1.) A backup system compatible with rdiff-backup, or at least as simple as rdiff-backup (i.e. the incremental copy, minus one folder, can be the latest snapshot) 2.) Make it work with gamin, so that backups are automatic 3.) Make 'thumbs' for files it understands, and store those as well
My mom made the mistake of buying a service plan for her Toshiba Satellite.
She asked me to pick it up for her at the Carbondale, IL store (dead HD, laptop still under warranty) and after they'd left me to cool my heels for 20 minutes, had me sign paperwork, etc. they handed me the, paperwork, old HD (in case she chose to send it to Toshiba for data recovery) and then stated that they "weren't sure" if the OS installation fee was covered by the service plan and wouldn't let me leave with the computer unless I paid $130(!) for OS installation (Toshiba recovery CD) and that if (IF!) they found that it was covered, I would be refunded.
I called her (I had places to be right then) and she called the store manager, corporate, etc. and after 1.5 hours decided they could waive the fee if I was willing to wait for them to REPLACE THE DRIVE, a wait of 1-2 HOURS. Well, no, I wasn't willing to wait, so I left. Shortly afterward she received a call that the recently installed drive was WIPED and the computer was ready to be picked up.
I'm going today to pick up the computer. My bet is that either 1.) they'll conveniently "forget" that they were waiving the fee, or that 2.) they've lost either the old HD or the entire computer. Bets, anyone?
No frickin' way would I buy a computer from Best Buy. DVDs and CDs, sure, and maybe hardware with decent factory warranties, but not computers, and if I were dumb enough to, I certainly wouldn't take it to the store for warranty work! I've heard too many horror stories from other people who've ended up spending the same amount of money they'd spent on their hardware, only to have to wait for half a month for a computer just as bricked as it was when it went in.
Best Buy and Geek Squad is about as crooked as the crookedest used-car dealership.
Meh. That's a pretty mediocre collection. Aside from Zahn's Thrawn series (which would make an awesome film trilogy, but would put Lucas's offerings to shame) there's not that much in the extended universe that really offers much. Then again, we're talking about Star Wars, so it's frickin' awesome. I realize the second part sounds sarcastic (it's not) and that I sound like I'm contradicting myself, so rather than untangle the cognitive dissonance I just caused, I'll click 'Submit.'
Kidding! If you want to continue the bounty hunters adventures, the Bounty Hunter Wars series has its moments. Wish Jeter had gone for a story line more about the Kuat drive yards, because there's obviously a talent there more for courtly intrigue than for action. And let's face it, Boba Fett demands someone who can write action.
P.S. Anyone remember how, before Attack of the Clones came out, a story board was leaked that featured the Jango Fett/Obi-Wan fight on Camino, and loads of fans dismissed it as fake, some even going as far as to say it was 'too boring' to be real? Well...does that give anyone pause about Lucas's joking comment about the series being about droids? C'mon, Lucas, you already dumped a crappy droid cartoon on my generation. Don't do it to us again. Please, no R2/3P0 buddy series. Please, for the love of GOD and all that is HOLY, do NOT do that to us again.
Largely because mainstream press hijacked a perfectly innocuous term like 'hacker' to mean 'someone who is actively trying to steal all your intentity data along with your money.'
The sentiment comes partially from George W. Bush's public speeches following September 11. In a nutshell, since the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, we should go on living our lives as we have, otherwise the terrorists have won.
Well, we're not able to live our lives as we did before. Therefore, by historical record of our Commander-in-Chief's own words, the War on Terror has been lost. We live in fear, we allow the federal government to impose Constitutionally illegal directives, imposing will both on the rights of citizens and states. And yet, if you point this out to the radical Right, they'll shout you down, reminding you--as loudly as possible--to remember the people who jumped out of the World Trade Center on September 11th.
Check the statistics. Several times more Americans died due to drunk drivers than terrorist activities in 2001. Yet no one is suggesting that distilleries and car manufacturers be bugged, wiretapped, infiltrated, or bombed out of existence. What will it take for America to stop being ruled by the iron fist of Knee-Jerk Politics? Will it take the end of the Union, the Great Experiment that seems to be in such peril? Will it take seeing the young men and women in uniform marching the "diaper heads" into the ovens? What will it take?
If you run XScreensaver, you can have your Matrix screen saver.
