That looks like an interesting network solution for Windows, though I'm not sure if it has any advantages over a locally-installed PDFcreator. On linux, to get around the firefox weirdness I think also "CupsPDF" does the trick too.
Any time someone mentions how they don't like having papers around but want a hard copy, my response is immediately, print it to PDF! Your operating system should be able to do this:) Linux firefox, print to generic printer to a file named something.ps, then run ps2pdf on it, in just about every other GNOME app PDF support is built in to the print dialog. Mac OS X, well, you already knew you could save PDF (or save the preview, same diff) from your print dialog. Windows: www.sf.net/projects/pdfcreator is your friend - just don't install their toolbar (the existence of which makes me rather sad). Then, you've got the page (or whatever) archived in a nice, portable, paper-like file, and when desktop search is ready for the masses (if you're not on a Mac), you'll even be able to search it - much better than paper!
The changes you see are probably similar to those of (for instance) visual themes and the "Luna" plump blue design turned off by default in Win2003, the server "version" of Windows XP, rather than any change in strategy. System/server administrators just put up with less and want performance and security over pretty and irritating.
gksudo - with a recent (within last 2-3 years) distribution of at least Ubuntu and probably other distros, your Administration menu will automatically ask for elevation when needed, with a nice graphical interface. Since Ubuntu 6.06 (almost a year ago), the request also greys out the rest of your screen so that you aren't tricked into typing your password into a "false" elevation dialog, as well as prevents accidental typing of your password into your IM or whatever.
On a Windows system, just make a first clone of your working master (to become your clone master), then run the "sysprep" tool (after configuration, use google) on this clone master. It will shut down the machine. At that point, clone the disk however you want - it will reset the security id (SID) and computer name on each new machine, and do some hardware detection too (not all of it, though, so test first)
This concept reminds me of the idea of security theatre, or that it is easier and more effective to make people feel like you're doing something to protect them, rather than actually doing the protecting. If folks seriously claim Wikipedia should be blocked because it may contain non-credible information, then not only should they whitelist-only and block essentially the entire Internet, I would wager that published, physical books sometimes contain non-credible information. Though the demands of the publishing process may reduce this likelyhood, it's not like there's never been a challenge to what a book says. Heck, isn't that what book-burnings were for?
There is a lot of anti-Wikipedia bad blood in society at the moment, it seems, and it's really quite a shame. The fact that anyone can edit it is nearly wholly a non-issue: middle- and high-schoolers who haven't been explained techniques of research and credibility have been citing Geocities pages for years now anyway, and at least with Wikipedia there's a Recent Changes list that people tend to watch for fun, or so I'm told.
If the block is acknowledged as being done to "make parents feel better," then I would suspect insufficient leadership but would somewhat understand. Saying it is blocked because it may be non-credible, however, completely lays bare some serious fundamental misunderstandings about the Internet and global decentralized communication in general.
We have pretty standard styles support and opendocument import/export is supported as well (you may need to install a plugin, or it may be packaged with your distro if you're Linux) - try harder:) If you need help, just join and email the AbiWord users mailing list.
Have you tried AbiWord and Gnumeric? All you then need to use OO.o for is presentation (which can kind of be hacked inelegantly with Inkscape and Evince), which makes it a lot less painful, especially if you rarely need to do a presentation.
you mean this? http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=59 4095 One hen; two ducks; three squawking geese; four Limerick oysters; five corpulent porpoises; six pairs of Don Alversos tweezers; 7,000 Macedonians in full battle array; eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt; nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity toward procrastination and sloth; 10 lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who hall stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery, all at the same time.
You seem to be expending an awful lot of effort to debunk what is really just innocent fun.
This scares me not because I'm a teacher, but because I'm an IT guy. I see everyone saying "lock up the IT people", and while letting filtering software run out and not using Firefox is a little ignorant, this is an unreasonable burden to say "you must block all possibly pornographic materials." Even with the best of filters, you're never going to catch all of it, that's just the way it is. If you do whitelist-only, the closest thing to a foolproof filter, you've just ruined the decentralized nature of the Internet. It seems like there's no way I can win here, short of getting a lawyer and having everyone sign something that waives me of liability for random junk on the Internet (a logical waiver, I'd say) that gets past my reasonable effort.
That is a bit of hyperbole. If you're goofing around on a MEDICAL IMAGING machine because of spyware, then someone already didn't have permission - things like that should never be connected to the internet, full stop.
