Correct. But then a lot of people who write OSS do so because they find reinventing the wheel rather fun. It's a challenge, "scratches an itch" and often leads to software that's better in some ways and worse in others. Who cares? Some people like xine because it does X, Y and Z; others like mplayer because it does A, B and C... and I've got news for you - everyone's different. People don't always like the same things - and one enormous software suite isn't going to satisfy them anyway. As it has often been pointed out - you can't please all the cooks all of the time:)
Two applications that do the exact same thing. Most sane people would see that as pointless and redundant. It's a waste of resources.
What resources?? You make it sound like developing mplayer or xine is a job for these people. Perhaps we could set up someone as supreme OSS guru who tells each opensource programmer what project they're going to work on and what they're going to do! Then no resources would every be wasted!!
But it's not a job - it's a pastime, a puzzle, sometimes a frustration but always, ultimately, a pleasure. Welcome to the OSS world:)
Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off.
What do you call "non-essential" services? If I want to run X, all I need to start is XFS! Everything else is non-essential. And I can assure you, booting this way is very, very fast...
Speaking of MS games, does anyone else remember what must have been one of MicroSoft's first games, Olympic Decathalon on the Apple ][, programmed by one Bill Gates?
I don't think there's much pre-loading of MSOffice, except for the fact that OOo uses a non-MS toolkit and obviously needs to load that on startup... but then MSOffice often seems to use non-standard toolkits too (they're always modifying the look-and-feel in their releases). Also it's worth comparing how fast MSOffice starts using Wine under Linux - there's cetainly no pre-loading there and it's *still* damn fast.
Personally I think MSOffice is the best thing Microsoft's ever released - it generally seems to be stable, bug free and quite streamlined compared to other office suites. Note that despite this I happen to use OOo rather than MSOffice... but that's partly because I use Linux and partly because I'm part of a working group seeking to promote OOo to students at my University.
Is that using Ximian's OOo release? And is that first startup or restarting after the app's been cached?? Your value seems unbelievably low - it'd be interesting to know if Ximian's done some pre-loading of the OOo libs or something...
Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.
Well, compared to 1.0.x the startup is much, much faster (even includes a progess bar:) On my Linux AthlonXP 2000 system it takes about 2-3 seconds to startup first time (and of course quite a bit less once it's cached in memory)... on the 450 MHz P3 Win2K machine here at work it takes 40secs, but that's using a dog of a hard disk which is really ancient.
But if you tried a 1.1 RC from a few weeks ago, I doubt you'll notice much difference...
Sadly, no - I think part of the problem is that once something becomes a pdf there's no longer any information as to how one horizontal line of text links up with any other (e.g. - same paragraph? same column? different column? figure heading? etc) - so recreating the formatting information becomes impossible.
But there are some pdf -> text utilities which you can use to extract the text (all based on xpdf, I think, so no bypassing of password protection:)
My one concern with the new Palms is the "Graffiti 2" recognition software - you can try a demo at this site and it's really annoying for a long term palm user like myself who's very, very comfortable with standard graffiti, eg.:
"t" and "k" are completely different
the unofficial strokes for "d" (backwards [shortcut]), "y" (Greek gamma) and "v" (backwards "v") don't work
"i" is now "l", etc...
It looks a lot slower, too (requiring multiple strokes for several characters). Does anyone with one of these devices know if traditional Graffiti is supplied, is compatible or is possible to emulate? I've been thinking of replacing my old IIIx for a while now, and I've got to say that apart from the graffiti issue the T3 looks exceptionally nice (finally providing 320x480 and a virtual graffiti area:)
Think about it - Fill a (microwave save) plastic pint jug with cold water, and put the jug in your microwave for 5 minutes on full power. Now, is the water hot or cold? Is the jug hot or cold?
Umm... it's really terrible that you could get modded up for something like that! Have a read of the link that was posted... or better yet, I'll quote it to you:
You warm up a mug of water for a few minutes in the microwave oven. You take it out, then you dump in some powdered coffee, tea, sugar, etc...