I know what you mean, though. I'm finding myself migrating back to a large collection of (gasp) console apps. Last night I caught myself using Screen to switch between irssi, mutt, wyrd, vim, and ncmpc. After spending a few years working with Macs and being a KDE zealot, I feel a little dirty:-}
Basically all an ioslave: is is a virtual filesystem. For example, the audiocd ioslave generally allows for straight CDDB (iirc, don't have Konq and friends installed on this machine), Wav, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3. Navigate to the proper directory, and with a bit of luck, the subsystem has automatically retrieved the FreeDB information and named virtual "files" for you. Select those files, drag them to the location you want them, and you are, in theory, done.
Personally I like a bit more control, which is why I use abcde.
I wasn't a big fan of the original cut, but the much more recent "completed" cut is fantastic. I think most people don't like it because it's more serious, something Star Trek's not that good at.
If that was an example of what Phase II could have been, where did those crappy 1st-season Next Generation scripts come from? Surely these aren't from the same people...sadly, though, I suppose they were.
So many missed opportunities while Berman was permitted to rotate tired time travel and Borg storylines until even many diehard fans just said "fuck it" and turned to more interest fare.
Yeah. You know Star Trek is dead when fans are more excited about a redo of a 20-year-old series whose plotline is borrowed from the Book of Mormon.:-P
Totally. A lot of people claim that Stewart was the best actor on the show; I think it was Spiner. How many other actors could have made Data seem like anything OTHER than mere comic relief, or unintentionally funny?
The man has a gift for comedy, and by that token a gift for keeping things from being comedy when it needed to be serious, which translated well to Data.
If it hadn't been for Data, the show would have been pointless and boring. Leave the Captain in his lounge with his Shakespeare and his fish and hot Earl Grey. Data's the guy processing Vivaldi's Four Seasons while recreating Mondrian art!
Yep. And those of us in smaller offices have loads of fun. As in, 'sysadmin' is so 'unimportant' that it's just part of someone's job. Like me; some people literally expect me to drop what I'm doing, and if I don't, my boss hears about it. Thankfully he's smart enough to realize what a load of crap that is.:-) Not like the last guy who'd just come over and give me hell for not being 'understanding.'
Oh, and don't let that 3 a.m. call/drive to work stop you from coming back in bright and early!
And does anyone remember that in the late 90s, the deal-killer was that "Linux doesn't support Internet Explorer"? I mean, please!
I hope I'm not alone in this, but I'm perfectly happy to let people who don't want to futz with their computers buy proprietary operating systems. I've met too many people who're highly intelligent in one field but actually believe that Windows is just part of a computer. I cannot and will not support moving these types over to a system that's not a drop-in replacement for people who are either unable or unwilling to learn something new. I'm sure I'm not alone in encountering educated people who find MacOS too difficult to comprehend(!); you really want these people to buy a computer at "the Walmart's" and even attempt a distribution upgrade on Ubuntu? Not me!
I know people will be screaming "ivory tower!" in response to this, but I guess what I'm saying is that if the way things are in Linux tends to run incredibly lazy and incompetent people away (and you have to be both to not "get" Ubuntu, I'm sorry), then good riddance.
Indeed. There's no definitive proof that using LAME opens me to legal action, nor that playing back the MP3s created with LAME in, say, AmaroK or some other player (I run MPD on my machine for various reasons.) Distributing those MP3s and the illegal activity that even "legal" codecs allows, however, is the real interesting problem, and I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if Fraunhofer pursued what they perceive to be "illegal" MP3 encoding cases. Plus it's been explained to me by a much smarter person that it'd be open and shut, against them, if they chose Germany as their legal venue, since LAME isn't a commercial venture.
I agree mostly, but I have to admit that I have a production machine running Ubuntu (Dapper LTS). To be fair it was a tossup between Ubuntu and Debian, and the machine in question was running OS 9.2.2 and ASIP Server before that, so it's not like anyone had to try very hard to find a more stable system;-)
I don't think it's a choice of 300 anyway for most people, anyway. Outside of Debian, Ubuntu (and the variants of Ubuntu), SuSE, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, and maybe Linspire and Xandros, how many people are you aware of who run other systems? And how many of those 300 are minor variants of the ones I listed above?
I mean, does Damn Small Linux and College Linux really add significantly to cognitive dissonance?
This is what really irks me about Americans. Why aren't you Americans revolting over things like this? In Canada, the Liberal party lost an election because a few bad Liberals stole a mere $1 million.
