I've had it with these complicated operating systems. I've never gotten my printer to work correctly on Linux, my Mac is just a total pain in the ass and slug, and I spend hours upon hours trying to do the easiest things on Windows.
The hell with all of you. I just installed DOS on my box and all is well.
Slashdot, please don't post this. You guys are jerks and I'm going to tell my mommy about you.
There are many of us who haven't gone up to broadband. I've been online for a few years now (and been reading/. for a long time too) and I get by with dial-up. When I need to download a large file (a new distribution, OpenOffice, music or video) I use the connection at work or ask a friend to grab it for me. But for the most part what I do online is perfectly served by dial-up and can be done on my oldest machine (a 1995 box with 32MB of RAM running Windows 98). I want to be able to read news and mail, check weather, and participate in/. discussions. I can do that on dial-up.
This is no rant against broadband--heavens no, I would love broadband. But my dial-up is less than $13 a month and broadband would be a lot more than that. I'm cheap, that's all.
Firefox says that there is a missing plugin to provide the toolbar for deleting, sending, etc. I click on the "get missing plugin" message but Firefox cannot find the plugin. I can't find anything online that will tell me which plugin I need or how to get around it. This is using the iNotes webmail client.
I know that there's a way around it, I just can't find it.
By the way, the question to ask your wife is whether or not there is anything of interest on the mail coming from school. Mine is pretty barren, but I'm supposed to keep an eye on it anyway. That's how things work in New York State.
I'm guessing that this is to run the Notes program. I don't have that option at home as I'm unwilling to purchase Notes and the school would not install it on my home computer even if I wanted. I'll look at the link and see if it says anything about running the iNotes web client.
I teach school and our administration has chosen to do all communication to us through Lotus Notes. I have four choices: (1) Read mail without the ability to delete or respond to it on Linux running Firefox; (2) Not read mail from the administrators (my personal favorite choice); (3) Get any of the information I need from the secretary who checks her mail twenty times each day; (4) Have full access to mail functions by running Windows and using IE.
So far I'm doing a mixture of choices 1-3 (4 is just too ridiculous for me), but I don't have full functionality or even sufficient functionality. I can get by, mostly because our administrators almost never have anything of import or intelligence to say, but some people can't.
Until things online are platform independent, some folks are stuck with Windows and IE which means they will have to have their computers serviced or replaced annually. And isn't that the real goal here? I think that this behavior is accepted because people then upgrade lots of hardware and software often. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
I mean, after reading an uplifting article like this, I want to do all that I can to support the industry. The music industry is a well-meaning group of underpaid folks who are simply trying to put food on the table for their kids. It's not a blood sucking bunch of pariahs who are consumed and controlled only by their greed. No, it's just folks like you and me who have to make the next mortgage payment. Of course, in their case the house is worth fourteen million, but that's beside the point.
I have purchased one cd in two years. That one disk was purchased from the musician for a reasonable fee and very little money (if any) found its way into the hands of the record company execs.
This is another example of why people steal music and feel absolutely no regret. Note that I did say "steal" because I know that copying my friends' and the library's disks, and downloading music are all examples of theft. The problem that the record companies have is that they make people like me feel good about stealing or at least they do nothing to make me feel bad about it.
Meanwhile, yesterday at Wegmans (the greatest supermarket on the planet), the cashier was all done with our order when I remembered that my daughters and I had each eaten a corn muffin while shopping. I told her about it and she added them to our total. I would have felt lousy about stealing from Wegmans, a company that puts customers ahead of their interests (or seems to). Stealing from them is and feels wrong. Not so much with the Jack Johnson disk I just took out of the library.
I work in a New York State (US) school and there is no way that we would ever be allowed to get a reasonably priced computer. No, instead, we would have to do a PO through the tech office who has a contract to buy IBM computers. These computers were purchased (more than likely) last school year and we then purchase them from the tech office.
The last two machines we were allowed to buy in the summer of 2001 (before Bush, 9/11, and the NYS Legislature/Governor budget debacle) cost $1200 each, used mouses (mice?) without scroll wheels, had 64MB of ram, 20GB HDs and 17" CRT monitors. We would like to get another machine, but the price has gone up to $1400 per machine. I can buy a better machine from Dell for $599 and I can buy a comparable used machine from a local company going out of business for $150, but I'm not allowed to do these things.
