The original DOA had a "bouncing breast" feature which could be turned up or down. Even on the most conservative setting, the breasts of all the female characters jiggled like vibrating jello when they were standing still, and on the highest setting they looked like they were going to fly off any second...
As a male gamer, I did not find much to attract me to this game. I am generally skeptical anyway of a game with a gimmick like this "Oooh! in ths game I get to stare at this blocky ass all day! woohoo!" I find most people who *did* like the game, like it because of the blocky ass. The camera sucks, the controls suck, the gameplay is repetitive, the graphics very very blocky. Every bit of improvement in graphics has been (surprise surprise) geared to making the blocky ass rounder.
I try to find games with a compelling storyline, or at least a decent engine in the controls department, with decent gameplay. Not just what is the fad today. Although I must say, the GTA series is something game designers would do well to study and learn from, as there is a lot of everything there. (Decent gameplay, good graphics, sex, violence, and yes it is a big fad right now because of great marketing, soundtrack, and named voice actors).
Of course if you played the early series, you can see it did not start out that way, but the designers kept putting out solid games, to the point that with the latest offering they can have big name stars for voice acting and music.
I have in the past bought cheap CDRs for which the failure rate was 100% (well, to be fair, I only went through 25 out of the set of 100...) Never Again, mon frere, never again.
I hate that there are very often asterisks beside prices but no footnote to be found at all. Dell mailed me a catalog like that recently. Many asterisks all over, but no relevant footnotes...
In all reality the action of choosing not to fund Theo will make him more populer with the majority of american citizens. The majority like myself would rather see their tax money be used to fund people and projects based in the United States.
...
Then again I am an evil American that should be self loathing because I beleive in protecting my own interests.
No you simply have a typical American's sense of geography since you seem to believe the University of Pennsylvania is in Canada. Did they win that in the War of 1812? I forget, my history is pretty rusty:P.
--Although it must be said, that Theo displayed remarkable thick-headedness by making those remarks in the 1st place, considering the source of the money.
I think he did the right thing. He expressed his opinions and clarified his position, which in the face of the source of his money did stand clarification. There should be no reason that the Department of *Defense* gets upset that someone doing work for them is against an unprovoked *attack*. Beside that, it is, as I posted earlier, completely against the very principles upon which the US was founded to axe someone for their beliefs.
To then have the grant canceled just because the head honcho made his views known on the war is being petty beyond belief!
What makes me the angriest about this whole debacle is the notion that since Theo is Canadian suddenly the US Government does not have to recognize his right to freedom of speech. That is the biggest crock of shit of the century. The founding fathers of the United States explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independance, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." unlike the current crop of politicians, among them the words "all" unalienable" and "abridged" were well understood and unambiguous in their meaning.
All human beings are endowed by their creator with these rights. They are *NOT* granted by government, and the process which created Humans is the same (for now [see clones] ):) ) the world over. It is completely against the basic principles upon which the US was founded to treat anyone anywhere in the world, or most especially any visitor to this country, as though those rights do not apply to them because our Illustrious Government did not give them a rubber stamp.
The idea that government grants rights is a dangerous one, and it is this very idea which has been used to erode rights in this country even as brave men and women fight and die in foreign countries believing wholeheartedly they are fighting for the ideals and rights of their beloved homeland; oddly enough, of late, with the claim we are extending these rights to other groups of people in said countries. I think the idea is being spread on purpose, and is aided by what passes for an education system in this country (a system in which History and Social Studies are officially declared Non-Essential and cut while sports programs are expanded to compete with professional sports and, I suppose, help produce more soldiers).
The idea that Jerry Falwell can say whatever he wants, but if Saddam Hussein says the same thing it makes him a criminal is preposterous. The idea that we should deny due process to immigrants and visa-holding foreign nationals to this country is preposterous. And if we are going to degrade, in the face of this "War on Terror" the quality of our country's security systems simply because one of the experts to be employed is guilty of the dual crimes of being Canadian and a pacifist, well, it's just another shining example of how we are allowing our very civilization to decline.
