Yes I have tried Gimp 2 you self righteous fool. Stop telling me what I do and don't know, and stop telling me what my opinion should be based on what you know.
Gimp 2 when compared to Photoshop is sub-standard. That's my opinion. I have not used Gimp extensively because when I tried it out I found it to be horrendous. I had no such issue with Photoshop.
Furthermore I have friends with much more exposure to graphics software that have tried both bits of software and I've found that none of them prefer Gimp. What do you think that the whole world is stupid and is going to ignore software that's better than Photoshop just out of spite? People will jump on a more capable product, particularly where their livelihood depends on it.
It makes you a laughing stock to make assumptions about what I have or haven't done and what I know. Do you even have the brain cells to understand the irony involved here? You're claiming to be more knowledgble than me without knowing anything about me. By your own statements you should stop sniffing glue long enough to do some research about what my experience is with graphics software before having an opinion of it.
Yes I have tried Gimp 2 you self righteous fool. Stop telling me what I do and don't know, and stop telling me what my opinion should be based on what you know.
Gimp 2 when compared to Photoshop is sub-standard. That's my opinion. I have not used Gimp extensively because when I tried it out I found it to be horrendous. I had no such issue with Photoshop.
Furthermore I have friends with much more exposure to graphics software that have tried both bits of software and I've found that none of them prefer Gimp. What do you think that the whole world is stupid and is going to ignore software that's better than Photoshop just out of spite? People will jump on a more capable product, particularly where their livelihood depends on it.
It makes you a laughing stock to make assumptions about what I have or haven't done and what I know. Do you even have the brain cells to understand the irony involved here? You're claiming to be more knowledgble than me without knowing anything about me. By your own statements you should stop sniffing glue long enough to do some research about what my experience is with graphics software before having an opinion of it.
Re:This troll modded "Interesting?!!?"
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Cooking With Linux
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· Score: 1
I was just stating my opinion, and in my opinion you are indeed a twit for deciding I'm a troll for stating a different opinion.
Astronomy software only makes up a small portion of scientific software. Try comparing practically any CAD, EDA or mathematics software.
Hence why I'm saying use the right tool for the right job. If all the software written for discipline X is on platform Y, don't use platform Z instead because you're a zealot, or you deserve what you get.
Re:This troll modded "Interesting?!!?"
on
Cooking With Linux
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· Score: 1
And because I have a different opinion to yourself I must be a troll who should obviously be modded down otherwise the moderators are asleep at the wheel. That was what exactly what you were saying, right?
If you need $100,000 for a life saving operation, and you don't have it or can't get a loan, it truely doesn't matter how well you can manage your $30k/year.
For Christ sake, I know Gimp does all that but HOW WELL does it do it all. Is it an easy interface? I was trying to gauge what you were doing with it that you could seriously think Gimp is as good as photoshop? A lot of people I know just do very basic things and for those tasks, yeah Gimp's fine once you get past the clunky interface.
For the record my experience is only in manipulating my own photos. Why the hell are you assuming I'm a graphic artist or designer?
And anyway what the fuck is wrong with a camcorder tourist? There's a place for all types in this world. At least your camcorder tourist is out there doing something they enjoy with their lives, you condescending elitist fool. Everyone's entitled to an opinion. Next you'll be saying I shouldn't have commented on chess software cause I'm not a Grandmaster.
I thought crafty could beat fritz with a full endgame book.
And of course the way to judge which platform is better for chess is by working out which engine wins playing chess right? WRONG. Unless your rating is high (well above 2000) any of today's chess engines will still put up an excellent fight. If you're learning chess, this is all even less relevant.
I don't gripe about open software lacking features, I try to figure out a way to live without them and contribute what I can on the development side.
Some of us have other priorities in life (like family), and some of us don't have the time, desire or skills to contribute directly to software development.
Do you drive a car? Why can't you just make do with a horse and buggy since its the better way?
Using sub-standard out of date software that doesn't fulfil your needs is no different to trying to replace your car with a horse and buggy.
