.
Well, the main developer of Broadcast2K has switched to Athlon --dual Athlon-- as the main test bed. Has a shrine of benchmarks and large jpegs devoted to the Tyan Thunder S462 up on the site heroines.sourceforge.net.
A certain-maker of very popular graphics editing and photo shopping tools (ahhem.. hint) found that for every one legal copy of their flagship product another illegal one was in use..
Ugh, that's one of the lamest series of excuses I've ever heard from a vendor.
A friendly heads-up for you Adobe: if you think it's just a 1:1 ratio I guarantee you're still *way* low. Revise estimates upwards! Sorry that you were the last to know. Maybe you do know but you don't want admit how bad it really is...
This is really a classic case of cutting your nose off to spite your face.
"We will cling to a slender snapping reed of a platform and stand in the way of a rampaging monopoly without providing ourselves with any other defense because we are afraid of being pirated".
OMG, as IF the Windows and Macintosh user communities didn't think nothing of pirating your wares already!
It all depends on you and how you sell the product, Adobe. If you are aiming at the LCD Windows consumer market (Where BTW you are going to eventually be devoured by the local deity) you are going to have trouble just reaching parity in legit copies v. scammed ones. That big fat demographic which looks like a huge market, can't use even your product because it's too hard for them to understand in basic operation. The power users on that Win32 platform on the other hand will pirate your applications gladly, taking advantage of the relatively low threshold to installation you are enticing the masses with. (While you were dithering over the question Gnome or KDE did this ever occur to you? ) That's the nature of the PC/Windows market. As for watered down versions of Photoshop... you don't really think you're going to compete with Microsoft do you?
Macintosh users who use Adobe tools professionally always feel entitled to make a few copies of your programs for themselves and their friends. I know several people who are in that metier; all of them have made at least one pirate installation. Let's not even talk about fonts! Again, that's at least in part your fault, Adobe, for making it too easy to install/pirate the software for which you charge a professional price. As for the long term viability of Apple, I would not take that bet. One day before you know it, it's just going to be you and that wolf...
If you sell into a professional graphics market for Intel/Linux, you can employ stricter anti-piracy countermeasures and the people in that market won't complain about it being "too hard" to install & use your product. If they want your stuff for their work, they'll jump through the hoops, pay for it, register their MAC addresses,hair and blood samples, etc. If they don't really need it, they can use GIMP and be fine. IOW, there's less incentive for them to rip you off on Linux than other platforms, and additionally fewer barriers to using strong license authentication measures. However, as long as you try to make Windrone mass market pay for a professional tool when THEY are the user population conditioned by bundling to expect office suites pre-installed and other software for "free" you are trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
You have a massive piracy "problem" but if you face it honestly, you must admit that none of it is due to users like the Dreamworks artists or other designers who use Linux, or would like to use Linux. And yet they are somehow the problem?? In short Linux is being penalized for the crimes of
Windows software thieves.
As to the question Gnome or KDE --it's like I told you in God knows how many emails Adobe! (Did you even read them?) Pick one. Flip a coin. Whichever one you pick is the environment people who need to use your products on Linux will use. You are in the RARE & ENVIABLE position of MAKING the first market for Linux desktops. That means you don't have to ask Bill if he prefers Gnome or KDE. Be LEADERS, you sheep!
If you want to fight the next "rich capitalist bastard" (tm) you need to start going after Warren Buffett.
Why ?? Warren Buffet is a good socially conscious "New Deal" Democrat with a capital "D."
For that matter so is Bill Gate's dad --it's little Billy who's flouting the law and fucking up software markets.
As to your larger point: you're living a dream world Sheepdot. This case has represented a "breather" for MS so far, and will be not much more than that if they can now get the other states to fold, too.
Not even. Recall that they were under a court order to come up with a plan to break themselves up into separate business units. They did not and publically flaunted their disobedience.
See how the Court of Appeals dealt with their light attitude to the law: here, Microsoft, have some more time to wreck the software industry and fuck your customers! You're guilty and we see flipping off the American legal system but we like you anyway.
What would a be real change is if the top tier vendors had to make Windows a line item in the invoice so that, in selecting and configuring a PC, you saw how much Windows was going to cost you, at this particular OEM, and how much you can save by going completely "bare" or ordering a 5 or 10 dollar Linux self-installation CD along with your PC from the same webpage.
