I've been using it for around 6 months. I no longer have MS Office on my machine.
I refuse to use MS products (I abhor their business practices, and boycott their products), and have no problems using OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J, both at home and at work.
Have her play with OpenOffice.org. If she is okay with it, she'll be okay with NeoOffice/J.
I'm too lazy to do it now, but might I suggest browsing scholar.google.com
A couple preliminary searches reveal a couple articles that may be of interest, but I haven't found one that clearly delineates the percentage of BitTorrent traffic on the back bone.
I've found a couple showing P2P traffic on the backbone, and a couple showing growth of BiTTorrent, and perhaps you can put together a correlation. I suspect the article you (and I) am looking for is there.
BitTorrent is currently the *dominant* protocol on the net, in terms of bits transfered. Yes, bigger than HTTP, FTP, all the normal protocols, and all the other P2P protocols.
In addition to *ALL THAT TRAFFIC*, BitTorrent is starting to see siginifcant corporate legitimacy. Blizzard uses BitTorrent in a customized downloader to distribute patches.
Valve uses a BitTorrent-like (read, licensed from Bram Cohen (infact developed by him, http://www.ferrago.com/story/2963) protocol for distributing their software.
One can imagine that the legitimate electronic channels of distribution in the future will uses BitTorrent or BitTorrent-like schemes. The cost savings on bandwidth alone will set companies that use it apart from the competition.
And right now, MS has no technology that comes close. This is from a company that once dreamed of making MSN synonmous with 'The Net'.
More likely than not, MS currently sees BitTorrent as a massive threat to their having a position in the content distribution networks of tomorrow. Why use a Microsoft solution if you can either write your own in-house OSS solution, or hire another company with a pre-developed, pre-test solution (steam), that crushes the MS solution in bandwidth efficiency.
In the realm of content distribution (which is a big, big place, and a place where 'visionaries' see a lot of growth (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary), BitTorrent is the 'big fish'. And Bram Cohen occupies a similar spot to Linus Torvald's position in the 'Linux World'.
My magnetic actuator running WindowsME has locked me into my bathroom before.....
Dell licensing Mac OS X? This is how it would work
on
Dell We'd Sell Mac OS X
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone see HP+iPod?
Dell *might* still make the case. Apple would require them to use reference designs for the internals, and Apple would require them to sell at a certain price.
Dell *might* be permitted to bundle extras with the computer, similar to the way you can get a ram upgrade or free printer from Mac Mall.
At Apple's prices, there's still quite a bit of room for profit for a manufacturer. Basically, Dell would manufacture Apples, and be permitted to sell it through their existing channels.
For example, many businesses have Dell accounts. They may not have Apple accounts. Of course Dell would love to sell Apples. Even if they pay a large premium to Apple, there is still a lot greater margin than with Windows PC products.
The Economist is great. However, they have say many things (That I agree with) that will *never* come to pass.
For example, the Economist staff openly advocates the legalization of Cocaine in the U.S. Why? Because this would be a more *effective* policy for reducing drug use in the U.S., let alone reducing the harms of the Cocaine economy.
Can you imagine the U.S. *ever* legalizing Cocaine? I think not. Look for lawmakers to continue parroting the BSA (BS) line.
I've done *a lot* of SuSE installs, on all kinds of crazy hardware.
Ancient stuff, cutting edge stuff. Very, very rarely do I have to add in a device driver. I also don't have to reboot constantly. Like I have to with Windows- 2 reboots for the install, a reboot after the video card driver, a reboot after Via's chipset drivers, a reboot or two after multiple Windows updates.
XP does *not* come with working drivers for most modern video cards. XP does *not* come with drivers for newer sound cards. XP does *not* come with drivers for most wireless cards. XP does *not* come with fully functional chipset drivers for most SiS and Via boards, especially newer ones.
XP does *not* come with drivers for the nforce line of boards, some of the most popular 'high-end' boards avaliable now.
And don't try and tell me its just 'cutting' edge stuff. The original nforce is getting rather long in the tooth now.
