I believe the command is "sudo update-manager -d" The -d will look to update the distro, and give you the button.
Not true.
The -d flag gives you the latest development release - which will be newly unstable 8.04 any minute now. You may be able to cheat with the -d flag (and get 7.10) for a couple more hours, but in general update manager will automatically show a new distro version when it's ready - probably tomorrow.
Don't get me wrong , I love OO , and use it exclusively, but when we are honest about its weaknesses, its much more clear where the work needs to go.
OO does have weaknesses, that's true. But when we're dishonest about how significant those weaknesses are, and about which things are weaknesses versus simply being different from one specific other office suite then we risk wasting time on trivia and getting drawn into the unwinnable game of being an imperfect copy rather than a high quality piece of software.
A bad review is a bug report and should be treated as such.
And some bug reports are stupid and need to be marked "Invalid".
I can't help being reminded of the 'workgroup' stuff out there that can't work with outlook
You mean like Lotus Notes? Yea, if it's not from Microsoft than no-one in the world could possibly use it.
Sorry, just because your workplace is stuck with a Microsoft Office centric workflow and an Exchange-centric communication infrastructure doesn't mean that everyone else in the world is doomed to that horrible fate too.
But it's not a valid reason for him to post that OpenOffice is unusable crap - and yet every Microsoft Office user who's tried OpenOffice for 10 minutes and had trouble with new ideas seems compelled to post exactly that every time there's an OpenOffice story.
Whenever you're working with non-native closed format export functionality, there *will* be incompatibilities. That's a fact of life that can't be changed. The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.
When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame? Spacing around inserted elements is one of the basic things you can always do in OO.o, and you can even caption the image without inserting a frame around it.
It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.
If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.
People who spend a significant chunk of their time working in a given piece of software tend to get attached to the details of how it does things, regardless of the technical merit of those design decisions.
Your complaints about OO.o are a perfect example of this effect. "Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals"? Clearly this isn't annoying the crap out of the OpenOffice developers (who have to use the program to write any number of internal documents), so it's not a major problem with using the program - so it must be an artifact of your learned workflow.
Now, having trouble unlearning that sort of workflow artifact is a real issue. OpenOffice really will suck for you until you've gotten used to the native workflow for every single task that you do. Let me clarify: Until a Microsoft Office user adapts to OpenOffice almost completely, Microsoft Office really will be marginally better for them.
None of this means anything but the simple fact that OpenOffice, being different from what you have the most experience with, is harder for you personally. You can't get any sort of objective data about other people using the program from a biased sample of one.
merely helped its government intercept phone conversations with (strongly) suspected foreign terrorists.
Basically every single person in the country trusts their private conversations to telecom companies. If a telecom company breaks that trust and shares those conversations with a government agency (without a court-issued warrant), they damn well deserve to lose business over it.
The government breaking the law and private citizens breaking the law are radically different things. The government is an artificial structure defined by the law - if it breaks that law, then it can no longer be trusted to serve it's intended purpose rather than some unwanted purpose. And when a government is serving unwanted and unintended purposes that's a very bad thing.
OpenOffice is not simply an attempt to copy Microsoft Office. It's not supposed to act exactly the same - it's a different program. Before you call anything a "bug", make sure you understand what the program is actually trying to do - some of these things may be wildly useful features that you simply assumed were wrong because they're slightly different.
OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...
What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.
Censorship is horrible, but it doesn't appear to be necessary to create a de-facto totalitarian state. All you need to do is to spread the sense that "everything is OK, and everyone who says otherwise is a liberal wacko / conspiracy theorist" and you can have your totalitarian policies right out in the open. Actually, historically, full-fledged censorship seems to be more of an endgame play of totalitarian states after freedom is already gone rather than an early step in subverting a free society.
That's becoming the most cliche ad-hominem attack ever.
I'd personally like to suggest a Goodwin-esque rule for "tin-foil hat". Anyone who makes fun of the other guy's tin-foil hat loses the argument for his side.
If you want to use the iLife and iWork software, then you obviously need a Mac to do that. Just remember that a MacBook is *not* the appropriate hardware to run Linux or Solaris - on the off chance that you decide what you really wanted was KOffice, Gnome Office, or some other better-on-*nix software.
If you get Linux on hardware that works (sort of like getting OS X on hardware that works, except more hardware is commercially supported on Linux), then neither of these things (wireless / DVD playback) eare problems. They're only really issues when you take a "Designed for Windows" machine and hope that it happens to have 100% Linux-compatible hardware.