That is how the monopoly price on Windows will get exposed for the first time ever to the effects of competition among OEMs, which has managed to drive everything else in a PC down in price over time, and against a less expensive alternative OS.
MS will never allow this - they will have to be forced to accept competition by the courts.
There's some pent up demand for alternatives to Quicken, and there's also some penned in resistance to allowing non-Quicken, non-MS clients to connect to online banking services.
As of version 3.0, Moneydance was able to exchange OFX data online. Well, that was some time ago and most banks still will not allow Moneydance to connect to their servers --although American Express and Discover Card do find Moneydance is up to snuff and allow Moneydance to echange data.
It's not always sufficient for data formats to be open, when powerful partners in information exchange don't feel like being even-handed.
, the facts still show that MS broke the law. (It says a lot more, but essentially says that the facts are still there, and MS cannot dispute them).
hey not to be a jerk or anything but... so what?
MS can be a monopolist.
MS can flip off a Federal Judge in court --lie, fabricate evidence, whatever. It doesn't matter.
Now they get to settle with the Bush administration. You remember them ? The people who said we would like to settle the federal racketeering suit against the tobacco co.s even though the trial has not begun and even though we are holding all the cards?
Like a lot of people, you seem to be mistakenly looking at the words of the court to understand what happened. You think it's significant that the court didn't throw out the FOF. But that's not how it works. Many of the most significant things never are stated in words. The 1886 case which established corporations as natural persons with 14th Amendment rights along with their limited liability status was never stated in the text of an appellate or Supreme Court decision but was simply announced before the trial to the press --and it is the most significant landmark from the period Scott v. Sanford to Bush v. Gore. The Appeals Court has clearly signalled to the District Court to whom the case will be remanded that it's not going to accept a breakup of Microsoft. What they DON'T HAVE TO SAY is that the case is now subject to a sweetheart settlement with the Bush administration. Look for it.
I don't know if they have a class on this at that Law school you go to, but in this case as in many others of similar importance, the relevant facts were always political facts, not legal concepts and evidence.
this is like the vaction of Judge Stanley Sporkin previously in the earlier case against Microsoft. IOW: we can find no point of law with which to attack his ruling therefore we will attack him primarily and springboard from there to say some of his applications of legal principles were wrong, although in order to say that we have to say the laws don't mean what they apparently say.
if you can't win on the facts as a defendant appeal and make your appeal in effect a trial of the judge. Don't be surprised if it happend again if the next judge rules against Microsoft too.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
This insightful post, currently languishing at Score: 1, deserves moderator marks.
Did we use them all up giving a "3" to that troll above screaming about how Redhat was cravenly using Postgre after, get this, *HE HEARD* Redhat was writing their own?
Does one need an MCSE to get moderator access at Slashdot? Sure seems like it these days.
I have heard that Sampo makes a 12" LCD. I can't find it around, though.
The New Internet Computer Company has 12" 800x600 LCDs which you may have seen, but it's more like 480 dollars rather than 200.
Then there's Sony's 13" LCD --apparently the only 13" LCD made in the world --which is very popular in hospitals and similar places since it's small but still does 1024x768. That puppy is 900 dollars. Even though larger screens are below 600 dollars.
Other considerations:
How noisy is the bearing? A good fraction of the whining of fans is the bearing noise at high speed.
Where in the audible band does the noise occur? The human ear is not a linear device and is more sensitive to some ranges than others.
Placement in the case and case build- to what extent does the surrounding structure act as a resonant cavity magnifying the noise?
And of course, how many cfm of cooling draft does your cpu require to operate w/in tolerance?
Modern PPC's are lower in power consumption than all X86 designs since the 486. As you know some PPC designs like some recent iMacs have no fan at all.
Despite having case fans G4 towers are nearly silent. Even the quiet Quantum drives are the loudest thing about them. If it's idle, you may need to look at the front of a G4 to see if it's on, depending on ambient noise levels.
Slashdot Mirror
If I send 'rm -fr / ' to you in a spam email which I also send out to thousands of others and tell you to paste it and execute it in a rootshell, that "certainly isn't good" to quote the original poster, but the chances of any people doing as I instruct and hosing their systems is minuscule bordering on infintesimal (and those people were already going to destroy their systems anyway through one way or another because they are truly idiots).
