I believe you have been thinking in circles here. You can't say that windows is as cross plaform as java, because windows programs don't run on java. It's nonsense. The point was that wine doesn't provide cross platform for windows binaries, because you are tied to a subset of windows programs, and just x86 processors. On the other hand, java programs run on many processors, and many OSs, and implementing the full set of java capabilities, and on systems that don't have those capabilities, with a specified subset.
You can do whatever you want with C++, but the fact is that you will have a hard time finding people doing good code for C++, and it's much easier to find good java coders. That affects the quality, and the performance of your software. Of course, theoretically, it's possible to write safe C code, but in practice it's very difficult, and unless it's a personal toy project, or a great scale free software project, it's too difficult to find the right developers to do it. With Java, safe comes for free.
The whole native/bytecode/interpreted thing, well, I can't argue anymore about that, because that has become too entangled for my taste, and we don't share views on that, I don't think interpreted languages are the same thing as bytecode, for lots of reasons. There is a world outside windows and *unix, and there are lots of diverse processors that have a java VM available, and that can take advantage of java bytecode. I am just beggining to write those, but I enjoy very much the fact that I can program my servers, my thick clients and my thin mobile clients with the same language, all running on different architectures, with just one compiler (two, in fact I compile with GCJ when the thick client is run on Windows, so I skip the startup times), and one IDE.
Anyway, I think this has gone too far.
You just keep repeating the same preconceptions that make you think java is useless, and I shouldn't try to keep you from doing it. I find Java is a very powerful and versatile laguage, with no measurable shortcomings compared to other commonly used languages, and lots of advantages as a platform. If you just don't see it, I know I won't be the one that makes you see it.
But that's a meaningless statement. Hey, any Windows program is cross-platform if you have Wine, right?
Not. Wine is x86-only, and not all windows programs run on wine.
You are just talking about Sun JDK, but java is more than that. It's a language inherently somewhat slower than C++, but much safer, and in some specific cases, even faster than C++. I understand that you have experienced the speed decrease first hand. Everybody has. I was just trying to explain that such speed decrease is a packaging, distribution, or even a marketing problem, other than a technical problem.
When competing with native programs in any platform, Java doesn't need to be cross platform, because that's wha native means, non general purpose, but close tot he hardware. In those cases, you can compile with GCJ, and have a theoretically slightly slower binary than with C++, but actually a better binary, because it doesn't have the possibility of buffer overflows, and for all practical purposes doesn't have a speed difference with C++. You get native widgets with SWT, and native performance with GCJ.
When you need cross platform, you use sun JDK, or the native JDK, with the startup delays you talk about, but in this case, it's not slower than anything, because nothing else is cross platform at the binary level, so it's xxx speed against zero speed, so it's still faster, because any positive speed is better than zero, period.
1 - Nazis are as bad as they can be, but lots of extremist groups share their place, and live happily in society with other. Every country in the world is a haven for some extremist group that has harmed some other. The fact that nazis have commited superlative atrocities doesn't make other countries that host similar criminals less fucked up that Argentina. And when I talk about "other countries" I am talking about most developed countries. There are examples in most of them.
2 - Argentina is not my country. I live in Uruguay, it's next to Argentina.
The problem with your reasoning is that you have made up your own definition from analogy to current state of affairs. The problem is that theft does have an actual meaning, and in every definition, it implies someone losing something. The act of theft has two consequences: 1- the owner loses his property, and 2- the thieve gains some property he didn't own.
If 2- doesn't happen, then it's not theft. If, for example, I go to your house and break all your windows, then, 1- follows, you lost your property (the windows), but 2- doesn't, because I gained nothing. Then I would not be a thieve, I would be a mad man that breaks windows, a window destroyer, an aggresor, or I don't know what.
If 1- doesn't happen, then it's not theft. If I go to a river, and get a bucket of water, then I haven't paid for it. I now own the water, and I didn't pay. 2- did happen, and 1- didn't. Then I am not a thieve.