We're taking a lesson from the Canadians. Instead of having a revolution like we did in 1776, we'll just do what y'all did and wait patiently for things to change.
I'M KIDDING! A revolution would be great, if we wouldn't get stomped down by American might 3 minutes after the revolution started.
And I'm thoroughly convinced that if just one person had voted for Bush in the popular vote, he still would have won. I have no proof of that, but it's still questionable whether or not he won his first election.
And of course the news is reluctant to cover it. A lot of people are dumb and think it's traitorous to expose governmental deception. I've heard Democratic politicians who call for an end date to the Iraq war called "cowards" (and worse) and ABC News denounced as "traitors" for releasing what could be sensitive information. Folks, if the press is chasing down wrongdoing, even if revealing that information could cause harm to others, they're doing their JOB when they release that! Erm, anyway, yes, I agree, news media should be just as aggressive with the Bush administration as they were with the Clinton administration. Why they go soft on corrupt moronic Republicans is beyond me.
It's not as if we have a monopoly on stupid, ignorant people, you know. How many Canadians know anything about Parliamentary procedure?
Color me stupid here, but isn't Apache the de facto standard that most everyone uses?
OK, you're colored stupid, champ.
Seriously, Mongrel is good for development; it's a good mix of fast and easy. Though why someone would need an *easy* package of something available as a RubyGem is still beyond me. If you can't run 'gem install rails -y' you'll never get a Rails app going.
"Alternatively download the source tarball and run./configure && make && sudo make install. What's hard about that?"
Try explaining that to your mother and your grandmother. You'll find out what's so hard about that.
Uh...huh. Grandma can't do the./configure && make && sudo make install three-step but she's going to be developing Ruby on Rails apps. Riiiiiiight.
You want to sue me for being a user of an OS you don't like...erm, I mean, is your only real competition...erm, I mean, violates an arbitrary number of your patents? Fine; I'll ditch my Linux box and go buy a Mac. So fuck you; I will never purchase and will never recommend for purchase another Microsoft product so long as I shall live, simply because you feel the need to bully *me* for Free Software developers unwittingly violating patents you've not even specified yet. I'm through with your bullshit, Microsoft; I'm through with you trying to charge me for software you didn't even create, I'm through with your lazy-ass practice of buying companies just to run competing companies out of business, and I'm sick and fucking tired of people treating me like I'm a criminal because I use a Free OS. And I'm DEFINITELY sick of you shipping beta-quality software and convincing PHBs that it's *enterprise-ready*. I've been a dual-OS user since 1997, and it's single-OS from here on out, with that being whatever OS you don't currently try to steal money from me for.
In all honesty, I doubt the legal team will even let Ballmer do something this abysmally stupid. It'd be like suing Palm for violating an obscure and overly generic patent, then mailing out overdue account notices to all Palm owners. If they're really that desperate it's time for a re-think of a lot of things, starting with their broken busines model which requires a constant increase in their business growth.
Fix your company, fix your O.S., and don't rely on attacking your userbase (some of us using Linux are..erm, *were* loyal MS customers) just to bail your pathetic fucking asses out.
Don't even talk to me about how sad it is that it'll probably take *IBM* to bail us out...;-)
Amen. You said almost everything I think about the situation in a much more succinct manner. Bravo! I can dump video from my MiniDV camera, edit footage and burn to DVD, manage/edit/print photos, websurf/check email, work on Ruby projects, share an Internet connection, and do DTP. I have everything I need, the software's all great for what I do, and I couldn't care one bit if it's ever so simple that my grandma (who doesn't own a computer) could install it from scratch and use it effortlessly, since she couldn't do that with any other OS. Let's all just concentrate on keeping it great, much as Apple does in maintaining what some people complain is a small market share.:-D
Not to throw a monkey wrench into the works, but I just tried both dist-upgrading and fresh installing Feisty onto a machine that previously ran Breezy, Dapper, Edgy more or less flawlessly, and I couldn't even boot. The install CD even identified my IDE drives as SCSI. That's some quality work there, fellers.
Now, I'm not running off to get Vista or anything; I just set about the work of setting up a mixed Edgy/Sid machine work like exactly like my previous Kubuntu install. But it was still a shock to the system going from previously working great to not at all. Not sure what the issues were but they apparently weren't issues on Debian. My guess is that the strain to meet the predictable release cycle caused a road bump, that's all; I'm hoping the next release will be excellent.