Well, I have to plead to some ignorance of embedded devices (though the idea of an "embedded" device using an X86 processor strikes me as odd. I had always thought they used stuff like ARM or the TI and Motorola CPUs mostly. And you are right about the embedded linux to a degree, though I would think many things which work on/for one do not work on/for another, even with recompilation. My main point was that the Slashdot blurb made this sound like Microsoft was finally porting apps to Linux, and we would be able to use them, when the fact of the matter is they will make damn sure we cannot.
To be fair, I only ever tried to compile on Slackware, and there the configure script complained about the version of gcc (because the mplayer guys did not like any later gcc than the one before RedHat started releasing crazy gcc versions) and the compile did not work when the gcc checking was turned off. On the site, there were numerous nasty remarks about all the distros named (probably more) as well as against people daring to make packages of mplayer for said distros. At least the winex people tell you what distro they expect their stuff to work on, but I never saw anything but what distros mplayer would probably not work for (which was pretty comprehensably all major ones) and never got it to compile.
Ah, I get your point. And, that is pretty cool. Assuming, of course, that you can set it on a folder level, and not necessarily on a per-file basis (which I think would have too much overhead associated with it, and might be annoying when I no longer want to use gimp for x.jpg, but forgot to change the metadata or whatever to set it back to a simple viewer).
Unfortunately, this was controlled on a per file basis. I think there might have been programs that would batch-process files, but the only one I ever used to mess with type and creator codes was resedit, which did other things, too...
I love this sort of discussion, BTW, and I think the major weakness of GUI's is that they're often not tweaked or refined enough to be as efficient (and consistent) as they can be. They seem to be either dumbed-down for the lowest-common-denominator, or hyper-complex for the power-user and requiring lots of setup or learning to be efficient.
I agree and this is a problem with computing in general. Of course in the GUI interface problems are easier to see because of the nature of the interface. Hopefully we will learn. I think the idea of having levels ("basic" and "advanced" with "basic" as default) is a good way to go and has been tried in MacOS, Windows to some extent, and Mozilla to name a few... But the idea coudl be expanded, maybe even a "newbie bit" that could be set globally for all apps run from a user or that could be set by default and unset by the user.
On older macs I've used, I found the GUI very efficient (but always lamented the single mouse button limitation -- seemes like it would have been 2x better with another button, and 2.5x better with a 3rd button. No scroller is annoying too). I think these things are available now (I've seen 2-button, 3-button, and scroller mac mice, but I'm not sure how well they integrate into the OS or apps, or how configurable they are). But OS X seems to be a bit of a regression -- it's prettier, but less efficient to me. And not for the same reasons that the spatial finder guy lists. It simply seems less consistent than the pre-OS X GUIs. And slower. A lot slower. I want BeOS responsiveness, even if it is an illusion, or sucks my RAM dry on boot (RAM's cheap).
I agree with you on the mouse problem (unfortunately for mac users, Steve Jobs does not agree). But it is entirely possible to have mice with many buttons and have them work in MacOS, Windows, and even Linux. I have seen mice that had about 5-7 buttons being used on Macs, and they came with driver software that let you configure the buttons. One of the first things I did after having to muck with my girlfriend's iBook awhile (helping her get it set up right) was to take my favorite (of all time) Logitech USB trackball and install the drivers on her iBook, configureing the right button for ctrl-click and the middle button for Command-V so that middle button pastes and right click brings up a context menu.
In an aside, I am still pissed off at Logitech for discontinuing this kick-butt mouse. It is hard for me to find a good mouse, and this one was the best. The one I am talking about is the marble trackball with wheel, and the current version has lost the space provided by the third button and is therefore far too small for me to use comfortably. The old one was spaced out enough I could just drop my hand on it and generally expect the buttons to be near the right fingers, whereas the new one requires far more precision. Oh well, back to the used computer parts stores for me:(.