Win2k - Offline Updates: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682 . From a post here on Slashdot a while ago, it's a pretty slick tool. Just keep running it until they stop making updates for Win2k, then burn it to multiple high-quality archival CD's for safety:D A firewall (or even consumer router) never hurts, unless it's the Norton firewall.
Win98 - I'll agree with another poster, virtualize it. VMWare Player is your friend. (and why is Win98 your friend too? I suppose it's not WinME;D )
Well, AbiWord serializes its internal data structure into XML, so it's not an exact dump - it lets us do things like have backward-compatible additions such as LaTeX and MathML equations and include an image preview of the equation as a fallback, for instance. There are things you can do to make your internal format more lucid, and binary->text is one of those things: I can fix almost anything that can go wrong with an AbiWord doc (usually only happens in dev releases, but sometimes strange things happen) with Notepad.
(And I would say that as long as it's well-documented and in a useful manner, if you're just using it for internal/non-archival data storage and need a lot of speed, using the internal structure would make sense.)
Oh, I'm sure testing is a nightmare, and it can't be good for performance to be going from a binary memory dump to a binary memory dump probably encoded somehow and shoehorned into XML so you can use those three letters. (Apologies for the lack of solid knowledge - for legal reasons I'd rather not know too much about the intricacies of Microsoft OpenXML.) I was reffering fmore to the fact that.doc is reasonable for use by Word, though it certainly is a pain to load and no good for interchange even between versions.
Actually, I think for most of the things you suggest, you can do them - I know AbiWord supports them at least. (images, complex styles, TOC) RTF's really not the old dog it seems to be - keep in mind that for copy/paste of any sort of rich text to work in any sensible manner on Windows, one _must_ support RTF well.
ODF is a nice idea in theory, but really, it's a similar situation (OpenOffice.Org internal dataformat jammed into a standard, so designed with OO.o in mind by necessity) just with more OSS-positive karma associated. There's nothing wrong with saving in a file format that matches your internal representation, in fact, it's a darn good idea (see.ABW for AbiWord,.DOC for Word,.WPD for WordPerfect I would also wager is the same idea). However, interoperability seems to work best when taken from the ground up - when working with another application's data structure of any complexity, you simply can't do a lossless roundtrip without losing before you've started.
There is, however, a format that can do this sort of thing. Yes, I'm talking about the dark horse of the "file format wars," the non-glamorous workaholic format that even WordPad and TextEdit.app can read with ease: RTF. It may not get press attention, but it's actually a fairly well-documented standard, has been working as an interchange format for years, and yet is designed with enough expandability that it's still useful with the kinds of documents produced today. It's a true de-facto standard.
This may not be an exciting idea, but for those who really want interoperability, RTF is the way to go with today's software. Not to say that import/export of ODF, Word, WPD, etc. isn't important (AbiWord, a project that I contribute to but do not purport to speak for, has very good to great support for those formats and many others), just that an unnecessary dichotomy is drawn between OpenXML and ODF with regard to their design goals - both are repurposed native formats for a single application.
It seems like perhaps the concepts of "modern" and "what I already know" are being confused. If anything, it is a more modern interface and could be a model for future UI enhancements to "modern" desktops and a source of new ideas.
Have you actually downloaded it though? My friends bought what they thought was Super Mario Brothers, and found it was Mario Brothers (y'know, the "battle game" included as a minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3). Still fun, but not quite Super Mario Brothers.
Tribes (now free for the PC/Windows, I think it runs in Wine ok - amazing lan party game)
and older-school requiring either an SNES or an as-of-yet-unreleased Wii Virtual Console: Super Bomberman 2 (with the multitap to support 4 players:D) Tetris Attack (completely addictive and only tangentally related to tetris) to a lesser degree, Bust-A-Move (fun, can be a little frustrating to begin with)
Well, according to the release notes you apparently must install an optional addon before installing IE7 on a Japanese system (for it to even work? This is unclear...), and you can't install it after. That sounds like a good enough reason to me to not force it out: what percentage of folks will have that prereq? (I know I don't, and hadn't even heard of it.) I am not even sure what that has to do with Japanese systems especially, but if it's in the release notes, it must be pretty serious.
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like an interesting network solution for Windows, though I'm not sure if it has any advantages over a locally-installed PDFcreator. On linux, to get around the firefox weirdness I think also "CupsPDF" does the trick too.
