"screen" doesn't mean montior resolution! I was referring to the resolution of the "dots" that make up the image that is printed... the term comes from "silk screen", I assume.
As for a nice printer doing better than 200 dpi, that goes back to what I was saying before. Make the silk-screen dots smaller and you lose shades of colour. So you gain resolution, but lose the effective number of colours.
You're confusing the resolution of the printing process (which is very, very high) with the actual resolution of the silk-screen.
If you're still confused, try thinking of a newspaper photo - obviously the resolution of the printer is very high: you won't be able to see any square pixels. But the photo is made up of dots that are quite visible - the size/density of those dots is the "screen" resolution, if you like.
Yeah? Well, until less that two years ago I was using google from a 14.4. And it worked just fine! I'm currently using a 56kbps modem, but I only got that a few months ago, upgrading from a 33.6:) I assure you, the faster speed is appreciated, but the net's perfectly usable with slower modems (unless all you care about is flash animations and other such hideous abominations...:)
My big question is - are there really people in poorer countries who are using less than a 14.4??
like say, a video box or similar size package (where the little spine pictures are about 40MB each)
Just curious, as I'm not a professional DTP and never will be, but I have dabled in strictly amateur printing of occasions...
I was under the impression that for most printing it's pointless having an image resolution of greater than about 200 dpi, because of the resolution of the screens used to print the photos... and, for that matter, that if the screen resolution was higher, the effective number of shades of each colour was progressively reduced (thus meaning that a higher screen resolution was undesirable).
I have successfully sent jobs to professional printers with artwork at 200 dpi covering most of the page, to be printed on A2 paper (in either full colour or as a duotone) and the end result showed no noticable pixelation. And the total file size of this was less than 20Mb, IIRC.
So why should the "little spine pictures" be so large?
But do Gnome and KDE merely provide a frontend to xset, or have they created their own specific managers? I was always of the impression that they'd done the latter, but I could be wrong - in which case ignore my comment. I never meant that everyone should use xset via the command line, merely that Gnome and/or KDE could simply have provided a frontend to xset instead of "re-inventing the wheel" and making a utility that ultimately doesn't work under the new kernel (from what people are saying...)
There's no reason why you can't test it out on your current distro, except the usual caveat of "be careful, this may corrupt all your data", which applies to just about everything. But it's probably safer to use a fresh new partition.
That said, it's not the easiest thing to do, but it's also not the hardest. Building the kernel is very easy: download the latest source, extract it into/usr/src/ and...
make menuconfig
(Going through all the different options takes a while. Don't forget that almost all of them are extensively documented, and generally tell you when you're likely to need them. You might want to select "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" in the "Code maturity level options" section (the first one!), if you want the latest stuff)
(also, don't forget simple things like enabling PPP - may sound obvious, but it's easy to forget the first time and then you'll wonder why you can't connect to the internet! Save your config to another location at the end, that way you'll be able to easily build new kernels without going through the whole shebang again...)
make
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage/boot/kernel25bz
(or whatever else you want to call your new kernel)
make modules && make modules install
Now edit/etc/lilo.conf to add your new kernel and run/sbin/lilo to incorporate these changes, then reboot. This is the hard part!! But if things don't work, you've still got your old kernel there to go back to.
It's also worth noting a few extra things you'll need, such as the latest Module Init tools, and you may also need to edit your/etc/fstab if you're using devfs and include a line such as
none/dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
And you'll need to find a patch if you're using Nvidia's drivers.
... But that's about all the problems I've personally found so far...:)
Agreed. It always fascinates me why Gnome/KDE feel the need to re-invent the wheel (heh, literally:) for things like mouse settings, keyboard settings, etc, when X already handles these perfectly well.
I've been playing around with 2.5.73 recently using WindowMaker, and I haven't noticed any problems with X mouse performance/accel...
In fact, I'm in the process of changing over to the 2.5 series - in my experience (albeit of about a week) it seems stable and highly usable. (The delay is that I'm switiching distro's as well, from bloated Mandrake to minimalist Crux - and I need to download and compile a lot of software!)
Can anyone put out an article on SCO and have it posted as news?
You didn't read the article, did you. Because if you had, you would have found out that this is not by anyone and it is not just "15 words in the english language [spelled] correctly".
