speak for yourself. or at least change that to
"at least one person, and possibly more, absolutely loves openoffice." that one person being me.
compare the math editing capabilities of openoffice and ms office and you will realize which is the goodEnoughWare.
i've gotten a whole letter grade 'raise' simply because my take home CS exam (which involved math eqns.) was typeset *much* better than the exam itself. the prof was using ms word. i used oo.o (i used to use latex/emacs but oo.o is more than adequet for most school work and in this space ms office doesn't even hold a candle to oo.o.)
i had an old palm. i mean really old. like, palm pro or some such. i think it was the second PDA model Palm made, back when it was a part of 3com.
it was nice at first. i was putting in memos, notes, appointments, grocery lists (the wife would input the list on the desktop and when i would sync it, i knew what to get at the grocery store) etc. but after a while the novelty wore off and it has been sitting in the pile with other gadgets.
recently, someone gave me an iQue as a gift. it's a palmOS based GPS by garmin. i gotta say, i don't care much for the PDA as much as the marrige between a PDA and a GPS. it absolutely rocks! it does voice navigation, turn by turn navigation, and other things you would expect from the latest generation consumer GPS device. but having the palm interface to the GPS is beautiful. i had a regular hand held GPS from garmin. my biggest peeve was that the screen was too small and input using 5-6 buttons were a pain (you couldn't type it in, you had to scroll thru the letters to input anything). but with the palm, you get to write it in.
i've never had an in-dash GPS but i can imagine that iQue would be better since with an in-dash system, you have to be in the car to input the data. with the iQue, you can input appointments and put in the waypoint at the same time. when it comes time for the appointment, the address is already there. ie, you could be away from your car, doing the things you do, and plan where you want to go right then and there. it's a beautiful combo.
i usually have some mp3's in the thing and it does a beautiful job of muting the audio when the voice prompts.
it is a little bulky but fits nicely in the shirt pocket. i haven't been this happy with a toy in a long time.
now, back to the point, i think with palm and other PDAs, the novelty and the status symbolism has gone bye bye. the small screen (compared to a laptop) is a huge impediment for working with documents pretending the PDA is a more mobile replacement for a computer. the only hope for it to survive, is to have other real world 'device' like functionality. that would work because a 'device' typically has a lesser interface and the palm interface would be a great improvement (just like it was a huge improvement going from the old 5 button garmin to the palm based garmin). but the windowsCE mindsed of trying to create a mobile computer with a PDA is not going to work.
i was born and raised in Nepal. 'khukuri', a machete like blade was made quite popular in WWII by 'Gurkhas'. (google 'British Gurkhas' or Gorkha depending on how you want to pronounce it..) so it's not like nepal has never seen a metal blade. they reason they were so excited to see the swiss knives was 1) it was a gift. they were being polite. 2) a swiss knife is a thing to be delighted over.
Metal mining is rare in nepal not because it's considered unclean but because if you look at the topography and size of nepal, you'll quickly notice that it goes from about
before most people here get the idea that metals are a rarity in nepal, consider this: there is a car manufacturing plant in nepal that opened recently. engines and tranny are imported from china. i think the body and assambly is done in nepal. but again, i think the raw metal is imported because mining is a challenge in a country with a small and *extreamly* rugged topography.
to say that nepal is "a country where goat-herding is a high-tech dream job people aspire to" is, let's just say, slightly off the mark. a friend of mine is working on a beowulf cluster in his home. and not of yaks.;) it's kinda like the equavalent of saying "oh, i went to the US and everyone there lives in trailer parks."
as far as being treated like a god, well, there is a saying in nepali that says guests are gods. you would get that treatment from any nepali even when not under a knifepoint.
i find it interesting that good hospitality is mistaken for glee over a metal blade. i guess given the rarity of hospatility in the western world, people have a hard time recognizing it.
Any sort of information being freely disseminated by sources other than approved ones is seen there as a threat. They don't like news/information to come to the masses from sources they can't control.
and i read this in the media..
