I made the same error years ago when I upgraded to my current system (a Celeron 400 MHz, overclocked to 500 MHz) - I bought a "better" motherboard (a BX) to allow an eventual upgrade to a Pentium III 800 or something...
Now that I'm considering getting a new system, I realise that (a) if I ever want to upgrade it, it will require a new MB, new graphics card and probably new RAM, and (b) since I barely need to upgrade my current system, I probably won't *ever* upgrade until my harddisk dies and my motherboard doesn't support the smallest size currently available (which is the case at the moment!)
But anyway... All I wanted to point out is that you may not have to upgrade your RAM - I know ECS for one makes boards (eg the K7S5A) that take both SDRAM and DDR, and they support at least an Athlon XP 2200. Just a thought...
This is so long after that noone will ever read this, but...
Not quite:)
Years and years ago I did some code that generated rtf (documents from database that should be formatted in Pagemaker). I read the standards and looked at what Word 4 generated -- my code generated rtf that was NOT compatible with Word 5...:-(
I must say that as a "standard", rtf is @#!!$% awful... while I did manage to write rtf in vim, and also wrote a perl script that sort-of worked in order to change e-text books from Project Gutenberg into formatted rtf, trudging through MS's documentation I found pretty awful. And depressing - you couldn't help thinking how much better the whole standard could have been organised.
And there seemed to be a certain sequence for an rtf document to be read correctly in Word - I couldn't find any reason for this reading the documentation, but Word wanted you to include certain tags that shouldn't really have been required. In the end I gave up trying to understand it and just added in the crap from a blank MS-Word rtf document onto the beginning of the file. At least that worked:)
Agreed. But I was simply pointing out that there was an open file format common to MSOffice for years, not commenting on whether anyone uses it or not:)
In any case... it occurs to me that if every competitive suite hadn't been falling over themselves backwards to provide.doc support, but had focussed on provided extremely good.rtf support, then attachments might be arriving as.rtfs today, not.docs? Well, probably not:) But it's a thought...
There are so many superior free alternative, you have to wonder why people use Office
Please, please, don't make a unsubstantiated sweeping statement like that - list them!! I personally use LyX for wordprocessing, but I can't imagine that that would appeal to the masses.
What else is there? OpenOffice would be OK, but it still lacks the depth of features of MSOffice (eg - a half-decent chart utility for spreadsheets) and yet is twice the size. Gnumeric I've still found lacking, AbiWord doesn't do footnotes (AFAIK) and KOffice is barely any better.
Much as I hate Microsoft in general, I'm believe that MSOffice is one of the few products they've really done well at. Mind you, they've had more than 12 years (which is when my first use of Office was) to develop it, so you could argue that it should be a good product by now!
FWIW, MSOffice - or at least, MSWord - does have an open file format that is almost 100% compatible with native.doc - it's called RTF, is extensively documented on Microsoft's Web Site, is an open standard and has been around for years.
In fact you can (and I have done so) write a RTF document with nothing but a text editor (although it's not the most pleasant of things... but that's not the point:). It supports just about everything.doc does - including footnotes, endnotes, margin spacing, layout, etc.
So the "open file format" issue can't be all that's behind the lack of good open-sourced office suites!
there is no real future for GNOME and I sometimes wonder why they still work on it and put so much effort into that project
I'm guessing it's something along the lines of: they (the GNOME developers) want to?? GNOME is opensource - it's developed by people who want a desktop interface that is not KDE and is not defined by anything else either; they're not getting paid to do it, but rather they're doing it (presumably) because it's what they want. Personally, neither GNOME nor KDE appeal. But everyone works differently, and some people do prefer GNOME. You say po-tay-to, I say po-ta-to, etc, etc.
It's foolish - like it or not, linux is primarily a "geek" OS. As long as it is GPL software based it always will be; it's only when commercial companies start developing software for it that it will ever become usable for the masses. Even the projects designed to bring linux to "Joe Longneck" seem more concerned with creating endless eye-candy than with providing speed, usability and userfriendliness.
Well, you kinda veered into FUD-ville here. Can you qualify any those statements? Or...wait...Bill, is that you? I didn't know you were still trolling slashdot!:)
*Grin* No, I'm not Bill Gates... in fact, I use Linux 100% at home and have done so for the past four years (at work I have no choice but to use Windows, and constantly regret it)
But, to get to the point - is it FUD to say that linux is a "geek OS"? I don't really think it is. Consider that GPL'ed software is - by nature - written by geeks and always will be: it is software that has been written because someone, a computer programmer, has thought: "gee, I wish I had software that did X, Y or Z... why don't I see if I can write that". Thus the features that GPL software possesses will by and large be features that (a) get things done and (b) directly appeal to a computer programmer. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to lead to applications that lack "user-friendliness". Now, most of the slashdot audience probably doesn't care about this, and I certainly don't care about this (hell, when I grew up I was word-processing using Word Star running on DOS, so just about anything is simple by comparison!) But that's beside the point - we're talking about what's relevant to Joe Longneck here. And if you think about it, how many GPL'ed apps are there with a nice, simple user interface? GIMP fails - I hear people complain that it doesn't have a menu bar and they don't know where the menu is (although, I must admit, the 1.3 branch has this option). LyX, probably one of the most powerful wordprocessors ever, falls down majorly in usability. In fact, two of the GPL'ed apps that I would consider most user-friendly : mozilla and OpenOffice, both had commercial backgrounds before being belatedly released as OpenSource, and another highly usable opensource app, xmms, is a blatent clone of the commercial WinAMP.
So, what did I mean when I said that only commercial apps will be user-friendly? Only that commercial apps can afford to have usability studies, employ programmers to work on simple features that they themselves do not require, and in general be driven by competition to make a product that appeals to the most people. Lowest common denominator is not generally a factor that you associate with GPL'ed software. But it is what you associate with MS software or Apple sofware - and it's also what appeals to the masses.