This is the only decent article I have read about the whole SCO debate. It is well written, it is concise, it is well argued. But most importantly, it comes from a legal perspective, not a geek's perspective - it is written by a Law Professor (I quote from the bottom of the article: "Anupam Chander is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. A graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College, he specializes in cyberlaw and international law.")
They are rehashing the same statements, we can all tell that SCO has almost no case to stand on, which is why the story is so compelling.
No, this article does not rehash the same statements, in fact it makes a number of points that I have not heard before in any forum. Perhaps you think it's obvious that SCO has no case, but I'm not sure that everyone does - just look at previous slashdot SCO comments. (I also can't help wondering if your assurity comes from any legal knowledge, or whether it's just based on naivety...)
Jeesh, it's comments like yours that make slashdot a bad read, and the fact that you got modded up I find even more appalling. Yes, there been many, many SCO articles and I'm as sick of them as the next geek. But that's more the pity, because this is one article that should be read by everyone who has an interest in this issue.
Well, I'm Australian, not American. But I must admit I associated drinking coffee with buying it at a cafe, despite the fact that I make wonderful coffee every day at home with a stove-top pot. Don't know about the UK, but here there's a big "cafe culture" - meeting friends for coffee is a very common thing.
That said, you can't really compare prices to a can of coke - a better comparison would be to a 1.25L bottle (which is about the same price in Australia as a can, and gives you 5 drinks of 250ml)... Instant is still cheaper, but not by that much, and it's probably on par with decent ground coffee.
So point taken about the price, but it still seems really weird to drink something you don't like the taste of, simply because it's got a chemical in it that makes your body shake and slows your brain down!
(Incidentally, I'd never go near Starbucks - there's much, much better coffee available here than that rubbish!)
Not as far as I'm concerned - I can't drink caffeine (sensitised myself to it something shocking about 5 years ago, and drinking it now just makes me feel sick). But I love coffee. Good coffee, that is - I wouldn't touch instant with 10 foot pole... A good cup of coffee from my stove-top percolator is pure heaven.
If you really hate the taste of coffee, but just drink it because you like the hit of caffeine... !! What a waste of money!! Why not just buy Jolt?? It's a lot cheaper.
(You might be interested to know that even without genetic engineering, chemically decaf coffee beans taste *identical* to normal ones. The only difference is... you guessed it... no caffeine hit)
AFAIK, the Nvidia drivers aren't included in linux distros because they're closed source. Instead, the default install uses the oss driver that comes with XFree86 (and which does not support 3D accel). It seems a bit silly to me, too, but there you go.
However, having recently bought a Geforce4 card and installed WinXP, I note that Windows doesn't come with Nvidia drivers for this card either. So you can't blame linux too much:)
(your point about having to edit XF86Config-4 is valid, though... I would have thought Nvidia would have included a fix for that in their script (all it should take is changing "nv" to "nvidia" in the driver section))
Often times I have to start some work and leave my computer alone since I can't even use a simple text editor like 'vi' because my system doesn't have the resources.
Thanks for the link - apparently you can't get internet access through the community networks, but I found a link to a commercial wireless internet provider, Alphalink. I don't suppose you'd know anything about using wireless networks with linux? Alphalink claims that only >=Win97 or MacOS X 10.2 are supported:(
Otherwise it sounds a great deal - 2Mbs connection for $33pm (with limits) or 64kbps for $22pm with unlimited down/uploads...
What the hell. The other night I had to plot 6 data series in oocalc, and had absolutely no problems whatsoever. How did I do it? EXACTLY THE SAME WAY I DID IT IN EXCEL!
Um. Ok. Either you always did it an odd way in Excel or I've missed an undocumented feature in OOo.
I just downloaded 1.1 Beta2 to check - it's still the same. The only support for data series is by highlighting separate columns of text with the shift key. There's no scope for custom labels or any of the power that Excell's chart feature gives you.
And worst of all, there is no support for custom (eg Standard Error) error bar values. It's useless for drawing anything remotely scientific. Or possibly I've missed another undocumented feature? - if you really do use it in a science field then PLEASE tell me how to add useful error bars. (Or don't you use error bars in your field of science;)
Honestly, unless you're using your office suite for engineering applications (like using a toothbrush to drive a nail), OOo does everything your average joe could want.
