I read this, went to www.gnome3.org to see the screenshots, and just gave my LXDE system a big hug. I still use KDE3.5 (and will for as long as I can find packages; fortunately openSUSE 11.3 still has them), and just as often boot into Windowmaker or the console. But KDE4's Plasma desktop sucks (I like the apps, but not the desktop). And Gnome3 seems to be an effort to see just how far they can go without pissing me off. I look forward to avoiding both of them for as long as humanly possible.
Meanwhile, LXDE is fast, easy, intuitive, powerful, and STAYS THE @#$#@ OUT OF MY WAY as I work. It's lightweight, and isn't trying to herd me into a new paradigm of computing. It's just useful.
Suddenly I'm more grateful than ever it exists, but KDE and Gnome are both apparently on a one-way trip to sucky land.
I'm not much of a batman fan, but enjoyed this anyway. Mostly because the author put the whole thing on one diagram, instead of doing what EVERYONE else is doing now: putting each of 60 diagrams on a different page and making you click through them, one by one, with a new ad on each page.
Kudos to this guy. The rest of the web is slowly turning to crap thanks to this "get as many ads across you as possible in one session" mentality.
I've got a third theory: the desktop apps suck donkeyballs. Disclaimer - I use Linux and am a staunch advocate. But the truth is, the desktop apps aren't great. They suffer from GUI oversimplification, over-complication, usability nightmares, crashes, slowness, and more. I'd love to use Koffice if only the font kerning issues were ever worked out. I hate evolution's rigid GUI; I can't change around things I'd like to. I used Kmail and mostly loved it, despite their insistence on not allowing a search filter based on date ("show me mail received within the last 4 days") and the new Kmail-on-Akonadi is utter crap: no new benefits, lots of new disadvantages.
I use Linux for precious few desktop apps these days: SLRN and Mutt for Usenet news and mail, and Vim and Emacs for writing (occasionally Joe and Jedit as well). And I've begun learning how to make Linux useful on the server, where it belongs: web services, LDAP, and more. I like O3Spaces and Joomla and MediaWiki and more, all things where Linux excels.
I agree the fierce ideology can be a turn off, I disagree that the fragmentation has made much of a difference, and insist crappy software is behind a lot of it: if the apps are there you'll figure out a way to install and make it work. If the apps suck, it's not worth dealing with compatibility, installation, and learning-curve issues.
I know this isn't a discussion about Linux, and I'm not trying to turn it into one. But I will say one of the things I love about KDE3.5 is that I can adjust all the toolbars the way I like, and I like to put them on the side. I've also got a monitor tilted 90 degrees, for the same reason: I want to see a whole page at a time, and want as much vertical space as possible. So for someone with those requirements, KDE3.5 is a pretty sweet desktop. I don't know if KDE4 lets you have that same flexibility or not, as I don't use it. And I dislike Gnome for that reason: I really can't move the toolbars around (that I know of), and that's important to me.
So there you go, my comment is about ergonomics, not Linux. Carry on.
It's getting harder and harder for Steve Ballmer to point to his resume and be able to justify his work over the past decade. While Microsoft has pushed out upgrades to all its software, the big picture is gloomy enough to make him sweat at upcoming board meetings: total loss to the ipod in the music market, total catastrophe in Microsoft's internally-competing music formats and platforms (Plays for Sure?), impending catastrophe in smart phones as RIM, Apple, and now Android eat his lunch, and growing irrelevance of desktop office software. Yes, they skirted disaster with Vista and pushed out Windows 7 which is generally well liked. But Microsoft is slipping behind in key growth markets and lack of vision and leadership is a big part of that.
If I were on the Board, I'd be telling Ballmer to go work on his golf game, and bring in new leadership. Microsoft has lots of talented developers and engineers. But upper management is sinking the ship.
Concede defeat? What would Wall-E say? Time for NASA to give Disney/PIXAR a chance. Seems like their robots always seem to pull through in the nick of time, and have something to say about it too.
Wow man, this is a fascinating subject! Do you think you could tell us a little more about your theory, maybe using a couple of Powerpoint slides with animation? For bonus points, just stand up there and read the text on the slides to us.
I've been a Fastmail user for about 4 years now, and I'm happy with them. Their IMAP and SMTP are straightforward and I can access them using every email client I've ever tried, I've never ever experienced any downtime, the tech support people are first rate, and their spam filtering is good. Furthermore, not being tied to any ISP means if I change ISP my mail is not affected. So Verizon and Comcast, bite me!