There are a number of existing free software POS apps. I'd suggest going through the list with a fine tooth comb and making sure that none of them even comes close to meeting your needs before trying to start a new project.
Those are all neat points. Someone makes them every time this discussion comes up. Here are some responses:
Sure, with "viewable source" it's possible to audit. With free/open source software people are actually motivated to dedicate a bunch of their time to doing that sort of thing.
Sure, you can go on forever with the spy vs. spy of shipping maliciously altered binaries. That doesn't change the fact that people who ship hidden-source propretary software are hiding *everything* - which is very suspicious. Even for something like PGP, it's illegal to distribute unofficial binaries so people aren't usually building and distributing versions from clean source to make it easy to notice a difference.
Yea, all software has bugs. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be less trusting of software who's source is suspiciously hidden or software known to have questionable features that can't be legally removed.
Putting a GPL license on something doesn't automatically make it pure and holy.
Nope, but at least it means that you can check for malicious features if you want to.
Take PGP Whole Disk Encryption for example. There was a questionable feature recently and we can't look to see if there were more. If the source were published, someone considering the software could audit it to see if there are any other questionable features.
Let me just get it straight. It's easier for you to accept that PGP has a malicious backdoor than it is to accept that they have a sensible feature that is quite useful (if ill-documented, but apparently it's mentioned in the knowledge base)?
With propretary software, there's no way to know. It could have any number of malicious or ill-conceived/insecure features. Why risk it?
IPv6 will be no better if we make the same mistakes, we'll use up all the IP addresses just as fast.
That's absurd. IPv4 doesn't even have enough IP addresses for everyone on the planet - much less enough IP addresses for each person to have more than one device.
There are horrible hacks like NAT that can be used to get around that simple fact, but that gets really ugly really fast - hell, it's *already* ugly and all we're trying to do is stuff like VoiP telephone calls and P2P file sharing with it.
IPv6 allows us to reliably assign 1 IP address per device (which is how IP networks are supposed to work). Compared to the nightmares of trying to do it some other way, a little bit of conversion pain is basically irrelevant.
There seems to be a huge resistance to paying anything other than a flat fee for internet access.
And yet paying per minute for cellphone usage is considered normal.
In any case, this is a campus network we're talking about, and I'm basically only suggesting charging for very high usage (the sort of thing they *might* cut a user off for "abuse" for now). The real resistance to this sort of policy is twofold: First, they don't want to deal with billing. Second, they don't want to deal with student/parent complaints after billing. Personally, I'd much rather be able to send out a bill and then say RTFM when the complaint comes in than having to cut off students and then deal with their ridiculous excuses for downloading 100 gigs in a day or whatever before turning them back on just to overuse bandwidth again.
Who buys government bonds? Who buys stock in banks that issue loans?
These probably aren't exactly the same groups of people, but I don't think it cleanly breaks down to "normal citizens" and "the evil banker elite". In fact, knowing exactly who was making money off interest in our economic system would be really interesting.
Hmm... apparently I wasn't quite as clear as I was trying to be.
My school charges me a $70/semester telecom fee. In exchange for that, I get network access.
For that $20+/month ($70/semester), my school should be able to deliver service at least as good as a somewhat more expensive home user connection due to economies of scale. They usually do - which is apparently praise-worthy compared to schools that can't even handle some students playing Halo 3. Unfortunately, my school still has a has a Comcast-esque "use too much bandwidth (we won't tell you what's too much) and you get cut off" policy.
If the network admins at my school were a little bit more useful, they could allow students to use whatever bandwidth we wanted to. All they would have to do is A.) set up QOS properly to prevent high-bandwidth users from degrading low-latency applications and B.) charge for high bandwidth usage. I haven't needed the bandwidth that badly so I haven't really pushed this idea with the network admins, but it really seems like the cleanest solution to the problem.
Note that charging reasonable fees for excess bandwidth usage is really important. It provides the right incentives for the parties involved - Students who don't really want the bandwidth won't use it (but students who want to do something useful won't be discouraged by the small fees), and when the bandwidth does get used the school will be happy because they'll collect the money to pay the upstream provider and probably a bit more to go in the "network upgrades" fund for when YouTube goes High Def.
Is it not possible, or LIKELY though that the hacks rely on a security hole, that the firmware update fixes the security hole, leaving software that depended on it dead, and bricking the unit??