Depends how you define your "average joe". For Mums, Dads and Secretaries it'll be fine. But for academics I cannot see that it is anywhere near adequate. The big failing (even if it does support custom error bars) is in not supporting any useful bibliographic database format (and/or being incompatible with Endnote6 - not that that's OOo's fault, mind you, but it doesn't help solve the problem)
OOo Calc has a lot more spreadsheet functions than Excel, lots of chart types too.
Please tell me this has changed, but last time I looked (1.1 Beta 1) there was still no support for more than one data series in charts (or if there was it was not obvious). I need to plot graphs with many different data series, a task which is dead simple in Excell.
If OOo has this functionality then I congratulate it. If not, you can forget about all those extra spreadsheet functions and chart types. Ploting multiple data series is basic functionality that should not have been neglected.
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''?
Well, I'm not the original poster, but I imagine he doesn't mean "It's different from MSOffice". What he means is that it's klunky, it's bloated, it's slow and the UI's crap. You're obviously an OOo zealot, but let's consider these points one by one:
Klunky I don't want to have one monolithic application that is a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation manager, a graphic design program and a coffee maker. A small, mostly self-contained application for each task is a far better way to manage things. Just look at how much better MozillaFirebird is as a browser compared to it's monolithic parent.
Bloated I can't imagine anyone could argue that OOo isn't bloated. Consider that MSOffice97 is a smaller suite that does far more, far better and far faster. There's no comparison - Office is streets ahead and has been for about five years now. (I haven't tried anything greater than Office97 - it still does more than I'll ever need it to and see no point in upgrading. And it's a valid comparison to OOo as it has far more functionality than OOo does)
Slow Goes with the bloated. The startup of OOo is so proverbially long that they've even included a progress bar in 1.1 beta2. Now that's funny! Especially when you compare the startup time of MSOffice - near instantaneous (read less than one second) on even fairly ancient hardware (read 400Mhz Celerons or greater). Now you could argue that this is in part due to the fact that OOo uses its own toolkit which is has to load at startup. And that's fine. But tell me why I can start MSOffice in Linux using WINE faster than I can start native OOo? It's really no excuse.
The UI's a joke Again, I'm puzzled how anyone could disagree - it's almost as though the choice of toolkit and look-and-feel styles of OOo were a deliberate attempt to stop people from using it. Practically every single aspect of the interface is a poor copy of MSOffice, and by being so it invites the inevitable and unflattering comparisons. (But I live in hope - Ximian seems to be putting a lot of effort into the interface for its XD2 release, and hopefully these changes will work their way back into the standard OOo releases...)
Note that I haven't even mentioned what I consider to be the major reasons why OOo is not even on the same playing field as MSOffice: lack of decent graphing support in the spreadsheet application and lack of Endnote/Bibtex/decent bibiographic format support in the writer application. Without these it will never surpass MSOffice in an academic environment.
(And a disclaimer to the above: I'm generally an opensource zealot myself - I work primarily in Linux and use opensource applications such as MozillaFirebird, PINE, Apache and the GIMP even when I'm in Windows. I don't personally use MSOffice or OOo except when colleagues send me files which are invariably in MSWord format (personally I use LyX for all my wordprocessing needs) or when I need to use a spreadsheet/graphing application. But it's hard to find a good word to say about OOo except that it is opensource. And like it or not, MSOffice is one of the few things that Microsoft actually did well.)
Students today need cursive to succeed in society about as much as I need Morse code to listen to NPR during drive time...
I don't think so. Cursive is much, much faster to write than printing - sure, use printing when you need to write for other people if your handwriting is really that bad, but cursive is what you use when you need to write for yourself - taking notes, for example.
Don't know about you, but I make pages and pages of handwriten, cursive notes in the course of my work. I very, very rarely write things that I expect others to read.
I'm sure Google indexes many warez sites a day, and on those sites must be copywritten files, SOMEHWERE.
It's worse than that. Go to mp3.lycos.com. This is a blatant music search engine, giving people direct links to unauthorised mp3 files of copyrighted material on the web. Hell, they've even got links to the top ten artist searches, just in case you couldn't even be bothered to type in the name, and each song link has a "reliability rating"...
But, gee, would the RIAA sue lycos?? Oh no! They'll just pick on some poor kid who can't pay to defend himself in order to frighten other kids away from file sharing.
Just because you don't need one doesn't mean that everyone doesn't need one.