If you're happy to live without decent software with decent features, or if you can afford to devote some or all of your life to contributing that's fantastic, but for fark sake don't go around abusing people who don't choose to the same. You're like the monk, who deciding to have devote their life to God and higher spirituality decides to spit on and abuse everyone else for not doing the same.
Photoshop can do a variety of things that Gimp can't. If you're not aware of these, that's fine you obviously don't need it but then you're not qualified to say Gimp is a good replacement.
People do "general image manipulations" in a variety of ways. Do you use layers and masks at all? Or do you just use the brightness/contrast control and save or save as?
The fact is there are a lot areas where competing companies only produce software for Windows (or Windows and Mac afterwards). There are lots of areas where you just can't get commercial quality software in Linux. Period.
I have a lot of respect for you, but I think you've made a strategic error. When one of you gets sick, or the kids grow up and you discover how expensive college is going to be for them - in particular when you can't give your family what they need for lack of money - you'll wish you'd kept the money flowing.
I was being illustrative not exhaustive in my examples and making the point that Linux is good for some things, windows for others. Saying one is better than another for everything is just plain silly.
It's amazing how many people I meet these days like you that only care about what's best for them. Then they blame society/others for all that goes wrong. But others are not the problem, it's your attitude stupid.
Oh yeah its me that has an attitude problem. I should go around using software that doesn't work for me and call people I disagree with stupid. That's a much better attitude.
Tell me do you drive a car? You do? Don't you care about pollution??? You're destroying the planet?
Have you ever read a book or written something on a piece of paper? What? You have? Don't you care that they're destroying the rainforests?
Do you use electricity? Of course you're at a computer! Fossil fuel user!!!!
Do you eat egs or poultry? What!?! You are condoning the killing of innocent animals.
This is the REAL world, and you have to make real compromises every single day about what you do and don't use and how it does harm. No one exists for free or in a vacuum. You take something out from the environment and hopefully you put something back in too. Bottom line is that going around abusing people for doing the right thing by themselves is futile, counter productive and will leave you with no friends.
Ya smelly hippy!;-)
Re:Right tool for the right job
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Cooking With Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I can agree that Mac offers a more solid work or productive environment. But Microsoft Windows? That is short of financial suicide.
Well its the sort of "financial suicide" that's standard in Banks and Insurance companies, large and small that I've worked for over the last few years.
About writing documents.. While I still think MS Excel is their best application ever (IMO). MS Word is an annoying frustrating experience.
Word is actually a lot better than it use to be, but both Word and Excel still can lose data. This isn't ideal and I do wish they were better BUT you can work around this by saving often and backing up often. I've regularly worked on very large documents (usually programming/system specs) and have only lost more than a few minutes of work a handful of times, usually because I didn't respect the fact that Word could get itself in a knot and did more than half a day's work without backing up.
Now I prefer Gimp to Photoshop - would you call me biased? What sort of stuff are you doing in Gimp? If you're converting to a different format and little more then sure save as works the same in Gimp as photoshop for the most part. You're right about neither being suited for vector graphics.
Linux is good for scientific apps? I'm sorry, but linux is a lot more limited in the availability and quality of scientific software
Most of the tools for reducing astronomical data coming for the large instruments (Hubble, large Radio telescopes etc.) is Un*x only. If you're doing serious Astronomy you're not going to get away with avoiding Unix.
Linux does a fantastic job for these applications by the way, but its only because academics wrote and built solutions using Unix in a space where there was little commerical interest.
Re:This troll modded "Interesting?!!?"
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Cooking With Linux
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· Score: 1
Yeah that's right. Anyone who says Linux isn't the bestest most nerdiest operating system that can do anything and everything for you and who needs stinkin' windows anyway! is a troll right?
I agree that OOo is a good replacement for MS Office, but the whole WYSIWYG idea sucks for writing anything more than a few pages. For longer, structured documents LaTeX or something similar is much better. It runs on Windows as well.