DOOSH! The water explodes in roiling foam, spraying boiling water all over your bare skin, and sending you to the emergency ward. I hate it when that happens.
Heatin water or coffee in a microwave oven can be dangerous, especially if you use a ceramic mug or clean glassware. Water sometimes "explodes" because the oven heats it to a temperature that's far hotter than the normal boiling point. When this occurs, any tiny disturbance can trigger some violent boiling. The stored energy is released as a steam explosion. This DOESN'T happen when water is boiled in a pot on the stove. The difference: a stove creates small hotspots on the bottom of the pot which are far hotter than 100C, and the hotspots continuously trigger a roiling boil which cools the rest of the water down to 100C.
Now, where in that does it say that the water or the container doesn't get hot?? I just suggests that the water doesn't bubble and as a consequence can get superheated.
I run a simple Fvwm environment on everything I have.
Heh, I hate to tell you this, but I had a quick look at FVWM and FVWM isn't simple any more! It's now got themes (as in window decorations)! And png support! Even the menu looks half-decent!
Try comparing compile times of the kernel between TWM and KDE3, no surprise which will win.
But there is a "middle-ground" between butt-ugly TWM and big-and-bloated KDE (which is also, IMHO, butt-ugly, but that's more because I can't see the GUI for the kitchen sink that's in the way...)
That's why environments like xfce, ROX, WindowMaker and IceWM exist - providing speed, but not at the expense of being so minimal they interfere with usability. I'm currently using IceWM and ROX as a desktop, but having had a quick look at xfce4 I'll certainly give it a try. It looks very neat indeed...
LyX defeats the point. It has menus. It has toolbars and buttons all over the place. It has far too many choices, which is what would cause a writer to play with them (in order to procrastinate) instead of writing.
Actually it's pretty minimal as far as the toolbars-and-buttons go. It does have a lot of menu features, mainly because LaTeX itself has a hell of a lot of features.
But the main thing is that the writer doesn't have to worry about (1) pagination/TOCs/styles/headings or (2) LaTeX syntax (which is going to scare many would-be writers away). Compared to OpenOffice Writer or MS Word when writing large (>10,000 word) files (master documents, anyone??), LyX is much more productive whilst also retaining a gui.
I don't know why nobody else has mentioned it... LyX is LaTeX without needing to know the LaTeX command set (or have to type \emph{} every time you want italics, etc:). For writing large documents without any distractions it's perfect.
Not that I'd use LyX for day-to-day word processing - that's what OOo is for... Pity there's not a LaTeX import/export filter in OOo, though...
btw - couldn't resist: And speaking of graphical editors, have you experienced the pain of having your careful setup, with a new page for every chapter, completely ruined by adding one line to the second paragraph of the first chapter?
That's what the "Insert Page Break" function is for:)
FWIW, I had a similar problem with a TNT2 and a monitor that was made in 1996.
The problem was the XFree drivers: trying to use the open-source drivers - regardless of distro - did exactly the same thing; whereas nVidia's closed-source drivers worked perfectly.
A simple solution is to use xserver=fbdev (or whatever the option is, I can't recall and don't have access to a knoppix disc at present).
Of course, the best solution would be to include nVidia's closed source drivers, but this would have issues with Debian's open-source only policy... There is at least one knoppix spin-off that does include the nVidia drivers: Morphix - which also has the advantage of providing "light" versions that don't use either KDE or GNOME. However, last time I tried (half a year ago), morphix had more hardware-compatibility issues.
OpenOffice is not there yet. Its help assistant spawns 1024x768 help windows to say as little as "I have automatically capitalized the first letter of your sentence." It has no integrated PIM software to unseat Microsoft Outlook. It has no easy migration path for the millions of users who open documents with useful macros and scripts. OpenOffice has no drop-in replacement for Microsoft Access-driven applications; primitive as Access is, many companies use it to develop simple database applications that would need to be recreated from scratch in another suite.
All very true. But for those of us who don't want to use Outlook, don't need Access, and don't want to pay several hundred dollars it's not a bad substitute. There's a long way to go yet before OOo is better than MSOffice. But who said it needed to be better when the vast majority of users don't need anything more than what it provides?
