a course which teachs pupils spreadsheets or word processing could, arguably be using the most widespread software.
My high school used IBM Selectric typewriters. I can't begin to express my frustration at being confronted with Brother or Smith Corona models and not being able to use them. Some of the typewriters I have to use are even labelled "Dell", "Sun", or "Happy Hacking". I sure wish my school had taught me to use the most common typewriters instead of just those old Selectrics; they completely failed to prepare me for the workplace.
That's where I'm at right now. After using Debian since '98, I finally switched to Gentoo about two months ago after tiring of the whole "frozen Sid" de facto condition Debian was in. I may very well switch back if/when Sarge is released and KDE 3.4 and X.org make it into Sid, but until then I don't want to give up the shiny things I can find in other distros.
You mean, like them being pro-legislation until someone protested, then deciding to be neutral until the bill had already been voted upon, then changing their mind and becoming pro-legislation again once it was a moot point?
The average user got Word/Office preinstalled, or "an old copy" from his brother's cousin's best friend. Price is not really a problem.
You could (invalidly) use that argument against any piece of FOSS when comparing it to a proprietary equivalent: no one would use The GIMP when they can just pirate Photoshop.
The fact that OOo crashes more frequently than Office (and that's an achievement in itself!) matters.
File under "YMMV". OOo doesn't crash for me, so I'll just have to take your word for it.
For professional users, the price doesn't matter either. If it helps me do my job, I'll happily shell out money for it - and Office isn't exactly expensive as far as major companies are concerned...
Other than legacy home-grown application support, I'm not really convinced that Office is significantly better then OOo. Different, sure, but no more than any two versions of Office itself in my experience.
The fact that OSS advocates run around accusing people to be idiots because they disagree doesn't help either.
Except that's not what's happening. I strongly assert that the wide, wide majority of Office users would be perfectly comfortable with OOo but won't try it because it doesn't have a dollar cost. We're accusing people of idiocy when they continue to choose the closed, expensive solution over the Free one for no apparent reason other than "you get what you pay for".
And nobody except Slashdot readers is "realizing that OOo is what you should be using".
Our (Windows-centric) office switched everyone but the bookkeeper (with her Excel scripts) from Office to OOo over a year ago. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that organizations are paying attention and switching in ever-increasing numbers.
In other words, the prerelease beta has a few rough edges but costs $334.95 less.
Yeah, that actually does sound like an Office killer for 99% of potential users. Basically, if you still fork over serious money for an only slightly better office suite without any substantial reasons (like you require VBA support for legacy reasons), you're an idiot and deserve what you get. OpenOffice.org is what pretty much every home or small office should be using, and it looks like people are starting to realize that.
The short version is, if you discriminate against members of group X, you cut yourself off from the contributions which potentially valuable members of group X can make.
Well, right; that much is fairly self-evident. I think what he's asking, though, is what the advantage is to creating an artificially diverse workplace.
For example, I live in an overwhelmingly (greater than 98%) white city. Would there be any reason my boss should go out of his way to find and hire an unrepresentatively diverse workforce? Are we missing out on something by not having minority representation even though we're stastically unlikely to naturally have one (.98^$NUM_EMPLOYEES is greater than 50%)?
WTF? If their management is 64 levels deep, then Longhorn's release schedule makes much more sense. What are they trying to attain? The Org Chart of Yendor?
To gays: You have our support!
From opposition groups: Hey, you're a business, not a charity! Stick to business-related stuff!
To the world, loudly: Oops! Changed our mind. We're a business, not a charity.
To gays, quietly:...until next time, but we'll be sure to support you then, honest!
I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a more two-faced reaction to the whole episode. You can't just support something whenever it's popular; either be for it, or against it, or stay out of the discussion altogether.
I think you missed the implicit smiley at the end, although people jumping at "free utilities" really does get on my nerves. It seems like it involves the same lack of math skills that makes a lottery seem like a good investment.
I definitely agree about the HVAC at mild temperatures, especially when it gets in the high 60's / low 70's. Unless you live in someplace where the ambient noise or air quality is unbearable, there's nothing like a fresh 68 degree breeze to make a house feel comfortable.
So, unless you live in some sort of a situation that provides power as part of your rent or such and don't really care about overall societal power consumption
<nitpick>
I think you meant to say "unless you are a sociopath who doesn't mind driving up everyone's rent by abusing an collectively paid resource...". That's one of the reasons that "free gas! free electricity!" apartments never appealed to me when I was younger; I'm not one of those people who leave the heat cranked and the windows open in January and I didn't want to subsidize them. By the same token, I didn't want everyone to kill me when their rent went up because I had 87 486 boxes and the air conditioning set at 50 to keep the carpet from igniting.
</nitpick>
Jokes aside, KimDaBa is an excellent image database. You create your own tags to apply to each picture or selection, and then search on those tags. I don't know how it'd hold up to huge collections, but since it only stores metadata and not the images themselves, I imagine it'd do pretty well.
