I'm not sure that's a reasonable question. A more reasonable question is, does it replace the features in Outlook that you actually use?
I have had to use Outlook for email in most organisations I've worked for (and out of the Office suite it is the only one I actually use regularly); admittedly I'm a developer and am therefore not a typical Office user, however I probably only used 50% of its functionality - basic email (with formatting), meeting requests, some very basic scheduling and task management. Not every user's usage of Outlook is going to be that simplistic but I would bet that one of the applications above would meet all of the needs of many users.
On the other hand, one massive hole that is still not really filled (although it is still being actively worked on) is Exchange connectivity, and I would imagine this would be a showstopper for adoption in many offices.
It'll definitely open documents that Office can't; however as for OOo Writer being able to save changes to documents in docx format without corrupting them, that's another story - at least anecdotally in my case. I got bitten just the other night - when I reopened a docx file I had previously edited I discovered that an entire table I had filled with text had vanished, much to my chagrin. As I had a requirement to fill in the document I had no choice but to find a Windows machine and use Word to edit it.
Now, maybe I wasn't using the absolute latest and greatest version of OOo (3.2, Go-OO version - actually, Writer 3.2.0-7ubuntu4.1 to be exact), and it did warn me initially about saving in a non-native format, but still, I was very frustrated by the loss. I hope this is the sort of thing they are working on.
Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
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· Score: 1
In most situations you'd be right. However, Microsoft has a monopoly and that changes everything. In the current market as an OEM (of PCs at least) you pretty much *are* forced to buy from them or remain a small-time player.
I think however that at some point you have to stand back and look at why you are trying to create a standard. The answer *ought* to be "for the good of the consumer, by way of creating a well-known benchmark, and therefore by extension the good of the industry". The second important realisation is that you achieve the most broad adoption of that standard (surely an important thing, if you are really serious about establishing the standard) by making it as easily available and implementable as you can. Imposing extra barriers such as fees and/or patents does the opposite.
Now, I'm willing to accept that standards organisations (or perhaps, their individual member organisations) don't necessarily think this way. I think they should, though.
Are you sure this is true? Last I checked, a fair bit of the software supplied with the Maemo OS was not open source. Not to mention that a number of high profile third-party Maemo applications aren't open source either.
I have an N800, and they're great devices, but finding this out after I bought it was a great disappointment.
OK, so let's deconstruct this point by point. I've left one or two points out where I have no specific comments.
0. Premise: proprietary software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but complicated software like games, 3D applications, databases, CADs(Computer-aided Design), etc. which cost millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be open sourced. Software patents are about to stay forever.
Bold predictions indeed. True, I think proprietary software will remain, particularly in the vertical market; however a certain segment of software will become commoditised (arguably some of it already has been) and therefore users will expect it to be free or priced lower than cost.
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
1.1 Insanely difficult to set up volume levels, audio recording... and in some situations even audio output.
1.2 Highly confusing, not self-explanatory mixer settings.
1.3 By default many distros do not set volume levels properly (no audio output/no sound recording).
Couldn't agree more here. ALSA has improved audio in a few areas but in all other aspects, from a user perspective it has only made things more difficult. Someone else commented recently on Slashdot regarding the BSD approach to this problem, it sounds like they have done a lot better by staying with/improving OSS. I really wish someone would stand up and take charge of improving Linux's core audio infrastructure instead of putting band-aids like PulseAudio on top.
2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.
I'm not sure this is really as bad as is made out. In between major releases, Qt and Gtk both take backwards compatibility very seriously. Qt at least is a commercial product, they have a commitment to maintain compatibility.
2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers on top of OpenGL).
Too general to respond to - can hardly be true for all machines.
2.3 Many GUI operations are not accelerated. No analogue of GDI or GDI+. Text antialiasing and other GUI operations are software rendered by GUI libraries (GTK->Cairo/QT->Xft).
I thought that was the point of Cairo... ? Not my area of expertise though.
2.5 No double buffering.
No explanation of how this is relevant to an end user.
3.1 No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Honestly I don't think the average user is really going to care where a configuration tool stores its settings as long as it works; only a power user or developer would. Of course it would be nice if people would use the same tools. However, although it's taken quite some time to work in all situations, NetworkManager has vastly improved network configuration ease of use and has been adopted by many distributions.
3.2 No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
True, but arguably as far as the packaging alone is concerned, if you target RPM and deb you're going to cover most of the distributions that actually matter to end users.