There's so much wrong with this sentence I don't know where to begin. Non-WYSIWYG solutions are awful if presentation matters to you and it can matter for a lot of reasons (eg. your document has to conform to a standard for legal purposes, your technical illustrations work better laid out a certain way, you're writing something for its presentation - eg marketting.). When you use Latex under those circumstances you spend hours fiddling trying to get the format right.
If you don't care what your layout looks like its no wonder you think Open Office is just as good as MS Office. You're showing clear contempt for the entire WYSIWYG concept.
I also know from practical experience that word processors get painfully slow to use for large and complicated documents. Besides, no office software has the stability of simple text editors, and it would be annoying to lose your thesis because of a bug in your nice and shiny word processor.
Certainly Open Office and MS Office are guilty of that, but that's an implementation issue and doesn't have anything to do with the concept being flawed. In any case they have gotten better. I've seen 200+ page specifications handled realtively well. Granted you had to back them up often in case there was a stuffup but that's infinitely better than having to alter a document that size by hand without seeing the finished product. The reason business users adopted office suites en mass is that they were simple (WYSIWYG, no time wasted thinking about how the document would present).
Personally what I'd like to see is something that was both stable and WYSIWYG. There are a couple of WYSIWYG interfaces to Latex such as scientific workplace. I was going to have to learn Latex for publishing papers during my astronomy masters but the requirement was withdrawn and I never did purchase a copy. I was dreding having to hand edit formulae, and large amounts of text in Latex. Really isn't very practical unless you truely don't care about layout, and have plenty of time to translate formulae into Latex speak.
What a WYSIWYG editor does is let you focus on what you're actually trying to say even when layout is important. Instead of figuring out "how do I put formula x in a square on the bottom right hand corner of the page", you just create your text box and forumla and build it up graphically. That's exactly the sort of time you do want it to be a graphical experience. You don't want to have to futz around with how you build the formula up in Latex and then how do you place it.
Most digital cameras, scanners and printers that work in Mac OS X work pretty much out of the box. Similarly, most that work in Linux also work pretty much out of the box. In either case of course you might have some crazy hardware that only works in Windows, and it's game over for ordinary users.
Most hardware will support Windows as priority one, Mac as priority 2, and Linux as a distant third. Linux hardware support is fantastic given its roots but is just no where near as universal as Windows. Just how many cameras and scanners have you tried to connect to a computer?
I haven't used non-Postscript printers for a long time (once you have a fast A0 poster printer you never care what HP's desktop division is up to)
Wait a second are you trying to tell me that you're using an A0 poster printer to print everything? That's an expensive way to print an office document. That really is using the wrong tool for the job! In any case having a small A3 or A4 printer has its advantages. For starters, you can now print to CD/DVD and being a recent development it would be a much more expensive proposition to replace an A0 printer than to upgrade A4 printers every 2-3 years.
Have you ever used openoffice ? Given my personal experience OOo performs just about the same as MO.
Yes I have. I wonder just how people who think its just as good as Microsoft Office use Microsoft Office, because I've found it to be useless.
I have switched probably 2 dozen friends/family over to linux in the past 2 years. The vast majority were your standard "web, email, IM" users.
Yes if all you do is web, email and IM, Linux will do just fine. For office use I totally disagree.
Right tool for the right job
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Cooking With Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Linux is good for: - Scientific apps (I know Astronomy best but as I understand it there are other areas where Analysis tools are all written to run under Un*x) - Running as a web/ftp/mail etc. etc. internet server - Teaching developers to code in a number of languages without forking out tens of dollars on costly development environments - Generally running in places where otherwise licensing costs would be prohibitive. - Users who want more control over the environment, and can afford the time configuring it correctly.
Windows is good for: - Writing documents (Word, Excel etc. suck but they're still better than anything else I've seen) - Presentations, Graphics, Video editing (though plenty would argue Mac's better still). - The many tasks where there isn't equivalent software under Linux. Can you beat Chessmaster, Fritz, Chessbase, Shredder, Tasc Tutor for chess on Linux? Certainly not. And I'm sorry but gimp is a poor replacement for Photoshop/Paintshop pro.
