Of course do you know what these "hundreds of free proxy servers" really are? They generally are misconfigured webservers, plain and simple. Using these is generally no better than being a spammer who trolls the internet for open relays.
Speaking as someone who has run such a misconfigured webserver before (by accident, when trying to proxy other local services intentionally), I can also say that these anonymizer programs NEVER seem to update their databases. The moment your server gets actively listed, your network load goes so high you can't help but notice and fix the problem. However, while the volume of hits will drop off, you will still get a fair amount of proxy hit attempts for years afterwards.
Oh, and these people don't realize that I can actually look at the logs. I could probably compile a list of thousands of Yahoo username/password pairs from my server logs (captured about 100 this month so far, and I made and fixed the misconfiguration error 2 years ago on the server), and I'll bet some are even valid.
This is the first feature I point to when people claim "OpenOffice can replace MS Office". Even if OO can do track changes, it doesn't do it as well as MS Office. People who want to switch in the workplace *need* damn-near-perfect file compatibility, and this is a perfect example of a place where OO can't properly handle MS Word files.
Features like this are totally meaningless and invisible to "home users" and "vocal OO advocates", but are a day-to-day "ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE" to many workplace users.
It actually didn't handle the calendars I was trying to subscribe to properly, while iCal did. (though such calendar setups are in desperate need of upgrading)
I think the bigger problem is that the open calendaring protocols (i.e. CalDAV) are still in their infancy, and not yet very well supported across the board. That will change, of course, but it'll take time.
I'd love a good open-source cross-platform calendar program. The problem is that Sunbird is still way-too-pre-release, and so is Chandler (another good option). Neither seem to want to handle remote calendar subscriptions without barfing, while iCal (which sucks in many other ways) handles them just fine.
The only ones that are actually usable are integrated into other programs (i.e. Evolution, Kontact, etc.) that don't seem so wonderful if you spend your day using Windows, MacOS, and Linux. (yes, I use all three, and all the good Linux stuff becomes close-to-worthless on MacOS, and of limited utility on Windows. Yes, I know you can point me to porting projects. No, they aren't the same as actual core app support.)
Step 1: Translate keywords... Check Step 2: Transform camel-case styles... Check Step 3: Transform properties into get/set methods... Check Step 4: Convert events and delegates into some hideous mess of interfaces and anonymous classes... uhhh... Might be more than a line of Perl.
OO isn't officially a native Aqua application. Sure it runs in X11, but MS Office is *much* better. Now on Linux, OO works great. On the Mac, well it just isn't there. There is the NeoOffice project, but it shouldn't have to exist. NeoOffice is just a couple of guys in their spare time, and really OO should have a native Aqua port.
Yeah, Apple's Mail/Calendaring apps are a joke. They work very well for the features Apple chose to provide, but seem to ignore anything beyond that subset. If it wasn't for integration issues, I'd have dumped Mail.app for Thunderbird ages ago (and actually did for a while, until MacOS 10.4 came out). I'm still looking for a good iCal alternative, but the best ones I can find are either commercial, or too immature to be usable yet.
The main thing I like about MacOSX is that it offers a very good compromise. However, a number of important open-source projects still don't sufficiently care about the Mac market. (as such, the only *good* office suite for OSX is MS Office, OO being a joke on the platform, etc.)
And since no one bothered to ever create a decent usable conventional IMAP/POP client for the BlackBerry, all I had to do was download the freely available SDK and write one =)
(What they do offer is good E-Mail integration if you run the BB enterprise server, or piss poor integration for the rest of us, that doesn't seem piss poor until you actually use it.)
Re:Less of the kitchen sink would make KDE better
on
A Sneak Preview of KDE 4
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Windows doesn't hide all the advanced options. Many are still easily accessible from the GUI. MacOSX, however, hides them so deep that you need to drop to the command like to tweak them. (Heck, Apple's complete hiding/elimination of options is why I ditch Apple's packaged apps whenever I find a suitable alternative, even if I used MacOSX every day at work)
Likewise, GNOME hides the options so deep as well, that only a poweruser spending the day on Google is ever going to even figure out how to get to them.
At least KDE (and Windows) put the options where you can find them using just the normal flow of the GUI.
This whole "assume the user is a drooling moron or an ubergeek, with *nothing* in-between" really puts off a lot of "competent" Windows users.
