Learn to use the command line and not a pretty gui, it will teach you alot about how Unix and Linux works
Please, no CLI! This is for newbies, and newbies don't want to know command line stuff. I have never seen Linux on TV where Chris or anyone else on tv who bothers to show even the simplest tasks accomplished without CLI.
Best thing to show on tv is that you can actually can get by without a command line. Show the config gui's. Show that you can accomplish real work without having to understand command line. CLI scares away newbies.
Newbies do not want to use CLI. Newbies should not want to use the CLI Newbies should not be expected by BOFH's to understand command line.
Newbies should experience free as in freedom. In the long run, that is the only real advantage we have.
Newbies need to understand where OSS comes from as a community, and how they can contribute to that community without writing code more than they need to "how Unix/Linux works".
I'd like to hear more opinions from people who use XP regularly and not from people who judge from what they hear on Slashdot.
I was in WinME hell for 2 years and recently got 2 new machines, one running XP pro at work and a laptop running XP home at home.
The good and bad news is that they are rock solid, never crash, and the long anticipated activitation hassles are virutally non-existent (so far).
Now that both Apple and M$ have solid and mature OS's out there, Linux on the desktop is going to have to compete right in their own back yard, by bringing ease-of-use and transparent interoperability to the click-and-drool masses.
Once these type of issues are addressed, and all the OS's and major app types are essentially the same, then all that's left is free as in freedom because free as in beer isn't that big of a deal to companies and governments. They are more than happy to pay a couple hundred bucks for some high-quality software if it translates into increased profit in the longrun.
This is the main failing of the OSS community. They all think that EVERYONE in the world is a coder.
I know I shouldn't respond to AC trolls like this, but I just can't stand it.
Free as in freedom resonates with the non-hacker when they begin to understand things like the M$ OEM license scheme that says even though they paid $300 for the M$ Office upgrade on their last Dell, they cannot move it to their new one when they move the old one into the family room where the kids are going to use it for sending each other rude email.
Free as in Freedom makes sense to Sally and Bob suburbanite when they can't find the 24 digit product key for Quicken 97 or whatever and their $99 investment doesnt' even make a good coaster because there's a hole in the middle of it.
A lot of the things that are "wrong" with free software as it stands are simply due to the fact that we are on the outside looking in. When GeForce is forced by the market to festoon their shrink-wrapped boxes with "LINUX Ready", then Sally doesn't have to write a driver fo the new GeForce card. IF John the accountant would check his books, he would see a lot of his profit being siphoned off by Redmond, and he might find that paying one of his IT people to help fix up OPenExcel will benefit both his company and all the other companies in the world (except M$, of course) by freeing them from recurring software subscription fees. Free as in freedom means that the when you pay for software and upgrades and support is up to the accountant, not M$.
Most people don't pay $199 for Office, it comes bundled with their PC. If they get a new PC, they either get the new version of office or they just install the old bundled version.
The OEM license does not let you move your bundled version of Office to your new box. You are only allowed to use it on the machine it wsas bundled with. I just went over to dell.com, chose a machine at random and found it was not bundled with Office, but rather with Works (bleh). Here are the upgrade prices:
Upgrade to Microsoft®Office XP Small Business w/Money 2002 and Educate [add $130]
Upgrade to Microsoft® Office XP Professional w/Money 2002 and EducateU [add $329]
What is it that you need that you cannot do in OpenOffice.org?
So far, I have only found a couple of problems with things like rendering of certain M$ form fields and a couple of things with drawing tools that are not ready for prime time in the word processor,and a few things with ease of use when sorting spreadsheets and so on, but it all works just fine.
Free-as-in-freedom will be easily trumped by features-as-in-less and training-as-in-more-needed.
Have you used OpenOffice.org lately? 1.0 is very good and has all the features that the vast majority of users will ever need.
Once the word gets out and ordinary people find out the monetary cost is $0, and the thing looks and feels basically like it did when they were paying $199 or more for the M$ equivalent, and they can still open their old M$ files, and they can install it on every machine they want and their grandma's too, and some big companies begin to switch and a lot of schools make the switch because it works in OS X and Windows and every other platform they have, and on and on...
M$ did it to Netscape, now it's M$'s turn to lose their air supply. There is a free in every sense alternative to Office. And it's not just a loss leader to get you hooked; it's the real deal free forever.