"The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don't," he said.
they didn't say the name of the chinese government official who said this.
i've been running RH since around 95. i was pretty happy about it despite others i knew who were using linux were making fun of my for using RH. whatever. then the RH announced EOL for the 'free' (as in beer) distros. so i mozied on over and got FC1 and am running *the* file and print server on it. no problems. it's all well and good. except, *the* webserver happens to be running RH5.x or some such. i can't upgrade because there are many deps of in-house apps. and because RH EOLed 'em a long time ago, i'm without security patches. yet, these machines are patched. wonder how? debian! i've been replacing the RH packages on an RH machines with debian packages of about the same version but patched..
so i got me thinking and decided that the hamster wheel of upgrades is really not very fesible for outfits that have tons of in-house software that would take months to migrate (we're still trying to get all of our php3 stuff to php4 -- the empty() change did a number on us). instead what we do need is:
1) a distro that is stable (not from uptime perspective -- just about any distro of linux is good for that) but from a change perspective.
2) backported bug/security fixes. (i'm still running 2.2 on a number of boxes. and no i can't upgrade)
Debian was the *only* solution. so here i am, on a debian workstation with "unstable" having just configured 3 boxes for a web-cluster with debian "stable". do i need gnome 2.x? sure on the workstation i do. not on the servers tho. i run from MS for it's constant upgrades. why would i want that from linux? the constant upgrades suites the suppliers. not outfits with a huge committment to their own software infrastructure. i don't want the latest and the greatest. give my stability (package/release etc) any day over the newfangled whiz-bang xyz feature.
also, i'm reading a lot of negatives about the community around debian. my experiences have been just the opposite. i've learnt a ton in a matter of a few days with the help of folks at #debian. i feel more comfortable with debian (after about 2 months) than i ever did with RH (after about almost 8 years).
third world is not a synonym for poverty. third world refers to a socio-political system that is not 1-capitalistic/free-market nor 2-communistic. it's a 3rd system and hence the term "third world". but because there aren't any examples of rich 3rd world nation, the term 3rd world has started seeing use as a synonym for "poor-nation". it's all fine an dandy until you start calling Russia a third world. they are not. them and the US (being the two polarising economies) necissiated this "third world" as a way to say "we are neither".
"Girlfriend 2.0 is not nearly as complicated nor as annoying as Wife 3.0;-) Not to mention the extra money and resources it eats up with no apparent benefit..."
the extra money and resources for Wife3.0 gives you a better end-user-licence-agreement to the one and only intuitive interface - "The Interface That's Simple".
while 2 females (only X's) can only create female offspring, males can create both male (XY), female (XX)
now, if two females can create an offspring, there is no need for a male offspring.
i saw a program on tv (i forget which) that essentially said that the 'template' was a female which further 'specializes' into a male just for the sake of continual reproduction. if that need were gone, i don't see why males would need to be created at all.
fellow nerds (which arguably consists of mostly males), this news confirms we're headed for extinction.;)
i see that as a good thing. for me. because I have GNU/Linux -- something Free (both free as in beer and free as in freedom), i have an edge on 90% of my competitors. I'm 100% MS free. A 90% market share for MS essentially means 90% of our competitors have an operating cost much higher than ours. we don't worry about periodic licencing fees and can use any and all the tools available unlike our competitors who would have to go thru budgeting and all that mumbo jumbo to get the tools they need to get their job done. consequently, we get our job done faster/cheaper without ever having to lose focus. a low operating cost for a business allowing it to compete against much bigger and established competitors just because they're bleeding cash thru their nose. how's that for "innovation"?
seeing this as it is, i don't see why we get our collective panties in a twist as to what the rest of the world uses. me, i'm just smug knowing that i can do what the others can do (and probably can do it better and faster) and definetely a lot cheaper. does the 90% have *all* of the following (i mean, do they *all* have *all* of the following):
a compiler for all imagenable languages? (gcc)
a sound editor? (audacity)
office tools (OOo)
internet suite (mozilla/firefox)
development libraries for everything ranging from crypto to i18n to what-have-you
the list would go on and on..
for the 90% of people, to put a system like that together would cost them thousends.
So, really, the MS monopoly has just kept my compititors from running a business with a superlow operating cost. hasn't kept me from running my operation on a low operating cost. if that means i'll have to break my web pages to work in IE. hey, small price to pay for that competitive advantage. All i can do is thank MS for spending all their time and money creating a coke-habit for the other 90% and letting me have this edge on them. Thank you MS!!