Why the hell would anyone want to use one OS where another works better? Until there are a LOT more feature rich easy to use applications and more variety under Linux than Windows that's the way it is. Using Linux for running office software is like using a saw to hammer in a nail. Using Windows as a high volume web server is similarly absurd. Don't let Linux zealots or Windows money hungry corporate sales people fool you into throwing away this common sense principle.
Yeah I guess I do take the certain destruction of the human race a little too seriously.
Why don't we worry about escape Earth first
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Escape from the Universe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's the point in theorizing about escaping the Universe when it expires, when we haven't even set up a permanent base outside Earth orbit??? Might be fun to think about but that's about it.
There will be cataclysms on Earth, and in our solar system long before, which we need to avoid. Hell we don't even have a decent early warning system for large meteors, let alone a workable action plan against being wiped out by one.
This isn't like trying to fly before you can walk. This is more like sperm in a testicle trying to plan for when it becomes an Olympic athelete!
I have 4 cameras - a Nikon D70 and 2 Olympus ultrazooms and a Canon A70. Not at all crappy. I spend a lot of time researching before I buy anything, so please don't presume to lecture me on that. As things stand:
- 2 of my cameras use Compact Flash, 2 use xD
- 2 of my cameras use AA batteries, 2 use proprietary batteries. Most of the better cameras out at the moment use proprietary batteries.
- If I wanted to buy another digital SLR, I'd be up for a lot of money for lenses unless it was another Nikon. The manufacturer has me very nicely locked me in there. If I want a decent flash unit my best option is a Nikon propriety as well. I lost the eyecup for the camera early on, and haven't replaced it since that tiny piece of rubber sells for $20.
- I want to buy a Panasonic FZ-20 - a very nice camera, and cheaper than buying a image stabilixed lense for my SLR to play around with... but it uses SD cards, so I'd have to get new memory cards.
Lots of competing standards is as expensive and useless as no standard at all. Just because your phone happens to use the same battery as your girlfriend's camera is not reason to conclude everything's compatible if you get a quality camera. It's usually a good idea to have some clue what you're talking about before you post so presumptuously.
Slashdot Mirror
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Yes I have tried Gimp 2 you self righteous fool. Stop telling me what I do and don't know, and stop telling me what my opinion should be based on what you know.
Gimp 2 when compared to Photoshop is sub-standard. That's my opinion. I have not used Gimp extensively because when I tried it out I found it to be horrendous. I had no such issue with Photoshop.
Furthermore I have friends with much more exposure to graphics software that have tried both bits of software and I've found that none of them prefer Gimp. What do you think that the whole world is stupid and is going to ignore software that's better than Photoshop just out of spite? People will jump on a more capable product, particularly where their livelihood depends on it.
It makes you a laughing stock to make assumptions about what I have or haven't done and what I know. Do you even have the brain cells to understand the irony involved here? You're claiming to be more knowledgble than me without knowing anything about me. By your own statements you should stop sniffing glue long enough to do some research about what my experience is with graphics software before having an opinion of it.
Yes I have tried Gimp 2 you self righteous fool. Stop telling me what I do and don't know, and stop telling me what my opinion should be based on what you know.
Gimp 2 when compared to Photoshop is sub-standard. That's my opinion. I have not used Gimp extensively because when I tried it out I found it to be horrendous. I had no such issue with Photoshop.
Furthermore I have friends with much more exposure to graphics software that have tried both bits of software and I've found that none of them prefer Gimp. What do you think that the whole world is stupid and is going to ignore software that's better than Photoshop just out of spite? People will jump on a more capable product, particularly where their livelihood depends on it.
It makes you a laughing stock to make assumptions about what I have or haven't done and what I know. Do you even have the brain cells to understand the irony involved here? You're claiming to be more knowledgble than me without knowing anything about me. By your own statements you should stop sniffing glue long enough to do some research about what my experience is with graphics software before having an opinion of it.
I was just stating my opinion, and in my opinion you are indeed a twit for deciding I'm a troll for stating a different opinion.