This trojan, without a means to autoexecute through Outlook-style email clients which just don't exist on Linux, without the hope of being saved from email automatically as an executable file, which just doesn't happen on any Linux email clients I've seen, and without an assurance of root access, like it would have on windows, on all the systems run by people who are dim enough to somehow become infected, has all in all about as good a chance as my random email idea at becoming a nuisance on the internet. IOW: next to none. There just isn't going to be enough of a medium for it to grow on its own.
The antivirus company --er, I meant to say-- the virus writer was wasting his time when he created it.
I hope he had a good excuse like being home sick from work with nothing better to do.
If you really believe that "this makes every download untrustworthy" then copy the next paragraph below to a file on your PATH, chown to root.root and change the mode to 7555. Now find it in your file manager and double click it. Man, it makes your system really FLY! WHOO-AHH !! You should have no trouble believing that one either.
dd if=/dev/random of=/boot/vmlinuz* count=3600
I like the sig, btw, I've been thinking of a similar one, like:
MS Windows/ IIS --if you were in jail, would you bet your ass on it?
Oh, and Star Office font handling sucks.
Oh well you can forget about that excuse after 6.0, pal.
StarOffice is more than good enough for anything that students in K-12 will need to do. Buying MS_Office for schools is a criminal waste of public funds. And since MS Office is not needed, the license for the petri dish OS is an unnecessary and negligent waste as well.
On a few applications it isn't so bad and helps to keep the enduser aware of the origin of an app. I'm not sure that's worth anything to the enduser, unless he's in the process of expunging all KDE packages from a system. If 'ls
But if it's innoccuous and even "unifying" on the kind of applications you expect to find built-in to a desktop environment like kedit or kpm, when used to prefix dozens of add-on applications the leading "K" becomes rather stupid sounding and I feel sure gives many newcomers an impression that Linux/KDE is bush league & unprofessional. A joKe.
Koffice, Kword, Killustrator --not only are some of these flirting with trademark infringement, they are as names kwite krappy. The hard work going into this software deserves much better.
Imagine yourself doing tech support over the phone and having to put "K" in front of every third word. Kwhat? Many "K" applications begin to confuse the user: is it K-this or k-that? This has already reached the point where it is worse than the legacy of x-this x-that for program names (begun I suppose when it was such a novelty for an application to be written with a xlib GUI that the author just had to insist on the distinction for his program's name -- now it's no distinction at all is it?)
PLease use your imagination when naming your applications, and if you haven't got any, ask a friend. Hopefully there will be 5x the number of kde/qt applications in the near future. Now if they all begin with "K" autocompletion in bash (or Krun) is going to rapidly lose its usefulness for invoking them by name. In other words, NOW is the time to break this bad trend.
On your moinitor, maybe, AA fonts look blurry. On any monitor with a deccently high resolution, = <
And I will do some generalization myself: the better the fonts look in many applications, such as word processors like OpenOffice which now automatically uses AA if available, and document layout programs like Quark Xpress, the more confident and comfortable most people feel about using those applications. The resemblance to printed output removes the need to imagine the look of the final document while working on it. Now that AA has been standard for so long on those platforms where such applications are most used, few of the typesetters, office workers, and none of the designers would ever consider a platform without this ability as minimally acceptable.
AA is most definitely *a* solution for Linux on the desktop. In fact it is an essential solution without any substitute. It is not the only display related feature that has needed improvement on the Linux desktop. But at last we are putting lack of AA behind us.
Well hinted Type 1 fonts would be far better than Microsoft's scraggly assed truetypes which are only useful for screen display anyway. But it is completely mistaking the nature of the problem to say that "hinting is important and Anti-aliasing is not at all important, and worse, it is a bad thing".
You are not mistaken. I have sampled s few of OpenOffice builds, including build 638 which is the latest. For several iterations now the "do everything in one place" pseudo desktop has been abolished in favor of separate applications. The latest build also has antialiased fonts, and basically it's looking really good.
I was worrying about what I'd have to do to get my fonts antialiased after hearing that openoffice638 supported them. I was surprised to discover that OpenOffice requires no fiddling to enable the AA fonts --for all of the fonts on my system. StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice are going to be more than just adequate software, they will finally make reports enjoyable on Unix, not to mention FREE on Windows, Unix and hopefully Mac OS-X as well.
You can download the iso for the ThinkNIC system free of charge from their site and see how they do it.
They also sell really inexpensive hardware ( $199 US) to run all that but it sounds like you already have the hardware.