Even with $40B in the bank, M$ cannot compete with the potential resources that are available to a massively successful GPL product. Whole governments are beginning to take notice. Add the financial and human resource support of a few major corporations, and you have all the features you will ever dream of. Add a billion or more new computer users as developing countries come online, and you have all you need to swamp the M$ Office castle.
With the amount of marketshare that Word has on the wordprocessing market, I don't think anything will cause its 'doom' anytime soon.
OpenOffice.org is a tremendous threat to M$ Office. I have said before that all OOo needs is for a few major corporate users of office suites to spend a fraction of the $ they send to Redmond instead on funding the final polish of OOo and the benefits of essentially zero $ cost coupled with open file formats and free-as-in-freedom will take care of the rest. If M$ does not see this as a real and serious threat, they are fools. (I believe they do see it as a threat, and will act accordingly) Boeing is on board, it shouldn't be too hard to get AOLTW and a few other obvious examples, and soon the dominoes will begin toppling. M$ cannot win the fight in the long term. They may win some battles, but they cannot win this war.
We're talking about education here. In many cases the sysadmin/tech coordinator/resident geek can do basically anything they want in the server room. Occasionally you'll find some administrators (school admins, not sysadmins, that is) who will insist no macs or only macs or whatever, but that only applies to the desktop machines that the teachers use. If the sysadmin wanted to install thin clients running linux for students surfing the web in the library, no one will care. If he or she is running Linux on all the servers but the user has no idea because of samba or netatalk, no one will ever know, much less care.
It wasn't so much that I was 'Doing something with the computers that I wasn't supposed to'.
You have never been the one who has to clean up after those sort of antics, are you? It's all about doing something you aren't supposed to. I bet if you had asked nicely first the teacher would have helped you do it. Any student in the bios or any command line without prior permission is automatically in trouble. Not too many of the kids who want to see the bios messages do so because of mere intellectual curiosity, eh.
Why is inaccurate crap like this moderated up? Try a third of this.
Let's see... At 1/3 of those prices, that's $22 for XP home, and $35 for for XP pro, which would mean that the OEM pays $13 more for Pro than Home.
I click over to Gateway and see they are still charging $99 for the XPPro upgrade.
You want me to believe that Gateway, in holy combat with Dell, makes $87 on the upgrade to XP Pro, while M$, the most powerful monopoly in business today, makes $13 on that same upgrade?
It's my personal opinion that Open Office doesn't even remotely compare with Office XP.
I agree with you there only as with regard to power users and raw newbies. OOo is already quite usable by the ordinary user, and will continue to catch up with M$.
Eventually, a couple of major corporations are going to realize that they would benefit by allocating some resources to OOo development thus saving many Million$ in licensing fees to Microsoft. There are a lot of worker bees out there with $300 installs of M$ Office who use about $3.00 worth of features.
If a few of the Fortune 500 companies who each year send $Millions to Redmond would get together and donate human resources or a little financial capital to OOo development, OOo could soon be ready to replace M$ Office in many many businesses.
Also, it wouldn't hurt if the OEM's would show some brass and ship OOo pre-installed. Don't count on that, though, since Judge K-K rolled over and played dead for M$.
Apparently what I had to say was a wee bit controversial. To me, it looked like the author was jumping to conclusions. Just because the average admin only manages 10 boxens doesn't mean necessarily that they couldn't manage more than 10.
I believe that anyone who has to manage many serveren will be more productive in *nix, but they are probably going to need more specialized knowledge, so for that reason and others, it seems likely that the bigger the server farm, the more likely it is to run Linux.
The Windows technicians, however, only managed an average of 10 machines each, while Linux or Solaris admins can generally handle several times that.
That could be a very misleading statement, though. What if Windows is much easier to manage, so it can be admin'd part time by someone who does other productive work? In that case, it is very misleading to say that "Linux or Solaris admins can handle several times that". It just means that smaller deployments work better with Windows because anyone can admin them. The windows admins might be able to admin 100 boxen, but they work in places that only have 10.
On another note, I just checked buy.com, and they have winXP Home Upgrade for only $96--that is CHEAPER than this. So, why would any run-of-the-mill user (the target audience) buy this software when good old M$FT has cheaper stuff?