3.3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using./config
Simply pay the commercial operators a fixed fee negotiated based on the capacity of their prison. This effectively means they make less profit the more prisoners they have to incarcerate. Of course, you'd have to get them to agree to those terms, and if you assume some level of corruption will always occur then it might result in larger prisons being built than necessary. It would lessen the likelihood of people being sent to jail unnecessarily as a result of corruption, however.
The Golgotha source did get released when the company producing it closed down. It's not exactly a success story though since apparently nobody completed the game based on the released material.
Yeah, and just see how far you get with a liability claim against almost any proprietary software vendor. They will just point to their EULA, which you must have agreed to in order to use their software, that disclaims any and all liability on their part. So you can't really hold them responsible, not in a legal sense.
If they're not breaching the terms of the licences under which the software they use was issued, then they are not "stealing" at all. Besides, as far as Google is concerned, for all their closed development and secrecy they do actually give *a lot* back to the community in the form of Summer of Code and many other initiatives.
Sorry to be a pedant, but the "I don't care!" line is spoken by a US Marshal. His job is not to investigate crimes, it's simply to apprehend fugitives, hence his response.
I'm not positive, but if you ask me the best place to report bugs in Kontact would be the KDE bug tracker rather than Launchpad. I'm not sure that many resources are directed into managing Launchpad bugs, particularly in KDE software that is not part of the Ubuntu core. Heck, I've seen bugs in core elements (such as wireless) that seem to sit unsolved and even apparently unnoticed in Launchpad for long periods.
Slashdot Mirror
Good lord. "Your CDFs" - really? Or do they actually belong to Wolfram?
Please, sir, what language do Amrecians speak?
Elngish, of course.
Nearly $500, and they still can't manage to put a locking tab protector on it.
You would probably be denied your insurance claim at the very least. It might not be liability, but it might at least be be "contributory negligence".
(IANAL, etc.)
Neither was Dr. Sbaitso - it was really just a simple Eliza-style program. The fun part was the text-to-speech.
Oh, and don't forget The Big Bang Theory. Classic.
WHEATON!!!!!
I'm not sure that's a reasonable question. A more reasonable question is, does it replace the features in Outlook that you actually use?
I have had to use Outlook for email in most organisations I've worked for (and out of the Office suite it is the only one I actually use regularly); admittedly I'm a developer and am therefore not a typical Office user, however I probably only used 50% of its functionality - basic email (with formatting), meeting requests, some very basic scheduling and task management. Not every user's usage of Outlook is going to be that simplistic but I would bet that one of the applications above would meet all of the needs of many users.
On the other hand, one massive hole that is still not really filled (although it is still being actively worked on) is Exchange connectivity, and I would imagine this would be a showstopper for adoption in many offices.
It'll definitely open documents that Office can't; however as for OOo Writer being able to save changes to documents in docx format without corrupting them, that's another story - at least anecdotally in my case. I got bitten just the other night - when I reopened a docx file I had previously edited I discovered that an entire table I had filled with text had vanished, much to my chagrin. As I had a requirement to fill in the document I had no choice but to find a Windows machine and use Word to edit it.
Now, maybe I wasn't using the absolute latest and greatest version of OOo (3.2, Go-OO version - actually, Writer 3.2.0-7ubuntu4.1 to be exact), and it did warn me initially about saving in a non-native format, but still, I was very frustrated by the loss. I hope this is the sort of thing they are working on.
And if you do, why not just use Sqllite?
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi#Why_not_use_sqlite.3F
In most situations you'd be right. However, Microsoft has a monopoly and that changes everything. In the current market as an OEM (of PCs at least) you pretty much *are* forced to buy from them or remain a small-time player.
Also, don't miss the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall (actually part of the Imperial War Museum).
Agreed, the n800 doesn't look like it will fit in your pocket but it fits in my jeans pocket just fine.
I think however that at some point you have to stand back and look at why you are trying to create a standard. The answer *ought* to be "for the good of the consumer, by way of creating a well-known benchmark, and therefore by extension the good of the industry". The second important realisation is that you achieve the most broad adoption of that standard (surely an important thing, if you are really serious about establishing the standard) by making it as easily available and implementable as you can. Imposing extra barriers such as fees and/or patents does the opposite.
