To *court*? With what resources? He's a grad student (a damn good one...he TAed a class of mine, and he's a wonderful guy, aside from liking SML a little too much:-) )
Tom's been putting out an enormous collection of hand-hinted fonts for years for free. He's one of the greater donators out there to the software world. Frankly, this whole thing disgusting.
Actually, the parent poster that asked for OLE is a pretty good example of what you're saying. The few times I've used Office, I've had no interest in OLE, and wouldn't care if it were left out. OTOH, I *do* like style sheets (using a word processor w/o style sheets sucks), and would be unhappy if they were left out.
Neither OLE nor style sheets, however, is used by the typical user.
Take the GIMP. Quite powerful plugins. But nothing like the easy-to-use with presets plugins you get on Photoshop. Every time I see a GIMP plugin, I think "this is neat, but a non-techie won't go for it".
Take edge-detection. AFAIK, not a big deal in Photoshop. There are *three* different plugins implemented for gimp, each named after the algorithm they implement. This is cool if you're into image processing, not image editing.
If you run out and download plugins you can get cool stuff, too. The problem is that downloading, compiling, and installing plugins is not going to work for new users. And most of those plugins aren't oriented toward design sorts either -- more towards image processing engineers.
Let me give an example. A tasty-sounding plugin for the GIMP is Artistic->Oilify. Oil painting, cool! In Photoshop, if you run something like this, you'll get a little window with a preview, a bunch of bundled presets named "big gloppy brush", "Van Gogh", etc. In the GIMP, you get a frame called "Parameter Settings" containing a checkbox called "Use Intensity Algorithm" and a slider entitled "Mask Size". Now, maybe it's just me, but I doubt anyone but the original coder k(or someone that's looked at the code, or is familiar with this family of image processing algorithms) knows what the "use Intensity Algorithm" does. There's no preview, so no easy way to check. Mask Size doesn't mean anything to a non-coder.
The GIMP (1.2.3 ximian) still doesn't bundle even have a good, preset-capable, previewing drop-shadow plugin. This is something that people want, and usually they don't want to still run out and create another layer, fill the selection, gaussian blur and then offset the new layer. It's work, and the 1% of the time they want some weird effects in their drop shadow, they can do things the hard way.
That means you shouldn't have a "alpha squared" value slider, you should have a "hairyness slider".
And this is the GIMP, which is billed as just about the most consumer-oriented app on Linux.
AbiWord is probably one of the closest apps here to what I'm talking about. Any word processor user will be familiar with most of the options.
Every feature has to be documented, tooltips be included, etc. if people really want to try to take over the commercial app market.
Something like Apple Guide or Windows Help needs to be implemented. Tooltips should be implemented more than once in a blue moon.
Now, I'm not asking for anything -- I'm happily using and hacking on the software out there, and it works nicely for me. But if the intent is to go after the commercial apps market, then a few areas need to be addressed.
If they're just office type machines, I don't see why you're upgrading. My machine is a beautifully working PII/266, and the only time I'm disadvantaged by the processor is when I'm compiling X or something, which can take a bit. Of course, I'm running Linux...
One of the better choices you could make is to *not* upgrade to new versions of your software (Office, Windows) over time. Saves money directly on not having to buy software and reduces hardware requirements massively. An NT 4.0 box running Office 97 should still work quite well for office work just as well as it did in '97. No reason to throw more money at it, as companies have a tendancy to do.
Frankly, my opinion is that if a company is upgrading general-purpose office computers more than once every five years, they're wasting money. During the big upgrade, they should do a *full* replacement -- new software, new hardware, and avoid the possibility of issues creeping in with one of many minor upgrades. They should test their intended configuration heavily, and only then deploy it all over.