But if the wmv solution is closed-source, and the license says it cannot be distributed, then you are not going to be able to get it to work on your Slackware box. Maybe if you pirated it, maybe if you reverse-engineered it. BUt it will not be available in any normally accepted sense of the word.
In my experience, in-store demos of monitors and TVs are relatively useless, unless you actually get lucky and see a monitor/tv that looks halfway decent (you should probably buy that one). One of the problems the major outlets (FRy's, Best Buy, CompUSA, WalMart, Sams, etc) seem to have is they set out row after row of monitors or TV's all on the same video feed, which is going through long-ass analog cables and splitters that are crappy and all spliced together, and the result is that every single one, without exception, looks like complete crap. They also routinely have crappy tuning on the monitors, though you can play with that yourself (as others no doubt have done, thus often exacerbating the problem).
So if you get lucky and see one on a decent signal you might get to judge the monitor. Or if you see one that even under these conditions displays decently, you shodul probably buy it because it works well under adverse conditions.
Yes. Honestly, the lines are very small, and the trinitron display is far better than any other crt technology. I usually don't see the lines unless I just happen upon them, or am looking for them. I usually tune them out. Of course now they are obvious to me again because this thread reminded me they are there, but I am sure they will disappear again soon.:)
Essentially your choices if you want a good display are to either take the trinitron and deal with the lines, or take the lcd and deal with the resolution limitations (LCD screens display best at their native resolution, which is directly related to the number of physical pixels in the display) and blurring (as described elsewhere in this article, a function of the refresh rate / memory effects in the pixels). Oh and the LCD is lighter. But this is human technology, it is not meant to be perfect.
Source based distros rock! I was never able to get mplayer to compile and work other distributions, primarily because the maintainers did not like the gcc that was running on pretty much any of them I could find. I am not sure what distro they use (perhaps lfs??) because they don't like Debian, they don't like Slackware, they sure as hell don't like RedHat/SUSE/Mandrake.. so who knows?
I should also qualify that by saying I haven't tried getting the result of my compile to work yet...
Well, my reading of the article leads me to believe this is *not* as the slashdot headline implies a deal which means wmv will work on Linux. Far to the contrary. It appears MS is *licensing* the use of software that will be able to use wmv on specific PVRs which also happen to run an *embedded* Linux. It is extremely likely this solution will not only not be open source but not be distributable at all nor applicable to the general purpose Linux most people run.
I agreed, and agreed, and agreed again, and still could not download. Then I got a confirmation email. I confirmed, and agreed some more, and still could not download. Eventually I got the file. But it is silly. Even Microsoft does not make you go through so many hoops to agree to an agreement.
SAP runs on Linux. The other one is a Windows-only application I never heard of, but if it is important to your business, that is an important consideration. Then again, if I had read everything possible on the Microsoft Trial, I would know why this software is only on Windows.:)
It appears from my googling this space is dominated by crappy software that requires the use of IE for the application and only run on Windows. This and the Intuit offerings are prime examples of places where windows is being used where it had better not be used, and poorly written software is requiring data which should be well-secured to be placed in an environment where security is eliminated. Indeed it might bear looking into from the various developers here. If someone can save these guys money and give them a proven solution, they will be rather rich and will have done a good thing.
I know about Gnucash, I support its development, and hope it eclipses all Intuit has to offer. However I see the parent is right w/r/t Insurance Agency software, and I would suspect travel agency software is still as scary and abysmal as it was years ago when I looked into it.
Eudora is nowhere near an approximation of Outlook. It is a decent mail client, but this is not teh reason people use Outlook. If all we needed were mail clienst, there are 5000 of those. Sylpheed is my current favorite.
