Yes! That would be a positive character trait, unless it was annoyingly, distractingly cheap. Picnics in the park are usually at least as tasty as Fine Dining, the imaginary change is good for paying down a hypothetical mortgage...
Check out TheOpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) -- OpenOffice.org is one of the things included. (1.1.3 is the version listed on their site... it would be cool to see a more 'bleeding edge' version, but the project's point is more working, high-quality Free software for Windows, and most -- all? -- of it is cross-platform, so if you can deal with The Gimp, and OO.o, and audacity (etc) on Windows, you might be just as happy using them on Linux, and perhaps have more stability at the same time.)
Installing just about any software for non-computer-types (I say as a just-barely-a-computer-type) can be intimidating, depending on how considerate a job was done of packaging it; you're right that it's rather a mess as provided from the OO.o site, though for the usual (vs. ideal) audience probably not a huge deal.
TheOpenCD makes the install really smooth, though, at least as good as any payware Windows installers I've seen; if you download the ISO and mail or bring it to your mother-in-law, she could probably install it with minimal help. (And it's a handy thing to keep around in case you encounter / need to use a "bare" windows machine without a decent browser, or office suite, or photo-editing tool, or ogg vorbis player...:))
Call me ignorant, but what does KDE have to do with BSD?
Mr. Helmet:
Well, KDE has about as much to do with BSD as it does with Linux:) Popular desktop on both.
My intent was to make it basically in the Linux section (since many more KDE users are using Linux -- I assert, without numbers, just observation, and I could be wrong, and a moose once bit my sister and and and), cross-listed in the BSD section.
A peculiarity of the Slashdot backend means I picked the wrong order / weighting for KDE vs. Linux; I updated the story to fix this. No slight is meant toward Linux users, BSD users, Gnome users, those who enjoy boiled eggs with dill of a winter evening...
I see that a few people have recommended QTorrent; I will second (or 3rd, or 4th...) that recommendation.
See, I am lazy: when I wanted to download something in the form of a torrent, and found that the client that's supposed to be integrated into Firefox on my distro (Mepis) didn't work, complaining about missing wxWindows or somesuch, I did what sanely insane people do. I fired up Synaptic, updated, searched for anything that had "torrent" in its name or description, and installed them all.
Then I used them, one by one. Azureus -- which many people seem to love, and on which I am obviously the farthest thing from an expert! -- I found mildly confusing because I couldn't get it working with a few minutes of futzing (needs more helpfiles, examples, etc, IMO), so went on to the next one, which was QTorrent. QTorrent was simple to get going (passed my 60-second test), so it's my new choice:)
Yes, this is an error, no matter how often it's made:)
It was an oversight - literally - on my part; I corrected the error in the headline as submitted, but the small monitor I was reading on at the time made it hard to see (and I missed) the one in the story text, or I would have changed it when setting up the story. Now fixed.
When I'm traveling, that's one of the few things I bring with my laptop, computerwise. The Marble Mouse (mine is new enough to be USB, old enough to be two flat buttons) is the best, cheapest, smoothest trackball I've been able to find; whenever I plug trackballs, I find people aren't aware they can be good, because they're used to ones that feel clunky and grainy, that are just like mice that have turned over to die.
Much agreed; that's why I couched my mention of a flat/flatter income tax as one possible better-than-now possibility.
Good book on the subject (I'm sick enough right now I'm not even going to google it) is titled something like "why we must abolish the Income tax and dissolve the IRS" and I *think* it's put out by the Cato folks, with whom I often / usually agree.
I find it annoying that *any* software is required to make sense of our tax laws and forms!
Jack Kemp (whatever else you think of him, and I think about him something close to not at all) used to push the "post-card tax return," and a flat tax, or even a flat-tax-with-simple-deductable could be done that way.
Now, I'd rather see all income taxes eliminated, and what taxes must be raised raised via sales taxes, but Hey, I'll take certain lesser goods over certain current evils.
So, however nice and worthy are all employees such things support, I'd like to the need for tax software go away completely, and that's an approachable goal.
(I noted with some disappointment that GWB tested the waters on this before the election, then quickly clammed up about it, while his circle of advisors paddled backwards to assure everyone that he'd never support such a nutty, fair, easy system. Nearly made me vote for him, that did.) The attack of common sense was too brief, though, and too narrow.
Dvorak's claim that users are spoiled by Windows' driver support level has a problem: sometimes Windows driver support is lousy.
There is a lot of hardware that doesn't yet work with Linux (which I wish did); for many people, this is a real downside to Linux as an OS choice right now for two closely linked reasons: 1) it means their existing hardware might not work with Linux, which might mean spending money to replace them if Linux is for other reasons especially attractive 2) When a new device comes out, especially a specialized one they might need in a field like medical imagery, it's likely to come with Windows drivers (if it's designed to interface with an PC, rather than self-contained) but may never work, or may only work with reduced functionality, with Linux.
However, there's another side to the driver problem. Adversity breeds strength; those devices which do work with my installation of Mepis Linux (and which have worked with various other distributions) generally don't need separate driver downloads to make work; my printer, for instance (Lexmark 210e) works under KDE after a 2-minute exercise with an actually decent "wizard" type application. (I loathe those "Wizards" in general, but this one works nicely, isn't condescending, and results in a working printer.)
For reasons unimportant here, I recently had to use a machine running Windows 2000; to make it work with the same printer, I had to find the driver for the printer and install it. (Which, surprising to me, did not require a re-boot. Thanks, that was less unpleasant than I expected.) Likewise, and more annoying, the same was true of an ethernet card I hooked to the same laptop. It came with a driver on floppy; none of my machines have a floppy drive. Luckily, I had a USB thumb drive handy, could download the driver from a different machine, transfer via the thumb drive. The same card is auto-recognized under Linux and Just Works. Perhaps it's also easy traveling with WIndows XP, but I don't have that to compare.
My dad has a color laser printer (Minolta/QMS) which for about half a year would cause his Windows-running computer to get even crummier whenever it was used; Minolta tech support blamed a memory leak in the driver or the spooler software. I think a new driver has solved the problem, but in the free operating system world. the problem *might* have been solved a lot faster; in the time between discovering the gooey performance under Windows and an improved driver, that model of printer actually gained support under CUPS.