The reason it's hard to "save money" vs buying OEM is largely because OEMs put crap components in wherever they possibly can in this incredibly price-competitive PC market. Yes, if they're selling a new gaming system, they're going to go for the points people look for:
High MHz processor High-end video card
Things that often fall by the wayside in OEM systems: * Input devices. Those cheap little OEM-rebranded mice and keyboards are often fragile, mushy things. * Sound card/system: Unless this is sold as a gamer or music system (and the sound system is explicitly mentioned in the specs), you're probably looking at on-board sound. Not a huge deal, but you can be looking at a performance hit when playing lots of sounds in a game. In Linux, no existing sound architecture, including OSS, the kernel, ALSA, artsd, and esd has good support for use-all-existing-hardware-channels-then-transparen tly-fall-back-to-software-mixed-channels. You're then looking at all software or all hardware, so getting a bunch of channels can be nice. Hardware midi synth can be nice, but timidity's softsynth and a good soundfont pretty much put to shame the hardware synth I've seen. * Hard drive: You do not want a bottom-of-the-line hard drive. It's not economical. If the current standard midrange size is 80GB, get an 80GB drive, not a 40GB. The small amount of savings you get for the large loss in space are not worth it. * Speakers: OEM speakers are pretty much bad, unless you're getting a high-end system * RAM: still not that good. For example, CompUSA is selling this system with WinXP and yet only 128MB of RAM. * Ethernet cards: to most people, these are pretty interchangeable. I've had some bad experiences and now only use 3com. You aren't going to be getting a 3com card in an OEM system. * Modem: If you're buying OEM, you're going to get a Winmodem. Most of these are useless in Linux. They slow down the machine (yes, I know that it isn't necessarily a massive chunk of the processor any more, but it does count). Poorly written drivers may take over the machine while dialing or give you stability problems, both of which I've run into. * Monitor: OEMs are absolutely awful here. Worst point. If you're buying an OEM system, your chance of getting a refurbished monitor is very very good. These are absolute crap -- the failure rate is ridiculous. I've lost count of how many Gateway (a particularly egregious offender) monitors I've seen die.
Now, you are likely to pay roughly what you would for an OEM for a given system. Maybe save a little, probably under a hundred bucks. However, you get significantly better components, and you get the guarantee that all the parts you're getting are Linux-savvy and don't have a bad rep (I'd be avoiding IBM's hard drives, for example).
Well, that *could* be because linuxgames.com linked to the poll and suggested that Linux users vote.
If download.com linked to and suggested that Windows users vote (and there were any users out there that cared enough about Windows to do anything about it), you'd see a similar shift the other way.
Microsoft Internet Explorer is important to Microsoft Windows.
Yes, he is silly, he talks like mickey mouse on crack, and he flops around stupidly, but had it not been for Jar Jar, there would be no episode 2 or 3...or the rest even.
Yes, it is unstable, it has no security inherent in its design and it gives users almost no control over its behavior, but had it not been for IE, there would be no file browser in Windows XP or ME, or Start Button even. After all, the file browser depends on IE.
If Qui Gon and Obi Wan had not stumbled across Jar Jar, they would never have gotten transport to the naboo city, nor would they have cannon fodder types to fight the war with the battle droids.
If Microsoft had never integrated MSIE into Windows, we never would have had a way of downloading files or accessing the Internet from Windows computers.
The trade federation would have won, and the evil sith schemes would have prospered...probably would have started the elimination of the jedi a few years earlier
The Internet would have collapsed, and geeks suffered...probably we would have started moving away from computers a few years later.
So, next time when you bash jar jar, realize that he is important to the story
So, next time when you bash MSIE, realize that it is important to our livelihoods.
I think they already paid out for this. Ridiculous amount of money. Apple Music is disgusting. Anyway, they can probably enter the music distribution business now.
They use Earthlink (blocker of outgoing and ingoing port 25, and home of the we-do-not-subscribe-to-you-using-sendmail-without- our-Carnivore-enabled-mail-gateway-involved philosophy) and AOL (just plain awful) and it's better than Gateway?
We can't estimate how much piracy is on the net but in one day we found a million sites under a search for one of the codenames for pirated software
Downright misleading. Search for "warez", get a million hits, trumpet about how software is being stolen. "We can't estimate...but we found". If you can't estimate it, why are you spitting out these meaningless figures, other than to feed the press? I think the best counterclaim would be to have people follow the top, say, hundred links and see what percentage of those pages *actually* contain links to pirated files. Be interesting, actually.
