There's a hacker who's sure, Open Source is the cure And he's using a kernel called Linux When he boots it he knows, that the source isn't closed With a "make" he can fix any problems
Woe oh oh oh oh oh And he's using a kernel called Linux
On the top he'll run GNU cos he wants to be sure All the standards and file types are open He'll put PERL on his box and he'll edit with vi Or with Emacs because he has choices
Woe oh oh oh oh oh And he's using a kernel called Linux
On the desktop he gets KDE, Gnome and X And Enlightenment if he wants slimmer GCC will compile all the source he may find Using optimise flags to go faster
Woe oh oh oh oh oh And he's using a kernel called Linux
And it whispered that soon, if FOSS does call the tune That the penguin will lead us to reason No proprietary code, software patents will die Cos the world will say knowledge's for sharing
Woe oh oh oh oh oh It was started by this guy called Linus
I have been using Word since version 4.0? I was in 6th grade (12?) and now I'm 26, so that's 14 years using Word. I enjoy the squiggly underlines when I misspell something. I like the tab interface. I turn off all the autocorrect features and fast save and I am left with a program that does *exactly* what I want: write Words.
I'm 42, I've been using "vi" for over 20 years - it also "writes words". Other people find "vi" unusable - it's just opinion, nothing more.
It's hard to fuck up a word processor and while people complain about bloat and all sorts of features never used, in 10 years of consulting, I have used EVERY feature of Word, from mail merge to macros to customizing the toolbar to autolinking graphs to speaking text to grammar check to HTML export and back. Word is the kitchen sink and it's stable. Word never crashes on me.
Word also enforces a proprietary document format. Therefore, unless you use plain text, HTML or RTF, you are limiting the audience for your documents, even to those people who use an older version of Word than you do.
I do not want to install X11 libraries and molest my kernel to make OO load faster.
Just because Windows and the GUI are inseperable, this does not mean that mean that a whole heaps of libraries aren't loaded up when Windows boots - they definitely are.
Please remember (if you know Linux/UNIX) that X is a GUI system that is separate from the OS and is a server/client application. X has its faults but you cannot compare Windows to X, they are completely different things.
I don't want new revisions all the time.
So there you are with Office 2000 and someone sends you an Office 2003 document. What are you going to do? You're still in an upgrade cycle here also...
Hell, I boot up Office 98 on my travel PowerBook and go to town... and that was released seven years ago!
I boot up vi on my Compaq laptop and that was released 20+ years ago. So what?
#1. Bill Gates didn't get rich writing bad software.
No, he got rich marketing bad software. Virtually every piece of software Microsoft release originated from a company they once bought.
#2. Microsoft is made up of some of the smartest people in computing.
Some of them is not all of them. Microsoft is made up of smart people who know how to make money from computing, not necessarily how to write the programs.
#3. No one puts a gun to anyone's head to buy a Windows box.
The situation is improving but it is still very difficult to buy a pre-built PC that does not include a Windows operating system. That's a big gun in my book...
But you can have Microsoft Word back when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands because when I need to write, I write.
Even if there is a far superior Word alternative out there people will still buy/get Office for Outlook/Excel/Access/Powerpoint and since they'll get Word with Office "for free" they wont need to buy an other Word.
I agree that some users need MS Office because of the level they work at with VB, macros and integration between the apps. However, for 90% of users, Calc and Impress do more than adequate jobs with spreadsheets & presentations respectively.
Or do you know anyone who actually bought (not pirated) Word allone?
No, I don't and there's the REAL issue. Aside from those people who bought new PCs and maybe got MS Works free with it, most other people use pirated copies of MS Office (or "borrowed" from MSDN buddies at work). I'm sure if those same people were face with paying the full amount for MS Office, they would be more inclined to consider and use the free alternatives.
For 90% of users, the features of OpenOffice.org are more than adequate.
Most people who use MS Office do so because they are running pirated copies or because they've paid the full price of several hundred pounds/dollars/euros for it and are not going to want to have wasted their money by not using it.
Your abusiveness just serves to indicate your lack of knowledge of OpenOffice.org - perhaps you need to get your tiny mind round the idea that old software is "old" because people like using it and it has been further developed over the years.
So how much did Microsoft pay you for your soul then?
Word may start up quickly but that's because, if you use the default installation, it preloads half of itself into memory upon startup - in Office 2000, look for the Microsoft Office shortcut in the Startup folder, I guess this is the same in Office 2003.
This is all well and good and does make Word immediately available but, on the other hand, there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
...the whole Star Wars movie filming saga would be equivalent to JRR Tolkein writing "The Two Towers" first, then (due to popular demand) going off and writing "Fellowship Of The Ring" and then being indecisive about writing "The Return Of The King" to finish the stories off!