Its just that XP is older. Furthermore, the software issue is a good one. XP doesn't come with a word processor. XP only comes with MSN messaging-- you'll need clients for other messaging protocols. XP does not come with a passable image editor; MS paint doesn't cut it.
XP does not come with modern printer drivers, either. You'll have to go to the manufacturer site for that, as well. XP's cd-burning is rudimentary, at best. Some people like to do more than just put files on their discs.
XP come with an ancient media player. Updates are necessary to play nearly any format, and you'll have to go and hunt down codecs to play things like divx.
Comparing XP and a Linux distribution in terms of out-of-the-box functionality is silly. Comparing XP and Linux in terms of out-of-the-box driver compatability is absurd.
It's simply no-contest.
XP, however, crushes Linux in terms of software avaliability, and driver avaliability. This doesn't mean that these apps come with the OS, or are part of the default install. You have to schlep them on to your system one at a time.
I've *never* seen a desktop that had all of the necessary device drivers included in the default Windows XP image.
No, I'm not counting stuff people have integrated via Slipstream. I don't have to Slipstream my linux drivers into my favorite distro.
SuSE 9.3 detects all the hardware on my system, and automagically downloads the only device driver I need that doesn't come with it, nvidia's closed source linux driver.
XP comes with a bunch of older drivers, many of which are buggy. It's not even reasonably close.
Still significantly cheaper than a Mac. Keep in mind, I'm saying this, and I *own* macs. I'm typing this from my powerbook, which I like very much (ideal portable system).
Infact, you can buy a preconfigured SuSE desktop workstation with dual dual-core Opterons for $3100. This includes a gig of ram and a 3 year warranty. This setup will blow *any* Mac rig out of the water.
Its still difficult to justify the price for tasks where Linux software can do the job. My Macs are for Adobe work. When Adobe releases Creative Suite for Linux, I'll probably be finished with the Mac, except for portables, perhaps, since the hardware is of such high quality.
If you don't want to bugger around with all those things, get a preconfigured Linux desktop. That's what you buy when your getting a Mac.
Difficult of install in regards to Linux in no way relates to the difficulty of setting up a Macintosh box.
We do that, I just switched our two secretaries over to linux.
The main problem has been making sure that Kprinter shows up *everywhere*.
Kprinter is fairly familiar. I've had to point them in the correct direction a couple times, but I think they're getting the hang of it.
One thing they *really* like is being able to always print straight to PDF. You could do this with Adobe Acrobat installed, or from OpenOffice.org, but now they can do it from any application, like Firefox (which is huge for them).
I'm not sure what fancy stuff you do at your office, though. Most of the stuff we want to do is easy in Kprinter, including occasionally printing borderless photos.
Beyond things like tiling, enlarge/shrink, rotate, etc. . . , what are you referring to? I'm not saying the functionality is there, but for our needs, anyways, KDE is perfect.
Actually, World of Warcraft is a surprising good example.
My midrange AMD64 (Geforce FX5900) system running World of Warcraft under Cedega (WINE) absolutely smokes World of Warcraft on the Dual G5 2.5 with a Geforce 6800GT we've got at work.
This is especially surprising given that the G5 is running native binaries. I posted this somewhere else in the thread, but even a top end Mac OS X system is simple not all that great for gaming, but my midrange AMD64 runs many, if not all, of the latest Windows games, and runs them really well.
G5 cost? ~$3200. AMD64 cost? ~$900.
I still like Macs. But they aren't the be all end all of computing.
My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
-- JWZ
If mozilla.org is an example of a failed project, than I won't mind Linux being a failed project, either.
I love the Mac, and I have several Mac systems. I love Linux, and I have several SuSE systems.
JWZ is an intelligent person who has contributed a greal deal to opensource, but he is also an emotional hothead who has little patience, and he rarely looks outside of the box.
He's dropped linux because of the difficulty of setting up software sound mixing. Hilariously, there are several distributions that have this *built-in*.
Talk about not doing your homework. I'm not trying to belittle this man, but this is not news; he's tired of there not being one perfect Linux OS. Well, thats the way it works. If you can't use a 'mainstream' linux like SuSE, Mandriva, or Fedora Core, don't go out an insult hardworking developers that have *already* solved the problems you're bitching about on your blog.