It also happens to very close to the general requirements you state: runs Linux/Xfree out of box. Without any hw mods or hacking, the ThinkNIC will run your X apps remotely. Unmodified it will print to your LPD or CUPS based printer hosts across the LAN. It includes XFree86, of course, but also includes the VNC client for Linux, SSH client, telnet, and for the not-quite-with-it crowd, Citrix ICA. If you really want it quiet and used as an Xterminal you could underclock the CPU and disable the case fan. Some people convert them to full PCs with laptop harddrives but that's going the opposite direction of your Xterminal ideal.
You will need a monitor. I scored a $300 13." tft flatscreen for my folks on ebay. Obviously used crts, or new 15" crts are much less.
I can make a $50 - $65 total Xterminal from a used PC using netbooting ethernet cards from disklessworkstations.com, but personally I have no place where I would put up with the size of the old PC I can get for 20 or 35 dollars. They're all stinkin huge.
Costs next to nothing. Has no reset button -it's turned on from the power button and off from the power button. It only runs a browser. Send "quit" to the browser and it automatically respawns. There are plugins and some apps accessed from the browser itself, but no other user interface exists besides the browser (no start menus, no panels, no taskbar) The OS and browser are loaded from a cdrom. It includes onboard 100mbit ethernet. it does not require an ISP contract. There is no harddrive.
It's perfect for libraries, hotels, schools, and some of the other places you mentioned right out of the box --and that's where many of them have gone so far.
I'm amazed that relatively few people seem to be aware of N|C. Ziff Davis / Cnet certainly have done a sterling service for Microsoft keeping this thing quiet.
However, the ThinkNIC is knocking on the door of perfection. It's small enough, flexible enough, powerful enough, and last but not least, cheap enough at $199 to fit in almost anyone's plans.
I put one in my parents' kitchen. With it my mother can view web pages, view and hear realmedia clips, streamed mp3s, chat online through irc ,and java chat, use AIM instant messaging and exchange email with kids, grandkids and friends*. It prints remotely to her main system's HP printer, surfs through a shared DSL link to her usual ISP instead of dialup connection thanks its onboard 100/10 bast-t nic.And that since the ThinkNIC is based on X11 any application on her main pc --even win32 apps accessed through win4lin-- can be easily accessed now from the NIC. Exactly like owning another powerful PC and having the same applications on it, only without the cost and maintenance headache. This makes the Nic one half of the only ASP/ web-services provider I'll ever be interested in: mine!
It presents virtually no maintenance worries since there is no writeable fs on a harddrive and minimal security worries, as there is no means to login to it remotely and no space for cracking tools to be stored in case someone was able to break in through some other means. Short of physically replacing the cdrom it runs from, there is no possibility of changing the root passwd or adding rootkit accounts.
I'm buying another for myself since its also an instant netbooting Xerminal box with a tiny shelf footprint.(I have used PCs converted to Xterminals but they are as large as the server they boot from -not what I want in my den) The Nic cdrom includes an appropriate NFS-root kernel image and modules to install on a linux terminal server, making this conversion almost a no-brainer.
Most of the web appliances have insisted that you pay for their own branded ISP. NIC does not and makes integrating the ThinkNIC into your existing LAN as easy as signing up for their ISP.
Most web appliances have required extensive hacking in order to use in any way other than the manufacturer planned. NIC does not require hardware modifications to be retasked. Just change the software on the Cdrom. The Nic software is good old Linux, pared down but still completely transparent to the enduser, and still modular and fully customizable. Adding a harddrive to convert the Nic from NC to PC in case you just have to for some reason, is easy enough too --there are several sites out there describing this-- but of course that voids the manufacturer's warranty.
Most of the better web appliance products have used somewhat unusual parts like giant flash devices. This can make for a nice, physically small system, but it's also directly responsible for the insanely high pricetags those products carry. It also leads the makers to insist on the customer subscribing to their ISP service/partners. The NIC has some flash ram for storing settings and configs and such, but the design sticks to using commodity bin parts and so its cost is kept down to the area where it compares to the price of a used PC. It is not as small as it could be if it was based on StrongARM or PPC cpu and the storeage was all flash instead of mainly cdrom based, but it 's definitely small enough to fit on a kitchen counter. It's noticeably smaller than a "BookPC" system for example and all "desktops" are massive compared to it. In fact my mother has a few cookbooks on the same counter top that are larger than her "computer". No one actually sees the ThinkNIC as it hides behind a 13" tft screen.
