Whatever. GNUcash works -- now -- and is to Quicken what the GIMP is to Microsoft Paint (with regards to power, flexibility, and yes usability.)
So based on the above, you either think that GNUcash is MUCH better than Quicken in terms of power, flexibility and usability, OR you think that Microsoft Paint is much better than GNUcash. I doubt if more than 1% of people would agree with you on that. Sorry, but you are the one that is missing something, your marbles or your reason perhaps.
If I do any stepping up I'll help out Kmymoney2, it has a brighter future, and KDE has a better future as well. And the best part is that Kmymoney2 has no dependancies.
But many people have said the GNUcash is NOT a replacement for an accounting program, thus GNUcash does not satisfy the home user or the business user's needs. And look how many years it's taken already. I say move on and write a new program.
What do you use GNUcash for, in terms of home finances. I found that it was pretty limited for this purpose, as I don't enjoy copying or importing my checking account statements, and GNUcash has no investment functions besides data entry.
GnuCash is a full-fleged dual entry accounting system: you can run your business accounting with it.
Quicken and Money are not: they are just good for keeping track of your personal bank accounts.
This is the problem. Money and Quicken have investment features, GnuCash does not. That's why it will never catch on. They should stop focusing on druids, and implement some good functionality for investments and the ability to produce a simple report which shows the annualized return for all investments, or the capital gains in the previous year. This is what most people use Quicken and Money for nowadays, and sometimes they might import their statements into the app via the web, but manual entry of items in a checking account is rare, IMHO, unless you are super-anal.
Um, actually I have done some software development. And I have been apart of some code re-writes, which because of rampant poor design of software beforehand.
I think I just think that GNUcash will never catch on, because it hasn't caught on yet, and it's been around for a long time. So I think developer would be better spent on new things, not patching old things which have something inherently wrong with them.
GnuCash brings a new method of money management to the table (accounts)
True, but truly this method has not been successful, at least as implemented by the GNUcash team. Thus, let it die. I don't really see how GNUcash "innovates" as you say. The only real innovation I see is that they have one of the largest developer to lines of code ratios, have more dependancies than a handicapped person, and the program has managed to look roughly the same for the past 3 years since I first used it, with still no support for investments! Who really tracks their checking accounts using software anyways, the only things these programs are good for is tracking your mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other investments, and to have it automatically tell you your capital gains for tax purposes and spew out the annualized return of all your investments in nice report form. I'm not sure what the GNUcash developers have been working on the past few years, when it is missing some key features.
BTW, I was never suggesting the GNUcash be a copy-cat app of MyMoney or Quicken. However, the features that those apps provide (ie. investments), are a benchmark for what other apps should provide, if they hope to grab any market/mind share whatsoever.
I wasn't comparing Kmymoney2 to those Windows products, I was comparing it to GNUcash. Nor was I comparing their ability to work, their stability, or their current features, etc... I was more or less comparing their potential, and they develop-ability, in other words, if you have 5 programmers who had x man hours to spare, where would they be better spent? I think they'd be better spent at Kmymoney2, not GNUcash.
And Kmymoney2 actually used to work a lot better in some earlier releases, IMHO. I'm glad it doesn't work so well now and is sometimes very broken in CVS, this means that they are working at it! And they truly are, the last time I run the CVS version, the checkbook interface was 10 times better, and it was converted to KDE3/qt3 widgets. It's come a long way, and they're almost there I think. It doesn't take much to match the functionality of Quicken and MS Money, they just need a few more developers and a few more years.
GNUcash is so complex. Why anyone would want to develop or even usefor the GNUcash project is a mystery to me (maybe if you're an accountant). Better to develop for Kmymoney2, a nice KDE/Qt C++ app, which behaves more like Quicken and Microsoft Money, the two most popular money managment apps. Kmymoney2 is the only real alternative to GNUcash for the future in my opinion. Let GNUcash die, and some new apps will come...
Haven't they given up already? Look at the amount of advertising. There is basically none anymore. Or at least their audience has changed. When I was in undergraduate in 2001-2002 they were promoting it tons to the students, and now they aren't promoting it at all to students. I think it's because they were promoting the WinXP/.NET combination when WinXP came out. But now that promotion for XP has died down so has.NET promotion. But still I don't see any evidence anywhere for.NET and I never here anyone in IT or any development area talking about it.
There is no fundamental rule. But if a government has $100 mil, they'd be best advised (IMHO) to invest it in something which will benefit the citizens as a whole, or generate revenue for the governent. If jobs are created as a result than this is fine. I'm just saying that things done for the SOLE PURPOSE of creating jobs do not work in general. For example, the BC Fast Ferries project: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/01/09/bcferries0301 09. Done solely to "create jobs" and "create a shipbuilding industry" in BC. It failed miserably, and in my opinion projects with that kind of intention without considering market factors will fail every time.