Personally I use mine as a diary, a phonebook, and a data repository for hundreds of useful notes that I can *search* (as well as a universal remote control and for playing chess/cards:) The fact I can search for and find any note that I may have taken (a login for a journal, or a IP address for a computer, or a scientific protocol, or a recipe for a buffer solution, or a listing of all the journal articles I have in my bibtex database, or the brand of film I used to take pictures with two years ago) is incredibly useful to me. The fact that it fits in my pocket and I can take a note at any time makes it all the more powerful. (And my PDA is only a Palm IIIx that's four years old and bought second-hand; it's nothing fancy)
Because if it loads the page automatically and it is the content of a page which crash the browser..
Good point! (AFAIK it doesn't ask, although as I mentioned I don't use that feature) You could always suggest it to the extension's author...
I wonder why it hasn't been put directly into the browser instead of an extension.
Well, that's the whole point of Mozilla, really - it's completely extensible so if you want a feature you can add it, and if you don't then you don't have to. (The extension's only a ~50kb download and installs automagically, so it doesn't take much effort to add it in...) But I think that's the way Mozilla (at least, MozillaFirebird) is going: make a barebones browser with most, if not all, complex functionality provided by extensions.
(... and I never thought I'd use the words Mozilla and barebones together in a sentence...:)
And about the design I'd like that Mozilla would copy something from Opera: if it has crashed Opera would ask you if you wanted to reopen the web pages previously opened, Mozilla crashes not too often these day, but it still happen, why Mozilla cannot do something similar?
It can. Use the tabbed browsing extensions (sorry, can't be bothered finding the link - just do a google search) - there's an option there to save every tab open and re-open on a crash.
However, since mozilla rarely crashes on me and since I also tend to have about forty tabs open at once (which would take about ten minutes to load simultaneously) I don't personally use the feature...:)
I can run that on a P-200 with decent speed, but throw X on there with Ice WM (which is "supposedly" lightweight) and it crawls.
I regularly run IceWM on XFree86 4.3.0 on a P120 and it's blazingly fast. I don't know what your problem is, but I can tell you it isn't anything to do with IceWM...
In fact, I have found IceWM to be faster than FVWM on this system (although I haven't tried any of these "minimal" window managers so can't comment on them) Maybe your graphics card is so esoteric that there isn't an accelerated driver for it?? That's about the only reason I can think of to explain your poor performance...
Why have lots and lots of PDA:s moved away from the graffit or similar type-in methods and moved onto the keyboard the size of two stamps overlapping?
Have a look at the results of Fitaly's Dom Perignon contest - the Treo thumbboard was the fastest (84 WPM, with an average of 58 WPM) whereas the fastest Palm Graffiti entry was 38 WPM (with an average of 29 WPM).
I dont want to park the stylus when I want to write something, and then have to pick it out again to access menues or other programs.
Actually I find the stylus a waste of time - 99.5% of anything I want to do on a Palm I can achieve with a fingernail just as accurately. In fact, using a fingernail makes my graffiti moreaccurate. The real pain about a thumbboard, I'd imagine, would be having to use two hands and a flat surface (or two thumbs) to type fast.
It's not just another remote - it's a universal remote. And universal remotes seem to be fairly popular things - it's much easier to have one remote that will control everything, rather than three or four different remotes. For example, if you have your video outputting audio through your amplifier (as I do) you need to use three separate remotes at once to watch TV/videos. Much easier just to use one:)
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As for a nice printer doing better than 200 dpi, that goes back to what I was saying before. Make the silk-screen dots smaller and you lose shades of colour. So you gain resolution, but lose the effective number of colours.
You're confusing the resolution of the printing process (which is very, very high) with the actual resolution of the silk-screen.
If you're still confused, try thinking of a newspaper photo - obviously the resolution of the printer is very high: you won't be able to see any square pixels. But the photo is made up of dots that are quite visible - the size/density of those dots is the "screen" resolution, if you like.
My big question is - are there really people in poorer countries who are using less than a 14.4??
Just curious, as I'm not a professional DTP and never will be, but I have dabled in strictly amateur printing of occasions...
I was under the impression that for most printing it's pointless having an image resolution of greater than about 200 dpi, because of the resolution of the screens used to print the photos ... and, for that matter, that if the screen resolution was higher, the effective number of shades of each colour was progressively reduced (thus meaning that a higher screen resolution was undesirable).