Surely Star Trek serves a classic example of what happens when you end up jumping back and forth to the beginning and end of events in a particular universe - ulitmately, money rules over cohesion of historical events until the whole mythology is totally messed up.
Episodes 4,5 & 6 are absolute classics and relate the story of a particular thread of events in the Star Wars universe - yes, after finishing "Return Of The Jedi", Lucas might have gone on into a subsequent film or trilogy about post-Darth Vader events - but I think he's already proven, as Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have with "Enterprise", that trying to write a prequel to fit into the existing accepted mythology is virtually impossible.
Lucas should put Star Wars down now and go off and retire with the money he has.
... a McDonald's hamburger you buy will look better than it does in the posters
... "Celebrity Deathmatch" will feature real celebrities and the pilot episode will have a fight between Britney Spears and Janet Jackson and they'll both be given big guns
... George Lucas will have made Star Wars Episodes 7-9, none of which will feature any cute aliens just for the kids
... Stevie Ray Vaughan will reveal himself to have actually been in hiding for over 20 years making the greatest blues rock album the world has ever heard
... and that it was Jon Bon Jovi that actually got into the plane that supposedly killed Stevie Ray Vaughan
... we will all be playing a sequel to "Elite" that actually is better than the original
... Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are publicly exposed as the perpetrators of the greatest animal massacre of all time whereupon it is revealed that Microsoft Windows is actually made from dismembered cute puppies, cuddly kittens and fluffy bunnies...
Remember, these are the people of the "Outlook" generation!:-)
I pose the same questions to buddies at work who store all their documents as attachments within emails within an Outlook *.pst file. Not only have we had frequent occasions where PST files have grown to bigger than 2GB (so Windows cannot actually access them anymore) but these things are stored on laptops who's hard drives can fail at any moment!
Much better to save out the attachments, put them neatly in folders and back them up occasionally - most email simply isn't worth keeping anyway.
Sorry, but if you need 2GB for email storage then you're probably far too lazy to manage attachments properly.
I think we're getting off-topic here with the energy argument so let's just call that a stalemate.
By all means argue that a home server is too complex for a normal user to configure because I full accept that as a valid argument.
However, if the end result is to have global access to email as easily and as quickly as possible, then SSH-ing to my home server and firing up Mutt in a terminal is definitely for me - not least because my mail's already been filtered, de-spammed and sorted by procmail so my time spent actually reading and replying to the stuff is much less anyway.
Probably true that it's not financially efficient but I enjoy the experience, not least staying one step ahead of the script-kiddies.
I've not used Gmail but had a Hotmail account for a while and just found it slow & cumbersome - as well as a complete spam-bucket.
With procmail and a decent recipe script (that's taken me a few weeks to get right I might add!) I now don't see any spam on my home server and can do all wierd and wacky things with forwarding mail to work (when I'm there) etc.
Add up all the time I spent configuring Outlook rules, folders and filters and I've probably saved time in the long run.
Maybe in you alternate universe, it is OK to spend tens (hundreds ?) of Watts to power an otherwise useless machine.
So you're obviously that "green" a person that when you get up from the TV at night to go to the toilet, you turn off the TV and light in your sitting room, go to the toilet, come back and turn them both on agian before sitting down, do you? Plus you must use low wattage light bulbs throughout your house and you cannot use a microwave oven because it is far more energy efficient to cook all of you food "en masse" in a large gas oven. Do that, then you have a right to complain about my server wasting a few hundred watts.
As to "otherwise useless", the same machine hosts a few of my web sites, acts as an SFTP server for a few of my buddies to use, occasionally gets fired up as a Doom, Unreal Tournament or Quake server, handles about a dozen email accounts shared between my girlfriend and I, acts as a syslog server to the rest of my home network and has a firewall on it also.
I'm not a Windows expert but let's say a Service Pack includes an update to Microsoft's FTP Server service. I install the Service Pack, then I decide to run the FTP Server service for the first time.
Is it already the updated version or do I have to go back and re-apply the Service Pack?
This is just a theoretical question because when I used to work on Windows a lot (during NT4 days), you were advised to re-install the Service Pack after making any major changes to a system.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud Microsoft for releasing software updates but the whole idea of a Service Pack has always struck me as a pretty bad way of doing things.
Why is so unreasonable to expect any user to have a rough idea of what programs they run on their computer so that they just update the bits they need to?
For example, if I run an AMD CPU, why do I need:
810064 - Short Battery Life on Your Pentium III-M Tualatin Processor Computer
I thought Windows Update was supposed to supply you with just the updates you need? Even if it cannot do that level of system checking, what about MS just doing a "portage" or "apt-get" system like in Linux?
