Re:PDF doesn't solve the problem
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 1
Granted, PDF doesn't solve every problem, but it IS a reliable way of sending information in such a way that they can be expected to view it as intended.
You can certainly print spreadsheets to PDF, as well as presentations.
PDF doesn't solve the problem for people who need to pass documents back and forth and have various people editing them. For that task, everyone should use the same word processor. I recommend that people push for others to use OpenOffice in this situation, but if it is really necessary, just get MS Office. The world won't end.
But if you do go that route, please use MSO for as little as necessary. Start using OOo for everything that doesn't need to be shared for editing.
Getting more and more people to commit to doing that is the way we're gonna win the war against proprietary file formats.
Re:While we're in punditry mode ...
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 1
I actually agree. The point of my message is that eventually, I think, the market will decide that one is a clear winner. That winner will be shipped on nearly all Linux systems, and the other will be on the back burner.
Until that happens, though, it's great that we have both. The competition makes both of them better!
> In older versions, print to file and the use ps2pdf.
Right, and for me it always ran ps2pdf automatically. The "PDF converter" was just another printer selection. Worked great. So OOo 1.1 and its PDF export wasn't really that big a deal to me.:-)
Actually, it's even a step backwards, because under OOo 1.0 I could merge-print to PDF using that method. Now, under 1.1, the PDF export doesn't support merge printing and the "PDF converter" printer filter isn't there anymore! Oh well.
Re:The Desktop Is Not Important Right Now
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There are a lot of reasons to support Linux on the desktop.
Moral reasons -- for those who think all software must be Free, period
Lower cost computers for everyone! (Also think schools and governments... lower taxes!)
You believe Microsoft has too much power over the computer industry. In this case, a competitor needs to attack it on all fronts.
You prefer the UNIX way of doing things
Competition would be possible between consumer-oriented distributors. Currently, Microsoft competes with no one. When Linux is common on the desktop, there should be fierce competition which will help everyone get a better system.
No stupid e-mail viruses. Security is much easier in a proper UNIX environment.
Level playing field for application developers. No more will folks like WordPerfect have to compete with Microsoft, where Microsoft knows a lot more about the OS than WordPerfect does.
As more people use Linux on the desktop, those of us who have decided to use it no matter what will find more application software for sale and more hardware supported.
While we're in punditry mode ...
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Here's a question I'd like to throw out:
When, if ever, will there be a clear "winner" between Gnome and KDE for the average desktop?
When Linux takes over the desktop in a few years, will either one of them be the de-facto standard that nearly everyone uses?
Right now there's so much mindshare and development commitment in both, and it's hard to see when that will change. But I don't think it will last forever. Eventually one will have to give. Which one and how long will it take?
Re:Never happen until...
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No, the answer is education and, in the meantime, PDF for preserving formatting.
We need to educate people of the value of open standards for file formats. Fortunately, this is starting to happen. Sitting back and saying "Microsoft's proprietary bloated file formats are standard and will always be" is suicide. There's nothing about them that is superior to the OOo formats.
Keep advocating and give it time. Interest in OOo keeps increasing. As more governments consider its use, more individuals and corporations will also need to try it.
But until that happens, send PDF files. They usually work better than going from one version of Word to another anyway.
Always "a couple years away"
on
Linux in 2004?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It seems like Linux on the desktop for the masses is always a couple years away.
In 1998, I was swearing up and down that by the beginning of 2000, some major PC manufacturer would be selling Linux-preloaded systems branded for comsumers in places like CompUSA. That obviously didn't happen.
For most of the last four years, I've been predicting that by the beginning of 2005, most people would be using open source operating systems (keeping in mind that that could be Windows, if Microsoft caught a clue in time). Doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Now it's looking to me like the first half of 2006 is when Linux use on the consumer desktop will move from the "early adopter" to the "early majority" phase. I say this because:
* It's virtually guaranteed that we'll have several more major deployments in 2004 and 2005. These might be specialized applications instead of general desktop, but that will help create demand for more general applications.
* If you read the "Roadmap to desktop Linux" posted earlier today, it's clear that several very cool and useful features will be coming to the Free desktop in the next couple years.