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I don't see a long line of people waiting to pay up...
umm... ok... you've just got done saying, in a very indirect way, that in this demand/supply based economy, there is no demand for the product at the price point it's offered. or else there would have been the demand, which would have resulted in the long line of people waiting to pay up. instead of artificially inflating the price up (by use of various other methods..) ummm... maybe the price should drop?! but what do i know? i just remember the demand/supply curve thing from high school economics.
i agree with you a 100%. i know quite a few instances of people plugging in their webcams and their utterly plug-n-play winXP doesn't blink and they are without a working webcam. and these are not the 'average joe user' (altho i met 'average joe user' just yesterday and he said to give all y'all on/. his regards. his linux box is running fine.) these are CS students.
anyhoo, the way i see it, the pundits, the tech writers, the analysts all figured that MS couldn't lose, and up until now that's been the track record, and thus whatever competed with them (this here linux thing) would go away and they could continue singing their praises for the redmondian thang and they could continue to scrape by with whatever shook out of the money train headed for redmond.
but a curious thing happened. despite beating it with a stick this here linux thang keeps coming back. it just won't quit. the analysts have proclaimed that linux won't make it past the latest stick beating. the pundits have talked about the bruises from the lastest beating. and the tech writers chimed in with their play by play of the said beating.... but this here linux thang comes back.
it goes kinda like this:
'linux isn't supported'. then it was 'linux isn't ready for the enterprise'. then it was 'linux won't dominate the server market'. and 'linux isn't ready for the desktop'. and 'linux isn't ready for the joe_sixpack desktop'. (oh i ran into joe_sixpack the day before. he's the cousin of joe_average_user. he too sends his regards. his linux box is running just fine too.)
the careful reader will notice that each proclamation here is an admission that their old proclamation was hogwash. what can these pundits, analysts and tech writers do? there is no money train headed in any direction in the name of linux for some chunk change to shake loose from it and fall into their hands. but that's what they're used to. so they're still praying to the 9 'o clock money train to redmond while trying to beat off this little mutt gnawing at their pants with a stick and hoping that it goes away allowing them to focus their undivided energy towards this money train that might shake loose with some coins. but alas, the mutt keeps coming back. oh, what to do.. what to do.. quite a predicament.
.. and the HP (?) DVD recorder where it etches an image on the top side with the same laser that burns the data on the bottom eliminating the need for a stick-on-label. i don't recall if the DVD format itself is new/different or not. the media itself is different tho (has to have that etchablity on the top side).
a Brit who has seen both US and Uk history textbooks
i must have seen the non-US and non-UK history textbooks where it talks about the slavery of various forms in colonies around the world. the massacares in india.. oppression.. but you said you read the US and UK history books. i'm not surprised you didn't see any of that.
"what is history but a fable agreed upon" - Napoleon
"The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down." - Whitney Brown
and
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill
read just the bolded parts and you'll get the message.
Slashdot Mirror
naahh.. he had to fix the draft coming in from the Windows.
speak for yourself. or at least change that to "at least one person, and possibly more, absolutely loves openoffice." that one person being me.
compare the math editing capabilities of openoffice and ms office and you will realize which is the goodEnoughWare.
i've gotten a whole letter grade 'raise' simply because my take home CS exam (which involved math eqns.) was typeset *much* better than the exam itself. the prof was using ms word. i used oo.o (i used to use latex/emacs but oo.o is more than adequet for most school work and in this space ms office doesn't even hold a candle to oo.o .)
GoodEnoughWare indeed.
it was nice at first. i was putting in memos, notes, appointments, grocery lists (the wife would input the list on the desktop and when i would sync it, i knew what to get at the grocery store) etc. but after a while the novelty wore off and it has been sitting in the pile with other gadgets.
recently, someone gave me an iQue as a gift. it's a palmOS based GPS by garmin. i gotta say, i don't care much for the PDA as much as the marrige between a PDA and a GPS. it absolutely rocks! it does voice navigation, turn by turn navigation, and other things you would expect from the latest generation consumer GPS device. but having the palm interface to the GPS is beautiful. i had a regular hand held GPS from garmin. my biggest peeve was that the screen was too small and input using 5-6 buttons were a pain (you couldn't type it in, you had to scroll thru the letters to input anything). but with the palm, you get to write it in.
i've never had an in-dash GPS but i can imagine that iQue would be better since with an in-dash system, you have to be in the car to input the data. with the iQue, you can input appointments and put in the waypoint at the same time. when it comes time for the appointment, the address is already there. ie, you could be away from your car, doing the things you do, and plan where you want to go right then and there. it's a beautiful combo.