MS has a reputation for bloatware and having to download a huge Service Pack where you only need 20-30 of the updates does nothing to quash that reputation.
Not to mention millions of people downloading a 250MB+ Service Pack and wasting bandwidth...
I'm from the UK and, yes, we pay taxes for a lot of teenagers to go avoid work for 3-5 years by doing courses like "media studies" - yes, I object to that also.
The only thing worse is one of those wastrels trying to convince us he/she is actually doing something useful with our money by releasing some paper that has no bearing or influence on anything in society.
Agreed. The reporting on Florida's recent devastation from Hurricane Charley is a classic example - I've probably seen about 20 different news reports that mentioned $16 billion dollars worth of damage but about 5 reports mentioned the 8 people who lost their lives.
Money and finance hold back human development because everything is subject to what it costs, not what benefits it can bring to the human race.
Hopefully Open Source software is just the first step of humankind realising that knowledge-sharing and just doing the right thing, regardless of money, is how we progress.
It seems to me that the listed applications do not work purely because of the default firewall settings in SP2 in which case Microsoft have done the only thing that they could.
The fact is that the majority of Joe Public is far too stupid & lazy to want to bother understanding how a computer works so Microsoft has had to force their hand into making their systems more secure.
Whilst I consider Microsoft "it's own worst enemy" by portraying its OSes as error free and requiring minimal management in advertising, they have taken the right action here because hopefully this starts to make it more difficult for viruses and worms to propagate meaning that we all benefit.
If there's one big advantage we have in the Linux world over the Windows world is that our proportion of idiot users is virtually zero - I for one hope it stays that way also.
"Free Klippy" - the story of a boy's love for his penguin-eating killer whale...
"xXxP" - Vin Diesel returns as the tattooed secret agent. This time he's after Open Source Communists and he's only taking DRM for an answer...
"The XP Men" - see the superpower team of Dr DLL, Outlookman, Captain Codec, Blue Screener and The Worm battle the "Freedom Force" of Stallman, the Perlmonger, Apache and Python...
This test just shows remaining Windows 98 users they should keep up to date or upgrade to XP.
Windows 98 does not support as full or as mature an IP stack as Windows 2000 or Windows XP - therefore 98 does not have the capabilities of running a lot of the normal Internet services that the other two do.
It could therefore be argued that running an unprotected Windows 2000 or Windows XP box would be much worse.
We should do it that way here in the UK, rather than just handing money out on the benefits system.
There are genuinely poor people in our system also who deserve assistance from the state - however, at the same time, there are a great number of swindlers and fraudsters that just leech off of the these handouts to pay for booze, cigarettes & drugs.
A food stamp system (as well as ones for energy bills, school books, etc.) would act as a deterrent to the swindlers and actually make them think about going out to work.
Bill: I work in the government welfare system. So how's business, John?
John: Not so good, Bill. People just aren't interested im my games with ones like Doom 3 around. Still, your job sounds fulfilling?
Bill: Well, John, it could be... except that we're trying to get over the message to people on welfare about how they need to maintain a balanced diet, especially for their kids. We're not doing too well getting the message across, even with a 25 million dollar advertising budget from the government...
John: Jeez, Bill. And there's me, unable to get my game "Kitchen Invaders" published, with a 22-year old nymphomaniac, single, lingerie-modelling daughter too...
Slashdot Mirror
There's a hacker who's sure, Open Source is the cure
And he's using a kernel called Linux
When he boots it he knows, that the source isn't closed
With a "make" he can fix any problems
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's using a kernel called Linux
On the top he'll run GNU cos he wants to be sure
All the standards and file types are open
He'll put PERL on his box and he'll edit with vi
Or with Emacs because he has choices
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's using a kernel called Linux
On the desktop he gets KDE, Gnome and X
And Enlightenment if he wants slimmer
GCC will compile all the source he may find
Using optimise flags to go faster
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And he's using a kernel called Linux
And it whispered that soon, if FOSS does call the tune
That the penguin will lead us to reason
No proprietary code, software patents will die
Cos the world will say knowledge's for sharing
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
It was started by this guy called Linus
I'm 42, I've been using "vi" for over 20 years - it also "writes words". Other people find "vi" unusable - it's just opinion, nothing more.
It's hard to fuck up a word processor and while people complain about bloat and all sorts of features never used, in 10 years of consulting, I have used EVERY feature of Word, from mail merge to macros to customizing the toolbar to autolinking graphs to speaking text to grammar check to HTML export and back. Word is the kitchen sink and it's stable. Word never crashes on me.
