Perhaps AbiWord, KWord or OpenOffice Writer work for well you, but none of them even begins to compare with WordPerfect for professional writers or secretaries -- give me a break, the functionality simply isn't there!
The area of professional-quality office software is not dominated by free software in Linux -- frankly, there isn't any! OpenOffice is finally starting to come close with the 6.0 release, but still suffers on the stability and format compatibility front. I still use WordPerfect for Linux every day and crossover office when I need to use MS Office.
There are no Linux equivalents. For a big writing project or serious work, give me WordPerfect 8 over AbiWord or KWord any old day. AbiWord and Gnumeric? KWord and KSpread? I repeat -- give me a break. Obviously you are a computer professional and not a professional in some other industry... a word processor is a word processor is a word processor, but there are inifinite shades of nuanced difference between bash 1.14 and bash 2.0, right?
And by the way, I'd buy Nero for Linux in a heartbeat.
All of the responses below are about WordPerfect 9 for Linux, which was indeed based on Wine.
WordPerfect 8 for Linux, which was available at least a two years before then, was a native Linux application based on Motif and worked very well indeed. It's the same application released by Corel for a number of different Unix systems.
It was as cheap as $29.00 at the local CompUSA by the time WordPerfect Office 9 for Linux was released, and yet it still wasn't selling.
"That story" from 1989 better not get old. It represents all that China (and, arguably, Communism) stands for- oppression and dumbing down of its society so that they do not question the authority.
This is where Americans begin to sound very arrogant and ignorant indeed. As a person from a Chinese family myself, allow me to say this:
1. China is not a "communist" country any more than Hitler was a good Christian. Just because you claim to be something does not make it true. China is a corrupt political state, but that has little in the end to do with abstract economic theory. "Communism" is just a word used by the powerful to justify keeping all of the cash and power for themselves!
2. China does not "stand for" oppression and dumbing down of society. China is not a symbol, China is home to more than a billion people like you and me who are living everyday lives full of the human things: love, work, sleep, family, and so on. China's citizens and even China's dissidents do not exist to make political points for you; they are trying to live life and to make the world a better place. And let me also tell you this: they are not dumb by any stretch of the imagination. You seem to imagine a land full of little uneducated, unskilled sheep who have been fattened on a diet of propaganda. Not so!
Yes, you're trying to score one for "freedom" I understand, but you're doing it in such a disrespectful way that one wonders whether you really care about those involved, or you're simply another American jingoist trying to feel superior to everyone else.
You miss the poster's original point: at one point what you call "gotchas" were common knowledge. It's like buying a car with an "automatic" transmission-- you assume that you still have to move a lever between 'Park' 'Reverse' and 'Drive' even though that's not really 'automatic' in any sense of the word. Yes, you could get upset, call it deceptive marketing and force Ford to start listing the feature as 'semi-automatic transmission' but that's a little silly, obviously.
The difference here is that when this stuff was common knowledge in the computer industry, there were far fewer people buying. But just because manufacturers haven't kept up with the times doesn't mean they're actively trying to rip anyone off.
It's just the ignorance of the 'new guy' in a world where 'new guys' outnumber everyone else 1000:1.
Another example of ongoing Windows instability was the IIS 4 server on NT 4, which leaked memory something horrible when ASP was used, resulting in busy sites needing to restart services and/or reboot servers every few hours in order to keep websites running. For some time, Microsoft ran a private mailing list ("ASPPrivate", iirc) for users experiencing this problem - mostly large website customers. I'm not sure when this was fixed, if ever - I think that Win2K and IIS5 came out before the problem was ever fixed on IIS4, and Microsoft's strategy for addressing customer concerns was simply to stall for many months and then tell customers to upgrade their OS.
The company I worked for was affected by this. I can't say who it was explicitly, but it was a top-10 Internet property at the time which we referred to in internal e-mails as Ab.c.
The sheer number of NT4+IIS4 systems we had was shocking, truly shocking -- the main reason for having so many being that none of them could actually be kept running for very long. Servers in the pool were all automatically cycled (i.e. rebooted) on a continuous round-robin-style basis, but it didn't matter: as the network grew, the number of visitrs hitting a brick wall on the way in also grew.
Unfortunately, I was in content, not in IT, so suggestions from me and others who worked closely with me that NT4 might not be robust enough to handle the job were basically laughed at -- there was a kind of "Oh yea? Well what's better than Microsoft?!" attitude going on. IIRC, there were actually teams of Microsoft people who were flown to headquarters to do onsite code work to try to improve the situation, but it never got any better and the percentage of the servers down at any given time kept on climbing, as the network grew as did the total number of servers required to handle incoming connection requests.
Finally, just before I left the company, some new IT wisdom came in and the whole mess was replaced with significantly fewer BSD servers, very significantly improving both uptime and responsiveness.
The funny thing was, even after having their words handed to them for lunch, the big Microsoft supporters still found something to complain about... "Yeah, maybe the Web servers are up most of the time now, but this damn Unix technology is so old-fashioned it's case-sensitive!"
The amount of bitching involved as everyone renamed content-related files, scripts, etc. to account for case-sensitivity was truly amazing.