To expect that a school will be allowed to make intelligent tech purchases is to live outside of New York. I suppose there are some people who do live outside our state boundaries, but New Yorkers don't like to acknowledge that.
I'm a teacher in a very small school with ten computers in our little lab. All but two of the computers run WinMe while the last two run XP and are administered by a tech staff off-site. We usually have one or two machines down at any time due to different software problems. Currently, one of the XP machines refuses to connect to the web though it will print to the networked printer and talk to the other computers on the network. Odd.
I got tired of this but don't have a lot of power to make changes. Beyond that, I'm not willing to become a pro-bono sys admin for my school. I'm underqualified and too poor. Instead of tending to all of the machines I claimed computer #1 and ran Knoppix off a cd for a week. All of the kids wanted to try it and liked it except that it was slow running off the cdrom.
Two kids and I installed Knoppix to the hard drive and it has been running without a problem since April. No problems at all. The two kids started making it look good and then got to see that they could do a lot with it including play games that the tech folks won't allow on the Windows machines. They introduced kids to it and I, in turn, introduced them all to having their own accounts on the machine. They loved that. (The windows machines are single user machines used by forty different people, ugh.)
The only people unhappy with the situation are the tech folks offsite. One of them asked what was wrong with computer number one. Nothing, I said. It doesn't look right, she said. I told her it was running Linux. She said that she had heard of it. I gave her a Knoppix cd and told her to try it. "I'm not supposed to have pirated software," she said. I told her that I thought it would be okay just this once. Geez.
Anyway, the point of this long-winded post is this: None of the kids has missed MS Word or IE. They asked about both and I said that Computer #1 doesn't run those any more. Instead, I showed them OpenOffice and Firefox. The kids showed them the games. Another teacher discovered The Gimp. Two kids moved the scanner from a non-functioning Windows box to the Knoppix one and got it working in no time.
I'm still not willing to switch them all over, but Computer #1 works and works all the time. I have a feeling that one or two kids might want to make some changes to Computer #2 this year.
How long before we get our hands on the server locked in the closet down the hall?
Thank goodness I'm not alone. Rock on, music luddites. Maybe I'll get out my discwasher, clean up and ALBUM and throw it on the turntable. I miss the seventies. (Well, not really.)
It's not that it's evil or that it should never be purchased, it's just that I don't want to buy a system that is very expensive and will lock me into a platform I don't want to use. If I could just hook the thing up to my machine and put my music on it, then fine. But I have concerns about the DRM, about having to use Mac or Windows, and about the price.
If you can believe it, I still don't have a portable music player other than my six year old cd player. (I'm one of three people in the US without some sort of modern music device). If the iPod came out in a less expensive model that would work with my Linux box, I would buy it. Plain and simple.
For now, I'll let others enjoy it and refrain from calling them evil unless they also support Bush.
Here, here. I just spent the better part of the day getting myself set to read old writings I did in WordPerfect. I wish the damn file format had been open and then there would be a filter built into OpenOffice. (By the by, KWord does a nice job of opening WP files.)
I'm not about to buy all of my music in one format just to lose it AGAIN. I did that with albums (which I had to transfer to my own cassettes since the cassettes sounded so bad) and replaced all of them with CD's. If I couldn't rip my CD's onto the hard drive, I would have to buy new MP3's of all of them. I'm tired of paying for the music over and over.
That and I agree that there is very little out ther that I want to pay for. A couple albums here and there, but for the most part I check the CD out of the library and rip the few songs off it that I like. If I like the whole thing, I'll pay for it or a few of us will get together and share the cost of it. The price of CDs is just way too high and I have no pity for a business that has for far too long jacked up prices. They are paying the price now.
Reminds me of a job I had for a couple years in high school. The boss was a real screw. He was mean to his employees, harrassed the young cashier girls, and treated his customers like the stuff his dog left on the lawn. After a month or two I understood why all the employees took it out in trade (so to speak). Right or wrong, it could have been prevented if he had been a good and fair person. I worked a similar job for a guy who treated his employees the way he wanted us to treat him. Never once did I steal from him and one guy who did got blown in for it. The boss let him keep the job after talking to him about it.