I have successfully sent jobs to professional printers with artwork at 200 dpi covering most of the page, to be printed on A2 paper (in either full colour or as a duotone) and the end result showed no noticable pixelation. And the total file size of this was less than 20Mb, IIRC.
So why should the "little spine pictures" be so large?
But do Gnome and KDE merely provide a frontend to xset, or have they created their own specific managers? I was always of the impression that they'd done the latter, but I could be wrong - in which case ignore my comment. I never meant that everyone should use xset via the command line, merely that Gnome and/or KDE could simply have provided a frontend to xset instead of "re-inventing the wheel" and making a utility that ultimately doesn't work under the new kernel (from what people are saying ...)
That said, it's not the easiest thing to do, but it's also not the hardest. Building the kernel is very easy: download the latest source, extract it into /usr/src/ and ...
make menuconfig
(Going through all the different options takes a while. Don't forget that almost all of them are extensively documented, and generally tell you when you're likely to need them. You might want to select "Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers" in the "Code maturity level options" section (the first one!), if you want the latest stuff)
(also, don't forget simple things like enabling PPP - may sound obvious, but it's easy to forget the first time and then you'll wonder why you can't connect to the internet! Save your config to another location at the end, that way you'll be able to easily build new kernels without going through the whole shebang again ...)
make
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel25bz
(or whatever else you want to call your new kernel)
make modules && make modules install
Now edit /etc/lilo.conf to add your new kernel and run /sbin/lilo to incorporate these changes, then reboot. This is the hard part!! But if things don't work, you've still got your old kernel there to go back to.
It's also worth noting a few extra things you'll need, such as the latest Module Init tools, and you may also need to edit your /etc/fstab if you're using devfs and include a line such as
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
And you'll need to find a patch if you're using Nvidia's drivers.
Yeah, slashdot really should have tags so people can spot the joke ... :)
Agreed. It always fascinates me why Gnome/KDE feel the need to re-invent the wheel (heh, literally :) for things like mouse settings, keyboard settings, etc, when X already handles these perfectly well.
I've been playing around with 2.5.73 recently using WindowMaker, and I haven't noticed any problems with X mouse performance/accel ...
In fact, I'm in the process of changing over to the 2.5 series - in my experience (albeit of about a week) it seems stable and highly usable. (The delay is that I'm switiching distro's as well, from bloated Mandrake to minimalist Crux - and I need to download and compile a lot of software!)
You didn't read the article, did you. Because if you had, you would have found out that this is not by anyone and it is not just "15 words in the english language [spelled] correctly".
This is the only decent article I have read about the whole SCO debate. It is well written, it is concise, it is well argued. But most importantly, it comes from a legal perspective, not a geek's perspective - it is written by a Law Professor (I quote from the bottom of the article: "Anupam Chander is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. A graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard College, he specializes in cyberlaw and international law.")
They are rehashing the same statements, we can all tell that SCO has almost no case to stand on, which is why the story is so compelling.
No, this article does not rehash the same statements, in fact it makes a number of points that I have not heard before in any forum. Perhaps you think it's obvious that SCO has no case, but I'm not sure that everyone does - just look at previous slashdot SCO comments. (I also can't help wondering if your assurity comes from any legal knowledge, or whether it's just based on naivety ...)
Jeesh, it's comments like yours that make slashdot a bad read, and the fact that you got modded up I find even more appalling. Yes, there been many, many SCO articles and I'm as sick of them as the next geek. But that's more the pity, because this is one article that should be read by everyone who has an interest in this issue.
That said, you can't really compare prices to a can of coke - a better comparison would be to a 1.25L bottle (which is about the same price in Australia as a can, and gives you 5 drinks of 250ml) ... Instant is still cheaper, but not by that much, and it's probably on par with decent ground coffee.
So point taken about the price, but it still seems really weird to drink something you don't like the taste of, simply because it's got a chemical in it that makes your body shake and slows your brain down!
(Incidentally, I'd never go near Starbucks - there's much, much better coffee available here than that rubbish!)
Not as far as I'm concerned - I can't drink caffeine (sensitised myself to it something shocking about 5 years ago, and drinking it now just makes me feel sick). But I love coffee. Good coffee, that is - I wouldn't touch instant with 10 foot pole ... A good cup of coffee from my stove-top percolator is pure heaven.
