I can't help feeling skeptical, but if this is decent software... this could be the answer to the last thing keeping my non-geeky friends/family on Linux. My mother, for instance, has been so annoyed with Windows lately that the only real hesitation she has about moving to Linux is the loss of using Quicken to keep track of finances.
If this thing is even marginally like Quicken, I'll snap it up in a heartbeat - one for them, and one for me! Yes, I know there's GnuCash, but it just wasn't up to snuff last I looked. Online access is a major plus, and if they don't have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, I think I have a chance.
Okay, so am I the only one who ever actually *wants* to watch commercials? Only very rarely, of course, but a small (very small) subset of commercials are entertaining. The Apple one with Vern Troyer and the tall bball player, for example. And my fiancee makes me stop any time the Sprint commercial with the dachshounds is on, and laughs histerically at it every time.
Incidentally, I just realized that we've since purchased two Sprint PCS cell phones. Hmmm...
Anyway, I think this is just a challenge to marketers and ad-makers: make interesting commericials. I mean, come on - some of those commercials are just *bad*. And not the good, I'll remember it because it was so bad, bad. I'm talking *bad*. Some days it saddens me to think that there is actually someone who got paid to sign off and give the "ok" to a certain commercial. Oh well.
Never use a big word when a dimunitive one will suffice.
Oooh! This is what I'm looking to do. I just bought a house (getting married!), and there is no wiring at all in the house, so I get to start from scratch. Basically, I want my main computer to be upstairs, but be able to play video and audio from the computer on my tv/stereo downstairs.
All this buzz is only for the "Enterprise" products, right? I mean, won't RedHat continue to release its usual RedHat 8.1 type product (although perhaps not quite as often?). I would think this would still be a viable option for many of those folks for whom the Enterprise Server is overkill.
For many companies, tho, the certification for standard vendors like Oracle are extremely important. If you don't have these, it doesn't matter how free your operating system is.
But, I don't see any way in RedHat's plan to give me minimal support for a long period of time (2-3 years) for a reasonable cost.
Ah, but that's the beauty of Open Source - you don't *need* RedHat to give you 2-3 years of support for reasonable cost. You can get that from someone else. If there are enough people like you out there to support a business model that satisfies your needs, then someone will probably start one (if there isn't one already).
CS should not be about programming! Programming is a tool
Exactly. My first internship out of college at MTU was for a company programming in both COBOL and DB2 databases, neither of which I had any experience in. However, due to the CS concepts I'd learned at college, I was programming code faster and better than those employees who had actually taken COBOL and DB2 classes for their IS degrees. (Lest you think this an isolated case, this was also true for my other CS co-worker).
For the CS students, I think the real question, tho, is what kind of degree are the people in the CS department getting? If they're looking to learn how to program in Visual Basic, they'd be better off going to a 6 month vocational school and saving themselves the time and money.
For the "other" students, I agree that not being exposed to M$ products entirely might be detrimental, especially for those in Business degrees. I mean, let's face it - when people are looking through resumes for keywords, they're looking for experience in "Microsoft PowerPoint", not "OpenOffice" or even "Presentation software." So I think you might have to allow for exceptions.
For the average student, tho, who only uses the computers to type up reports and essays, and surf the web, do email, and instant message - they're not going to be at a disadvantage, I don't think, especially if most of the college is non-M$. When they get to the "real" world, I doubt they're going to notice much of a difference between Outlook and Evolution, or IE and Mozilla.
Re:Close boxes in individual tabs - a bad idea
on
Hyatt Discusses Tabs
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· Score: 1
a close box in a tab takes up such a large proportion of space that it is very easy to accidentally close a tab just by clicking on it.
Huh. You know, I don't think I've ever had this happen to me, and I'm a long-time Galeon user. On my screen/resolution, the "x" only covers about 1/10th of the tab, so there's plenty of room to click without hitting the "x".
Personally, I think the user intuitiveness of having the "x" on the actual tab outweighs any possible disadvantage of accidentally closing the tab.
Paginated texts, you have to first have to notice that they ARE paginated, and then go through and open each individual one, and then pay attention to actually read the in order. Much more of a hassle.
YES. My recent experience is shopping for new tires. I went to Discount Tires, and after clicking through a few simple questions they displayed all the tires for my car on a simple page (which, incidentally, I then used tabbed browsing to open the "more info" button on the ones I was interested in).
Then, being the price checker I am, I also visited Tires Plus. After clicking a few simple questions, they told me that there were 86 tires to choose from - and started listing them at six per page.