They have a couple of lesser known features I use extensively: They let you access your address book via LDAP, which is an easy way for me to keep my addresses synched across many computers. They also run a Jabber server, so I can chat with Googletalk people. They also allow limited file storage you can access via FTP. So I have a small script on my machine that uploads the manuscript of a book I'm writing every time I ask it to; nice to have an offsite file backup system. It's limited space, but that's all I need.
They also have this new family package I'm looking at now, where you can link all your family's emails and manage them, share address books and mail folders, etc.
In general I get the idea they are trying hard to offer good service, and are doing so. Bully for them! Gmail is genius in many ways, but I refuse to give them my mail so they can target advertising at me; happy to pay Fastmail for good service.
I have used Softmaker Office since about 2001, and it works well. In my experience it does a better job of rendering Microsoft docs than OpenOffice.org does - especially docs that have tables, even simple ones. As for perfect compatibility, I don't know why anyone even bothers to compare to Word anymore, since it's well known that even Microsoft is unable to make Word perfectly compatible with previous versions, and I too have experienced issues going back and forth between Word 03 and Word 07 on Windows (at work). It's ridiculous.
On the plus side:
Softmaker Office is fast and uses few resources. I've got an old Pentium III (128M RAM, 555Mhz) and it runs WELL on an old version of SUSE Linux (8.1). Obviously on my Core Duo it flies. It does a better job of reading and writing Word docs than any other software I've got, including some Macintosh stuff. I can also use it on FreeBSD, which is really cool.
On the negative side:
I love the OO.o stylist (F11) and Navigator (F5) and miss them desperately on Softmaker Office. I also love OO.o's ability to make master documents, and its embedding of one doc into another are useful as well. Softmaker doesn't do either of those things, which I miss. The proprietary doc format is also annoying, but I export everything to RTF or PDF, same as I do for the rest of my docs. At least it lets you export to RTF, Word, and a bunch of other formats.
As for the fact that it's open source, I frankly don't give a crap. Abiword is the best example of an opensource word processor that I know of and I don't think it's that good (at least, it's never been very stable for me). I'll take the closed source - and even pay for it - if it's a good product and I can do what I want to do.
The user experience is all about a daily assessment of cost vs. benefit. When Skype appeared - with sound quality worse than real phones and occasional network break up, people decided they liked it because the benefit of cheaper calls at an acceptable quality was better than the cost of the downside.
Linux has a perfectly functional desktop environment (and it also has Gnome ha ha) and enough configurability to make any CTO happy. But where are the apps? I work in an industry that largely functions on office software and email, plus a collaborative suite. Linux could probably replace our Exchange-Sharepoint set up if it weren't for the fact that we need microsoft project. Where is the Linux equivalent? Kplato and the Gnome equivalent, "Planner" both suck. SUCK! Task Juggler is cool but missing some important things I need and use. The same complaint goes for other software categories. Linux software, in spite of its awesome potential, is feature poor.
I'm glued to Exchange and Sharepoint at work; if I found a place that would let me work on a Linux box - Mutt for email, Pidgin for chat, etc., I'd probably get such a raging hard on I'd faint at the keyboard. But because the apps we need don't quite exist (and because the IT guys are in love with GroupPolicy) Linux is out. At home I use the Mac, and in spite of some complaints (lack of keyboard shortcuts, for one), it has succeeded wildly because it does some things BETTER. That's why desktop Linux isn't taking off. Come out with an application that solves a problem, makes life easier for office drones, and desktop adoption will happen because the cost/benefit ratio will finally work in linux's favor.
Truth is, if the apps were superior to what's out there, people would overcome the learning curve and other hurdles and adopt the new system.
Re:What the world needs ...
on
Less Is Moore
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Cheers to that! At work I have a newish computer assigned to me by the corp. that does everything I need - it's actually a Pentium M from about 05. But at home I still have on line my PIII 555Mhz (128M RAM) running SUSE 8.2. And I can use it to do everything I do at work. That machine is now 9 years old but I've got updated software on it and a light office suite and I could perfectly easily use it to replace my work machine.
AutoCAD amazes me. I used to use it in '97 on a Pentium I, and in '95 I used it on a 386. How have its memory and processor requirements inflated so much?
No, this is the power of the market. Laptops are mostly commoditized by now, and consumers expect to purchase a laptop that will help them solve problems. Microsoft, for whom I am not an apologist, understands that to the user, a laptop is a black plastic box that users expect good things to come out of. Linux promotors still hope that users will want to tinker with the laptop, since that's what we like to do.