And I've never had an Ubuntu install that just worked out of the box. Never. There's always some wankery involved, and all I use my home machine for anymore is playing DVDs, making home movie DVDs, ripping CDs and playing MP3, browsing and checking mail, plus some light Ruby development. All of it required some wankery of some sort. I know I'm just one case and probably a special one, but as busy as the Ubuntu Forums are, I'm thinking I'm far from the only one.
Anyway, I'm glad Feisty is working fine for other people, as Ubuntu is generally a lovely desktop distribution. Just wish it was working for me.:-}
Totally agree about Grandma not being able to handle a Windows install, though. Haven't met too many people who do their own installs, but I have met a number of people who wonder why I'd bother downloading an operating system when Windows is free anyway. D'oh! And these people never understand what I'm talking about when I try to explain that no, it's not free. They just think I'm splittin' hairs, or some such.
I so wish I had some points to hand you, but I don't.:-} Let's not forget the compromises made in the audio signal just to make vinyl sound passably good, eh? Ah, yes; there was never anything quite like bringing a record home only to have the damn thing skip like mad, then take it back when you discover it's a defective record. And to have that seem normal and even acceptable.
Audiophiles rightly hated cassette tapes--but were records really that much better? I don't think so.
I doubt that there'll be an easy solution to the movie master backup problem, at least not anytime soon. In that case, I'm betting we'll never see any Star Wars Prequel Special Editions. Thank God.
Sure, they're commercial, but we're talking about operating with, and replacing, commercial, proprietary software.
Also, Entourage has been around for years. It's a steaming pile of shit. I know people who use it, love it, like it better than any alternative, but yeah, it was around in the OS 9 days. Not for long, but it was. I'd take a screenshot but I don't think we have a copy around here anymore.:-)
Hell, even if you're just a home user using a local address book and using pop/smtp, Evolution is a steaming pile. I had the thing just simply stop working, no error messages, just no more downloading mail and randomly disappearing messages. Nevermind that once started, Evolution leaves running processes (sometimes consuming a fair number of cpu cycles) all over the frickin' place. Agreed on Thunderbird/Lightning; bizarre enough, it took a Mozilla project to write a faster, less complex elient with optional calendaring support.:->
Slashdot Mirror
Give me the following:
1.) A backup system compatible with rdiff-backup, or at least as simple as rdiff-backup (i.e. the incremental copy, minus one folder, can be the latest snapshot)
2.) Make it work with gamin, so that backups are automatic
3.) Make 'thumbs' for files it understands, and store those as well
END RESULT: Who needs Leopard?
My mom made the mistake of buying a service plan for her Toshiba Satellite.
She asked me to pick it up for her at the Carbondale, IL store (dead HD, laptop still under warranty) and after they'd left me to cool my heels for 20 minutes, had me sign paperwork, etc. they handed me the, paperwork, old HD (in case she chose to send it to Toshiba for data recovery) and then stated that they "weren't sure" if the OS installation fee was covered by the service plan and wouldn't let me leave with the computer unless I paid $130(!) for OS installation (Toshiba recovery CD) and that if (IF!) they found that it was covered, I would be refunded.
I called her (I had places to be right then) and she called the store manager, corporate, etc. and after 1.5 hours decided they could waive the fee if I was willing to wait for them to REPLACE THE DRIVE, a wait of 1-2 HOURS. Well, no, I wasn't willing to wait, so I left. Shortly afterward she received a call that the recently installed drive was WIPED and the computer was ready to be picked up.
I'm going today to pick up the computer. My bet is that either 1.) they'll conveniently "forget" that they were waiving the fee, or that 2.) they've lost either the old HD or the entire computer. Bets, anyone?
No frickin' way would I buy a computer from Best Buy. DVDs and CDs, sure, and maybe hardware with decent factory warranties, but not computers, and if I were dumb enough to, I certainly wouldn't take it to the store for warranty work! I've heard too many horror stories from other people who've ended up spending the same amount of money they'd spent on their hardware, only to have to wait for half a month for a computer just as bricked as it was when it went in.
Best Buy and Geek Squad is about as crooked as the crookedest used-car dealership.
Meh. That's a pretty mediocre collection. Aside from Zahn's Thrawn series (which would make an awesome film trilogy, but would put Lucas's offerings to shame) there's not that much in the extended universe that really offers much. Then again, we're talking about Star Wars, so it's frickin' awesome. I realize the second part sounds sarcastic (it's not) and that I sound like I'm contradicting myself, so rather than untangle the cognitive dissonance I just caused, I'll click 'Submit.'