LOL... and what happens to this $3 cost advantage when you upgrade WinXP on a whole roomful of computers? You can install Lindows on as many machines as you wish...It's LINUX.
I doubt that they would let you use click-n-run on all of them, though. Such a service is a good example of a business model that could produce some actual profit in the land of GPL.
It seems that Lindows has the right idea WRT ease of use and the end user. It should be as simple and foolproof as possible to own and use a computer.
I disagree with the portion of the review that says who gives a crap about Winows apps, though. People want to be able to run their windows apps, and they will not make the switch until they can. Everybody has some special piece of software that they need. It is not just M$ Office. It's the 3D landscape software or SimCity or Quicken that they have been using forever and see no reason to switch. Geeks like to learn new things; most users do not. Lindows seems to understand this implicitly and is making tremendous strides in this arena.
Anyway, the less-than-rave reviews were for Lindows 1.0, but MSNBC.com recently had a nice review of the newest wally-world microtel $200 machines that was very positive. Disregard the misleading headline about it being an AOL computer. The article is really about Lindows 2.0, and mirrors many of the opinions of the new review today. See the article here: http://www.msnbc.com/news/813350.asp
If I moved from n to 1 on the list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased leverage with my vendor?
The merger was bitterly fought and hard won by Carly Fiorina vs the old guard of the company. It got ugly and personal. Fiorina is under extreme scrutiny and pressure to show that it was a good idea to buy CPQ. If HP management perceives that there could be any problems with M$, even if there isn't really a threat, they have to do something, because they cannot afford any missteps with Compaq.
So, to answer your question, even if HPQ theoretically has more leverage with M$, management is not in a position to use that leverage because they cannot afford to be seen as battling M$.
I believe there are a lot of insecure WAPs out there because there are a lot of computers with nothing of interest on them. (or at least nothing the owner thinks would be of interest to anyone). And what do I care if someone leeches a little bandwidth now and then? Most users wouldn't even notice or know how to find out if someone was using their WAP.
Even better, it can differentiate between good and bad spam. That is, over time, it would be able to decide if a certain kind of spam was on-topic for you. It would be nice if they could add something like this to a search engine so when you you click on a link in Google and it turned out to be off-topic for you you could add it to the "spam" corpus for you. It would personalize your results over time so it would learn what you are looking for when you use search terms with multiple meanings, and help week out all the websites that are little more than key-word spam.
When you donate your computer, put on a fresh linux distro and tape a copy of the GPL to the lid. Or do the corresponding thing for BSD. Either way, the school then has a computer and a license to go with it.
You have been assimilated. Why in the world should there be any hurdle, no matter how small, to donating your old computers to schools, charities, and people who need computers? It would be great if donators install or include a free operating system with their donation, but if they do it because of something M$ says, then it is wrong.
None for powerpoint that I know of, but the world would be a better place without that piece of crap (or even substitutes).
Sorry to break it to you, but Open Office and Star Office create "presentations" very easily. I have only recently switched to Open Office from StarOffice 5.2 so I havne't used the presntation maker there, but StarOffice will save and open in.ppt format, and does a good job of making html presentations as well.
There are other presentation makers, too, but I've never tried any of them.
You will continue to remain at risk for PowerPoint Poisoning even in a gnu/linux world.
Now they just say its a bad idea to accept computers without the original OS.
They don't say it's a bad idea, they say that a school should decline to accept a FREE COMPUTER just because it doesn't have an OS. I think that is just utterly unethical. They should be recommending not to decline the donation, but to make sure that all computers have legitimate licenses, or get a legitimate license. It's some of the worst FUD I've heard from M$, yet they seem to think we should be happy that they have at least stopped trying to tell schools that it is illegal to remove an OEM install of Windows.
Schools and the people who donate computers to schools should not be led to believe that it is in any way improper to donate or receive a donation of a pc without an OS. Large companies with donation programs often wipe the hard drive for data security reasons.
M$ doesn't want schools to get cheap old boxen because they know that sooner or later the schools will figure out that they can install k-12 LTSP and save themselves a lot of headaches and expense. It's the headaches of maintaining PC's in a student environment that will drive this more than the cost savings. Students rapidly break any security and change the settings so the computer labs all have Slipknot screensavers and so on.