Word also enforces a proprietary document format. Therefore, unless you use plain text, HTML or RTF, you are limiting the audience for your documents, even to those people who use an older version of Word than you do.
I do not want to install X11 libraries and molest my kernel to make OO load faster.
Just because Windows and the GUI are inseperable, this does not mean that mean that a whole heaps of libraries aren't loaded up when Windows boots - they definitely are.
Please remember (if you know Linux/UNIX) that X is a GUI system that is separate from the OS and is a server/client application. X has its faults but you cannot compare Windows to X, they are completely different things.
I don't want new revisions all the time.
So there you are with Office 2000 and someone sends you an Office 2003 document. What are you going to do? You're still in an upgrade cycle here also...
Hell, I boot up Office 98 on my travel PowerBook and go to town... and that was released seven years ago!
I boot up vi on my Compaq laptop and that was released 20+ years ago. So what?
#1. Bill Gates didn't get rich writing bad software.
No, he got rich marketing bad software. Virtually every piece of software Microsoft release originated from a company they once bought.
#2. Microsoft is made up of some of the smartest people in computing.
Some of them is not all of them. Microsoft is made up of smart people who know how to make money from computing, not necessarily how to write the programs.
#3. No one puts a gun to anyone's head to buy a Windows box.
The situation is improving but it is still very difficult to buy a pre-built PC that does not include a Windows operating system. That's a big gun in my book...
But you can have Microsoft Word back when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands because when I need to write, I write.
I agree that some users need MS Office because of the level they work at with VB, macros and integration between the apps. However, for 90% of users, Calc and Impress do more than adequate jobs with spreadsheets & presentations respectively.
Or do you know anyone who actually bought (not pirated) Word allone?
No, I don't and there's the REAL issue. Aside from those people who bought new PCs and maybe got MS Works free with it, most other people use pirated copies of MS Office (or "borrowed" from MSDN buddies at work). I'm sure if those same people were face with paying the full amount for MS Office, they would be more inclined to consider and use the free alternatives.
Most people who use MS Office do so because they are running pirated copies or because they've paid the full price of several hundred pounds/dollars/euros for it and are not going to want to have wasted their money by not using it.
Your abusiveness just serves to indicate your lack of knowledge of OpenOffice.org - perhaps you need to get your tiny mind round the idea that old software is "old" because people like using it and it has been further developed over the years.
So how much did Microsoft pay you for your soul then?
This is all well and good and does make Word immediately available but, on the other hand, there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
Surely Star Trek serves a classic example of what happens when you end up jumping back and forth to the beginning and end of events in a particular universe - ulitmately, money rules over cohesion of historical events until the whole mythology is totally messed up.
Episodes 4,5 & 6 are absolute classics and relate the story of a particular thread of events in the Star Wars universe - yes, after finishing "Return Of The Jedi", Lucas might have gone on into a subsequent film or trilogy about post-Darth Vader events - but I think he's already proven, as Rick Berman and Brannon Braga have with "Enterprise", that trying to write a prequel to fit into the existing accepted mythology is virtually impossible.
Lucas should put Star Wars down now and go off and retire with the money he has.
Perhaps it was "The Cray Twins"!
(For the benefit of our non-English readers, Ronnie & Reggie Kray were two infamous East-End (of London) criminal twin brothers during the 1960s.)
...drain cover manufacturer says their product is grate...
Remember, these are the people of the "Outlook" generation! :-)
I pose the same questions to buddies at work who store all their documents as attachments within emails within an Outlook *.pst file. Not only have we had frequent occasions where PST files have grown to bigger than 2GB (so Windows cannot actually access them anymore) but these things are stored on laptops who's hard drives can fail at any moment!
Much better to save out the attachments, put them neatly in folders and back them up occasionally - most email simply isn't worth keeping anyway.
Sorry, but if you need 2GB for email storage then you're probably far too lazy to manage attachments properly.
By all means argue that a home server is too complex for a normal user to configure because I full accept that as a valid argument.
However, if the end result is to have global access to email as easily and as quickly as possible, then SSH-ing to my home server and firing up Mutt in a terminal is definitely for me - not least because my mail's already been filtered, de-spammed and sorted by procmail so my time spent actually reading and replying to the stuff is much less anyway.
I've not used Gmail but had a Hotmail account for a while and just found it slow & cumbersome - as well as a complete spam-bucket.
With procmail and a decent recipe script (that's taken me a few weeks to get right I might add!) I now don't see any spam on my home server and can do all wierd and wacky things with forwarding mail to work (when I'm there) etc.
Add up all the time I spent configuring Outlook rules, folders and filters and I've probably saved time in the long run.
