I kind of harped on the lack of a coherent office suite, but except for the flamers, no one is saying Linux is dead on the desktop, just younger and more immature.
I have used Star Office; it is a memory hog and tries to load the entire suite into memory. It crashes a lot. It is slow. And, most annoyingly, it takes over your entire desktop. On the plus side, the code is out there should anyone care to improve it, but I doubt it will ever come close to matching the tight integration of Microsoft Office, which is, to me, one of the only reasons Microsoft controls the desktop market.
My point (still unanswered) was that I know of no equivalent set of apps for direct automation between a spreadsheet and database program on Linux. You can certainly assemble what you need from parts, but sometimes, especially under tight deadlines, this is just not an option.
To match the Excel/Access functionality in Linux, you would need a report writer, an IDE (Perl/Python probably), a spreadsheet/computation program, a database program (PostgresQL/MySQL/Interbase) and a whole hell-of-a-lot of luck trying to get these disparate pieces of software and code to talk to each other.
And dude, that mansion analogy is just sad. Windows 2000 is a decent, fairly stable operating system. If you're getting blue screens all the time, it's probably your own damn fault.
Could the lack of a COM / OLE / ActiveX architecture be hurting the desktop environment? I am no MS pundit, but the interoperability between Office products is really helpful and useful and, in my mind, is the main advantage to a Windows-based system. (On the other hand, this model is responsible for many of the security holes in both MS's OS and desktop app programs.)
For instance, from MS Access (or any other Office product) one can "drive" Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint not to mention other automation-compatible software put out by third parties. This includes exchanging information between applications, creating new instances of an application and creating new documents, all from the VBA IDE.
A typical Linux user might call this "bloatware," but if you know what you're doing, tasks that are difficult and time consuming in a Linux desktop environment (Netscape/Staroffice, etc.) are trivial using Office 2000 on Windows. Visual Basic was created to fulfill all the needs of the desktop workers and works with ALL Microsoft products. Any competing desktop has to deal with a guzillion man-years put in usability and interoperability by the MS juggernaut. On my last job, I did a breakdown on an 86 million dollar budget in one week using Access and Excel. Off the top of my head (please remember I'm not Linux-savy and I'm not flaming here!), I can't think of a similar DB/spreadsheet combo on Linux that would have done the job in that short an amount of time.
...because they are sick of dealing with the type of people who deface webpages and write to them saying 'Oh, please teach me how to be elite haxor' or 'Dude, ya gotta help me break into my girlfriend's hotmail account' or (personal favorite) 'Help me hack my on-line homework because my teacher (?) is too lazy to grade papers.'
I think after several years of fun and sarcastic replies, they've finally grown tired of the attention and want to stop attracting the riff-raff. Dropping the full mirror seems like it should help. Their site has tons of content and a huge text file archive that has been neglected lately. Probably they want to get back to adding meat to their already excellent site. Besides, with only 3 guys handling the mirroring, the rash of recent (and not-so-inspired) defacements forced them to spend hours mirroring all the crap.
Also, they confirm each hack individually. How could one "automate" this without risking said kiddies trying to break or exploit the automated system. You're not exactly dealing with the most honest or moral segment of the computing community.
Can you imagine receiving 10 or more e-mails a day similar to: 'Hey, where's my defacement? I put it up 10 minutes ago! God, you guys are slow. What are you doing, humping your sister?'
Basically, they were performing a service for which they got nothing back except abuse from kiddies and sys admins. So they just said, "Fuck it." Frankly, I don't blame them at all and look forward to more great stuff popping up on their site.
The real problem is dumbass bureaucrats in government offices who don't give two shits about overlapping or dubious patents and just want to get the paperwork out of their "IN" boxes so that the lawyers and judges can take care of the rest. Assign a number and pass the buck--standard bureaucratic procedure.
Maybe we need better patent laws and a more thorough process of review with awareness of implications on already existing institutional practices and patent holders. Patent litigation is treating the symptoms, not the root of the problem, which seems to be badly written and overly general patent laws that are implemented poorly.
Slashdot Mirror
On can only HOPE that the 'Where's the Beef' (tm) lady gets her long-deserved come-upance!