I also have some older hardware for which drivers exist for Windows 98 -maybe also 2000-, but not for XP; that means that for many users it would be effectively useless. (Or do those drivers also work in some sort of compatibility mode for XP? Haven't tried, don't know.) Most of it works fine under Linux.
So while it's nice for the buyers of new Windows-centric peripherals that they can install software to make the peripherals work, it's also nice not to be dependent on separate driver software. (Which, Yes, is needed to make some things work under Linux, too -- there's an overlap, clearly.) And for ethernet cards, it's plain annoying.
So while using Linux as my every-day desktop (as I have for the last 6 years) limits my hardware choices, it also means that my printer, scanner, modem, etc. really *are* plug-and-play -- or at least closer than I've ever seen to that ideal under Windows. [Note, YMMV; I find Windows annoying enough that I don't ever deal with it at much of a stretch. The laptop in question will soon be upgraded to a nice Linux install:)]
Not that everyone has the same opportunities, due to lumpiness in the space time continuum, conspiracies run by the Illuminati, the oppression of the proletariat by evil oppressors etc, but for those opportunies each person [outside a survival-only situation] *does* have, there are -- for practical purposes -- an infinite number of possibilities, different ways for them to expend their life energy.
Buy an iPod? Hey, that sounds good! One day I might.
Join a monastery? Hmm. Less appealing, to me, but you might think differently, spend your iPod money on the planefare to your new contemplative existence.
Write and send a postcard? Nah, I'd rather spend the same amount of time sipping some tea over a Dashiell Hammet book today, thanks.
And that's just about things that aren't even immediately related! The point is that we have finite, inexactly known stretches of time on earth and an incalculably wide set of preferences. Things that are closer to each other in form -- one clothing brand versus another, say -- may be more obviously in competition for mindspace (and money), but what about snowboard pants versus special tango-dancin' pants? Are those competitors? To ask that the government of France (or anywhere else) to determine exactly what is in competition with what else (and to what degree) would require magical powers that I more than suspect are far out of its reach.
For a country to pretend that the "market" (or any market) is simple enough to be intelligently or justifiably handicapped with such hamhanded, thought-constricting, interventionist rules comes close to parody. (In the Soviet Union, where the state was supposed to make intelligent choices on behalf of the downtrodden man who would otherwise be exploited by capitalism, it might have been a natural fit, though.)
'No comparisons, just 'this thing is really cool and think of all the cool things you can do with it.'
That part is exactly right. "This thing looks cool, think of the possibilities." If that's a product pitch, I'm... well, that's *not* product pitch, so there's no need to finish that thought.
Comparisons with... what? Other LED-based projectors? Other battery powered tiny projectors? Bring 'em on! I would much rather this post have contained a link to a comparison of several similar or at least functionally overlapping devices. There was a Swedish company promising a similar product a few years ago, but after the mocked-up prototype was shown and a release the following year was promised, I've not heard any more about that. (Though maybe it's selling in European markets.)
Companies want your money, so they make (what they hope are) attractive, interesting products you'll trade money for; this one is attractive and interesting to me -- it's the sort of thing that I've been wishing for since I first saw the pricetags (and expected bulb lives) of conventional projectors. We could refuse to run any news that mentioned an identifiable product or company, as many trollish comments suggest; that seems to be a pretty silly idea, and isn't going to happen.
I have a Lexmark e210, bought three years ago and in (rather light) use since then. Just about plug-n-play (I've generally set it up with the KDE printer control center), well-supported under Linux, built not like a tank but reasonably sturdy and I have no complaints on that count. For $30/year (and going), it's been a good deal:) There are some bum models (not to slag on HP, but some of their tiny "consumer" oriented ones have extensions that looks like they're begging to be snapped off by accident or by naughty teenagers*), but overall, monochrome laser printers are pretty satisfying these days. (And the color ones have plunged in price, too, which is nice to see.)
timothy
* As of a few years ago, anyhow. Not in the market lately...
I've found the same -- and my iBook is 4.5 years old now, too. I was expecting the newer versions of OS X to make it choke, and justify a new one, but Nooooo..... at least, not yet.
"Would there be messy edges? If the copyright infringer makes a profit from their infringement (eg pirate dvds being sold for $5 each in bulk) then copyright law should empower the copyright holder to sue the infringer for lost profit/revenue or whatever."
I'm thinking of a situation like this: a popular song is catchy, danceable, dangles sexy pictures in the listener's subconscious, etc. (You get the idea.) If one 7th grade girl in Des Moines buys the single at the mall, and rips the song, and passes to her brother at college, who shoots it all around the campus network, including to exchange student Tej, who pops it to a cousin in his hometown around the world (etc, etc), it's entirely possible that non-commercial distribution, hand-to-hand "here, listen to this" spreading, could *reduce* the market by removing the incentive to buy.
Yes, this is just what the RIAA argues for even now (lost sales!, they cry), and just what lots of downloaders argue vehemently against, on the basis that downloaded music spurs sales (Yeah, I'd have never bought this album if I hadn't heard it via P2P...well, I'm going to buy it this weekend, when my check clears). Both are right / neither is right, both are wrong / neither are wrong. They're arguing at cross-purposes, and about hard-to-falsify assertions. While the clarification I wish for (which would basically decriminalize casual hand-to-hand copying of music) wouldn't *change* the basic situation (of distributing copyrighted music without benefiting the artist), I think it would make a certain edge messy around just this issue -- it would make it easier to harm (if harm be done) the artist / the recording complex which led to the artist releasing an audio recording, while making it harder to address it legally. I'd still call it a huge gain, but not unalloyed.
The music industry's canard is calling the aggrieved party "the artist" when a potentially salable a CD is unsold, because they don't like to call themselves an industry, and because they like to spuriously equate non-sales with deprivation for the purposes of playing up their "harm" -- they like to pretend that Janet Jackson and Billy Joel are just really popular street performers who happen to sell some recordings of themselves and sometimes sing for large groups, like say, the occupants of central park;) The righteously indignant downloader's canard is to say that since "the artist" gets at best a tiny portion of profits from CD sales, and since the music industry is, like, all effed up and stuff, man, then it's only fair not to give any money to those exploitive music industry executives. More than fair! It's a *tribute* to the hard work of the artist not to give any money to that crummy David Geffen, eh?
Ah well, the whole thing is making me snarky;)
Now I will listen to a CD I bought today at local Goodwill store...