The record companies are that boss I had in high school. Am I breaking the law? Yes. Is it right? No and to pretend that it is right is to lie to myself. But do I feel any shame at all? Not even a little.
I wish that OpenOffice would start a "Firefox" project that would concentrate on a very fast, very tight project for word processing. OpenOffice is a great thing (free, does most everything anyone could ask of it) but it is a slug, a monster that eats memory and just kills older machines. If I could use OpenOffice on my home machine (which is pretty substantial) and then use a "firefox" version on my older machines (like the laptop I'm using now and most of the computers at our under-funded school), I would be all set.
Maybe I'm just getting ahead of the project here. I know that 2.0 is striving for faster startup times and the like. Maybe instead of a separate project, OO.o could focus most of their efforts on streamlining the thing.
Firefox and Thunderbird are THE open source answers for browsing and email. That's two of the necessary apps. OpenOffice plugs many of the other holes, but it needs work. Firefox is already there.
What converted me to OpenOffice is that I finally had someone tell me (correctly) that I could do this by typing the text at the left margin, hitting tab once, hitting Ctrl-R and typing text at the right margin. Not as easy as WP but better than setting tab stops any day.
Alright, but can anyone really think that the current market idea can continue to scale? Seems to me that there is going to be a rupture, that there must be a correction not in the market so much as in the way of thinking. Not in my lifetime, but likely in my grandchildrens' lifetimes there will be a new model that takes hold.
Believing the capitalism will rule forever is just silly.
I'm talking about high schools and (especially) small colleges where budget cutting has become not only a tradition but mandatory. No one is increasing spending on schools right now and that trend will continue.
Does this mean that Open Source software will take over? No, probably not. Linux and OpenOffice will fill niches (we've installed Linux on two of ten machines, OpenOffice on all the machines (along with Office), and had some success) but what will happen is that MS will give away software to schools.
This is already happening at the secondary school level by a quiet agreement. Schools ignore licenses more than they pay attention to them. My school has fourteen unlicensed copies of Windows, thirteen of Office, and a host of other software. We buy one copy and it ends up on all the machines, go figure.
Will Microsoft bust us? I would love it if they did because there simply is no money to buy licences and we would have to move to Linux. But what will happen is that MS will ignore it because most of our kids want Office at home and XP too. That leads to more sales of PCs with licensed, paid for copies of Microsoft software.
In fact, it leads to computers running nothing but MS software.
Still, MS has to give away software to get people using it. Too many places where computers are used by the next generation of software buyers can't afford to buy the software. If MS gives it away, most folks will choose it over Linux and OO.o.
Well, they will unless people like me are in the schools suggesting that it is better on many, many levels to not be tied down to any one software product.
Two years ago I would have been jumping up and down over this. I was a WP user for a long time and really wanted a good version for Linux. But it's too late now and it's going to cost too much for Linux users (on the whole). I might still need it a little bit, just to translate all of my WP files into something that OpenOffice can read, but I wouldn't do any new work in it. Here's why:
OpenOffice just released 1.1.1. They will likely release 2.0 sometime this year. Meanwhile, users of closed software will wait for fixes. I've gotten used to Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, and a host of other programs that are released much more often than anything in the closed source world.
Beyond that, I've gotten used to not paying for these products. I'll give back in other ways (including donating money to support, just the same way that I support Public Radio), but I won't pay over $100 (US) for software any more. It doesn't fit my budget, it doesn't fit my view of how things should work.
All that said, were I still working at my old school which was a Mac shop, I would buy WP for Mac in a heartbeat. That they aren't developing for Mac baffles me. That's where commercial software ought to focus when they're looking for something other than Windows.
WP had a great run. the 5.1 version was insanely great. But the time for WP is likely past.
Now, if someone would implement the Reveal Codes feature in OpenOffice, every WP user could switch and I could be completely happy with OpenOffice.
I used to use WP, right up until last June when I wanted to switch to Linux. That's when I started using OpenOffice. But I always missed WP5.1 because it was so clean, a real writer's word processor. I got to missing it too much in December but wasn't about to install it and run DOSemu, so I learned VI. It's nutty how much I'm reminded of the clean interface. It's also gotten me to forget about formatting and just write.