A software property that allows a user to use their own device in the manner of their choosing isn't a "security hole", it's "basic functionality". Apple pushing a patch to remove functionality in a manner that they know will cause their customer's phones to be rendered unusable should be considered unacceptable.
Nevertheless, I can't feel too bad for the victims here. They knew that the iPhone was proprietary crap that Apple expected to control - they had to go out of their way to get it "unlocked" before they could use it. Basically all they deserve here is a "Ha Ha! I told you so".
All used human languages should be 'turing complete' and therefore equally 'powerful' at expressing anything a human needs to express.
Great metaphor; note that it doesn't exclude some languages from being more suited to use in a given domain than others. Just because it's *possible* to express a given idea in a language doesn't mean that it's simple to do so - and people are much more likely to do things that are easy for them.
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Not true.
The -d flag gives you the latest development release - which will be newly unstable 8.04 any minute now. You may be able to cheat with the -d flag (and get 7.10) for a couple more hours, but in general update manager will automatically show a new distro version when it's ready - probably tomorrow.
OO does have weaknesses, that's true. But when we're dishonest about how significant those weaknesses are, and about which things are weaknesses versus simply being different from one specific other office suite then we risk wasting time on trivia and getting drawn into the unwinnable game of being an imperfect copy rather than a high quality piece of software.
And some bug reports are stupid and need to be marked "Invalid".
You mean like Lotus Notes? Yea, if it's not from Microsoft than no-one in the world could possibly use it.
Sorry, just because your workplace is stuck with a Microsoft Office centric workflow and an Exchange-centric communication infrastructure doesn't mean that everyone else in the world is doomed to that horrible fate too.
But it's not a valid reason for him to post that OpenOffice is unusable crap - and yet every Microsoft Office user who's tried OpenOffice for 10 minutes and had trouble with new ideas seems compelled to post exactly that every time there's an OpenOffice story.
Whenever you're working with non-native closed format export functionality, there *will* be incompatibilities. That's a fact of life that can't be changed. The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.
When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame? Spacing around inserted elements is one of the basic things you can always do in OO.o, and you can even caption the image without inserting a frame around it.
If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.
People who spend a significant chunk of their time working in a given piece of software tend to get attached to the details of how it does things, regardless of the technical merit of those design decisions.
Your complaints about OO.o are a perfect example of this effect. "Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals"? Clearly this isn't annoying the crap out of the OpenOffice developers (who have to use the program to write any number of internal documents), so it's not a major problem with using the program - so it must be an artifact of your learned workflow.
Now, having trouble unlearning that sort of workflow artifact is a real issue. OpenOffice really will suck for you until you've gotten used to the native workflow for every single task that you do. Let me clarify: Until a Microsoft Office user adapts to OpenOffice almost completely, Microsoft Office really will be marginally better for them.
None of this means anything but the simple fact that OpenOffice, being different from what you have the most experience with, is harder for you personally. You can't get any sort of objective data about other people using the program from a biased sample of one.
Basically every single person in the country trusts their private conversations to telecom companies. If a telecom company breaks that trust and shares those conversations with a government agency (without a court-issued warrant), they damn well deserve to lose business over it.
The government breaking the law and private citizens breaking the law are radically different things. The government is an artificial structure defined by the law - if it breaks that law, then it can no longer be trusted to serve it's intended purpose rather than some unwanted purpose. And when a government is serving unwanted and unintended purposes that's a very bad thing.
OpenOffice is not simply an attempt to copy Microsoft Office. It's not supposed to act exactly the same - it's a different program. Before you call anything a "bug", make sure you understand what the program is actually trying to do - some of these things may be wildly useful features that you simply assumed were wrong because they're slightly different.
What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.
This isn't "capitalism", this is "corruption". And that's true wherever it's happening.
Censorship is horrible, but it doesn't appear to be necessary to create a de-facto totalitarian state. All you need to do is to spread the sense that "everything is OK, and everyone who says otherwise is a liberal wacko / conspiracy theorist" and you can have your totalitarian policies right out in the open. Actually, historically, full-fledged censorship seems to be more of an endgame play of totalitarian states after freedom is already gone rather than an early step in subverting a free society.
That's becoming the most cliche ad-hominem attack ever.
I'd personally like to suggest a Goodwin-esque rule for "tin-foil hat". Anyone who makes fun of the other guy's tin-foil hat loses the argument for his side.
Can you give an example where globally replacing "y" with "i" would be ambiguous?