While I'm at it, will the people that insist on using the word "literally" to mean metaphorically give it a rest: "That was so funny I literally shit myself"
My friend, if someone says to you 'Oh man, that was so funny I literally shit myself...' I suggest that you work on putting down paper on your car seats before letting them sit in your car, rather than complaining about their particular euphemism for 'metaphorically'.
The mp3bot/jukebox script (one script, uses symbolic links, etc.) will be tossed out under GPL late this year sometime, once I clean it up a little and change 'mp3bot' to 'musicbot' (ogg, after all)... it's nice and simple and written for bash and just ties other software (cdparanoia, lame, oggenc, mpg123, ogg123, cdrecord, etc.) together nicely at the command line.
The photo system is a bit messier and not too well-written or flexible (it's very much tailored to the sort of shooting I do), but I have thought of a rewrite to make it suitable for public release... That will have to wait until 2003, though, when I will finally be at grad school and things in my life have settled down a little (right now I'm in the middle of a book and some other nonsense that's taking my time).
I have 80GB of consistently-named, ID3-correct MP3 files I that have ripped myself using a script I wrote called mp3bot, which in turn uses cdparanoia and lame --r3mix. I own every CD represented in my collection, at this point nearly a thousand of them. Some people don't believe this, but I love music -- folk, r&b, rap, pop, metal, industrial, alternative, punk, ska, classical, neo-classical, lounge, blues, cool jazz, acid jazz, swing, and on and on... and eventually you have an entire storage unit rented to hold your empty jewel cases (the discs are in 250-disc flip packs in the closet, in case I need to get at them).
BUT ANYWAY, I have written a shell script called 'jukebox' which allows me to do things like:
There's no way I ever want to go back to listening to CDs or creating mix CDs by hand. It's wayyyy to good to have instant access to *all* of your tracks for burning, shuffle-playing, album-playing, in any order, any mix, etc. But every time I buy a new CD and feed it to mp3bot, it adds a few MB to my collection... So I gotta keep adding hard drive space!
Now, I also have a 5mp digital SLR camera and I work as a freelance photographer. Every shot I have taken since 1999 is archived online with database-driven, browser-based interface (with captions and exif data) that I wrote myself. I probably have a total of 100GB or more stored in my photo archive and keeping them all online (instead of on small removable storage media) allows me to quickly search for one or several images across my entire collection. No way I want to start having to insert and remove DVD-RAM discs all day to get at 20 specific images... Not to mention all that clutter!
Now, to manipulate these photos, I also prefer Photoshop most of the time (sorry GIMP lovers!) and at times also use Corel Draw/PhotoPaint. And of course, I sometimes need to use MS Office as well because I also work as a freelance writer (photographer/writer, you can see how it goes together) and most publishers want stuff in Word format. To deal with these needs, I have Win4Lin running a Windows installation. All things told, this takes another 10GB or so on my drives.
The only important caveat is that with all this data in one place, I do have to be sure back up. I don't want to run RAID-1, that's a waste of energy and adds environmental noise. I use 8mm AIT storage for monthlies and an 8505xl for incrementals, which together are enough to be functional for my circumstances.
So there are some everyday uses of storage space -- about 200 GB of it all told -- a huge music collection, a huge photo archive, a Red Hat 7.2 installation with some Loki games and a Win4Lin installation. I bet the video guys can give you a few more uses.
I've since decided that open source people are simply disinclined toward business and there will always be a bulk of people who can't fathom that things can be both commercial and open and will make a fuss about it as a result, despite whatever benefits the continue to enjoy.
I never claimed not to be "disinclined toward business." In fact, my disinclination is why I use open source products to begin with in many cases. Maybe some people are on the fence, but I think anyone who visits Slashdot and reads the comments will understand: Open Source is, purely and simply, a way to try to provide technology for all, unencumbered by the flaws, restrictions and elitism created by the pairing of big business and technology.
Is this such a difficult thing to grasp? I doubt you'll find any real hardcore enterpreneurs latching on to OSS as their way to make a millions, buy a Bentley, and retire at 26. If you do find any such people, they are sadly misinformed.
At best, there is a willingness to tolerate business interests in OSS so long as they don't begin to interfere with the technology or with the access.
Yes, it's a kind of utopian ideal. Is that so wrong? Why are people so opposed to trying to create something without greed? It seems that some people are infinitely threatened by the though that their greed may someday get them nothing but disdain from others.
Someone already mentioned video editing and DVD mastering. This is job #1 for my fastest single-CPU setup, which is always OC'ed and which cannot possibly get fast enough. I'm a small operation with only a few machines. It is no fun to have to stop working and wait hours for a chunk of video to encode.
ALSO, there's a lot of frame-by-frame work going on here with things like Photoshop/GIMP (yup, use both) and that's where my current dual Xeon setup comes in. Here again -- for some of the more complex filters or transformations (i.e. perspective transformations and so on) on many successive images or frames... you run out of CPU very quickly. I/O is actually somewhat easy right now... a couple of mid-range drives in a RAID can easily deliver data as fast as I need it or write it as fast as I need to store it. I'm always waiting on CPU.