Corel can keep releasing, but OpenOffice is going to eat WP users alive. I appreciate them still selling to the faithful, but I can't be the only one who moved on when a real alternative to Word showed up.
I was just talking with friends about this the other day when we were discussing the purchase of a new car. My Toyota Tercel with 135,000 miles on it and a crumpled front fender has a trade-in value of less than $350 (US). My friend said, "ugh, that cars worthless." Well, no, not at all. It gets me to and from work every day, uses a fair amount of fuel, and is paid for. I would put its value far above $350 but I'm not looking to sell.
Seems to me that capitalism is based on people always wanting more. If people decide that they want less, capitalism will fall apart. Of course, that has yet to happen.
I would think that the increased use of caller ID would already be making phone polls almost worthless. Who answers their phone anymore if they don't know the caller? There is a certain population that just doesn't want to participate in surveys any more and there is another group that won't be bothered with phone calls. So who is answering these survey phone calls? That's a piece of data I would like to see.
Of course, the news media outlets (radio, television, newspaper, and web) like the polls because they make for quick headlines and short articles. Thus, the polls results become a force driving opinion disproportionately.
Of course, I'm not a statistician, so I'm probably just blowing smoke out of my ass.
Ridiculous. I in no way advocate the suppression of anyone's human rights. Nor do I advocate the brutal attack of any nation in order to "save" the people from a dicatorship. George Bush's foreign policy states that the US can invade when it feels that the justfication is there or that the justfication may soon be there. That's a horrendous, dangerous and absurd policy based largely on hubris.
As for not recognizing the sovereignty of a nation that doesn't recognize the liberty of its people, then you may not want to become a US citizen any time soon. The current US administration places many things higher on its list of priorities than it does the notion of personal liberty. Ask John Ashcroft. Ask the detainees in Guantanamo. Ask the thousands of people held in American jails without habeus corpus on the suspicion of terror sympathy.
The US government DID invade a soveriegn nation. It did so without international support. It did so in violation of international law. The means, especially in this case, do not justify the ends.
Keep in mind folks that this has absolutely nothing to do with September 11. Sure, a dictator is out of power. That's fine. Remember though that to topple him, our government invaded a sovereign nation without international support or a plan for after the initial attacks. The administration is going to spin this as a wonderful thing for Americans and a sure sign that the administration is tough on terrorists. This isn't the war on terrorism (as ill-thought as that war is). It's the war on Iraq that was started many years ago by the father and now reengaged by the son. Nothing more. Iraqi citizens may rejoice, but there is no reason for us to do the same.
Backward compatibilty with skins doesn't seem like the biggest issue to me. I worry that developers get too caught up in supporting what was and that limits what can be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for open source developers to do a Word format thing where they keep changing the format to get everyone to upgrade, but neither do I want a system whereby every legacy app is supported in the new version and thus, everything is clunky.
I'm not saying this as well as I had hoped. But what I guess I'm talking about is that I was very impressed when the Mozilla team made the decision to jettison the old Netscape code even though that meant a longer development cycle, backlash from lots of sources, and a host of other PR problems. By starting from scratch, they produced a product that is incredible, far better than if they had stayed with the old code.
So, if a few skins don't work, for me, that's not a big deal.
While I agree with you that "we're going to drive Microsoft out of business" is a bad business plan, I think it's at least as bad to ignore them. Any computer/software/gaming/entertainment device company that doesn't work to stay ahead of Microsoft and undermine them in some way will be killed. Why? Simply because Microsoft understands that they have to undermine or outwit every business out there in order to stay on top. And, weird thing, that's just what they've done for a few years now, say, since they sold their second copy of DOS.
What about the whole thing of Dell supporting LInux on the desktop? Does this mean that, in a few months, they might offer machines with Linux pre-installed? If so, and wouldn't that be great, would they offer these only at the enterprise level or would small businesses (or even, gasp, home users) be able to buy a new Dell system with Linux preinstalled and no Windows tax?