Getting back on topic, I agree with you in part on the value (or lack thereof) of an XML based format. But it's conceivable that companies could use an open XML format to automate tasks - thus giving them a good reason to switch. Which was basically what this story was asking about...:)
Am I the only one who wishes they'd asked someone to proofread before sending it off?? Maybe I'm being picky here, but I don't see grammatical errors as helping anyone's cause...
Well some people cant read, should we say books arent useful for everyone just because some people cant read them?
Hmmm... I think you've got the idea wrong. The question was not "Does the general public really need the internet when nobody knows how to use it?" but rather "Does the general public really need the internet, considering the content on the internet and its relevance"
Maybe some people need to grow a bigger brain.
Perhaps they should do a quick google search: how to grow a bigger brain Now all I've got to do is get me loads of B-catenin.... Who said the internet wasn't useful??
I am suprised that Sun's Star Office recieves so much attention from slashdot and the open sauce community.
Well, one major reason might be that most of Star Office, being the same as OOo, is open source. Whereas Ability Office appears pretty closed to me...
Ability Office offers similar functionality in most cases, it can export to PDF, open all MS Office file types and doesn't use a ugly as hell windowing toolkit.
Have you tried OOo 1.1? The toolkit is a lot nicer. And best of all, we've now finally got true anti-aliased fonts in linux! 1.1 running under linux now looks better than it does running under Windows...:)
It can even be run on linux.
As opposed to OOo or StarOffice... how exactly? You did realise that these run under linux as well, didn't you??
Star Office is not very similar to Open Office at all, sun kept the best parts to themselves (database app) so why are they seen to be *cooler* to open source zealots then other perfectly good office sweets?
There's not many Office users who are hanging out for that database app, I wouldn't have thought. But even if there are, OOo actually has extensive databasing capabilities including using MySQL, dbase, etc. They're well hidden, but they're there...
Also its cheaper than StarOffice, Ability only costs 69.95
But, as many others have pointed out, its not cheaper than OOo, which is free.
In answer to your original question, there's several other reasons why StarOffice receives so much attention. But the main reason is that if StarOffice gains significant market share then that will be a major victory for open source software, since Star is simply OOo with a few extras. And the two products, Star and OOo, complement each other nicely: Star is the "commercial" alternative for idiot company directors who don't believe anything good can be free; OOo is the free solution for those users who don't want to pay money for software. Either way, open source software wins out:)
Re:Another way to speed up booting Linux
on
Booting Linux Faster
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... or simply don't run the services you don't need? Distros try to please all the people all of the time. That doesn't mean you need to run half the stuff that's provided.
A very interesting experience for me was starting from scratch and only *including* the stuff I needed when playing around with a minimal linux distro (crux linux). You'd be amazed how much crud you don't need and how much faster the system boots...
OpenOffice.org is an open-source project, which means that it is a piece of software (an office suite in this case) developed under a set of very liberal licenses (the LGPL and SISSL - more on this later).
One of the freedoms provided is that one can take OpenOffice.org and package it as his/her own distribution. Then, this distribution can be sold to make a revenue. Such a distribution is StarOffice, from Sun Microsystems.
Therefore, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have exactly the same core applications, except that it misses out on certain fonts (like Asian language ones and a few for improved Microsoft file format compatibility), a database component (AdabasD), certain file filters, templates & a clip art gallery, and some sorting functionality. However, most of what OpenOffice.org lacks can be made up with the help of third-party applications...
What you're saying is rather like saying Mozilla is based on Netscape...
Re:What about Burlington in 1999?
on
Ford To Move To Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
my wife, she wigged on me when I went linux. she could not use microsoft money. I need to find another alternative to everything she uses then she cannot object to it.
The alternative is called dual-booting:) That's how my partner and I use the same computer. From the perspective of someone who uses a computer as simply a tool, not a whole philosophy, the problem is that if you already use and are familiar with MS software then linux/OOo/whatever will always be second best - you're happier with what you're most comfortable with.