The Lizard installer (1st graphical Linux installer), a number of administration tools, and believe it or not, early versions of RPM (a.k.a. the "Red Hat Package Manger").
The problem was, rather than advertise their contributions back to the community, Caldera was actually secretive about them, believing that giving away code for free and opening code up would make them scary to point-haired bosses.
I worked in the Utah Caldera office for a while and there was a lot of this around -- a kind of pride in giving back to the community, but at the same time, an undercurrent of unspoken *fear* that some of the customers might actually *find out* that they gave back to the community and because of that, switch away to more traditional Un*x operating systems.
So maybe I'm showing my age here, but a painted red computer case with a great gaping hole in the side and a blue neon light does not inspire me to drool about performance.
I'm much more interested in the specs -- an SMP Alpha or Sparc machine with gigabytes of memory, 64-bit SCSI RAID-5, DVD-RAM for removable storage and a fast pipe to the outside world is much more interesting to me than a single P4 with 512MB memory, IDE hard drive, 56k winmodem and a $2,000 paint+watercool+roundcable job.
Anyway, when I think 'fast computer look' I don't think something that looks like a Pepsi vending machine, I think more along the lines of those old Thinking Machines setups or even just your basic sun4 pizza box.
Damn, I am showing my age. I should have kept my mouth shut.
OpenNIC is the greatest! All those additional domains, the public-spiritedness of it all, plus the OpenNIC DNS servers, even the bottom rung ones, are so much faster than the ones provided by my ISP!
usability problems of KDE only themselves to blame for there[sic] lack of success
Hello, what are you smoking? KDE is widely regarded has having better usability than GNOME and it is by leaps and bounds the most widely used Linux GUI according to nearly every survey that has been done, magazines, developers, distributors, etc.
GNOME is great, but there's no point in trying to paint KDE like a broken, unpopular product because it just makes you look clueless.
I've an IBM Thinkpad 760xd that I use, that's in great shape and that I really like. It's a P166 with 104MB memory, so speed and memory footprint DO matter.
Oh, I see. I should just sell my car or my leg or something and buy a new laptop so that I can manage my accounts, check my e-mail, etc. Or better yet, I should throw it in the dumpster out back and just go to the library and wait in line to use their PCs to do my Web stuff.
Oh wait, the public library is running on P133's... D'oh!
Like $0 Web hosting. For less than $20 year in DNS registration fees, you can have you@youraddr.com and give nine friends an address@youraddr.com as well, not to mention Web hosting.
I'd much rather get to choose my own domain than have to be @usps.com.
I can't give you a reference because the StarDivision Web site with the Java port is long gone, but what the original poster said is true -- before Sun acquired StarOffice, it seemed that a big part of StarDivision's strategy was going to be their Java port.
For trivia purposes, note that there was also a Java version of Corel WordPerfect Office that ran on Linux (no, not the WordPerfect Office 2000 port that used Wine). Only a free test version was ever released, but I downloaded and used it for a few things.
I don't have a PalmOS device, but I do have a non-Windows PDA (an apple Newton). I wouldn't trade my Newton or a PalmOS device in on this thing. I used to have a Windows PDA, but I got rid of it. Why? Because a PDA needs to be FAST -- not just fast in terms of CPU power, but fast in terms of data entry and fast in terms of the number of "taps" required to do a given task.
My Windows CE PDA was SLOW on these fronts... To get anything done, I had to go to the start menu. To make a note I had to to Start -> Programs -> Note application -> File -> New note, and then after I was done entering the note, I had to do File -> Save note, then enter a filename. To retrieve it, I had to start the application the same way and then do a File -> Open -> [file dialog] -> Ok. People would be giving me information and I'd be saying "hold on --" while going tap, tap, tap, tappity, tap. Plus, the damn thing crashed all the time and had to be rebooted, which is not only embarrassing ("hold on, my PDA froze, I need to reboot") but also required turning the unit over and stabbing at the recessed reset button with the stylus.
I don't know if Windows CE PDAs have evolved since this (CE 2.11) or not, but this device that has such "great potential" is actually running a full-fledged Windows operating system (XP). That's too much going on, too many menus and settings, and too much room for something to go wrong for any PDA I care to carry. I'll keep my Newton.
For replacing laptops... Maybe. It does have an XGA screen according to the site and my eyesight is pretty good... But on the other hand, if you're writing a book, you'll still have to carry a keyboard. And if you're going to carry a keyboard, you might as well carry the entire laptop so that you can get the nice, large screen.
So if I were to buy one, I'd probably end up with FOUR computers -- desktop, laptop, Newton, and this thing. Arrrrrgh!
*PLEASE* tell me what to do to correct them! i am NOT bashing linux! i WANT to use linux! i WANT it to get better!
<preach>
Linux is not perfect for everything, but it is already damn near perfect for some things. For example, my entire life is managed by a pile of shell scripts 5-15 years old, PostScript-based application printing, and the ability to run legacy X applications over the network.