Now, as far as GNOME and KDE go... well, I think if you were honest you'd have to admit both of them have severe failings in terms of speed at the very least. Not to mention that there is still - AFAIK - no way for new applications to register MIME info, this despite there being now a shared MIME database concurrent between GNOME, KDE and some lesser known desktops. Perhaps you have some very geeky friends, I don't know, but whenever I've shown off KDE/GNOME to my friends they've not been impressed - it really seems to me that the linux desktop does not appeal to Joe Longneck... at least, not the Joe Longnecks I know (and these are University graduates - many with PhDs - who spend a lot of their working life using computers, so we're not talking complete morons here!) It saddens me that Linux-on-the-desktop is in such bad shape - don't get me wrong - but I don't think pretending that the problems don't exist is going to make them miraculously dissappear.
Wow, you really went off the reservation of simply disagreeing with me with this one. Where did you read that I advocated "coercing" people into running GNU/Linux? You're entitled to your opinion that people are better off running Windows and I won't argue otherwise; I'm too busy showing them the alternatives and letting them make the ultimate decision
Hmmm... perhaps not "coercing", but it did sound as though you were advocating linux whereever possible and encouraging everyone you knew to use it (you say "Teach them, Help them, Educate them and Support them" - isn't this linux advocacy?). This may possibly be a mis-reading on my part; sorry if that's the case:(
Don't get me wrong - I love linux and for me, for what I do, it's perfect. I love the philosophy of opensource, and I love the fact I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and add in features/bug fixes to code that I could never write in its entirity. But I'm also seeing more and more that what you and I like about linux, most users couldn't care less. They're happy with what they've got and if they moved to linux they'd for the most part be sacrificing features for the benefits of a philosophy that they couldn't care less about.
I have to disagree. I used to advocate linux to everyone, until I discovered that most people simply aren't interested in the concept of GPL'ed software ("well, I didn't pay for my pirate copies of windows/office/photoshop, so what's the difference??") and definitely aren't interested in learning a new gui. Doesn't matter if it's more useful, has more features and can help you get things done faster - most of my friends aren't even interested in trying Mozilla instead of IE on windows... and why? It's because the interface is different and they have to learn something new.
The second point that always crops up is that people want to have every single feature that was ever available under windows when running linux - that means the ability to run all their common apps, like office and photoshop. OpenOffice and GIMP don't impress them, because they just see an interface they're not familiar with and there'll always be one feature ("How do I use Endnote with OpenOffice?"... "What, I can't? Well, what good is that?"; or "How do I make colour seperations with GIMP"... "What, GIMP doesn't even handle CMYK colour? What kind of a useless program is that?") that they can't do without.
These days I don't advocate linux. If anyone asks me about it, I tell them that it's very different to Windows, and it has some advantages and some disadvantages. But to claim that linux is the Godsend for all users is not just delusional, it's really counterproductive - it causes new users to be rapidly disillusioned and they'll probably never try linux again.
I've read many posts on slashdot from users who've said "I tried linux in '98 and it didn't have this and it didn't do that, and I've used windows ever since". Where do you think this kind of attitude comes from if not from the linux-zealot who practically forces all their friends, mum and dad, grandma... not to mention the family dog... to use linux, and proudly boasts how their kid sister aged 2 and three-quarters prefers linux to windows? It creates this concept that linux can do everything from make you coffee in the morning to wash the dishes at night.
It's foolish - like it or not, linux is primarily a "geek" OS. As long as it is GPL software based it always will be; it's only when commercial companies start developing software for it that it will ever become usable for the masses. Even the projects designed to bring linux to "Joe Longneck" seem more concerned with creating endless eye-candy than with providing speed, usability and userfriendliness.
And after all the coercing the user into running linux - is it worth it? Have they gained anything in terms of usability/functionality/price? Generally, the answer is no, and I hate to say it but I really think that most users are better off with Windows at the moment, and probably will be for some time yet.
Personally, I use rox - although it may not have all the features of konqueror, I find it infinitely faster... and the fact I can use it on my ancient P120 laptop and it's even fast on that impresses me enormously. Konqueror only seems useful to me when using single window navigation, and even then I find it clumsy -perhaps it's because the first gui file-manager I experienced was the mac finder, but I expect folders to open instantly. Yet even on my Celeron 500 konqueror takes two seconds to open my home directory, even when the program is already cached in memory. (yeah, I know the computer's a dinosaur compared to new PCs these days, but it runs everything I use (IceWM, rox, lyx, sixpack, phoenix, gimp, nedit) more than adequately - and file-manager software shouldn't require the resources of a P4 2Gig to run adequately) To me, konqueror's performance is substandard and I can't use it as a filemanager - the CLI is far faster. (In fact, one of the things I like about rox is that it integrates with the CLI perfectly - it's so easy to switch between terminal and file-manager window)
But anyway - I can see the point that middle-clicking on the scroll bar to move to that exact point could be useful... although I find I generally need to see the text I'm scrolling through to find the spot I'm looking for and hence just drag the scoll bar:)
KDE likes to see itself as a close thing to windows, as far as I can gather. Or at least, many slashdotters see KDE as the optimal migration aid for windows users. On the other hand, I don't know of many "power-users" of linux that use KDE - this may merely represent short-sightedness on my behalf/mixing with a unique subset of users, but in my experience people who actually want to get work done don't stay with KDE - they migrate to more memory efficient, faster WMs and either use a better file manager than konqueror or simply use the CLI.
In which case, we can conclude that a majority of KDE users are newbies and/or people who don't like to "get their hands dirty" with configuring the basic underlying OS. I'm not saying this isn't a bad thing, mind you. BUT: what you're not going to find in this audience are people who know that the middle mouse button moves the slider to the point under the mouse - Windows, as you point out, has no such feature.
OK, you say - this is an advantage of KDE. But this whole sub-thread came about because of someone pointing out that you couldn't move the time slider in noatun with the left mouse button. And this behaviour is exactly what windows users are used to - try xmms or winamp and you'll see what I mean.
Now would you please also tell me what is archaic about jumping to a certain point in a slider by using mouse button 3? Are GNOME and KDE archaic? Is it better to have no way of jumping to a certain point like Windows?