I have used Star Office; it is a memory hog and tries to load the entire suite into memory. It crashes a lot. It is slow. And, most annoyingly, it takes over your entire desktop. On the plus side, the code is out there should anyone care to improve it, but I doubt it will ever come close to matching the tight integration of Microsoft Office, which is, to me, one of the only reasons Microsoft controls the desktop market.
My point (still unanswered) was that I know of no equivalent set of apps for direct automation between a spreadsheet and database program on Linux. You can certainly assemble what you need from parts, but sometimes, especially under tight deadlines, this is just not an option.
To match the Excel/Access functionality in Linux, you would need a report writer, an IDE (Perl/Python probably), a spreadsheet/computation program, a database program (PostgresQL/MySQL/Interbase) and a whole hell-of-a-lot of luck trying to get these disparate pieces of software and code to talk to each other.
And dude, that mansion analogy is just sad. Windows 2000 is a decent, fairly stable operating system. If you're getting blue screens all the time, it's probably your own damn fault.
Could the lack of a COM / OLE / ActiveX architecture be hurting the desktop environment? I am no MS pundit, but the interoperability between Office products is really helpful and useful and, in my mind, is the main advantage to a Windows-based system. (On the other hand, this model is responsible for many of the security holes in both MS's OS and desktop app programs.) For instance, from MS Access (or any other Office product) one can "drive" Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint not to mention other automation-compatible software put out by third parties. This includes exchanging information between applications, creating new instances of an application and creating new documents, all from the VBA IDE. A typical Linux user might call this "bloatware," but if you know what you're doing, tasks that are difficult and time consuming in a Linux desktop environment (Netscape/Staroffice, etc.) are trivial using Office 2000 on Windows. Visual Basic was created to fulfill all the needs of the desktop workers and works with ALL Microsoft products. Any competing desktop has to deal with a guzillion man-years put in usability and interoperability by the MS juggernaut. On my last job, I did a breakdown on an 86 million dollar budget in one week using Access and Excel. Off the top of my head (please remember I'm not Linux-savy and I'm not flaming here!), I can't think of a similar DB/spreadsheet combo on Linux that would have done the job in that short an amount of time.
When / where was the beginning?
...because they are sick of dealing with the type of people who deface webpages and write to them saying 'Oh, please teach me how to be elite haxor' or 'Dude, ya gotta help me break into my girlfriend's hotmail account' or (personal favorite) 'Help me hack my on-line homework because my teacher (?) is too lazy to grade papers.'
I think after several years of fun and sarcastic replies, they've finally grown tired of the attention and want to stop attracting the riff-raff. Dropping the full mirror seems like it should help. Their site has tons of content and a huge text file archive that has been neglected lately. Probably they want to get back to adding meat to their already excellent site. Besides, with only 3 guys handling the mirroring, the rash of recent (and not-so-inspired) defacements forced them to spend hours mirroring all the crap.
Also, they confirm each hack individually. How could one "automate" this without risking said kiddies trying to break or exploit the automated system. You're not exactly dealing with the most honest or moral segment of the computing community.
Can you imagine receiving 10 or more e-mails a day similar to: 'Hey, where's my defacement? I put it up 10 minutes ago! God, you guys are slow. What are you doing, humping your sister?'
Basically, they were performing a service for which they got nothing back except abuse from kiddies and sys admins. So they just said, "Fuck it." Frankly, I don't blame them at all and look forward to more great stuff popping up on their site.
Apache, Perl, FreeBSD, mySQL... Need I list more. The web runs off open-source software.
The real problem is dumbass bureaucrats in government offices who don't give two shits about overlapping or dubious patents and just want to get the paperwork out of their "IN" boxes so that the lawyers and judges can take care of the rest. Assign a number and pass the buck--standard bureaucratic procedure. Maybe we need better patent laws and a more thorough process of review with awareness of implications on already existing institutional practices and patent holders. Patent litigation is treating the symptoms, not the root of the problem, which seems to be badly written and overly general patent laws that are implemented poorly.
I going to try and prove that I own the patent for the idea of the patent. That way everybody who gets one will have to send me a check.
;P