Yes. It allows you to get your email SLOW and INEFFECTIVELY from anywhere in the world.
So you're obviously that "green" a person that when you get up from the TV at night to go to the toilet, you turn off the TV and light in your sitting room, go to the toilet, come back and turn them both on agian before sitting down, do you? Plus you must use low wattage light bulbs throughout your house and you cannot use a microwave oven because it is far more energy efficient to cook all of you food "en masse" in a large gas oven. Do that, then you have a right to complain about my server wasting a few hundred watts.
As to "otherwise useless", the same machine hosts a few of my web sites, acts as an SFTP server for a few of my buddies to use, occasionally gets fired up as a Doom, Unreal Tournament or Quake server, handles about a dozen email accounts shared between my girlfriend and I, acts as a syslog server to the rest of my home network and has a firewall on it also.
2. Dynamic DNS service on your IP address from your ISP.
3. Procmail & fetchmail grabbing mail from the ISP mail server.
4. Strong firewall rules & SSH-only access with public & private keys.
5. Carry around your private key with Putty on a USB memory stick and / or a floppy disk.
I have 160GB of storage and can get to my email form just about any PC in the world. Plus I haven't got to worry about "yet another email account".
Is it already the updated version or do I have to go back and re-apply the Service Pack?
This is just a theoretical question because when I used to work on Windows a lot (during NT4 days), you were advised to re-install the Service Pack after making any major changes to a system.
Just curious.
Why is so unreasonable to expect any user to have a rough idea of what programs they run on their computer so that they just update the bits they need to?
For example, if I run an AMD CPU, why do I need:
810064 - Short Battery Life on Your Pentium III-M Tualatin Processor Computer
I thought Windows Update was supposed to supply you with just the updates you need? Even if it cannot do that level of system checking, what about MS just doing a "portage" or "apt-get" system like in Linux?
MS has a reputation for bloatware and having to download a huge Service Pack where you only need 20-30 of the updates does nothing to quash that reputation.
Not to mention millions of people downloading a 250MB+ Service Pack and wasting bandwidth...
The only thing worse is one of those wastrels trying to convince us he/she is actually doing something useful with our money by releasing some paper that has no bearing or influence on anything in society.
Money and finance hold back human development because everything is subject to what it costs, not what benefits it can bring to the human race.
Hopefully Open Source software is just the first step of humankind realising that knowledge-sharing and just doing the right thing, regardless of money, is how we progress.
...because I'd be really annoyed that my taxes were being spent keeping this "professor" in his work-avoidance program.
The fact is that the majority of Joe Public is far too stupid & lazy to want to bother understanding how a computer works so Microsoft has had to force their hand into making their systems more secure.
Whilst I consider Microsoft "it's own worst enemy" by portraying its OSes as error free and requiring minimal management in advertising, they have taken the right action here because hopefully this starts to make it more difficult for viruses and worms to propagate meaning that we all benefit.
If there's one big advantage we have in the Linux world over the Windows world is that our proportion of idiot users is virtually zero - I for one hope it stays that way also.
"xXxP" - Vin Diesel returns as the tattooed secret agent. This time he's after Open Source Communists and he's only taking DRM for an answer...
"The XP Men" - see the superpower team of Dr DLL, Outlookman, Captain Codec, Blue Screener and The Worm battle the "Freedom Force" of Stallman, the Perlmonger, Apache and Python...
Windows 98 does not support as full or as mature an IP stack as Windows 2000 or Windows XP - therefore 98 does not have the capabilities of running a lot of the normal Internet services that the other two do.
It could therefore be argued that running an unprotected Windows 2000 or Windows XP box would be much worse.
There are genuinely poor people in our system also who deserve assistance from the state - however, at the same time, there are a great number of swindlers and fraudsters that just leech off of the these handouts to pay for booze, cigarettes & drugs.
A food stamp system (as well as ones for energy bills, school books, etc.) would act as a deterrent to the swindlers and actually make them think about going out to work.
Bill: Nice to meet you, John. I'm Bill.
John: I create video games. How about you?
Bill: I work in the government welfare system. So how's business, John?
John: Not so good, Bill. People just aren't interested im my games with ones like Doom 3 around. Still, your job sounds fulfilling?
Bill: Well, John, it could be... except that we're trying to get over the message to people on welfare about how they need to maintain a balanced diet, especially for their kids. We're not doing too well getting the message across, even with a 25 million dollar advertising budget from the government...
John: Jeez, Bill. And there's me, unable to get my game "Kitchen Invaders" published, with a 22-year old nymphomaniac, single, lingerie-modelling daughter too...