My point was that most users are not familiar with this usage - again, it goes back to the fact that Windows does not have this and therefore forcing a newbie to use this feature to gain functionality is simply going to alienate them. (Again, I'm not saying that it should alienate them, just that it generally does - they don't like things to be different) Perhaps "archaic" was a bad word, but as I recall it was one of the few features of X that I never liked when I started using linux (probably because it was coupled with having to drag the slider with the middle mouse button, which always seemed counterintuitive).
But in anycase, I hope you see my point - if a feature doesn't make sense to newbies (who've probably never had to click a middle mouse button before in their lives) it isn't a smart thing to put into KDE, especially when it's in a music playing program and when the defacto standard applications of linux and windows use a different method of scrolling (in fact, middle mouse clicking does not work with xmms on the time slider, despite the fact it's built with gtk!).
(I might also mention that I've never seen an application in the last four or five years that's required you to use the middle mouse button to move a slider, so noatun seems to be rather unique. Yes, I know that GTK (and motif) also use the middle mouse button to set the slider position, but you can just as easily drag the slider a la windows (which makes more sense anyway since you can *see* where you're scrolling); while Xforms doesn't use the middle mouse button in the same way (you scroll by smaller increments instead) and the toolkit that OpenOffice uses doesn't recognise middle-mouse button clicks in the scroll bar at all. So it's not even a shared feature between linux toolkits.)
Yes. It is totally obious. Middle clicking a slider has meant jump here for over ten years on X11. All sliders in KDE obey it.[Unless you choose a different look'n'feel style] BTW, even my GTK apps obey this.
*lol* You've got to be kidding me, right?? KDE, which considers itself the bastion of user-friendliness, which re-designed UNIX cut-and-paste, which tried in every aspect to clone windows (even to the point of making its filemanager a web-browser as well)... uses one of the most archaic, unintuitive aspects of X?? And this is supposed to be "totally obvious"??
Now, come on - do you really expect new linux users to grasp this idea? Or do you think KDE is the power-users' interface (*chukle*)
Yes, obviously, to the first one (which I mentioned in my original post), possibly the fourth, but I think the second and especially the third would be considered anal!
Look, I know no more about the GPL than what I can glean through reading it, but it seemed to me as though the spirit of the license was that - while you could distribute binaries and charge what you wanted for them - you had to give access to the source code to anyone possessing those binaries, and not charge a fee for doing it. The "cost of physically performing source distribution" seems to be there so that the author doesn't find him or herself out-of-pocket because they've been altruistic enough to release their software under the GPL. This doesn't mean being able to charge the same amount again for a copy of the source as you did for the binaries, which is what the poster I replied to suggested.
(interesting, though, that you can initially restrict access to the source code to those individuals who have bought your binaries - although you cannot prevent these individuals from then distributing both binaries and source freely... which was the question that started this whole offtopic thread:)
Charge for the source (see above), but no more than you charged for the binary. That means that if you charge $50 for the binary, you may charge up to $50 more for the source, for a grand total of $100. Charging more for the source would not be considered giving free access to the source (free as in speech, again)
As far as I can gather, from www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, this is incorrect. The GPL states that - as far as distributing source code goes - you may do one of the following (quoted from above):
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
In other words, you must either accompany binaries with source code at no extra charge, or offer to provide source code at only the cost it takes to send it to someone (i.e. the price of a blank CD, the price of postage). So you cannot charge an extra $50 or whatever for access to the source code - you can charge all you like for the binaries and only give out the code with those binaries, but you cannot charge any extra for the code (excepting the costs of physically distibuting it, as mentioned above)
All games of this type derive from Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move (they were the same game, just that in the US it was called by the second name).
Does it really matter, though? I don't see posts about Quake3 refering to the original 3D FPS that kicked off that whole genre! (what was that, incidentally? Wolf3D? Doom? I can't remember!! But the point is that I don't see people complaining about how Quake3 is a rip off of Doom.)
But Snood's been the only game to go one better than the original Puzzle Bobble (which got called bust-a-move in the states), as opposed to just cloning the game practically ball for ball. Very challenging, competitive scoring... beats Frozen Bubble hands down I fear. If only snood was ported to linux...
btw, the really interesting thing about frozen bubble is that it's written in perl!
Yes, but the scary thing is that Palm's graffiti was the fastest of the lot, as far as I was concerned, and the most accurate (although I'm seriously considering tealscript, it does seem to generate more errors and is slower in character recognition).
I'd hate it if Palm switched to jot - jot was the worst of the lot in my experience, and about 1.5 times as slow to write as graffiti (the strokes are more complex, so they take longer to draw).
(Mind you, since I'm still using a three-year-old IIIx and doubt that I'll ever have the money to buy a Tungsten, it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to me:)
You need CDs 2 and 3 from Mandrake 9.0 if you want to install any development packages... and if you have your "own choice apps already" then you're probably going to want to compile them, hence you need the development libs.
I downloaded all three CDs at work just before taking a week of leave, didn't have time to checksum them and of course the CD 2 download was b*ggered. It just about made the distro unusable for me:(
but the upshot is that if I want to write any GUI app for Linux, I can't rely on the environment, so it might look fine under window manager A, and look like crap under window manager B
Um, Window managers manage windows - they put pretty little borders around them, say where they should go, aid resizing and closing, and maybe provide lists of running tasks/frequently used apps and a nice desktop background.