You raise a good point, that if they aren't braindead... What you talking about is more or less governments making investments here and there. I believe these investments should be made in the interests of making money for the government, and jobs should be a consequence of that. But if a government makes a $100 mil investment for the sole purpose of creating jobs, then it will not be a prosperous venture in the long run.
By no means to I think I'll always have a job. I'm actually an engineer, well not really, I graduated from engineering, and was forced to go to grad school because there are no jobs. There are even less jobs now, a year later. Now I hear that many companies are outsourcing programmers, engineers, etc. from India, China, etc.. where that labour is cheap. Fuck, do you think I think the future is bright for me! I have no real engineering skills, just a degree, and a few tens of thousands of Nortel engineers with real skills are out there looking for work before me. Seriously, it's going to get worse and worse. If I ever do get my foot into the door I will be somewhat set for life, making at least $60,000 CAD as an engineer in Canada averaged over my career. But frankly I think I deserve that for a 5 year degree + 2 years in grad school But I know what it's like to not be able to find a job, so I will give to the poor that's for damn sure. We do have it better in Canada though, the rich are taxed a lot (it could be more though, for those $100,000+ earners), the poor aren't (I know because I've never paid any taxes in the past 8 years, and I get $75/quarter for GST rebate) and good social programs. But the gov't has done a good job at this, even while our neighbor the U.S. is doing the opposite.
The Hoover Dam was created to generate electricity. There was a real demand for electricity, and I believe all the demand was coming from Las Vegas actually, which hadn't started it's growth spurt yet...
Of course the Hoover Dam created jobs, but just as a consequence of the demand for electricity. But "job creation" programs which are not based on any real market demand are not well thought out.
Sorry, I am not a capitalist. All I'm saying is that you (government) can't create real jobs, they have to be created through market forces. I am not a neo-capitalist. My comment was just saying that if you really want to create jobs, this is what you can do.
The NDP in British Columbia is notorious for trying to do this kind of "job creation" thing. They poured money (man millions) into Skeena Cellulose for years, just to prevent the loss of a few hundred jobs. All they did was hold off evolution for a few years...in the end, Skeena Cellulose shut down. Why? The same reasons that they were almost shut down in the first place! They could have used the money to *help* those people get new jobs, or used the money for a hell of a lot of other things, social programs, healthcare, etc... Then there was the fast ferry issue. The NDP government's goal was to "revive" the BC shipbuilding industry. Actually there wasn't much of one, so they were trying to "create" a ferry/ship-building industry in BC. These kinds of govenment business plans do not go through the same kinds of scrutiny that investors put publicly-traded companies or private companies through though. This is a typical example of governments thinking they can "create" jobs out of thin air. What we were left with was a few useless ferries that no one would buy (so much for the "market") and no ship-building industry. And a whole bunch of people who were out of work before, are out of work again.
I don't know a hell of a lot about politics. I just know a bit about the issues I care about. All I know is, government job creation=bad, paying down the debt=good, freezing tuition rates=bad, providing bursaries and loans ot those who can't afford university=good, free tuition=better, controlled urban growth=good, some privatization=good, NDP=bad, socialism=good, "tax bads, not goods"=good.
Get your socialist democratic head out of your ass, we're not all hard-liners, nothing is black and white, left and right-wing, etc... Think about it next time you decide to label someone as a neo-capitalist and go on a rant.
Yes, but those jobs will either disappear once they realize there is no work to do, or when they go into deficit and have to start laying people off. Those jobs were not created out of need, they were created for a non-existent need. They could just give people social assistance instead, if they actually had lots of money, or they could give some money for them to go to school to get trained in some useful skill.
In my town, there were 5 bank of montreal branches. Suddenly they closed all of them, and built a new one, so now there is one. At all the old branches, there is one ATM now, and some new business in the extra space. Sounds like good business to me. My other bank, ING direct, doesn't even have any branches.
You're right, as old jobs disappear, new jobs will be created. Like we will need lots of programmers and engineers to create the robots. This is good news for me! But eventually those jobs will disappear too, as we figure out better ways to make programming easier and easier. Pretty soon the computers will be auto-generated all the code based on just answering a few questions and hitting "next", like a Wizard.
What do you mean the governments will be trying to create jobs elsewhere? Are you a supported of the NDP party in Canada or something? Anyone who actually believe a job can be "created" out of thin air is a crackpot. Jobs are created if a market is created, and that just comes naturally. The only thing a government can do it get rid of deficit/debt and promote investment and lower taxes in their country, to draw business.