Well, there was no freaking way I was going to click through 15 pages of tires. That and the fact that they wouldn't tell me the price, but had to email me a quote, got Discount Tires my business.
Um, excuse me while I saw PUH-SHAW?!? Are you seriously implying that Windows is 100% compatible? You, my friend, have obviously never used different versions of MS Office. I can't tell you the number of headaches (and pissed off friends and relatives) that I've had from Word97 not reading Word2000, or even WordXP not reading Word97!
Have you ever sent somebody a Word.doc as a resume? I can tell you that you darn well better find out which version they have, and give them that *exact* version, or your chances of getting the job are going in the trashheap as soon as they see the first mis-formatted character or error dialogue box.
Fast. Easy computing. That's why I pay for my software..
Riiiiiight. WindowsXP (and maybe Win2000) is the first time Windows FINALLY got some of this stuff working. Have you ever tried to find a driver for your system with Win95/98/ME? Holy crap is it stupid. I mean, come on - Windows couldn't even find the driver that was on THE SAME FREAKING DISC that the OS was installed from?
I'm sorry, but I've worked with Windows too much to buy that it's "fast, easy computing." It's only fast and easy for those who have people like me fix their problems for them...
Hmmph. I encountered the same thing when I upgraded, but all I did was choose to continue and everything worked just fine. Pulled up Red-Carpet and updated everything, and all was well.
Doesn't seem to difficult to me. Naturally Red-Hat is going to complain when upgrading a system that has packages that aren't theirs on it (and by that I mean the same program). I'm pretty sure you can use Red-Carpet to do the upgrade for you, tho, which would take care of that.
It's already obsolete if they're using GNOME 2.0 instead of 2.2.
Um, nobody cares. That is, no one outside the geek development crowd. This thing is aimed at people who want to run Linux, but want to have it look nice and do what they want without having to spend all day setting it up, or all year learning how to install/compile/rpm/apt-get/whatever.
In fact, most places that would use Ximian Desktop, like actual companies, don't want the latest, greatest. They want something that has been around for a little bit, that they know is not going to break right away.
I, for one, will be quite happy if it fulfills half the expectations this guy sets up for it. I've been looking for something that I can put on my Mom's computer that will still give her all her Windows functionality and ease-of-use. If Ximian Desktop 2.0 does this, she doesn't care what the number is (indeed, she probably won't even realize there is one!).
This still wont last. The number of people who dont have fast land access and want more than dialup is nowhere near enough to keep this thing up.
I beg to differ. There are plenty of people in rural areas who don't have access to a broadband connection, for a variety of reasons:
They live in a small rural town, and the cable company doesn't offer internet (and likely won't for quite some time
They live in a small rural town, and the phone company doesn't offer DSL (and likely won't for quite some time
They live several miles outside of a rural town, and the only option is dial-up or satellite (my parents fall into this category - they live 5miles outside a Wisconsin town of 2600. No broadband anywhere!
The reason it may not last is, IMHO, the price. Most of the people who are in such a position as to need satellite are also not going to want to spend $100/mo on broadband internet access. Witness how long it took for satellite TV to take off - it wasn't until the major packages got down in the $30-$50 range that people started to buy, but once they did, they did it with a vengeance.
I think if satellite access got down to under $50 a month for decent broadband, with relatively low ($100) startup costs, more people would use it.
I haven't used it myself, but I've heard of many people here in MN (Minneapolis/St. Paul) who love SimonDelivers, which has no delivery fee for orders above $80, otherwise $2.95. I don't know their financials, but they seem to be doing ok, and I certainly see their trucks all over the place!
Right... except for when you want to get some REAL work done. I suppose you do all that fancy simulation stuff that saves you millions of dollars when looking for where to drill for oil on a Windows box, eh?
Other then people doing video work, at this time who really needs this kind of storage. I have a 20Gb mp3 player and I still have not filled it 1/2 way.
Hmmm... so you're saying you have at least 2 DVDs worth of music on your hard drive. Do you not plan to have any more, ever? What about backing up that 20GB drive?
I would hope a system would never need, a 20 Gb system would still have 5Gb for user data
Sure, your user data or your OS may fit on 5GB (although really 640k should be enough for anyone), but with hard drives already in the 100s of GBs, it'll soon take a whole pack of DVD-Rs to back that sucker up. (And have you seen the latest MS Office products? Or heck, even the latest RedHat distro?)
But yeah, who'll ever need that much storage? I still store everything of mine on my 5 1/4" floppies...
No, you'd still pay $27, but you could watch the whole movie without changing discs.