What they don't do is have anything to do with the toolkits you'd be using to write the GUI app - that's what your toolkit libraries are there for!! If I take an app written using GTK, it will look exactly the same whether I run it in Blackbox, Windowmaker, IceWM, TWM, or even if I don't have a windowmanager running at all! (KDE and GNOME are "desktop environments" and are a little bit different as they provide development tools and libraries that add on all kinds of unneccessary crap... but these aren't window managers)
The only criteria for your app to display as you wanted it to is for everyone to have the toolkit libraries, and if they don't have the neccessary libraries then your app ain't gonna display at all:)
So I'm not sure what you meant. BTW - I did read the article you referenced - and I'm not impressed. Some of it is out-of-date (Hell, X gets criticised for intitially being designed to run xterm, xload and xclock!!), much of it is polemic (I loved the line about being "archaic enough to use vi") and although I've never used X to remotely administer a box, there's many slashdotters who routinely state that this is X's greatest feature, not greatest detraction as this article claims. *shrug* I'm not saying the guy doesn't have some valid points, but X has come a long way since the days of motif and xclock, and XFree 4.0 fixed up a lot of the dross and sped things up enormously. If I wrote an article on windows stability and security, based solely upon Windows 95, would you take me seriously??
The overall effect: Linux looks like a half-assed amateur effort.
Well, that's because it is one!! It's a true cast-of-thousands production. But does it matter what something looks like if it gets the job done??
while this argument may hold water for KDE and gnome, there is a fundamental point being missed here. KDE and gnome are NOT linux. they are programs, window managers, than CAN be run on linux, but need NOT be. this is the primary flaw in the article, which invalidates his whole argument. judging linux solely by them is like judging the preverbial book by the cover; only in this case, you can use whatever cover you want.
Um. I think you are missing the point. Yes, of course KDE/GNOME are not linux. But the article was about the perception of linux by a first time user, not by Mr/Ms SuperGeek.
Personally I couldn't give a damn about whether linux achieves world domination or not. However, if you do wish to convert more people to using linux then we're talking about exactly those people who are going to judge books (or in this case OSes) by their covers. We're talking about people who will only use linux because it is better than Windows, and they're not going to spend months finding obscure, hidden software - it's going to be based on a first experiences thing. And having seen that KDE/GNOME is crud, they're going to avoid linux like the plague for the next couple of years, based on that one experience. I've seen it happen.
As I've said before, I couldn't care less - linux does what I want it to, and that's all I care about. But since a substantial population of slashdot seems to think that linux should achieve world domination, or at the very least give Windows a run for its money, then this article should be very, very relevant.
And shoving your head in the sand and refusing to listen to criticism, even when it is valid and constructive, is plain out stupid. (But hell, this is slashdot, isn't it - when did constructive criticism of linux ever get noticed?:)
I think you're so evangelical that you can't see beyond the propaganda. Try showing KDE to a standard windows user (i.e. not a geek who likes to tweak interfaces, but just an ordinary person who users computers to get things done) - you'll be amazed at their comments: "This is ugly. This is just like Windows. But why is it so slow? Why does every application start with a "g" or a "k"??"
Look, the guy really does have a point - KDE (and to a lesser extent GNOME) has always tried to copy windows and it's made it a far worse product as a result. It looks contrived, it's slow, and there's no good reason why anyone would want to use it instead of Windows, unless they cared about (a) opensource philosophy or (b) having to pay money for windows. Both KDE and GNOME are just as ugly and souless as Windows, and no amount of pro-Linux propaganda is going to miraculously fix this!
Compare this to Mac OS X - people use Macs even though they cost more and use monopolistic, proprietary hardware because the interface appeals to them. It means something to them, and that's even worth more than the extra costs involved in buying a Mac. Macintosh has always wanted to be seen as being different, as revolutionary, not recycling. If linux really wanted to succeed then it (read Linux-on-the-Desktop, read GNOME/KDE) would be best to develop its own style and glory in its uniqueness, not harp on about it's similarity to Windows! If people want to switch from Windows, they're not going to do it because it costs less. They're going to do it because Linux can offer more.
As a disclaimer, I should add that I use linux exclusively and yes, I'm happy in linux because I stick well clear of either KDE or GNOME and use some of the wonderful alternative interfaces that have been developed. There is good stuff out there, you're absolutely right. But this is so well hidden that a newbie will never find it - and this is Dvorak's point. The first thing a new linux user will see is the KDE desktop, and it's only if they're brave enough to experiment (fairly unlikely) that they will discover any of the software that makes linux a joy to use.
So please, don't start believing your own propaganda. If the first look at linux doesn't appeal to someone, perhaps you should pause and think - "hey, maybe there might be a reason for that", not automatically say "hmph! they don't like linux, they must be some stupid luser, what would they know!"
To me, the issue is whether one should donate money to a company for an opensource product that they give away for free. Surely the whole point of GPL'ed open-source software is that it is written for fun/interest/altuism by anyone, and anyone can contribute back to this by contributing code. It's not written for money, it's written for the greater good of the community. So I don't see how anyone can justify paying Mandrake for developing GPL'ed software.
I might just be able to understand why it might be worthwhile to contribute money for the service of packaging all that software in a nice, easy-to-install.iso image. Possibly.
What I can understand paying Mandrake for is support/input. If you need help with linux, then paying for Mandrake for this service makes sense. Or if you're not a developer but want to have some input in what software gets included in the next release, then again it's fair enough to pay money. This is how Mandrake should be making money, and if this doesn't work then why prolong the inevitable?
I also happen to like and use Mandrake. I'm sorry for their cash situation in a way, since I think they have developed a lot of useful software in recent years. But if Mandrake dies, it's likely that more people will start helping and contributing to Debian, start making it user friendly to fill the void left by Mandrake. After all, that's how most opensource software was developed in the first place, wasn't it?? Someone felt that it would be useful to have software that filled a certain niche, and went ahead and wrote it? And if the whole linux community ends up using a user-friendly version of Debian, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that a far better situation than relying upon a distro developed by a company?
Surely it's better to contribute code, resources, bug reports, feedback to developers than to donate money to a company that exists to make a profit?
(And no, after some soul-searching, I don't feel that I'm a leach for saying this - I'll happily use Mandrake while it's available; but if it's not I'll use some other distro. I'm happy to - and do - contribute code back to the opensource community. But for better or worse, that's all I'm going to do. I believe that software should be free for all - and that doesn't mean paying money for opensource software.)