Now, I'm willing to accept that standards organisations (or perhaps, their individual member organisations) don't necessarily think this way. I think they should, though.
everything open source
Are you sure this is true? Last I checked, a fair bit of the software supplied with the Maemo OS was not open source. Not to mention that a number of high profile third-party Maemo applications aren't open source either.
I have an N800, and they're great devices, but finding this out after I bought it was a great disappointment.
You do realise that *loads* of drivers currently in the Linux kernel were written by developers working under NDAs from manufacturers, right?
OK, so let's deconstruct this point by point. I've left one or two points out where I have no specific comments.
0. Premise: proprietary software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally,
but complicated software like games, 3D applications, databases, CADs(Computer-aided Design),
etc. which cost millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be open sourced.
Software patents are about to stay forever.
Bold predictions indeed. True, I think proprietary software will remain, particularly in the vertical market; however a certain segment of software will become commoditised (arguably some of it already has been) and therefore users will expect it to be free or priced lower than cost.
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
1.1 Insanely difficult to set up volume levels, audio recording ... and in some situations even audio output.
1.2 Highly confusing, not self-explanatory mixer settings.
1.3 By default many distros do not set volume levels properly (no audio output/no sound recording).
Couldn't agree more here. ALSA has improved audio in a few areas but in all other aspects, from a user perspective it has only made things more difficult. Someone else commented recently on Slashdot regarding the BSD approach to this problem, it sounds like they have done a lot better by staying with/improving OSS. I really wish someone would stand up and take charge of improving Linux's core audio infrastructure instead of putting band-aids like PulseAudio on top.
2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.
I'm not sure this is really as bad as is made out. In between major releases, Qt and Gtk both take backwards compatibility very seriously. Qt at least is a commercial product, they have a commitment to maintain compatibility.
2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers on top of OpenGL).
Too general to respond to - can hardly be true for all machines.
2.3 Many GUI operations are not accelerated. No analogue of GDI or GDI+. Text antialiasing and other GUI operations are software rendered by GUI libraries (GTK->Cairo/QT->Xft).
I thought that was the point of Cairo... ? Not my area of expertise though.
2.5 No double buffering.
No explanation of how this is relevant to an end user.
3.1 No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Honestly I don't think the average user is really going to care where a configuration tool stores its settings as long as it works; only a power user or developer would. Of course it would be nice if people would use the same tools. However, although it's taken quite some time to work in all situations, NetworkManager has vastly improved network configuration ease of use and has been adopted by many distributions.
3.2 No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
True, but arguably as far as the packaging alone is concerned, if you target RPM and deb you're going to cover most of the distributions that actually matter to end users.
3.3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using ./config
It doesn't work well on low-end hardware on which Windows XP will still run smoothly.
Which is a moot point since we're talking about ARM, on which Windows XP will not run.
Simply pay the commercial operators a fixed fee negotiated based on the capacity of their prison. This effectively means they make less profit the more prisoners they have to incarcerate. Of course, you'd have to get them to agree to those terms, and if you assume some level of corruption will always occur then it might result in larger prisons being built than necessary. It would lessen the likelihood of people being sent to jail unnecessarily as a result of corruption, however.
They weren't the only ones. nationalrail.co.uk refused to deal with January 1 yesterday, complaining that it was in the past.
The Golgotha source did get released when the company producing it closed down. It's not exactly a success story though since apparently nobody completed the game based on the released material.
Yeah, and just see how far you get with a liability claim against almost any proprietary software vendor. They will just point to their EULA, which you must have agreed to in order to use their software, that disclaims any and all liability on their part. So you can't really hold them responsible, not in a legal sense.
"What?"
If they're not breaching the terms of the licences under which the software they use was issued, then they are not "stealing" at all. Besides, as far as Google is concerned, for all their closed development and secrecy they do actually give *a lot* back to the community in the form of Summer of Code and many other initiatives.
Sorry to be a pedant, but the "I don't care!" line is spoken by a US Marshal. His job is not to investigate crimes, it's simply to apprehend fugitives, hence his response.
I'm not positive, but if you ask me the best place to report bugs in Kontact would be the KDE bug tracker rather than Launchpad. I'm not sure that many resources are directed into managing Launchpad bugs, particularly in KDE software that is not part of the Ubuntu core. Heck, I've seen bugs in core elements (such as wireless) that seem to sit unsolved and even apparently unnoticed in Launchpad for long periods.