Slashdot Mirror
I've had it with these complicated operating systems. I've never gotten my printer to work correctly on Linux, my Mac is just a total pain in the ass and slug, and I spend hours upon hours trying to do the easiest things on Windows.
The hell with all of you. I just installed DOS on my box and all is well.
Slashdot, please don't post this. You guys are jerks and I'm going to tell my mommy about you.
There are many of us who haven't gone up to broadband. I've been online for a few years now (and been reading /. for a long time too) and I get by with dial-up. When I need to download a large file (a new distribution, OpenOffice, music or video) I use the connection at work or ask a friend to grab it for me. But for the most part what I do online is perfectly served by dial-up and can be done on my oldest machine (a 1995 box with 32MB of RAM running Windows 98). I want to be able to read news and mail, check weather, and participate in /. discussions. I can do that on dial-up.
This is no rant against broadband--heavens no, I would love broadband. But my dial-up is less than $13 a month and broadband would be a lot more than that. I'm cheap, that's all.
Thank you. The mirrors of the article have been really clogged.
Firefox says that there is a missing plugin to provide the toolbar for deleting, sending, etc. I click on the "get missing plugin" message but Firefox cannot find the plugin. I can't find anything online that will tell me which plugin I need or how to get around it. This is using the iNotes webmail client.
I know that there's a way around it, I just can't find it.
By the way, the question to ask your wife is whether or not there is anything of interest on the mail coming from school. Mine is pretty barren, but I'm supposed to keep an eye on it anyway. That's how things work in New York State.
I'm guessing that this is to run the Notes program. I don't have that option at home as I'm unwilling to purchase Notes and the school would not install it on my home computer even if I wanted. I'll look at the link and see if it says anything about running the iNotes web client.
I teach school and our administration has chosen to do all communication to us through Lotus Notes. I have four choices: (1) Read mail without the ability to delete or respond to it on Linux running Firefox; (2) Not read mail from the administrators (my personal favorite choice); (3) Get any of the information I need from the secretary who checks her mail twenty times each day; (4) Have full access to mail functions by running Windows and using IE.
So far I'm doing a mixture of choices 1-3 (4 is just too ridiculous for me), but I don't have full functionality or even sufficient functionality. I can get by, mostly because our administrators almost never have anything of import or intelligence to say, but some people can't.
Until things online are platform independent, some folks are stuck with Windows and IE which means they will have to have their computers serviced or replaced annually. And isn't that the real goal here? I think that this behavior is accepted because people then upgrade lots of hardware and software often. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
I mean, after reading an uplifting article like this, I want to do all that I can to support the industry. The music industry is a well-meaning group of underpaid folks who are simply trying to put food on the table for their kids. It's not a blood sucking bunch of pariahs who are consumed and controlled only by their greed. No, it's just folks like you and me who have to make the next mortgage payment. Of course, in their case the house is worth fourteen million, but that's beside the point.
I have purchased one cd in two years. That one disk was purchased from the musician for a reasonable fee and very little money (if any) found its way into the hands of the record company execs.
This is another example of why people steal music and feel absolutely no regret. Note that I did say "steal" because I know that copying my friends' and the library's disks, and downloading music are all examples of theft. The problem that the record companies have is that they make people like me feel good about stealing or at least they do nothing to make me feel bad about it.
Meanwhile, yesterday at Wegmans (the greatest supermarket on the planet), the cashier was all done with our order when I remembered that my daughters and I had each eaten a corn muffin while shopping. I told her about it and she added them to our total. I would have felt lousy about stealing from Wegmans, a company that puts customers ahead of their interests (or seems to). Stealing from them is and feels wrong. Not so much with the Jack Johnson disk I just took out of the library.
I work in a New York State (US) school and there is no way that we would ever be allowed to get a reasonably priced computer. No, instead, we would have to do a PO through the tech office who has a contract to buy IBM computers. These computers were purchased (more than likely) last school year and we then purchase them from the tech office.
The last two machines we were allowed to buy in the summer of 2001 (before Bush, 9/11, and the NYS Legislature/Governor budget debacle) cost $1200 each, used mouses (mice?) without scroll wheels, had 64MB of ram, 20GB HDs and 17" CRT monitors. We would like to get another machine, but the price has gone up to $1400 per machine. I can buy a better machine from Dell for $599 and I can buy a comparable used machine from a local company going out of business for $150, but I'm not allowed to do these things.