Users' predilection for returning a laptop makes sense in today's market, since users have neither the time nor skills to fix problems like busted VPN connections. What other recourse do people think they have?
This quote from one very disgruntled Jamie Ziewinski comes to mind:
My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
Point is, open source is no solution, and while some of the mechanisms open source developers use to promote transparency and equity are enviable and perhaps even applicable to government processes, it's the equity and transparency that are the key, not the open source-osity.
I strongly support this initiative. For YOUR company. Have fun with it.
In the mean time, we'll be over here, competing with you. Users have no shown themselves to be overly savvy about IT equipment, policies, and configurations in general. So while all hell breaks loose over in your company, we'll be over here doing it the old fashioned way, with professional technical support making informed decisions. Let me know how it works out for you.
Taunting happy fun ball? That's my kind of EULA. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be true. The EULA at the link you provided not only isn't very fun, it exhibits some of my biggest pet peeves with EULAs in general, like:
1. Visit our website from time to time to be aware of the latest version of the agreement [like I have nothing better to do with my time than wonder if my EULAs are up to date? That was convenient for some lawyer but total horse-crap for all users].
2. Consent for us to collect non-personal data [why? I'm purchasing your product because I need a backup; not because I want to be part of your database]
3. Limitation of liability. ["Now that you've given it all up, we'd like to remind you we are responsible for nothing." Big business is great at this: it took me $50 worth of phone calls and 8 months to get a $180 rebate back from Verizon one time, but try paying your cellphone bill 8 months late some time and see how friendly they are with you. The customer is too easily abused].
Bring in the happy fun ball. I hope whoever read that EULA is visiting the website to get the latest version, because the latest version seems to be a whole lot less pleasant than its predecessors. Bastages.
Clarke shaped my adolescence as well; at the age of 13 it was a pleasure to find a book that was so engaging and kept me up at night turning pages. I still think about Clarke when I'm at the computer working on my own writing projects. I've got the latest word processors on four platforms and 'enjoy' things like auto correct and pagination and print preview, etc. but it hasn't made me much of a better writer, and never will.
But Clarke wrote his masterpieces a generation before me, using software like Wordstar, which predates even Word Perfect and has a lot less power and a lot fewer features than, basically, the text editor pico. He seems to have liked upgrading his systems as he went, which means he certainly wasn't using Wordstar to write his most recent works, but when you think of the power and elegance of his novels you realize the hardware and software made exactly zero difference: it was the mind. A little depressing for someone banging away on a brand new x86_64 with 2G of RAM, the latest software, integrated spell checking, and a whole lot more: it's not good enough.
I hate to piss on the parade here, but OSS will sell itself when the software is seen as better quality enough than the paid edition for the learning curve to be worth it. Consumers engage in a cost/benefit analysis when choosing. "I know Windows, so I'll have to learn Linux": cost. "Evolution is an almost-but-not-quite as good alternative to Outlook": cost. Whoops, where's the benefit? "But it's FREE!" Not good enough.
How about: "I know Windows, so I'll have to learn Linux": cost. "Evolution does everything you want to AND does this new cool thing": benefit. If it's a cool enough new thing, people will go for it.
I'm talking desktop software here. Linux and OSS is wildly popular on the server side because its benefits in that area are obvious and the benefits wildly outweigh the costs. Abiword is a much harder package to try to "sell" to a potential user because its benefits are not quite good enough and the cost is too high (ie the learning curve, not the price).
I love Linux on my desktop but I use it for writing, text processing, and a whole slew of CLI apps, since I'm not much of a GUI fan. But I'm not the kind of computer user you have to convince to use OSS. Those people need software whose benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Sadly, OSS software continues to be in catch up mode on the desktop. Had the OSS folks come up with Apple's Expose and compositing desktop first, or if Abiword did some of the cool stuff that Apple's Pages does, or if Evolution did some cool Facebook/Myspace/whatever (I don't use the stuff) tie-in thingy, you could say, "why are you using that tired old software, when [OSS product] does THIS?"
This has one advantage that I can see. I don't really expect to do much word processing on line, and it's not a collaborative suite, so that's another missed opportunity.
But this does give me the ability to send people ODT documents and when they complain "MS Word won't read this" send them to this site so they can read. Basically this gives me a justification to insist on sending people ODT rather than Word. Perhaps some of them will get tired of the website and decide to install OO.o on their own computer.