M$ has no excuse anymore for the donated computers FUD, because it has now been cleared at high levels in the corporation. When the original "donation" site appeared on slashdot, I wrote to them to complain. Shortly after they changed the site, M$ wrote back to me explaining that they had changed the site to clear up misleading language.
They have not responded yet to me regarding the just as misleading suggestion that schools should decline to accept donated pc's without OS's. They cannot say that the site has "unclear language" or anything like that anymore, because it has obviously been reviewed and approved by someone with some clout.
I cannot imagine the fantasy world they are living in that they think it is a good idea to recommend that schools refuse perfectly good computers just because they don't have an OS. And what makes matters even worse is that they are in the business of selling OS's !!!!! . If that isn't evidence of something being seriously rotten in Denmark, I don't know what is.
Think about that for a while. I'll repeat it again...
1. M$ sells OS's 2. M$ recommends that schools refuse to accept FREE computers unless it comes with a valid OS.
If you were in the OS business, wouldn't the logical thing be to recommend that schools BUY an OS for their donated computers?
The review you have posted is from his first viewing of the film. This weekend on the Ebert and Ropert (sp?) show, he mentioned that he had seen AotC again, at the same theater, in the same seat, even, in full digital, and he found it much better.
Well, it looks like I've found a new web mail handler. I like this from their subscribe page (I wonder if they've collected the $10 per email from any spammers):
User Agreement
I will not use this mailbox in any way associated with spam including sending spam through MyRealBox.com, using this address as a return address for spam or as a drop box. If I violate this agreement I subject myself to legal action and will be held financially responsible for every piece of spam that goes into or out of MyRealBox.com at the amount of $10 for every piece of spam.
Place an "y" in each box to agree: I will not use MyRealBox.com for commercial purposes: I will not use MyRealBox.com to send spam: I will not use MyRealBox.com as a drop box for spam: I will not use MyRealBox.com for any fraudulent activity: I will not use MyRealBox.com for any illegal activity: I will pay USD $10 for every E-mail that violates this agreement:
By typing "I agree" in the box below you agree to the Term of service as well as the statements above:
Slashdot Mirror
Learn to use the command line and not a pretty gui, it will teach you alot about how Unix and Linux works
Please, no CLI! This is for newbies, and newbies don't want to know command line stuff. I have never seen Linux on TV where Chris or anyone else on tv who bothers to show even the simplest tasks accomplished without CLI.
Best thing to show on tv is that you can actually can get by without a command line. Show the config gui's. Show that you can accomplish real work without having to understand command line. CLI scares away newbies.
Newbies do not want to use CLI.
Newbies should not want to use the CLI
Newbies should not be expected by BOFH's to understand command line.
Newbies should experience free as in freedom. In the long run, that is the only real advantage we have.
Newbies need to understand where OSS comes from as a community, and how they can contribute to that community without writing code more than they need to "how Unix/Linux works".
Sorry, I will get off my soapbox now.
Carry on.
I'd like to hear more opinions from people who use XP regularly and not from people who judge from what they hear on Slashdot.
I was in WinME hell for 2 years and recently got 2 new machines, one running XP pro at work and a laptop running XP home at home.
The good and bad news is that they are rock solid, never crash, and the long anticipated activitation hassles are virutally non-existent (so far).
Now that both Apple and M$ have solid and mature OS's out there, Linux on the desktop is going to have to compete right in their own back yard, by bringing ease-of-use and transparent interoperability to the click-and-drool masses.
Once these type of issues are addressed, and all the OS's and major app types are essentially the same, then all that's left is free as in freedom because free as in beer isn't that big of a deal to companies and governments. They are more than happy to pay a couple hundred bucks for some high-quality software if it translates into increased profit in the longrun.
This is the main failing of the OSS community. They all think that EVERYONE in the world is a coder.
I know I shouldn't respond to AC trolls like this, but I just can't stand it.
Free as in freedom resonates with the non-hacker when they begin to understand things like the M$ OEM license scheme that says even though they paid $300 for the M$ Office upgrade on their last Dell, they cannot move it to their new one when they move the old one into the family room where the kids are going to use it for sending each other rude email.
Free as in Freedom makes sense to Sally and Bob suburbanite when they can't find the 24 digit product key for Quicken 97 or whatever and their $99 investment doesnt' even make a good coaster because there's a hole in the middle of it.