There's no way you can define theft as "gaining property without paying", without being inconsistent with the world, and outlawing most things that people do, like breathing. Plus, I won't start talking about capitalism, and how your statement only applies in a consumers society, but the concept theft applies in any society, other than real socialism.
The real issue here is cloning. When you make a copy, 2- happens, but 1- doesn't.
You can talk about lost revenue, but lots of things we do make companies lose revenue, and they don't sue us in result.
Java for the desktop is cross-platform, period. Win, OSX, GNU/Linux, BSD, all run Sun Java on most platforms they run. GCJ is java, so java has the potential to be as cross platform as GCC, if you want.
Plus, SWT, in those "desktop" platforms, provides the look and feel, without platform-specific code.
So, java was less cross-platform, now it's more cross-platform. It used to need lots of platform-specific code. Now it needs mumch less. It used to be slow. Current implementations just aren't. JIT helps a lot, and GC uses much better techniques.
" The problems is, most users "decision" is simply clicking "no" and forgetting about it forever. "
Well, there is a discipline that takes care of interfaces. Most interface designers, nowadays, understand that popup boxes don't work. It's not the user that is stupid, it's the designer not understanding the inherent abilities of people.
A correct design for this would be, at the start of the update, warning the user that he will need to reboot, after the update is done. For any change that needs a reboot, that statement should be made. After that, the reboot should be just part of the update procedure, while performing the update, and not after, you should be informed of the reboot, and maybe even given the choice of reverting the update, if you don't want to reboot, or reboot and complete the update. There you wouldn't have those silly popups that people have learned to ignore.
Hey!! Argentina is a great place to live. There are some places with serious security issues, but overall it's a great country to live in. Much better than most Europe. Of course, Uruguay, where I live, is a much better place to live, but good luck finding a job here, with 13% unemployment rate.
I care about GCJ. I can develop in SuSE native GCJ binaries for windows deployment, and noone needs to know it's java, other than I, of course. That allows my team to reuse all the server side software and build windows clients, all with the same language, and the same backend. That's too good. Plus, it does work. We even have SWT binaries working, all that compiled ith good old GCC.
Ok. Again, the Linus thing. The problem with "the best tool for the job" is that you, and Linus, misinterpret it as "the best tool for the job, in a technical way". Of course, it's always useful to use "the best tool for the job", from a technical, financial, political and ethical point of view. What I was pointing out about Linus is that he obviated the ethical, financial and political aspects of his choice. That resulted in extra work, compared to using a technically inferior, but better overall version control system, as he was using before BitKeeper. Even using CVS is better than having your choice of version control systems rely on the wishes of one guy, even if he seems to be a friend. ---------------- Anyway, that misses my original point. What I was talking about is that, even if Flash does have some technical advantages above animated GIF, there are other characteristics that fail to make it the best tool for a web advertisement. For example, today, with my Firefox browser, I couldn't watch the xbox360 site, because it failed to detect my up-to-date flash plugin. That's a hidden problem with flash, you need to detect whether the guy does or doesn't have any flash, and then you need to fail gracefuly. Then you need to put a replacement, at least some text, and then you have to make sure that your "flash detection" doesn't fail, which does usually happen. Then you have to make sure that you publish for the least common player. Then you have to take into account performance implications for slow machines, load times and stuff. I have worked with flash, and got paid, but I believe it takes a lot of work to make good, effective use of it, and should be avoided except where it does provide needed functionality. But, of course, that is just my opinion, I'm not trying to change what you think.
Linus used BitKeeper, a proprietary app, to maintain linux development. At the time, when free software zealots were crying, he said that it was the best tool for the job. For commercial/political reasons, it backslashed, badly. Crash and burn. I thought everyone here knew that, it was on/. frontpage, of course.
About 95% not being wide enough, well, it's just my opinion, anyway, it's just marketing, I'm not an expert in that field.
There was another guy who used to say that, some Finnish guy, some "Torvalds" guy. There's a rumor, though, that that kind of turbocharged pragmatism didn't go so well for him.
