I'll call BS to the general idea. Sure there may be a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, but there are a LOT of other areas where there are plenty of houses for reasonable rates with decent sized yards... and in reasonable sized cities.
Give up the idea that you have to live in SV, SF, NY, or any number of other expensive west/east coast cities and you'll find there are plenty of nice houses for the "geeks". Also tell your company to let you work remotely or set up a remote office in a cheaper place.
I'd mod you up if I had the points today. I've been thinking the same thing for the last few years about all the wasted time and effort on duplication that doesn't really make much difference. Sometimes there is too much choice.
To take 1 example, could you imagine the awesome GUI we'd have if the KDE and Gnome folks dropped their fight and instead made 1 desktop environment? I think that would bring the vast majority of users together.
I agree on the examples and discussion around them.
I taught a class for some new programmers fairly recently out of school. They knew PHP and a few other languages, so they could do basic coding. However, we needed them to know Perl and our app.
I taught 5 classes of 1 hour each, 2 every week. There was about 20 minutes of lecture up front to explain ideas beyond the basics, and they were encouraged to ask questions during that. I also gave them a problem to solve at end of the lessons to complete for next time. The homework at the beginning was solvable in 10-20 lines; the ones at the end took nearly 50 lines. The last ~40 minutes of a session was spent going over the homework and discussing it. Each person presented their answer for everyone to look at and were asked what they found hard to do and why and we talked about solutions with emphasis on the why.
Part of the reason it worked well was because I stressed there was not 1 definitive answer, not even mine... a working program (without bugs:) was the goal -- however they got there (rule 1). Negative criticism wasn't allowed -- only constructive criticism (rule 2) -- and thankfully there were no issues with this. My usual teaching phrase was to say "a better way to have done the same thing was ___ because ___", and to remind them that in the end we paid them to write working code.
The discussion of the homework allowed them to see how others did it, I also showed my answer though I always went last. We also talked about ways to do it better with a large emphasis on why something was better, trade-offs, etc. I also did my best to point them in the direction of good habits: comments, testing, modularization, maintainability, etc. I also mentioned useful books, most of which have been mentioned by others.
If I ever had to teach something like this again, I believe I'd do it the same way. All of the class members gave me good feedback and said they liked the format.
Better use Linux directly and put Windows 10 into the trash can...
I've used Linux since before it hit 1.0 and I'd love to do that. However, at work, I'm forced to use a laptop that boots Win7 for now and I'm told Win10 is coming in the future. So no matter how much I want to use only Linux, I don't have that option at work (at home I use Linux). Therefore, something like this has appeal to me. Historically, I used Cygwin, but if I could have something that feels more native, that would be a good thing.
Perhaps one day we can convince the IT department that Linux is a viable option for the computer on my desk; but until then, I have to suffer with MS-Windows whether I like it or not.
The IDE gives the warning. Real programmers use IDEs with syntax checking...
You obviously only do web programming and/or don't program on big systems. I want to see you ssh into a server that doesn't have a GUI and use an IDE to fix a program. You'll fail dramatically and then what will you do?
This is why I use "vi" as my editor. It doesn't require a GUI (there is version with one if you're in a position to use it), and I'm guaranteed vi will be available on every Linux/Unix server I work on. IDE's are also bloated; try to use an IDE on a server with only 1G of RAM total.
There is that, but I'm also concerned about the abuse up front. They want them to come and "hang out and work for 2 weeks" without being hired? Is MS paying for food and lodging at least? Is MS just taking 2 weeks of work for free? Do these people do that all of that for the "hope" of being hired in the end, which might not happen?
I've heard of "speculative interviewing" before, but this really seems over the top to me.
You should never, ever write code that allows SQL injections. It's negligent.
Then why do nearly all SQL libraries enable injections? Why aren't parameterized queries required? Is there any reason not to use them?
Is there any reason not to use parameterized queries? No.
