It's OOo that's playing catch up - MS doesn't have to lift a finger. They need to improve their import functionality.
Suggestion, have a "shoot out" between the top office suites (both commercial and free) available for Linux/Unix (OOo, Abiword, etc) solely testing their MS Office import capabilities.
In order to complete a normal sized program, you would eventually have to be fluent in XML, JavaScript, CSS, RDF, DTD, DOM, XPCOM, XPConnect, JSLib, and other technologies.
They need to simplify it. I'm not learning that many different technologies just to complete a "normal sized program".
Unfortunately, due to the large number of dependencies of some of these programs, it suspect it would be a pain to do it all by hand.
I've been looking into getting XFCE built by hand on my powerbook, because it's not supported by Fink (beyond the 3.x branch). It's caused me so much grief that I've temporarily ditched it in favour of IceWM.
However, simply for a server, there's very few "cuttting edge" programs you'd need to manually build. So in that situation I'd advocate one of the BSD's.
I used to run OpenBSD on my Ultra10, it's now running Gentoo - because I wanted some additional software like latest XFCE and Evolution - that wasn't supported in OpenBSD.
This was at the beginning of the year. I was looking at the top end, and what was locally available included:
Sony Clie UX-50 (keyboard, wifi, camera, usb) $AUD 1299
Sony Clie Clie PEGNX80VG (keyboard, camera) $AUD 999
Palm Tungsten 3 (graffiti, bluetooth) $AUD 799
In short, I ended up going for the Palm for a few reasons. First off was price - Sony does not price their gear competitively. Their market appears to be the executives with fat expense accounts who see shiny new toys and go for them. I have a number of geek friends and none of them are big purchasers at Sony, with the sole exception being Sony's monitors.
Secondly, when it came to software - because Sony regularly releases high-end models with customised software, they don't seem to support them for too long.
So if I was somebody looking at the palmtop/tablet options out there, I would probably give this a miss. The spec's are nice, but it looks like something for someone who needs such functionality *today*, rather than waiting for equivalent devices to come to market in the next 6-12 months with a lower pricetag.
But like most Sony products, damn... it looks sweet!;-)
As both a FreeBSD user and Gentoo user, I think the best description would be that Gentoo is BSD for Linux users. As a humourous aside, some friends have also started describing Gentoo as "ricenix: 2Fast2Optimized".;-)
Gentoo is laid out fairly logically (no idea if it follows the Linux Standards Base though). The main benefit is the total control you gain over your installation - much like you gain with BSD (hence, BSD for Linux users). Though it is achieved through the remarkable Portage package management system, vs FreeBSD which is a wholly maintained o/s, with a very large "ports" system.
The only thing that keeps me from using FreeBSD on my workstation is that I do play some games on Linux, and write software to support game playing on a local Australian gaming network. For those that don't need the fluff that's supported on Linux (games being a primary example), almost everything else is available under FreeBSD. But to save you extra work, Gentoo is probably the way to go (easy to manage once installed through portage).
Two points for today. Firstly, from the article about tabbed browsing:
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them...
There are times when there's only one right way to do things, and one wrong way to do things, but in general - there's multiple approaches to using your computer, all depending on your level of technicality and your attitude on computing. My boss at work for example, only likes to look less than a handful of web pages at a time in Explorer (I've tried converting him!). Whereas I'm of a bit more chaotic mentality, and will open a new page in a background tab in Firefox while reading news articles and slashdot articles - and comes back to them later. This often leaves me with 10+ tabs open at a time. It saves me bookmarking and coming back later. I can quickly click each tab to see which tab is which - read the page at each, close them and get back to work.
And from the parent poster:
In the end, the reviewer is just grasping at straws to try and defend the horrible idea that is Spatial Gnome, and he accuses those who dislike it of only disliking it because it doesn't work like Windows Explorer.
Heh, yeh - they had to fucking fly to Poland to find someone to defend Gnome!;-)
Slashdot needs to post an article, on above all things - article posting ethics. This current article demonstrates a trend that's happening recently, whereby people are seeing someone's cool homepage (or submitting their own), and forwarding it to hundreds of thousands of internet users via a Slashdot article.
I mean please, linking a CGI page on a windows server hosted on your cable modem connection, with a throughput of 9.6K... that's not gonna hold up 5 seconds after slashdot posts the article.
This is hopelessly offtopic, but it's something that people need to start thinking about before they submit an article.