Some times it's good to think beyond development costs, and into the consequences of what we do.
For a flash site, well, you say it, adobe just bought Macromedia, so now nothing is certain in the future of Flash, it could be great, good, or become the animated equivalent of Acrobat for the web. And you wouldn't have any options. Using an standard like GIF, which is not anymore encumbered with patents, you are in a safer place, with a known future, and you are using standards. Plus, 95% is too small a percentage for a promotional site. 99%, at least, would be more like it, if you can't acheive 100%.
I was just pointing out the importance of pre-processing in your way of installing software. The example of my case was jujst to point out that even _with_ sophisticated preinstalling mswindows was way too expensive in time.
For the rest of the people, that don't do tech support for a living, that cost that you dissmis as negligible is huge, when you only need to install a couple of desktops a month.
Without all that extra stuff you need to do, installing mswindows can take a very long time, and if you count honestly the hours it takes you to be prepared to make that task "automatically", they do add up to something.
Anyway, the cost should down to near 0, when you buy preinstalled desktops.
Well All those options you talk about take some kind of pre-production.
If I have a Slackware installation in the same network, I can boot a live CD on the new machine, set up the network in less than 5 minutes, and copy all the files with a piped tar command, excluding personal directories.
10 minutes setting up +
10-X minutes network-copying
If it's a slow network, I can go make some mate (grab a coffee if you want). After the files have been copied, I need to run liloconf, plus edit/etc/rc.d/rc.modules, xorg.conf, and reboot the machine. After that, netconfig takes care of the network config, and I'm done with it. 30 mins
So, it's 40 min, + nework copying of the image, when I have to configure different machines. For machines that are just the same hardware, I just need 20 min interactive, + copying time.
What? you say that my way needs pre-processing, and that it takes a skilled person to perform the task? Well, what you describe does, too, and it takes more time, too. I don't imagine a non computer-savvy person making his own custom winxp install CDs.
So, in both install styles (regular or express) the installation time of a free desktop kicks the shit out of a winxp desktop.
Hm............. Maybe we have different ideas of "better". These guys used sunflower oil, and a container, and it works. A pump is overkill, and a styrofoam container is against the purpose of losing heat. What would be just a tad cooler is a chromed or white tin container for the oil, or even an oil can, and some rubber "feet" or isolators for the components.
Well, I don't live in the US. In my country, the government doesn't have enough money to fix the social disaster, and for a long time won't be spending money on medical research. Private companies are small here, anyway.
That said, some unis here get EU money to work on some drugs, studying native plants, and stuff.
I wasn't saying that communism was the way, I was saying that my comment would be dismissed by some, because it resembles too much socialism, and US people are too afraid of that to study some of its possibilities. With your comment as exhibit #1, I believe was right to assume that.
I wasn't talking about communism anyway, but come to think of it, if Cuba can develop _some_ drugs, medical procedures, and vaccines that compete against the best in the world, then maybe it's not because of communism, but because of the fact that you don't need a huge pharma company to come up with the best stuff in medicine.
RMS had a nice job at a nice enterprise, and a great product he could sell (Emacs, yeah, laugh), and he did sell it.
He was in a much better position that Bill Gates at the time. He could have had some dollars. He wanted freedom, not power. Well, freedom _is_ power, but is a much nicer power, because it's power to all the users, and not just to some guy.
Of course, I believe RMS does want recognition, or even fame, but if he wanted _power_, there would be no point in copyleft.
GNU is used by lots of people throughout the world, and he has even less power than Linus!! But that's not accidental, the GPL warrants that!
Re:Put more than one virtual page on an actual pag
on
Printing (Big) Manuals?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Will print a nice manual, in several 16 pages booklets, that you can bind with your own stapler in the middle (hint: open the stapler all the way, plus the side of your desk is your friend).
If you used a nice laser printer (a cheap one will do) then you have a nice, book sized manual, as easy to read as a common book.