A lot of the things that are "wrong" with free software as it stands are simply due to the fact that we are on the outside looking in. When GeForce is forced by the market to festoon their shrink-wrapped boxes with "LINUX Ready", then Sally doesn't have to write a driver fo the new GeForce card. IF John the accountant would check his books, he would see a lot of his profit being siphoned off by Redmond, and he might find that paying one of his IT people to help fix up OPenExcel will benefit both his company and all the other companies in the world (except M$, of course) by freeing them from recurring software subscription fees. Free as in freedom means that the when you pay for software and upgrades and support is up to the accountant, not M$.
Most people don't pay $199 for Office, it comes bundled with their PC. If they get a new PC, they either get the new version of office or they just install the old bundled version.
The OEM license does not let you move your bundled version of Office to your new box. You are only allowed to use it on the machine it wsas bundled with. I just went over to dell.com, chose a machine at random and found it was not bundled with Office, but rather with Works (bleh). Here are the upgrade prices:
Upgrade to Microsoft®Office XP Small Business w/Money 2002 and Educate [add $130]
Upgrade to Microsoft® Office XP Professional w/Money 2002 and EducateU [add $329]
What is it that you need that you cannot do in OpenOffice.org?
So far, I have only found a couple of problems with things like rendering of certain M$ form fields and a couple of things with drawing tools that are not ready for prime time in the word processor,and a few things with ease of use when sorting spreadsheets and so on, but it all works just fine.
Free-as-in-freedom will be easily trumped by features-as-in-less and training-as-in-more-needed.
Have you used OpenOffice.org lately? 1.0 is very good and has all the features that the vast majority of users will ever need.
Once the word gets out and ordinary people find out the monetary cost is $0, and the thing looks and feels basically like it did when they were paying $199 or more for the M$ equivalent, and they can still open their old M$ files, and they can install it on every machine they want and their grandma's too, and some big companies begin to switch and a lot of schools make the switch because it works in OS X and Windows and every other platform they have, and on and on...
M$ did it to Netscape, now it's M$'s turn to lose their air supply. There is a free in every sense alternative to Office. And it's not just a loss leader to get you hooked; it's the real deal free forever.
Even with $40B in the bank, M$ cannot compete with the potential resources that are available to a massively successful GPL product. Whole governments are beginning to take notice. Add the financial and human resource support of a few major corporations, and you have all the features you will ever dream of. Add a billion or more new computer users as developing countries come online, and you have all you need to swamp the M$ Office castle.
With the amount of marketshare that Word has on the wordprocessing market, I don't think anything will cause its 'doom' anytime soon.
OpenOffice.org is a tremendous threat to M$ Office. I have said before that all OOo needs is for a few major corporate users of office suites to spend a fraction of the $ they send to Redmond instead on funding the final polish of OOo and the benefits of essentially zero $ cost coupled with open file formats and free-as-in-freedom will take care of the rest. If M$ does not see this as a real and serious threat, they are fools. (I believe they do see it as a threat, and will act accordingly) Boeing is on board, it shouldn't be too hard to get AOLTW and a few other obvious examples, and soon the dominoes will begin toppling. M$ cannot win the fight in the long term. They may win some battles, but they cannot win this war.
We're talking about education here. In many cases the sysadmin/tech coordinator/resident geek can do basically anything they want in the server room. Occasionally you'll find some administrators (school admins, not sysadmins, that is) who will insist no macs or only macs or whatever, but that only applies to the desktop machines that the teachers use. If the sysadmin wanted to install thin clients running linux for students surfing the web in the library, no one will care. If he or she is running Linux on all the servers but the user has no idea because of samba or netatalk, no one will ever know, much less care.
It wasn't so much that I was 'Doing something with the computers that I wasn't supposed to'.
You have never been the one who has to clean up after those sort of antics, are you? It's all about doing something you aren't supposed to. I bet if you had asked nicely first the teacher would have helped you do it. Any student in the bios or any command line without prior permission is automatically in trouble. Not too many of the kids who want to see the bios messages do so because of mere intellectual curiosity, eh.
Why is inaccurate crap like this moderated up? Try a third of this.
Let's see... At 1/3 of those prices, that's $22 for XP home, and $35 for for XP pro, which would mean that the OEM pays $13 more for Pro than Home.
I click over to Gateway and see they are still charging $99 for the XPPro upgrade.