Any time someone mentions how they don't like having papers around but want a hard copy, my response is immediately, print it to PDF! Your operating system should be able to do this :) Linux firefox, print to generic printer to a file named something.ps, then run ps2pdf on it, in just about every other GNOME app PDF support is built in to the print dialog. Mac OS X, well, you already knew you could save PDF (or save the preview, same diff) from your print dialog. Windows: www.sf.net/projects/pdfcreator is your friend - just don't install their toolbar (the existence of which makes me rather sad). Then, you've got the page (or whatever) archived in a nice, portable, paper-like file, and when desktop search is ready for the masses (if you're not on a Mac), you'll even be able to search it - much better than paper!
The changes you see are probably similar to those of (for instance) visual themes and the "Luna" plump blue design turned off by default in Win2003, the server "version" of Windows XP, rather than any change in strategy. System/server administrators just put up with less and want performance and security over pretty and irritating.
gksudo - with a recent (within last 2-3 years) distribution of at least Ubuntu and probably other distros, your Administration menu will automatically ask for elevation when needed, with a nice graphical interface. Since Ubuntu 6.06 (almost a year ago), the request also greys out the rest of your screen so that you aren't tricked into typing your password into a "false" elevation dialog, as well as prevents accidental typing of your password into your IM or whatever.
On a Windows system, just make a first clone of your working master (to become your clone master), then run the "sysprep" tool (after configuration, use google) on this clone master. It will shut down the machine. At that point, clone the disk however you want - it will reset the security id (SID) and computer name on each new machine, and do some hardware detection too (not all of it, though, so test first)
This concept reminds me of the idea of security theatre, or that it is easier and more effective to make people feel like you're doing something to protect them, rather than actually doing the protecting. If folks seriously claim Wikipedia should be blocked because it may contain non-credible information, then not only should they whitelist-only and block essentially the entire Internet, I would wager that published, physical books sometimes contain non-credible information. Though the demands of the publishing process may reduce this likelyhood, it's not like there's never been a challenge to what a book says. Heck, isn't that what book-burnings were for?
There is a lot of anti-Wikipedia bad blood in society at the moment, it seems, and it's really quite a shame. The fact that anyone can edit it is nearly wholly a non-issue: middle- and high-schoolers who haven't been explained techniques of research and credibility have been citing Geocities pages for years now anyway, and at least with Wikipedia there's a Recent Changes list that people tend to watch for fun, or so I'm told.
If the block is acknowledged as being done to "make parents feel better," then I would suspect insufficient leadership but would somewhat understand. Saying it is blocked because it may be non-credible, however, completely lays bare some serious fundamental misunderstandings about the Internet and global decentralized communication in general.
AbiWord does, if you want a word processor, though it's not a whole suite.
http://www.easyvmx.com/ is your VMWare Player friend :)
We have pretty standard styles support and opendocument import/export is supported as well (you may need to install a plugin, or it may be packaged with your distro if you're Linux) - try harder :) If you need help, just join and email the AbiWord users mailing list.
We have a Pango renderer in the development (2.5.x, will become 2.6.x) version, if you know Hebrew please help us test it out! http://www.abisource.com/ and http://bugzilla.abisource.com/
Thanks so much!
Have you tried AbiWord and Gnumeric? All you then need to use OO.o for is presentation (which can kind of be hacked inelegantly with Inkscape and Evince), which makes it a lot less painful, especially if you rarely need to do a presentation.
Bias: I'm an AbiWord dev because I like it a lot.
you mean this? http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=59 4095
One hen; two ducks; three squawking geese; four Limerick oysters; five
corpulent porpoises; six pairs of Don Alversos tweezers; 7,000
Macedonians in full battle array; eight brass monkeys from the ancient
sacred crypts of Egypt; nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men
on roller skates with a marked propensity toward procrastination and
sloth; 10 lyrical, spherical, diabolical denizens of the deep who hall
stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery, all at
the same time.
You seem to be expending an awful lot of effort to debunk what is really just innocent fun.
This scares me not because I'm a teacher, but because I'm an IT guy. I see everyone saying "lock up the IT people", and while letting filtering software run out and not using Firefox is a little ignorant, this is an unreasonable burden to say "you must block all possibly pornographic materials." Even with the best of filters, you're never going to catch all of it, that's just the way it is. If you do whitelist-only, the closest thing to a foolproof filter, you've just ruined the decentralized nature of the Internet. It seems like there's no way I can win here, short of getting a lawyer and having everyone sign something that waives me of liability for random junk on the Internet (a logical waiver, I'd say) that gets past my reasonable effort.
Jeepers...
That is a bit of hyperbole. If you're goofing around on a MEDICAL IMAGING machine because of spyware, then someone already didn't have permission - things like that should never be connected to the internet, full stop.