As well as possibly, in the future, getting a higher quality picture. Remember, DVDs are still compressed quite a bit, so there's room for improvement, both in the area of sound and in picture. And with movies starting to get shot in digital format, higher quality stuff will be more easily available.
I'm guessing this will happen someday, just not soon. There will need to be a point where the standard changes from the ~5GB DVD to a new format that will store much more, but it's anyone's guess when that will happen.
Where do you get the idea that Ogg enthusiasts are cheap? All signs to me would point in the opposite direction:
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
As I noted in a different reply, though, this may also be misleading, as apparently Sony negotiated to have Spider-man shown on the largest capacity screens.
The gross for 20th Century Fox's Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones could have been higher had it not been for a strategic move made by Sony's Columbia Pictures when it locked up theater screens for Spider-Man, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Monday). According to the newspaper, the studio demanded the largest-capacity theaters at megaplexes through the Memorial Day weekend as a condition of its deals with exhibitors.
That said, I quite thoroughly enjoyed both movies, and will probably see both again. The only bad part for me, now, is that because Ep. II doesn't suck, it's likely I'll end up having to own the whole set, which means I have to pay good $$$ for _The Phantom Menace_. Ugh.
I, for one, am quite happy they decided to do 7.3 instead of 8.0. I work for SGI, and while we have plenty of things we'd rather not brag about, one that is almost universally touted as an advantage by customers is that we've consistently come out with updates to our 6.5 OS (on a quarterly basis) for the last *four* *years*. We've introduced tons of new features and support for brand new architectures, but always kept binary compatibility.
Of course, you do have the "Thisdistro 8.1 must be better than Thatdistro 7.3" problem, but I think Red Hat is probably big enough now that the backwards compatibility for their current customer base is a bigger plus for them.
Forget Oscar - I just want to beat Harry
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 1
The only reason I cared about the Oscars was the hope that the post-Oscar surge in attendence for nominated movies might finally push LoTR past Harry Potter for the highest grossing movie of 2001. Harry's almost out on video, and LotR is only $15 million behind ($300M vs $315). Not that I really have anything against Harry, it just wasn't anywhere near the movie that LotR was.
I do need to see A Beautiful Mind, tho.
Exactly. As Jerry B. Ray Jr. once said in r.m.c, "There's a remarkable amount of point missing going on around here."
As was said, Yahoo! is only charging for the POP3 and Automatic forwarding service. Web-based mail won't change.
The spam reason isn't to decrease the amount of SPAM you get to your Yahoo! email account, it's to decrease the amount of dipwads who are using thousands of different free Yahoo! accounts to send that SPAM.
And as was also pointed out, $20/yr isn't *that* bad. Heck, it used to be that and more for pretty much the same service back in the bulletin board days (mine was $36/yr, actually). We've just gotten spoiled with all the Internet madness these last few years. Why should we expect someone else to maintain a mail server for us to use and not get compensated for it? Are you going to fork over the big bucks per year for the system, maintenance, and bandwith?
That said, this certainly does suck, and is kinda annoying... but $20 is a small price to pay for the convenience Yahoo! POP3 service provides.
Slashdot Mirror
If this thing is even marginally like Quicken, I'll snap it up in a heartbeat - one for them, and one for me! Yes, I know there's GnuCash, but it just wasn't up to snuff last I looked. Online access is a major plus, and if they don't have to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, I think I have a chance.
Here's hoping this is good software.
Incidentally, I just realized that we've since purchased two Sprint PCS cell phones. Hmmm...
Anyway, I think this is just a challenge to marketers and ad-makers: make interesting commericials. I mean, come on - some of those commercials are just *bad*. And not the good, I'll remember it because it was so bad, bad. I'm talking *bad*. Some days it saddens me to think that there is actually someone who got paid to sign off and give the "ok" to a certain commercial. Oh well.
Never use a big word when a dimunitive one will suffice.
Any tips from your experience?
For many companies, tho, the certification for standard vendors like Oracle are extremely important. If you don't have these, it doesn't matter how free your operating system is.
Ah, but that's the beauty of Open Source - you don't *need* RedHat to give you 2-3 years of support for reasonable cost. You can get that from someone else. If there are enough people like you out there to support a business model that satisfies your needs, then someone will probably start one (if there isn't one already).
Exactly. My first internship out of college at MTU was for a company programming in both COBOL and DB2 databases, neither of which I had any experience in. However, due to the CS concepts I'd learned at college, I was programming code faster and better than those employees who had actually taken COBOL and DB2 classes for their IS degrees. (Lest you think this an isolated case, this was also true for my other CS co-worker).