Outlook is a groupware client, and currently the top of the heap. It allows corporate workers to collaborate, share folders of files, share calendars, automagically schedule meetings, and do many other neat things. There are a few other commercial applications for the purpose, but none really come close in terms of market share or even quality and ease of use to Outlook. This is *why* Evolution has an Exchange connection plugin. That is a very smart things for them to do. Unfortunately maintaining Evolution proved unwieldly for me. RPM HELL?! RPM HELL NO!
Anyway, this is what the poster was on about, and also incidentally why I end up using Windows at work, though my other work puter runs Sourcemage currently.
I'm inclined to agree. While I think it is a Good Thing for linux to be used by Joe Sixpack, and for computers in general to be easier to use, and I think KDE and Gnome are a step in a good direction, for me fvwm2 does more than enough, and I do not have to use the resources Gnome and KDE make me use.
My philosophy is if you are going to take up my ram and cpu with features, they need to be features I use. I am happy with the features of fvwm, though I do use and like the apps that come with KDE and Gnome within my environment.
However, I do agree with 90% of the article as well. I think the more effort spent finishing apps that we have, the better, rather than having 5000 beta applications and still not being able to finish my chosen task on the computer.
It is free as in beer and speech. If you want an easily installable version and your distribution does not include it you do need to pay $5/month for a subscription. Every $5/month you pay gives you a vote toward what games get worked on. Not really bad if you ask me.
This is very informative, indeed. I have searched fairly regulary for resources for doing just this sort of thing on Linux, and mostly got the answer that "It can't be done."
This is, of course, yet another example of what is getting lost in the forest of OS projects. I think what we need is some kind of site which truly extolls the benefits of various programs, and is properly organized in categories of useful things you can do with your computer, and links to programs you can do that with, and howtos and manuals and newsgroups that will explain how to do use them.
Not to mention, when the answer involves hardware, what hardware you can buy to work with these things under lInux, and how good/bad it is/works under Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The original DOA had a "bouncing breast" feature which could be turned up or down. Even on the most conservative setting, the breasts of all the female characters jiggled like vibrating jello when they were standing still, and on the highest setting they looked like they were going to fly off any second...
As a male gamer, I did not find much to attract me to this game. I am generally skeptical anyway of a game with a gimmick like this "Oooh! in ths game I get to stare at this blocky ass all day! woohoo!" I find most people who *did* like the game, like it because of the blocky ass. The camera sucks, the controls suck, the gameplay is repetitive, the graphics very very blocky. Every bit of improvement in graphics has been (surprise surprise) geared to making the blocky ass rounder.
I try to find games with a compelling storyline, or at least a decent engine in the controls department, with decent gameplay. Not just what is the fad today. Although I must say, the GTA series is something game designers would do well to study and learn from, as there is a lot of everything there. (Decent gameplay, good graphics, sex, violence, and yes it is a big fad right now because of great marketing, soundtrack, and named voice actors).
Of course if you played the early series, you can see it did not start out that way, but the designers kept putting out solid games, to the point that with the latest offering they can have big name stars for voice acting and music.
Dude, do you have a Dell? :)
I have in the past bought cheap CDRs for which the failure rate was 100% (well, to be fair, I only went through 25 out of the set of 100...) Never Again, mon frere, never again.
I hate that there are very often asterisks beside prices but no footnote to be found at all. Dell mailed me a catalog like that recently. Many asterisks all over, but no relevant footnotes...
Nono.. it's "submit slashdot article" and "bitch and moan on slashdot!" get it right! :)
In all reality the action of choosing not to fund Theo will make him more populer with the majority of american citizens. The majority like myself would rather see their tax money be used to fund people and projects based in the United States.
...
Then again I am an evil American that should be self loathing because I beleive in protecting my own interests.
No you simply have a typical American's sense of geography since you seem to believe the University of Pennsylvania is in Canada. Did they win that in the War of 1812? I forget, my history is pretty rusty :P.
--Although it must be said, that Theo displayed remarkable thick-headedness by making those remarks in the 1st place, considering the source of the money.