A specialized version of AbiWord is in production right now for use on the OLPC, and we are a part of the standard test image - the writing activity.
-- Ryan, AbiWord Dev, Win32 Maintainer, and Art Lead
Win2k - Offline Updates: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682 . From a post here on Slashdot a while ago, it's a pretty slick tool. Just keep running it until they stop making updates for Win2k, then burn it to multiple high-quality archival CD's for safety :D A firewall (or even consumer router) never hurts, unless it's the Norton firewall.
;D )
Win98 - I'll agree with another poster, virtualize it. VMWare Player is your friend. (and why is Win98 your friend too? I suppose it's not WinME
Well, AbiWord serializes its internal data structure into XML, so it's not an exact dump - it lets us do things like have backward-compatible additions such as LaTeX and MathML equations and include an image preview of the equation as a fallback, for instance. There are things you can do to make your internal format more lucid, and binary->text is one of those things: I can fix almost anything that can go wrong with an AbiWord doc (usually only happens in dev releases, but sometimes strange things happen) with Notepad.
(And I would say that as long as it's well-documented and in a useful manner, if you're just using it for internal/non-archival data storage and need a lot of speed, using the internal structure would make sense.)
Oh, I'm sure testing is a nightmare, and it can't be good for performance to be going from a binary memory dump to a binary memory dump probably encoded somehow and shoehorned into XML so you can use those three letters. (Apologies for the lack of solid knowledge - for legal reasons I'd rather not know too much about the intricacies of Microsoft OpenXML.) I was reffering fmore to the fact that .doc is reasonable for use by Word, though it certainly is a pain to load and no good for interchange even between versions.
Actually, I think for most of the things you suggest, you can do them - I know AbiWord supports them at least. (images, complex styles, TOC) RTF's really not the old dog it seems to be - keep in mind that for copy/paste of any sort of rich text to work in any sensible manner on Windows, one _must_ support RTF well.
ODF is a nice idea in theory, but really, it's a similar situation (OpenOffice.Org internal dataformat jammed into a standard, so designed with OO.o in mind by necessity) just with more OSS-positive karma associated. There's nothing wrong with saving in a file format that matches your internal representation, in fact, it's a darn good idea (see .ABW for AbiWord, .DOC for Word, .WPD for WordPerfect I would also wager is the same idea). However, interoperability seems to work best when taken from the ground up - when working with another application's data structure of any complexity, you simply can't do a lossless roundtrip without losing before you've started.
There is, however, a format that can do this sort of thing. Yes, I'm talking about the dark horse of the "file format wars," the non-glamorous workaholic format that even WordPad and TextEdit.app can read with ease: RTF. It may not get press attention, but it's actually a fairly well-documented standard, has been working as an interchange format for years, and yet is designed with enough expandability that it's still useful with the kinds of documents produced today. It's a true de-facto standard.
This may not be an exciting idea, but for those who really want interoperability, RTF is the way to go with today's software. Not to say that import/export of ODF, Word, WPD, etc. isn't important (AbiWord, a project that I contribute to but do not purport to speak for, has very good to great support for those formats and many others), just that an unnecessary dichotomy is drawn between OpenXML and ODF with regard to their design goals - both are repurposed native formats for a single application.
It seems like perhaps the concepts of "modern" and "what I already know" are being confused. If anything, it is a more modern interface and could be a model for future UI enhancements to "modern" desktops and a source of new ideas.
Have you actually downloaded it though? My friends bought what they thought was Super Mario Brothers, and found it was Mario Brothers (y'know, the "battle game" included as a minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3). Still fun, but not quite Super Mario Brothers.
Just empty your trash while your device is plugged in. It should empty the trash everywhere it can, in theory.
Tribes (now free for the PC/Windows, I think it runs in Wine ok - amazing lan party game)
:D)
and older-school requiring either an SNES or an as-of-yet-unreleased Wii Virtual Console:
Super Bomberman 2 (with the multitap to support 4 players
Tetris Attack (completely addictive and only tangentally related to tetris)
to a lesser degree, Bust-A-Move (fun, can be a little frustrating to begin with)
Well, according to the release notes you apparently must install an optional addon before installing IE7 on a Japanese system (for it to even work? This is unclear...), and you can't install it after. That sounds like a good enough reason to me to not force it out: what percentage of folks will have that prereq? (I know I don't, and hadn't even heard of it.) I am not even sure what that has to do with Japanese systems especially, but if it's in the release notes, it must be pretty serious.
Seems logical enough for me.