Is there any reason non-parameterized queries are enabled? Yes, probably plenty, but I'll give the easy one.:)
The libraries and code can't really tell the difference between "select * from table1 where id < 100" and "select * from table1 where id < $variable" because the calling code is going to fill in $variable from some user input. The first form may be reasonable business logic because all non-reference values are less than 100 and user input values start at 101. The second form looks a lot like the first, but has different intent. The libraries can't determine the intent and by the time they see the SQL, the variable has been expanded and really looks the same.
That being said, good libraries only allow 1 SQL statement per call so injection is a lot harder because "select * from table1 where id < 0 ; delete from users where 1" (injected part in bold) would be disallowed. But injection is a problem because many libraries allow that.
It may be warm in Canada now, but it's all the frozen stuff in multiple months of winter that I don't like. Sure, it's in 90's (F) where I am now, but I can deal with that; I just don't like it to be below freezing.
A guy I work with uses left join for everything when the majority of the time an inner join would be more suitable. Oh well, it still works.
I'd guess because he learned SQL while using the older versions of Mysql, where left joins were faster than inner joins for some strange reason.
Hmm, that reminds me that Mysql would qualify for this overall topic. Mysql isn't that great of a DB, but it generally works well enough for many people.
Then you probably want Onenote. It can do 1-8 no problem. I'm not aware of encryption (#9) for it, but you can password lock pages/notes. It doesn't do Markdown, but there's really no need. If you want bold, just do ^Bsomething bold^B (like any other MS-Windows program) and you're good... all the MS-office shortcuts work. For #3, you didn't say what devices, but I do use it on phone (android), tablet (win8.1), and desktop (win7 & winxp in a VM on Linux). It also has a browser interface if required. Onenote is the best thing MS sells, IMO, and perhaps the only thing from them that I like. It also works on Macs if you swing that way.:)... HTH
I've researched OneNote and EverNote before and neither of them have any features that would be worth losing all of your personal notes when you don't pay your monthly ransom.
Onenote is a program on my local machine. That's not going to away so there's no ransom. When I decide to ditch Onenote, I'll export all of my stuff to HTML and then suck it into my new note program. But for now, Onenote is the best electronic notebook I've found, bar none, and I've look at a lot of them.
For me, Onenote is 1 of the few programs holding me to MS-Windows. Games? They're fun but I can give them up and most of the games I'd play anyway are older and can be found for SteamOS. I just want a good note taking program that will sync between devices and will run on both MS-Windows (for my tablet) and Linux (for my desktop).
I recently found Turtl and NoteCase Pro, 2 tools that didn't exist when I did my big survey a few years ago. I'm looking into them now and am hoping 1 of them will do the job, putting me that much closer to kicking MS-Windows out of my life (except for work).
If it's like what I have now, it comes in basically on the 802.11 spectrum. The antennae sit on water towers (cheaper than the rent on cell towers I'm told). I live in a semi-rural area and the tower I point at is like 3 miles away. I'll also point that that you must have line of site to the tower or it's a no go. I can get 5Mb down on a good day. During the busy 6p-9p I'm lucky to get 1.5Mb which makes Netflix rough. Yes, our area is oversold but they won't upgrade.:( They say they have equipment that can do 15Mb, but until the towers support that higher speed, what I have on my roof doesn't matter. FWIW, that comes at $45/month.
So if Google can come up with a way to compete with this, I would welcome our new wireless overlords.;)
As others have pointed it, it depends on what's going on as to whether this is a good thing... e.g. if you only need to the place to sleep because you'll hardly be in the room but must have a "base" while you're somewhere.
I first ran into something like this about 10 years ago. In the bottom of the Helsinki airport, there is a Scandic Hotel and each room is about 5m by 3m (probably about double what's in the summary). It's actually a great place to stay when you have a flight before 7am (which would require you to be in line by 0530 or earlier). You can check in the night before, all you really need it for is to sleep and the basic bathroom needs, and you have no travel time to the airport in early morning so you can actually sleep a little longer. I wouldn't want to stay a week there, but in the circumstance I used it for, it was a great thing.
Perhaps this will spur the Libre/Open office (Apache foundation for openoffice) to add EPub export the way Firefox got tabs as a standard browser feature....