I'm not the only posting this, either. The latest SuSE has software-mixing for cards that do not support hardware-mixing. It does this out of the box. No setup required. Not even a checkbox.
You can remap the outputs using a.alsarc, but thats really far more trouble than its worth. ALSA is really, really powerful, and really, really configurable, but its just too much of a beast to wrestle.
No, Linux works with many particular hardware setups, however, if you wish to have a *perfect* installation using only drivers that come with the distribution your hardware support is limited.
Not nearly as limited as Mac OS X or Windows, mind you. Any DRI video card or Nvidia card, any ACX100/110/111, Atmel, Prism, and a whole series of other wireless cards, nearly any soundcard (now that SuSE 9.3 is out, dmix is setup out-of-box for cards that do not support hardware mixing).
I was merely making a simple recommendation following my own setup. Similar to saying: Get an Apple Run OS X.
Obviously, there are otherways to run OS X. Mac-on-Linux on PowerPC hardware, or PearPC. But getting a Mac is the simplest way.
Using SuSE supported hardware is the simplest way to get Linux.
Interesting. I've gotten surround sound working (4.1) on my SB Live!, and I recently upgraded to an Audigy2 Value, and now have working 5.1.
Perhaps its a SuSE thing (evil grin). My distro of choice.
What happens when you do this? mplayer -channels 4 -ao alsa:device=surround40
Don't you get 4 channel audio?
How about this?
You need an AC3 capable sound card, with digital out (S/PDIF). The card's driver must properly support the AFMT_AC3 format (C-Media does). Connect your AC3 decoder to the S/PDIF output, and use the -ac hwac3 option. It is experimental but known to work with C-Media cards and Soundblaster Live! + ALSA (but not OSS) drivers and DXR3/Hollywood+ MPEG decoder cards.
Check alsamixer, or kmix, or whatever, and make sure that the switch for digital output is on, then: mplayer -ac hwac3
You should get AC3 passthrough, which should have perfect audio quality.
Also, do you have the correct frequency set? Both the nforce2 (I have one of these as well) and the SB Live/Audigies recommend 48000 kHz over the default 44000 kHz.
surround40 doesn't work as your alsa output? What error message do you get? Are you running an AMD64 kernel? Surround sound and ALSA in general are a bit buggy when running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel; the 32-bit wrapper isn't perfect, yet.
Try a different distro. The newest SuSE (9.3) has software mixing (i.e. dmix) already setup for cards that do not support hardware mixing.
One last point that I will make. I try to help a fair amount on the transgaming forums (www.transgaming.org) and more people seem to have audio problems with Gentoo than with any other distribution. This may be because there are more Gentoo users on the trangaming site than other platforms, but it is a strange trend.
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NeoOffice/J is pretty good.
I've been using it for around 6 months. I no longer have MS Office on my machine.
I refuse to use MS products (I abhor their business practices, and boycott their products), and have no problems using OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J, both at home and at work.
Have her play with OpenOffice.org. If she is okay with it, she'll be okay with NeoOffice/J.
I'm too lazy to do it now, but might I suggest browsing scholar.google.com
A couple preliminary searches reveal a couple articles that may be of interest, but I haven't found one that clearly delineates the percentage of BitTorrent traffic on the back bone.
I've found a couple showing P2P traffic on the backbone, and a couple showing growth of BiTTorrent, and perhaps you can put together a correlation. I suspect the article you (and I) am looking for is there.
Is there anywhere I can get a binary tarball of your dx9wine?
I can't get it to build properly on an x86_64 kernel, but I know it'll run (I run a vanilla wine and cedega).
I get a 'can't relocate an elf-32 binary to an elf-64 binary', even when I chroot to a linux32 environment and specify CC='gcc -m32'
Why would MS seek to undermine BitTorrent?
Why would MS be interested in BitTorrent?
Because they are pretty good at seeing where the market is going.
BitTorrent is *not* a niche protocol. BitTorrent is the *dominant* form of net-traffic.
http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide3.php
Ask anyone who works at a major ISP.