For the CS students, I think the real question, tho, is what kind of degree are the people in the CS department getting? If they're looking to learn how to program in Visual Basic, they'd be better off going to a 6 month vocational school and saving themselves the time and money.
For the "other" students, I agree that not being exposed to M$ products entirely might be detrimental, especially for those in Business degrees. I mean, let's face it - when people are looking through resumes for keywords, they're looking for experience in "Microsoft PowerPoint", not "OpenOffice" or even "Presentation software." So I think you might have to allow for exceptions.
For the average student, tho, who only uses the computers to type up reports and essays, and surf the web, do email, and instant message - they're not going to be at a disadvantage, I don't think, especially if most of the college is non-M$. When they get to the "real" world, I doubt they're going to notice much of a difference between Outlook and Evolution, or IE and Mozilla.
Huh. You know, I don't think I've ever had this happen to me, and I'm a long-time Galeon user. On my screen/resolution, the "x" only covers about 1/10th of the tab, so there's plenty of room to click without hitting the "x".
Personally, I think the user intuitiveness of having the "x" on the actual tab outweighs any possible disadvantage of accidentally closing the tab.
YES. My recent experience is shopping for new tires. I went to Discount Tires, and after clicking through a few simple questions they displayed all the tires for my car on a simple page (which, incidentally, I then used tabbed browsing to open the "more info" button on the ones I was interested in).
Then, being the price checker I am, I also visited Tires Plus. After clicking a few simple questions, they told me that there were 86 tires to choose from - and started listing them at six per page.
Well, there was no freaking way I was going to click through 15 pages of tires. That and the fact that they wouldn't tell me the price, but had to email me a quote, got Discount Tires my business.
Um, excuse me while I saw PUH-SHAW?!? Are you seriously implying that Windows is 100% compatible? You, my friend, have obviously never used different versions of MS Office. I can't tell you the number of headaches (and pissed off friends and relatives) that I've had from Word97 not reading Word2000, or even WordXP not reading Word97!
Have you ever sent somebody a Word .doc as a resume? I can tell you that you darn well better find out which version they have, and give them that *exact* version, or your chances of getting the job are going in the trashheap as soon as they see the first mis-formatted character or error dialogue box.
Huh. 99% compatibility indeed.
Riiiiiight. WindowsXP (and maybe Win2000) is the first time Windows FINALLY got some of this stuff working. Have you ever tried to find a driver for your system with Win95/98/ME? Holy crap is it stupid. I mean, come on - Windows couldn't even find the driver that was on THE SAME FREAKING DISC that the OS was installed from?
I'm sorry, but I've worked with Windows too much to buy that it's "fast, easy computing." It's only fast and easy for those who have people like me fix their problems for them...
Troy
Ximian has a RedHat 8.0 channel. I just upgraded my RH 7.3 machine at home last week, and everything went fine.
Troy
Doesn't seem to difficult to me. Naturally Red-Hat is going to complain when upgrading a system that has packages that aren't theirs on it (and by that I mean the same program). I'm pretty sure you can use Red-Carpet to do the upgrade for you, tho, which would take care of that.
Troy
Um, nobody cares. That is, no one outside the geek development crowd. This thing is aimed at people who want to run Linux, but want to have it look nice and do what they want without having to spend all day setting it up, or all year learning how to install/compile/rpm/apt-get/whatever.
In fact, most places that would use Ximian Desktop, like actual companies, don't want the latest, greatest. They want something that has been around for a little bit, that they know is not going to break right away.
I, for one, will be quite happy if it fulfills half the expectations this guy sets up for it. I've been looking for something that I can put on my Mom's computer that will still give her all her Windows functionality and ease-of-use. If Ximian Desktop 2.0 does this, she doesn't care what the number is (indeed, she probably won't even realize there is one!).
Troy
I beg to differ. There are plenty of people in rural areas who don't have access to a broadband connection, for a variety of reasons:
The reason it may not last is, IMHO, the price. Most of the people who are in such a position as to need satellite are also not going to want to spend $100/mo on broadband internet access. Witness how long it took for satellite TV to take off - it wasn't until the major packages got down in the $30-$50 range that people started to buy, but once they did, they did it with a vengeance.
I think if satellite access got down to under $50 a month for decent broadband, with relatively low ($100) startup costs, more people would use it.
Troy
Troy
Right... except for when you want to get some REAL work done. I suppose you do all that fancy simulation stuff that saves you millions of dollars when looking for where to drill for oil on a Windows box, eh?