If we fix a lot of the "problems" with Linux -- for example, radically restructuring the security and filesystem models to be more Windows-like, migrating to non-PostScript-centric applications, changing X to be more Windows-like (i.e. no virtual desktop, color depth switch on-the-fly, no X stream but direct drawing instead), etc. -- then Linux won't actually be useful to me anymore. I'm not a Windows user, but (gasp) this isn't because Windows is put out by the wrong company or crashes too much, etc. -- this is because Windows, even in ideal form, doesn't fulfill >my< needs.
I think part of the problem is that there is an entire demographic of users out there who have been told "Linux is better" not "Linux is different" -- if we make Linux "perfect" by the standards of a Windows user, a lot of existing Linux users will leave, not because the "coolness" factor is gone but simply because some of us actually do live and die by things like backward compatibility of X and shell scripts, the ability to compile our own software (and insert our own set of patches), the ability to use the same hand-built text configuration or script files we've been using for years that are lengthy and cryptic but give functionality not easily duplicated in a click-to-do-the-common-things, no-way-to-do-anything-else environment like Windows...
I think too many people view Linux as a Windows-contender in search of more users, rather than viewing Linux as the correct solution only for a particular group of users. No product is perfect for everybody. If you're looking for a Windows system, buy Windows! For god's sake, there's no need to be embarrassed if the tool used by billions also fits your needs as well.
Linux isn't for everyone, but it is for me. The day it becomes a great system for Windows users is likely also the day I move to BSD or some other system which still retains Unix-like behavior, because that is what I'm looking for!
What I do seem to have is a mature sense of right and wrong which anyone who tries to legitimize piracy simply doesn't yet possess.
What you don't seem to have is the ability to differentiate between piracy and fair use. Every time one of these discussions begins, there is a dedicated group of people who post and say that fair use as a concept is great but we really can't have it because every "fair user" out there might actually be a pirate at some point.
Hey, every citizen out there might actually be a murderer at some point. So what? It's a ridiculous jump to make.
I'm a writer. I have a much greater vested interest in copyright than you do. But I am also a realist -- and you are not. People are going to make copies of some chapters of my books. Maybe they will even copy the entire book and carry it around in a three-ring binder. So what? The value in selling that one copy is very low. The value in having yet another person "spreading the word" about a title I've written is much greater.
The same holds true for the audio and video content industries. Before the "MP3 revolution" I was buying maybe six CDs a year. Afterward, I'm buying 20-30 because my exposure to artists is greater. Most of my (working) friends are in the same position.
The RIAA/MPAA are complaining like babies about slightly decreased sales... and they're doing it in the middle of an economy that is tanking, worse than it's been in years. The decreases are directly related to the lack of disposable income on the part of the buying public, not to the greatly increased exposure they're getting through P2P.
Or maybe what the big media outlets are really upset about is a leveling of the playing field... the fact that maybe 80% of the CD's I've bought this year are indies or self-pubs that I wouldn't have known about had P2P never existed. We tried to do away with the studio system in Hollywood years ago for antitrust reasons, yet the music industry still functions exactly that way today and the MPAA has even managed to recreate most of the old income superstructure using intellectual property ownership rather than real property ownership as leverage. Let's try again to level the playing field, for once and for all.
Sorry, but the issue is not as simple or as black-and-white as so many devout capitalists seem to believe... not all sharing violates copyright. To end sharing because some sharing violates copyright is patently unjust and smacks of the kind of baby-with-bathwater institutional mentality Americans claim to hate.
The Newton 2100 kicks ass. I used Palm and Windows CE before finally trying out a Newton 2x00 series. The Newton made me swoon.
It's the best damn computing device out there, PC, PDA, or otherwise. I used to do my e-mail, my diary-keeping, my word processing, etc. on my PC in Linux, but now I even write my books and do 90% of my e-mailing on my Newton 2100 directly over ethernet. I read news on it, make travel plans on it, I have my household inventory on it (in Notion)... and I read BBC World News and Slashdot on it in Newt's Cape.
The PC only gets touched every few days. The Palm and CE devices are long gone. I only regret that Apple killed the Newton, so there won't be a color version.:(
When I installed slackware for the first time (back at v2, from several boxes of floppies) I had never used Linux before. It was the best computing and networking experience of my life to try to get Slackware and a small handful of 10b2-connected PCs to do what I wanted. When you are looking right into the guts of the system, as you are with Slackware, it is easy rather than difficult to come to some understanding of just how much more powerful Unix/Linux are than Windows.
And today, there's a reason people come to me for Linux advice now, a reason that publishers will print my Linux books... It's because I know what I'm doing. And it's all thanks to Slackware, which wouldn't allow me to get away with anything or ignore any small piece of documentation on my quest for functionality. Thanks to Slackware, I know how to make Linux work for me at what I want it to do -- not simply how to chose a task from the list of what Red Hat thinks Linux can do.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps AbiWord, KWord or OpenOffice Writer work for well you, but none of them even begins to compare with WordPerfect for professional writers or secretaries -- give me a break, the functionality simply isn't there!