BitTorrent is currently the *dominant* protocol on the net, in terms of bits transfered. Yes, bigger than HTTP, FTP, all the normal protocols, and all the other P2P protocols.
In addition to *ALL THAT TRAFFIC*, BitTorrent is starting to see siginifcant corporate legitimacy. Blizzard uses BitTorrent in a customized downloader to distribute patches.
Valve uses a BitTorrent-like (read, licensed from Bram Cohen (infact developed by him, http://www.ferrago.com/story/2963) protocol for distributing their software.
One can imagine that the legitimate electronic channels of distribution in the future will uses BitTorrent or BitTorrent-like schemes. The cost savings on bandwidth alone will set companies that use it apart from the competition.
And right now, MS has no technology that comes close. This is from a company that once dreamed of making MSN synonmous with 'The Net'.
More likely than not, MS currently sees BitTorrent as a massive threat to their having a position in the content distribution networks of tomorrow. Why use a Microsoft solution if you can either write your own in-house OSS solution, or hire another company with a pre-developed, pre-test solution (steam), that crushes the MS solution in bandwidth efficiency.
In the realm of content distribution (which is a big, big place, and a place where 'visionaries' see a lot of growth (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary), BitTorrent is the 'big fish'. And Bram Cohen occupies a similar spot to Linus Torvald's position in the 'Linux World'.
Obviously, its much easier when you have a monoculture.
Why not just have the government pick one automaker, and that can be "the" automaker.
Or airline, for that matter
My magnetic actuator running WindowsME has locked me into my bathroom before.....
Anyone see HP+iPod?
Dell *might* still make the case. Apple would require them to use reference designs for the internals, and Apple would require them to sell at a certain price.
Dell *might* be permitted to bundle extras with the computer, similar to the way you can get a ram upgrade or free printer from Mac Mall.
At Apple's prices, there's still quite a bit of room for profit for a manufacturer. Basically, Dell would manufacture Apples, and be permitted to sell it through their existing channels.
For example, many businesses have Dell accounts. They may not have Apple accounts. Of course Dell would love to sell Apples. Even if they pay a large premium to Apple, there is still a lot greater margin than with Windows PC products.
Offtopic, yes.
I HATE SONY AUDIO EQUIPMENT.
It's garbage. The stuff *fails* within 3-4 years of purchase.
Out of 6 sony receives purchased within my family, we have a 66% failure rate over 5 years. That's *shocking*.
I don't know about Denon and marantz (heard pretty good things) but my Harmon-Kardon has never gone bad.
Don't forget the second processor to run all the stuff...
For only $499, you'll get a second processor (or second core) to run all your security software!
Twice the computing power, at only 25% more cost!
I hope so.
The Economist is great. However, they have say many things (That I agree with) that will *never* come to pass.
For example, the Economist staff openly advocates the legalization of Cocaine in the U.S.
Why?
Because this would be a more *effective* policy for reducing drug use in the U.S., let alone reducing the harms of the Cocaine economy.
Can you imagine the U.S. *ever* legalizing Cocaine?
I think not. Look for lawmakers to continue parroting the BSA (BS) line.
Strickly, its correct.
Dell does indeed *sell* Windows.
Similar in the way that Walmart is a vendor for dried foodstuffs, Dell is a vendor for Windows.
The situation is sad, that the computing market is driven by OS rather than platform, but Dell does indeed sell Windows.
Perhaps not an idiot, but definetly a troll.
I've done *a lot* of SuSE installs, on all kinds of crazy hardware.
Ancient stuff, cutting edge stuff. Very, very rarely do I have to add in a device driver. I also don't have to reboot constantly. Like I have to with Windows- 2 reboots for the install, a reboot after the video card driver, a reboot after Via's chipset drivers, a reboot or two after multiple Windows updates.
XP does *not* come with working drivers for most modern video cards. XP does *not* come with drivers for newer sound cards. XP does *not* come with drivers for most wireless cards. XP does *not* come with fully functional chipset drivers for most SiS and Via boards, especially newer ones.
XP does *not* come with drivers for the nforce line of boards, some of the most popular 'high-end' boards avaliable now.
