Not in my experience. Hold on I wrote this down somewhere.. Mar 21, 2005 KDE 3.4 Boot into KDE, no apps started 63MB used (with JPG wallpaper) (yeah I'm a nerd) But anyway, by your metric Windows fully booted uses 21.5 MB of RAM? I somehow doubt it.
By the way, above measurements were on Debian unstable.
I'm not saying I agree with everything that James says in the article. For example, this statement is pretty silly "citizens who want to take advantage of online services will potentially have to purchase, install and learn new software to comply with the policy." if the most prominent suite supporting OpenDocument is free. His point about training is perfectly valid though.
Also, in the next paragraph, James states that support for assistive technologies is not as good in Openoffice. I work at an organization that develops devices for the disabled, and I've seen this first hand. Accessibility support in the open source apps that I've looked at is generally poor. Firefox kind of works with the Microsoft Active Accessibility framework, but it has many oddities that make it hard to work with. Same goes for OpenOffice
Spending a lot of money to replace the existing systems with some Opendocument thing seems to me like the choice to rewrite a software project. As a developer, I know it is often tempting to rewrite an application because something about the design bothers you, and you think there could be benefits by rewriting from scratch. In the end though, it is almost always a bad idea to go ahead with the rewrite. Costs too much, takes too long.
I think the switch will eventually happen, but lets wait until we can say that the opensource replacements are demonstrateably superior.
Microsoft shill or not, I think this James guy has a point. I don't think anyone can really deny that openoffice is just not as advanced as the MS Office suite. Sure openoffice has several key advantages, but the local bureaucrat is not going to care that openoffice runs on multiple platforms when they're stuck on windows and suddenly can't properly load documents.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to work, but I just don't see it happening. Openoffice just isn't that good yet. (Unless there is another mature office suite supporting Opendocument and importing MS Word that runs on windows). Even for my own personal use, which is a couple letters, a couple presentations, and a couple lab reports, Openoffice is a pain to use. I use it almost exclusively when I can, mostly because I don't want to pirate MS Office anymore, but I routinely run into things that are harder or impossible to do in Openoffice than in MS Office.
So yeah, good luck Massachusetts, I hope you succeed, but I wouldn't count on it.
I love gmail, but one thing annoys me about it. I use my account for a lot of high traffic mailing lists, which get automatically labelled by gmail when I receive them. So its great that I can click on the label to see all the emails from that list, but how do I see emails that haven't been labelled? My inbox is filled with hundreds of emails from mailing list, and if I'm not careful, regular email gets lost in the mess. Is there any way to do something like "view all emails without labels"?
Sure, everyone wants a free lunch. But opensource is not a free lunch. It doesn't matter if that is what it means for most people, it still isn't what opensource software is about. Lots of people having free software and not caring about where it came from is a side effect of open source, not its primary goal.
True, I remember that demo. But when you get down to it, what is that good for in real life? Do I ever play 6 videos at the same time on a cube? Do I ever watch a DVD while at the same time moving the video window around the screen like a maniac? Hell no. Any sane person watches one video at a time and that person won't notice the difference between BeOS or any other system.
I tried BeOS back in the 4.5 days and sure it booted ridiculously quickly, but when you got there all you could do was twiddle your thumbs and sit around (albeit sitting and twiddling very fast).
That's cool, and I respect your anecdote, but you have to acknowledge that your experience is obviously not typical. Yes, it's bad that you had such a shit experience with linux, but if this was a common issue, or even anything more than extremely rare issue, no one would be using Linux.
So who knows why your linux install went so badly; weird interaction with the hardware, obscure bug in slackware 10.1, who knows.. But indicative of the general linux experience it is not.
You're right about QT being completely offtopic on this discussion but wrong about GTK being a replacement for QT just free. QT is far more than a GUI toolkit such as GTK. QT provides a ton of functionality for networking, XML, collections, database programming. In fact, the new QT 4 is actually separated into a GUI part and an "everything else" part. So you could build an application on QT that has a GTK UI (although I don't know why you'd want to).
"I tested right-clicking with varying degrees of skin contact on the left side of the mouse and you can't be touching it "too much" on the left side before the right click gives up and you're now left clicking."