These days, it's class-A arrogance to send someone an ODT and require them to download and install the huge OO.o suite just so they can read it. Maybe some day Kword/QT4 running on Windows would make an option attractive enough to let people like me force ODT docs on people with a smug "if you want to read it, download the software" but for now Kword/Windows doesn't exist and OO.o is a hefty download that risk-averse computer users will not be interested in installing. There's a third option: http://officeviewers.com/ which is published by softmaker and actually serves as a decent ODT document reader as well. But again, that involves installing software, and not everyone is willing to do that.
In my opinion, this is the easiest way to increase people's awareness of and ability to read ODT documents. You send them the doc and if they haven't got the software, they can read it using the online suite. And if they're curious they can then go install OO.o. In my opinion, OO.o is more valuable as a vehicle for pushing an document format than as an office suite. Even on windows it's a bit slow; on Linux it's slower. And the "almost as good and FREE" line is the worst way to market a software product ever. But if we can wean people off of the.DOC format and get them reading - and then writing - ODTs, that's progress. This website and software service might be a decent next step in that direction.
Consider me a satisfied customer of Fastmail. Does everything Gmail does, except target me with ads. I'm so sick of advertising anymore I've taken to reading the web as often as possible in a text-based browser, and the last thing I need is advertising PLUS spam in my mailbox.
That said, Gmail's label system is ingenuous. Opera's M3 email client works in a similar way, and I love it. I hope the people who roll out new standards are able to create a new version of IMAP, if not a replacement protocol, that permits something similar. I used to use a lot of folders, but nowadays I only folderize mailing lists. Everything else goes into the inbox.
Sorry for the inflammatory subject line, but I am the author of a best selling travel guidebook to Nicaragua http://www.gotonicaragua.com/. Travel guidebooks are one area that are the frequent subject of ill-fated "let's do a travel wiki" ideas that immediately turn into steaming piles of horse crap. Here's why: the crowds are stupid; many can't write, and everyone's pushing an agenda.
The reason why travel guidebooks continue to sell in the Internet age is because the Internet is a huge, unfettered mixing bowl of ignorance. People are still willing to turn to professional writers and editors to sort through all the horse crap and turn it into something concise, concrete, and helpful. I too would prefer to pay $17 for a book for my next trip to Morocco than trawl through the Internet forums trying to separate fact from fiction from propaganda.
These travel wikis come and go, but they all bear the same characteristics: huge number of Google ads, a couple of lame wiki posts that two or more prolific authors debate back and forth without conclusion, and huge chunks of background material, insight, or commentary. The masses can't produce that, and anyone who's ever participated in a corporate meeting where 7 people need to come to a conclusion about something they differ in opinion about, knows why.
There's a place for this kind of approach, but mass authoring as I've seen it done, only works if one person is the lead author and has near dictatorial privileges and the diplomacy and savvy to use that power wisely. If you let the madhouse run the party, you get a madhouse. And that's why people like me can still earn the big bucks selling travel information to a place like Nicaragua in the Internet age.
August begins next week, and within three weeks zillions of students will head back to school. A lot of them are eying that tasty "buy a Mac, get a free Ipod Nano" advertisement as I write. I suspect macs will spike soon enough.
Not that I care. I've given up advocating Mac OS X. Let Windows keep its monopoly so all the virus writer's choice remains clear. The rest of us can enjoy an easier existence. It's like going into the mosquito swarm with a fat, naked friend. Go get'em! Have fun downloading your latest virus definition file, suckers.
Greetings. I live and work in Africa (http://therandymon.com/content/view/104/59/), so I happen to know a little something about the way things are. Frankly, I don't see the scandal in the fact that Africa doesn't have good access to the Internet, and reject this article on the grounds that (a) as usual, the story is focused on lack of infrastructure, which is not the correct focus, and (b) as usual paints a bleaker picture than neecssary.
It's true service is slower and more expensive but in the capitals and in major cities there is more than enough to go around. In Benin there is dial up service for about $15 per month plus the cost of the phone call, ADSL service in the capital for about $75 a month for 256/128, and if that's not good enough you can pay more (up to $200/month) for greater bandwidth. It's more expensive than I'd like and the service is occasionally down for service, not to mention phone line trouble, saturated networks, and so on, but that's another story. The point is, I've got Internet in the capital (Cotonou, if you care) and it's essentially satisfactory. Inland in places like Burkina Faso and Mali they've got internet connections as well, but they are more expensive and the bandwidth isn't as good, since the network goes through the coastal nations - Ghana, Togo, and Benin. The big agencies - UN, embassies, major companies working in the region - also have available satellite internet at much higher prices.