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 should be released in the first half of 2005, and it is planned to make development of add-ons much easier. This will hopefully help get more office-oriented vertical applications ported to OOo.
When all this happens over the next couple years, I believe desktop Linux will turn from a stream to an avalanche.
But still, we need consumer pre-loads with all hardware configured to work out of the box, and marketed well. Few people are going to buy a Windows-infested PC, then choose to replace Windows with Linux. This is probably the most iffy condition, but I think it will happen. Most PC manufacturers would do anything to break away from MSFT.
Slashcode does indeed use templates, based on the Template Toolkit Perl module. It's actually quite slick.
There's a web-based interface to edit the templates which, IMHO, is a bit less slick, but it works.
(I commercially hosted Slashcode sites for a couple years.)
And indeed, I did exactly that once for a site -- changed a few templates and the resulting site was reasonably standards compliant. Wasn't hard at all. Why Taco hasn't done it here yet is way beyond my comprehension.
They'd have to modify the theme, of course, which would (hopefully) be done on a development server. Then, Slashcode allows exporting and importing themes. That could be done quickly, and only a server restart would make the change complete.
I agree with you up to the last paragraph -- I don't think it would have much affect on system load. Slashcode still has to process a lot for every request, in terms of database queries and such. It doesn't really take the system any time to copy the output to the network pipe.
Now, if they used client-side XSLT, they could probably take a fair bit off the server load.
Of course, one might wonder why you would want to host a production website on CVS code...
Is anything happening with Slash 2.4 CVS? I got out of the slashcode business earlier this year, for many reasons, one of which I figured it would die to the MUCH simpler PHP based solutions. (Of course, most of the PHP solutions are dog slow because they parse buttloads of PHP objects for every HTTP request.)
That's a good point. I used to host Slashcode based sites. The default home page was around 50k normally, but with mod_gzip it got down to around 6k per page. HUGE savings!
Certainly, caching CSS files locally would save a little in this scenario, but not nearly as much as they say.
Speaking of div tag names, I noticed they had one called "advertisement". Man, wouldn't that make ad blockers easy! Just overlay a custom CSS file with something like:
> You can do the transformations on the client side. Maybe two setups could be developed, one for those who have XML support on the client side, such as Mozilla based browsers and internet explorer and those who dont for older brwosers...
This is something I *really* want to know more about. I've searched for info on client side XSLT transforms, and haven't really found a lot. I've seen something on mozilla.org, and a tutorial for IE.
Is it possible to just send an XML doc to the client, along with a link to an XSLT, and have it work in IE and Mozilla? Would it be easy for the user to select different XSLT engines? (Preferrably without building it in programatically.)
>...but really, Gnumeric & Abiword are way better. Especially if youre on a machine that hasn't got a boatload of RAM & CPU cycles to burn (like, say, a multi-user system, or a computer more than 2 years old) plus, imho, they look better.
I don't completely disagree.
AbiWord is a fine lightweight word processor, and I admit it looks better than OOo. But OOo Writer has quite a few more features. For "light" documents, yes, AbiWord is fine.
I agree with you more about Gnumeric. I don't use spreadsheets a lot, but when I do, I use Gnumeric more often than OOo Calc. It looks a LOT better, and is quite capable.
With Sun's sinking fortunes, I for one have been a bit worried whether they could continue to fund OOo development. They absolutely need to sell quite a few StarOffice 7 licenses, and it looks like that is happenning!
They have a good plan in place for OOo 2.0, probably released in the first half of 2005. Good luck to them!
Actually it should come bundled with sqlite, not MySQL. *That* would make it a true Access-like application, as sqlite files are self contained, like Access MDBs.
Maybe it already does support SQLite; I can't tell because the site is slashdotted.
Gentoo can use whichever kernel source you want. You're correct that "gentoo-sources", the one generally recommended by the Gentoo team, is still at 2.4.20. But there's also pfeifer-sources, at 2.4.21. There are also ebuilds for the vanilla-sources 2.4.22.
Personally, I use mm-sources -- 2.6.0test8-mm2 currently. Been using it for almost three weeks, works fine. (Tried to upgrade to test9-mm1, had mouse trouble, so I downgraded again.)
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, PDF doesn't solve every problem, but it IS a reliable way of sending information in such a way that they can be expected to view it as intended.