Kidding! If you want to continue the bounty hunters adventures, the Bounty Hunter Wars series has its moments. Wish Jeter had gone for a story line more about the Kuat drive yards, because there's obviously a talent there more for courtly intrigue than for action. And let's face it, Boba Fett demands someone who can write action.
P.S. Anyone remember how, before Attack of the Clones came out, a story board was leaked that featured the Jango Fett/Obi-Wan fight on Camino, and loads of fans dismissed it as fake, some even going as far as to say it was 'too boring' to be real? Well...does that give anyone pause about Lucas's joking comment about the series being about droids? C'mon, Lucas, you already dumped a crappy droid cartoon on my generation. Don't do it to us again. Please, no R2/3P0 buddy series. Please, for the love of GOD and all that is HOLY, do NOT do that to us again.
Largely because mainstream press hijacked a perfectly innocuous term like 'hacker' to mean 'someone who is actively trying to steal all your intentity data along with your money.'
The sentiment comes partially from George W. Bush's public speeches following September 11. In a nutshell, since the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, we should go on living our lives as we have, otherwise the terrorists have won.
Well, we're not able to live our lives as we did before. Therefore, by historical record of our Commander-in-Chief's own words, the War on Terror has been lost. We live in fear, we allow the federal government to impose Constitutionally illegal directives, imposing will both on the rights of citizens and states. And yet, if you point this out to the radical Right, they'll shout you down, reminding you--as loudly as possible--to remember the people who jumped out of the World Trade Center on September 11th.
Check the statistics. Several times more Americans died due to drunk drivers than terrorist activities in 2001. Yet no one is suggesting that distilleries and car manufacturers be bugged, wiretapped, infiltrated, or bombed out of existence. What will it take for America to stop being ruled by the iron fist of Knee-Jerk Politics? Will it take the end of the Union, the Great Experiment that seems to be in such peril? Will it take seeing the young men and women in uniform marching the "diaper heads" into the ovens? What will it take?
If you run XScreensaver, you can have your Matrix screen saver.
:-}
I know what you mean, though. I'm finding myself migrating back to a large collection of (gasp) console apps. Last night I caught myself using Screen to switch between irssi, mutt, wyrd, vim, and ncmpc. After spending a few years working with Macs and being a KDE zealot, I feel a little dirty
Basically all an ioslave: is is a virtual filesystem. For example, the audiocd ioslave generally allows for straight CDDB (iirc, don't have Konq and friends installed on this machine), Wav, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3. Navigate to the proper directory, and with a bit of luck, the subsystem has automatically retrieved the FreeDB information and named virtual "files" for you. Select those files, drag them to the location you want them, and you are, in theory, done.
Personally I like a bit more control, which is why I use abcde.
I wasn't a big fan of the original cut, but the much more recent "completed" cut is fantastic. I think most people don't like it because it's more serious, something Star Trek's not that good at.
If that was an example of what Phase II could have been, where did those crappy 1st-season Next Generation scripts come from? Surely these aren't from the same people...sadly, though, I suppose they were.
Yeah. You know Star Trek is dead when fans are more excited about a redo of a 20-year-old series whose plotline is borrowed from the Book of Mormon.
Totally. A lot of people claim that Stewart was the best actor on the show; I think it was Spiner. How many other actors could have made Data seem like anything OTHER than mere comic relief, or unintentionally funny?
The man has a gift for comedy, and by that token a gift for keeping things from being comedy when it needed to be serious, which translated well to Data.
If it hadn't been for Data, the show would have been pointless and boring. Leave the Captain in his lounge with his Shakespeare and his fish and hot Earl Grey. Data's the guy processing Vivaldi's Four Seasons while recreating Mondrian art!
Yep. And those of us in smaller offices have loads of fun. As in, 'sysadmin' is so 'unimportant' that it's just part of someone's job. Like me; some people literally expect me to drop what I'm doing, and if I don't, my boss hears about it. Thankfully he's smart enough to realize what a load of crap that is. :-) Not like the last guy who'd just come over and give me hell for not being 'understanding.'
Oh, and don't let that 3 a.m. call/drive to work stop you from coming back in bright and early!
And does anyone remember that in the late 90s, the deal-killer was that "Linux doesn't support Internet Explorer"? I mean, please!