You're right:) A lot of what I said there is perfectly applicable to Free software generally. I like the GPL in particular because it applies to a large chunk of the software I use day to day, but by no means did I mean to exclude or discount other licenses with the same benefits -- I was just responding to the title of the linked article.
I think more because of a natural human tendency to polaraize, exaggerate and simplify than because this is the true situation, the worlds of "pro-" and "anti-" when it comes to this sort of thing are often drawn as two completely incompatible world views, no overlap, nothin'. Either you're an Evil Pirate (arr!) in the eyes of the benevolent and morally impregnable Copyright Holders, or a regressive Copyright Tyrant in the eyes of the Splendid Kids.
Instead, there's a much finer gradation in the real world. I have some music that I've found on the net (most of it in almost certain violation of copyright, but most of it music either not widely available, such as small-run remixes or out-of-print recordings), and I've watched some episodes of TV shows like the Simpsons that my dad's taped over the years. (Before I bought him a boxed set of a couple of seasons, that is.) Some of it's pretty ambiguous -- some laws are a hindrance to perfectly reasonable day-to-day actions, and the law is of necessity always playing catch-up. (And I wouldn't want it *not* to be playing catch-up; the alternative is far scarier.) For instance, I like to listen to old radio shows; many of them are now in the public domain, some of them are of ambiguous copyright, and usually listed (I think quite sincerely) on the websites of collectors with earnest invitations to report if a particular episode thought free and clear is not. I've never been able to work up much moral indignation with myself for listening to widely available audio material that I'd never otherwise encounter.
(And moderate, curious downloading, no matter what the copyright issues, seems qualitatively different to me than proudly downloading current popular music by the bucketload just to fill up Ye Olde iPodde, to "stick it to the Man" or whatever. High-end grocery stores I've been in don't mind customers sampling a grape or two; they know it increases sales either directly or through generated goodwill. That doesn't mean that carting out a case of oranges is the same thing. There are slipper slopes going both ways, I realize, but there are some slippery slopes worth venturing around the upper stretches of, or something.)
Appropriate moderation also applies to the whole concept of copyright. I'm not opposed to copyright (in fact, as societal constructs go, I think it's high on the Good list), but [even / especially] as a rabid free marketeer, I know that copyright is an extended rather than a natural right; the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by contrast, are inalienable. Copyright is different -- it's a societal convention codified in law, to grant certain privileges (temporary monopoly) in exchange for certain later transfers (into the public domain). It shouldn't mean people can't remember and repeat lyrics, and (let me whack an obvious mole), it shouldn't mean that superficial cultural aspects like the words to Happy Birthday are forever off limits to TV characters. Copyright law is perhaps not as broken as patent law, but it needs some overhauling. Specifically, I'd like to see the temporary monopoly bit be clarified as applying specifically to wide-scale copying likely to affect commerical endeavors of the copyright holder. This still leaves messy edges, but ones I think easier to deal with the current system's mess.
With TV, back to the Simpsons box set: I'd not see much moral problem with anything I do (record, re-watch, commerical skip, dub with voices of my relatives, use as the inspiration for a novel) with television shows unless I've explicitly and with full knowledge promised not to do those things. But for certain shows (glad to see Northern Exposure's box sets, and Monk's) I'd *like* to get liner notes, extra features, snippets, outtakes, etc, and paying for them seems fair. [On the other hand, when DVDs are available from the library, is there moral harm in recording them for later watching, before handing them back to the library? For private, non-commerical use, is the maker actually likely to lose revenue fr
Not just in this case, of course, but since it's been raised...
- Apple (or anyone) could make a zero-button mouse, too. And Yes, I know they *have* the "zero-button" / unibody one, but that's not what I mean;) Imagine a mouse whose action was determined by an on-screen "safe zone" of *inaction*, or which was activated not by clicking but by swirling over the screen area of intended action. I'm not advocating it, but if that had become a standard for some reason in 1960, we'd probably still have a few in production, and a clan of defenders noting that it was the greatest / only "real" design.
Mice could (by default / most usually) have a larer number of buttons, like... 6. Maybe six standard functions could be conventionally associated with each, in a certain order going clockwise around. Then, the introduction of the fewer-button button mouse would be a huge controversy, dumbing-down, etc. "Stupid Apple mice only have 4 buttons! That's 2 less than normal!"
I've gotten used to the 2/3 button variety (and you can blame familiarity here, too, but I like a pseudo-three button mouse better than an *actual* 3-button mouse -- that is, I like L+R click for center click). On the other hand, mouse isn't even the right word -- I generally use a trackball rather than a mouse anyhow, maybe it's easier this way.
The fact that Apple software is usually nicely designed and *works well with only one button* is I think the most persuasive argument to be had about whether it's a "good idea" for Apple to make a single-button mouse. The unibutton forces the software makers to make their interfaces compatable with it, reducing one layer of complexity for the user. (No, I'm not saying complexity is evil. No, I'm not saying having more options is bad. Just that sometimes having strictly bounded options makes a complex system more usable for most users, and can make a tool or plaything more pleasant to use than would a hard-to-figure-out interface.)
Of course, people like to argue, so there will always be the "No way, Christina Aguilera is *way* more hot now than Phoebe Cates was when she made Fast TImes at Ridgemont Hight!" crowd, but those people are wrong at two levels:)
timothy
why *I* like the GPL ...
on
Why I Love The GPL
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· Score: 3, Interesting
(a subset, at least)
- I don't like it when my favorite apps go away. Until I have grey hair and fake kidneys I will miss the ultra-fast, ultra-simple WriteNow word processor, which was my high-school-and-college favorite, and which ran fast even on what are now pitifully slow machines. Open source apps may go away, too, but generally there are better, sleeker replacements which (kicker) open the same file formats, because the Unix philosophy and GNU have the same good things about Unix-type things in mind, including saving to plainish formats. (Often possible, rarely the default, with proprietary software).
- I like frequent upgrades and bug fixes. And while it's not the simplest thing to balance, I mostly prefer some instability (as in, trying new versions of Mozilla, especially the versions of 5 years ago, say) with the attendant improvements in the next versions than sticking with, say, Netscape. [insert your own favorite stable-but-moribund application.]