A component is a subpart of an application that you can embed dynamically in other applications. Making KVim available as a Kde component means that every Kde application will be able to embed Vim when it needs an editor : KDevelop, mail clients, news clients,...
The problem is, that I suspect many others (like myself) collectively groan when they see the trademark Swing look-and-feel, and think - this program's gonna run like a dog.
My typical attitude as an interviewee, when asked if I know how to do 'X', and I don't know off the top of my head - is to say "give me google and/or manual pages and I will be able to figure it out."
However, after discovering a new online "hacking" challenge, I've started thinking that in some situations - appropriate on-the-spot challenges might be worth doing (note: my field is comp security, so this example is appropriate). Such examples would give the interview candidate an opportunity to demonstrate their reasoning and problem solving abilities, along with their knowledge of the subject at hand.
Fixing a broken system would also be another good example of this. However, ensure that you yourself know what the solution is, and that it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to solve. One to three of these might be appropriate during the interview timeframe.
Examples might include:
You can ping host X, and X and ping you, but when it tries to ssh in it initially connects and gets disconnected by the system: TCP Wrappers misconfiguration
Newly installed application Y won't start, it's complaining about some libz.so.1 not being available, even though you installed it earlier: libz.so.1 is in/usr/local/lib, which isn't in/etc/ld.so.conf
Apache starts up fine when you run/etc/init.d/apache start - but you can't connect to port 80 from remote hosts: Someone configured listenaddress to be 127.0.0.1
Just make sure you give them access to the machine, and access to google. Who knows, you might learn a thing from them - plus, you get to see their problem solving in action (which is the biggest part of being a system administrator).
I'm sure other slashdot readers can provide further examples. The trick with GPL-based OSS and generating revenue, is to provide value-add (which may be through commercial closed-source tools). Alternatively, the tried and true position is through services, which IBM and HP seem to have figured out.
I've had Microsoft Movie Maker (2) crap out and use 1.6GB of virtual memory on me (on a 1GB RAM system). I've also had Azureus (java bittorrent client) using like 500+ MB of virtual memory (on a system with 256 real memory).
It's becoming a real problem at work too. On my desktop system (has 256MB RAM), I typically have outlook, firefox, and checkpoint GUI clients running. Not to mention a few odd securecrt sessions. It's gotten to the point where I have to choose between outlook and checkpoint. Grrr.
Reminds me of issues we had from Welchia
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If I recall correctly, Welchia (the worm) looked for target hosts by ICMP scanning. On several of our cisco routers, the increased traffic resulted in them running out of memory, to such a point where you could not log into them.
Apparently a new feature (mentioned by a network engineer workmate), is to have the IOS reserve a portion of memory for administrative tasks (like supporting the login process and configuration shell).
A feature like this, that "reserves" a portion of RAM so that if something really fubars your system, you can still login to fix it - would be great for Linux/BSD.
Solaris is a pain in the ass if you're looking to use many typical open-source software. If you can't find a prebuilt package at either Sunfreeware or Blastwave (my fave), you have to build it yourself. Then comes the problem of having very long $PATH's to various third-party package "bins"./opt/sfw/bin,/opt/csw/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin - and becomes a bit of a nightmare when having to specify library paths and header locations.
Sun's third-party software CD has a java-based installer too. Was a little annoying when all I wanted to do was install a few choice packages without having to hunt down all the dependencies on the CD - on a headless server a few suburbs away.:P
The other bonus for Linux is, that as more companies migrate to the platform, the vendors and integrators (IBM, Novell, RedHat, etc) gain more experience in deploying it as an end-user platform, as well as demonstration sites they can point to when courting new customers.
Having just gotten back from watching this movie, I hope I can explain (at least based on the science used in the movie). Apparently, due to global warming, and melting ice sheets, the delicate balance of the salinity of the north atlantic current-somethingorother is upset, leading it to shut down.
This current is responsible for most of the northern hemisphere's weather systems, and as such results in the catastrophic effects demonstrated in the movie.
One interesting part of the movie is when the Jake Gyllehnadslkal character and his friends are walking through the Natural History Museum, and his friend stops at a wooly mammoth display and reads the description. "This Mammoth was discovered in perfect condition, still with food in its mouth and stomach, and must have been frozen in an instant to have been preserved the way it was" (or something similar).
Not a bad movie in my opinion (was a fan of the Poseidon Adventure as a kid). Leaving the cinema here in Sydney, Australia (and it being very chilly), kind of brings the discussion of global warming and the potential side effects to the front of your thoughts.