You want me to believe that Gateway, in holy combat with Dell, makes $87 on the upgrade to XP Pro, while M$, the most powerful monopoly in business today, makes $13 on that same upgrade?
Sure. You bet.
It's my personal opinion that Open Office doesn't even remotely compare with Office XP.
I agree with you there only as with regard to power users and raw newbies. OOo is already quite usable by the ordinary user, and will continue to catch up with M$.
Eventually, a couple of major corporations are going to realize that they would benefit by allocating some resources to OOo development thus saving many Million$ in licensing fees to Microsoft. There are a lot of worker bees out there with $300 installs of M$ Office who use about $3.00 worth of features.
If a few of the Fortune 500 companies who each year send $Millions to Redmond would get together and donate human resources or a little financial capital to OOo development, OOo could soon be ready to replace M$ Office in many many businesses.
Also, it wouldn't hurt if the OEM's would show some brass and ship OOo pre-installed. Don't count on that, though, since Judge K-K rolled over and played dead for M$.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Overrated=4, Total=8.
Apparently what I had to say was a wee bit controversial. To me, it looked like the author was jumping to conclusions. Just because the average admin only manages 10 boxens doesn't mean necessarily that they couldn't manage more than 10.
I believe that anyone who has to manage many serveren will be more productive in *nix, but they are probably going to need more specialized knowledge, so for that reason and others, it seems likely that the bigger the server farm, the more likely it is to run Linux.
The Windows technicians, however, only managed an average of 10 machines each, while Linux or Solaris admins can generally handle several times that.
That could be a very misleading statement, though. What if Windows is much easier to manage, so it can be admin'd part time by someone who does other productive work? In that case, it is very misleading to say that "Linux or Solaris admins can handle several times that". It just means that smaller deployments work better with Windows because anyone can admin them. The windows admins might be able to admin 100 boxen, but they work in places that only have 10.
On another note, I just checked buy.com, and they have winXP Home Upgrade for only $96--that is CHEAPER than this. So, why would any run-of-the-mill user (the target audience) buy this software when good old M$FT has cheaper stuff?
LOL... and what happens to this $3 cost advantage when you upgrade WinXP on a whole roomful of computers? You can install Lindows on as many machines as you wish...It's LINUX.
I doubt that they would let you use click-n-run on all of them, though. Such a service is a good example of a business model that could produce some actual profit in the land of GPL.
It seems that Lindows has the right idea WRT ease of use and the end user. It should be as simple and foolproof as possible to own and use a computer.
I disagree with the portion of the review that says who gives a crap about Winows apps, though. People want to be able to run their windows apps, and they will not make the switch until they can. Everybody has some special piece of software that they need. It is not just M$ Office. It's the 3D landscape software or SimCity or Quicken that they have been using forever and see no reason to switch. Geeks like to learn new things; most users do not. Lindows seems to understand this implicitly and is making tremendous strides in this arena.
Anyway, the less-than-rave reviews were for Lindows 1.0, but MSNBC.com recently had a nice review of the newest wally-world microtel $200 machines that was very positive. Disregard the misleading headline about it being an AOL computer. The article is really about Lindows 2.0, and mirrors many of the opinions of the new review today. See the article here: http://www.msnbc.com/news/813350.asp
Never thought I would see any post with a goatse link modded up.
If I moved from n to 1 on the list of a vendor's customers, why wouldn't I see increased leverage with my vendor?
The merger was bitterly fought and hard won by Carly Fiorina vs the old guard of the company. It got ugly and personal. Fiorina is under extreme scrutiny and pressure to show that it was a good idea to buy CPQ. If HP management perceives that there could be any problems with M$, even if there isn't really a threat, they have to do something, because they cannot afford any missteps with Compaq.
So, to answer your question, even if HPQ theoretically has more leverage with M$, management is not in a position to use that leverage because they cannot afford to be seen as battling M$.
I believe there are a lot of insecure WAPs out there because there are a lot of computers with nothing of interest on them. (or at least nothing the owner thinks would be of interest to anyone). And what do I care if someone leeches a little bandwidth now and then? Most users wouldn't even notice or know how to find out if someone was using their WAP.