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Your analogy still is not soo perfect. GIMP is powerful, whereas GNUcash IMHO is not.
So based on the above, you either think that GNUcash is MUCH better than Quicken in terms of power, flexibility and usability, OR you think that Microsoft Paint is much better than GNUcash. I doubt if more than 1% of people would agree with you on that. Sorry, but you are the one that is missing something, your marbles or your reason perhaps.
Isn't GIMP more comparable to Photoshop?
You can track investments although it is very clumsy. There are almost no reports that can be generated from this.
If I do any stepping up I'll help out Kmymoney2, it has a brighter future, and KDE has a better future as well. And the best part is that Kmymoney2 has no dependancies.
But many people have said the GNUcash is NOT a replacement for an accounting program, thus GNUcash does not satisfy the home user or the business user's needs. And look how many years it's taken already. I say move on and write a new program.
What do you use GNUcash for, in terms of home finances. I found that it was pretty limited for this purpose, as I don't enjoy copying or importing my checking account statements, and GNUcash has no investment functions besides data entry.
Will it be easy for me to pitch in and write reporting functions? I looked into this for GNUcash, but it was more complicated than I would have liked.
This is the problem. Money and Quicken have investment features, GnuCash does not. That's why it will never catch on. They should stop focusing on druids, and implement some good functionality for investments and the ability to produce a simple report which shows the annualized return for all investments, or the capital gains in the previous year. This is what most people use Quicken and Money for nowadays, and sometimes they might import their statements into the app via the web, but manual entry of items in a checking account is rare, IMHO, unless you are super-anal.
I think I just think that GNUcash will never catch on, because it hasn't caught on yet, and it's been around for a long time. So I think developer would be better spent on new things, not patching old things which have something inherently wrong with them.
True, but truly this method has not been successful, at least as implemented by the GNUcash team. Thus, let it die. I don't really see how GNUcash "innovates" as you say. The only real innovation I see is that they have one of the largest developer to lines of code ratios, have more dependancies than a handicapped person, and the program has managed to look roughly the same for the past 3 years since I first used it, with still no support for investments! Who really tracks their checking accounts using software anyways, the only things these programs are good for is tracking your mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other investments, and to have it automatically tell you your capital gains for tax purposes and spew out the annualized return of all your investments in nice report form. I'm not sure what the GNUcash developers have been working on the past few years, when it is missing some key features.
BTW, I was never suggesting the GNUcash be a copy-cat app of MyMoney or Quicken. However, the features that those apps provide (ie. investments), are a benchmark for what other apps should provide, if they hope to grab any market/mind share whatsoever.
I wasn't comparing Kmymoney2 to those Windows products, I was comparing it to GNUcash. Nor was I comparing their ability to work, their stability, or their current features, etc... I was more or less comparing their potential, and they develop-ability, in other words, if you have 5 programmers who had x man hours to spare, where would they be better spent? I think they'd be better spent at Kmymoney2, not GNUcash. And Kmymoney2 actually used to work a lot better in some earlier releases, IMHO. I'm glad it doesn't work so well now and is sometimes very broken in CVS, this means that they are working at it! And they truly are, the last time I run the CVS version, the checkbook interface was 10 times better, and it was converted to KDE3/qt3 widgets. It's come a long way, and they're almost there I think. It doesn't take much to match the functionality of Quicken and MS Money, they just need a few more developers and a few more years.
GNUcash is so complex. Why anyone would want to develop or even usefor the GNUcash project is a mystery to me (maybe if you're an accountant). Better to develop for Kmymoney2, a nice KDE/Qt C++ app, which behaves more like Quicken and Microsoft Money, the two most popular money managment apps. Kmymoney2 is the only real alternative to GNUcash for the future in my opinion. Let GNUcash die, and some new apps will come...
It is the standard development environment? Since when?
Haven't they given up already? Look at the amount of advertising. There is basically none anymore. Or at least their audience has changed. When I was in undergraduate in 2001-2002 they were promoting it tons to the students, and now they aren't promoting it at all to students. I think it's because they were promoting the WinXP/.NET combination when WinXP came out. But now that promotion for XP has died down so has .NET promotion. But still I don't see any evidence anywhere for .NET and I never here anyone in IT or any development area talking about it.
Add .NET/C# to the list of Microsoft failures. C#, reminds of J++ or whatever they had for a while. What a failure that was.
There is no fundamental rule. But if a government has $100 mil, they'd be best advised (IMHO) to invest it in something which will benefit the citizens as a whole, or generate revenue for the governent. If jobs are created as a result than this is fine. I'm just saying that things done for the SOLE PURPOSE of creating jobs do not work in general. For example, the BC Fast Ferries project: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/01/09/bcferries0301 09. Done solely to "create jobs" and "create a shipbuilding industry" in BC. It failed miserably, and in my opinion projects with that kind of intention without considering market factors will fail every time.