That would be for A4, but if you would like bigger sizes, you can do some tricks to print on legal size, and chop the top and bottom margins, acheiving book-grade font sizes, but you are on your own (hint: man psbook). Of course, only use A4.
You'd need to take the treatment essentially forever. Drug companies could make billions.
But that's not a flaw of the treatment. It's just a flaw of the regulations, or the current state of affairs regarding that sort of stuff. Maybe it wold be nice to rethink all that stuff about companies making such big investments, and then making lots of money out of them, which rules out any cheap treatment. Maybe governments could make the investments, and then everybody could make the drugs just for the real cost. Hmmmm, no! that would be __coooommmunism__, ack!
Ok. In my narrow world, OO is good. MSOffice is bad. MSOffice changes interfaces everytime I blink. OO just doesn't. MSOffice has difficult to remember commands and stuff.
I never learned how to write formulas with it. With OpenOffice, it's a snap, you can type directly the formula codes. For every student that ever had a math homework assignment, it's a must-have. Much easier than kludging some third-party formula into a word document, or using its painful formula editor.
I don't know how to make a PDF with MSOffice. I have to keep saving that.prn files, renaming and ps2pdf so I can publish my files.
Well, that aside from the fact that I don't use MSWindows in most of my machines, so it would be a pain to have to install windows, plus double boot every time I needed to use that. Even it it were free, it's just not convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
12. Ignore everything you read on Slashdot!
But that would leave me with 11 steps again. And then I would read you, and get 12 steps again. And then I would have 11. Ohh, the paradox.
I believe you have been thinking in circles here.
You can't say that windows is as cross plaform as java, because windows programs don't run on java. It's nonsense. The point was that wine doesn't provide cross platform for windows binaries, because you are tied to a subset of windows programs, and just x86 processors. On the other hand, java programs run on many processors, and many OSs, and implementing the full set of java capabilities, and on systems that don't have those capabilities, with a specified subset.
You can do whatever you want with C++, but the fact is that you will have a hard time finding people doing good code for C++, and it's much easier to find good java coders. That affects the quality, and the performance of your software.
Of course, theoretically, it's possible to write safe C code, but in practice it's very difficult, and unless it's a personal toy project, or a great scale free software project, it's too difficult to find the right developers to do it.
With Java, safe comes for free.
The whole native/bytecode/interpreted thing, well, I can't argue anymore about that, because that has become too entangled for my taste, and we don't share views on that, I don't think interpreted languages are the same thing as bytecode, for lots of reasons.
There is a world outside windows and *unix, and there are lots of diverse processors that have a java VM available, and that can take advantage of java bytecode. I am just beggining to write those, but I enjoy very much the fact that I can program my servers, my thick clients and my thin mobile clients with the same language, all running on different architectures, with just one compiler (two, in fact I compile with GCJ when the thick client is run on Windows, so I skip the startup times), and one IDE.
Anyway, I think this has gone too far.
You just keep repeating the same preconceptions that make you think java is useless, and I shouldn't try to keep you from doing it.
I find Java is a very powerful and versatile laguage, with no measurable shortcomings compared to other commonly used languages, and lots of advantages as a platform. If you just don't see it, I know I won't be the one that makes you see it.
Java for the desktop is cross-platform, period.
But that's a meaningless statement. Hey, any Windows program is cross-platform if you have Wine, right?
Not.
Wine is x86-only, and not all windows programs run on wine.
You are just talking about Sun JDK, but java is more than that. It's a language inherently somewhat slower than C++, but much safer, and in some specific cases, even faster than C++.
I understand that you have experienced the speed decrease first hand. Everybody has.
I was just trying to explain that such speed decrease is a packaging, distribution, or even a marketing problem, other than a technical problem.
When competing with native programs in any platform, Java doesn't need to be cross platform, because that's wha native means, non general purpose, but close tot he hardware. In those cases, you can compile with GCJ, and have a theoretically slightly slower binary than with C++, but actually a better binary, because it doesn't have the possibility of buffer overflows, and for all practical purposes doesn't have a speed difference with C++. You get native widgets with SWT, and native performance with GCJ.