- It's nice to be able to give to friends [F/f]ree software, and to make (however minor) suggestions to developers. Some open source developers are as rude and unaccomodating as typical proprietary software makers are impersonal and stand-offish (and some proprietary makers are downright friendly!), but I've seen small text improvements made in some cases an hour or so after pointing out a spelling or grammar problem on a project web site. That's responsive in a way that giant software makers don't really have the capability to be.
- Related to that last point: I believe that developers have the right to control their invented software. I don't want to use software *against* the wishes of its creators.(1) If you want to write some software to control Whooznit Manufacturing Units (or process words), with secret source, proprietary storage formats, and a very large pricetag, then Fine. I just don't have to use it. GPL- (and BSD-, and many other licenses) licensed software is explicitly free to use and give away. No developer *has* to use such licenses -- they have a range of moral choices open to them -- but I don't want illegally install one copy of Windows on several machines, even if I find it a moral non-issue if I'm the only one using them, and they're only being used one at a time. Easier and saner to use software that is more flexible; I can have Mepis, Knoppix and Red Hat on any / all of several machines,(2) with the full consent of the makers. It's nicer to visit at a friend's place than evade an angry landowner while sleeping in his guest bedroom, especially when he doesn't have a guest bedroom.
timothy
(1) Are there edge cases, and finer points? Yes. For instance, I own DVDs which some aspect of their "creator" -- the DVDCCA that is -- wants me to be unable to watch on a Linux box. Too bad for them, their case doesn't win my mind, so unlike the case of using (for instance) a non-legit copy of Windows, I feel not bad at all about watching movies with Mplayer or Xine. Also, using software illegally is in some cases about as horrifying to me as taking the occasional shortcut through private property. You can believe in the primacy of private property without denying all shades of grey in the world.
(2) Mac OS X is a near exception here; since it's included with (nearly) all the hardware that will happily run it -- as things stand, at least! -- there is no dilemma of trying to put it on my other machines (besides my iBook, that is) without permission. And I wouldn't feel at all bad about the experimentation of running it in a virtual machine on a Linux box, and I suspect no one at Apple would either.
it's not exactly in line with this article ...
on
Microsoft in 2008
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· Score: 3, Interesting
but something I've been thinking and asserting for a few years is that Microsoft, if they wanted to, could easily be the world's largest Open Source company.
Now, with their cash, they could probably also quickly be the world's largest X company for nearly any X;) However, as an entrenched company with experts in all levels of the software world (from marketing and PR to theoretical next-century noodling that one day will be genuine workable technology), this is a not-crazy idea.
Microsoft has adopted to market changes before, and they will in the future. (And then, of course, one day they won't exist any more... dust to dust).
Actually, he does mention this fact, in the second paragraph (first paragraph under the cut on the page), when he writes "(Please note that John Funge is a friend and former coworker of mine. I was pleased to accept John's invitation to review his book.)"
I don't consider this bashing, nor do I (generally) bash Microsoft. Like any big organization, Microsoft has done some things that deserve criticism (adjust tenses to reflect ongoing and future offenses:)), but on the whole I am anything but a Microsoft basher. My 5-second thought on Microsoft is that it is a large, smart, lucky, successful software maker which one day will cease to exist.
Maybe the submitter secretly throws darts at taped-up pictures of MS executives, I don't know:) But my note attached to the story is sincere -- I like that this shows off a fun, exuberant aspect of Microsoft (though it would have been as funny if it was a similar ad from the early days of *any* software maker), and that is what I liked about this little video.
I recently had to fill out a form that required Adope Acrobat Reader 6.something to open properly, a version which is not available for Linux.
(I think the extension is.asx, or maybe.apx -- at any rate, it's got some parts that render correctly, and some that are oh-so-secret and don't appear unless using a new enough AA Reader, by design.)
After no reader in Linux would work, I decided to try it with my iBook. Apple's preview also won't show the hidden parts -- it actually demands AA Reader. Sigh. So I downloaded a new AA Reader 6.02 think, (an obnoxious, screen-stealing application, btw, which makes you appreciate the beauty both of kPDF, Ghostview and other free viewers, and Apple's Preview), thinking, "Hey, I can view it with this, including the hidden parts, and print to a *real* (all displayed) PDF, then email to my Linux box, where I have a working printer...
Even this convoluted path was too much to hope for, because the special encoded PDF didn't allow printing to a PDF, only to paper. Catch-22; you can view this PDF, but don't you try to save it as a PDF!
So, sadly, even PDF can be used to obscure as well as to delight and inform.
I'm not actually arguing with your basic point, but one data point: for me, the "messing about" stage has gotten much smaller / shorter thanks to easy-to-install Linux distros.
At the moment, I'm using ProMepis beta3; flash works, OO.org is not actually MS Office, but in my limited use of Office-created documents, words great, GIMP 2.2 is very sweet (IMO, YMMV). I won't try to convince you about individual pieces of software; we all have deal-breakers in life.
Installing Mepis (and Knoppix, and any similar distro) on typical x86 hardware is just about painless, and gives you buckets of apps built in and well-integrated. I don't visit Windows machines very often, but it certainly seems like a nicer desktop than Windows machines I've used. Aesthetics are individual, of course; I have OS 1X 10.3 on my iBook, and I prefer this (Mepis, mini-ITX) machine as an all-day envirment.
Yes, it can be done, but it's not as simple as a PS/2 --> USB adapter; you have to get one that will actually convert the signal. While that sounds strange (isn't an A an A? Why would the cheap kind work connecting PS/2 keyboards to the USB port on a PC, but not to the USB port on a Mac?), I've reluctantly accepted this through personal experience.
I bought a Mac-friendly PS/2-->USB dongler (with two PS/2 inputs -- for mouse and keyboard -- and one USB output) at a computer show in the U.S. (I think that one was in western Maryland) for about $30; the simpler ones, which will work fine with a PC, are of course much cheaper; I've paid as little as $5 for one of those.
(Why have I bought several? Because I like old, clicky keyboards, which all have PS/2 or AT connections, and I'd rather keep an adapter on each one, so I have a keyboard handy if I construct of acquire a new machine. And I'm not a big fan of laptop keyboards, so I wanted to have a keyboard with my iBook...)
Slashdot Mirror
"Would you date someone cheap?"
...
Yes! That would be a positive character trait, unless it was annoyingly, distractingly cheap. Picnics in the park are usually at least as tasty as Fine Dining, the imaginary change is good for paying down a hypothetical mortgage
timothy
"Why use OpenOffice / When Microsoft Office is free?"
