...buying a tablet doesn't mean you don't need a PC....
Depends who you are. If you only watch youtube, email and do IM then you can get rid of the PC entirely, and many folks already do, particularly in the upcoming generation. If you're an old far you still need a PC because otherwise you go stark raving mad trying to enter text, but that's about the only serious difficultly for most people, apart from an app landscape that is more oriented to consuming media the productivity (rapidly changing). I don't need to burden myself with a PC in the form of a laptop, network, or ultrabook any more, thanks much for that. I typically throw the laptop in the checked luggage now, from which it seldom emerges. More like a good luck charm than anything. Pretty soon I get in the habit of leaving it home, where it is largely a paperweight because my real work happens on a firebreathing workstation. I would be a small minority though, as anybody can see from PC sales stats, standalone desktop is a rapidly shrinking market.
Wrong on both counts. Tablets first. Very solid market segment, lots of good solid reasons to own a tablet, actually, multiple tablets per household. Ask around your neighbors, you know I'm right. My kid keeps swiping my tablets (both...) and I know its just a matter of time before I must part with one permanently (and bring in a newer more powerful one of course). I don't take a laptop on most road trips any more, just the tablet and phone. That's good for doing presentations, working on documents, administrating systems remotely, emailing, chatting, texting, route planning, wasting time with media... basically everything I need to do with the exception of hardcore development. Which you're basically fooling yourself if you think you're going to accomplish anything meaningful while travelling, but that's another story.
Smart watch. Will be a fine little bauble when it hits its stride. I perceive it as a remote display and controller for your real device - phone, tablet or both. A little postage stamp size navigation map on it would be sweet, you could view it without taking your eyes of the road, and only turn to the tablet when you need to read road names. Even that could be finessed into the watch with decent UI skills.
Of course, smart watches will be crippled until power consumption issues are under control. It just won't do to need a charge every day. And UI and apps are both far from where they need to be justify the cost, and the cost is way above where it needs to be to get to the tipping point of developer interest. But time will solve all of these issues. Dick Tracy all the way.
I agree that current smart watch offerings are a sad joke and nobody is getting the Apple watch for reasons of actual utility. Too bad the Swiss don't quite get the plot yet - smart swatches are going nowhere without really tight Android integration. But they will probably get it right on the second or third try, it's not like they're known for giving up.
Those are your words, and frankly they just make you sound stupid
Inferred from your assertion that teachers who send out powerpoint or word documents are "incompetent".
No such logical inference is possible from my words, only rhetorical twisting by a dimwitted bottomfeeder such as you.
If a teacher sends you a powerpoint presentation and you cant deal with it then it is you who is incompetent.
You yourself might draw that conclusion, but you are an anonymous asshole so does anybody care. On the contrary, my style at that age would have me going back to the teacher and showing them how to send out educational materials properly in a form that saves time and money for everybody. Yes I did that kind of thing, and yes I ended up with those teachers as friends.
but what can we expect from an AC troll...
If you actually believed I were a troll you wouldnt be replying so dont lie.
I believe that you are a troll and a self-important ass with a greatly exaggerated opinion of their debating skills and will continue to believe that until you prove otherwise, perhaps by posting under a registered ID or posting some immortal prose that doesn't smell like it came out of your ass.
Which is more likely to get you into a good school? A) Knowledge of Linux internals B) Powerpoint skillz?
It is not a question of one or the other.
Yes it is. I asked that question and the question is unambiguous. Sheesh. If you fancy yourself a skilled debater at least try to stick to basic principles of logic.
In school, you carry your tools between your ears, you didn't go there to learn powerpointing. I hope.
No but as was said earlier, if I need powerpoint for something I will use it. I am not going to whine about how powerpoint isnt my moral choice.
Those are your words, and frankly they just make you sound stupid (but what can we expect from an AC troll...)
Why are you pretending Linux or "free" is necessary for this? I sure hope you arent going to school to learn Linux.
Which is more likely to get you into a good school? A) Knowledge of Linux internals B) Powerpoint skillz?
From your good school, you get a good position, a good life and respect. From the crap community college you got into with your powerpoint and Word(tm) skillz you take your chances with the rest of the back-biting, entitled assholes. Some of you will slime your way to a decent income, but you'll play long odds. The rest of you will end up flipping burgers feeling sorry for yourselves.
Eh, you're in danger of being tarred with the dinosaur brush yourself unless you recognize that mainframes at JPL died 30 years ago and the systema being replaced are probably Oracle Applications and Microsoft Exchange.
In the real world I'll just use the right tool for the job.