If you really hate the taste of coffee, but just drink it because you like the hit of caffeine ... !! What a waste of money!! Why not just buy Jolt?? It's a lot cheaper.
(You might be interested to know that even without genetic engineering, chemically decaf coffee beans taste *identical* to normal ones. The only difference is ... you guessed it ... no caffeine hit)
However, having recently bought a Geforce4 card and installed WinXP, I note that Windows doesn't come with Nvidia drivers for this card either. So you can't blame linux too much :)
(your point about having to edit XF86Config-4 is valid, though ... I would have thought Nvidia would have included a fix for that in their script (all it should take is changing "nv" to "nvidia" in the driver section))
nice -n 19 [insert big CPU intensive task here]?
Windows97 ???? :)
*grin* - don't know what I was thinking of ...
Otherwise it sounds a great deal - 2Mbs connection for $33pm (with limits) or 64kbps for $22pm with unlimited down/uploads ...
Um. Ok. Either you always did it an odd way in Excel or I've missed an undocumented feature in OOo.
I just downloaded 1.1 Beta2 to check - it's still the same. The only support for data series is by highlighting separate columns of text with the shift key. There's no scope for custom labels or any of the power that Excell's chart feature gives you.
And worst of all, there is no support for custom (eg Standard Error) error bar values. It's useless for drawing anything remotely scientific. Or possibly I've missed another undocumented feature? - if you really do use it in a science field then PLEASE tell me how to add useful error bars. (Or don't you use error bars in your field of science ;)
Honestly, unless you're using your office suite for engineering applications (like using a toothbrush to drive a nail), OOo does everything your average joe could want.
Depends how you define your "average joe". For Mums, Dads and Secretaries it'll be fine. But for academics I cannot see that it is anywhere near adequate. The big failing (even if it does support custom error bars) is in not supporting any useful bibliographic database format (and/or being incompatible with Endnote6 - not that that's OOo's fault, mind you, but it doesn't help solve the problem)
Please tell me this has changed, but last time I looked (1.1 Beta 1) there was still no support for more than one data series in charts (or if there was it was not obvious). I need to plot graphs with many different data series, a task which is dead simple in Excell.
If OOo has this functionality then I congratulate it. If not, you can forget about all those extra spreadsheet functions and chart types. Ploting multiple data series is basic functionality that should not have been neglected.
Well, I'm not the original poster, but I imagine he doesn't mean "It's different from MSOffice". What he means is that it's klunky, it's bloated, it's slow and the UI's crap. You're obviously an OOo zealot, but let's consider these points one by one:
Klunky I don't want to have one monolithic application that is a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation manager, a graphic design program and a coffee maker. A small, mostly self-contained application for each task is a far better way to manage things. Just look at how much better MozillaFirebird is as a browser compared to it's monolithic parent.
Bloated I can't imagine anyone could argue that OOo isn't bloated. Consider that MSOffice97 is a smaller suite that does far more, far better and far faster. There's no comparison - Office is streets ahead and has been for about five years now. (I haven't tried anything greater than Office97 - it still does more than I'll ever need it to and see no point in upgrading. And it's a valid comparison to OOo as it has far more functionality than OOo does)
Slow Goes with the bloated. The startup of OOo is so proverbially long that they've even included a progress bar in 1.1 beta2. Now that's funny! Especially when you compare the startup time of MSOffice - near instantaneous (read less than one second) on even fairly ancient hardware (read 400Mhz Celerons or greater). Now you could argue that this is in part due to the fact that OOo uses its own toolkit which is has to load at startup. And that's fine. But tell me why I can start MSOffice in Linux using WINE faster than I can start native OOo? It's really no excuse.
The UI's a joke Again, I'm puzzled how anyone could disagree - it's almost as though the choice of toolkit and look-and-feel styles of OOo were a deliberate attempt to stop people from using it. Practically every single aspect of the interface is a poor copy of MSOffice, and by being so it invites the inevitable and unflattering comparisons. (But I live in hope - Ximian seems to be putting a lot of effort into the interface for its XD2 release, and hopefully these changes will work their way back into the standard OOo releases ...)
Note that I haven't even mentioned what I consider to be the major reasons why OOo is not even on the same playing field as MSOffice: lack of decent graphing support in the spreadsheet application and lack of Endnote/Bibtex/decent bibiographic format support in the writer application. Without these it will never surpass MSOffice in an academic environment.