You can certainly print spreadsheets to PDF, as well as presentations.
PDF doesn't solve the problem for people who need to pass documents back and forth and have various people editing them. For that task, everyone should use the same word processor. I recommend that people push for others to use OpenOffice in this situation, but if it is really necessary, just get MS Office. The world won't end.
But if you do go that route, please use MSO for as little as necessary. Start using OOo for everything that doesn't need to be shared for editing.
Getting more and more people to commit to doing that is the way we're gonna win the war against proprietary file formats.
I actually agree. The point of my message is that eventually, I think, the market will decide that one is a clear winner. That winner will be shipped on nearly all Linux systems, and the other will be on the back burner.
Until that happens, though, it's great that we have both. The competition makes both of them better!
> In older versions, print to file and the use ps2pdf.
:-)
Right, and for me it always ran ps2pdf automatically. The "PDF converter" was just another printer selection. Worked great. So OOo 1.1 and its PDF export wasn't really that big a deal to me.
Actually, it's even a step backwards, because under OOo 1.0 I could merge-print to PDF using that method. Now, under 1.1, the PDF export doesn't support merge printing and the "PDF converter" printer filter isn't there anymore! Oh well.
Here's a question I'd like to throw out:
When, if ever, will there be a clear "winner" between Gnome and KDE for the average desktop?
When Linux takes over the desktop in a few years, will either one of them be the de-facto standard that nearly everyone uses?
Right now there's so much mindshare and development commitment in both, and it's hard to see when that will change. But I don't think it will last forever. Eventually one will have to give. Which one and how long will it take?
No, the answer is education and, in the meantime, PDF for preserving formatting.
We need to educate people of the value of open standards for file formats. Fortunately, this is starting to happen. Sitting back and saying "Microsoft's proprietary bloated file formats are standard and will always be" is suicide. There's nothing about them that is superior to the OOo formats.
Keep advocating and give it time. Interest in OOo keeps increasing. As more governments consider its use, more individuals and corporations will also need to try it.
But until that happens, send PDF files. They usually work better than going from one version of Word to another anyway.
It seems like Linux on the desktop for the masses is always a couple years away.
In 1998, I was swearing up and down that by the beginning of 2000, some major PC manufacturer would be selling Linux-preloaded systems branded for comsumers in places like CompUSA. That obviously didn't happen.
For most of the last four years, I've been predicting that by the beginning of 2005, most people would be using open source operating systems (keeping in mind that that could be Windows, if Microsoft caught a clue in time). Doesn't look like that's going to happen.
Now it's looking to me like the first half of 2006 is when Linux use on the consumer desktop will move from the "early adopter" to the "early majority" phase. I say this because:
* It's virtually guaranteed that we'll have several more major deployments in 2004 and 2005. These might be specialized applications instead of general desktop, but that will help create demand for more general applications.
* If you read the "Roadmap to desktop Linux" posted earlier today, it's clear that several very cool and useful features will be coming to the Free desktop in the next couple years.
* OpenOffice.org 2.0 should be released in the first half of 2005, and it is planned to make development of add-ons much easier. This will hopefully help get more office-oriented vertical applications ported to OOo.
When all this happens over the next couple years, I believe desktop Linux will turn from a stream to an avalanche.
But still, we need consumer pre-loads with all hardware configured to work out of the box, and marketed well. Few people are going to buy a Windows-infested PC, then choose to replace Windows with Linux. This is probably the most iffy condition, but I think it will happen. Most PC manufacturers would do anything to break away from MSFT.
I'll probably get modded down for this, but...
NOBODY should be using Netscape 4.x anymore. Period. No exceptions.
Slashcode does indeed use templates, based on the Template Toolkit Perl module. It's actually quite slick.
There's a web-based interface to edit the templates which, IMHO, is a bit less slick, but it works.
(I commercially hosted Slashcode sites for a couple years.)
And indeed, I did exactly that once for a site -- changed a few templates and the resulting site was reasonably standards compliant. Wasn't hard at all. Why Taco hasn't done it here yet is way beyond my comprehension.
They'd have to modify the theme, of course, which would (hopefully) be done on a development server. Then, Slashcode allows exporting and importing themes. That could be done quickly, and only a server restart would make the change complete.