In school, you carry your tools between your ears, you didn't go there to learn powerpointing. I hope.
Well, I could be wrong about you, but my child certainly don't go to school to learn powerpointing, and if I found that being taught instead of proper academics I'd move my child to a different school the next day.
BTW, my child's school standardized on Linux, both the back office and teaching side. Even the security system. There great education software out there, and school administration software for Linux. See, free is compelling for educators these days, and students get a great chance to learn high value skills like programming and network adminisration (pen testing is particularly popular...)
From where I sit, Linux looks like the right tool for education, so I agree with you. Use the right tool for the job, and bin that expensive, proprietary, virus-magnet Microsoft crap.
there comes a point, at least for me, where the screen size gets large enough that I'd rather just buy a notebook...
Notebook hardware is starting to look a bit fossilized. Crappy power management, no GPS, no cellular data, no gyros, etc. At least cameras come as standard now... usually...
The only thing that stands in the way of 100% notebook-replacement status for tablets is Google's footdragging on the necessary UI improvements, most notably a proper window manager. Which is there now, but it's years late and it isn't enabled by default.
That's the problem with Google's closed project governance. Sigh. But it's getting there, and it's already past the tipping point of me. Now I tend to value portability over creature comforts, but the day is not far away when I can have both.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I've connected to both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. On the nexus 5, the small screen real estate makes it pointless...
Nonsense. I use this regularly on my Nexus 4 even. Sometimes I don't bother switching to the 10 inch tablet even when its sitting right there in front of me, and use it as a stand for the Nexus 4 instead. See, the keyboard is the limiting factor, not the screen resolution (1080p) or even the screen size. But then, I mostly use my slabphone in landscape mode so maybe I'm just different.
...developing two separate FOSS office suites means duplication of efforts that could otherwise be spent furthering development on a single FOSS office suite.
The duplication of effort if there is any can't be very substantial, considering the rather lopsided manpower ratio. Think of it as more like additional independent eyeballs on the shared code, which is still most of the code base. And it would be unseemly to just let OpenOffice languish without bug fixes and security updates in its sunset years. It's hard to see anything wrong with the current situation.
In short, you want somebody to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Nobody has time for that. Too bad Larry and his boys mortally wounded OpenOffice, but they did. Just let it die in peace.
Anyway, GPL is a lot better licence for this, it means there won't be a bunch of proprietary forks. And OpenOffice development does continue, at a very slow pace, which occasionally feeds bug fixes or even features into LibreOffice, so it is actually doing something useful.
There's always something that doesn't work on my computers. The last time I tried to install it, it was the video drivers that didn't work. They worked well enough to run the desktop, but as soon as I tried to play a game (or even test with GLXgears) the performance was abysmal.
Meaning that you were running software OpenGL, it just means that your installation is incomplete. Usually, the installer will autosense your video hardware and install the correct driver, but if it doesn't then it is usually easy to put things right. Start with:
glxinfo | grep "direct rendering:"
Probably you will see "direct rendering: No". You are now probably one package install away from fixing it.
The last large number of times I've installed Linux it came up with functional hardware 3D out of the box. Verified on hardware from all the major manufacturers. I usually use Ubuntu's install from USB key.
I'm using software that could easily replace both Outlook and Exchange right now. Fortunately, it's made by a company that is very good at engineering but terrible at PR and marketing, so Microsoft is safe.
I remember being hopeful in evaluating Evolution years ago as a possible Outlook replacement, and it was a no-go. Speed and stability issues aside, there are a lot of little features that need to work well to displace Outlook. It's not just about being able to access calendars and contacts, but things like: How well does it support public folders? How well does it support shared calendars? How well does it support delegate access? How well does it support Exchange rules? What about Out-Of-Office assistants?
Those are just a couple off the top of my head, but there are a bunch of those kinds of things-- features you might not think of immediately, but that people rely on all the time. And not only would an Outlook replacement need to offer those features, but the UI for them would have to be at least as easy/non-annoying.
Is there a drop-in replacement these days? Something that I can use with Exchange instead of Outlook? Something that I can use with Outlook instead of Exchange?
Thunderbird is your best bet. With plugins, Exchange calendar protocols seem to work as expected, though I haven't really tried every feature, nor do I want to. These days, it seems like startups are going with Google Office a lot more than Microsoft's expensive, high maintenance solutions. The wind is definitely shifting, as can be seen in Microsoft's division revenues.
Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook...