When you need cross platform, you use sun JDK, or the native JDK, with the startup delays you talk about, but in this case, it's not slower than anything, because nothing else is cross platform at the binary level, so it's xxx speed against zero speed, so it's still faster, because any positive speed is better than zero, period.
Sorry for my lack of understanding, I'm not a native English speaker.
Well, nazis, or at least people closely related to them, _have_ lived in some parts of Argentina!.
And yes, Uruguay _is_, of course, the capital of Argentina, we just let them call themselves independent.
2 bits.
1 - Nazis are as bad as they can be, but lots of extremist groups share their place, and live happily in society with other.
Every country in the world is a haven for some extremist group that has harmed some other. The fact that nazis have commited superlative atrocities doesn't make other countries that host similar criminals less fucked up that Argentina.
And when I talk about "other countries" I am talking about most developed countries. There are examples in most of them.
2 - Argentina is not my country. I live in Uruguay, it's next to Argentina.
The problem with your reasoning is that you have made up your own definition from analogy to current state of affairs.
The problem is that theft does have an actual meaning, and in every definition, it implies someone losing something.
The act of theft has two consequences: 1- the owner loses his property, and 2- the thieve gains some property he didn't own.
If 2- doesn't happen, then it's not theft.
If, for example, I go to your house and break all your windows, then, 1- follows, you lost your property (the windows), but 2- doesn't, because I gained nothing. Then I would not be a thieve, I would be a mad man that breaks windows, a window destroyer, an aggresor, or I don't know what.
If 1- doesn't happen, then it's not theft.
If I go to a river, and get a bucket of water, then I haven't paid for it. I now own the water, and I didn't pay. 2- did happen, and 1- didn't.
Then I am not a thieve.
There's no way you can define theft as "gaining property without paying", without being inconsistent with the world, and outlawing most things that people do, like breathing.
Plus, I won't start talking about capitalism, and how your statement only applies in a consumers society, but the concept theft applies in any society, other than real socialism.
The real issue here is cloning. When you make a copy, 2- happens, but 1- doesn't.
You can talk about lost revenue, but lots of things we do make companies lose revenue, and they don't sue us in result.
Weeeeeeeeeellll.
Java for the desktop is cross-platform, period.
Win, OSX, GNU/Linux, BSD, all run Sun Java on most platforms they run.
GCJ is java, so java has the potential to be as cross platform as GCC, if you want.
Plus, SWT, in those "desktop" platforms, provides the look and feel, without platform-specific code.
So, java was less cross-platform, now it's more cross-platform.
It used to need lots of platform-specific code. Now it needs mumch less.
It used to be slow. Current implementations just aren't. JIT helps a lot, and GC uses much better techniques.
" The problems is, most users "decision" is simply clicking "no" and forgetting about it forever. "
Well, there is a discipline that takes care of interfaces.
Most interface designers, nowadays, understand that popup boxes don't work.
It's not the user that is stupid, it's the designer not understanding the inherent abilities of people.
A correct design for this would be, at the start of the update, warning the user that he will need to reboot, after the update is done. For any change that needs a reboot, that statement should be made. After that, the reboot should be just part of the update procedure, while performing the update, and not after, you should be informed of the reboot, and maybe even given the choice of reverting the update, if you don't want to reboot, or reboot and complete the update. There you wouldn't have those silly popups that people have learned to ignore.
Hey!!
Argentina is a great place to live.
There are some places with serious security issues, but overall it's a great country to live in. Much better than most Europe.
Of course, Uruguay, where I live, is a much better place to live, but good luck finding a job here, with 13% unemployment rate.
Worse than that would be if you happen to "enjoy" it.
I care about GCJ.
I can develop in SuSE native GCJ binaries for windows deployment, and noone needs to know it's java, other than I, of course.
That allows my team to reuse all the server side software and build windows clients, all with the same language, and the same backend.