Ideally yes. In reality no. What about education? Its also expensive these days. You need money for more than just food, clothes and utility bills.
Astronomy software only makes up a small portion of scientific software. Try comparing practically any CAD, EDA or mathematics software.
Hence why I'm saying use the right tool for the right job. If all the software written for discipline X is on platform Y, don't use platform Z instead because you're a zealot, or you deserve what you get.
And because I have a different opinion to yourself I must be a troll who should obviously be modded down otherwise the moderators are asleep at the wheel. That was what exactly what you were saying, right?
Twit.
If you need $100,000 for a life saving operation, and you don't have it or can't get a loan, it truely doesn't matter how well you can manage your $30k/year.
For Christ sake, I know Gimp does all that but HOW WELL does it do it all. Is it an easy interface? I was trying to gauge what you were doing with it that you could seriously think Gimp is as good as photoshop? A lot of people I know just do very basic things and for those tasks, yeah Gimp's fine once you get past the clunky interface.
For the record my experience is only in manipulating my own photos. Why the hell are you assuming I'm a graphic artist or designer?
And anyway what the fuck is wrong with a camcorder tourist? There's a place for all types in this world. At least your camcorder tourist is out there doing something they enjoy with their lives, you condescending elitist fool. Everyone's entitled to an opinion. Next you'll be saying I shouldn't have commented on chess software cause I'm not a Grandmaster.
I thought crafty could beat fritz with a full endgame book.
And of course the way to judge which platform is better for chess is by working out which engine wins playing chess right? WRONG. Unless your rating is high (well above 2000) any of today's chess engines will still put up an excellent fight. If you're learning chess, this is all even less relevant.
I don't gripe about open software lacking features, I try to figure out a way to live without them and contribute what I can on the development side.
Some of us have other priorities in life (like family), and some of us don't have the time, desire or skills to contribute directly to software development.
Do you drive a car? Why can't you just make do with a horse and buggy since its the better way?
Using sub-standard out of date software that doesn't fulfil your needs is no different to trying to replace your car with a horse and buggy.
If you're happy to live without decent software with decent features, or if you can afford to devote some or all of your life to contributing that's fantastic, but for fark sake don't go around abusing people who don't choose to the same. You're like the monk, who deciding to have devote their life to God and higher spirituality decides to spit on and abuse everyone else for not doing the same.
Get a clue. You'll be a happier person for it.
Photoshop can do a variety of things that Gimp can't. If you're not aware of these, that's fine you obviously don't need it but then you're not qualified to say Gimp is a good replacement.
People do "general image manipulations" in a variety of ways. Do you use layers and masks at all? Or do you just use the brightness/contrast control and save or save as?
The fact is there are a lot areas where competing companies only produce software for Windows (or Windows and Mac afterwards). There are lots of areas where you just can't get commercial quality software in Linux. Period.
I have a lot of respect for you, but I think you've made a strategic error. When one of you gets sick, or the kids grow up and you discover how expensive college is going to be for them - in particular when you can't give your family what they need for lack of money - you'll wish you'd kept the money flowing.
I was being illustrative not exhaustive in my examples and making the point that Linux is good for some things, windows for others. Saying one is better than another for everything is just plain silly.
It's amazing how many people I meet these days like you that only care about what's best for them. Then they blame society/others for all that goes wrong. But others are not the problem, it's your attitude stupid.
Oh yeah its me that has an attitude problem. I should go around using software that doesn't work for me and call people I disagree with stupid. That's a much better attitude.
Tell me do you drive a car? You do? Don't you care about pollution??? You're destroying the planet?
Have you ever read a book or written something on a piece of paper? What? You have? Don't you care that they're destroying the rainforests?
Do you use electricity? Of course you're at a computer! Fossil fuel user!!!!
Do you eat egs or poultry? What!?! You are condoning the killing of innocent animals.
This is the REAL world, and you have to make real compromises every single day about what you do and don't use and how it does harm. No one exists for free or in a vacuum. You take something out from the environment and hopefully you put something back in too. Bottom line is that going around abusing people for doing the right thing by themselves is futile, counter productive and will leave you with no friends.