(*) I easily burned a replacement cdrom for my parent's NIC that substituted Netscape Communicator for the standalone Navigator the ThinkNIC comes with, so certain email options would be possible for us.
Some people are in the habit of saying that internet appliances are a useless solution in search of a nonexistent problem that the PC has already solved. This is a deeply ignorant and unimaginative view. Many internet appliances are fatally flawed products. The ThinkNIC, however, shows that the appliance idea is not just desireable but technically and econmically workable in brilliant fashion.
I hope Adobe realizes that eventually, inevitably Microsoft is going to expand beyond the lowend of the home and small office graphics applications market, which Adobe has already lost to them, and begin to invade their core markets in printing and web content. It would be extremely foolish of Adobe managment not to anticipate this, but if they have figured this out it's not clear yet that they understand the gravity of their situation. They really have nowhere else to go. And they haven't really done anything to make Adobe preferable to an "integrated, bundled solution" from Microsoft when that appears. Eventually Microsoft demands control over all standards that affect any of their products; a shark cannot stop swimming and eating; a pyramid-scheme stock swindle like MSFT must continue leveraging itself into related markets or its seemingly endless appreciation will contract violently. In the absence of law enforcement, Adobe is just a juicy filet mignon on Microsoft's table. Sooner or later, the diner will turn his attention to them.
Of course I believe that Adobe's long term hope is to take advantage of the cost savings of the Linux platform. This is a saleable counter to MS integration and bundling. But Adobe seems to think they are somehow special and that they don't have to evolve and change, and that what has happened to all other major ISVs on the PC platform will not happen to them too. Probably this mental lapse is an effect of being a monopoly for so long.
However, I would not be surprised to discover, in the fullness of time, that there is a Rick Belluzzo type situation at work in Adobe's upper managment. It's just hard to believe that people could reach these kinds of positions and be so clueless as not to see the looming dangers.
Farewell Adobe?
Well, the main developer of Broadcast2K has switched to Athlon --dual Athlon-- as the main test bed. Has a shrine of benchmarks and large jpegs devoted to the Tyan Thunder S462 up on the site heroines.sourceforge.net.
Ugh, that's one of the lamest series of excuses I've ever heard from a vendor.
A friendly heads-up for you Adobe: if you think it's just a 1:1 ratio I guarantee you're still *way* low. Revise estimates upwards! Sorry that you were the last to know. Maybe you do know but you don't want admit how bad it really is...
This is really a classic case of cutting your nose off to spite your face. "We will cling to a slender snapping reed of a platform and stand in the way of a rampaging monopoly without providing ourselves with any other defense because we are afraid of being pirated".
OMG, as IF the Windows and Macintosh user communities didn't think nothing of pirating your wares already!
It all depends on you and how you sell the product, Adobe. If you are aiming at the LCD Windows consumer market (Where BTW you are going to eventually be devoured by the local deity) you are going to have trouble just reaching parity in legit copies v. scammed ones. That big fat demographic which looks like a huge market, can't use even your product because it's too hard for them to understand in basic operation. The power users on that Win32 platform on the other hand will pirate your applications gladly, taking advantage of the relatively low threshold to installation you are enticing the masses with. (While you were dithering over the question Gnome or KDE did this ever occur to you? ) That's the nature of the PC/Windows market. As for watered down versions of Photoshop ... you don't really think you're going to compete with Microsoft do you?
Macintosh users who use Adobe tools professionally always feel entitled to make a few copies of your programs for themselves and their friends. I know several people who are in that metier; all of them have made at least one pirate installation. Let's not even talk about fonts! Again, that's at least in part your fault, Adobe, for making it too easy to install/pirate the software for which you charge a professional price. As for the long term viability of Apple, I would not take that bet. One day before you know it, it's just going to be you and that wolf...
If you sell into a professional graphics market for Intel/Linux, you can employ stricter anti-piracy countermeasures and the people in that market won't complain about it being "too hard" to install & use your product. If they want your stuff for their work, they'll jump through the hoops, pay for it, register their MAC addresses,hair and blood samples, etc. If they don't really need it, they can use GIMP and be fine. IOW, there's less incentive for them to rip you off on Linux than other platforms, and additionally fewer barriers to using strong license authentication measures. However, as long as you try to make Windrone mass market pay for a professional tool when THEY are the user population conditioned by bundling to expect office suites pre-installed and other software for "free" you are trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
You have a massive piracy "problem" but if you face it honestly, you must admit that none of it is due to users like the Dreamworks artists or other designers who use Linux, or would like to use Linux. And yet they are somehow the problem??