That's too good.
Plus, it does work.
We even have SWT binaries working, all that compiled ith good old GCC.
curl .... |less
no trash left
Ok.
Again, the Linus thing.
The problem with "the best tool for the job" is that you, and Linus, misinterpret it as "the best tool for the job, in a technical way".
Of course, it's always useful to use "the best tool for the job", from a technical, financial, political and ethical point of view.
What I was pointing out about Linus is that he obviated the ethical, financial and political aspects of his choice. That resulted in extra work, compared to using a technically inferior, but better overall version control system, as he was using before BitKeeper. Even using CVS is better than having your choice of version control systems rely on the wishes of one guy, even if he seems to be a friend.
----------------
Anyway, that misses my original point.
What I was talking about is that, even if Flash does have some technical advantages above animated GIF, there are other characteristics that fail to make it the best tool for a web advertisement.
For example, today, with my Firefox browser, I couldn't watch the xbox360 site, because it failed to detect my up-to-date flash plugin.
That's a hidden problem with flash, you need to detect whether the guy does or doesn't have any flash, and then you need to fail gracefuly. Then you need to put a replacement, at least some text, and then you have to make sure that your "flash detection" doesn't fail, which does usually happen. Then you have to make sure that you publish for the least common player. Then you have to take into account performance implications for slow machines, load times and stuff.
I have worked with flash, and got paid, but I believe it takes a lot of work to make good, effective use of it, and should be avoided except where it does provide needed functionality.
But, of course, that is just my opinion, I'm not trying to change what you think.
Linus used BitKeeper, a proprietary app, to maintain linux development. /. frontpage, of course.
At the time, when free software zealots were crying, he said that it was the best tool for the job.
For commercial/political reasons, it backslashed, badly. Crash and burn. I thought everyone here knew that, it was on
About 95% not being wide enough, well, it's just my opinion, anyway, it's just marketing, I'm not an expert in that field.
"The right tool for the job"
There was another guy who used to say that, some Finnish guy, some "Torvalds" guy.
There's a rumor, though, that that kind of turbocharged pragmatism didn't go so well for him.
Some times it's good to think beyond development costs, and into the consequences of what we do.
For a flash site, well, you say it, adobe just bought Macromedia, so now nothing is certain in the future of Flash, it could be great, good, or become the animated equivalent of Acrobat for the web. And you wouldn't have any options.
Using an standard like GIF, which is not anymore encumbered with patents, you are in a safer place, with a known future, and you are using standards.
Plus, 95% is too small a percentage for a promotional site. 99%, at least, would be more like it, if you can't acheive 100%.
I seems I wasn't clear.
I was just pointing out the importance of pre-processing in your way of installing software.
The example of my case was jujst to point out that even _with_ sophisticated preinstalling mswindows was way too expensive in time.
For the rest of the people, that don't do tech support for a living, that cost that you dissmis as negligible is huge, when you only need to install a couple of desktops a month.
Without all that extra stuff you need to do, installing mswindows can take a very long time, and if you count honestly the hours it takes you to be prepared to make that task "automatically", they do add up to something.
Anyway, the cost should down to near 0, when you buy preinstalled desktops.
Well
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules, xorg.conf, and reboot the machine.
All those options you talk about take some kind of pre-production.
If I have a Slackware installation in the same network, I can boot a live CD on the new machine, set up the network in less than 5 minutes, and copy all the files with a piped tar command, excluding personal directories.
10 minutes setting up +
10-X minutes network-copying
If it's a slow network, I can go make some mate (grab a coffee if you want).
After the files have been copied, I need to run liloconf, plus edit
After that, netconfig takes care of the network config, and I'm done with it.
30 mins
So, it's 40 min, + nework copying of the image, when I have to configure different machines.
For machines that are just the same hardware, I just need 20 min interactive, + copying time.
What? you say that my way needs pre-processing, and that it takes a skilled person to perform the task?
Well, what you describe does, too, and it takes more time, too.