To expect that a school will be allowed to make intelligent tech purchases is to live outside of New York. I suppose there are some people who do live outside our state boundaries, but New Yorkers don't like to acknowledge that.
I'm a teacher in a very small school with ten computers in our little lab. All but two of the computers run WinMe while the last two run XP and are administered by a tech staff off-site. We usually have one or two machines down at any time due to different software problems. Currently, one of the XP machines refuses to connect to the web though it will print to the networked printer and talk to the other computers on the network. Odd.
I got tired of this but don't have a lot of power to make changes. Beyond that, I'm not willing to become a pro-bono sys admin for my school. I'm underqualified and too poor. Instead of tending to all of the machines I claimed computer #1 and ran Knoppix off a cd for a week. All of the kids wanted to try it and liked it except that it was slow running off the cdrom.
Two kids and I installed Knoppix to the hard drive and it has been running without a problem since April. No problems at all. The two kids started making it look good and then got to see that they could do a lot with it including play games that the tech folks won't allow on the Windows machines. They introduced kids to it and I, in turn, introduced them all to having their own accounts on the machine. They loved that. (The windows machines are single user machines used by forty different people, ugh.)
The only people unhappy with the situation are the tech folks offsite. One of them asked what was wrong with computer number one. Nothing, I said. It doesn't look right, she said. I told her it was running Linux. She said that she had heard of it. I gave her a Knoppix cd and told her to try it. "I'm not supposed to have pirated software," she said. I told her that I thought it would be okay just this once. Geez.
Anyway, the point of this long-winded post is this: None of the kids has missed MS Word or IE. They asked about both and I said that Computer #1 doesn't run those any more. Instead, I showed them OpenOffice and Firefox. The kids showed them the games. Another teacher discovered The Gimp. Two kids moved the scanner from a non-functioning Windows box to the Knoppix one and got it working in no time.
I'm still not willing to switch them all over, but Computer #1 works and works all the time. I have a feeling that one or two kids might want to make some changes to Computer #2 this year.
How long before we get our hands on the server locked in the closet down the hall?
Thank goodness I'm not alone. Rock on, music luddites. Maybe I'll get out my discwasher, clean up and ALBUM and throw it on the turntable. I miss the seventies. (Well, not really.)
It's not that it's evil or that it should never be purchased, it's just that I don't want to buy a system that is very expensive and will lock me into a platform I don't want to use. If I could just hook the thing up to my machine and put my music on it, then fine. But I have concerns about the DRM, about having to use Mac or Windows, and about the price.
If you can believe it, I still don't have a portable music player other than my six year old cd player. (I'm one of three people in the US without some sort of modern music device). If the iPod came out in a less expensive model that would work with my Linux box, I would buy it. Plain and simple.
For now, I'll let others enjoy it and refrain from calling them evil unless they also support Bush.
Here, here. I just spent the better part of the day getting myself set to read old writings I did in WordPerfect. I wish the damn file format had been open and then there would be a filter built into OpenOffice. (By the by, KWord does a nice job of opening WP files.)
I'm not about to buy all of my music in one format just to lose it AGAIN. I did that with albums (which I had to transfer to my own cassettes since the cassettes sounded so bad) and replaced all of them with CD's. If I couldn't rip my CD's onto the hard drive, I would have to buy new MP3's of all of them. I'm tired of paying for the music over and over.
That and I agree that there is very little out ther that I want to pay for. A couple albums here and there, but for the most part I check the CD out of the library and rip the few songs off it that I like. If I like the whole thing, I'll pay for it or a few of us will get together and share the cost of it. The price of CDs is just way too high and I have no pity for a business that has for far too long jacked up prices. They are paying the price now.
Reminds me of a job I had for a couple years in high school. The boss was a real screw. He was mean to his employees, harrassed the young cashier girls, and treated his customers like the stuff his dog left on the lawn. After a month or two I understood why all the employees took it out in trade (so to speak). Right or wrong, it could have been prevented if he had been a good and fair person. I worked a similar job for a guy who treated his employees the way he wanted us to treat him. Never once did I steal from him and one guy who did got blown in for it. The boss let him keep the job after talking to him about it.
