When ever I'm on a vacation, I try to stay away from computers as much as possible. For example I had a five week vacation this year and I used the Net only three times. And on each time it was about checking my email. (Yes, I checked my email only three times in five weeks! There were quite many unread messages waiting for me each time:-) )
At work I have to stare the screen 8 hours per day. I don't want to do that when I'm on vacation. It is not good for your physical well being to sit all day long.
This all comes down to money and the fact that so many people are very very greedy. Corporations fear that if they don't do everything to protect their precious products from tampering, they'll lose some serious money.
We/. readers know that providing specifications and helping people to tinker with a product usually helps the company in the long run. It is very sad to see that this whole DRM thing has blurred the vision of so many managers out there and they just can't get it that by making non-restricted products you help yourself. *sigh*
Few months ago I switched most of my own programs to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL.
The process was relatively simple. Most of my problems came from the use of
MySQL's non-standard SQL-extensions. (It should be noted that PostgreSQL also
has many extensions to the standard.)
I use SQL mainly from Perl and Python scripts and I was very happy to notice that not very many lines of code needed tuning. Almost all my problems in this area were related to the fact that PostgreSQL has very different way of automatically incrementing the primary key. But luckily the PostgreSQL's documentation was excellent and there they explained very carefully how their system works. I needed about one line more code to handle the difference:-)
So my opinion is that it is not very difficult to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL. If you have the will you'll succeed:-)
...before it can compete in usability with commercial software.
The company I work for, generally sees Open Source as a good thing. But very often we choose commercial solutions just because they offer as a far better usability than those available for free.
Few months ago we tested OpenOffice.org against MS Office. We found out that OO.org was significantly slower than MSO, when running on not-so-modern hardware. Our users also found many problems in normal day-to-day usage. For example creating a document with a working table of contents was quite difficult for many of our users. With only a few clicks they usually managed to totally screw up their document.
Also OO.org sucked really bad in compatibility with MS Office. Almost all Word and Excel-documents our clients sent to us during that testing period, were displayed wrong. Only those with no embedded objects, pictures and tables, were displayed correctly.
I'm not trying to bash OO.org here. I'm merely trying to point out that it still needs a lot of work to become as good as MS Office is.
"experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years."
Yeah, right. On what planet/rock/asteroid these experts are living? Eros?
CDs/DVDs are going to be around much longer than 5 years. There is no way in hell that could make the average consumer to switch to a new distribution media this fast.
is, that there is no such thing. People who develop and use "free software", still need money to do it. Computers aren't free, internet connection isn't free, food isn't free, etc.
Selling t-shirts, mugs, etc. for a project, is a good thing, but it isn't enough to keep a big software project alive in the long run.
I don't like Microsoft's way of doing business, but it sure is more profitable than the free software community's way.
Hands-free systems are required by law here in Finland, and the one I use has bluetooth. It works quite well and I can keep the phone (Nokia 6310i) anywhere in the car while talking. The max distance between of the two devices is somewhere around 10m.
Bluetooth is good for small range data transfers, and I think it could be a good replacement for IrDA, for example in laptops.
I've had 3 Nokia phones (1631, 3310, 3330) and
each one of them has had many bugs. First two
lasted about one year (no warranty left...) and then just suddenly stopped working.
The 3330 still works but occasionally it just shuts itself down without a reason. And one time it did it when it was attached to a battery charger.
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When ever I'm on a vacation, I try to stay away from computers as much as possible. For example I had a five week vacation this year and I used the Net only three times. And on each time it was about checking my email. (Yes, I checked my email only three times in five weeks! There were quite many unread messages waiting for me each time :-) )
At work I have to stare the screen 8 hours per day. I don't want to do that when I'm on vacation. It is not good for your physical well being to sit all day long.
This all comes down to money and the fact that so many people are very very greedy.
/. readers know that providing specifications and helping people to tinker with a product usually helps the company in the long run. It is very sad to see that
Corporations fear that if they don't do everything to protect their precious products
from tampering, they'll lose some serious money.
We
this whole DRM thing has blurred the vision of so many managers out there and they
just can't get it that by making non-restricted products you help yourself. *sigh*
Few months ago I switched most of my own programs to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. The process was relatively simple. Most of my problems came from the use of MySQL's non-standard SQL-extensions. (It should be noted that PostgreSQL also has many extensions to the standard.)
:-)
:-)
I use SQL mainly from Perl and Python scripts and I was very happy to notice that not very many lines of code needed tuning. Almost all my problems in this area were related to the fact that PostgreSQL has very different way of automatically incrementing the primary key. But luckily the PostgreSQL's documentation was excellent and there they explained very carefully how their system works. I needed about one line more code to handle the difference
So my opinion is that it is not very difficult to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL. If you have the will you'll succeed
They should also write an article titled 'How to select a GOOD webserver'. It seems they could use one...
Via Bittorrent, I'm getting about 0.1k/s, but if I go and directly download from Microsoft's website, I get 100k/s. Go BitTorrent, Go! :)
...before it can compete in usability with commercial software.
The company I work for, generally sees Open Source as a good thing. But very often we choose commercial solutions just because they offer as a far better usability than those available for free.
Few months ago we tested OpenOffice.org against MS Office. We found out that OO.org was significantly slower than MSO, when running on not-so-modern hardware. Our users also found many problems in normal day-to-day usage. For example creating a document with a working table of contents was quite difficult for many of our users. With only a few clicks they usually managed to totally screw up their document.
Also OO.org sucked really bad in compatibility with MS Office. Almost all Word and Excel-documents our clients sent to us during that testing period, were displayed wrong. Only those with no embedded objects, pictures and tables, were displayed correctly.
I'm not trying to bash OO.org here. I'm merely trying to point out that it still needs a lot of work to become as good as MS Office is.
"Toilet paper" form has been there from GIMP v1.3, so it is not a new thing.
"experts are predicting the death of the compact disc in as little as 5 years."
Yeah, right. On what planet/rock/asteroid these experts are living? Eros?
CDs/DVDs are going to be around much longer than 5 years. There is no way in hell that could make the average consumer
to switch to a new distribution media this fast.
-N
is, that there is no such thing. People who develop and use "free software", still need money to do it. Computers aren't free, internet connection isn't free, food isn't free, etc.
Selling t-shirts, mugs, etc. for a project, is a good thing, but it isn't enough to keep a big software project alive in the long run.
I don't like Microsoft's way of doing business, but it sure is more profitable than the free software community's way.
Hands-free systems are required by law here in Finland, and the one I use has bluetooth. It works quite well and I can keep the phone (Nokia 6310i) anywhere in the car while talking. The max distance between of the two devices is somewhere around 10m.
Bluetooth is good for small range data transfers, and I think it could be a good replacement for IrDA, for example in laptops.
I've had 3 Nokia phones (1631, 3310, 3330) and each one of them has had many bugs. First two lasted about one year (no warranty left...) and then just suddenly stopped working.
The 3330 still works but occasionally it just shuts itself down without a reason. And one time it did it when it was attached to a battery charger.
So, no new Nokia phones for me.
Good luck to both of you!!!
The power source of my home computer stopped working yesterday. Now that is the most secure system in the world.
If you can hack it, you are truly a real guru.
All programs that used MesaGL, stopped working after I upgraded to XF4.0. All I got was a core dump.
The new XFree 4.0.1 has now fixed this problem. So I think you should try that one.