I'm a big fan of Gentoo personally (installed it onto an Ultra 10 at home last weekend), but when discussing Linux with less-savvy workmates, I usually steer them towards the more 'user-friendly' distributions. My current method of advocacy is to hand out Knoppix CD's around the office, which has received a lot of interest. Especially when I show them that they can access their corporate email, terminal services, and routers (these are network engineers) with ease. Openoffice still runs like a dog though..
I even have a few guys who are going so far as to asking which "version" of Linux to run at home. So for the moment I'm recommending Mandrake.
But I totally agree with the problem (that was also present with RedHat) of 6-month reinstall's to get everything up to scratch. And don't even get me started on RPM dependency issues or issues between RPM's built for Mandrake vs those for RedHat.
Ideally I'd like to get a copy of Xandros to show these guys. Unfortunately, it too falls into the commercial category. Where's my try before I buy!?:(
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, the oldest! (ducks)
Sounds vaguely like standard military spending. ;)
Sharks with frickin' ... !
It's OOo that's playing catch up - MS doesn't have to lift a finger. They need to improve their import functionality.
Suggestion, have a "shoot out" between the top office suites (both commercial and free) available for Linux/Unix (OOo, Abiword, etc) solely testing their MS Office import capabilities.
They need to simplify it. I'm not learning that many different technologies just to complete a "normal sized program".
Unfortunately, due to the large number of dependencies of some of these programs, it suspect it would be a pain to do it all by hand.
I've been looking into getting XFCE built by hand on my powerbook, because it's not supported by Fink (beyond the 3.x branch). It's caused me so much grief that I've temporarily ditched it in favour of IceWM.
However, simply for a server, there's very few "cuttting edge" programs you'd need to manually build. So in that situation I'd advocate one of the BSD's.
I used to run OpenBSD on my Ultra10, it's now running Gentoo - because I wanted some additional software like latest XFCE and Evolution - that wasn't supported in OpenBSD.
In short, I ended up going for the Palm for a few reasons. First off was price - Sony does not price their gear competitively. Their market appears to be the executives with fat expense accounts who see shiny new toys and go for them. I have a number of geek friends and none of them are big purchasers at Sony, with the sole exception being Sony's monitors.
Secondly, when it came to software - because Sony regularly releases high-end models with customised software, they don't seem to support them for too long.
So if I was somebody looking at the palmtop/tablet options out there, I would probably give this a miss. The spec's are nice, but it looks like something for someone who needs such functionality *today*, rather than waiting for equivalent devices to come to market in the next 6-12 months with a lower pricetag.
But like most Sony products, damn... it looks sweet! ;-)
As both a FreeBSD user and Gentoo user, I think the best description would be that Gentoo is BSD for Linux users. As a humourous aside, some friends have also started describing Gentoo as "ricenix: 2Fast2Optimized". ;-)
Gentoo is laid out fairly logically (no idea if it follows the Linux Standards Base though). The main benefit is the total control you gain over your installation - much like you gain with BSD (hence, BSD for Linux users). Though it is achieved through the remarkable Portage package management system, vs FreeBSD which is a wholly maintained o/s, with a very large "ports" system.
The only thing that keeps me from using FreeBSD on my workstation is that I do play some games on Linux, and write software to support game playing on a local Australian gaming network. For those that don't need the fluff that's supported on Linux (games being a primary example), almost everything else is available under FreeBSD. But to save you extra work, Gentoo is probably the way to go (easy to manage once installed through portage).
There are times when there's only one right way to do things, and one wrong way to do things, but in general - there's multiple approaches to using your computer, all depending on your level of technicality and your attitude on computing. My boss at work for example, only likes to look less than a handful of web pages at a time in Explorer (I've tried converting him!). Whereas I'm of a bit more chaotic mentality, and will open a new page in a background tab in Firefox while reading news articles and slashdot articles - and comes back to them later. This often leaves me with 10+ tabs open at a time. It saves me bookmarking and coming back later. I can quickly click each tab to see which tab is which - read the page at each, close them and get back to work.
And from the parent poster:
Heh, yeh - they had to fucking fly to Poland to find someone to defend Gnome! ;-)
Slashdot needs to post an article, on above all things - article posting ethics. This current article demonstrates a trend that's happening recently, whereby people are seeing someone's cool homepage (or submitting their own), and forwarding it to hundreds of thousands of internet users via a Slashdot article.
I mean please, linking a CGI page on a windows server hosted on your cable modem connection, with a throughput of 9.6K... that's not gonna hold up 5 seconds after slashdot posts the article.