Those guys are going to need to change because the world is moving on and their outmoded workflow will become an increasing liability for any organization that employs them. Particularly tech companies where frontline engineers tend to have a low tolerance for back office drones who can't fulfill their work roles efficiently because they can't be bothered to adapt.
...my kids' teachers will send out documents in Word or Powerpoint; often the clipart they love so dearly is oddly reformatted and covers text.
So, basically your kid's teachers are strutting their incompetence. If you sent your kids to secretary school they might have a point, but they went to school to prepare for college, didn't they?
I now have a laptop with Office loaded just for these types of cases.
I do too. It's covered with dust because the frequency I actually need it has dropped to nearly zero. These days, the onus is really on the author to send out documents that can be read, and requiring a Microsoft machine on the receiving side is increasingly risky. At least, the document better be sharable and viewable on Google drive.
PDF is a far better choice for informational documents. Nobody wants to sit through a bunch of animations to get the content they're looking for. These days, that kind of promotional wanking is basically relegated to the boardroom and trade shows.
For document generation, Libre Office is awesome and does everything I need.
Your laptop that weighs 5 pounds, gets 5 hours on a charge, requires a 1990's shoulder bag and won't fit on the dinner tray? Be my guest.
I suspect that you have never actually tried a mouse and keyboard on a tablet. Even with Android's relatively crappy and uneven support it's quite usable and works much batter than a laptop that just shut down for lack of power. Oh another thing, when you go through security you will need to pull out your laptop, just what you need when you're tight for a transfer. Your tablet can stay in your bag, which by the way, will be a civilized size and weight compared to those monstrosities the paunchy middle managers lug around, annoying their neighbours.
I mostly leave my laptop at home now, what a relief. The only time it needs to go on the road is for dev-station-replacement, and actually, a laptop is a crappy substitute for a proper workstation, so that's a last resort.
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...buying a tablet doesn't mean you don't need a PC....
Depends who you are. If you only watch youtube, email and do IM then you can get rid of the PC entirely, and many folks already do, particularly in the upcoming generation. If you're an old far you still need a PC because otherwise you go stark raving mad trying to enter text, but that's about the only serious difficultly for most people, apart from an app landscape that is more oriented to consuming media the productivity (rapidly changing). I don't need to burden myself with a PC in the form of a laptop, network, or ultrabook any more, thanks much for that. I typically throw the laptop in the checked luggage now, from which it seldom emerges. More like a good luck charm than anything. Pretty soon I get in the habit of leaving it home, where it is largely a paperweight because my real work happens on a firebreathing workstation. I would be a small minority though, as anybody can see from PC sales stats, standalone desktop is a rapidly shrinking market.
Smart watches are a fad, like tablets...
Wrong on both counts. Tablets first. Very solid market segment, lots of good solid reasons to own a tablet, actually, multiple tablets per household. Ask around your neighbors, you know I'm right. My kid keeps swiping my tablets (both...) and I know its just a matter of time before I must part with one permanently (and bring in a newer more powerful one of course). I don't take a laptop on most road trips any more, just the tablet and phone. That's good for doing presentations, working on documents, administrating systems remotely, emailing, chatting, texting, route planning, wasting time with media... basically everything I need to do with the exception of hardcore development. Which you're basically fooling yourself if you think you're going to accomplish anything meaningful while travelling, but that's another story.
Smart watch. Will be a fine little bauble when it hits its stride. I perceive it as a remote display and controller for your real device - phone, tablet or both. A little postage stamp size navigation map on it would be sweet, you could view it without taking your eyes of the road, and only turn to the tablet when you need to read road names. Even that could be finessed into the watch with decent UI skills.
Of course, smart watches will be crippled until power consumption issues are under control. It just won't do to need a charge every day. And UI and apps are both far from where they need to be justify the cost, and the cost is way above where it needs to be to get to the tipping point of developer interest. But time will solve all of these issues. Dick Tracy all the way.
I agree that current smart watch offerings are a sad joke and nobody is getting the Apple watch for reasons of actual utility. Too bad the Swiss don't quite get the plot yet - smart swatches are going nowhere without really tight Android integration. But they will probably get it right on the second or third try, it's not like they're known for giving up.
And I didn't mean to denigrate your main point, however your point would be stronger if stated accurately without hyperbole.
The push to open source to lower costs really threw productivity down the cliff...
That theory would seem to conflict with what the JPL guys said, but don't let me stop your frothing, Coward.
Those are your words, and frankly they just make you sound stupid
Inferred from your assertion that teachers who send out powerpoint or word documents are "incompetent".
No such logical inference is possible from my words, only rhetorical twisting by a dimwitted bottomfeeder such as you.