RTF export/import shouldn't be that difficult - RTF is (surprise!!) an open format (from Microsoft... who would believe it?), and all the documentation's available. I had a play around with it once, trying to design a bibtex-type replacement for RTF files; but since I ended up realising that I'd never use it, it got ditched halfway through. But RTF is a fairly straightforward markup language - it's really easy to write a simple RTF file in a text editor; in many cases you should just be able to use a simple perl script to replace LaTeX tags for RTF tags.
In fact, I think there are already LaTeX-to-RTF converters out there.
The solution is to use a different approach to word processing. Linux has had the wonderful LyX word processor for years, and as a front end to LaTeX - and coupled with BibTeX - it is faster, more efficient, allows easy editing of enormous files and is far less buggy than either MS Office or OpenOffice. LyX is my word processor of choice, and I constantly regret that it's not really usable in Windows (the whole cygwin, X server setup is much too unstable to be really useful, IMO)
But all that aside, you can't say "Linux is 2-5 times slower" based on the performance of OOo in Linux vs MS Word in Windows. MS Word is a really good programme, pure and simple; OOo suffers from terminal bloat and delusions of grandeur. Hell, MS Word under WINE starts up about three times faster than native Linux OOo...
KDE and GNOME are bad examples too... if you're looking for speed in a desktop environment, there's much better software out there! (try ROX for starters, together with a fast window manager like IceWM or Sawfish)
I've never used XP and so can't comment on its stability. But considering the extreme up-times I've experienced when running a linux box as a desktop computer (and web/file server at the same time) I'd be very surprised if XP is actually better. (IIRC the box crashed a total of three times in ten months continuous running, and we're talking RedHat 6.1 here, not Debian) In the last year of using Mandrake Linux (8.1, then 9.0) as a sole desktop OS, I cannot remember it crashing. Put simply, the underlying OS is very, very stable, and it's getting better, not worse. Now, granted XP may well be as stable, but I can't see how it can be noticably more so... unless you're confusing OS stability with application stability, which is a completely different issue.
All this garbage about requiring an XFT-enabled build for aa fonts is just plain and utter crap. You can use the vanilla 1.2 release and do it... hell, I've had aa fonts since 1.0:)
If you don't care about using XFT (which is prob faster) but just want aa fonts, you just have to edit the global preferences/unix.js file in your mozilla directory. Make a backup, and then use a text editor... don't be afraid - all the features are commented.
I'm posting this from work, where I'm forced to use windows, but if you need more info than that reply to this and I'll post a patch of the vanilla 1.2 unix.js file.
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Now that I'm considering getting a new system, I realise that (a) if I ever want to upgrade it, it will require a new MB, new graphics card and probably new RAM, and (b) since I barely need to upgrade my current system, I probably won't *ever* upgrade until my harddisk dies and my motherboard doesn't support the smallest size currently available (which is the case at the moment!)
But anyway ... All I wanted to point out is that you may not have to upgrade your RAM - I know ECS for one makes boards (eg the K7S5A) that take both SDRAM and DDR, and they support at least an Athlon XP 2200. Just a thought ...
Not quite :)
Years and years ago I did some code that generated rtf (documents from database that should be formatted in Pagemaker). I read the standards and looked at what Word 4 generated -- my code generated rtf that was NOT compatible with Word 5... :-(
I must say that as a "standard", rtf is @#!!$% awful ... while I did manage to write rtf in vim, and also wrote a perl script that sort-of worked in order to change e-text books from Project Gutenberg into formatted rtf, trudging through MS's documentation I found pretty awful. And depressing - you couldn't help thinking how much better the whole standard could have been organised.
And there seemed to be a certain sequence for an rtf document to be read correctly in Word - I couldn't find any reason for this reading the documentation, but Word wanted you to include certain tags that shouldn't really have been required. In the end I gave up trying to understand it and just added in the crap from a blank MS-Word rtf document onto the beginning of the file. At least that worked :)
In any case ... it occurs to me that if every competitive suite hadn't been falling over themselves backwards to provide .doc support, but had focussed on provided extremely good .rtf support, then attachments might be arriving as .rtfs today, not .docs? Well, probably not :) But it's a thought ...
Please, please, don't make a unsubstantiated sweeping statement like that - list them!! I personally use LyX for wordprocessing, but I can't imagine that that would appeal to the masses.
What else is there? OpenOffice would be OK, but it still lacks the depth of features of MSOffice (eg - a half-decent chart utility for spreadsheets) and yet is twice the size. Gnumeric I've still found lacking, AbiWord doesn't do footnotes (AFAIK) and KOffice is barely any better.
Much as I hate Microsoft in general, I'm believe that MSOffice is one of the few products they've really done well at. Mind you, they've had more than 12 years (which is when my first use of Office was) to develop it, so you could argue that it should be a good product by now!
In fact you can (and I have done so) write a RTF document with nothing but a text editor (although it's not the most pleasant of things ... but that's not the point :). It supports just about everything .doc does - including footnotes, endnotes, margin spacing, layout, etc.
So the "open file format" issue can't be all that's behind the lack of good open-sourced office suites!
I'm guessing it's something along the lines of: they (the GNOME developers) want to?? GNOME is opensource - it's developed by people who want a desktop interface that is not KDE and is not defined by anything else either; they're not getting paid to do it, but rather they're doing it (presumably) because it's what they want. Personally, neither GNOME nor KDE appeal. But everyone works differently, and some people do prefer GNOME. You say po-tay-to, I say po-ta-to, etc, etc.