The record companies are that boss I had in high school. Am I breaking the law? Yes. Is it right? No and to pretend that it is right is to lie to myself. But do I feel any shame at all? Not even a little.
I wish that OpenOffice would start a "Firefox" project that would concentrate on a very fast, very tight project for word processing. OpenOffice is a great thing (free, does most everything anyone could ask of it) but it is a slug, a monster that eats memory and just kills older machines. If I could use OpenOffice on my home machine (which is pretty substantial) and then use a "firefox" version on my older machines (like the laptop I'm using now and most of the computers at our under-funded school), I would be all set.
Maybe I'm just getting ahead of the project here. I know that 2.0 is striving for faster startup times and the like. Maybe instead of a separate project, OO.o could focus most of their efforts on streamlining the thing.
Firefox and Thunderbird are THE open source answers for browsing and email. That's two of the necessary apps. OpenOffice plugs many of the other holes, but it needs work. Firefox is already there.
What converted me to OpenOffice is that I finally had someone tell me (correctly) that I could do this by typing the text at the left margin, hitting tab once, hitting Ctrl-R and typing text at the right margin. Not as easy as WP but better than setting tab stops any day.
Alright, but can anyone really think that the current market idea can continue to scale? Seems to me that there is going to be a rupture, that there must be a correction not in the market so much as in the way of thinking. Not in my lifetime, but likely in my grandchildrens' lifetimes there will be a new model that takes hold.
Believing the capitalism will rule forever is just silly.
I'm talking about high schools and (especially) small colleges where budget cutting has become not only a tradition but mandatory. No one is increasing spending on schools right now and that trend will continue.
Does this mean that Open Source software will take over? No, probably not. Linux and OpenOffice will fill niches (we've installed Linux on two of ten machines, OpenOffice on all the machines (along with Office), and had some success) but what will happen is that MS will give away software to schools.
This is already happening at the secondary school level by a quiet agreement. Schools ignore licenses more than they pay attention to them. My school has fourteen unlicensed copies of Windows, thirteen of Office, and a host of other software. We buy one copy and it ends up on all the machines, go figure.
Will Microsoft bust us? I would love it if they did because there simply is no money to buy licences and we would have to move to Linux. But what will happen is that MS will ignore it because most of our kids want Office at home and XP too. That leads to more sales of PCs with licensed, paid for copies of Microsoft software.
In fact, it leads to computers running nothing but MS software.
Still, MS has to give away software to get people using it. Too many places where computers are used by the next generation of software buyers can't afford to buy the software. If MS gives it away, most folks will choose it over Linux and OO.o.
Well, they will unless people like me are in the schools suggesting that it is better on many, many levels to not be tied down to any one software product.
Two years ago I would have been jumping up and down over this. I was a WP user for a long time and really wanted a good version for Linux. But it's too late now and it's going to cost too much for Linux users (on the whole). I might still need it a little bit, just to translate all of my WP files into something that OpenOffice can read, but I wouldn't do any new work in it. Here's why:
OpenOffice just released 1.1.1. They will likely release 2.0 sometime this year. Meanwhile, users of closed software will wait for fixes. I've gotten used to Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, and a host of other programs that are released much more often than anything in the closed source world.
Beyond that, I've gotten used to not paying for these products. I'll give back in other ways (including donating money to support, just the same way that I support Public Radio), but I won't pay over $100 (US) for software any more. It doesn't fit my budget, it doesn't fit my view of how things should work.
All that said, were I still working at my old school which was a Mac shop, I would buy WP for Mac in a heartbeat. That they aren't developing for Mac baffles me. That's where commercial software ought to focus when they're looking for something other than Windows.
WP had a great run. the 5.1 version was insanely great. But the time for WP is likely past.
Now, if someone would implement the Reveal Codes feature in OpenOffice, every WP user could switch and I could be completely happy with OpenOffice.
I used to use WP, right up until last June when I wanted to switch to Linux. That's when I started using OpenOffice. But I always missed WP5.1 because it was so clean, a real writer's word processor. I got to missing it too much in December but wasn't about to install it and run DOSemu, so I learned VI. It's nutty how much I'm reminded of the clean interface. It's also gotten me to forget about formatting and just write.