Sounds like a goddamn nightmare. Randomly sending left or right clicks based on whether you happen to be resting your finger on the left side "too much". Just great. At least with a regular mouse there is always a predefined action for each side.
The scroll nipple is pretty cool though. I'd still rather have a tilt-scroll wheel but this is an acceptable substitute.
There are no "linux people", just like there are no "windows people". Aside from happening to use the same OS, there isn't anything saying they have similar views. No one goes around saying "banana people" are so stuck up and "grapefruit people" are much more relaxed. I don't get why people love lumping all Linux users in the same pile.
Want to work on your report? Why wait for your word processor to load when you can just press F12 and it's RIGHT THERE!
What if you want to watch a movie? Just press F12 and there's your movie player! Wow!
Dashboard is only a way to keep applications loaded in memory and display a certain subset of them at a keypress, this is absolutely nothing new. So I want to do a quick calculation, I hit the shortcut key I bound to my calculator and there it is. When I'm done with it I close it and it doesn't suck up memory. I see absolutely no value in keeping these applications running all the time when you're barely ever using them and could just pull them up on demand anyway.
The original author of this article seems bored by his functional applications. That's ok, some people like flash over functionality. I've used OS X a fair bit and didn't see anything that I was particularly impressed by. It sure looks nice, but I'm not more productive or happy with it than any other platform.
No. Gaim is an application that happens to run on Gnome as well as several other platforms/environments. Notice how there is no mention of Gnome on the gaim website.
Kopete on the other hand is an IM client specifically for KDE (although it can be used on Gnome too). It is tightly integrated with the KDE framework and other KDE applications.
I'm not entirely convinved of the usefulness of this feature.. I tried it once and thought it was ultimately useless. Much better would be just to have a context menu with a "Look up in Wikipedia" entry for any word.
How often do you really need to look up a word in an IM conversation? All this feature does is place useless load on the wikipedia servers because people are bored and are mousing over the links to look at definitions for mundane words.
Does allofmp3.com and similar services count as legal in this survey?
It's apparently legal for allofmp3 to offer the music (in Russia), and it's legal for me in Canada to download it, but I somehow think that this type of service is not what they had in mind when they said "legal".
You're quite wrong in that respect. Just because there are two widget sets with about equal popularity on Linux doesn't mean that applications are not consistent. My Linux (KDE) environment is much more consistent than my Windows environment. In windows, a lot of apps roll their own widgets (off the top of my head, MS Office, Visual Studio, Firefox, MSN Messenger, Winamp, Various proprietary apps for hardware devices, Zonealarm firewall, AVG antivirus) Hell, every second application I use on Windows has it's own idea of what widgets to use or what keyboard shortcuts to assign.
In KDE, the only application I run that doesn't use KDE widgets and standard keyboard shortcuts is Firefox. Every other application is very predictable and consistent.
Also, consistancy goes further than just looks and keyboard shortcuts. In KDE, the advanced text editor widget is the same in every editor, so I get the same syntax highlighting and code folding and whatever if I'm editing C++ in KDevelop or if I'm doing PHP in Quanta or viewing a text file in Kate. In addition, I get the same spell checking whether I'm typing an email in Kontact, typing an instant message in Kopete, or submitting a form in Konqueror. I could go on. Network transparency, password storing, mouse gestures.. All these things are standard across the whole platform.
Now that is a level of consistency not matched in ANY other platform.
Lycoris, a major north american linux linux distro? Hardly. Lycoris is in the same class as Xandros, they have some cool ideas, but no user base to speak of.
A major north american linux distro would be Redhat, and maybe Novell.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in my experience. Hold on I wrote this down somewhere..
Mar 21, 2005 KDE 3.4 Boot into KDE, no apps started 63MB used (with JPG wallpaper)
(yeah I'm a nerd) But anyway, by your metric Windows fully booted uses 21.5 MB of RAM? I somehow doubt it.
By the way, above measurements were on Debian unstable.
Man, replying to myself again.