Even better, it can differentiate between good and bad spam. That is, over time, it would be able to decide if a certain kind of spam was on-topic for you. It would be nice if they could add something like this to a search engine so when you you click on a link in Google and it turned out to be off-topic for you you could add it to the "spam" corpus for you. It would personalize your results over time so it would learn what you are looking for when you use search terms with multiple meanings, and help week out all the websites that are little more than key-word spam.
When you donate your computer, put on a fresh linux distro and tape a copy of the GPL to the lid. Or do the corresponding thing for BSD. Either way, the school then has a computer and a license to go with it.
You have been assimilated. Why in the world should there be any hurdle, no matter how small, to donating your old computers to schools, charities, and people who need computers? It would be great if donators install or include a free operating system with their donation, but if they do it because of something M$ says, then it is wrong.
None for powerpoint that I know of, but the world would be a better place without that piece of crap (or even substitutes).
.ppt format, and does a good job of making html presentations as well.
Sorry to break it to you, but Open Office and Star Office create "presentations" very easily. I have only recently switched to Open Office from StarOffice 5.2 so I havne't used the presntation maker there, but StarOffice will save and open in
There are other presentation makers, too, but I've never tried any of them.
You will continue to remain at risk for PowerPoint Poisoning even in a gnu/linux world.
Now they just say its a bad idea to accept computers without the original OS.
They don't say it's a bad idea, they say that a school should decline to accept a FREE COMPUTER just because it doesn't have an OS. I think that is just utterly unethical. They should be recommending not to decline the donation, but to make sure that all computers have legitimate licenses, or get a legitimate license. It's some of the worst FUD I've heard from M$, yet they seem to think we should be happy that they have at least stopped trying to tell schools that it is illegal to remove an OEM install of Windows.
Schools and the people who donate computers to schools should not be led to believe that it is in any way improper to donate or receive a donation of a pc without an OS. Large companies with donation programs often wipe the hard drive for data security reasons.
M$ doesn't want schools to get cheap old boxen because they know that sooner or later the schools will figure out that they can install k-12 LTSP and save themselves a lot of headaches and expense. It's the headaches of maintaining PC's in a student environment that will drive this more than the cost savings. Students rapidly break any security and change the settings so the computer labs all have Slipknot screensavers and so on.
M$ has no excuse anymore for the donated computers FUD, because it has now been cleared at high levels in the corporation. When the original "donation" site appeared on slashdot, I wrote to them to complain. Shortly after they changed the site, M$ wrote back to me explaining that they had changed the site to clear up misleading language.
They have not responded yet to me regarding the just as misleading suggestion that schools should decline to accept donated pc's without OS's. They cannot say that the site has "unclear language" or anything like that anymore, because it has obviously been reviewed and approved by someone with some clout.
I cannot imagine the fantasy world they are living in that they think it is a good idea to recommend that schools refuse perfectly good computers just because they don't have an OS. And what makes matters even worse is that they are in the business of selling OS's !!!!! . If that isn't evidence of something being seriously rotten in Denmark, I don't know what is.
Think about that for a while. I'll repeat it again...
1. M$ sells OS's
2. M$ recommends that schools refuse to accept FREE computers unless it comes with a valid OS.
If you were in the OS business, wouldn't the logical thing be to recommend that schools BUY an OS for their donated computers?
The review you have posted is from his first viewing of the film. This weekend on the Ebert and Ropert (sp?) show, he mentioned that he had seen AotC again, at the same theater, in the same seat, even, in full digital, and he found it much better.
Well, it looks like I've found a new web mail handler. I like this from their subscribe page (I wonder if they've collected the $10 per email from any spammers) :
User Agreement
I will not use this mailbox in any way associated with spam including sending spam through MyRealBox.com, using this address as a return address for spam or as a drop box. If I violate this agreement I subject myself to legal action and will be held financially responsible for every piece of spam that goes into or out of MyRealBox.com at the amount of $10 for every piece of spam.
Place an "y" in each box to agree:
I will not use MyRealBox.com for commercial purposes:
I will not use MyRealBox.com to send spam:
I will not use MyRealBox.com as a drop box for spam:
I will not use MyRealBox.com for any fraudulent activity:
I will not use MyRealBox.com for any illegal activity:
I will pay USD $10 for every E-mail that violates this agreement:
By typing "I agree" in the box below you agree to the Term of service as well as the statements above:
Account Information
Is there any alternative out there? Maybe we can get Google to do web mail.