This is hopelessly offtopic, but it's something that people need to start thinking about before they submit an article.
In fact, after a brief look at the FAQ for Kvim:
PS, More IDE's need vi(m) support!!!
The problem is, that I suspect many others (like myself) collectively groan when they see the trademark Swing look-and-feel, and think - this program's gonna run like a dog.
However, after discovering a new online "hacking" challenge, I've started thinking that in some situations - appropriate on-the-spot challenges might be worth doing (note: my field is comp security, so this example is appropriate). Such examples would give the interview candidate an opportunity to demonstrate their reasoning and problem solving abilities, along with their knowledge of the subject at hand.
Fixing a broken system would also be another good example of this. However, ensure that you yourself know what the solution is, and that it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to solve. One to three of these might be appropriate during the interview timeframe.
Examples might include:
Just make sure you give them access to the machine, and access to google. Who knows, you might learn a thing from them - plus, you get to see their problem solving in action (which is the biggest part of being a system administrator).
May I direct you to a few companies/products that seem to be doing well in this regard:
I'm sure other slashdot readers can provide further examples. The trick with GPL-based OSS and generating revenue, is to provide value-add (which may be through commercial closed-source tools). Alternatively, the tried and true position is through services, which IBM and HP seem to have figured out.
Definitely something useful for small developers who can't afford an installshield license.
I've had Microsoft Movie Maker (2) crap out and use 1.6GB of virtual memory on me (on a 1GB RAM system). I've also had Azureus (java bittorrent client) using like 500+ MB of virtual memory (on a system with 256 real memory).
It's becoming a real problem at work too. On my desktop system (has 256MB RAM), I typically have outlook, firefox, and checkpoint GUI clients running. Not to mention a few odd securecrt sessions. It's gotten to the point where I have to choose between outlook and checkpoint. Grrr.
Apparently a new feature (mentioned by a network engineer workmate), is to have the IOS reserve a portion of memory for administrative tasks (like supporting the login process and configuration shell).
A feature like this, that "reserves" a portion of RAM so that if something really fubars your system, you can still login to fix it - would be great for Linux/BSD.
Solaris is a pain in the ass if you're looking to use many typical open-source software. If you can't find a prebuilt package at either Sunfreeware or Blastwave (my fave), you have to build it yourself. Then comes the problem of having very long $PATH's to various third-party package "bins". /opt/sfw/bin, /opt/csw/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin - and becomes a bit of a nightmare when having to specify library paths and header locations.
Sun's third-party software CD has a java-based installer too. Was a little annoying when all I wanted to do was install a few choice packages without having to hunt down all the dependencies on the CD - on a headless server a few suburbs away. :P
The other bonus for Linux is, that as more companies migrate to the platform, the vendors and integrators (IBM, Novell, RedHat, etc) gain more experience in deploying it as an end-user platform, as well as demonstration sites they can point to when courting new customers.
I think you've watched Antitrust a few too many times... ;)
Having just gotten back from watching this movie, I hope I can explain (at least based on the science used in the movie). Apparently, due to global warming, and melting ice sheets, the delicate balance of the salinity of the north atlantic current-somethingorother is upset, leading it to shut down.
This current is responsible for most of the northern hemisphere's weather systems, and as such results in the catastrophic effects demonstrated in the movie.
One interesting part of the movie is when the Jake Gyllehnadslkal character and his friends are walking through the Natural History Museum, and his friend stops at a wooly mammoth display and reads the description. "This Mammoth was discovered in perfect condition, still with food in its mouth and stomach, and must have been frozen in an instant to have been preserved the way it was" (or something similar).
Not a bad movie in my opinion (was a fan of the Poseidon Adventure as a kid). Leaving the cinema here in Sydney, Australia (and it being very chilly), kind of brings the discussion of global warming and the potential side effects to the front of your thoughts.
I even have a few guys who are going so far as to asking which "version" of Linux to run at home. So for the moment I'm recommending Mandrake.
But I totally agree with the problem (that was also present with RedHat) of 6-month reinstall's to get everything up to scratch. And don't even get me started on RPM dependency issues or issues between RPM's built for Mandrake vs those for RedHat.
Ideally I'd like to get a copy of Xandros to show these guys. Unfortunately, it too falls into the commercial category. Where's my try before I buy!? :(
No offense to slack users, I just haven't touched it since I first got started with Linux, almost 8 years ago. ;)
I still have memories of trying to find 6 (?) non-dodgy floppies to store it on, heheh.