And don't try and tell me its just 'cutting' edge stuff. The original nforce is getting rather long in the tooth now.
Its just that XP is older. Furthermore, the software issue is a good one. XP doesn't come with a word processor. XP only comes with MSN messaging-- you'll need clients for other messaging protocols. XP does not come with a passable image editor; MS paint doesn't cut it.
XP does not come with modern printer drivers, either. You'll have to go to the manufacturer site for that, as well. XP's cd-burning is rudimentary, at best. Some people like to do more than just put files on their discs.
XP come with an ancient media player. Updates are necessary to play nearly any format, and you'll have to go and hunt down codecs to play things like divx.
Comparing XP and a Linux distribution in terms of out-of-the-box functionality is silly. Comparing XP and Linux in terms of out-of-the-box driver compatability is absurd.
It's simply no-contest.
XP, however, crushes Linux in terms of software avaliability, and driver avaliability. This doesn't mean that these apps come with the OS, or are part of the default install. You have to schlep them on to your system one at a time.
Troll.
I've *never* seen a desktop that had all of the necessary device drivers included in the default Windows XP image.
No, I'm not counting stuff people have integrated via Slipstream. I don't have to Slipstream my linux drivers into my favorite distro.
SuSE 9.3 detects all the hardware on my system, and automagically downloads the only device driver I need that doesn't come with it, nvidia's closed source linux driver.
XP comes with a bunch of older drivers, many of which are buggy. It's not even reasonably close.
Yeah, this is true.
r kstations.html
However, you can also buy a Linux Desktop with all that stuff *already* setup.
http://www.aslab.com/products/workstations/uni_wo
Still significantly cheaper than a Mac. Keep in mind, I'm saying this, and I *own* macs. I'm typing this from my powerbook, which I like very much (ideal portable system).
Infact, you can buy a preconfigured SuSE desktop workstation with dual dual-core Opterons for $3100. This includes a gig of ram and a 3 year warranty. This setup will blow *any* Mac rig out of the water.
Its still difficult to justify the price for tasks where Linux software can do the job. My Macs are for Adobe work. When Adobe releases Creative Suite for Linux, I'll probably be finished with the Mac, except for portables, perhaps, since the hardware is of such high quality.
If you don't want to bugger around with all those things, get a preconfigured Linux desktop. That's what you buy when your getting a Mac.
Difficult of install in regards to Linux in no way relates to the difficulty of setting up a Macintosh box.
We do that, I just switched our two secretaries over to linux.
The main problem has been making sure that Kprinter shows up *everywhere*.
Kprinter is fairly familiar. I've had to point them in the correct direction a couple times, but I think they're getting the hang of it.
One thing they *really* like is being able to always print straight to PDF. You could do this with Adobe Acrobat installed, or from OpenOffice.org, but now they can do it from any application, like Firefox (which is huge for them).
I'm not sure what fancy stuff you do at your office, though. Most of the stuff we want to do is easy in Kprinter, including occasionally printing borderless photos.
Beyond things like tiling, enlarge/shrink, rotate, etc. . . , what are you referring to? I'm not saying the functionality is there, but for our needs, anyways, KDE is perfect.
Yuck.
That Turtle Beach card is looking good.
Hehe.
Linux switched to a Powermac, and boots Linux on it.
Now Apple is switch to Intel. Will a Powermac x86 running Linux be different from a commodity box running Linux?
I'm skeptical.
Actually, World of Warcraft is a surprising good example.
My midrange AMD64 (Geforce FX5900) system running World of Warcraft under Cedega (WINE) absolutely smokes World of Warcraft on the Dual G5 2.5 with a Geforce 6800GT we've got at work.
This is especially surprising given that the G5 is running native binaries. I posted this somewhere else in the thread, but even a top end Mac OS X system is simple not all that great for gaming, but my midrange AMD64 runs many, if not all, of the latest Windows games, and runs them really well.
G5 cost? ~$3200.
AMD64 cost? ~$900.
I still like Macs. But they aren't the be all end all of computing.
Heheh.
This is *exactly* what I'm saying.
"BWAAHAHHAAA! My Gentoo is HARD! I can't get everything to work."