Corel can keep releasing, but OpenOffice is going to eat WP users alive. I appreciate them still selling to the faithful, but I can't be the only one who moved on when a real alternative to Word showed up.
I was just talking with friends about this the other day when we were discussing the purchase of a new car. My Toyota Tercel with 135,000 miles on it and a crumpled front fender has a trade-in value of less than $350 (US). My friend said, "ugh, that cars worthless." Well, no, not at all. It gets me to and from work every day, uses a fair amount of fuel, and is paid for. I would put its value far above $350 but I'm not looking to sell.
Seems to me that capitalism is based on people always wanting more. If people decide that they want less, capitalism will fall apart. Of course, that has yet to happen.
I would think that the increased use of caller ID would already be making phone polls almost worthless. Who answers their phone anymore if they don't know the caller? There is a certain population that just doesn't want to participate in surveys any more and there is another group that won't be bothered with phone calls. So who is answering these survey phone calls? That's a piece of data I would like to see.
Of course, the news media outlets (radio, television, newspaper, and web) like the polls because they make for quick headlines and short articles. Thus, the polls results become a force driving opinion disproportionately.
Of course, I'm not a statistician, so I'm probably just blowing smoke out of my ass.
Ridiculous. I in no way advocate the suppression of anyone's human rights. Nor do I advocate the brutal attack of any nation in order to "save" the people from a dicatorship. George Bush's foreign policy states that the US can invade when it feels that the justfication is there or that the justfication may soon be there. That's a horrendous, dangerous and absurd policy based largely on hubris.
As for not recognizing the sovereignty of a nation that doesn't recognize the liberty of its people, then you may not want to become a US citizen any time soon. The current US administration places many things higher on its list of priorities than it does the notion of personal liberty. Ask John Ashcroft. Ask the detainees in Guantanamo. Ask the thousands of people held in American jails without habeus corpus on the suspicion of terror sympathy.
The US government DID invade a soveriegn nation. It did so without international support. It did so in violation of international law. The means, especially in this case, do not justify the ends.
Keep in mind folks that this has absolutely nothing to do with September 11. Sure, a dictator is out of power. That's fine. Remember though that to topple him, our government invaded a sovereign nation without international support or a plan for after the initial attacks. The administration is going to spin this as a wonderful thing for Americans and a sure sign that the administration is tough on terrorists. This isn't the war on terrorism (as ill-thought as that war is). It's the war on Iraq that was started many years ago by the father and now reengaged by the son. Nothing more. Iraqi citizens may rejoice, but there is no reason for us to do the same.
Backward compatibilty with skins doesn't seem like the biggest issue to me. I worry that developers get too caught up in supporting what was and that limits what can be. Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for open source developers to do a Word format thing where they keep changing the format to get everyone to upgrade, but neither do I want a system whereby every legacy app is supported in the new version and thus, everything is clunky.
I'm not saying this as well as I had hoped. But what I guess I'm talking about is that I was very impressed when the Mozilla team made the decision to jettison the old Netscape code even though that meant a longer development cycle, backlash from lots of sources, and a host of other PR problems. By starting from scratch, they produced a product that is incredible, far better than if they had stayed with the old code.
So, if a few skins don't work, for me, that's not a big deal.
Then again, I'm just one user.
While I agree with you that "we're going to drive Microsoft out of business" is a bad business plan, I think it's at least as bad to ignore them. Any computer/software/gaming/entertainment device company that doesn't work to stay ahead of Microsoft and undermine them in some way will be killed. Why? Simply because Microsoft understands that they have to undermine or outwit every business out there in order to stay on top. And, weird thing, that's just what they've done for a few years now, say, since they sold their second copy of DOS.
What about the whole thing of Dell supporting LInux on the desktop? Does this mean that, in a few months, they might offer machines with Linux pre-installed? If so, and wouldn't that be great, would they offer these only at the enterprise level or would small businesses (or even, gasp, home users) be able to buy a new Dell system with Linux preinstalled and no Windows tax?
And can I fit any more questions into one post?