Wrong. Windows XP appears to have booted in 7 seconds. It takes quite a bit longer for it to actually finish starting to the point of stable usability. This is something MS did in WinXP to make it seem to start faster than Win2k, and probably frustrates power users too. (while making the lesser users *think* their machines start faster)
From what I can tell, they're doing something really ugly:-) They're basically screen-scraping a full-screen Windows desktop session, and only rendering portions where your windows are located. (and maybe adding support so Windows windows and MacOS windows can more elegantly overlap like X11 ones.
You actually notice this when Parallels has minor visual redraw lags, and you can see the windows desktop under a window area that just moved or disappeared.
Or the way both MacOSX and PC-BSD (FreeBSD variant) handle it... Install applications in self-contained "bundles":) With OSX, you can litterally "drag 'n drop" a single icon (which is actually a directory) to launch/install/uninstall/move whole applications.
Right now I stick with Apple on laptops. In areas where "laptop versatility" is concerned, they kick the crap out of both Linux and Windows. However, at one point I did trial SLED 10 on a laptop just to see if I could make it work as my "work machine". In the end, I could, but didn't want to migrate all my data-to-day stuff for a brief trial. Of course this trial also involved CrossOver Office (yes, I *need* to run MS Office, sand no, OpenOffice isn't a suitable alternative 100% of the time), which works quite well.
But I did have complaints, and here they are: - Suspend/resume is a tossup (always a problem in Linux, sometimes an issue in Windows, but it JFW on MacOSX so I'm used to it JFWorking!) - Run-time display versatility (in other words, the ability to plug my laptop into a projector, and extend my display onto it, without having to dig into the bowels of my GUI configuration and restart all of X)
I also was bothered by Crossover Office having so many caveats in its application support, and a few kinks in SLED 10's setup (what to you mean, Evolution isn't packaged with new-mail-notification?), but they really aren't applicable here.
SLED has only one problem, IMHO. They make too much of an effort to assume who their userbase is, and severely limit their package offerings based on that. As such, you essentially have to install 1/4 of SuSE 10.1 on top of SLED 10 to get a usable system. This obviously has the side-effect of potentially breaking clean package management of the OS.
Which brings me to another rant... Why do I have to be totally beholden to the maker of my Linux distro for all my software, if I don't want that software to feel like a crufty and poorly installed kludge? When Firefox 2.0 comes out, I should be able to get it from Mozilla, install it, and not break things. When GNUcash 2.0 comes out, I should be able to get it from the GnuCash folks, install it, and not break things. Instead, I must choose between waiting for my distro to provide these (from a repository update or even a new major distro release), hacking up my distro to install software from other 3rd party software sources related to my distro, or adding cruft by manually dropping files into place.
Hmm... I thought the Vietnam conflict was the textbook example of how not to fight a war. (or why Politicians should stay the hell away from trying to micromanage the military)
I think it really depends on the workplace. Only once did I ever have a co-worker terminated for cause, and he was escorted out the door. Every other time, whether leaving by choice or due to layoff, they've let the person work even after knowing that they're leaving (and this is at more than one employer. I've also never seen anyone abuse this. Of course, I'm used to working in an environment where people do have to transition and complete things before leaving the job, and where people tend to care about things like a good professional reputation. (Heck, I usually even see "going away" parties when people leave, under either circumstance.)
Windows 2000 was the last *good* and *non-evil* (for an MS definition of non-evil) version of Windows. It had the NT kernel, and didn't have any of that activation crap. All the "evilness" you are complaining about with Vista first started being introduced in Windows XP, and its obviously gotten worse from there.
(Then again, I personally refuse to use Windows in any regular capability except under two specific situations: Playing games, and being forced to by a workplace. Of course right now I don't have much time for games, and my employer thankfully does not force me to use Windows.)
The 486 was also technically known as the "80486". Only with the Pentium, did they start switching to a weirder naming scheme (i.e. "P5", "P54C", and so forth) that is different enough from the product names so as to be seen almost nowhere anymore.
Not always, actually. Thanks to tack-on systems like "Java Web Start", sites can provide *real* locally-running applications through a delivery mechanism that makes them launch from web sites. I've actually run into some applications (like web conferencing software) that use this approach, and it works rather well.
Um, that kinda already exists. Sun has a 64-bit version of Java for SPARC *and* x86-64, and has for quite some time. (they don't have a 64-bit browser plugin, but they have 64-bit *everything else*)
Of course SPARC isn't a braindead architecture that sucks less in 64-bit mode, so Solaris doesn't actually need to run the entire userland as 64-bit code. As such, even on 64-bit Solaris, most of your apps are still 32-bit. (which makes sense, since 64-bit code can be wasteful on system resources if your app doesn't actually need 64-bit pointers)
And you gotta love how MS manged to basically typedef/#define just about every single data type in their API. As such, Win32 C/C++ code starts to almost look like its entirely own programming language.