Well, no shit. Can't say I'm surprised.
-- JWZ
If mozilla.org is an example of a failed project, than I won't mind Linux being a failed project, either.
I love the Mac, and I have several Mac systems. I love Linux, and I have several SuSE systems.
JWZ is an intelligent person who has contributed a greal deal to opensource, but he is also an emotional hothead who has little patience, and he rarely looks outside of the box.
He's dropped linux because of the difficulty of setting up software sound mixing. Hilariously, there are several distributions that have this *built-in*.
Talk about not doing your homework. I'm not trying to belittle this man, but this is not news; he's tired of there not being one perfect Linux OS. Well, thats the way it works. If you can't use a 'mainstream' linux like SuSE, Mandriva, or Fedora Core, don't go out an insult hardworking developers that have *already* solved the problems you're bitching about on your blog.
Ugh. How about a label for 'uninformed'.
I've been posting all over this story.
SuSE doesn't have any of these problems.
I'm not the only posting this, either. The latest SuSE has software-mixing for cards that do not support hardware-mixing. It does this out of the box. No setup required. Not even a checkbox.
Heh... Funny.
.alsarc, but thats really far more trouble than its worth. ALSA is really, really powerful, and really, really configurable, but its just too much of a beast to wrestle.
Post it to the ALSA-support list?
You can remap the outputs using a
No, Linux works with many particular hardware setups, however, if you wish to have a *perfect* installation using only drivers that come with the distribution your hardware support is limited.
Not nearly as limited as Mac OS X or Windows, mind you. Any DRI video card or Nvidia card, any ACX100/110/111, Atmel, Prism, and a whole series of other wireless cards, nearly any soundcard (now that SuSE 9.3 is out, dmix is setup out-of-box for cards that do not support hardware mixing).
I was merely making a simple recommendation following my own setup. Similar to saying:
Get an Apple
Run OS X.
Obviously, there are otherways to run OS X. Mac-on-Linux on PowerPC hardware, or PearPC. But getting a Mac is the simplest way.
Using SuSE supported hardware is the simplest way to get Linux.
Hah!
Actually, yes, you can do all of those things.
K3B in SuSE comes with DVD burning support, including USB burners.
Thumb drivers pop-up in the devices:// protocol, and under the 'My Computer' folder on your desktop.
digiKam automagically pops-up when you connect your USB camera, and utilizes an iPhoto like interface.
Linux really has started to change.
Interesting. I've gotten surround sound working (4.1) on my SB Live!, and I recently upgraded to an Audigy2 Value, and now have working 5.1.
Perhaps its a SuSE thing (evil grin). My distro of choice.
What happens when you do this?
mplayer -channels 4 -ao alsa:device=surround40
Don't you get 4 channel audio?
How about this?
You need an AC3 capable sound card, with digital out (S/PDIF). The card's driver must properly support the AFMT_AC3 format (C-Media does). Connect your AC3 decoder to the S/PDIF output, and use the -ac hwac3 option. It is experimental but known to work with C-Media cards and Soundblaster Live! + ALSA (but not OSS) drivers and DXR3/Hollywood+ MPEG decoder cards.
Check alsamixer, or kmix, or whatever, and make sure that the switch for digital output is on, then:
mplayer -ac hwac3
You should get AC3 passthrough, which should have perfect audio quality.
Also, do you have the correct frequency set? Both the nforce2 (I have one of these as well) and the SB Live/Audigies recommend 48000 kHz over the default 44000 kHz.
surround40 doesn't work as your alsa output? What error message do you get? Are you running an AMD64 kernel? Surround sound and ALSA in general are a bit buggy when running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit kernel; the 32-bit wrapper isn't perfect, yet.
Poor, but possibly useful reference:
http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/linuxSoundALSA.html
Try a different distro. The newest SuSE (9.3) has software mixing (i.e. dmix) already setup for cards that do not support hardware mixing.
One last point that I will make. I try to help a fair amount on the transgaming forums (www.transgaming.org) and more people seem to have audio problems with Gentoo than with any other distribution. This may be because there are more Gentoo users on the trangaming site than other platforms, but it is a strange trend.