(And a disclaimer to the above: I'm generally an opensource zealot myself - I work primarily in Linux and use opensource applications such as MozillaFirebird, PINE, Apache and the GIMP even when I'm in Windows. I don't personally use MSOffice or OOo except when colleagues send me files which are invariably in MSWord format (personally I use LyX for all my wordprocessing needs) or when I need to use a spreadsheet/graphing application. But it's hard to find a good word to say about OOo except that it is opensource. And like it or not, MSOffice is one of the few things that Microsoft actually did well.)
I don't think so. Cursive is much, much faster to write than printing - sure, use printing when you need to write for other people if your handwriting is really that bad, but cursive is what you use when you need to write for yourself - taking notes, for example.
Don't know about you, but I make pages and pages of handwriten, cursive notes in the course of my work. I very, very rarely write things that I expect others to read.
It's worse than that. Go to mp3.lycos.com. This is a blatant music search engine, giving people direct links to unauthorised mp3 files of copyrighted material on the web. Hell, they've even got links to the top ten artist searches, just in case you couldn't even be bothered to type in the name, and each song link has a "reliability rating" ...
But, gee, would the RIAA sue lycos?? Oh no! They'll just pick on some poor kid who can't pay to defend himself in order to frighten other kids away from file sharing.
Really, really pathetic.
Just because you don't need one doesn't mean that everyone doesn't need one.
Personally I use mine as a diary, a phonebook, and a data repository for hundreds of useful notes that I can *search* (as well as a universal remote control and for playing chess/cards :) The fact I can search for and find any note that I may have taken (a login for a journal, or a IP address for a computer, or a scientific protocol, or a recipe for a buffer solution, or a listing of all the journal articles I have in my bibtex database, or the brand of film I used to take pictures with two years ago) is incredibly useful to me. The fact that it fits in my pocket and I can take a note at any time makes it all the more powerful. (And my PDA is only a Palm IIIx that's four years old and bought second-hand; it's nothing fancy)
Good point! (AFAIK it doesn't ask, although as I mentioned I don't use that feature) You could always suggest it to the extension's author ...
I wonder why it hasn't been put directly into the browser instead of an extension.
Well, that's the whole point of Mozilla, really - it's completely extensible so if you want a feature you can add it, and if you don't then you don't have to. (The extension's only a ~50kb download and installs automagically, so it doesn't take much effort to add it in ...) But I think that's the way Mozilla (at least, MozillaFirebird) is going: make a barebones browser with most, if not all, complex functionality provided by extensions.
(... and I never thought I'd use the words Mozilla and barebones together in a sentence ... :)
It can. Use the tabbed browsing extensions (sorry, can't be bothered finding the link - just do a google search) - there's an option there to save every tab open and re-open on a crash.
However, since mozilla rarely crashes on me and since I also tend to have about forty tabs open at once (which would take about ten minutes to load simultaneously) I don't personally use the feature ... :)
I regularly run IceWM on XFree86 4.3.0 on a P120 and it's blazingly fast. I don't know what your problem is, but I can tell you it isn't anything to do with IceWM ...
In fact, I have found IceWM to be faster than FVWM on this system (although I haven't tried any of these "minimal" window managers so can't comment on them) Maybe your graphics card is so esoteric that there isn't an accelerated driver for it?? That's about the only reason I can think of to explain your poor performance ...
Have a look at the results of Fitaly's Dom Perignon contest - the Treo thumbboard was the fastest (84 WPM, with an average of 58 WPM) whereas the fastest Palm Graffiti entry was 38 WPM (with an average of 29 WPM).
I dont want to park the stylus when I want to write something, and then have to pick it out again to access menues or other programs.
Actually I find the stylus a waste of time - 99.5% of anything I want to do on a Palm I can achieve with a fingernail just as accurately. In fact, using a fingernail makes my graffiti moreaccurate. The real pain about a thumbboard, I'd imagine, would be having to use two hands and a flat surface (or two thumbs) to type fast.
great so why do I need another remote???
It's not just another remote - it's a universal remote. And universal remotes seem to be fairly popular things - it's much easier to have one remote that will control everything, rather than three or four different remotes. For example, if you have your video outputting audio through your amplifier (as I do) you need to use three separate remotes at once to watch TV/videos. Much easier just to use one :)