If a teacher sends you a powerpoint presentation and you cant deal with it then it is you who is incompetent.
You yourself might draw that conclusion, but you are an anonymous asshole so does anybody care. On the contrary, my style at that age would have me going back to the teacher and showing them how to send out educational materials properly in a form that saves time and money for everybody. Yes I did that kind of thing, and yes I ended up with those teachers as friends.
but what can we expect from an AC troll...
If you actually believed I were a troll you wouldnt be replying so dont lie.
I believe that you are a troll and a self-important ass with a greatly exaggerated opinion of their debating skills and will continue to believe that until you prove otherwise, perhaps by posting under a registered ID or posting some immortal prose that doesn't smell like it came out of your ass.
Which is more likely to get you into a good school? A) Knowledge of Linux internals B) Powerpoint skillz?
It is not a question of one or the other.
Yes it is. I asked that question and the question is unambiguous. Sheesh. If you fancy yourself a skilled debater at least try to stick to basic principles of logic.
What's in it for me, for teaching them to take their clown shoes off?
In school, you carry your tools between your ears, you didn't go there to learn powerpointing. I hope.
No but as was said earlier, if I need powerpoint for something I will use it. I am not going to whine about how powerpoint isnt my moral choice.
Those are your words, and frankly they just make you sound stupid (but what can we expect from an AC troll...)
Why are you pretending Linux or "free" is necessary for this? I sure hope you arent going to school to learn Linux.
Which is more likely to get you into a good school? A) Knowledge of Linux internals B) Powerpoint skillz?
From your good school, you get a good position, a good life and respect. From the crap community college you got into with your powerpoint and Word(tm) skillz you take your chances with the rest of the back-biting, entitled assholes. Some of you will slime your way to a decent income, but you'll play long odds. The rest of you will end up flipping burgers feeling sorry for yourselves.
It's really hard. You could take a look at adapting Collada.
Eh, you're in danger of being tarred with the dinosaur brush yourself unless you recognize that mainframes at JPL died 30 years ago and the systema being replaced are probably Oracle Applications and Microsoft Exchange.
For that matter, sysops should not call themselves engineers unless they actually are.
Quick summary: we stay the fuck out of the way of the engineers so they can install and use the tools they prefer in the way they want.
In the real world I'll just use the right tool for the job.
In school, you carry your tools between your ears, you didn't go there to learn powerpointing. I hope.
Well, I could be wrong about you, but my child certainly don't go to school to learn powerpointing, and if I found that being taught instead of proper academics I'd move my child to a different school the next day.
BTW, my child's school standardized on Linux, both the back office and teaching side. Even the security system. There great education software out there, and school administration software for Linux. See, free is compelling for educators these days, and students get a great chance to learn high value skills like programming and network adminisration (pen testing is particularly popular...)
From where I sit, Linux looks like the right tool for education, so I agree with you. Use the right tool for the job, and bin that expensive, proprietary, virus-magnet Microsoft crap.
there comes a point, at least for me, where the screen size gets large enough that I'd rather just buy a notebook...
Notebook hardware is starting to look a bit fossilized. Crappy power management, no GPS, no cellular data, no gyros, etc. At least cameras come as standard now... usually...
The only thing that stands in the way of 100% notebook-replacement status for tablets is Google's footdragging on the necessary UI improvements, most notably a proper window manager. Which is there now, but it's years late and it isn't enabled by default.
That's the problem with Google's closed project governance. Sigh. But it's getting there, and it's already past the tipping point of me. Now I tend to value portability over creature comforts, but the day is not far away when I can have both.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I've connected to both my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. On the nexus 5, the small screen real estate makes it pointless...
Nonsense. I use this regularly on my Nexus 4 even. Sometimes I don't bother switching to the 10 inch tablet even when its sitting right there in front of me, and use it as a stand for the Nexus 4 instead. See, the keyboard is the limiting factor, not the screen resolution (1080p) or even the screen size. But then, I mostly use my slabphone in landscape mode so maybe I'm just different.
Oh I get it, that would imply he's terrible at PR and marketing.
You can use Inkscape to create shapes for Dia, a fairly decent solution for that type of thing. BTW, Inkscape is beyond awesome.
...developing two separate FOSS office suites means duplication of efforts that could otherwise be spent furthering development on a single FOSS office suite.
The duplication of effort if there is any can't be very substantial, considering the rather lopsided manpower ratio. Think of it as more like additional independent eyeballs on the shared code, which is still most of the code base. And it would be unseemly to just let OpenOffice languish without bug fixes and security updates in its sunset years. It's hard to see anything wrong with the current situation.