I'm not saying I agree with everything that James says in the article. For example, this statement is pretty silly "citizens who want to take advantage of online services will potentially have to purchase, install and learn new software to comply with the policy." if the most prominent suite supporting OpenDocument is free. His point about training is perfectly valid though.
Also, in the next paragraph, James states that support for assistive technologies is not as good in Openoffice. I work at an organization that develops devices for the disabled, and I've seen this first hand. Accessibility support in the open source apps that I've looked at is generally poor. Firefox kind of works with the Microsoft Active Accessibility framework, but it has many oddities that make it hard to work with. Same goes for OpenOffice
And another thought..
Spending a lot of money to replace the existing systems with some Opendocument thing seems to me like the choice to rewrite a software project. As a developer, I know it is often tempting to rewrite an application because something about the design bothers you, and you think there could be benefits by rewriting from scratch. In the end though, it is almost always a bad idea to go ahead with the rewrite. Costs too much, takes too long.
I think the switch will eventually happen, but lets wait until we can say that the opensource replacements are demonstrateably superior.
Microsoft shill or not, I think this James guy has a point. I don't think anyone can really deny that openoffice is just not as advanced as the MS Office suite. Sure openoffice has several key advantages, but the local bureaucrat is not going to care that openoffice runs on multiple platforms when they're stuck on windows and suddenly can't properly load documents.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to work, but I just don't see it happening. Openoffice just isn't that good yet. (Unless there is another mature office suite supporting Opendocument and importing MS Word that runs on windows). Even for my own personal use, which is a couple letters, a couple presentations, and a couple lab reports, Openoffice is a pain to use. I use it almost exclusively when I can, mostly because I don't want to pirate MS Office anymore, but I routinely run into things that are harder or impossible to do in Openoffice than in MS Office.
So yeah, good luck Massachusetts, I hope you succeed, but I wouldn't count on it.
I love gmail, but one thing annoys me about it.
I use my account for a lot of high traffic mailing lists, which get automatically labelled by gmail when I receive them. So its great that I can click on the label to see all the emails from that list, but how do I see emails that haven't been labelled?
My inbox is filled with hundreds of emails from mailing list, and if I'm not careful, regular email gets lost in the mess. Is there any way to do something like "view all emails without labels"?
Serves you right for making the treasure map in MS Word!
Better than generic names.
"Yeah boss, just open up explorer and navigate to.. No, not MSN explorer, not internet explorer, just windows explorer!"
Sure, everyone wants a free lunch.
But opensource is not a free lunch. It doesn't matter if that is what it means for most people, it still isn't what opensource software is about. Lots of people having free software and not caring about where it came from is a side effect of open source, not its primary goal.
True, I remember that demo. But when you get down to it, what is that good for in real life? Do I ever play 6 videos at the same time on a cube? Do I ever watch a DVD while at the same time moving the video window around the screen like a maniac?
Hell no. Any sane person watches one video at a time and that person won't notice the difference between BeOS or any other system.
I tried BeOS back in the 4.5 days and sure it booted ridiculously quickly, but when you got there all you could do was twiddle your thumbs and sit around (albeit sitting and twiddling very fast).
That's cool, and I respect your anecdote, but you have to acknowledge that your experience is obviously not typical. Yes, it's bad that you had such a shit experience with linux, but if this was a common issue, or even anything more than extremely rare issue, no one would be using Linux.
So who knows why your linux install went so badly; weird interaction with the hardware, obscure bug in slackware 10.1, who knows.. But indicative of the general linux experience it is not.
You're asking for it.
".. if you made your spelling skills better?" should be "...if you improved your spelling skills?"
I would think since they blindly send out mass emails, it really is closer to dynamite phishing.
You're right about QT being completely offtopic on this discussion but wrong about GTK being a replacement for QT just free. QT is far more than a GUI toolkit such as GTK. QT provides a ton of functionality for networking, XML, collections, database programming. In fact, the new QT 4 is actually separated into a GUI part and an "everything else" part. So you could build an application on QT that has a GTK UI (although I don't know why you'd want to).
From the article:
"I tested right-clicking with varying degrees of skin contact on the left side of the mouse and you can't be touching it "too much" on the left side before the right click gives up and you're now left clicking."