Ya smelly hippy!
Word is better than TeX/LaTeX?
A hammer is better than a saw?
I can agree that Mac offers a more solid work or productive environment.
..
But Microsoft Windows? That is short of financial suicide.
Well its the sort of "financial suicide" that's standard in Banks and Insurance companies, large and small that I've worked for over the last few years.
About writing documents
While I still think MS Excel is their best application ever (IMO).
MS Word is an annoying frustrating experience.
Word is actually a lot better than it use to be, but both Word and Excel still can lose data. This isn't ideal and I do wish they were better BUT you can work around this by saving often and backing up often. I've regularly worked on very large documents (usually programming/system specs) and have only lost more than a few minutes of work a handful of times, usually because I didn't respect the fact that Word could get itself in a knot and did more than half a day's work without backing up.
Now I prefer Gimp to Photoshop - would you call me biased?
What sort of stuff are you doing in Gimp? If you're converting to a different format and little more then sure save as works the same in Gimp as photoshop for the most part. You're right about neither being suited for vector graphics.
Linux is good for scientific apps? I'm sorry, but linux is a lot more limited in the availability and quality of scientific software
Most of the tools for reducing astronomical data coming for the large instruments (Hubble, large Radio telescopes etc.) is Un*x only. If you're doing serious Astronomy you're not going to get away with avoiding Unix.
Linux does a fantastic job for these applications by the way, but its only because academics wrote and built solutions using Unix in a space where there was little commerical interest.
Yeah that's right. Anyone who says Linux isn't the bestest most nerdiest operating system that can do anything and everything for you and who needs stinkin' windows anyway! is a troll right?
Grow up!
I agree that OOo is a good replacement for MS Office, but the whole WYSIWYG idea sucks for writing anything more than a few pages. For longer, structured documents LaTeX or something similar is much better. It runs on Windows as well.
There's so much wrong with this sentence I don't know where to begin. Non-WYSIWYG solutions are awful if presentation matters to you and it can matter for a lot of reasons (eg. your document has to conform to a standard for legal purposes, your technical illustrations work better laid out a certain way, you're writing something for its presentation - eg marketting.). When you use Latex under those circumstances you spend hours fiddling trying to get the format right.
If you don't care what your layout looks like its no wonder you think Open Office is just as good as MS Office. You're showing clear contempt for the entire WYSIWYG concept.
I also know from practical experience that word processors get painfully slow to use for large and complicated documents. Besides, no office software has the stability of simple text editors, and it would be annoying to lose your thesis because of a bug in your nice and shiny word processor.
Certainly Open Office and MS Office are guilty of that, but that's an implementation issue and doesn't have anything to do with the concept being flawed. In any case they have gotten better. I've seen 200+ page specifications handled realtively well. Granted you had to back them up often in case there was a stuffup but that's infinitely better than having to alter a document that size by hand without seeing the finished product. The reason business users adopted office suites en mass is that they were simple (WYSIWYG, no time wasted thinking about how the document would present).
Personally what I'd like to see is something that was both stable and WYSIWYG. There are a couple of WYSIWYG interfaces to Latex such as scientific workplace. I was going to have to learn Latex for publishing papers during my astronomy masters but the requirement was withdrawn and I never did purchase a copy. I was dreding having to hand edit formulae, and large amounts of text in Latex. Really isn't very practical unless you truely don't care about layout, and have plenty of time to translate formulae into Latex speak.
What a WYSIWYG editor does is let you focus on what you're actually trying to say even when layout is important. Instead of figuring out "how do I put formula x in a square on the bottom right hand corner of the page", you just create your text box and forumla and build it up graphically. That's exactly the sort of time you do want it to be a graphical experience. You don't want to have to futz around with how you build the formula up in Latex and then how do you place it.
Most digital cameras, scanners and printers that work in Mac OS X work pretty much out of the box. Similarly, most that work in Linux also work pretty much out of the box. In either case of course you might have some crazy hardware that only works in Windows, and it's game over for ordinary users.