In short, you want somebody to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Nobody has time for that. Too bad Larry and his boys mortally wounded OpenOffice, but they did. Just let it die in peace.
Anyway, GPL is a lot better licence for this, it means there won't be a bunch of proprietary forks. And OpenOffice development does continue, at a very slow pace, which occasionally feeds bug fixes or even features into LibreOffice, so it is actually doing something useful.
There's always something that doesn't work on my computers. The last time I tried to install it, it was the video drivers that didn't work. They worked well enough to run the desktop, but as soon as I tried to play a game (or even test with GLXgears) the performance was abysmal.
Meaning that you were running software OpenGL, it just means that your installation is incomplete. Usually, the installer will autosense your video hardware and install the correct driver, but if it doesn't then it is usually easy to put things right. Start with:
glxinfo | grep "direct rendering:"
Probably you will see "direct rendering: No". You are now probably one package install away from fixing it.
The last large number of times I've installed Linux it came up with functional hardware 3D out of the box. Verified on hardware from all the major manufacturers. I usually use Ubuntu's install from USB key.
I'm using software that could easily replace both Outlook and Exchange right now. Fortunately, it's made by a company that is very good at engineering but terrible at PR and marketing, so Microsoft is safe.
Give us a hint?
I remember being hopeful in evaluating Evolution years ago as a possible Outlook replacement, and it was a no-go. Speed and stability issues aside, there are a lot of little features that need to work well to displace Outlook. It's not just about being able to access calendars and contacts, but things like: How well does it support public folders? How well does it support shared calendars? How well does it support delegate access? How well does it support Exchange rules? What about Out-Of-Office assistants?
Those are just a couple off the top of my head, but there are a bunch of those kinds of things-- features you might not think of immediately, but that people rely on all the time. And not only would an Outlook replacement need to offer those features, but the UI for them would have to be at least as easy/non-annoying.
Is there a drop-in replacement these days? Something that I can use with Exchange instead of Outlook? Something that I can use with Outlook instead of Exchange?
Thunderbird is your best bet. With plugins, Exchange calendar protocols seem to work as expected, though I haven't really tried every feature, nor do I want to. These days, it seems like startups are going with Google Office a lot more than Microsoft's expensive, high maintenance solutions. The wind is definitely shifting, as can be seen in Microsoft's division revenues.
Creating a "perfect" alternative to MS Office is harder than just engineering an office suite. LibreOffice is great in many ways, but one of the things that keeps many people on MS Office is that they've built their workflows on Outlook...
Those guys are going to need to change because the world is moving on and their outmoded workflow will become an increasing liability for any organization that employs them. Particularly tech companies where frontline engineers tend to have a low tolerance for back office drones who can't fulfill their work roles efficiently because they can't be bothered to adapt.
There is one crucial feature that isn't covered perfectly: absolute compatibility with MS Office.
Even MS Office isn't absolutely compatible with MS Office.
...my kids' teachers will send out documents in Word or Powerpoint; often the clipart they love so dearly is oddly reformatted and covers text.
So, basically your kid's teachers are strutting their incompetence. If you sent your kids to secretary school they might have a point, but they went to school to prepare for college, didn't they?
I now have a laptop with Office loaded just for these types of cases.
I do too. It's covered with dust because the frequency I actually need it has dropped to nearly zero. These days, the onus is really on the author to send out documents that can be read, and requiring a Microsoft machine on the receiving side is increasingly risky. At least, the document better be sharable and viewable on Google drive.
PDF is a far better choice for informational documents. Nobody wants to sit through a bunch of animations to get the content they're looking for. These days, that kind of promotional wanking is basically relegated to the boardroom and trade shows.
For document generation, Libre Office is awesome and does everything I need.
Your laptop that weighs 5 pounds, gets 5 hours on a charge, requires a 1990's shoulder bag and won't fit on the dinner tray? Be my guest.
I suspect that you have never actually tried a mouse and keyboard on a tablet. Even with Android's relatively crappy and uneven support it's quite usable and works much batter than a laptop that just shut down for lack of power. Oh another thing, when you go through security you will need to pull out your laptop, just what you need when you're tight for a transfer. Your tablet can stay in your bag, which by the way, will be a civilized size and weight compared to those monstrosities the paunchy middle managers lug around, annoying their neighbours.
I mostly leave my laptop at home now, what a relief. The only time it needs to go on the road is for dev-station-replacement, and actually, a laptop is a crappy substitute for a proper workstation, so that's a last resort.