Just one problem with that: In the past the one big pro for Windows was that it ran your apps from way back.
The Metro tablets don't.
Now, given that you're going to have to buy all new apps anyway, you've got a choice, whereas previously you didn't: 1) iOS: a whole lot of apps, and easy. Millions also have it. 2) Android: a few less apps, a little more geeky. Millions also have it. 3) Metro: starting out from near zero apps and zero market.
I encourage you to have a look at the latest Unity in Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04).
They've fixed the worst problems and it actually works quite well for a developer workstation now.
-AltTab only cycles through the windows on the current virtual desktop, not all desktops. -It's actually nice having icons in fixed locations. Good for muscle memory. -Global menu is nice on a laptop. On a huge monitor it may not be. But you can turn it off with one of the tweak programs. -"You have to know the name of the app" is a concern. But not most of the time. -If you want a hierarchical menu of the installed apps, you can install Cardapio, which I did. -Showing your most recently used files, apps, etc. is useful, because 90% of the time you're working with what you worked with yesterday. -The multimonitor spec is pretty good
There are some annoyances with the indicators (they don't have tooltips anymore). Settings are also sort of dumbed down. But it's generally great for developers.
I mean, back in the day, everyday run-of-the-mill secretaries knew all about what text command to enter to get WordPerfect to do X. And high-schoolers in typing class. And a lot of other people, too.
Now they have to have a ribbon because supposedly even pulldown menus are too hard.
>Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.
It's hard to understand what you mean.
If you sent someone a perfectly formatted.doc, the formatting would, of course, change when your European colleagues open it up. That's because they have their settings on A4.
It would never have been the same in both places.
On the other hand, if you (or they) send a PDF, your OS/printer will slightly enlarge/reduce and center the document so it all prints on an A4 sheet, or letter sheet. No muss, no fuss.
And the page numbering doesn't change, so you can still refer to page nos. in conference calls.
>Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers.
His experience (and mine) trump yours. You haven't seen that, but that doesn't prove it doesn't happen. He has, and that does prove it happens.
The usual reason is printer drivers. A very minute difference in space available will result in a line having to go to the next page, which can then have a cascading effect.
The thing is, no one is really criticizing LaTeX. People are just reacting to those who have no idea that Word does styles.
If you can live with the crashes, and save your work often, you can even write a book in it. M$ used to, back when they actually gave you manuals with their software. ("This book was composed in Word for Windows 2.0 using Blah font and XYZ.")
>For the final copy one-half or double-spaced is required. In LaTeX this is as difficult as changing one line in the pre-amble of the document. In MS Word this is likely going to be a week of getting all the figures positioned "just right" again.
Look, I make fun of M$ all the time, too (check history). But there's no point to dissing them on stuff which isn't true. They should have set styles on all text, and then changed the styles (a 30 second job).
If your bros diddled with formatting, it's because they didn't take the time to learn it.
I can't say I can really blame them, either, because no one gives you books/manuals with software anymore.
I remember back in the day the Access manual was not only a great, well-written introduction to Access usage and programming, but it also taught you about normal form!
These days, you have to buy the "missing manual". Your friends didn't do that, and thought they were saving time. They weren't.
Learn to use the tool, and then you can criticize it. For example, Word doesn't have page styles; OpenOffice does.
I have no doubt LaTeX would be better for hardcore documents, but regarding the stuff you specifically mentioned:
Equations- OpenOffice Math seems good enough for light usage.
Number of stuff- Just because you haven't seen an office drone do this doesn't mean anything. The feature's there, and people do use it. Again, office drones don't use it because they don't know how, and they're just writing simple letters.
The way you really use OpenOffice (or Word, for that matter) is with styles and object fields (including numbering).
Good point. Someone at M$ thought this whole thing was a great way to get people to move to Windows 7 or 8.
But that only works if people have no options whatsoever.
It's so nice being able to work up in a startup without any legacy Excel spreadsheets with macros tying you in to the MS ecosystem. Without that tie-in, you're free to have an all Linux environment from the get-go. If you never went the Windows route, you don't know or care what you're supposed to be missing.
>All of our sites have public addresses... as well as all of our desktops.
(Not directed at you, but your adminstrator): How is this a good thing?
If your company wants to make stuff available (whether to the public or to vendors), it should do so on specifically defined servers. What's the point of making every desktop a peer?
That's sort of cool in a university environment, where you're there to learn, experiment, and play. But not in a corporate environment.
Why would there (necessarily) be something in the press? This is news for geeks, but editors have to make a judgement call everyday as to whether a particular story will be of interest to readers. The newspaper doesn't print everything that happened yesterday, not even every assault (for a city as big as Paris), only the stuff that they guessed readers might be interested in.