Most hardware will support Windows as priority one, Mac as priority 2, and Linux as a distant third. Linux hardware support is fantastic given its roots but is just no where near as universal as Windows. Just how many cameras and scanners have you tried to connect to a computer?
I haven't used non-Postscript printers for a long time (once you have a fast A0 poster printer you never care what HP's desktop division is up to)
Wait a second are you trying to tell me that you're using an A0 poster printer to print everything? That's an expensive way to print an office document. That really is using the wrong tool for the job! In any case having a small A3 or A4 printer has its advantages. For starters, you can now print to CD/DVD and being a recent development it would be a much more expensive proposition to replace an A0 printer than to upgrade A4 printers every 2-3 years.
Have you ever used openoffice ? Given my personal experience OOo performs just about the same as MO.
Yes I have. I wonder just how people who think its just as good as Microsoft Office use Microsoft Office, because I've found it to be useless.
I have switched probably 2 dozen friends/family over to linux in the past 2 years. The vast majority were your standard "web, email, IM" users.
Yes if all you do is web, email and IM, Linux will do just fine. For office use I totally disagree.
Linux is good for:
- Scientific apps (I know Astronomy best but as I understand it there are other areas where Analysis tools are all written to run under Un*x)
- Running as a web/ftp/mail etc. etc. internet server
- Teaching developers to code in a number of languages without forking out tens of dollars on costly development environments
- Generally running in places where otherwise licensing costs would be prohibitive.
- Users who want more control over the environment, and can afford the time configuring it correctly.
Windows is good for:
- Writing documents (Word, Excel etc. suck but they're still better than anything else I've seen)
- Presentations, Graphics, Video editing (though plenty would argue Mac's better still).
- The many tasks where there isn't equivalent software under Linux. Can you beat Chessmaster, Fritz, Chessbase, Shredder, Tasc Tutor for chess on Linux? Certainly not. And I'm sorry but gimp is a poor replacement for Photoshop/Paintshop pro.
Why the hell would anyone want to use one OS where another works better? Until there are a LOT more feature rich easy to use applications and more variety under Linux than Windows that's the way it is. Using Linux for running office software is like using a saw to hammer in a nail. Using Windows as a high volume web server is similarly absurd. Don't let Linux zealots or Windows money hungry corporate sales people fool you into throwing away this common sense principle.
Yeah I guess I do take the certain destruction of the human race a little too seriously.
What's the point in theorizing about escaping the Universe when it expires, when we haven't even set up a permanent base outside Earth orbit??? Might be fun to think about but that's about it.
There will be cataclysms on Earth, and in our solar system long before, which we need to avoid. Hell we don't even have a decent early warning system for large meteors, let alone a workable action plan against being wiped out by one.
This isn't like trying to fly before you can walk. This is more like sperm in a testicle trying to plan for when it becomes an Olympic athelete!
I have 4 cameras - a Nikon D70 and 2 Olympus ultrazooms and a Canon A70. Not at all crappy. I spend a lot of time researching before I buy anything, so please don't presume to lecture me on that. As things stand:
- 2 of my cameras use Compact Flash, 2 use xD
- 2 of my cameras use AA batteries, 2 use proprietary batteries. Most of the better cameras out at the moment use proprietary batteries.
- If I wanted to buy another digital SLR, I'd be up for a lot of money for lenses unless it was another Nikon. The manufacturer has me very nicely locked me in there. If I want a decent flash unit my best option is a Nikon propriety as well. I lost the eyecup for the camera early on, and haven't replaced it since that tiny piece of rubber sells for $20.
- I want to buy a Panasonic FZ-20 - a very nice camera, and cheaper than buying a image stabilixed lense for my SLR to play around with... but it uses SD cards, so I'd have to get new memory cards.
Lots of competing standards is as expensive and useless as no standard at all. Just because your phone happens to use the same battery as your girlfriend's camera is not reason to conclude everything's compatible if you get a quality camera. It's usually a good idea to have some clue what you're talking about before you post so presumptuously.