No need, there's a great tool for EPub generation called Calibre. It will take a variety of inputs and produce an EPub doc. If you want to edit, Calibre can help there too, but I prefer Sigil. The point is there are other and better tools to work with EPub than LibreOffice. No need added a lot of extra stuff to that behemoth, instead use a tool made for the job.
The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at. I've used Audacity as my primary audio editor for years. Admittedly, my requirements are pretty lightweight, but it does what I need.
I've done some audio editing in the past where I take raw inputs, clean them up, add effects & other work as needed, then produce a final track. While I can do that with Audacity, I find it harder to do than with SoundForge (an MS-Windows only program). I'm sure some of my preference is what I'm used to, but it's always felt to me that Audacity just makes things a little harder than they need to be, or is missing something I'm looking for (it might even have what I want but is called something else that I don't recognize so I think it can't do what I need). I appreciate what the team has done in giving us Audacity, and it's fine for when I need to take a recording and trim the ends or something else dead simple, but for real editing I'd *much* rather have SoundForge.
To use an analogy that is somewhat apropos, I actually prefer MS-Word over LibreOffice-Writer. Sure, I can use Writer to get the job done, but I always seem to have to hunt a little harder to find the task I need, or Writer randomly renders the document incorrectly occasionally (displaying into the margins is the most annoying one but it screws up in other ways too). I use Writer for simple tasks like viewing only, but for heavy editing I prefer Word.
In both cases, I'm discussing ease of use to get the job done and not about which is "freer" (which maybe be more important to some poeople... me, I just want to get the job done so I can move on to the next job).
When I truly *need* to write, 1 thing that is important to me is environment. It may still be hard to get started, but once you take the first few minutes to make yourself start, a good environment can help you stay in "the writing zone". Of course, that will be an individual thing that you may have to hunt for.
For me, it means no interruptions (from people, phones, etc), good music that is slightly energetic but not overly so and no words/singing. I also do best in blocks of 2-4 hours so I have time to get into the zone and stay there long enough to really produce something but not so long as I become uncomfortable -- your brain needs breaks too occasionally. Also, don't overlook your sense of smell; generally that means avoiding distracting smells, but perhaps there are also smells that you find pleasant and puts you in a good (or relaxed or whatever) mood. There are times a good beverage is a positive, but not too much as that causes bathroom breaks at inopportune times.;)
There's a lot of trial and error, but that's life sometimes.:) Rewards don't work for me, but I could see how they might for some.
So if my mentioning Oracle on my resume on LinkedIn helps them out, I guess it's time to take Oracle off my resume.:) It's not like it'd hurt me because I've only used OSS DBs for the last 15+ years anyway.
Bollox. Getting a job is still very well possible,...
Absolutely. A couple of months ago I started looking around. I had 2 interviews in about 3 weeks. Neither company asked about social networks during the interview, as is "do you have one?". I received an offer from the 2nd company and took it.
Perhaps they checked on their own and didn't tell me, but my lack of presence on Facebook and Twitter didn't seem to hurt me at all. I do have a google+ account, but I hardly use it. It's hard to be less into social networks than I am and I didn't find getting a job hard.
I could see where maybe there are a few jobs that would almost require it, say if you were in marketing or something, but for those of us in the tech fields, this isn't an issue.
Early on mysql was limited in the kinds of joins it could do...
Can it do a FULL OUTER JOIN yet?
No, not yet.
While it can do UNION, it can't do INTERSECTION or DIFFERENCE. There's a number of useful things that are left out, but those 3 are at the top of the list for me.
I would second the use of OneNote. It is the standard by which I measure all other note taking apps, and IMO, none come close... but it does depend on what you want in said app.:) I say that after having done a survey of about 40 products, all of which think they can be used for note taking. If you can get the 2010 version, I find it better than the 2013 version.
OTOH, I can understand wanting an "open" tool for this. As much as I love OneNote, it's hard to use on Linux and I do feel the "lock in". There is a browser version of OneNote that can generally get the job done, but it's not as nice as the real app. I just bought Crossover Office, so we'll see how well I can get it running there.