I hope I'm not alone in this, but I'm perfectly happy to let people who don't want to futz with their computers buy proprietary operating systems. I've met too many people who're highly intelligent in one field but actually believe that Windows is just part of a computer. I cannot and will not support moving these types over to a system that's not a drop-in replacement for people who are either unable or unwilling to learn something new. I'm sure I'm not alone in encountering educated people who find MacOS too difficult to comprehend(!); you really want these people to buy a computer at "the Walmart's" and even attempt a distribution upgrade on Ubuntu? Not me!
I know people will be screaming "ivory tower!" in response to this, but I guess what I'm saying is that if the way things are in Linux tends to run incredibly lazy and incompetent people away (and you have to be both to not "get" Ubuntu, I'm sorry), then good riddance.
Indeed. There's no definitive proof that using LAME opens me to legal action, nor that playing back the MP3s created with LAME in, say, AmaroK or some other player (I run MPD on my machine for various reasons.) Distributing those MP3s and the illegal activity that even "legal" codecs allows, however, is the real interesting problem, and I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if Fraunhofer pursued what they perceive to be "illegal" MP3 encoding cases. Plus it's been explained to me by a much smarter person that it'd be open and shut, against them, if they chose Germany as their legal venue, since LAME isn't a commercial venture.
I agree mostly, but I have to admit that I have a production machine running Ubuntu (Dapper LTS). To be fair it was a tossup between Ubuntu and Debian, and the machine in question was running OS 9.2.2 and ASIP Server before that, so it's not like anyone had to try very hard to find a more stable system ;-)
I don't think it's a choice of 300 anyway for most people, anyway. Outside of Debian, Ubuntu (and the variants of Ubuntu), SuSE, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, and maybe Linspire and Xandros, how many people are you aware of who run other systems? And how many of those 300 are minor variants of the ones I listed above?
I mean, does Damn Small Linux and College Linux really add significantly to cognitive dissonance?
This is what really irks me about Americans. Why aren't you Americans revolting over things like this? In Canada, the Liberal party lost an election because a few bad Liberals stole a mere $1 million.
We're taking a lesson from the Canadians. Instead of having a revolution like we did in 1776, we'll just do what y'all did and wait patiently for things to change.
I'M KIDDING! A revolution would be great, if we wouldn't get stomped down by American might 3 minutes after the revolution started.
And I'm thoroughly convinced that if just one person had voted for Bush in the popular vote, he still would have won. I have no proof of that, but it's still questionable whether or not he won his first election.
And of course the news is reluctant to cover it. A lot of people are dumb and think it's traitorous to expose governmental deception. I've heard Democratic politicians who call for an end date to the Iraq war called "cowards" (and worse) and ABC News denounced as "traitors" for releasing what could be sensitive information. Folks, if the press is chasing down wrongdoing, even if revealing that information could cause harm to others, they're doing their JOB when they release that! Erm, anyway, yes, I agree, news media should be just as aggressive with the Bush administration as they were with the Clinton administration. Why they go soft on corrupt moronic Republicans is beyond me.
It's not as if we have a monopoly on stupid, ignorant people, you know. How many Canadians know anything about Parliamentary procedure?
OK, you're colored stupid, champ.
Seriously, Mongrel is good for development; it's a good mix of fast and easy. Though why someone would need an *easy* package of something available as a RubyGem is still beyond me. If you can't run 'gem install rails -y' you'll never get a Rails app going.
Alternatives? ALTERNATIVES??? LOL.
There are none.
hth.
Seriously, people suggesting The GIMP with a rudimentary CMYK addon...no. Just no.
Inkscape is seriously cool but no.
Scribus offers some nice features but no.
Don't get me started on affordable PDF support outside Acrobat.
You want to sue me for being a user of an OS you don't like...erm, I mean, is your only real competition...erm, I mean, violates an arbitrary number of your patents? Fine; I'll ditch my Linux box and go buy a Mac. So fuck you; I will never purchase and will never recommend for purchase another Microsoft product so long as I shall live, simply because you feel the need to bully *me* for Free Software developers unwittingly violating patents you've not even specified yet. I'm through with your bullshit, Microsoft; I'm through with you trying to charge me for software you didn't even create, I'm through with your lazy-ass practice of buying companies just to run competing companies out of business, and I'm sick and fucking tired of people treating me like I'm a criminal because I use a Free OS. And I'm DEFINITELY sick of you shipping beta-quality software and convincing PHBs that it's *enterprise-ready*. I've been a dual-OS user since 1997, and it's single-OS from here on out, with that being whatever OS you don't currently try to steal money from me for.