It's called choice :)
Well, you kinda veered into FUD-ville here. Can you qualify any those statements? Or...wait...Bill, is that you? I didn't know you were still trolling slashdot! :)
*Grin* No, I'm not Bill Gates ... in fact, I use Linux 100% at home and have done so for the past four years (at work I have no choice but to use Windows, and constantly regret it)
But, to get to the point - is it FUD to say that linux is a "geek OS"? I don't really think it is. Consider that GPL'ed software is - by nature - written by geeks and always will be: it is software that has been written because someone, a computer programmer, has thought: "gee, I wish I had software that did X, Y or Z ... why don't I see if I can write that". Thus the features that GPL software possesses will by and large be features that (a) get things done and (b) directly appeal to a computer programmer. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to lead to applications that lack "user-friendliness". Now, most of the slashdot audience probably doesn't care about this, and I certainly don't care about this (hell, when I grew up I was word-processing using Word Star running on DOS, so just about anything is simple by comparison!) But that's beside the point - we're talking about what's relevant to Joe Longneck here. And if you think about it, how many GPL'ed apps are there with a nice, simple user interface? GIMP fails - I hear people complain that it doesn't have a menu bar and they don't know where the menu is (although, I must admit, the 1.3 branch has this option). LyX, probably one of the most powerful wordprocessors ever, falls down majorly in usability. In fact, two of the GPL'ed apps that I would consider most user-friendly : mozilla and OpenOffice, both had commercial backgrounds before being belatedly released as OpenSource, and another highly usable opensource app, xmms, is a blatent clone of the commercial WinAMP.
So, what did I mean when I said that only commercial apps will be user-friendly? Only that commercial apps can afford to have usability studies, employ programmers to work on simple features that they themselves do not require, and in general be driven by competition to make a product that appeals to the most people. Lowest common denominator is not generally a factor that you associate with GPL'ed software. But it is what you associate with MS software or Apple sofware - and it's also what appeals to the masses.
Now, as far as GNOME and KDE go ... well, I think if you were honest you'd have to admit both of them have severe failings in terms of speed at the very least. Not to mention that there is still - AFAIK - no way for new applications to register MIME info, this despite there being now a shared MIME database concurrent between GNOME, KDE and some lesser known desktops. Perhaps you have some very geeky friends, I don't know, but whenever I've shown off KDE/GNOME to my friends they've not been impressed - it really seems to me that the linux desktop does not appeal to Joe Longneck ... at least, not the Joe Longnecks I know (and these are University graduates - many with PhDs - who spend a lot of their working life using computers, so we're not talking complete morons here!) It saddens me that Linux-on-the-desktop is in such bad shape - don't get me wrong - but I don't think pretending that the problems don't exist is going to make them miraculously dissappear.
Wow, you really went off the reservation of simply disagreeing with me with this one. Where did you read that I advocated "coercing" people into running GNU/Linux? You're entitled to your opinion that people are better off running Windows and I won't argue otherwise; I'm too busy showing them the alternatives and letting them make the ultimate decision
Hmmm ... perhaps not "coercing", but it did sound as though you were advocating linux whereever possible and encouraging everyone you knew to use it (you say "Teach them, Help them, Educate them and Support them" - isn't this linux advocacy?). This may possibly be a mis-reading on my part; sorry if that's the case :(
Don't get me wrong - I love linux and for me, for what I do, it's perfect. I love the philosophy of opensource, and I love the fact I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and add in features/bug fixes to code that I could never write in its entirity. But I'm also seeing more and more that what you and I like about linux, most users couldn't care less. They're happy with what they've got and if they moved to linux they'd for the most part be sacrificing features for the benefits of a philosophy that they couldn't care less about.
The second point that always crops up is that people want to have every single feature that was ever available under windows when running linux - that means the ability to run all their common apps, like office and photoshop. OpenOffice and GIMP don't impress them, because they just see an interface they're not familiar with and there'll always be one feature ("How do I use Endnote with OpenOffice?" ... "What, I can't? Well, what good is that?"; or "How do I make colour seperations with GIMP" ... "What, GIMP doesn't even handle CMYK colour? What kind of a useless program is that?") that they can't do without.
These days I don't advocate linux. If anyone asks me about it, I tell them that it's very different to Windows, and it has some advantages and some disadvantages. But to claim that linux is the Godsend for all users is not just delusional, it's really counterproductive - it causes new users to be rapidly disillusioned and they'll probably never try linux again.
I've read many posts on slashdot from users who've said "I tried linux in '98 and it didn't have this and it didn't do that, and I've used windows ever since". Where do you think this kind of attitude comes from if not from the linux-zealot who practically forces all their friends, mum and dad, grandma ... not to mention the family dog ... to use linux, and proudly boasts how their kid sister aged 2 and three-quarters prefers linux to windows? It creates this concept that linux can do everything from make you coffee in the morning to wash the dishes at night.
It's foolish - like it or not, linux is primarily a "geek" OS. As long as it is GPL software based it always will be; it's only when commercial companies start developing software for it that it will ever become usable for the masses. Even the projects designed to bring linux to "Joe Longneck" seem more concerned with creating endless eye-candy than with providing speed, usability and userfriendliness.
And after all the coercing the user into running linux - is it worth it? Have they gained anything in terms of usability/functionality/price? Generally, the answer is no, and I hate to say it but I really think that most users are better off with Windows at the moment, and probably will be for some time yet.
But anyway - I can see the point that middle-clicking on the scroll bar to move to that exact point could be useful ... although I find I generally need to see the text I'm scrolling through to find the spot I'm looking for and hence just drag the scoll bar :)
KDE likes to see itself as a close thing to windows, as far as I can gather. Or at least, many slashdotters see KDE as the optimal migration aid for windows users. On the other hand, I don't know of many "power-users" of linux that use KDE - this may merely represent short-sightedness on my behalf/mixing with a unique subset of users, but in my experience people who actually want to get work done don't stay with KDE - they migrate to more memory efficient, faster WMs and either use a better file manager than konqueror or simply use the CLI.
In which case, we can conclude that a majority of KDE users are newbies and/or people who don't like to "get their hands dirty" with configuring the basic underlying OS. I'm not saying this isn't a bad thing, mind you. BUT: what you're not going to find in this audience are people who know that the middle mouse button moves the slider to the point under the mouse - Windows, as you point out, has no such feature.
OK, you say - this is an advantage of KDE. But this whole sub-thread came about because of someone pointing out that you couldn't move the time slider in noatun with the left mouse button. And this behaviour is exactly what windows users are used to - try xmms or winamp and you'll see what I mean.