My most recent attempt for going open with note taking is a tool called Tagspaces. It will run on all major platforms and you can put whatever files into it that you want: text, html, pics, etc. Then you can add "tags" to it to mark what it's for. It has search. It can show the file with a native app, or for simple apps show it in the tool and allow you to edit it. Combine that with a syncing tool like Dropbox and I think it will be what I want, or it will be when the next version comes out I believe (I need 1 more feature to make the syncing better, but if you don't need to sync between multiple computers then you won't have my problem). If I can get Tagspaces whipped into shape, then I'll migrate from OneNote to this.
One more thing with many jobs is that when a person walks out, they can take irreplaceable information with them. Most of us probably aren't given time to really document what we do, so when we leave, all the "whys" and "designs" go with us. Where I am now, I'd love to know why several things were done like they are because I think they need to be changed but we don't dare for fear of breaking something important; but we'll never know why as the people who coded it are long gone. If I and a few others like me leave the company, they will be in a very difficult spot as it could take our replacement well over a year to come up to speed and as the 3rd generation of coders to work on this product they'll know even less than I do. So yeah, it's far cheaper to keep your current employees happy.
"People pay for Office because it's better."
> No, people pay for Office because they are sheeple and don't know any better; and because Micro$oft has a stranglehold on the market.
Some people are sheeple, but some of us want/pay-for Office because it has programs that there are no equivalents for on Linux. Someone above mentioned Outlook (personally I hate Outlook with a passion). For me, it's OneNote; nothing in the OSS world comes close and I've looked. Even Evernote, which is about half of what OneNote is doesn't even have a native Linux app.
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They can't - there's a housing shortage.
I'll call BS to the general idea. Sure there may be a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, but there are a LOT of other areas where there are plenty of houses for reasonable rates with decent sized yards ... and in reasonable sized cities.
Give up the idea that you have to live in SV, SF, NY, or any number of other expensive west/east coast cities and you'll find there are plenty of nice houses for the "geeks". Also tell your company to let you work remotely or set up a remote office in a cheaper place.
I'd mod you up if I had the points today. I've been thinking the same thing for the last few years about all the wasted time and effort on duplication that doesn't really make much difference. Sometimes there is too much choice.
To take 1 example, could you imagine the awesome GUI we'd have if the KDE and Gnome folks dropped their fight and instead made 1 desktop environment? I think that would bring the vast majority of users together.
I agree on the examples and discussion around them.
... a working program (without bugs :) was the goal -- however they got there (rule 1). Negative criticism wasn't allowed -- only constructive criticism (rule 2) -- and thankfully there were no issues with this. My usual teaching phrase was to say "a better way to have done the same thing was ___ because ___", and to remind them that in the end we paid them to write working code.
I taught a class for some new programmers fairly recently out of school. They knew PHP and a few other languages, so they could do basic coding. However, we needed them to know Perl and our app.
I taught 5 classes of 1 hour each, 2 every week. There was about 20 minutes of lecture up front to explain ideas beyond the basics, and they were encouraged to ask questions during that. I also gave them a problem to solve at end of the lessons to complete for next time. The homework at the beginning was solvable in 10-20 lines; the ones at the end took nearly 50 lines. The last ~40 minutes of a session was spent going over the homework and discussing it. Each person presented their answer for everyone to look at and were asked what they found hard to do and why and we talked about solutions with emphasis on the why.
Part of the reason it worked well was because I stressed there was not 1 definitive answer, not even mine
The discussion of the homework allowed them to see how others did it, I also showed my answer though I always went last. We also talked about ways to do it better with a large emphasis on why something was better, trade-offs, etc. I also did my best to point them in the direction of good habits: comments, testing, modularization, maintainability, etc. I also mentioned useful books, most of which have been mentioned by others.
If I ever had to teach something like this again, I believe I'd do it the same way. All of the class members gave me good feedback and said they liked the format.