Of course in my occasional attempt at poking fun at Windows programming, I like to cite two different API function specification styles I've seen. Style 1 seems to involve a function with a few parameters, each of which is a 50-item struct. Style 2 seems to involve a function that just has 50 parameters (some of them potentially being huge structs).
One of my favorite examples is creating a new process.
In UNIX, you need to care about using: pid_t fork(void); int execv(const char *path, char *const argv[]); (or another similarly simple variation thereof)
In Windows, you need to read up on: BOOL WINAPI CreateProcess(
LPCTSTR lpApplicationName,
LPTSTR lpCommandLine,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpProcessAttributes,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
BOOL bInheritHandles,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPVOID lpEnvironment,
LPCTSTR lpCurrentDirectory,
LPSTARTUPINFO lpStartupInfo,
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInformation );
And every type in that massive parameters list is a typedef. Two of those parameters are even structs. LPSTARTUPINFO has 4 members, while LPPROCESS_INFORMATION has about 17! (thank goodness I'm not a Win32 programmer)
I sure hope they put more serious attention on file transfers. While I can't say its keeping me off of Gaim (since I really don't have any other serious choices for my *nix-based chat desktop session), it is really the only thing lacking in Gaim that I actually care about.
I don't even want to remember just how many times Windows users try to send me files, before I get the chance to type "stop, it won't work, just post on the web or e-mail it to me". (meanwhile, Adium (MacOSX only, also F/OSS) seems to work just fine for file transfers)
Of course all those multimedia features would be "nice to have", but working file transfers are the only missing feature I actually notice most of the time.
(Come to think of it, a port of Adium to non-OSX would be very nice, but not practical since its whole design is probably heavily embedded in the OSX APIs)
Ahh, that is one annoying problem with Apple that you just have to get used to. As soon as they release MacOS 10.[x], they soon forget that 10.[x-1] even existed, and cease to care about supporting it. On the bright side, however, 10.4 finally stabilized a lot of the system interfaces. As such, 10.5 may not hurt 10.4 as much as 10.4 hurt 10.3.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course do you know what these "hundreds of free proxy servers" really are? They generally are misconfigured webservers, plain and simple. Using these is generally no better than being a spammer who trolls the internet for open relays.
Speaking as someone who has run such a misconfigured webserver before (by accident, when trying to proxy other local services intentionally), I can also say that these anonymizer programs NEVER seem to update their databases. The moment your server gets actively listed, your network load goes so high you can't help but notice and fix the problem. However, while the volume of hits will drop off, you will still get a fair amount of proxy hit attempts for years afterwards.
Oh, and these people don't realize that I can actually look at the logs. I could probably compile a list of thousands of Yahoo username/password pairs from my server logs (captured about 100 this month so far, and I made and fixed the misconfiguration error 2 years ago on the server), and I'll bet some are even valid.
This is the first feature I point to when people claim "OpenOffice can replace MS Office". Even if OO can do track changes, it doesn't do it as well as MS Office. People who want to switch in the workplace *need* damn-near-perfect file compatibility, and this is a perfect example of a place where OO can't properly handle MS Word files.
Features like this are totally meaningless and invisible to "home users" and "vocal OO advocates", but are a day-to-day "ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE" to many workplace users.
It actually didn't handle the calendars I was trying to subscribe to properly, while iCal did. (though such calendar setups are in desperate need of upgrading)
I think the bigger problem is that the open calendaring protocols (i.e. CalDAV) are still in their infancy, and not yet very well supported across the board. That will change, of course, but it'll take time.
I'd love a good open-source cross-platform calendar program. The problem is that Sunbird is still way-too-pre-release, and so is Chandler (another good option). Neither seem to want to handle remote calendar subscriptions without barfing, while iCal (which sucks in many other ways) handles them just fine.
The only ones that are actually usable are integrated into other programs (i.e. Evolution, Kontact, etc.) that don't seem so wonderful if you spend your day using Windows, MacOS, and Linux. (yes, I use all three, and all the good Linux stuff becomes close-to-worthless on MacOS, and of limited utility on Windows. Yes, I know you can point me to porting projects. No, they aren't the same as actual core app support.)
Hmmm.... Perl C# to Java translator:
Step 1: Translate keywords... Check
Step 2: Transform camel-case styles... Check
Step 3: Transform properties into get/set methods... Check
Step 4: Convert events and delegates into some hideous mess of interfaces and anonymous classes... uhhh... Might be more than a line of Perl.