;)
1) Free-as-in-shoplifting isn't quite the same thing
2) Microsoft Office doesn't run on my top two platforms of choice, and I doubt it will anytime soon.
timothy
Check out TheOpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) -- OpenOffice.org is one of the things included. (1.1.3 is the version listed on their site ... it would be cool to see a more 'bleeding edge' version, but the project's point is more working, high-quality Free software for Windows, and most -- all? -- of it is cross-platform, so if you can deal with The Gimp, and OO.o, and audacity (etc) on Windows, you might be just as happy using them on Linux, and perhaps have more stability at the same time.)
... :))
Installing just about any software for non-computer-types (I say as a just-barely-a-computer-type) can be intimidating, depending on how considerate a job was done of packaging it; you're right that it's rather a mess as provided from the OO.o site, though for the usual (vs. ideal) audience probably not a huge deal.
TheOpenCD makes the install really smooth, though, at least as good as any payware Windows installers I've seen; if you download the ISO and mail or bring it to your mother-in-law, she could probably install it with minimal help. (And it's a handy thing to keep around in case you encounter / need to use a "bare" windows machine without a decent browser, or office suite, or photo-editing tool, or ogg vorbis player
Cheers,
timothy
Call me ignorant, but what does KDE have to do with BSD?
:) Popular desktop on both.
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Mr. Helmet:
Well, KDE has about as much to do with BSD as it does with Linux
My intent was to make it basically in the Linux section (since many more KDE users are using Linux -- I assert, without numbers, just observation, and I could be wrong, and a moose once bit my sister and and and), cross-listed in the BSD section.
A peculiarity of the Slashdot backend means I picked the wrong order / weighting for KDE vs. Linux; I updated the story to fix this. No slight is meant toward Linux users, BSD users, Gnome users, those who enjoy boiled eggs with dill of a winter evening
timothy
I see that a few people have recommended QTorrent; I will second (or 3rd, or 4th ...) that recommendation.
:)
See, I am lazy: when I wanted to download something in the form of a torrent, and found that the client that's supposed to be integrated into Firefox on my distro (Mepis) didn't work, complaining about missing wxWindows or somesuch, I did what sanely insane people do. I fired up Synaptic, updated, searched for anything that had "torrent" in its name or description, and installed them all.
Then I used them, one by one. Azureus -- which many people seem to love, and on which I am obviously the farthest thing from an expert! -- I found mildly confusing because I couldn't get it working with a few minutes of futzing (needs more helpfiles, examples, etc, IMO), so went on to the next one, which was QTorrent. QTorrent was simple to get going (passed my 60-second test), so it's my new choice
timothy
Yes, this is an error, no matter how often it's made :)
It was an oversight - literally - on my part; I corrected the error in the headline as submitted, but the small monitor I was reading on at the time made it hard to see (and I missed) the one in the story text, or I would have changed it when setting up the story. Now fixed.
Cheers,
timothy
When I'm traveling, that's one of the few things I bring with my laptop, computerwise. The Marble Mouse (mine is new enough to be USB, old enough to be two flat buttons) is the best, cheapest, smoothest trackball I've been able to find; whenever I plug trackballs, I find people aren't aware they can be good, because they're used to ones that feel clunky and grainy, that are just like mice that have turned over to die.
I wish I'd bought more before the button switch.
timothy
Much agreed; that's why I couched my mention of a flat/flatter income tax as one possible better-than-now possibility.
Good book on the subject (I'm sick enough right now I'm not even going to google it) is titled something like "why we must abolish the Income tax and dissolve the IRS" and I *think* it's put out by the Cato folks, with whom I often / usually agree.
timothy
I find it annoying that *any* software is required to make sense of our tax laws and forms!
Jack Kemp (whatever else you think of him, and I think about him something close to not at all) used to push the "post-card tax return," and a flat tax, or even a flat-tax-with-simple-deductable could be done that way.
Now, I'd rather see all income taxes eliminated, and what taxes must be raised raised via sales taxes, but Hey, I'll take certain lesser goods over certain current evils.
So, however nice and worthy are all employees such things support, I'd like to the need for tax software go away completely, and that's an approachable goal.
(I noted with some disappointment that GWB tested the waters on this before the election, then quickly clammed up about it, while his circle of advisors paddled backwards to assure everyone that he'd never support such a nutty, fair, easy system. Nearly made me vote for him, that did.) The attack of common sense was too brief, though, and too narrow.
timothy
Dvorak's claim that users are spoiled by Windows' driver support level has a problem: sometimes Windows driver support is lousy.
:)]
There is a lot of hardware that doesn't yet work with Linux (which I wish did); for many people, this is a real downside to Linux as an OS choice right now for two closely linked reasons: 1) it means their existing hardware might not work with Linux, which might mean spending money to replace them if Linux is for other reasons especially attractive 2) When a new device comes out, especially a specialized one they might need in a field like medical imagery, it's likely to come with Windows drivers (if it's designed to interface with an PC, rather than self-contained) but may never work, or may only work with reduced functionality, with Linux.
However, there's another side to the driver problem. Adversity breeds strength; those devices which do work with my installation of Mepis Linux (and which have worked with various other distributions) generally don't need separate driver downloads to make work; my printer, for instance (Lexmark 210e) works under KDE after a 2-minute exercise with an actually decent "wizard" type application. (I loathe those "Wizards" in general, but this one works nicely, isn't condescending, and results in a working printer.)
For reasons unimportant here, I recently had to use a machine running Windows 2000; to make it work with the same printer, I had to find the driver for the printer and install it. (Which, surprising to me, did not require a re-boot. Thanks, that was less unpleasant than I expected.) Likewise, and more annoying, the same was true of an ethernet card I hooked to the same laptop. It came with a driver on floppy; none of my machines have a floppy drive. Luckily, I had a USB thumb drive handy, could download the driver from a different machine, transfer via the thumb drive. The same card is auto-recognized under Linux and Just Works. Perhaps it's also easy traveling with WIndows XP, but I don't have that to compare.
My dad has a color laser printer (Minolta/QMS) which for about half a year would cause his Windows-running computer to get even crummier whenever it was used; Minolta tech support blamed a memory leak in the driver or the spooler software. I think a new driver has solved the problem, but in the free operating system world. the problem *might* have been solved a lot faster; in the time between discovering the gooey performance under Windows and an improved driver, that model of printer actually gained support under CUPS.