I don't imagine a non computer-savvy person making his own custom winxp install CDs.
So, in both install styles (regular or express) the installation time of a free desktop kicks the shit out of a winxp desktop.
Use corn oil.
Problem solved.
Hm.............
Maybe we have different ideas of "better".
These guys used sunflower oil, and a container, and it works.
A pump is overkill, and a styrofoam container is against the purpose of losing heat.
What would be just a tad cooler is a chromed or white tin container for the oil, or even an oil can, and some rubber "feet" or isolators for the
components.
Some guys in Spain (http://www.sorgonet.com/torderawireless/nodo1mejo rado.html) already did it in 2003, and we at /. talked about it. Apparently it keeps on working.
m l?tid=193&tid=137
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/03/16/2023221.sht
As everybody says here: nothing [new] to see here, move along.
Well, I don't live in the US.
In my country, the government doesn't have enough money to fix the social disaster, and for a long time won't be spending money on medical research.
Private companies are small here, anyway.
That said, some unis here get EU money to work on some drugs, studying native plants, and stuff.
I wasn't saying that communism was the way, I was saying that my comment would be dismissed by some, because it resembles too much socialism, and US people are too afraid of that to study some of its possibilities. With your comment as exhibit #1, I believe was right to assume that.
I wasn't talking about communism anyway, but come to think of it, if Cuba can develop _some_ drugs, medical procedures, and vaccines that compete against the best in the world, then maybe it's not because of communism, but because of the fact that you don't need a huge pharma company to come up with the best stuff in medicine.
Well.......
RMS had a nice job at a nice enterprise, and a great product he could sell (Emacs, yeah, laugh), and he did sell it.
He was in a much better position that Bill Gates at the time.
He could have had some dollars.
He wanted freedom, not power. Well, freedom _is_ power, but is a much nicer power, because it's power to all the users, and not just to some guy.
Of course, I believe RMS does want recognition, or even fame, but if he wanted _power_, there would be no point in copyleft.
GNU is used by lots of people throughout the world, and he has even less power than Linus!!
But that's not accidental, the GPL warrants that!
Don't be so radical.
(print even pages)
psbook -s16 file.ps |psnup -n 2 |psselect -e |lpr -P printer
(re-feed your pages, print odd pages)
psbook -s16 file.ps |psnup -n 2 |psselect -o |lpr -P printer
Will print a nice manual, in several 16 pages booklets, that you can bind with your own stapler in the middle (hint: open the stapler all the way, plus the side of your desk is your friend).
If you used a nice laser printer (a cheap one will do) then you have a nice, book sized manual, as easy to read as a common book.
That would be for A4, but if you would like bigger sizes, you can do some tricks to print on legal size, and chop the top and bottom margins, acheiving book-grade font sizes, but you are on your own (hint: man psbook).
Of course, only use A4.
You'd need to take the treatment essentially forever. Drug companies could make billions.
But that's not a flaw of the treatment. It's just a flaw of the regulations, or the current state of affairs regarding that sort of stuff.
Maybe it wold be nice to rethink all that stuff about companies making such big investments, and then making lots of money out of them, which rules out any cheap treatment.
Maybe governments could make the investments, and then everybody could make the drugs just for the real cost. Hmmmm, no! that would be __coooommmunism__, ack!
Ok.
.prn files, renaming and ps2pdf so I can publish my files.
In my narrow world, OO is good. MSOffice is bad.
MSOffice changes interfaces everytime I blink.
OO just doesn't.
MSOffice has difficult to remember commands and stuff.
I never learned how to write formulas with it. With OpenOffice, it's a snap, you can type directly the formula codes. For every student that ever had a math homework assignment, it's a must-have. Much easier than kludging some third-party formula into a word document, or using its painful formula editor.
I don't know how to make a PDF with MSOffice. I have to keep saving that
Well, that aside from the fact that I don't use MSWindows in most of my machines, so it would be a pain to have to install windows, plus double boot every time I needed to use that. Even it it were free, it's just not convenient.