OO isn't officially a native Aqua application. Sure it runs in X11, but MS Office is *much* better. Now on Linux, OO works great. On the Mac, well it just isn't there. There is the NeoOffice project, but it shouldn't have to exist. NeoOffice is just a couple of guys in their spare time, and really OO should have a native Aqua port.
Yeah, Apple's Mail/Calendaring apps are a joke. They work very well for the features Apple chose to provide, but seem to ignore anything beyond that subset. If it wasn't for integration issues, I'd have dumped Mail.app for Thunderbird ages ago (and actually did for a while, until MacOS 10.4 came out). I'm still looking for a good iCal alternative, but the best ones I can find are either commercial, or too immature to be usable yet.
The main thing I like about MacOSX is that it offers a very good compromise. However, a number of important open-source projects still don't sufficiently care about the Mac market. (as such, the only *good* office suite for OSX is MS Office, OO being a joke on the platform, etc.)
And since no one bothered to ever create a decent usable conventional IMAP/POP client for the BlackBerry, all I had to do was download the freely available SDK and write one =)
(What they do offer is good E-Mail integration if you run the BB enterprise server, or piss poor integration for the rest of us, that doesn't seem piss poor until you actually use it.)
Windows doesn't hide all the advanced options. Many are still easily accessible from the GUI. MacOSX, however, hides them so deep that you need to drop to the command like to tweak them. (Heck, Apple's complete hiding/elimination of options is why I ditch Apple's packaged apps whenever I find a suitable alternative, even if I used MacOSX every day at work)
Likewise, GNOME hides the options so deep as well, that only a poweruser spending the day on Google is ever going to even figure out how to get to them.
At least KDE (and Windows) put the options where you can find them using just the normal flow of the GUI.
This whole "assume the user is a drooling moron or an ubergeek, with *nothing* in-between" really puts off a lot of "competent" Windows users.
Wrong. Windows XP appears to have booted in 7 seconds. It takes quite a bit longer for it to actually finish starting to the point of stable usability. This is something MS did in WinXP to make it seem to start faster than Win2k, and probably frustrates power users too. (while making the lesser users *think* their machines start faster)
From what I can tell, they're doing something really ugly :-) They're basically screen-scraping a full-screen Windows desktop session, and only rendering portions where your windows are located. (and maybe adding support so Windows windows and MacOS windows can more elegantly overlap like X11 ones.
You actually notice this when Parallels has minor visual redraw lags, and you can see the windows desktop under a window area that just moved or disappeared.
Oh, you mean something like the Boost multi-index containers library?
Boost is loaded with these sorts of goodies, and is a must-check-out for anyone who does serious C++ programming.
Or the way both MacOSX and PC-BSD (FreeBSD variant) handle it... Install applications in self-contained "bundles" :) With OSX, you can litterally "drag 'n drop" a single icon (which is actually a directory) to launch/install/uninstall/move whole applications.
Right now I stick with Apple on laptops. In areas where "laptop versatility" is concerned, they kick the crap out of both Linux and Windows. However, at one point I did trial SLED 10 on a laptop just to see if I could make it work as my "work machine". In the end, I could, but didn't want to migrate all my data-to-day stuff for a brief trial. Of course this trial also involved CrossOver Office (yes, I *need* to run MS Office, sand no, OpenOffice isn't a suitable alternative 100% of the time), which works quite well.
But I did have complaints, and here they are:
- Suspend/resume is a tossup (always a problem in Linux, sometimes an issue in Windows, but it JFW on MacOSX so I'm used to it JFWorking!)
- Run-time display versatility (in other words, the ability to plug my laptop into a projector, and extend my display onto it, without having to dig into the bowels of my GUI configuration and restart all of X)
I also was bothered by Crossover Office having so many caveats in its application support, and a few kinks in SLED 10's setup (what to you mean, Evolution isn't packaged with new-mail-notification?), but they really aren't applicable here.
SLED has only one problem, IMHO. They make too much of an effort to assume who their userbase is, and severely limit their package offerings based on that. As such, you essentially have to install 1/4 of SuSE 10.1 on top of SLED 10 to get a usable system. This obviously has the side-effect of potentially breaking clean package management of the OS.
Which brings me to another rant...
Why do I have to be totally beholden to the maker of my Linux distro for all my software, if I don't want that software to feel like a crufty and poorly installed kludge?
When Firefox 2.0 comes out, I should be able to get it from Mozilla, install it, and not break things.
When GNUcash 2.0 comes out, I should be able to get it from the GnuCash folks, install it, and not break things.