I have a 20Gb mp3 player and I still have not filled it 1/2 way.
Hmmm... so you're saying you have at least 2 DVDs worth of music on your hard drive. Do you not plan to have any more, ever? What about backing up that 20GB drive?
I would hope a system would never need, a 20 Gb system would still have 5Gb for user data
Sure, your user data or your OS may fit on 5GB (although really 640k should be enough for anyone), but with hard drives already in the 100s of GBs, it'll soon take a whole pack of DVD-Rs to back that sucker up. (And have you seen the latest MS Office products? Or heck, even the latest RedHat distro?)
But yeah, who'll ever need that much storage? I still store everything of mine on my 5 1/4" floppies...
Troy
As well as possibly, in the future, getting a higher quality picture. Remember, DVDs are still compressed quite a bit, so there's room for improvement, both in the area of sound and in picture. And with movies starting to get shot in digital format, higher quality stuff will be more easily available.
I'm guessing this will happen someday, just not soon. There will need to be a point where the standard changes from the ~5GB DVD to a new format that will store much more, but it's anyone's guess when that will happen.
1) Ogg advocates tend to be Slashdot-type geeks - those who are typically willing to spend more on "cool toys" than your average Joe, and have the means to do so.
2) Ogg development is supported in part by donations of people who use it. This may not be a huge amount, but this is people paying for something when they don't even have to.
3) Comparing Ogg people to MP3 people... most people are into MP3s because they can download (for free) all sorts of cool songs they didn't spend money for. Ogg, mainly for lack of available downloads, is used primarily by people ripping their own (usually extensive) collection of legally purchased CDs.
4) I've heard many Ogg enthusiasts claim that as soon as a portable Ogg player exists, they will buy one, even at significantly higher cost. I am one of these.
A free integer decoder exists. Xiph will help with engineering resources to the best of their ability. No licensing fees. And with software that can play both, a seemless transition from MP3 to Ogg is trivial. Seems pretty attractive to me.
Troy
As I noted in a different reply, though, this may also be misleading, as apparently Sony negotiated to have Spider-man shown on the largest capacity screens.
From IMDB:
The gross for 20th Century Fox's Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones could have been higher had it not been for a strategic move made by Sony's Columbia Pictures when it locked up theater screens for Spider-Man, the Wall Street Journal reported today (Monday). According to the newspaper, the studio demanded the largest-capacity theaters at megaplexes through the Memorial Day weekend as a condition of its deals with exhibitors.
That said, I quite thoroughly enjoyed both movies, and will probably see both again. The only bad part for me, now, is that because Ep. II doesn't suck, it's likely I'll end up having to own the whole set, which means I have to pay good $$$ for _The Phantom Menace_. Ugh.
I, for one, am quite happy they decided to do 7.3 instead of 8.0. I work for SGI, and while we have plenty of things we'd rather not brag about, one that is almost universally touted as an advantage by customers is that we've consistently come out with updates to our 6.5 OS (on a quarterly basis) for the last *four* *years*. We've introduced tons of new features and support for brand new architectures, but always kept binary compatibility.
Of course, you do have the "Thisdistro 8.1 must be better than Thatdistro 7.3" problem, but I think Red Hat is probably big enough now that the backwards compatibility for their current customer base is a bigger plus for them.
The only reason I cared about the Oscars was the hope that the post-Oscar surge in attendence for nominated movies might finally push LoTR past Harry Potter for the highest grossing movie of 2001. Harry's almost out on video, and LotR is only $15 million behind ($300M vs $315). Not that I really have anything against Harry, it just wasn't anywhere near the movie that LotR was. I do need to see A Beautiful Mind, tho.
Exactly. As Jerry B. Ray Jr. once said in r.m.c, "There's a remarkable amount of point missing going on around here."
As was said, Yahoo! is only charging for the POP3 and Automatic forwarding service. Web-based mail won't change.
The spam reason isn't to decrease the amount of SPAM you get to your Yahoo! email account, it's to decrease the amount of dipwads who are using thousands of different free Yahoo! accounts to send that SPAM.
And as was also pointed out, $20/yr isn't *that* bad. Heck, it used to be that and more for pretty much the same service back in the bulletin board days (mine was $36/yr, actually). We've just gotten spoiled with all the Internet madness these last few years. Why should we expect someone else to maintain a mail server for us to use and not get compensated for it? Are you going to fork over the big bucks per year for the system, maintenance, and bandwith?
That said, this certainly does suck, and is kinda annoying... but $20 is a small price to pay for the convenience Yahoo! POP3 service provides.