Better use Linux directly and put Windows 10 into the trash can...
I've used Linux since before it hit 1.0 and I'd love to do that. However, at work, I'm forced to use a laptop that boots Win7 for now and I'm told Win10 is coming in the future. So no matter how much I want to use only Linux, I don't have that option at work (at home I use Linux). Therefore, something like this has appeal to me. Historically, I used Cygwin, but if I could have something that feels more native, that would be a good thing.
Perhaps one day we can convince the IT department that Linux is a viable option for the computer on my desk; but until then, I have to suffer with MS-Windows whether I like it or not.
The IDE gives the warning. Real programmers use IDEs with syntax checking...
You obviously only do web programming and/or don't program on big systems. I want to see you ssh into a server that doesn't have a GUI and use an IDE to fix a program. You'll fail dramatically and then what will you do?
This is why I use "vi" as my editor. It doesn't require a GUI (there is version with one if you're in a position to use it), and I'm guaranteed vi will be available on every Linux/Unix server I work on. IDE's are also bloated; try to use an IDE on a server with only 1G of RAM total.
There is that, but I'm also concerned about the abuse up front. They want them to come and "hang out and work for 2 weeks" without being hired? Is MS paying for food and lodging at least? Is MS just taking 2 weeks of work for free? Do these people do that all of that for the "hope" of being hired in the end, which might not happen?
I've heard of "speculative interviewing" before, but this really seems over the top to me.
You should never, ever write code that allows SQL injections. It's negligent.
Then why do nearly all SQL libraries enable injections? Why aren't parameterized queries required? Is there any reason not to use them?
Is there any reason not to use parameterized queries? No.
:)
Is there any reason non-parameterized queries are enabled? Yes, probably plenty, but I'll give the easy one.
The libraries and code can't really tell the difference between "select * from table1 where id < 100" and "select * from table1 where id < $variable" because the calling code is going to fill in $variable from some user input. The first form may be reasonable business logic because all non-reference values are less than 100 and user input values start at 101. The second form looks a lot like the first, but has different intent. The libraries can't determine the intent and by the time they see the SQL, the variable has been expanded and really looks the same.
That being said, good libraries only allow 1 SQL statement per call so injection is a lot harder because "select * from table1 where id < 0 ; delete from users where 1" (injected part in bold) would be disallowed. But injection is a problem because many libraries allow that.
"Well, if it wasn't so cold. :) "
Is your area under yet another "heat warning"?
It may be warm in Canada now, but it's all the frozen stuff in multiple months of winter that I don't like. Sure, it's in 90's (F) where I am now, but I can deal with that; I just don't like it to be below freezing.
Well, if it wasn't so cold. :) But seriously, how do we get something like this down in the US? Can we also get this for the Internet providers too?
A guy I work with uses left join for everything when the majority of the time an inner join would be more suitable. Oh well, it still works.
I'd guess because he learned SQL while using the older versions of Mysql, where left joins were faster than inner joins for some strange reason.
Hmm, that reminds me that Mysql would qualify for this overall topic. Mysql isn't that great of a DB, but it generally works well enough for many people.
Then you probably want Onenote. It can do 1-8 no problem. I'm not aware of encryption (#9) for it, but you can password lock pages/notes. It doesn't do Markdown, but there's really no need. If you want bold, just do ^Bsomething bold^B (like any other MS-Windows program) and you're good ... all the MS-office shortcuts work. For #3, you didn't say what devices, but I do use it on phone (android), tablet (win8.1), and desktop (win7 & winxp in a VM on Linux). It also has a browser interface if required. Onenote is the best thing MS sells, IMO, and perhaps the only thing from them that I like. It also works on Macs if you swing that way. :) ... HTH
I've researched OneNote and EverNote before and neither of them have any features that would be worth losing all of your personal notes when you don't pay your monthly ransom.
Onenote is a program on my local machine. That's not going to away so there's no ransom. When I decide to ditch Onenote, I'll export all of my stuff to HTML and then suck it into my new note program. But for now, Onenote is the best electronic notebook I've found, bar none, and I've look at a lot of them.