In short Linux is being penalized for the crimes of Windows software thieves. As to the question Gnome or KDE --it's like I told you in God knows how many emails Adobe! (Did you even read them?) Pick one. Flip a coin. Whichever one you pick is the environment people who need to use your products on Linux will use. You are in the RARE & ENVIABLE position of MAKING the first market for Linux desktops. That means you don't have to ask Bill if he prefers Gnome or KDE. Be LEADERS, you sheep!
Why ?? Warren Buffet is a good socially conscious "New Deal" Democrat with a capital "D." For that matter so is Bill Gate's dad --it's little Billy who's flouting the law and fucking up software markets.
As to your larger point: you're living a dream world Sheepdot. This case has represented a "breather" for MS so far, and will be not much more than that if they can now get the other states to fold, too.
Not even. Recall that they were under a court order to come up with a plan to break themselves up into separate business units. They did not and publically flaunted their disobedience.
See how the Court of Appeals dealt with their light attitude to the law: here, Microsoft, have some more time to wreck the software industry and fuck your customers! You're guilty and we see flipping off the American legal system but we like you anyway.
That is how the monopoly price on Windows will get exposed for the first time ever to the effects of competition among OEMs, which has managed to drive everything else in a PC down in price over time, and against a less expensive alternative OS.
MS will never allow this - they will have to be forced to accept competition by the courts.
As of version 3.0, Moneydance was able to exchange OFX data online. Well, that was some time ago and most banks still will not allow Moneydance to connect to their servers --although American Express and Discover Card do find Moneydance is up to snuff and allow Moneydance to echange data.
It's not always sufficient for data formats to be open, when powerful partners in information exchange don't feel like being even-handed.
hey not to be a jerk or anything but... so what?
MS can be a monopolist.
MS can flip off a Federal Judge in court --lie, fabricate evidence, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
Now they get to settle with the Bush administration. You remember them ? The people who said we would like to settle the federal racketeering suit against the tobacco co.s even though the trial has not begun and even though we are holding all the cards?
Like a lot of people, you seem to be mistakenly looking at the words of the court to understand what happened. You think it's significant that the court didn't throw out the FOF. But that's not how it works. Many of the most significant things never are stated in words. The 1886 case which established corporations as natural persons with 14th Amendment rights along with their limited liability status was never stated in the text of an appellate or Supreme Court decision but was simply announced before the trial to the press --and it is the most significant landmark from the period Scott v. Sanford to Bush v. Gore. The Appeals Court has clearly signalled to the District Court to whom the case will be remanded that it's not going to accept a breakup of Microsoft. What they DON'T HAVE TO SAY is that the case is now subject to a sweetheart settlement with the Bush administration. Look for it.
I don't know if they have a class on this at that Law school you go to, but in this case as in many others of similar importance, the relevant facts were always political facts, not legal concepts and evidence.
if you can't win on the facts as a defendant appeal and make your appeal in effect a trial of the judge. Don't be surprised if it happend again if the next judge rules against Microsoft too.
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
Did we use them all up giving a "3" to that troll above screaming about how Redhat was cravenly using Postgre after, get this, *HE HEARD* Redhat was writing their own?
Does one need an MCSE to get moderator access at Slashdot? Sure seems like it these days.
Thanks.
Then there's Sony's 13" LCD --apparently the only 13" LCD made in the world --which is very popular in hospitals and similar places since it's small but still does 1024x768. That puppy is 900 dollars. Even though larger screens are below 600 dollars.
this "magical marketplace" thing sucks ass.
Other considerations:
How noisy is the bearing? A good fraction of the whining of fans is the bearing noise at high speed.
Where in the audible band does the noise occur? The human ear is not a linear device and is more sensitive to some ranges than others.
Placement in the case and case build- to what extent does the surrounding structure act as a resonant cavity magnifying the noise? And of course, how many cfm of cooling draft does your cpu require to operate w/in tolerance? Modern PPC's are lower in power consumption than all X86 designs since the 486. As you know some PPC designs like some recent iMacs have no fan at all.
Despite having case fans G4 towers are nearly silent. Even the quiet Quantum drives are the loudest thing about them. If it's idle, you may need to look at the front of a G4 to see if it's on, depending on ambient noise levels.