If you want to use the iLife and iWork software, then you obviously need a Mac to do that. Just remember that a MacBook is *not* the appropriate hardware to run Linux or Solaris - on the off chance that you decide what you really wanted was KOffice, Gnome Office, or some other better-on-*nix software.
If you get Linux on hardware that works (sort of like getting OS X on hardware that works, except more hardware is commercially supported on Linux), then neither of these things (wireless / DVD playback) eare problems. They're only really issues when you take a "Designed for Windows" machine and hope that it happens to have 100% Linux-compatible hardware.
You probably are re-inventing the wheel.
There are a number of existing free software POS apps. I'd suggest going through the list with a fine tooth comb and making sure that none of them even comes close to meeting your needs before trying to start a new project.
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=point+of+sale§ion=projects&Go.x=0&Go.y=0
Those are all neat points. Someone makes them every time this discussion comes up. Here are some responses:
Nope, but at least it means that you can check for malicious features if you want to.
Take PGP Whole Disk Encryption for example. There was a questionable feature recently and we can't look to see if there were more. If the source were published, someone considering the software could audit it to see if there are any other questionable features.
With propretary software, there's no way to know. It could have any number of malicious or ill-conceived/insecure features. Why risk it?
That's absurd. IPv4 doesn't even have enough IP addresses for everyone on the planet - much less enough IP addresses for each person to have more than one device.
There are horrible hacks like NAT that can be used to get around that simple fact, but that gets really ugly really fast - hell, it's *already* ugly and all we're trying to do is stuff like VoiP telephone calls and P2P file sharing with it.
IPv6 allows us to reliably assign 1 IP address per device (which is how IP networks are supposed to work). Compared to the nightmares of trying to do it some other way, a little bit of conversion pain is basically irrelevant.
And yet paying per minute for cellphone usage is considered normal.
In any case, this is a campus network we're talking about, and I'm basically only suggesting charging for very high usage (the sort of thing they *might* cut a user off for "abuse" for now). The real resistance to this sort of policy is twofold: First, they don't want to deal with billing. Second, they don't want to deal with student/parent complaints after billing. Personally, I'd much rather be able to send out a bill and then say RTFM when the complaint comes in than having to cut off students and then deal with their ridiculous excuses for downloading 100 gigs in a day or whatever before turning them back on just to overuse bandwidth again.
Who buys government bonds? Who buys stock in banks that issue loans?
These probably aren't exactly the same groups of people, but I don't think it cleanly breaks down to "normal citizens" and "the evil banker elite". In fact, knowing exactly who was making money off interest in our economic system would be really interesting.
Hmm... apparently I wasn't quite as clear as I was trying to be.
My school charges me a $70/semester telecom fee. In exchange for that, I get network access.
For that $20+/month ($70/semester), my school should be able to deliver service at least as good as a somewhat more expensive home user connection due to economies of scale. They usually do - which is apparently praise-worthy compared to schools that can't even handle some students playing Halo 3. Unfortunately, my school still has a has a Comcast-esque "use too much bandwidth (we won't tell you what's too much) and you get cut off" policy.
If the network admins at my school were a little bit more useful, they could allow students to use whatever bandwidth we wanted to. All they would have to do is A.) set up QOS properly to prevent high-bandwidth users from degrading low-latency applications and B.) charge for high bandwidth usage. I haven't needed the bandwidth that badly so I haven't really pushed this idea with the network admins, but it really seems like the cleanest solution to the problem.
Note that charging reasonable fees for excess bandwidth usage is really important. It provides the right incentives for the parties involved - Students who don't really want the bandwidth won't use it (but students who want to do something useful won't be discouraged by the small fees), and when the bandwidth does get used the school will be happy because they'll collect the money to pay the upstream provider and probably a bit more to go in the "network upgrades" fund for when YouTube goes High Def.
A software property that allows a user to use their own device in the manner of their choosing isn't a "security hole", it's "basic functionality". Apple pushing a patch to remove functionality in a manner that they know will cause their customer's phones to be rendered unusable should be considered unacceptable.
Nevertheless, I can't feel too bad for the victims here. They knew that the iPhone was proprietary crap that Apple expected to control - they had to go out of their way to get it "unlocked" before they could use it. Basically all they deserve here is a "Ha Ha! I told you so".
Great metaphor; note that it doesn't exclude some languages from being more suited to use in a given domain than others. Just because it's *possible* to express a given idea in a language doesn't mean that it's simple to do so - and people are much more likely to do things that are easy for them.