Most people switch to linux because of two reasons - either they hate MS so much they want to take the plunge into a completely new environment, or they believe in open-source software so much that they're willing to make sacrifices. Personally, I think linux is wonderful, but then I believe in the philosophy and I love programming - which I find much, much easier to do in linux than in Windows. But that's not what's important to most people, such as my partner and probably your wife...
Slashdot Mirror
It also is redundant and reinvents the wheel.
... and I've got news for you - everyone's different. People don't always like the same things - and one enormous software suite isn't going to satisfy them anyway. As it has often been pointed out - you can't please all the cooks all of the time :)
:)
Correct. But then a lot of people who write OSS do so because they find reinventing the wheel rather fun. It's a challenge, "scratches an itch" and often leads to software that's better in some ways and worse in others. Who cares? Some people like xine because it does X, Y and Z; others like mplayer because it does A, B and C
Two applications that do the exact same thing. Most sane people would see that as pointless and redundant. It's a waste of resources.
What resources?? You make it sound like developing mplayer or xine is a job for these people. Perhaps we could set up someone as supreme OSS guru who tells each opensource programmer what project they're going to work on and what they're going to do! Then no resources would every be wasted!!
But it's not a job - it's a pastime, a puzzle, sometimes a frustration but always, ultimately, a pleasure. Welcome to the OSS world
But any player (not just Xine or mplayer) that uses the Xv mode has the same sharpness.
... Can Xine do this also?
But mplayer has a whole host of post-processing options that can make the standard picture much nicer
Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off.
...
What do you call "non-essential" services? If I want to run X, all I need to start is XFS! Everything else is non-essential. And I can assure you, booting this way is very, very fast
Speaking of MS games, does anyone else remember what must have been one of MicroSoft's first games, Olympic Decathalon on the Apple ][, programmed by one Bill Gates?
:)
(IIRC it was really, really crap
I don't think there's much pre-loading of MSOffice, except for the fact that OOo uses a non-MS toolkit and obviously needs to load that on startup ... but then MSOffice often seems to use non-standard toolkits too (they're always modifying the look-and-feel in their releases). Also it's worth comparing how fast MSOffice starts using Wine under Linux - there's cetainly no pre-loading there and it's *still* damn fast.
... but that's partly because I use Linux and partly because I'm part of a working group seeking to promote OOo to students at my University.
Personally I think MSOffice is the best thing Microsoft's ever released - it generally seems to be stable, bug free and quite streamlined compared to other office suites. Note that despite this I happen to use OOo rather than MSOffice
Is that using Ximian's OOo release? And is that first startup or restarting after the app's been cached?? Your value seems unbelievably low - it'd be interesting to know if Ximian's done some pre-loading of the OOo libs or something ...
Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.
:) On my Linux AthlonXP 2000 system it takes about 2-3 seconds to startup first time (and of course quite a bit less once it's cached in memory) ... on the 450 MHz P3 Win2K machine here at work it takes 40secs, but that's using a dog of a hard disk which is really ancient.
...
Well, compared to 1.0.x the startup is much, much faster (even includes a progess bar
But if you tried a 1.1 RC from a few weeks ago, I doubt you'll notice much difference
Do you know if you can import pdf?
:)
Sadly, no - I think part of the problem is that once something becomes a pdf there's no longer any information as to how one horizontal line of text links up with any other (e.g. - same paragraph? same column? different column? figure heading? etc) - so recreating the formatting information becomes impossible.
But there are some pdf -> text utilities which you can use to extract the text (all based on xpdf, I think, so no bypassing of password protection
FWIW, you can write captitals in the middle with normal graffiti using the hack "MiddleCaps" ...
"t" and "k" are completely different
the unofficial strokes for "d" (backwards [shortcut]), "y" (Greek gamma) and "v" (backwards "v") don't work
"i" is now "l", etc ...