I also have some older hardware for which drivers exist for Windows 98 -maybe also 2000-, but not for XP; that means that for many users it would be effectively useless. (Or do those drivers also work in some sort of compatibility mode for XP? Haven't tried, don't know.) Most of it works fine under Linux.
So while it's nice for the buyers of new Windows-centric peripherals that they can install software to make the peripherals work, it's also nice not to be dependent on separate driver software. (Which, Yes, is needed to make some things work under Linux, too -- there's an overlap, clearly.) And for ethernet cards, it's plain annoying.
So while using Linux as my every-day desktop (as I have for the last 6 years) limits my hardware choices, it also means that my printer, scanner, modem, etc. really *are* plug-and-play -- or at least closer than I've ever seen to that ideal under Windows. [Note, YMMV; I find Windows annoying enough that I don't ever deal with it at much of a stretch. The laptop in question will soon be upgraded to a nice Linux install
timothy
ideas, products, places to visit ...
Not that everyone has the same opportunities, due to lumpiness in the space time continuum, conspiracies run by the Illuminati, the oppression of the proletariat by evil oppressors etc, but for those opportunies each person [outside a survival-only situation] *does* have, there are -- for practical purposes -- an infinite number of possibilities, different ways for them to expend their life energy.
Buy an iPod? Hey, that sounds good! One day I might.
Join a monastery? Hmm. Less appealing, to me, but you might think differently, spend your iPod money on the planefare to your new contemplative existence.
Write and send a postcard? Nah, I'd rather spend the same amount of time sipping some tea over a Dashiell Hammet book today, thanks.
And that's just about things that aren't even immediately related! The point is that we have finite, inexactly known stretches of time on earth and an incalculably wide set of preferences. Things that are closer to each other in form -- one clothing brand versus another, say -- may be more obviously in competition for mindspace (and money), but what about snowboard pants versus special tango-dancin' pants? Are those competitors? To ask that the government of France (or anywhere else) to determine exactly what is in competition with what else (and to what degree) would require magical powers that I more than suspect are far out of its reach.
For a country to pretend that the "market" (or any market) is simple enough to be intelligently or justifiably handicapped with such hamhanded, thought-constricting, interventionist rules comes close to parody. (In the Soviet Union, where the state was supposed to make intelligent choices on behalf of the downtrodden man who would otherwise be exploited by capitalism, it might have been a natural fit, though.)
timothy
'No comparisons, just 'this thing is really cool and think of all the cool things you can do with it.'
... well, that's *not* product pitch, so there's no need to finish that thought.
... what? Other LED-based projectors? Other battery powered tiny projectors? Bring 'em on! I would much rather this post have contained a link to a comparison of several similar or at least functionally overlapping devices. There was a Swedish company promising a similar product a few years ago, but after the mocked-up prototype was shown and a release the following year was promised, I've not heard any more about that. (Though maybe it's selling in European markets.)
That part is exactly right. "This thing looks cool, think of the possibilities." If that's a product pitch, I'm
Comparisons with
Companies want your money, so they make (what they hope are) attractive, interesting products you'll trade money for; this one is attractive and interesting to me -- it's the sort of thing that I've been wishing for since I first saw the pricetags (and expected bulb lives) of conventional projectors. We could refuse to run any news that mentioned an identifiable product or company, as many trollish comments suggest; that seems to be a pretty silly idea, and isn't going to happen.
timothy
I have a Lexmark e210, bought three years ago and in (rather light) use since then. Just about plug-n-play (I've generally set it up with the KDE printer control center), well-supported under Linux, built not like a tank but reasonably sturdy and I have no complaints on that count. For $30/year (and going), it's been a good deal :) There are some bum models (not to slag on HP, but some of their tiny "consumer" oriented ones have extensions that looks like they're begging to be snapped off by accident or by naughty teenagers*), but overall, monochrome laser printers are pretty satisfying these days. (And the color ones have plunged in price, too, which is nice to see.)
...
timothy
* As of a few years ago, anyhow. Not in the market lately
I've found the same -- and my iBook is 4.5 years old now, too. I was expecting the newer versions of OS X to make it choke, and justify a new one, but Nooooo ..... at least, not yet.
timothy
"Would there be messy edges? If the copyright infringer makes a profit from their infringement (eg pirate dvds being sold for $5 each in bulk) then copyright law should empower the copyright holder to sue the infringer for lost profit/revenue or whatever."
...well, I'm going to buy it this weekend, when my check clears). Both are right / neither is right, both are wrong / neither are wrong. They're arguing at cross-purposes, and about hard-to-falsify assertions. While the clarification I wish for (which would basically decriminalize casual hand-to-hand copying of music) wouldn't *change* the basic situation (of distributing copyrighted music without benefiting the artist), I think it would make a certain edge messy around just this issue -- it would make it easier to harm (if harm be done) the artist / the recording complex which led to the artist releasing an audio recording, while making it harder to address it legally. I'd still call it a huge gain, but not unalloyed.
;) The righteously indignant downloader's canard is to say that since "the artist" gets at best a tiny portion of profits from CD sales, and since the music industry is, like, all effed up and stuff, man, then it's only fair not to give any money to those exploitive music industry executives. More than fair! It's a *tribute* to the hard work of the artist not to give any money to that crummy David Geffen, eh?
;)
...
I'm thinking of a situation like this: a popular song is catchy, danceable, dangles sexy pictures in the listener's subconscious, etc. (You get the idea.) If one 7th grade girl in Des Moines buys the single at the mall, and rips the song, and passes to her brother at college, who shoots it all around the campus network, including to exchange student Tej, who pops it to a cousin in his hometown around the world (etc, etc), it's entirely possible that non-commercial distribution, hand-to-hand "here, listen to this" spreading, could *reduce* the market by removing the incentive to buy.