The area of professional-quality office software is not dominated by free software in Linux -- frankly, there isn't any! OpenOffice is finally starting to come close with the 6.0 release, but still suffers on the stability and format compatibility front. I still use WordPerfect for Linux every day and crossover office when I need to use MS Office.
There are no Linux equivalents. For a big writing project or serious work, give me WordPerfect 8 over AbiWord or KWord any old day. AbiWord and Gnumeric? KWord and KSpread? I repeat -- give me a break. Obviously you are a computer professional and not a professional in some other industry... a word processor is a word processor is a word processor, but there are inifinite shades of nuanced difference between bash 1.14 and bash 2.0, right?
And by the way, I'd buy Nero for Linux in a heartbeat.
All of the responses below are about WordPerfect 9 for Linux, which was indeed based on Wine.
WordPerfect 8 for Linux, which was available at least a two years before then, was a native Linux application based on Motif and worked very well indeed. It's the same application released by Corel for a number of different Unix systems.
It was as cheap as $29.00 at the local CompUSA by the time WordPerfect Office 9 for Linux was released, and yet it still wasn't selling.
And what are you?
Obsessive-compulsive? A nag? An asshole?
Do you really care so much about that one-liner? Elaborate.
"That story" from 1989 better not get old. It represents all that China (and, arguably, Communism) stands for- oppression and dumbing down of its society so that they do not question the authority.
This is where Americans begin to sound very arrogant and ignorant indeed. As a person from a Chinese family myself, allow me to say this:
1. China is not a "communist" country any more than Hitler was a good Christian. Just because you claim to be something does not make it true. China is a corrupt political state, but that has little in the end to do with abstract economic theory. "Communism" is just a word used by the powerful to justify keeping all of the cash and power for themselves!
2. China does not "stand for" oppression and dumbing down of society. China is not a symbol, China is home to more than a billion people like you and me who are living everyday lives full of the human things: love, work, sleep, family, and so on. China's citizens and even China's dissidents do not exist to make political points for you; they are trying to live life and to make the world a better place. And let me also tell you this: they are not dumb by any stretch of the imagination. You seem to imagine a land full of little uneducated, unskilled sheep who have been fattened on a diet of propaganda. Not so!
Yes, you're trying to score one for "freedom" I understand, but you're doing it in such a disrespectful way that one wonders whether you really care about those involved, or you're simply another American jingoist trying to feel superior to everyone else.
You miss the poster's original point: at one point what you call "gotchas" were common knowledge. It's like buying a car with an "automatic" transmission-- you assume that you still have to move a lever between 'Park' 'Reverse' and 'Drive' even though that's not really 'automatic' in any sense of the word. Yes, you could get upset, call it deceptive marketing and force Ford to start listing the feature as 'semi-automatic transmission' but that's a little silly, obviously.
The difference here is that when this stuff was common knowledge in the computer industry, there were far fewer people buying. But just because manufacturers haven't kept up with the times doesn't mean they're actively trying to rip anyone off.
It's just the ignorance of the 'new guy' in a world where 'new guys' outnumber everyone else 1000:1.
Another example of ongoing Windows instability was the IIS 4 server on NT 4, which leaked memory something horrible when ASP was used, resulting in busy sites needing to restart services and/or reboot servers every few hours in order to keep websites running. For some time, Microsoft ran a private mailing list ("ASPPrivate", iirc) for users experiencing this problem - mostly large website customers. I'm not sure when this was fixed, if ever - I think that Win2K and IIS5 came out before the problem was ever fixed on IIS4, and Microsoft's strategy for addressing customer concerns was simply to stall for many months and then tell customers to upgrade their OS.
The company I worked for was affected by this. I can't say who it was explicitly, but it was a top-10 Internet property at the time which we referred to in internal e-mails as Ab.c.
The sheer number of NT4+IIS4 systems we had was shocking, truly shocking -- the main reason for having so many being that none of them could actually be kept running for very long. Servers in the pool were all automatically cycled (i.e. rebooted) on a continuous round-robin-style basis, but it didn't matter: as the network grew, the number of visitrs hitting a brick wall on the way in also grew.
Unfortunately, I was in content, not in IT, so suggestions from me and others who worked closely with me that NT4 might not be robust enough to handle the job were basically laughed at -- there was a kind of "Oh yea? Well what's better than Microsoft?!" attitude going on. IIRC, there were actually teams of Microsoft people who were flown to headquarters to do onsite code work to try to improve the situation, but it never got any better and the percentage of the servers down at any given time kept on climbing, as the network grew as did the total number of servers required to handle incoming connection requests.
Finally, just before I left the company, some new IT wisdom came in and the whole mess was replaced with significantly fewer BSD servers, very significantly improving both uptime and responsiveness.
The funny thing was, even after having their words handed to them for lunch, the big Microsoft supporters still found something to complain about... "Yeah, maybe the Web servers are up most of the time now, but this damn Unix technology is so old-fashioned it's case-sensitive!"
The amount of bitching involved as everyone renamed content-related files, scripts, etc. to account for case-sensitivity was truly amazing.