There are legitimate numbers that could have been given. The number of Hotline servers serving files containing given strings. The percentage of computers without licenses found when MS audits are conducted. The "number of times transferred" statistic some IRC file serving bots put out. Number of napster or gnutella hits for a search for the name of a piece of software. Call me naive, but it seems that if piracy is as big a problem as the BSA is telling everyone, they should be able to come up with some meaningful statistics.
I also love the BSA's emphasis of organized crime. Most software is pirated through organized crime? Please. Oh, maybe in China or Russia, and I don't live in eastern Europe, so I can't really say there. But in the US (and, I would assume, western Europe), the BSA likes holding up the Mafia on one hand and asking legislators "Don't you want to stop this?" Most software pirated in the US is from casual copying, end of story.
Now, all this doesn't mean that piracy isn't a real, legitimate problem. But that release has as much spin on it as I've ever seen.
As for the token handed to Linux, I don't know why that was in there, unless it was to try to split up the groups of people (pirates, OSS folks) who don't really approve of the BSA.
I don't know if Microsoft is evil, but a search for "microsoft evil" on google spits out a quarter million results...:-)
Oh, it's probably quite easy. The thing is, you also have to be Outlook/Exchange compatible to be taken seriously, and you can be quite sure that MS will fight compatibility tooth and nail.
Because "integration" is bad. Modularity is good, and doesn't mean that you can't have a consistent interface (contrary to what MS would like everyone to believe) or *standardized* application data interchange.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a version of DeCSS in a few hundred bytes. How short can you make this one? :-)
To *court*? With what resources? He's a grad student (a damn good one...he TAed a class of mine, and he's a wonderful guy, aside from liking SML a little too much :-) )
Tom's been putting out an enormous collection of hand-hinted fonts for years for free. He's one of the greater donators out there to the software world. Frankly, this whole thing disgusting.
Sealand
No Outlook, no MSIE, no scripting vulnerabilities, no problem!
Actually, the parent poster that asked for OLE is a pretty good example of what you're saying. The few times I've used Office, I've had no interest in OLE, and wouldn't care if it were left out. OTOH, I *do* like style sheets (using a word processor w/o style sheets sucks), and would be unhappy if they were left out.
Neither OLE nor style sheets, however, is used by the typical user.
2. Integrate with other applications as well as office does
"Integration" is a bad thing. "Modularity" is good.
You can have modular software with a consistent interface that exchanges data via standard channels, regardless of what Microsoft says.
Take the GIMP. Quite powerful plugins. But nothing like the easy-to-use with presets plugins you get on Photoshop. Every time I see a GIMP plugin, I think "this is neat, but a non-techie won't go for it".
Take edge-detection. AFAIK, not a big deal in Photoshop. There are *three* different plugins implemented for gimp, each named after the algorithm they implement. This is cool if you're into image processing, not image editing.
If you run out and download plugins you can get cool stuff, too. The problem is that downloading, compiling, and installing plugins is not going to work for new users. And most of those plugins aren't oriented toward design sorts either -- more towards image processing engineers.
Let me give an example. A tasty-sounding plugin for the GIMP is Artistic->Oilify. Oil painting, cool! In Photoshop, if you run something like this, you'll get a little window with a preview, a bunch of bundled presets named "big gloppy brush", "Van Gogh", etc. In the GIMP, you get a frame called "Parameter Settings" containing a checkbox called "Use Intensity Algorithm" and a slider entitled "Mask Size". Now, maybe it's just me, but I doubt anyone but the original coder k(or someone that's looked at the code, or is familiar with this family of image processing algorithms) knows what the "use Intensity Algorithm" does. There's no preview, so no easy way to check. Mask Size doesn't mean anything to a non-coder.
The GIMP (1.2.3 ximian) still doesn't bundle even have a good, preset-capable, previewing drop-shadow plugin. This is something that people want, and usually they don't want to still run out and create another layer, fill the selection, gaussian blur and then offset the new layer. It's work, and the 1% of the time they want some weird effects in their drop shadow, they can do things the hard way.
That means you shouldn't have a "alpha squared" value slider, you should have a "hairyness slider".
And this is the GIMP, which is billed as just about the most consumer-oriented app on Linux.
AbiWord is probably one of the closest apps here to what I'm talking about. Any word processor user will be familiar with most of the options.