I think he did the right thing. He expressed his opinions and clarified his position, which in the face of the source of his money did stand clarification. There should be no reason that the Department of *Defense* gets upset that someone doing work for them is against an unprovoked *attack*. Beside that, it is, as I posted earlier, completely against the very principles upon which the US was founded to axe someone for their beliefs.
To then have the grant canceled just because the head honcho made his views known on the war is being petty beyond belief!
What makes me the angriest about this whole debacle is the notion that since Theo is Canadian suddenly the US Government does not have to recognize his right to freedom of speech. That is the biggest crock of shit of the century. The founding fathers of the United States explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independance, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." unlike the current crop of politicians, among them the words "all" unalienable" and "abridged" were well understood and unambiguous in their meaning.
All human beings are endowed by their creator with these rights. They are *NOT* granted by government, and the process which created Humans is the same (for now [see clones] ):) ) the world over. It is completely against the basic principles upon which the US was founded to treat anyone anywhere in the world, or most especially any visitor to this country, as though those rights do not apply to them because our Illustrious Government did not give them a rubber stamp.
The idea that government grants rights is a dangerous one, and it is this very idea which has been used to erode rights in this country even as brave men and women fight and die in foreign countries believing wholeheartedly they are fighting for the ideals and rights of their beloved homeland; oddly enough, of late, with the claim we are extending these rights to other groups of people in said countries. I think the idea is being spread on purpose, and is aided by what passes for an education system in this country (a system in which History and Social Studies are officially declared Non-Essential and cut while sports programs are expanded to compete with professional sports and, I suppose, help produce more soldiers).
The idea that Jerry Falwell can say whatever he wants, but if Saddam Hussein says the same thing it makes him a criminal is preposterous. The idea that we should deny due process to immigrants and visa-holding foreign nationals to this country is preposterous. And if we are going to degrade, in the face of this "War on Terror" the quality of our country's security systems simply because one of the experts to be employed is guilty of the dual crimes of being Canadian and a pacifist, well, it's just another shining example of how we are allowing our very civilization to decline.
Well, I have to plead to some ignorance of embedded devices (though the idea of an "embedded" device using an X86 processor strikes me as odd. I had always thought they used stuff like ARM or the TI and Motorola CPUs mostly. And you are right about the embedded linux to a degree, though I would think many things which work on/for one do not work on/for another, even with recompilation. My main point was that the Slashdot blurb made this sound like Microsoft was finally porting apps to Linux, and we would be able to use them, when the fact of the matter is they will make damn sure we cannot.
It doesn't sound like the two would be mutually exclusive, and most cartels are illegal.
As are Trusts, at least in the US and otehr countries which have Anti-Trust laws.
To be fair, I only ever tried to compile on Slackware, and there the configure script complained about the version of gcc (because the mplayer guys did not like any later gcc than the one before RedHat started releasing crazy gcc versions) and the compile did not work when the gcc checking was turned off. On the site, there were numerous nasty remarks about all the distros named (probably more) as well as against people daring to make packages of mplayer for said distros. At least the winex people tell you what distro they expect their stuff to work on, but I never saw anything but what distros mplayer would probably not work for (which was pretty comprehensably all major ones) and never got it to compile.
Ah, I get your point. And, that is pretty cool. Assuming, of course, that you can set it on a folder level, and not necessarily on a per-file basis (which I think would have too much overhead associated with it, and might be annoying when I no longer want to use gimp for x.jpg, but forgot to change the metadata or whatever to set it back to a simple viewer).
Unfortunately, this was controlled on a per file basis. I think there might have been programs that would batch-process files, but the only one I ever used to mess with type and creator codes was resedit, which did other things, too...
I love this sort of discussion, BTW, and I think the major weakness of GUI's is that they're often not tweaked or refined enough to be as efficient (and consistent) as they can be. They seem to be either dumbed-down for the lowest-common-denominator, or hyper-complex for the power-user and requiring lots of setup or learning to be efficient.