;-)
In all honesty, I doubt the legal team will even let Ballmer do something this abysmally stupid. It'd be like suing Palm for violating an obscure and overly generic patent, then mailing out overdue account notices to all Palm owners. If they're really that desperate it's time for a re-think of a lot of things, starting with their broken busines model which requires a constant increase in their business growth.
Fix your company, fix your O.S., and don't rely on attacking your userbase (some of us using Linux are..erm, *were* loyal MS customers) just to bail your pathetic fucking asses out.
Don't even talk to me about how sad it is that it'll probably take *IBM* to bail us out...
LOL, yeah--I wonder what the reason was. Probably some Fox exec kept saying, "I don't get it!" iirc that's what got Futurama canceled.
Amen. You said almost everything I think about the situation in a much more succinct manner. Bravo! I can dump video from my MiniDV camera, edit footage and burn to DVD, manage/edit/print photos, websurf/check email, work on Ruby projects, share an Internet connection, and do DTP. I have everything I need, the software's all great for what I do, and I couldn't care one bit if it's ever so simple that my grandma (who doesn't own a computer) could install it from scratch and use it effortlessly, since she couldn't do that with any other OS. Let's all just concentrate on keeping it great, much as Apple does in maintaining what some people complain is a small market share. :-D
Not to throw a monkey wrench into the works, but I just tried both dist-upgrading and fresh installing Feisty onto a machine that previously ran Breezy, Dapper, Edgy more or less flawlessly, and I couldn't even boot. The install CD even identified my IDE drives as SCSI. That's some quality work there, fellers.
:-}
Now, I'm not running off to get Vista or anything; I just set about the work of setting up a mixed Edgy/Sid machine work like exactly like my previous Kubuntu install. But it was still a shock to the system going from previously working great to not at all. Not sure what the issues were but they apparently weren't issues on Debian. My guess is that the strain to meet the predictable release cycle caused a road bump, that's all; I'm hoping the next release will be excellent.
And I've never had an Ubuntu install that just worked out of the box. Never. There's always some wankery involved, and all I use my home machine for anymore is playing DVDs, making home movie DVDs, ripping CDs and playing MP3, browsing and checking mail, plus some light Ruby development. All of it required some wankery of some sort. I know I'm just one case and probably a special one, but as busy as the Ubuntu Forums are, I'm thinking I'm far from the only one.
Anyway, I'm glad Feisty is working fine for other people, as Ubuntu is generally a lovely desktop distribution. Just wish it was working for me.
Totally agree about Grandma not being able to handle a Windows install, though. Haven't met too many people who do their own installs, but I have met a number of people who wonder why I'd bother downloading an operating system when Windows is free anyway. D'oh! And these people never understand what I'm talking about when I try to explain that no, it's not free. They just think I'm splittin' hairs, or some such.
I so wish I had some points to hand you, but I don't. :-} Let's not forget the compromises made in the audio signal just to make vinyl sound passably good, eh? Ah, yes; there was never anything quite like bringing a record home only to have the damn thing skip like mad, then take it back when you discover it's a defective record. And to have that seem normal and even acceptable.
Audiophiles rightly hated cassette tapes--but were records really that much better? I don't think so.
I doubt that there'll be an easy solution to the movie master backup problem, at least not anytime soon. In that case, I'm betting we'll never see any Star Wars Prequel Special Editions. Thank God.
CrossOver Office.
:-)
CrossOver Server.
Sure, they're commercial, but we're talking about operating with, and replacing, commercial, proprietary software.
Also, Entourage has been around for years. It's a steaming pile of shit. I know people who use it, love it, like it better than any alternative, but yeah, it was around in the OS 9 days. Not for long, but it was. I'd take a screenshot but I don't think we have a copy around here anymore.
Hell, even if you're just a home user using a local address book and using pop/smtp, Evolution is a steaming pile. I had the thing just simply stop working, no error messages, just no more downloading mail and randomly disappearing messages. Nevermind that once started, Evolution leaves running processes (sometimes consuming a fair number of cpu cycles) all over the frickin' place. Agreed on Thunderbird/Lightning; bizarre enough, it took a Mozilla project to write a faster, less complex elient with optional calendaring support. :->