Instead, I must choose between waiting for my distro to provide these (from a repository update or even a new major distro release), hacking up my distro to install software from other 3rd party software sources related to my distro, or adding cruft by manually dropping files into place.
Hmm... I thought the Vietnam conflict was the textbook example of how not to fight a war. (or why Politicians should stay the hell away from trying to micromanage the military)
Reminds me of when I first installed SpamAssassin on my mail server :)
Of course today, no matter what I do, the majority still gets through.
I think it really depends on the workplace. Only once did I ever have a co-worker terminated for cause, and he was escorted out the door. Every other time, whether leaving by choice or due to layoff, they've let the person work even after knowing that they're leaving (and this is at more than one employer. I've also never seen anyone abuse this. Of course, I'm used to working in an environment where people do have to transition and complete things before leaving the job, and where people tend to care about things like a good professional reputation. (Heck, I usually even see "going away" parties when people leave, under either circumstance.)
Windows 2000 was the last *good* and *non-evil* (for an MS definition of non-evil) version of Windows. It had the NT kernel, and didn't have any of that activation crap. All the "evilness" you are complaining about with Vista first started being introduced in Windows XP, and its obviously gotten worse from there.
(Then again, I personally refuse to use Windows in any regular capability except under two specific situations: Playing games, and being forced to by a workplace. Of course right now I don't have much time for games, and my employer thankfully does not force me to use Windows.)
The 486 was also technically known as the "80486". Only with the Pentium, did they start switching to a weirder naming scheme (i.e. "P5", "P54C", and so forth) that is different enough from the product names so as to be seen almost nowhere anymore.
Not always, actually. Thanks to tack-on systems like "Java Web Start", sites can provide *real* locally-running applications through a delivery mechanism that makes them launch from web sites. I've actually run into some applications (like web conferencing software) that use this approach, and it works rather well.
Um, that kinda already exists. Sun has a 64-bit version of Java for SPARC *and* x86-64, and has for quite some time. (they don't have a 64-bit browser plugin, but they have 64-bit *everything else*)
Of course SPARC isn't a braindead architecture that sucks less in 64-bit mode, so Solaris doesn't actually need to run the entire userland as 64-bit code. As such, even on 64-bit Solaris, most of your apps are still 32-bit. (which makes sense, since 64-bit code can be wasteful on system resources if your app doesn't actually need 64-bit pointers)
And you gotta love how MS manged to basically typedef/#define just about every single data type in their API. As such, Win32 C/C++ code starts to almost look like its entirely own programming language.
Of course in my occasional attempt at poking fun at Windows programming, I like to cite two different API function specification styles I've seen. Style 1 seems to involve a function with a few parameters, each of which is a 50-item struct. Style 2 seems to involve a function that just has 50 parameters (some of them potentially being huge structs).
One of my favorite examples is creating a new process.
In UNIX, you need to care about using:
pid_t fork(void);
int execv(const char *path, char *const argv[]); (or another similarly simple variation thereof)
In Windows, you need to read up on:
BOOL WINAPI CreateProcess(
LPCTSTR lpApplicationName,
LPTSTR lpCommandLine,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpProcessAttributes,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
BOOL bInheritHandles,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPVOID lpEnvironment,
LPCTSTR lpCurrentDirectory,
LPSTARTUPINFO lpStartupInfo,
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInformation
);
And every type in that massive parameters list is a typedef. Two of those parameters are even structs. LPSTARTUPINFO has 4 members, while LPPROCESS_INFORMATION has about 17! (thank goodness I'm not a Win32 programmer)
I sure hope they put more serious attention on file transfers. While I can't say its keeping me off of Gaim (since I really don't have any other serious choices for my *nix-based chat desktop session), it is really the only thing lacking in Gaim that I actually care about.
I don't even want to remember just how many times Windows users try to send me files, before I get the chance to type "stop, it won't work, just post on the web or e-mail it to me". (meanwhile, Adium (MacOSX only, also F/OSS) seems to work just fine for file transfers)
Of course all those multimedia features would be "nice to have", but working file transfers are the only missing feature I actually notice most of the time.
(Come to think of it, a port of Adium to non-OSX would be very nice, but not practical since its whole design is probably heavily embedded in the OSX APIs)
Ahh, that is one annoying problem with Apple that you just have to get used to. As soon as they release MacOS 10.[x], they soon forget that 10.[x-1] even existed, and cease to care about supporting it. On the bright side, however, 10.4 finally stabilized a lot of the system interfaces. As such, 10.5 may not hurt 10.4 as much as 10.4 hurt 10.3.