You raise a good point, that if they aren't braindead... What you talking about is more or less governments making investments here and there. I believe these investments should be made in the interests of making money for the government, and jobs should be a consequence of that. But if a government makes a $100 mil investment for the sole purpose of creating jobs, then it will not be a prosperous venture in the long run.
By no means to I think I'll always have a job. I'm actually an engineer, well not really, I graduated from engineering, and was forced to go to grad school because there are no jobs. There are even less jobs now, a year later. Now I hear that many companies are outsourcing programmers, engineers, etc. from India, China, etc.. where that labour is cheap. Fuck, do you think I think the future is bright for me! I have no real engineering skills, just a degree, and a few tens of thousands of Nortel engineers with real skills are out there looking for work before me. Seriously, it's going to get worse and worse. If I ever do get my foot into the door I will be somewhat set for life, making at least $60,000 CAD as an engineer in Canada averaged over my career. But frankly I think I deserve that for a 5 year degree + 2 years in grad school But I know what it's like to not be able to find a job, so I will give to the poor that's for damn sure. We do have it better in Canada though, the rich are taxed a lot (it could be more though, for those $100,000+ earners), the poor aren't (I know because I've never paid any taxes in the past 8 years, and I get $75/quarter for GST rebate) and good social programs. But the gov't has done a good job at this, even while our neighbor the U.S. is doing the opposite.
The Hoover Dam was created to generate electricity. There was a real demand for electricity, and I believe all the demand was coming from Las Vegas actually, which hadn't started it's growth spurt yet... Of course the Hoover Dam created jobs, but just as a consequence of the demand for electricity. But "job creation" programs which are not based on any real market demand are not well thought out.
Sorry, I am not a capitalist. All I'm saying is that you (government) can't create real jobs, they have to be created through market forces. I am not a neo-capitalist. My comment was just saying that if you really want to create jobs, this is what you can do. The NDP in British Columbia is notorious for trying to do this kind of "job creation" thing. They poured money (man millions) into Skeena Cellulose for years, just to prevent the loss of a few hundred jobs. All they did was hold off evolution for a few years...in the end, Skeena Cellulose shut down. Why? The same reasons that they were almost shut down in the first place! They could have used the money to *help* those people get new jobs, or used the money for a hell of a lot of other things, social programs, healthcare, etc... Then there was the fast ferry issue. The NDP government's goal was to "revive" the BC shipbuilding industry. Actually there wasn't much of one, so they were trying to "create" a ferry/ship-building industry in BC. These kinds of govenment business plans do not go through the same kinds of scrutiny that investors put publicly-traded companies or private companies through though. This is a typical example of governments thinking they can "create" jobs out of thin air. What we were left with was a few useless ferries that no one would buy (so much for the "market") and no ship-building industry. And a whole bunch of people who were out of work before, are out of work again. I don't know a hell of a lot about politics. I just know a bit about the issues I care about. All I know is, government job creation=bad, paying down the debt=good, freezing tuition rates=bad, providing bursaries and loans ot those who can't afford university=good, free tuition=better, controlled urban growth=good, some privatization=good, NDP=bad, socialism=good, "tax bads, not goods"=good. Get your socialist democratic head out of your ass, we're not all hard-liners, nothing is black and white, left and right-wing, etc... Think about it next time you decide to label someone as a neo-capitalist and go on a rant.
Yes, but those jobs will either disappear once they realize there is no work to do, or when they go into deficit and have to start laying people off. Those jobs were not created out of need, they were created for a non-existent need. They could just give people social assistance instead, if they actually had lots of money, or they could give some money for them to go to school to get trained in some useful skill.
In my town, there were 5 bank of montreal branches. Suddenly they closed all of them, and built a new one, so now there is one. At all the old branches, there is one ATM now, and some new business in the extra space. Sounds like good business to me. My other bank, ING direct, doesn't even have any branches.
You're right, as old jobs disappear, new jobs will be created. Like we will need lots of programmers and engineers to create the robots. This is good news for me! But eventually those jobs will disappear too, as we figure out better ways to make programming easier and easier. Pretty soon the computers will be auto-generated all the code based on just answering a few questions and hitting "next", like a Wizard.
What do you mean the governments will be trying to create jobs elsewhere? Are you a supported of the NDP party in Canada or something? Anyone who actually believe a job can be "created" out of thin air is a crackpot. Jobs are created if a market is created, and that just comes naturally. The only thing a government can do it get rid of deficit/debt and promote investment and lower taxes in their country, to draw business.