:)
It looks a lot slower, too (requiring multiple strokes for several characters). Does anyone with one of these devices know if traditional Graffiti is supplied, is compatible or is possible to emulate? I've been thinking of replacing my old IIIx for a while now, and I've got to say that apart from the graffiti issue the T3 looks exceptionally nice (finally providing 320x480 and a virtual graffiti area
Think about it - Fill a (microwave save) plastic pint jug with cold water, and put the jug in your microwave for 5 minutes on full power. Now, is the water hot or cold? Is the jug hot or cold?
Umm ... it's really terrible that you could get modded up for something like that! Have a read of the link that was posted ... or better yet, I'll quote it to you:
You warm up a mug of water for a few minutes in the microwave oven. You take it out, then you dump in some powdered coffee, tea, sugar, etc...
DOOSH! The water explodes in roiling foam, spraying boiling water all over your bare skin, and sending you to the emergency ward. I hate it when that happens.
Heatin water or coffee in a microwave oven can be dangerous, especially if you use a ceramic mug or clean glassware. Water sometimes "explodes" because the oven heats it to a temperature that's far hotter than the normal boiling point. When this occurs, any tiny disturbance can trigger some violent boiling. The stored energy is released as a steam explosion. This DOESN'T happen when water is boiled in a pot on the stove. The difference: a stove creates small hotspots on the bottom of the pot which are far hotter than 100C, and the hotspots continuously trigger a roiling boil which cools the rest of the water down to 100C.
Now, where in that does it say that the water or the container doesn't get hot?? I just suggests that the water doesn't bubble and as a consequence can get superheated.
I run a simple Fvwm environment on everything I have.
Heh, I hate to tell you this, but I had a quick look at FVWM and FVWM isn't simple any more! It's now got themes (as in window decorations)! And png support! Even the menu looks half-decent!
Who'd have thought it ... ??
Try comparing compile times of the kernel between TWM and KDE3, no surprise which will win.
But there is a "middle-ground" between butt-ugly TWM and big-and-bloated KDE (which is also, IMHO, butt-ugly, but that's more because I can't see the GUI for the kitchen sink that's in the way ...)
That's why environments like xfce, ROX, WindowMaker and IceWM exist - providing speed, but not at the expense of being so minimal they interfere with usability. I'm currently using IceWM and ROX as a desktop, but having had a quick look at xfce4 I'll certainly give it a try. It looks very neat indeed ...
Actually it's pretty minimal as far as the toolbars-and-buttons go. It does have a lot of menu features, mainly because LaTeX itself has a hell of a lot of features.
But the main thing is that the writer doesn't have to worry about (1) pagination/TOCs/styles/headings or (2) LaTeX syntax (which is going to scare many would-be writers away). Compared to OpenOffice Writer or MS Word when writing large (>10,000 word) files (master documents, anyone??), LyX is much more productive whilst also retaining a gui.
I don't know why nobody else has mentioned it ... LyX is LaTeX without needing to know the LaTeX command set (or have to type \emph{} every time you want italics, etc :). For writing large documents without any distractions it's perfect.
Not that I'd use LyX for day-to-day word processing - that's what OOo is for ... Pity there's not a LaTeX import/export filter in OOo, though ...
btw - couldn't resist:
And speaking of graphical editors, have you experienced the pain of having your careful setup, with a new page for every chapter, completely ruined by adding one line to the second paragraph of the first chapter?
That's what the "Insert Page Break" function is for :)
The problem was the XFree drivers: trying to use the open-source drivers - regardless of distro - did exactly the same thing; whereas nVidia's closed-source drivers worked perfectly.
A simple solution is to use xserver=fbdev (or whatever the option is, I can't recall and don't have access to a knoppix disc at present).
Of course, the best solution would be to include nVidia's closed source drivers, but this would have issues with Debian's open-source only policy ... There is at least one knoppix spin-off that does include the nVidia drivers: Morphix - which also has the advantage of providing "light" versions that don't use either KDE or GNOME. However, last time I tried (half a year ago), morphix had more hardware-compatibility issues.
Is there a reason why you can't just use OOo's "export as PDF" function?
All very true. But for those of us who don't want to use Outlook, don't need Access, and don't want to pay several hundred dollars it's not a bad substitute. There's a long way to go yet before OOo is better than MSOffice. But who said it needed to be better when the vast majority of users don't need anything more than what it provides?