Good to see fpm working for you. I've been running into the "incomplete headers" problem, which also aborts Drupal installs. Had to revert to bog-standard prefork mod_php. Any hints?
The problem with Nokia in the US was they failed to engage the carriers, which, unfortunately, is a requirement to sell phones in the backwards US phone market.
Moreover, "improvement" for you, or for Jolla. They're in this to make money. If they can sell in the largest market in the world, why would they care about a monopolistic/oligopolistic market like the US?
They're trying to do new and cool stuff, not necessarily the same as what American Telephone & Telegraph wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, don't smart companies give you combined "personal days"? Use it if you're sick or just want to goof off or go to Disneyland.
That prevents having to lie about being sick.
Just one problem with that: In the past the one big pro for Windows was that it ran your apps from way back.
The Metro tablets don't.
Now, given that you're going to have to buy all new apps anyway, you've got a choice, whereas previously you didn't:
1) iOS: a whole lot of apps, and easy. Millions also have it.
2) Android: a few less apps, a little more geeky. Millions also have it.
3) Metro: starting out from near zero apps and zero market.
Where did you grow up, by the way?
I encourage you to have a look at the latest Unity in Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04).
They've fixed the worst problems and it actually works quite well for a developer workstation now.
-AltTab only cycles through the windows on the current virtual desktop, not all desktops.
-It's actually nice having icons in fixed locations. Good for muscle memory.
-Global menu is nice on a laptop. On a huge monitor it may not be. But you can turn it off with one of the tweak programs.
-"You have to know the name of the app" is a concern. But not most of the time.
-If you want a hierarchical menu of the installed apps, you can install Cardapio, which I did.
-Showing your most recently used files, apps, etc. is useful, because 90% of the time you're working with what you worked with yesterday.
-The multimonitor spec is pretty good
There are some annoyances with the indicators (they don't have tooltips anymore). Settings are also sort of dumbed down. But it's generally great for developers.
I think M$ has dumbed down computer usage.
I mean, back in the day, everyday run-of-the-mill secretaries knew all about what text command to enter to get WordPerfect to do X. And high-schoolers in typing class. And a lot of other people, too.
Now they have to have a ribbon because supposedly even pulldown menus are too hard.
Do we indeed use graphics accel for browsers?
Also, browsers normally show videos and other content that may need to be hardware accelerated (H264).
It's hard to see what would be the same in word procs, unless the document were just a collection of videos, in which case, why would you print it?
One thing I wish they would add is "reveal codes" (remember that from WordPerfect for DOS)?
There are a lot of times where "you can't get there from here". Your formatting is messed up, but you don't know exactly why.
Yeah, I know they have some variant of reveal codes, but I'd like something more.
>Try doing business with people who use metric paper sizes when you work in US sizes or the reverse. You can work around it, but all of a sudden your document isn't the same both places.
It's hard to understand what you mean.
If you sent someone a perfectly formatted .doc, the formatting would, of course, change when your European colleagues open it up. That's because they have their settings on A4.
It would never have been the same in both places.
On the other hand, if you (or they) send a PDF, your OS/printer will slightly enlarge/reduce and center the document so it all prints on an A4 sheet, or letter sheet. No muss, no fuss.
And the page numbering doesn't change, so you can still refer to page nos. in conference calls.
>Also, I don't know what decade you're living in, but if you have the same paper size selected word documents don't seem to have that problem across computers.
His experience (and mine) trump yours. You haven't seen that, but that doesn't prove it doesn't happen. He has, and that does prove it happens.
The usual reason is printer drivers. A very minute difference in space available will result in a line having to go to the next page, which can then have a cascading effect.
This. If you're sending a completed document to somebody, why would you send it in an editable format?
The thing is, no one is really criticizing LaTeX. People are just reacting to those who have no idea that Word does styles.
If you can live with the crashes, and save your work often, you can even write a book in it. M$ used to, back when they actually gave you manuals with their software. ("This book was composed in Word for Windows 2.0 using Blah font and XYZ.")
It's a great approximation (i.e., 20/80 solution).
What will a non-trivial macro do for you that a macro in Visual Basic or OpenOffice Basic won't? I'd guess the latter would cover 80% of the cases.
>For the final copy one-half or double-spaced is required. In LaTeX this is as difficult as changing one line in the pre-amble of the document. In MS Word this is likely going to be a week of getting all the figures positioned "just right" again.
Look, I make fun of M$ all the time, too (check history). But there's no point to dissing them on stuff which isn't true. They should have set styles on all text, and then changed the styles (a 30 second job).