While I'm at it, will the people that insist on using the word "literally" to mean metaphorically give it a rest: "That was so funny I literally shit myself"
My friend, if someone says to you 'Oh man, that was so funny I literally shit myself...' I suggest that you work on putting down paper on your car seats before letting them sit in your car, rather than complaining about their particular euphemism for 'metaphorically'.
Wow, it seems I've generated some interest.
The mp3bot/jukebox script (one script, uses symbolic links, etc.) will be tossed out under GPL late this year sometime, once I clean it up a little and change 'mp3bot' to 'musicbot' (ogg, after all)... it's nice and simple and written for bash and just ties other software (cdparanoia, lame, oggenc, mpg123, ogg123, cdrecord, etc.) together nicely at the command line.
The photo system is a bit messier and not too well-written or flexible (it's very much tailored to the sort of shooting I do), but I have thought of a rewrite to make it suitable for public release... That will have to wait until 2003, though, when I will finally be at grad school and things in my life have settled down a little (right now I'm in the middle of a book and some other nonsense that's taking my time).
I have 80GB of consistently-named, ID3-correct MP3 files I that have ripped myself using a script I wrote called mp3bot, which in turn uses cdparanoia and lame --r3mix. I own every CD represented in my collection, at this point nearly a thousand of them. Some people don't believe this, but I love music -- folk, r&b, rap, pop, metal, industrial, alternative, punk, ska, classical, neo-classical, lounge, blues, cool jazz, acid jazz, swing, and on and on... and eventually you have an entire storage unit rented to hold your empty jewel cases (the discs are in 250-disc flip packs in the closet, in case I need to get at them).
BUT ANYWAY, I have written a shell script called 'jukebox' which allows me to do things like:
jukebox 'sonic youth' 'soundgarden' 'beethoven' -shuffle -continuous
and
jukebox 'interstate love song' 'hey jude'
and
jukebox 'strawberry fields' 'gimme shelter' 'nachtmusik' -burnwavtracks
and
jukebox mytrackslist.txt -repeatall
There's no way I ever want to go back to listening to CDs or creating mix CDs by hand. It's wayyyy to good to have instant access to *all* of your tracks for burning, shuffle-playing, album-playing, in any order, any mix, etc. But every time I buy a new CD and feed it to mp3bot, it adds a few MB to my collection... So I gotta keep adding hard drive space!
Now, I also have a 5mp digital SLR camera and I work as a freelance photographer. Every shot I have taken since 1999 is archived online with database-driven, browser-based interface (with captions and exif data) that I wrote myself. I probably have a total of 100GB or more stored in my photo archive and keeping them all online (instead of on small removable storage media) allows me to quickly search for one or several images across my entire collection. No way I want to start having to insert and remove DVD-RAM discs all day to get at 20 specific images... Not to mention all that clutter!
Now, to manipulate these photos, I also prefer Photoshop most of the time (sorry GIMP lovers!) and at times also use Corel Draw/PhotoPaint. And of course, I sometimes need to use MS Office as well because I also work as a freelance writer (photographer/writer, you can see how it goes together) and most publishers want stuff in Word format. To deal with these needs, I have Win4Lin running a Windows installation. All things told, this takes another 10GB or so on my drives.
The only important caveat is that with all this data in one place, I do have to be sure back up. I don't want to run RAID-1, that's a waste of energy and adds environmental noise. I use 8mm AIT storage for monthlies and an 8505xl for incrementals, which together are enough to be functional for my circumstances.
So there are some everyday uses of storage space -- about 200 GB of it all told -- a huge music collection, a huge photo archive, a Red Hat 7.2 installation with some Loki games and a Win4Lin installation. I bet the video guys can give you a few more uses.
I've since decided that open source people are simply disinclined toward business and there will always be a bulk of people who can't fathom that things can be both commercial and open and will make a fuss about it as a result, despite whatever benefits the continue to enjoy.
I never claimed not to be "disinclined toward business." In fact, my disinclination is why I use open source products to begin with in many cases. Maybe some people are on the fence, but I think anyone who visits Slashdot and reads the comments will understand: Open Source is, purely and simply, a way to try to provide technology for all, unencumbered by the flaws, restrictions and elitism created by the pairing of big business and technology.
Is this such a difficult thing to grasp? I doubt you'll find any real hardcore enterpreneurs latching on to OSS as their way to make a millions, buy a Bentley, and retire at 26. If you do find any such people, they are sadly misinformed.
At best, there is a willingness to tolerate business interests in OSS so long as they don't begin to interfere with the technology or with the access.
Yes, it's a kind of utopian ideal. Is that so wrong? Why are people so opposed to trying to create something without greed? It seems that some people are infinitely threatened by the though that their greed may someday get them nothing but disdain from others.
Someone already mentioned video editing and DVD mastering. This is job #1 for my fastest single-CPU setup, which is always OC'ed and which cannot possibly get fast enough. I'm a small operation with only a few machines. It is no fun to have to stop working and wait hours for a chunk of video to encode.
ALSO, there's a lot of frame-by-frame work going on here with things like Photoshop/GIMP (yup, use both) and that's where my current dual Xeon setup comes in. Here again -- for some of the more complex filters or transformations (i.e. perspective transformations and so on) on many successive images or frames... you run out of CPU very quickly. I/O is actually somewhat easy right now... a couple of mid-range drives in a RAID can easily deliver data as fast as I need it or write it as fast as I need to store it. I'm always waiting on CPU.