I agree and this is a problem with computing in general. Of course in the GUI interface problems are easier to see because of the nature of the interface. Hopefully we will learn. I think the idea of having levels ("basic" and "advanced" with "basic" as default) is a good way to go and has been tried in MacOS, Windows to some extent, and Mozilla to name a few... But the idea coudl be expanded, maybe even a "newbie bit" that could be set globally for all apps run from a user or that could be set by default and unset by the user.
On older macs I've used, I found the GUI very efficient (but always lamented the single mouse button limitation -- seemes like it would have been 2x better with another button, and 2.5x better with a 3rd button. No scroller is annoying too). I think these things are available now (I've seen 2-button, 3-button, and scroller mac mice, but I'm not sure how well they integrate into the OS or apps, or how configurable they are). But OS X seems to be a bit of a regression -- it's prettier, but less efficient to me. And not for the same reasons that the spatial finder guy lists. It simply seems less consistent than the pre-OS X GUIs. And slower. A lot slower. I want BeOS responsiveness, even if it is an illusion, or sucks my RAM dry on boot (RAM's cheap).
I agree with you on the mouse problem (unfortunately for mac users, Steve Jobs does not agree). But it is entirely possible to have mice with many buttons and have them work in MacOS, Windows, and even Linux. I have seen mice that had about 5-7 buttons being used on Macs, and they came with driver software that let you configure the buttons. One of the first things I did after having to muck with my girlfriend's iBook awhile (helping her get it set up right) was to take my favorite (of all time) Logitech USB trackball and install the drivers on her iBook, configureing the right button for ctrl-click and the middle button for Command-V so that middle button pastes and right click brings up a context menu.
In an aside, I am still pissed off at Logitech for discontinuing this kick-butt mouse. It is hard for me to find a good mouse, and this one was the best. The one I am talking about is the marble trackball with wheel, and the current version has lost the space provided by the third button and is therefore far too small for me to use comfortably. The old one was spaced out enough I could just drop my hand on it and generally expect the buttons to be near the right fingers, whereas the new one requires far more precision. Oh well, back to the used computer parts stores for me :(.
But if the wmv solution is closed-source, and the license says it cannot be distributed, then you are not going to be able to get it to work on your Slackware box. Maybe if you pirated it, maybe if you reverse-engineered it. BUt it will not be available in any normally accepted sense of the word.
In my experience, in-store demos of monitors and TVs are relatively useless, unless you actually get lucky and see a monitor/tv that looks halfway decent (you should probably buy that one). One of the problems the major outlets (FRy's, Best Buy, CompUSA, WalMart, Sams, etc) seem to have is they set out row after row of monitors or TV's all on the same video feed, which is going through long-ass analog cables and splitters that are crappy and all spliced together, and the result is that every single one, without exception, looks like complete crap. They also routinely have crappy tuning on the monitors, though you can play with that yourself (as others no doubt have done, thus often exacerbating the problem).
So if you get lucky and see one on a decent signal you might get to judge the monitor. Or if you see one that even under these conditions displays decently, you shodul probably buy it because it works well under adverse conditions.
A pointy-haired KDS marketing manager got moderator points, of course! :)
Yes. Honestly, the lines are very small, and the trinitron display is far better than any other crt technology. I usually don't see the lines unless I just happen upon them, or am looking for them. I usually tune them out. Of course now they are obvious to me again because this thread reminded me they are there, but I am sure they will disappear again soon. :)
Essentially your choices if you want a good display are to either take the trinitron and deal with the lines, or take the lcd and deal with the resolution limitations (LCD screens display best at their native resolution, which is directly related to the number of physical pixels in the display) and blurring (as described elsewhere in this article, a function of the refresh rate / memory effects in the pixels). Oh and the LCD is lighter. But this is human technology, it is not meant to be perfect.