Yes, this is just what the RIAA argues for even now (lost sales!, they cry), and just what lots of downloaders argue vehemently against, on the basis that downloaded music spurs sales (Yeah, I'd have never bought this album if I hadn't heard it via P2P
The music industry's canard is calling the aggrieved party "the artist" when a potentially salable a CD is unsold, because they don't like to call themselves an industry, and because they like to spuriously equate non-sales with deprivation for the purposes of playing up their "harm" -- they like to pretend that Janet Jackson and Billy Joel are just really popular street performers who happen to sell some recordings of themselves and sometimes sing for large groups, like say, the occupants of central park
Ah well, the whole thing is making me snarky
Now I will listen to a CD I bought today at local Goodwill store
timothy
You're right :) A lot of what I said there is perfectly applicable to Free software generally. I like the GPL in particular because it applies to a large chunk of the software I use day to day, but by no means did I mean to exclude or discount other licenses with the same benefits -- I was just responding to the title of the linked article.
timothy
I think more because of a natural human tendency to polaraize, exaggerate and simplify than because this is the true situation, the worlds of "pro-" and "anti-" when it comes to this sort of thing are often drawn as two completely incompatible world views, no overlap, nothin'. Either you're an Evil Pirate (arr!) in the eyes of the benevolent and morally impregnable Copyright Holders, or a regressive Copyright Tyrant in the eyes of the Splendid Kids.
Instead, there's a much finer gradation in the real world. I have some music that I've found on the net (most of it in almost certain violation of copyright, but most of it music either not widely available, such as small-run remixes or out-of-print recordings), and I've watched some episodes of TV shows like the Simpsons that my dad's taped over the years. (Before I bought him a boxed set of a couple of seasons, that is.) Some of it's pretty ambiguous -- some laws are a hindrance to perfectly reasonable day-to-day actions, and the law is of necessity always playing catch-up. (And I wouldn't want it *not* to be playing catch-up; the alternative is far scarier.) For instance, I like to listen to old radio shows; many of them are now in the public domain, some of them are of ambiguous copyright, and usually listed (I think quite sincerely) on the websites of collectors with earnest invitations to report if a particular episode thought free and clear is not. I've never been able to work up much moral indignation with myself for listening to widely available audio material that I'd never otherwise encounter.
(And moderate, curious downloading, no matter what the copyright issues, seems qualitatively different to me than proudly downloading current popular music by the bucketload just to fill up Ye Olde iPodde, to "stick it to the Man" or whatever. High-end grocery stores I've been in don't mind customers sampling a grape or two; they know it increases sales either directly or through generated goodwill. That doesn't mean that carting out a case of oranges is the same thing. There are slipper slopes going both ways, I realize, but there are some slippery slopes worth venturing around the upper stretches of, or something.)
Appropriate moderation also applies to the whole concept of copyright. I'm not opposed to copyright (in fact, as societal constructs go, I think it's high on the Good list), but [even / especially] as a rabid free marketeer, I know that copyright is an extended rather than a natural right; the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by contrast, are inalienable. Copyright is different -- it's a societal convention codified in law, to grant certain privileges (temporary monopoly) in exchange for certain later transfers (into the public domain). It shouldn't mean people can't remember and repeat lyrics, and (let me whack an obvious mole), it shouldn't mean that superficial cultural aspects like the words to Happy Birthday are forever off limits to TV characters. Copyright law is perhaps not as broken as patent law, but it needs some overhauling. Specifically, I'd like to see the temporary monopoly bit be clarified as applying specifically to wide-scale copying likely to affect commerical endeavors of the copyright holder. This still leaves messy edges, but ones I think easier to deal with the current system's mess.
With TV, back to the Simpsons box set: I'd not see much moral problem with anything I do (record, re-watch, commerical skip, dub with voices of my relatives, use as the inspiration for a novel) with television shows unless I've explicitly and with full knowledge promised not to do those things. But for certain shows (glad to see Northern Exposure's box sets, and Monk's) I'd *like* to get liner notes, extra features, snippets, outtakes, etc, and paying for them seems fair. [On the other hand, when DVDs are available from the library, is there moral harm in recording them for later watching, before handing them back to the library? For private, non-commerical use, is the maker actually likely to lose revenue fr
Not just in this case, of course, but since it's been raised ...
;) Imagine a mouse whose action was determined by an on-screen "safe zone" of *inaction*, or which was activated not by clicking but by swirling over the screen area of intended action. I'm not advocating it, but if that had become a standard for some reason in 1960, we'd probably still have a few in production, and a clan of defenders noting that it was the greatest / only "real" design.
... 6. Maybe six standard functions could be conventionally associated with each, in a certain order going clockwise around. Then, the introduction of the fewer-button button mouse would be a huge controversy, dumbing-down, etc. "Stupid Apple mice only have 4 buttons! That's 2 less than normal!"
:)
- Apple (or anyone) could make a zero-button mouse, too. And Yes, I know they *have* the "zero-button" / unibody one, but that's not what I mean
Mice could (by default / most usually) have a larer number of buttons, like
I've gotten used to the 2/3 button variety (and you can blame familiarity here, too, but I like a pseudo-three button mouse better than an *actual* 3-button mouse -- that is, I like L+R click for center click). On the other hand, mouse isn't even the right word -- I generally use a trackball rather than a mouse anyhow, maybe it's easier this way.
The fact that Apple software is usually nicely designed and *works well with only one button* is I think the most persuasive argument to be had about whether it's a "good idea" for Apple to make a single-button mouse. The unibutton forces the software makers to make their interfaces compatable with it, reducing one layer of complexity for the user. (No, I'm not saying complexity is evil. No, I'm not saying having more options is bad. Just that sometimes having strictly bounded options makes a complex system more usable for most users, and can make a tool or plaything more pleasant to use than would a hard-to-figure-out interface.)
Of course, people like to argue, so there will always be the "No way, Christina Aguilera is *way* more hot now than Phoebe Cates was when she made Fast TImes at Ridgemont Hight!" crowd, but those people are wrong at two levels
timothy
(a subset, at least)
- I don't like it when my favorite apps go away. Until I have grey hair and fake kidneys I will miss the ultra-fast, ultra-simple WriteNow word processor, which was my high-school-and-college favorite, and which ran fast even on what are now pitifully slow machines. Open source apps may go away, too, but generally there are better, sleeker replacements which (kicker) open the same file formats, because the Unix philosophy and GNU have the same good things about Unix-type things in mind, including saving to plainish formats. (Often possible, rarely the default, with proprietary software).
- I like frequent upgrades and bug fixes. And while it's not the simplest thing to balance, I mostly prefer some instability (as in, trying new versions of Mozilla, especially the versions of 5 years ago, say) with the attendant improvements in the next versions than sticking with, say, Netscape. [insert your own favorite stable-but-moribund application.]