The Lizard installer (1st graphical Linux installer), a number of administration tools, and believe it or not, early versions of RPM (a.k.a. the "Red Hat Package Manger").
The problem was, rather than advertise their contributions back to the community, Caldera was actually secretive about them, believing that giving away code for free and opening code up would make them scary to point-haired bosses.
I worked in the Utah Caldera office for a while and there was a lot of this around -- a kind of pride in giving back to the community, but at the same time, an undercurrent of unspoken *fear* that some of the customers might actually *find out* that they gave back to the community and because of that, switch away to more traditional Un*x operating systems.
So maybe I'm showing my age here, but a painted red computer case with a great gaping hole in the side and a blue neon light does not inspire me to drool about performance.
I'm much more interested in the specs -- an SMP Alpha or Sparc machine with gigabytes of memory, 64-bit SCSI RAID-5, DVD-RAM for removable storage and a fast pipe to the outside world is much more interesting to me than a single P4 with 512MB memory, IDE hard drive, 56k winmodem and a $2,000 paint+watercool+roundcable job.
Anyway, when I think 'fast computer look' I don't think something that looks like a Pepsi vending machine, I think more along the lines of those old Thinking Machines setups or even just your basic sun4 pizza box.
Damn, I am showing my age. I should have kept my mouth shut.
OpenNIC is the greatest! All those additional domains, the public-spiritedness of it all, plus the OpenNIC DNS servers, even the bottom rung ones, are so much faster than the ones provided by my ISP!
Win-win-win-win.
only themselves to blame for there[sic] lack of success
Hello, what are you smoking? KDE is widely regarded has having better usability than GNOME and it is by leaps and bounds the most widely used Linux GUI according to nearly every survey that has been done, magazines, developers, distributors, etc.
GNOME is great, but there's no point in trying to paint KDE like a broken, unpopular product because it just makes you look clueless.
I've an IBM Thinkpad 760xd that I use, that's in great shape and that I really like. It's a P166 with 104MB memory, so speed and memory footprint DO matter.
Oh, I see. I should just sell my car or my leg or something and buy a new laptop so that I can manage my accounts, check my e-mail, etc. Or better yet, I should throw it in the dumpster out back and just go to the library and wait in line to use their PCs to do my Web stuff.
Oh wait, the public library is running on P133's... D'oh!
Like $0 Web hosting. For less than $20 year in DNS registration fees, you can have you@youraddr.com and give nine friends an address@youraddr.com as well, not to mention Web hosting.
I'd much rather get to choose my own domain than have to be @usps.com.
Um, sorry mods, but this post was funny, not a troll. You screwed up yet again. I have karma to burn so I feel free to say this openly.
I can't give you a reference because the StarDivision Web site with the Java port is long gone, but what the original poster said is true -- before Sun acquired StarOffice, it seemed that a big part of StarDivision's strategy was going to be their Java port.
For trivia purposes, note that there was also a Java version of Corel WordPerfect Office that ran on Linux (no, not the WordPerfect Office 2000 port that used Wine). Only a free test version was ever released, but I downloaded and used it for a few things.
I don't have a PalmOS device, but I do have a non-Windows PDA (an apple Newton). I wouldn't trade my Newton or a PalmOS device in on this thing. I used to have a Windows PDA, but I got rid of it. Why? Because a PDA needs to be FAST -- not just fast in terms of CPU power, but fast in terms of data entry and fast in terms of the number of "taps" required to do a given task.
My Windows CE PDA was SLOW on these fronts... To get anything done, I had to go to the start menu. To make a note I had to to Start -> Programs -> Note application -> File -> New note, and then after I was done entering the note, I had to do File -> Save note, then enter a filename. To retrieve it, I had to start the application the same way and then do a File -> Open -> [file dialog] -> Ok. People would be giving me information and I'd be saying "hold on --" while going tap, tap, tap, tappity, tap. Plus, the damn thing crashed all the time and had to be rebooted, which is not only embarrassing ("hold on, my PDA froze, I need to reboot") but also required turning the unit over and stabbing at the recessed reset button with the stylus.
I don't know if Windows CE PDAs have evolved since this (CE 2.11) or not, but this device that has such "great potential" is actually running a full-fledged Windows operating system (XP). That's too much going on, too many menus and settings, and too much room for something to go wrong for any PDA I care to carry. I'll keep my Newton.
For replacing laptops... Maybe. It does have an XGA screen according to the site and my eyesight is pretty good... But on the other hand, if you're writing a book, you'll still have to carry a keyboard. And if you're going to carry a keyboard, you might as well carry the entire laptop so that you can get the nice, large screen.
So if I were to buy one, I'd probably end up with FOUR computers -- desktop, laptop, Newton, and this thing. Arrrrrgh!
<preach>
Linux is not perfect for everything, but it is already damn near perfect for some things. For example, my entire life is managed by a pile of shell scripts 5-15 years old, PostScript-based application printing, and the ability to run legacy X applications over the network.