Every feature has to be documented, tooltips be included, etc. if people really want to try to take over the commercial app market.
Something like Apple Guide or Windows Help needs to be implemented. Tooltips should be implemented more than once in a blue moon.
Now, I'm not asking for anything -- I'm happily using and hacking on the software out there, and it works nicely for me. But if the intent is to go after the commercial apps market, then a few areas need to be addressed.
old 400mhz laptop
What crazy times with crazy CPU power we live in.
BetterTelnet for the Mac. PuTTY for Windows. CygWin. All the MUD ports. Abuse for Windows.
There's already good open source software out there for non-UNIX systems.
Anyone have any other favorites? Finding out about new goodies from fellow slashdotters is always good...
I believe cdrom.com wasn't all open-source...didn't they do freeware/shareware as well?
SGI's STL has iota() and libstdc++ doesn't.
if they're just office type machines...
If they're just office type machines, I don't see why you're upgrading. My machine is a beautifully working PII/266, and the only time I'm disadvantaged by the processor is when I'm compiling X or something, which can take a bit. Of course, I'm running Linux...
One of the better choices you could make is to *not* upgrade to new versions of your software (Office, Windows) over time. Saves money directly on not having to buy software and reduces hardware requirements massively. An NT 4.0 box running Office 97 should still work quite well for office work just as well as it did in '97. No reason to throw more money at it, as companies have a tendancy to do.
Frankly, my opinion is that if a company is upgrading general-purpose office computers more than once every five years, they're wasting money. During the big upgrade, they should do a *full* replacement -- new software, new hardware, and avoid the possibility of issues creeping in with one of many minor upgrades. They should test their intended configuration heavily, and only then deploy it all over.
The reason it's hard to "save money" vs buying OEM is largely because OEMs put crap components in wherever they possibly can in this incredibly price-competitive PC market. Yes, if they're selling a new gaming system, they're going to go for the points people look for:
n tly-fall-back-to-software-mixed-channels. You're then looking at all software or all hardware, so getting a bunch of channels can be nice. Hardware midi synth can be nice, but timidity's softsynth and a good soundfont pretty much put to shame the hardware synth I've seen.
High MHz processor
High-end video card
Things that often fall by the wayside in OEM systems:
* Input devices. Those cheap little OEM-rebranded mice and keyboards are often fragile, mushy things.
* Sound card/system: Unless this is sold as a gamer or music system (and the sound system is explicitly mentioned in the specs), you're probably looking at on-board sound. Not a huge deal, but you can be looking at a performance hit when playing lots of sounds in a game. In Linux, no existing sound architecture, including OSS, the kernel, ALSA, artsd, and esd has good support for use-all-existing-hardware-channels-then-transpare
* Hard drive: You do not want a bottom-of-the-line hard drive. It's not economical. If the current standard midrange size is 80GB, get an 80GB drive, not a 40GB. The small amount of savings you get for the large loss in space are not worth it.
* Speakers: OEM speakers are pretty much bad, unless you're getting a high-end system
* RAM: still not that good. For example, CompUSA is selling this system with WinXP and yet only 128MB of RAM.
* Ethernet cards: to most people, these are pretty interchangeable. I've had some bad experiences and now only use 3com. You aren't going to be getting a 3com card in an OEM system.
* Modem: If you're buying OEM, you're going to get a Winmodem. Most of these are useless in Linux. They slow down the machine (yes, I know that it isn't necessarily a massive chunk of the processor any more, but it does count). Poorly written drivers may take over the machine while dialing or give you stability problems, both of which I've run into.
* Monitor: OEMs are absolutely awful here. Worst point. If you're buying an OEM system, your chance of getting a refurbished monitor is very very good. These are absolute crap -- the failure rate is ridiculous. I've lost count of how many Gateway (a particularly egregious offender) monitors I've seen die.
Now, you are likely to pay roughly what you would for an OEM for a given system. Maybe save a little, probably under a hundred bucks. However, you get significantly better components, and you get the guarantee that all the parts you're getting are Linux-savvy and don't have a bad rep (I'd be avoiding IBM's hard drives, for example).
Well, that *could* be because linuxgames.com linked to the poll and suggested that Linux users vote.