Sounds like a goddamn nightmare. Randomly sending left or right clicks based on whether you happen to be resting your finger on the left side "too much". Just great. At least with a regular mouse there is always a predefined action for each side.
The scroll nipple is pretty cool though. I'd still rather have a tilt-scroll wheel but this is an acceptable substitute.
"It's about time we moved in on them."
Wow.. Just wow. WTF?
*sigh*..
There are no "linux people", just like there are no "windows people". Aside from happening to use the same OS, there isn't anything saying they have similar views. No one goes around saying "banana people" are so stuck up and "grapefruit people" are much more relaxed. I don't get why people love lumping all Linux users in the same pile.
There are two ways to get modded up on slashdot.
1) Bash Microsoft
2) Bash "open source zealots" for bashing Microsoft
All clear?
Why don't we take this to extremes?
Want to work on your report? Why wait for your word processor to load when you can just press F12 and it's RIGHT THERE!
What if you want to watch a movie? Just press F12 and there's your movie player! Wow!
Dashboard is only a way to keep applications loaded in memory and display a certain subset of them at a keypress, this is absolutely nothing new. So I want to do a quick calculation, I hit the shortcut key I bound to my calculator and there it is. When I'm done with it I close it and it doesn't suck up memory. I see absolutely no value in keeping these applications running all the time when you're barely ever using them and could just pull them up on demand anyway.
The original author of this article seems bored by his functional applications. That's ok, some people like flash over functionality.
I've used OS X a fair bit and didn't see anything that I was particularly impressed by. It sure looks nice, but I'm not more productive or happy with it than any other platform.
No. Gaim is an application that happens to run on Gnome as well as several other platforms/environments. Notice how there is no mention of Gnome on the gaim website.
Kopete on the other hand is an IM client specifically for KDE (although it can be used on Gnome too). It is tightly integrated with the KDE framework and other KDE applications.
I'm not entirely convinved of the usefulness of this feature.. I tried it once and thought it was ultimately useless. Much better would be just to have a context menu with a "Look up in Wikipedia" entry for any word.
How often do you really need to look up a word in an IM conversation? All this feature does is place useless load on the wikipedia servers because people are bored and are mousing over the links to look at definitions for mundane words.
Seems the interview with chris was conducted a while ago. They are actually accepting 400 projects now, instead of 200.
One more day left until I know if one of those projects is mine!
Does allofmp3.com and similar services count as legal in this survey?
It's apparently legal for allofmp3 to offer the music (in Russia), and it's legal for me in Canada to download it, but I somehow think that this type of service is not what they had in mind when they said "legal".
You're quite wrong in that respect. Just because there are two widget sets with about equal popularity on Linux doesn't mean that applications are not consistent.
My Linux (KDE) environment is much more consistent than my Windows environment. In windows, a lot of apps roll their own widgets (off the top of my head, MS Office, Visual Studio, Firefox, MSN Messenger, Winamp, Various proprietary apps for hardware devices, Zonealarm firewall, AVG antivirus)
Hell, every second application I use on Windows has it's own idea of what widgets to use or what keyboard shortcuts to assign.
In KDE, the only application I run that doesn't use KDE widgets and standard keyboard shortcuts is Firefox. Every other application is very predictable and consistent.
Also, consistancy goes further than just looks and keyboard shortcuts. In KDE, the advanced text editor widget is the same in every editor, so I get the same syntax highlighting and code folding and whatever if I'm editing C++ in KDevelop or if I'm doing PHP in Quanta or viewing a text file in Kate. In addition, I get the same spell checking whether I'm typing an email in Kontact, typing an instant message in Kopete, or submitting a form in Konqueror. I could go on. Network transparency, password storing, mouse gestures.. All these things are standard across the whole platform.
Now that is a level of consistency not matched in ANY other platform.
Lycoris, a major north american linux linux distro? Hardly. Lycoris is in the same class as Xandros, they have some cool ideas, but no user base to speak of.
A major north american linux distro would be Redhat, and maybe Novell.
This is good, but it's not like there was no choice for x86_64 before. Debian, (K)Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva all have 64 bit versions out.