i usually have some mp3's in the thing and it does a beautiful job of muting the audio when the voice prompts.
it is a little bulky but fits nicely in the shirt pocket. i haven't been this happy with a toy in a long time.
now, back to the point, i think with palm and other PDAs, the novelty and the status symbolism has gone bye bye. the small screen (compared to a laptop) is a huge impediment for working with documents pretending the PDA is a more mobile replacement for a computer. the only hope for it to survive, is to have other real world 'device' like functionality. that would work because a 'device' typically has a lesser interface and the palm interface would be a great improvement (just like it was a huge improvement going from the old 5 button garmin to the palm based garmin). but the windowsCE mindsed of trying to create a mobile computer with a PDA is not going to work.
oye. not again. where's the box that you speak of? what box?
the only thing that resembles a 'box', that i'm thinking inside of, is my house. i like to be inside it while i think; thank you very much.
PHD = Permanent Head Damage
and maybe they were just happy to recieve a gift from a guest.
i was born and raised in Nepal. 'khukuri', a machete like blade was made quite popular in WWII by 'Gurkhas'. (google 'British Gurkhas' or Gorkha depending on how you want to pronounce it..) so it's not like nepal has never seen a metal blade. they reason they were so excited to see the swiss knives was 1) it was a gift. they were being polite. 2) a swiss knife is a thing to be delighted over.
Metal mining is rare in nepal not because it's considered unclean but because if you look at the topography and size of nepal, you'll quickly notice that it goes from about before most people here get the idea that metals are a rarity in nepal, consider this: there is a car manufacturing plant in nepal that opened recently. engines and tranny are imported from china. i think the body and assambly is done in nepal. but again, i think the raw metal is imported because mining is a challenge in a country with a small and *extreamly* rugged topography.
to say that nepal is "a country where goat-herding is a high-tech dream job people aspire to" is, let's just say, slightly off the mark. a friend of mine is working on a beowulf cluster in his home. and not of yaks. ;) it's kinda like the equavalent of saying "oh, i went to the US and everyone there lives in trailer parks."
as far as being treated like a god, well, there is a saying in nepali that says guests are gods. you would get that treatment from any nepali even when not under a knifepoint.
i find it interesting that good hospitality is mistaken for glee over a metal blade. i guess given the rarity of hospatility in the western world, people have a hard time recognizing it.
and i read this in the media..
"The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don't," he said.
they didn't say the name of the chinese government official who said this.
so i got me thinking and decided that the hamster wheel of upgrades is really not very fesible for outfits that have tons of in-house software that would take months to migrate (we're still trying to get all of our php3 stuff to php4 -- the empty() change did a number on us). instead what we do need is:
1) a distro that is stable (not from uptime perspective -- just about any distro of linux is good for that) but from a change perspective.
2) backported bug/security fixes. (i'm still running 2.2 on a number of boxes. and no i can't upgrade)
Debian was the *only* solution. so here i am, on a debian workstation with "unstable" having just configured 3 boxes for a web-cluster with debian "stable". do i need gnome 2.x? sure on the workstation i do. not on the servers tho. i run from MS for it's constant upgrades. why would i want that from linux? the constant upgrades suites the suppliers. not outfits with a huge committment to their own software infrastructure. i don't want the latest and the greatest. give my stability (package/release etc) any day over the newfangled whiz-bang xyz feature.
also, i'm reading a lot of negatives about the community around debian. my experiences have been just the opposite. i've learnt a ton in a matter of a few days with the help of folks at #debian. i feel more comfortable with debian (after about 2 months) than i ever did with RH (after about almost 8 years).
But, to each his own. the beauty of FOSS.
wasn't that the whole idea of "embedded journalism"?
i love the 60s or the 70s or whatever decade 'disco inferno' came out..
third world is not a synonym for poverty. third world refers to a socio-political system that is not 1-capitalistic/free-market nor 2-communistic. it's a 3rd system and hence the term "third world". but because there aren't any examples of rich 3rd world nation, the term 3rd world has started seeing use as a synonym for "poor-nation". it's all fine an dandy until you start calling Russia a third world. they are not. them and the US (being the two polarising economies) necissiated this "third world" as a way to say "we are neither".