If download.com linked to and suggested that Windows users vote (and there were any users out there that cared enough about Windows to do anything about it), you'd see a similar shift the other way.
Jar Jar is important to the story line
Microsoft Internet Explorer is important to Microsoft Windows.
Yes, he is silly, he talks like mickey mouse on crack, and he flops around stupidly, but had it not been for Jar Jar, there would be no episode 2 or 3...or the rest even.
Yes, it is unstable, it has no security inherent in its design and it gives users almost no control over its behavior, but had it not been for IE, there would be no file browser in Windows XP or ME, or Start Button even. After all, the file browser depends on IE.
If Qui Gon and Obi Wan had not stumbled across Jar Jar, they would never have gotten transport to the naboo city, nor would they have cannon fodder types to fight the war with the battle droids.
If Microsoft had never integrated MSIE into Windows, we never would have had a way of downloading files or accessing the Internet from Windows computers.
The trade federation would have won, and the evil sith schemes would have prospered...probably would have started the elimination of the jedi a few years earlier
The Internet would have collapsed, and geeks suffered...probably we would have started moving away from computers a few years later.
So, next time when you bash jar jar, realize that he is important to the story
So, next time when you bash MSIE, realize that it is important to our livelihoods.
I believe there are still people somewhere that find the Star Wars series interesting/worthwhile after Episode One.
Presumably, at least one of them is both a nerd and reads Slashdot, making this "news for nerds".
I think they already paid out for this. Ridiculous amount of money. Apple Music is disgusting. Anyway, they can probably enter the music distribution business now.
They use Earthlink (blocker of outgoing and ingoing port 25, and home of the we-do-not-subscribe-to-you-using-sendmail-without- our-Carnivore-enabled-mail-gateway-involved philosophy) and AOL (just plain awful) and it's better than Gateway?
Ick.
/me shrugs
Well, if MS wants to take away their dev tools and make them use gcc, I'm certainly not complaining.
The BSA is second only to Red Hat and IBM in Linux advocacy, abeit indirectly.
Actually, I haven't seen any "I need Photoshop instead of GIMP" rants in a while.
We can't estimate how much piracy is on the net but in one day we found a million sites under a search for one of the codenames for pirated software
Downright misleading. Search for "warez", get a million hits, trumpet about how software is being stolen. "We can't estimate...but we found". If you can't estimate it, why are you spitting out these meaningless figures, other than to feed the press? I think the best counterclaim would be to have people follow the top, say, hundred links and see what percentage of those pages *actually* contain links to pirated files. Be interesting, actually.
There are legitimate numbers that could have been given. The number of Hotline servers serving files containing given strings. The percentage of computers without licenses found when MS audits are conducted. The "number of times transferred" statistic some IRC file serving bots put out. Number of napster or gnutella hits for a search for the name of a piece of software. Call me naive, but it seems that if piracy is as big a problem as the BSA is telling everyone, they should be able to come up with some meaningful statistics.
I also love the BSA's emphasis of organized crime. Most software is pirated through organized crime? Please. Oh, maybe in China or Russia, and I don't live in eastern Europe, so I can't really say there. But in the US (and, I would assume, western Europe), the BSA likes holding up the Mafia on one hand and asking legislators "Don't you want to stop this?" Most software pirated in the US is from casual copying, end of story.
Now, all this doesn't mean that piracy isn't a real, legitimate problem. But that release has as much spin on it as I've ever seen.
As for the token handed to Linux, I don't know why that was in there, unless it was to try to split up the groups of people (pirates, OSS folks) who don't really approve of the BSA.
I don't know if Microsoft is evil, but a search for "microsoft evil" on google spits out a quarter million results...:-)
Oh, it's probably quite easy. The thing is, you also have to be Outlook/Exchange compatible to be taken seriously, and you can be quite sure that MS will fight compatibility tooth and nail.
Because "integration" is bad. Modularity is good, and doesn't mean that you can't have a consistent interface (contrary to what MS would like everyone to believe) or *standardized* application data interchange.
Apple makes nice, really tight fonts.
:-)
Can't wait until someone leaks it. Apple Garamond was a beaut.
Uh...so can this even be conducted over fiber?