Graphical programs don't care about the spaces, and I haven't used a CLI that wouldn't tab-complete spaces by escaping them in years. Given that every tool I've used in this millenium can handle the above without any problems, I don't understand the drive to remove innocent (and helpful) whitespace from filenames.
It's a noticeable flaw, every 30 seconds. Doesn't matter if all you care about is "frames per second."
You know, that's a good point that I'd never really thought about. If setup A runs at 60fps for a minute, and setup B runs at 61fps for a minute but then pauses for a full second, then the mean framerate would be identical. Maybe we should start asking for standard deviation in benchmarks?
So, how does that actually work out in real life? If Syndicate Foo is "protecting" my business, and Syndicate Bar sends a couple of "salesmen" to offer me competing rates, how do I pick which policy to use? Do we all sit down with lasagna and compare market capitalization, research projects, and offensive/defensive capabilities? Do I have to weigh the relative likelihood of widowerhood if I switch from Foo to Bar, or reject Bar to stick with Foo?
Sorry, but I grew up in a decidedly non-ethnic area and am somewhat ignorant in the finer points of coercee etiquette.
I'm not sure how people even justify the cost to them selves.
Who cares, as long as they keep doing it?
See, I have roughly zero interest in the latest FPS game ("Jax and Daxter" on PS2 is more my style), but this irrational push for the latest and greatest means that you and I get to buy some amazing year-old hardware for next to nothing. $30 will get you an MX 440. Joe Gamer would look on it with distaste, but it's screamingly fast for the easy work I ask of it. With the upcoming OpenGL desktops, I think it's wonderful that I can get on the bandwagon without shelling out a load of cash.
It's the same reason I want to see every gamer rush out to buy Opterons - I don't need one now, but I'd like them to be cheap by the time I get around to buying one.
Go, gamers, go! Keep loading up on the stuff I'll want a year or two from now!
My sister has her old Aptiva loaded with every damn croaking, tweeping, fluttering rainforest-styled thing there is, complete with bad-animated-GIF desktop icons and a mouse cursor that squirms.
If it's not causing problems with her machine, and it makes her happier to use her own uniquely personalized desktop, why not? I can't stand country music, but I wouldn't advocate a radio that played only jazz...
[I]t helped me to read what I thought was unreadable - James Joyces' Ulysses. The key tip is that Ulysses should be read with the help of Stuart Gilbert.
No. The key tip is to realize that Ulysses is the most over-rated awful piece of "classic" literature ever to become popular. Really, honestly, it was horrible.
There seem to be two main camps among people who've attempted to read Ulysses:
Finished the book and claim to have loved it because they don't want to admit that they just wasted a month on something so bad.
Didn't finish the book and hated it. Derided by group #1: "if only you'd finish it, you'd see how brilliant it really is."
I'm in the small third group who actually slogged through it, even understood most of it, but still admit to hating it. Don't get me wrong - parts of it were pretty entertaining and interesting on their own. The whole, though, was just terrible. I don't want to read a 448 page book just to be able to half-decipher a 783 page mess.
...and I just did a doctoral thesis on Improved Child Porn Distribution Through Client Tracking. Feel free to contact me if you'd like more information.
OK, so you're probably more legit than that, but it was the first thought I had when I read your post.
Slashdot Mirror
My high school used IBM Selectric typewriters. I can't begin to express my frustration at being confronted with Brother or Smith Corona models and not being able to use them. Some of the typewriters I have to use are even labelled "Dell", "Sun", or "Happy Hacking". I sure wish my school had taught me to use the most common typewriters instead of just those old Selectrics; they completely failed to prepare me for the workplace.
P.S. FreeBSD on the server, rah-rah!
Cool, at least it isn't Country, which is what everyone else around here listens to (sigh).
I finally had to buy a Sirius radio so that I could get something other than Clear Channel Country 1 through 7 and AM talk. I feel your pain.
You mean, like them being pro-legislation until someone protested, then deciding to be neutral until the bill had already been voted upon, then changing their mind and becoming pro-legislation again once it was a moot point?
What about it?
You could (invalidly) use that argument against any piece of FOSS when comparing it to a proprietary equivalent: no one would use The GIMP when they can just pirate Photoshop.
The fact that OOo crashes more frequently than Office (and that's an achievement in itself!) matters.
File under "YMMV". OOo doesn't crash for me, so I'll just have to take your word for it.
For professional users, the price doesn't matter either. If it helps me do my job, I'll happily shell out money for it - and Office isn't exactly expensive as far as major companies are concerned...
Other than legacy home-grown application support, I'm not really convinced that Office is significantly better then OOo. Different, sure, but no more than any two versions of Office itself in my experience.
The fact that OSS advocates run around accusing people to be idiots because they disagree doesn't help either.
Except that's not what's happening. I strongly assert that the wide, wide majority of Office users would be perfectly comfortable with OOo but won't try it because it doesn't have a dollar cost. We're accusing people of idiocy when they continue to choose the closed, expensive solution over the Free one for no apparent reason other than "you get what you pay for".
And nobody except Slashdot readers is "realizing that OOo is what you should be using".