Getting back on topic, I agree with you in part on the value (or lack thereof) of an XML based format. But it's conceivable that companies could use an open XML format to automate tasks - thus giving them a good reason to switch. Which was basically what this story was asking about ... :)
That'd be what Jenny Craig worships, right??
Am I the only one who wishes they'd asked someone to proofread before sending it off?? Maybe I'm being picky here, but I don't see grammatical errors as helping anyone's cause ...
Hmmm ... I think you've got the idea wrong. The question was not "Does the general public really need the internet when nobody knows how to use it?" but rather "Does the general public really need the internet, considering the content on the internet and its relevance"
Maybe some people need to grow a bigger brain.
Perhaps they should do a quick google search: how to grow a bigger brain Now all I've got to do is get me loads of B-catenin .... Who said the internet wasn't useful??
Well, one major reason might be that most of Star Office, being the same as OOo, is open source. Whereas Ability Office appears pretty closed to me ...
Ability Office offers similar functionality in most cases, it can export to PDF, open all MS Office file types and doesn't use a ugly as hell windowing toolkit.
Have you tried OOo 1.1? The toolkit is a lot nicer. And best of all, we've now finally got true anti-aliased fonts in linux! 1.1 running under linux now looks better than it does running under Windows ... :)
It can even be run on linux.
As opposed to OOo or StarOffice ... how exactly? You did realise that these run under linux as well, didn't you??
Star Office is not very similar to Open Office at all, sun kept the best parts to themselves (database app) so why are they seen to be *cooler* to open source zealots then other perfectly good office sweets?
There's not many Office users who are hanging out for that database app, I wouldn't have thought. But even if there are, OOo actually has extensive databasing capabilities including using MySQL, dbase, etc. They're well hidden, but they're there ...
Also its cheaper than StarOffice, Ability only costs 69.95
But, as many others have pointed out, its not cheaper than OOo, which is free.
In answer to your original question, there's several other reasons why StarOffice receives so much attention. But the main reason is that if StarOffice gains significant market share then that will be a major victory for open source software, since Star is simply OOo with a few extras. And the two products, Star and OOo, complement each other nicely: Star is the "commercial" alternative for idiot company directors who don't believe anything good can be free; OOo is the free solution for those users who don't want to pay money for software. Either way, open source software wins out :)
A very interesting experience for me was starting from scratch and only *including* the stuff I needed when playing around with a minimal linux distro (crux linux). You'd be amazed how much crud you don't need and how much faster the system boots ...
I don't think so ...
OpenOffice was based on StarOffice ...
StarOffice is now based on OpenOffice.
From the OpenOffice.org Unofficial FAQ:
OpenOffice.org is an open-source project, which means that it is a piece of software (an office suite in this case) developed under a set of very liberal licenses (the LGPL and SISSL - more on this later).
One of the freedoms provided is that one can take OpenOffice.org and package it as his/her own distribution. Then, this distribution can be sold to make a revenue. Such a distribution is StarOffice, from Sun Microsystems.
Therefore, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have exactly the same core applications, except that it misses out on certain fonts (like Asian language ones and a few for improved Microsoft file format compatibility), a database component (AdabasD), certain file filters, templates & a clip art gallery, and some sorting functionality. However, most of what OpenOffice.org lacks can be made up with the help of third-party applications...
What you're saying is rather like saying Mozilla is based on Netscape ...
The alternative is called dual-booting :) That's how my partner and I use the same computer. From the perspective of someone who uses a computer as simply a tool, not a whole philosophy, the problem is that if you already use and are familiar with MS software then linux/OOo/whatever will always be second best - you're happier with what you're most comfortable with.
Most people switch to linux because of two reasons - either they hate MS so much they want to take the plunge into a completely new environment, or they believe in open-source software so much that they're willing to make sacrifices. Personally, I think linux is wonderful, but then I believe in the philosophy and I love programming - which I find much, much easier to do in linux than in Windows. But that's not what's important to most people, such as my partner and probably your wife ...