the extra money and resources for Wife3.0 gives you a better end-user-licence-agreement to the one and only intuitive interface - "The Interface That's Simple".
lack of a sexy vision ? so that's what they want to do.. bundle pr0n with windows? i wouldn't mind ;)
now, if two females can create an offspring, there is no need for a male offspring.
i saw a program on tv (i forget which) that essentially said that the 'template' was a female which further 'specializes' into a male just for the sake of continual reproduction. if that need were gone, i don't see why males would need to be created at all.
fellow nerds (which arguably consists of mostly males), this news confirms we're headed for extinction. ;)
look; gawk; talk; date; wine; unzip; strip; touch; finger; head; mount; fsck; more; yes; shake; spray; umount; sleep; leave
...the last remaining superpower armed to the teeth with nukes. any questions? i didn't think so.
seeing this as it is, i don't see why we get our collective panties in a twist as to what the rest of the world uses. me, i'm just smug knowing that i can do what the others can do (and probably can do it better and faster) and definetely a lot cheaper. does the 90% have *all* of the following (i mean, do they *all* have *all* of the following):
- a compiler for all imagenable languages? (gcc)
- a sound editor? (audacity)
- office tools (OOo)
- internet suite (mozilla/firefox)
- development libraries for everything ranging from crypto to i18n to what-have-you
- the list would go on and on..
for the 90% of people, to put a system like that together would cost them thousends.So, really, the MS monopoly has just kept my compititors from running a business with a superlow operating cost. hasn't kept me from running my operation on a low operating cost. if that means i'll have to break my web pages to work in IE. hey, small price to pay for that competitive advantage. All i can do is thank MS for spending all their time and money creating a coke-habit for the other 90% and letting me have this edge on them. Thank you MS!!
umm... ok... you've just got done saying, in a very indirect way, that in this demand/supply based economy, there is no demand for the product at the price point it's offered. or else there would have been the demand, which would have resulted in the long line of people waiting to pay up. instead of artificially inflating the price up (by use of various other methods..) ummm... maybe the price should drop?! but what do i know? i just remember the demand/supply curve thing from high school economics.
hear, hear. those SCOmbags deserve just such a dedication.
anyhoo, the way i see it, the pundits, the tech writers, the analysts all figured that MS couldn't lose, and up until now that's been the track record, and thus whatever competed with them (this here linux thing) would go away and they could continue singing their praises for the redmondian thang and they could continue to scrape by with whatever shook out of the money train headed for redmond.
but a curious thing happened. despite beating it with a stick this here linux thang keeps coming back. it just won't quit. the analysts have proclaimed that linux won't make it past the latest stick beating. the pundits have talked about the bruises from the lastest beating. and the tech writers chimed in with their play by play of the said beating. ... but this here linux thang comes back.
it goes kinda like this: 'linux isn't supported'. then it was 'linux isn't ready for the enterprise'. then it was 'linux won't dominate the server market'. and 'linux isn't ready for the desktop'. and 'linux isn't ready for the joe_sixpack desktop'. (oh i ran into joe_sixpack the day before. he's the cousin of joe_average_user. he too sends his regards. his linux box is running just fine too.)
the careful reader will notice that each proclamation here is an admission that their old proclamation was hogwash. what can these pundits, analysts and tech writers do? there is no money train headed in any direction in the name of linux for some chunk change to shake loose from it and fall into their hands. but that's what they're used to. so they're still praying to the 9 'o clock money train to redmond while trying to beat off this little mutt gnawing at their pants with a stick and hoping that it goes away allowing them to focus their undivided energy towards this money train that might shake loose with some coins. but alas, the mutt keeps coming back. oh, what to do.. what to do.. quite a predicament.
well, SUN got some green from MS. one green is leaving. what can you say.. win some, lose some.
.. and the HP (?) DVD recorder where it etches an image on the top side with the same laser that burns the data on the bottom eliminating the need for a stick-on-label. i don't recall if the DVD format itself is new/different or not. the media itself is different tho (has to have that etchablity on the top side).
i must have seen the non-US and non-UK history textbooks where it talks about the slavery of various forms in colonies around the world. the massacares in india.. oppression.. but you said you read the US and UK history books. i'm not surprised you didn't see any of that.
"what is history but a fable agreed upon" - Napoleon
"The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down." - Whitney Brown
and
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill
read just the bolded parts and you'll get the message.
try this