For me, Onenote is 1 of the few programs holding me to MS-Windows. Games? They're fun but I can give them up and most of the games I'd play anyway are older and can be found for SteamOS. I just want a good note taking program that will sync between devices and will run on both MS-Windows (for my tablet) and Linux (for my desktop).
I recently found Turtl and NoteCase Pro, 2 tools that didn't exist when I did my big survey a few years ago. I'm looking into them now and am hoping 1 of them will do the job, putting me that much closer to kicking MS-Windows out of my life (except for work).
If it's like what I have now, it comes in basically on the 802.11 spectrum. The antennae sit on water towers (cheaper than the rent on cell towers I'm told). I live in a semi-rural area and the tower I point at is like 3 miles away. I'll also point that that you must have line of site to the tower or it's a no go. I can get 5Mb down on a good day. During the busy 6p-9p I'm lucky to get 1.5Mb which makes Netflix rough. Yes, our area is oversold but they won't upgrade. :( They say they have equipment that can do 15Mb, but until the towers support that higher speed, what I have on my roof doesn't matter. FWIW, that comes at $45/month.
;)
So if Google can come up with a way to compete with this, I would welcome our new wireless overlords.
As others have pointed it, it depends on what's going on as to whether this is a good thing ... e.g. if you only need to the place to sleep because you'll hardly be in the room but must have a "base" while you're somewhere.
I first ran into something like this about 10 years ago. In the bottom of the Helsinki airport, there is a Scandic Hotel and each room is about 5m by 3m (probably about double what's in the summary). It's actually a great place to stay when you have a flight before 7am (which would require you to be in line by 0530 or earlier). You can check in the night before, all you really need it for is to sleep and the basic bathroom needs, and you have no travel time to the airport in early morning so you can actually sleep a little longer. I wouldn't want to stay a week there, but in the circumstance I used it for, it was a great thing.
Perhaps this will spur the Libre/Open office (Apache foundation for openoffice) to add EPub export the way Firefox got tabs as a standard browser feature. ...
No need, there's a great tool for EPub generation called Calibre. It will take a variety of inputs and produce an EPub doc. If you want to edit, Calibre can help there too, but I prefer Sigil. The point is there are other and better tools to work with EPub than LibreOffice. No need added a lot of extra stuff to that behemoth, instead use a tool made for the job.
The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at. I've used Audacity as my primary audio editor for years. Admittedly, my requirements are pretty lightweight, but it does what I need.
I've done some audio editing in the past where I take raw inputs, clean them up, add effects & other work as needed, then produce a final track. While I can do that with Audacity, I find it harder to do than with SoundForge (an MS-Windows only program). I'm sure some of my preference is what I'm used to, but it's always felt to me that Audacity just makes things a little harder than they need to be, or is missing something I'm looking for (it might even have what I want but is called something else that I don't recognize so I think it can't do what I need). I appreciate what the team has done in giving us Audacity, and it's fine for when I need to take a recording and trim the ends or something else dead simple, but for real editing I'd *much* rather have SoundForge.
... me, I just want to get the job done so I can move on to the next job).
To use an analogy that is somewhat apropos, I actually prefer MS-Word over LibreOffice-Writer. Sure, I can use Writer to get the job done, but I always seem to have to hunt a little harder to find the task I need, or Writer randomly renders the document incorrectly occasionally (displaying into the margins is the most annoying one but it screws up in other ways too). I use Writer for simple tasks like viewing only, but for heavy editing I prefer Word.
In both cases, I'm discussing ease of use to get the job done and not about which is "freer" (which maybe be more important to some poeople
When I truly *need* to write, 1 thing that is important to me is environment. It may still be hard to get started, but once you take the first few minutes to make yourself start, a good environment can help you stay in "the writing zone". Of course, that will be an individual thing that you may have to hunt for.
;)
:) Rewards don't work for me, but I could see how they might for some.