Now would you please also tell me what is archaic about jumping to a certain point in a slider by using mouse button 3? Are GNOME and KDE archaic? Is it better to have no way of jumping to a certain point like Windows?
My point was that most users are not familiar with this usage - again, it goes back to the fact that Windows does not have this and therefore forcing a newbie to use this feature to gain functionality is simply going to alienate them. (Again, I'm not saying that it should alienate them, just that it generally does - they don't like things to be different) Perhaps "archaic" was a bad word, but as I recall it was one of the few features of X that I never liked when I started using linux (probably because it was coupled with having to drag the slider with the middle mouse button, which always seemed counterintuitive).
But in anycase, I hope you see my point - if a feature doesn't make sense to newbies (who've probably never had to click a middle mouse button before in their lives) it isn't a smart thing to put into KDE, especially when it's in a music playing program and when the defacto standard applications of linux and windows use a different method of scrolling (in fact, middle mouse clicking does not work with xmms on the time slider, despite the fact it's built with gtk!).
(I might also mention that I've never seen an application in the last four or five years that's required you to use the middle mouse button to move a slider, so noatun seems to be rather unique. Yes, I know that GTK (and motif) also use the middle mouse button to set the slider position, but you can just as easily drag the slider a la windows (which makes more sense anyway since you can *see* where you're scrolling); while Xforms doesn't use the middle mouse button in the same way (you scroll by smaller increments instead) and the toolkit that OpenOffice uses doesn't recognise middle-mouse button clicks in the scroll bar at all. So it's not even a shared feature between linux toolkits.)
*lol* You've got to be kidding me, right?? KDE, which considers itself the bastion of user-friendliness, which re-designed UNIX cut-and-paste, which tried in every aspect to clone windows (even to the point of making its filemanager a web-browser as well) ... uses one of the most archaic, unintuitive aspects of X?? And this is supposed to be "totally obvious"??
Now, come on - do you really expect new linux users to grasp this idea? Or do you think KDE is the power-users' interface (*chukle*)
Look, I know no more about the GPL than what I can glean through reading it, but it seemed to me as though the spirit of the license was that - while you could distribute binaries and charge what you wanted for them - you had to give access to the source code to anyone possessing those binaries, and not charge a fee for doing it. The "cost of physically performing source distribution" seems to be there so that the author doesn't find him or herself out-of-pocket because they've been altruistic enough to release their software under the GPL. This doesn't mean being able to charge the same amount again for a copy of the source as you did for the binaries, which is what the poster I replied to suggested.
(interesting, though, that you can initially restrict access to the source code to those individuals who have bought your binaries - although you cannot prevent these individuals from then distributing both binaries and source freely ... which was the question that started this whole offtopic thread :)
As far as I can gather, from www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, this is incorrect. The GPL states that - as far as distributing source code goes - you may do one of the following (quoted from above):
In other words, you must either accompany binaries with source code at no extra charge, or offer to provide source code at only the cost it takes to send it to someone (i.e. the price of a blank CD, the price of postage). So you cannot charge an extra $50 or whatever for access to the source code - you can charge all you like for the binaries and only give out the code with those binaries, but you cannot charge any extra for the code (excepting the costs of physically distibuting it, as mentioned above)
Does it really matter, though? I don't see posts about Quake3 refering to the original 3D FPS that kicked off that whole genre! (what was that, incidentally? Wolf3D? Doom? I can't remember!! But the point is that I don't see people complaining about how Quake3 is a rip off of Doom.)
btw, the really interesting thing about frozen bubble is that it's written in perl!
... not to mention writing g's as a six and d's as the shortcut symbol backwards ...
I'd hate it if Palm switched to jot - jot was the worst of the lot in my experience, and about 1.5 times as slow to write as graffiti (the strokes are more complex, so they take longer to draw).
(Mind you, since I'm still using a three-year-old IIIx and doubt that I'll ever have the money to buy a Tungsten, it probably isn't going to make much of a difference to me :)
You need CDs 2 and 3 from Mandrake 9.0 if you want to install any development packages ... and if you have your "own choice apps already" then you're probably going to want to compile them, hence you need the development libs.
I downloaded all three CDs at work just before taking a week of leave, didn't have time to checksum them and of course the CD 2 download was b*ggered. It just about made the distro unusable for me :(
Well, this is rather late but ...
but the upshot is that if I want to write any GUI app for Linux, I can't rely on the environment, so it might look fine under window manager A, and look like crap under window manager B
Um, Window managers manage windows - they put pretty little borders around them, say where they should go, aid resizing and closing, and maybe provide lists of running tasks/frequently used apps and a nice desktop background.
What they don't do is have anything to do with the toolkits you'd be using to write the GUI app - that's what your toolkit libraries are there for!! If I take an app written using GTK, it will look exactly the same whether I run it in Blackbox, Windowmaker, IceWM, TWM, or even if I don't have a windowmanager running at all! (KDE and GNOME are "desktop environments" and are a little bit different as they provide development tools and libraries that add on all kinds of unneccessary crap ... but these aren't window managers)
The only criteria for your app to display as you wanted it to is for everyone to have the toolkit libraries, and if they don't have the neccessary libraries then your app ain't gonna display at all :)
So I'm not sure what you meant. BTW - I did read the article you referenced - and I'm not impressed. Some of it is out-of-date (Hell, X gets criticised for intitially being designed to run xterm, xload and xclock!!), much of it is polemic (I loved the line about being "archaic enough to use vi") and although I've never used X to remotely administer a box, there's many slashdotters who routinely state that this is X's greatest feature, not greatest detraction as this article claims. *shrug* I'm not saying the guy doesn't have some valid points, but X has come a long way since the days of motif and xclock, and XFree 4.0 fixed up a lot of the dross and sped things up enormously. If I wrote an article on windows stability and security, based solely upon Windows 95, would you take me seriously??
The overall effect: Linux looks like a half-assed amateur effort.
Well, that's because it is one!! It's a true cast-of-thousands production. But does it matter what something looks like if it gets the job done??