If your bros diddled with formatting, it's because they didn't take the time to learn it.
I can't say I can really blame them, either, because no one gives you books/manuals with software anymore.
I remember back in the day the Access manual was not only a great, well-written introduction to Access usage and programming, but it also taught you about normal form!
These days, you have to buy the "missing manual". Your friends didn't do that, and thought they were saving time. They weren't.
Learn to use the tool, and then you can criticize it. For example, Word doesn't have page styles; OpenOffice does.
I have no doubt LaTeX would be better for hardcore documents, but regarding the stuff you specifically mentioned:
Equations- OpenOffice Math seems good enough for light usage.
Number of stuff- Just because you haven't seen an office drone do this doesn't mean anything. The feature's there, and people do use it. Again, office drones don't use it because they don't know how, and they're just writing simple letters.
The way you really use OpenOffice (or Word, for that matter) is with styles and object fields (including numbering).
What? Really?
I haven't had to use LaTeX, but isn't it hierarchical, like many/most other markup languages?
A missing symbol or terminator somewhere, and the whole document is messed up.
"But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. "
I thought you were talking about Word.
Because it is flak and unreliable for serious stuff.
I'm talking 300-page proposals with styles, columns, over/underhangs, pictures/tables, cross-references, etc.
Daily crashes, necessitating manual versioning (blah-proposal01, blah-proposal02, etc.)
Had to use OpenOffice as a replacement.
Good point. Someone at M$ thought this whole thing was a great way to get people to move to Windows 7 or 8.
But that only works if people have no options whatsoever.
It's so nice being able to work up in a startup without any legacy Excel spreadsheets with macros tying you in to the MS ecosystem. Without that tie-in, you're free to have an all Linux environment from the get-go. If you never went the Windows route, you don't know or care what you're supposed to be missing.
The funniest thing is "DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration." Say what?
You need hardware acceleration to write a memo? Or enter numbers into a spreadsheet?
Is that for Clippy?
I don't know if we can really complain. I mean, with Gnome/Ubuntu requiring 3D for the basic desktop environment anymore.
But still.
Help me out: Is this a joke, or real?
http://www.01189998819991197253.co.uk/
>All of our sites have public addresses... as well as all of our desktops.
(Not directed at you, but your adminstrator): How is this a good thing?
If your company wants to make stuff available (whether to the public or to vendors), it should do so on specifically defined servers. What's the point of making every desktop a peer?
That's sort of cool in a university environment, where you're there to learn, experiment, and play. But not in a corporate environment.
Wait, is there something I'm missing here?
Under DHCP, admins don't assign addresses to devices manually, the device asks for an address, and it gets one. Is that jackbooted?
What is stateless autoconfig? A device asking every other device over the entire address range "do you exist" and can I take this number?
Is this an offshoot of the Liberal Democrats, or is it "the original Liberal party"?
Are they basically like the Libertarians of the US?
Why would there (necessarily) be something in the press? This is news for geeks, but editors have to make a judgement call everyday as to whether a particular story will be of interest to readers. The newspaper doesn't print everything that happened yesterday, not even every assault (for a city as big as Paris), only the stuff that they guessed readers might be interested in.
In this case, they called no.
"knowledge worker" != geek
That would be more like "corporate drone", which just couldn't compute when he saw the outfitted professor.
Good to see fpm working for you. I've been running into the "incomplete headers" problem, which also aborts Drupal installs. Had to revert to bog-standard prefork mod_php. Any hints?
Install:
59 sudo aptitude install mysql mysql-server
60 sudo aptitude install apache2-mpm-worker
63 sudo ufw allow http/tcp
64 sudo ufw allow https/tcp
65 sudo ufw status
66 apt-get install libapache2-mod-fastcgi php5-fpm php5
67 sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-fastcgi php5-fpm php5
68 sudo a2enmod actions fastcgi alias
Error log:
[Mon Jul 09 00:12:17 2012] [error] [client 10.0.0.4] FastCGI: comm with server "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi" aborted: idle timeout (30 sec), referer: http://10.0.0.6/d7b/install.php?profile=standard&locale=en
[Mon Jul 09 00:12:17 2012] [error] [client 10.0.0.4] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi", referer: http://10.0.0.6/d7b/install.php?profile=standard&locale=en
The problem with Nokia in the US was they failed to engage the carriers, which, unfortunately, is a requirement to sell phones in the backwards US phone market.
Moreover, "improvement" for you, or for Jolla. They're in this to make money. If they can sell in the largest market in the world, why would they care about a monopolistic/oligopolistic market like the US?
They're trying to do new and cool stuff, not necessarily the same as what American Telephone & Telegraph wants.