That is why I
cast mplayer
Source based distros rock! I was never able to get mplayer to compile and work other distributions, primarily because the maintainers did not like the gcc that was running on pretty much any of them I could find. I am not sure what distro they use (perhaps lfs??) because they don't like Debian, they don't like Slackware, they sure as hell don't like RedHat/SUSE/Mandrake.. so who knows?
I should also qualify that by saying I haven't tried getting the result of my compile to work yet...
Well, my reading of the article leads me to believe this is *not* as the slashdot headline implies a deal which means wmv will work on Linux. Far to the contrary. It appears MS is *licensing* the use of software that will be able to use wmv on specific PVRs which also happen to run an *embedded* Linux. It is extremely likely this solution will not only not be open source but not be distributable at all nor applicable to the general purpose Linux most people run.
I agreed, and agreed, and agreed again, and still could not download. Then I got a confirmation email. I confirmed, and agreed some more, and still could not download. Eventually I got the file. But it is silly. Even Microsoft does not make you go through so many hoops to agree to an agreement.
The other one is a Windows-only application I never heard of, but if it is important to your business, that is an important consideration. Then again, if I had read everything possible on the Microsoft Trial, I would know why this software is only on Windows.
It appears from my googling this space is dominated by crappy software that requires the use of IE for the application and only run on Windows. This and the Intuit offerings are prime examples of places where windows is being used where it had better not be used, and poorly written software is requiring data which should be well-secured to be placed in an environment where security is eliminated. Indeed it might bear looking into from the various developers here. If someone can save these guys money and give them a proven solution, they will be rather rich and will have done a good thing.
I know about Gnucash, I support its development, and hope it eclipses all Intuit has to offer. However I see the parent is right w/r/t Insurance Agency software, and I would suspect travel agency software is still as scary and abysmal as it was years ago when I looked into it.
Eudora is nowhere near an approximation of Outlook. It is a decent mail client, but this is not teh reason people use Outlook. If all we needed were mail clienst, there are 5000 of those. Sylpheed is my current favorite.
Outlook is a groupware client, and currently the top of the heap. It allows corporate workers to collaborate, share folders of files, share calendars, automagically schedule meetings, and do many other neat things. There are a few other commercial applications for the purpose, but none really come close in terms of market share or even quality and ease of use to Outlook. This is *why* Evolution has an Exchange connection plugin. That is a very smart things for them to do. Unfortunately maintaining Evolution proved unwieldly for me. RPM HELL?! RPM HELL NO!
Anyway, this is what the poster was on about, and also incidentally why I end up using Windows at work, though my other work puter runs Sourcemage currently.
I'm inclined to agree. While I think it is a Good Thing for linux to be used by Joe Sixpack, and for computers in general to be easier to use, and I think KDE and Gnome are a step in a good direction, for me fvwm2 does more than enough, and I do not have to use the resources Gnome and KDE make me use.
My philosophy is if you are going to take up my ram and cpu with features, they need to be features I use. I am happy with the features of fvwm, though I do use and like the apps that come with KDE and Gnome within my environment.
However, I do agree with 90% of the article as well. I think the more effort spent finishing apps that we have, the better, rather than having 5000 beta applications and still not being able to finish my chosen task on the computer.
It is free as in beer and speech. If you want an easily installable version and your distribution does not include it you do need to pay $5/month for a subscription. Every $5/month you pay gives you a vote toward what games get worked on. Not really bad if you ask me.
This is very informative, indeed. I have searched fairly regulary for resources for doing just this sort of thing on Linux, and mostly got the answer that "It can't be done."
This is, of course, yet another example of what is getting lost in the forest of OS projects. I think what we need is some kind of site which truly extolls the benefits of various programs, and is properly organized in categories of useful things you can do with your computer, and links to programs you can do that with, and howtos and manuals and newsgroups that will explain how to do use them.
Not to mention, when the answer involves hardware, what hardware you can buy to work with these things under lInux, and how good/bad it is/works under Linux.