Um. I think you are missing the point. Yes, of course KDE/GNOME are not linux. But the article was about the perception of linux by a first time user, not by Mr/Ms SuperGeek.
Personally I couldn't give a damn about whether linux achieves world domination or not. However, if you do wish to convert more people to using linux then we're talking about exactly those people who are going to judge books (or in this case OSes) by their covers. We're talking about people who will only use linux because it is better than Windows, and they're not going to spend months finding obscure, hidden software - it's going to be based on a first experiences thing. And having seen that KDE/GNOME is crud, they're going to avoid linux like the plague for the next couple of years, based on that one experience. I've seen it happen.
As I've said before, I couldn't care less - linux does what I want it to, and that's all I care about. But since a substantial population of slashdot seems to think that linux should achieve world domination, or at the very least give Windows a run for its money, then this article should be very, very relevant.
And shoving your head in the sand and refusing to listen to criticism, even when it is valid and constructive, is plain out stupid. (But hell, this is slashdot, isn't it - when did constructive criticism of linux ever get noticed? :)
Look, the guy really does have a point - KDE (and to a lesser extent GNOME) has always tried to copy windows and it's made it a far worse product as a result. It looks contrived, it's slow, and there's no good reason why anyone would want to use it instead of Windows, unless they cared about (a) opensource philosophy or (b) having to pay money for windows. Both KDE and GNOME are just as ugly and souless as Windows, and no amount of pro-Linux propaganda is going to miraculously fix this!
Compare this to Mac OS X - people use Macs even though they cost more and use monopolistic, proprietary hardware because the interface appeals to them. It means something to them, and that's even worth more than the extra costs involved in buying a Mac. Macintosh has always wanted to be seen as being different, as revolutionary, not recycling. If linux really wanted to succeed then it (read Linux-on-the-Desktop, read GNOME/KDE) would be best to develop its own style and glory in its uniqueness, not harp on about it's similarity to Windows! If people want to switch from Windows, they're not going to do it because it costs less. They're going to do it because Linux can offer more.
As a disclaimer, I should add that I use linux exclusively and yes, I'm happy in linux because I stick well clear of either KDE or GNOME and use some of the wonderful alternative interfaces that have been developed. There is good stuff out there, you're absolutely right. But this is so well hidden that a newbie will never find it - and this is Dvorak's point. The first thing a new linux user will see is the KDE desktop, and it's only if they're brave enough to experiment (fairly unlikely) that they will discover any of the software that makes linux a joy to use.
So please, don't start believing your own propaganda. If the first look at linux doesn't appeal to someone, perhaps you should pause and think - "hey, maybe there might be a reason for that", not automatically say "hmph! they don't like linux, they must be some stupid luser, what would they know!"
To me, the issue is whether one should donate money to a company for an opensource product that they give away for free. Surely the whole point of GPL'ed open-source software is that it is written for fun/interest/altuism by anyone, and anyone can contribute back to this by contributing code. It's not written for money, it's written for the greater good of the community. So I don't see how anyone can justify paying Mandrake for developing GPL'ed software.
I might just be able to understand why it might be worthwhile to contribute money for the service of packaging all that software in a nice, easy-to-install .iso image. Possibly.
What I can understand paying Mandrake for is support/input. If you need help with linux, then paying for Mandrake for this service makes sense. Or if you're not a developer but want to have some input in what software gets included in the next release, then again it's fair enough to pay money. This is how Mandrake should be making money, and if this doesn't work then why prolong the inevitable?
I also happen to like and use Mandrake. I'm sorry for their cash situation in a way, since I think they have developed a lot of useful software in recent years. But if Mandrake dies, it's likely that more people will start helping and contributing to Debian, start making it user friendly to fill the void left by Mandrake. After all, that's how most opensource software was developed in the first place, wasn't it?? Someone felt that it would be useful to have software that filled a certain niche, and went ahead and wrote it? And if the whole linux community ends up using a user-friendly version of Debian, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that a far better situation than relying upon a distro developed by a company?
Surely it's better to contribute code, resources, bug reports, feedback to developers than to donate money to a company that exists to make a profit?
(And no, after some soul-searching, I don't feel that I'm a leach for saying this - I'll happily use Mandrake while it's available; but if it's not I'll use some other distro. I'm happy to - and do - contribute code back to the opensource community. But for better or worse, that's all I'm going to do. I believe that software should be free for all - and that doesn't mean paying money for opensource software.)
In fact, I think there are already LaTeX-to-RTF converters out there.
But all that aside, you can't say "Linux is 2-5 times slower" based on the performance of OOo in Linux vs MS Word in Windows. MS Word is a really good programme, pure and simple; OOo suffers from terminal bloat and delusions of grandeur. Hell, MS Word under WINE starts up about three times faster than native Linux OOo ...
KDE and GNOME are bad examples too ... if you're looking for speed in a desktop environment, there's much better software out there! (try ROX for starters, together with a fast window manager like IceWM or Sawfish)
I've never used XP and so can't comment on its stability. But considering the extreme up-times I've experienced when running a linux box as a desktop computer (and web/file server at the same time) I'd be very surprised if XP is actually better. (IIRC the box crashed a total of three times in ten months continuous running, and we're talking RedHat 6.1 here, not Debian) In the last year of using Mandrake Linux (8.1, then 9.0) as a sole desktop OS, I cannot remember it crashing. Put simply, the underlying OS is very, very stable, and it's getting better, not worse. Now, granted XP may well be as stable, but I can't see how it can be noticably more so ... unless you're confusing OS stability with application stability, which is a completely different issue.
All this garbage about requiring an XFT-enabled build for aa fonts is just plain and utter crap. You can use the vanilla 1.2 release and do it ... hell, I've had aa fonts since 1.0 :)
If you don't care about using XFT (which is prob faster) but just want aa fonts, you just have to edit the global preferences/unix.js file in your mozilla directory. Make a backup, and then use a text editor ... don't be afraid - all the features are commented.
I'm posting this from work, where I'm forced to use windows, but if you need more info than that reply to this and I'll post a patch of the vanilla 1.2 unix.js file.