Our (Windows-centric) office switched everyone but the bookkeeper (with her Excel scripts) from Office to OOo over a year ago. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that organizations are paying attention and switching in ever-increasing numbers.
In other words, the prerelease beta has a few rough edges but costs $334.95 less.
Yeah, that actually does sound like an Office killer for 99% of potential users. Basically, if you still fork over serious money for an only slightly better office suite without any substantial reasons (like you require VBA support for legacy reasons), you're an idiot and deserve what you get. OpenOffice.org is what pretty much every home or small office should be using, and it looks like people are starting to realize that.
Well, right; that much is fairly self-evident. I think what he's asking, though, is what the advantage is to creating an artificially diverse workplace.
For example, I live in an overwhelmingly (greater than 98%) white city. Would there be any reason my boss should go out of his way to find and hire an unrepresentatively diverse workforce? Are we missing out on something by not having minority representation even though we're stastically unlikely to naturally have one (.98^$NUM_EMPLOYEES is greater than 50%)?
WTF? If their management is 64 levels deep, then Longhorn's release schedule makes much more sense. What are they trying to attain? The Org Chart of Yendor?
To gays: You have our support! ...until next time, but we'll be sure to support you then, honest!
From opposition groups: Hey, you're a business, not a charity! Stick to business-related stuff!
To the world, loudly: Oops! Changed our mind. We're a business, not a charity.
To gays, quietly:
I'd be hard-pressed to imagine a more two-faced reaction to the whole episode. You can't just support something whenever it's popular; either be for it, or against it, or stay out of the discussion altogether.
[plugs ears, clenches eyes tightly] LA LA LA LA LA LA LA
Not necessarily. They could be taking the inverse "seconds per frame" on a per-frame basis, which should be reasonably accurate.
I definitely agree about the HVAC at mild temperatures, especially when it gets in the high 60's / low 70's. Unless you live in someplace where the ambient noise or air quality is unbearable, there's nothing like a fresh 68 degree breeze to make a house feel comfortable.
<nitpick>
I think you meant to say "unless you are a sociopath who doesn't mind driving up everyone's rent by abusing an collectively paid resource...". That's one of the reasons that "free gas! free electricity!" apartments never appealed to me when I was younger; I'm not one of those people who leave the heat cranked and the windows open in January and I didn't want to subsidize them. By the same token, I didn't want everyone to kill me when their rent went up because I had 87 486 boxes and the air conditioning set at 50 to keep the carpet from igniting.
</nitpick>
Jokes aside, KimDaBa is an excellent image database. You create your own tags to apply to each picture or selection, and then search on those tags. I don't know how it'd hold up to huge collections, but since it only stores metadata and not the images themselves, I imagine it'd do pretty well.
Graphical programs don't care about the spaces, and I haven't used a CLI that wouldn't tab-complete spaces by escaping them in years. Given that every tool I've used in this millenium can handle the above without any problems, I don't understand the drive to remove innocent (and helpful) whitespace from filenames.
You know, that's a good point that I'd never really thought about. If setup A runs at 60fps for a minute, and setup B runs at 61fps for a minute but then pauses for a full second, then the mean framerate would be identical. Maybe we should start asking for standard deviation in benchmarks?
Sorry, but I grew up in a decidedly non-ethnic area and am somewhat ignorant in the finer points of coercee etiquette.
Hey, leave me out of this! I can't even get my own articles accepted.
Who cares, as long as they keep doing it?
See, I have roughly zero interest in the latest FPS game ("Jax and Daxter" on PS2 is more my style), but this irrational push for the latest and greatest means that you and I get to buy some amazing year-old hardware for next to nothing. $30 will get you an MX 440. Joe Gamer would look on it with distaste, but it's screamingly fast for the easy work I ask of it. With the upcoming OpenGL desktops, I think it's wonderful that I can get on the bandwagon without shelling out a load of cash.
It's the same reason I want to see every gamer rush out to buy Opterons - I don't need one now, but I'd like them to be cheap by the time I get around to buying one.
Go, gamers, go! Keep loading up on the stuff I'll want a year or two from now!
Do they get to collaborate by adding "You're Not Hired" to the end?
Of all the places you could've chosen, why Merimac Caverns? Are you from the area?
If it's not causing problems with her machine, and it makes her happier to use her own uniquely personalized desktop, why not? I can't stand country music, but I wouldn't advocate a radio that played only jazz...
No. The key tip is to realize that Ulysses is the most over-rated awful piece of "classic" literature ever to become popular. Really, honestly, it was horrible.
There seem to be two main camps among people who've attempted to read Ulysses:
I'm in the small third group who actually slogged through it, even understood most of it, but still admit to hating it. Don't get me wrong - parts of it were pretty entertaining and interesting on their own. The whole, though, was just terrible. I don't want to read a 448 page book just to be able to half-decipher a 783 page mess.
OK, so you're probably more legit than that, but it was the first thought I had when I read your post.
I tried to come up with a witty FireWire joke here, but I just couldn't do it.