- It's nice to be able to give to friends [F/f]ree software, and to make (however minor) suggestions to developers. Some open source developers are as rude and unaccomodating as typical proprietary software makers are impersonal and stand-offish (and some proprietary makers are downright friendly!), but I've seen small text improvements made in some cases an hour or so after pointing out a spelling or grammar problem on a project web site. That's responsive in a way that giant software makers don't really have the capability to be.
- Related to that last point: I believe that developers have the right to control their invented software. I don't want to use software *against* the wishes of its creators.(1) If you want to write some software to control Whooznit Manufacturing Units (or process words), with secret source, proprietary storage formats, and a very large pricetag, then Fine. I just don't have to use it. GPL- (and BSD-, and many other licenses) licensed software is explicitly free to use and give away. No developer *has* to use such licenses -- they have a range of moral choices open to them -- but I don't want illegally install one copy of Windows on several machines, even if I find it a moral non-issue if I'm the only one using them, and they're only being used one at a time. Easier and saner to use software that is more flexible; I can have Mepis, Knoppix and Red Hat on any / all of several machines,(2) with the full consent of the makers. It's nicer to visit at a friend's place than evade an angry landowner while sleeping in his guest bedroom, especially when he doesn't have a guest bedroom.
timothy
(1) Are there edge cases, and finer points? Yes. For instance, I own DVDs which some aspect of their "creator" -- the DVDCCA that is -- wants me to be unable to watch on a Linux box. Too bad for them, their case doesn't win my mind, so unlike the case of using (for instance) a non-legit copy of Windows, I feel not bad at all about watching movies with Mplayer or Xine. Also, using software illegally is in some cases about as horrifying to me as taking the occasional shortcut through private property. You can believe in the primacy of private property without denying all shades of grey in the world.
(2) Mac OS X is a near exception here; since it's included with (nearly) all the hardware that will happily run it -- as things stand, at least! -- there is no dilemma of trying to put it on my other machines (besides my iBook, that is) without permission. And I wouldn't feel at all bad about the experimentation of running it in a virtual machine on a Linux box, and I suspect no one at Apple would either.
but something I've been thinking and asserting for a few years is that Microsoft, if they wanted to, could easily be the world's largest Open Source company.
;) However, as an entrenched company with experts in all levels of the software world (from marketing and PR to theoretical next-century noodling that one day will be genuine workable technology), this is a not-crazy idea.
... dust to dust).
Now, with their cash, they could probably also quickly be the world's largest X company for nearly any X
Microsoft has adopted to market changes before, and they will in the future. (And then, of course, one day they won't exist any more
timothy
Hi, there!
Actually, he does mention this fact, in the second paragraph (first paragraph under the cut on the page), when he writes "(Please note that John Funge is a friend and former coworker of mine. I was pleased to accept John's invitation to review his book.)"
Cheers,
Tim
I don't consider this bashing, nor do I (generally) bash Microsoft. Like any big organization, Microsoft has done some things that deserve criticism (adjust tenses to reflect ongoing and future offenses :)), but on the whole I am anything but a Microsoft basher. My 5-second thought on Microsoft is that it is a large, smart, lucky, successful software maker which one day will cease to exist.
:) But my note attached to the story is sincere -- I like that this shows off a fun, exuberant aspect of Microsoft (though it would have been as funny if it was a similar ad from the early days of *any* software maker), and that is what I liked about this little video.
Maybe the submitter secretly throws darts at taped-up pictures of MS executives, I don't know
Cheers,
timothy
I recently had to fill out a form that required Adope Acrobat Reader 6.something to open properly, a version which is not available for Linux.
.asx, or maybe .apx -- at any rate, it's got some parts that render correctly, and some that are oh-so-secret and don't appear unless using a new enough AA Reader, by design.)
...
(I think the extension is
After no reader in Linux would work, I decided to try it with my iBook. Apple's preview also won't show the hidden parts -- it actually demands AA Reader. Sigh. So I downloaded a new AA Reader 6.02 think, (an obnoxious, screen-stealing application, btw, which makes you appreciate the beauty both of kPDF, Ghostview and other free viewers, and Apple's Preview), thinking, "Hey, I can view it with this, including the hidden parts, and print to a *real* (all displayed) PDF, then email to my Linux box, where I have a working printer
Even this convoluted path was too much to hope for, because the special encoded PDF didn't allow printing to a PDF, only to paper. Catch-22; you can view this PDF, but don't you try to save it as a PDF!
So, sadly, even PDF can be used to obscure as well as to delight and inform.
timothy
I'm not actually arguing with your basic point, but one data point: for me, the "messing about" stage has gotten much smaller / shorter thanks to easy-to-install Linux distros.
At the moment, I'm using ProMepis beta3; flash works, OO.org is not actually MS Office, but in my limited use of Office-created documents, words great, GIMP 2.2 is very sweet (IMO, YMMV). I won't try to convince you about individual pieces of software; we all have deal-breakers in life.
Installing Mepis (and Knoppix, and any similar distro) on typical x86 hardware is just about painless, and gives you buckets of apps built in and well-integrated. I don't visit Windows machines very often, but it certainly seems like a nicer desktop than Windows machines I've used. Aesthetics are individual, of course; I have OS 1X 10.3 on my iBook, and I prefer this (Mepis, mini-ITX) machine as an all-day envirment.
Anyhow --
timothy
Yes, it can be done, but it's not as simple as a PS/2 --> USB adapter; you have to get one that will actually convert the signal. While that sounds strange (isn't an A an A? Why would the cheap kind work connecting PS/2 keyboards to the USB port on a PC, but not to the USB port on a Mac?), I've reluctantly accepted this through personal experience.
...)
I bought a Mac-friendly PS/2-->USB dongler (with two PS/2 inputs -- for mouse and keyboard -- and one USB output) at a computer show in the U.S. (I think that one was in western Maryland) for about $30; the simpler ones, which will work fine with a PC, are of course much cheaper; I've paid as little as $5 for one of those.
(Why have I bought several? Because I like old, clicky keyboards, which all have PS/2 or AT connections, and I'd rather keep an adapter on each one, so I have a keyboard handy if I construct of acquire a new machine. And I'm not a big fan of laptop keyboards, so I wanted to have a keyboard with my iBook
timothy