For me, it means no interruptions (from people, phones, etc), good music that is slightly energetic but not overly so and no words/singing. I also do best in blocks of 2-4 hours so I have time to get into the zone and stay there long enough to really produce something but not so long as I become uncomfortable -- your brain needs breaks too occasionally. Also, don't overlook your sense of smell; generally that means avoiding distracting smells, but perhaps there are also smells that you find pleasant and puts you in a good (or relaxed or whatever) mood. There are times a good beverage is a positive, but not too much as that causes bathroom breaks at inopportune times.
There's a lot of trial and error, but that's life sometimes.
HTH and that you find what works for you,
Kevin
So if my mentioning Oracle on my resume on LinkedIn helps them out, I guess it's time to take Oracle off my resume. :) It's not like it'd hurt me because I've only used OSS DBs for the last 15+ years anyway.
and getting a job impossible
Bollox. Getting a job is still very well possible, ...
Absolutely. A couple of months ago I started looking around. I had 2 interviews in about 3 weeks. Neither company asked about social networks during the interview, as is "do you have one?". I received an offer from the 2nd company and took it.
Perhaps they checked on their own and didn't tell me, but my lack of presence on Facebook and Twitter didn't seem to hurt me at all. I do have a google+ account, but I hardly use it. It's hard to be less into social networks than I am and I didn't find getting a job hard.
I could see where maybe there are a few jobs that would almost require it, say if you were in marketing or something, but for those of us in the tech fields, this isn't an issue.
Early on mysql was limited in the kinds of joins it could do... Can it do a FULL OUTER JOIN yet?
No, not yet.
While it can do UNION, it can't do INTERSECTION or DIFFERENCE. There's a number of useful things that are left out, but those 3 are at the top of the list for me.
I would second the use of OneNote. It is the standard by which I measure all other note taking apps, and IMO, none come close ... but it does depend on what you want in said app. :) I say that after having done a survey of about 40 products, all of which think they can be used for note taking. If you can get the 2010 version, I find it better than the 2013 version.
OTOH, I can understand wanting an "open" tool for this. As much as I love OneNote, it's hard to use on Linux and I do feel the "lock in". There is a browser version of OneNote that can generally get the job done, but it's not as nice as the real app. I just bought Crossover Office, so we'll see how well I can get it running there.
My most recent attempt for going open with note taking is a tool called Tagspaces. It will run on all major platforms and you can put whatever files into it that you want: text, html, pics, etc. Then you can add "tags" to it to mark what it's for. It has search. It can show the file with a native app, or for simple apps show it in the tool and allow you to edit it. Combine that with a syncing tool like Dropbox and I think it will be what I want, or it will be when the next version comes out I believe (I need 1 more feature to make the syncing better, but if you don't need to sync between multiple computers then you won't have my problem). If I can get Tagspaces whipped into shape, then I'll migrate from OneNote to this.
Great post, I'd mod you up if I could.
One more thing with many jobs is that when a person walks out, they can take irreplaceable information with them. Most of us probably aren't given time to really document what we do, so when we leave, all the "whys" and "designs" go with us. Where I am now, I'd love to know why several things were done like they are because I think they need to be changed but we don't dare for fear of breaking something important; but we'll never know why as the people who coded it are long gone. If I and a few others like me leave the company, they will be in a very difficult spot as it could take our replacement well over a year to come up to speed and as the 3rd generation of coders to work on this product they'll know even less than I do. So yeah, it's far cheaper to keep your current employees happy.
The best Winamp clone I've found so far is "qmmp".
I like Winmerge when on Windows. For linux, you want "meld". I think I prefer meld a little more, but that may be just because I use it more.
HTH!
"People pay for Office because it's better."
> No, people pay for Office because they are sheeple and don't know any better; and because Micro$oft has a stranglehold on the market.
Some people are sheeple, but some of us want/pay-for Office because it has programs that there are no equivalents for on Linux. Someone above mentioned Outlook (personally I hate Outlook with a passion). For me, it's OneNote; nothing in the OSS world comes close and I've looked. Even Evernote, which is about half of what OneNote is doesn't even have a native Linux app.