If we fix a lot of the "problems" with Linux -- for example, radically restructuring the security and filesystem models to be more Windows-like, migrating to non-PostScript-centric applications, changing X to be more Windows-like (i.e. no virtual desktop, color depth switch on-the-fly, no X stream but direct drawing instead), etc. -- then Linux won't actually be useful to me anymore. I'm not a Windows user, but (gasp) this isn't because Windows is put out by the wrong company or crashes too much, etc. -- this is because Windows, even in ideal form, doesn't fulfill >my< needs.
I think part of the problem is that there is an entire demographic of users out there who have been told "Linux is better" not "Linux is different" -- if we make Linux "perfect" by the standards of a Windows user, a lot of existing Linux users will leave, not because the "coolness" factor is gone but simply because some of us actually do live and die by things like backward compatibility of X and shell scripts, the ability to compile our own software (and insert our own set of patches), the ability to use the same hand-built text configuration or script files we've been using for years that are lengthy and cryptic but give functionality not easily duplicated in a click-to-do-the-common-things, no-way-to-do-anything-else environment like Windows...
I think too many people view Linux as a Windows-contender in search of more users, rather than viewing Linux as the correct solution only for a particular group of users. No product is perfect for everybody. If you're looking for a Windows system, buy Windows! For god's sake, there's no need to be embarrassed if the tool used by billions also fits your needs as well.
Linux isn't for everyone, but it is for me. The day it becomes a great system for Windows users is likely also the day I move to BSD or some other system which still retains Unix-like behavior, because that is what I'm looking for!
</preach>
What I do seem to have is a mature sense of right and wrong which anyone who tries to legitimize piracy simply doesn't yet possess.
What you don't seem to have is the ability to differentiate between piracy and fair use. Every time one of these discussions begins, there is a dedicated group of people who post and say that fair use as a concept is great but we really can't have it because every "fair user" out there might actually be a pirate at some point.
Hey, every citizen out there might actually be a murderer at some point. So what? It's a ridiculous jump to make.
I'm a writer. I have a much greater vested interest in copyright than you do. But I am also a realist -- and you are not. People are going to make copies of some chapters of my books. Maybe they will even copy the entire book and carry it around in a three-ring binder. So what? The value in selling that one copy is very low. The value in having yet another person "spreading the word" about a title I've written is much greater.
The same holds true for the audio and video content industries. Before the "MP3 revolution" I was buying maybe six CDs a year. Afterward, I'm buying 20-30 because my exposure to artists is greater. Most of my (working) friends are in the same position.
The RIAA/MPAA are complaining like babies about slightly decreased sales... and they're doing it in the middle of an economy that is tanking, worse than it's been in years. The decreases are directly related to the lack of disposable income on the part of the buying public, not to the greatly increased exposure they're getting through P2P.
Or maybe what the big media outlets are really upset about is a leveling of the playing field... the fact that maybe 80% of the CD's I've bought this year are indies or self-pubs that I wouldn't have known about had P2P never existed. We tried to do away with the studio system in Hollywood years ago for antitrust reasons, yet the music industry still functions exactly that way today and the MPAA has even managed to recreate most of the old income superstructure using intellectual property ownership rather than real property ownership as leverage. Let's try again to level the playing field, for once and for all.
Sorry, but the issue is not as simple or as black-and-white as so many devout capitalists seem to believe... not all sharing violates copyright. To end sharing because some sharing violates copyright is patently unjust and smacks of the kind of baby-with-bathwater institutional mentality Americans claim to hate.
No onslaught here.
:(
The Newton 2100 kicks ass. I used Palm and Windows CE before finally trying out a Newton 2x00 series. The Newton made me swoon.
It's the best damn computing device out there, PC, PDA, or otherwise. I used to do my e-mail, my diary-keeping, my word processing, etc. on my PC in Linux, but now I even write my books and do 90% of my e-mailing on my Newton 2100 directly over ethernet. I read news on it, make travel plans on it, I have my household inventory on it (in Notion)... and I read BBC World News and Slashdot on it in Newt's Cape.
The PC only gets touched every few days. The Palm and CE devices are long gone. I only regret that Apple killed the Newton, so there won't be a color version.
After all, in the next round of TV commercials, would you rather stare Jamie Lee Curtis in the tooth, or...
When I installed slackware for the first time (back at v2, from several boxes of floppies) I had never used Linux before. It was the best computing and networking experience of my life to try to get Slackware and a small handful of 10b2-connected PCs to do what I wanted. When you are looking right into the guts of the system, as you are with Slackware, it is easy rather than difficult to come to some understanding of just how much more powerful Unix/Linux are than Windows.
And today, there's a reason people come to me for Linux advice now, a reason that publishers will print my Linux books... It's because I know what I'm doing. And it's all thanks to Slackware, which wouldn't allow me to get away with anything or ignore any small piece of documentation on my quest for functionality. Thanks to Slackware, I know how to make Linux work for me at what I want it to do -- not simply how to chose a task from the list of what Red Hat thinks Linux can do.