I agree with you up to the last paragraph -- I don't think it would have much affect on system load. Slashcode still has to process a lot for every request, in terms of database queries and such. It doesn't really take the system any time to copy the output to the network pipe.
Now, if they used client-side XSLT, they could probably take a fair bit off the server load.
I just stuck it in my userContent.css. Wow, that's brilliant!
Not sure about the ethics of it, but it's brilliant nevertheless!
Of course, one might wonder why you would want to host a production website on CVS code...
Is anything happening with Slash 2.4 CVS? I got out of the slashcode business earlier this year, for many reasons, one of which I figured it would die to the MUCH simpler PHP based solutions. (Of course, most of the PHP solutions are dog slow because they parse buttloads of PHP objects for every HTTP request.)
That's a good point. I used to host Slashcode based sites. The default home page was around 50k normally, but with mod_gzip it got down to around 6k per page. HUGE savings!
Certainly, caching CSS files locally would save a little in this scenario, but not nearly as much as they say.
Speaking of div tag names, I noticed they had one called "advertisement". Man, wouldn't that make ad blockers easy! Just overlay a custom CSS file with something like:
:-)
#advertisement { display: none; }
> You can do the transformations on the client side. Maybe two setups could be developed, one for those who have XML support on the client side, such as Mozilla based browsers and internet explorer and those who dont for older brwosers...
This is something I *really* want to know more about. I've searched for info on client side XSLT transforms, and haven't really found a lot. I've seen something on mozilla.org, and a tutorial for IE.
Is it possible to just send an XML doc to the client, along with a link to an XSLT, and have it work in IE and Mozilla? Would it be easy for the user to select different XSLT engines? (Preferrably without building it in programatically.)
What's the best source of info on this stuff?
Thanks!
I actually did a standards/CSS based slashcode theme for a customer once. It wasn't all that hard really.
But it's way past high time the default Slashdot and Slashcode theme make this jump.
...for a few bucks each, and have a few hundred bucks with which to buy a nice quad-proc motherboard and CPUs.
> ...but really, Gnumeric & Abiword are way better. Especially if youre on a machine that hasn't got a boatload of RAM & CPU cycles to burn (like, say, a multi-user system, or a computer more than 2 years old) plus, imho, they look better.
I don't completely disagree.
AbiWord is a fine lightweight word processor, and I admit it looks better than OOo. But OOo Writer has quite a few more features. For "light" documents, yes, AbiWord is fine.
I agree with you more about Gnumeric. I don't use spreadsheets a lot, but when I do, I use Gnumeric more often than OOo Calc. It looks a LOT better, and is quite capable.
With Sun's sinking fortunes, I for one have been a bit worried whether they could continue to fund OOo development. They absolutely need to sell quite a few StarOffice 7 licenses, and it looks like that is happenning!
They have a good plan in place for OOo 2.0, probably released in the first half of 2005. Good luck to them!
Actually it should come bundled with sqlite, not MySQL. *That* would make it a true Access-like application, as sqlite files are self contained, like Access MDBs.
Maybe it already does support SQLite; I can't tell because the site is slashdotted.
What is proprietary in RHEL? I thought it was all still open source, except maybe for their installer and maybe some Java stuff. But I could be wrong.
I agree, but hopefully the Slashdot editors will realize that these questions are blatantly obvious and pass over them.
Of course, it might be a mistake to assume too much from the Slashdot editors........
Gentoo can use whichever kernel source you want. You're correct that "gentoo-sources", the one generally recommended by the Gentoo team, is still at 2.4.20. But there's also pfeifer-sources, at 2.4.21. There are also ebuilds for the vanilla-sources 2.4.22.
Personally, I use mm-sources -- 2.6.0test8-mm2 currently. Been using it for almost three weeks, works fine. (Tried to upgrade to test9-mm1, had mouse trouble, so I downgraded again.)
I can't believe the absolute drivel of the previous 11 replies. Just wanted to say I fully agree with you Greg!
Professional content costs money, and having to let a few ads pass into your field of vision for a few seconds is NOT too high a price to pay.
If someone doesn't want to see ads, he should commit himself to only viewing sites that don't have them.