Lack of infrastructure is not the problem. Lack of a market willing to pay for the service that demands that infrastructure is, and as the market develops the infrastructure will suddenly seem like a worthwhile investment. You don't get Africans connected by building a bunch of equipment and hoping they show up. The second factor is regulation, which is clearly an area where African governments have some growing to do. To build a telecommunications sector (and make no mistake about it, if you put in cable and connections you're building the sector) you need effective government regulation. Unfortunately that has to happen from within, and no multinational company can effectively impose good government (and thus good government oversight) on a nation. The article's story about Kigali is a perfect example of this point.
In the meantime, where's the scandal? I have friends and colleagues who live in small villages inland, not in the capital. Every one of them has a hotmail/yahoo.fr/gmail account, and when they need to use the Internet they go to a cybercafe for a quick hour or two. That fits their budget and works well.
If you want to connect Africa, help educate the people so they can improve their own economic situation. They will form the basis for a stronger economic market for these services, and the system will be sustainable. Impose on these growing countries the infrastructure before they are ready to sustain it and you will just perpetuate the development myth.
Before leaving this post, I highly recommend you read White Man's Burden by William Easterly, if the idea of development interests you. After 40 years of investing in growing countries we know a lot more about it than before, and there are many lessons to be learned.
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I read this, went to www.gnome3.org to see the screenshots, and just gave my LXDE system a big hug. I still use KDE3.5 (and will for as long as I can find packages; fortunately openSUSE 11.3 still has them), and just as often boot into Windowmaker or the console. But KDE4's Plasma desktop sucks (I like the apps, but not the desktop). And Gnome3 seems to be an effort to see just how far they can go without pissing me off. I look forward to avoiding both of them for as long as humanly possible.
Meanwhile, LXDE is fast, easy, intuitive, powerful, and STAYS THE @#$#@ OUT OF MY WAY as I work. It's lightweight, and isn't trying to herd me into a new paradigm of computing. It's just useful.
Suddenly I'm more grateful than ever it exists, but KDE and Gnome are both apparently on a one-way trip to sucky land.
I'm not much of a batman fan, but enjoyed this anyway. Mostly because the author put the whole thing on one diagram, instead of doing what EVERYONE else is doing now: putting each of 60 diagrams on a different page and making you click through them, one by one, with a new ad on each page.
Kudos to this guy. The rest of the web is slowly turning to crap thanks to this "get as many ads across you as possible in one session" mentality.
Hate to gloat, but ...
Hey Ballmer, How you like THEM Apples?
I've got a third theory: the desktop apps suck donkeyballs. Disclaimer - I use Linux and am a staunch advocate. But the truth is, the desktop apps aren't great. They suffer from GUI oversimplification, over-complication, usability nightmares, crashes, slowness, and more. I'd love to use Koffice if only the font kerning issues were ever worked out. I hate evolution's rigid GUI; I can't change around things I'd like to. I used Kmail and mostly loved it, despite their insistence on not allowing a search filter based on date ("show me mail received within the last 4 days") and the new Kmail-on-Akonadi is utter crap: no new benefits, lots of new disadvantages.
I use Linux for precious few desktop apps these days: SLRN and Mutt for Usenet news and mail, and Vim and Emacs for writing (occasionally Joe and Jedit as well). And I've begun learning how to make Linux useful on the server, where it belongs: web services, LDAP, and more. I like O3Spaces and Joomla and MediaWiki and more, all things where Linux excels.
I agree the fierce ideology can be a turn off, I disagree that the fragmentation has made much of a difference, and insist crappy software is behind a lot of it: if the apps are there you'll figure out a way to install and make it work. If the apps suck, it's not worth dealing with compatibility, installation, and learning-curve issues.
I know this isn't a discussion about Linux, and I'm not trying to turn it into one. But I will say one of the things I love about KDE3.5 is that I can adjust all the toolbars the way I like, and I like to put them on the side. I've also got a monitor tilted 90 degrees, for the same reason: I want to see a whole page at a time, and want as much vertical space as possible. So for someone with those requirements, KDE3.5 is a pretty sweet desktop. I don't know if KDE4 lets you have that same flexibility or not, as I don't use it. And I dislike Gnome for that reason: I really can't move the toolbars around (that I know of), and that's important to me.
So there you go, my comment is about ergonomics, not Linux. Carry on.
It's getting harder and harder for Steve Ballmer to point to his resume and be able to justify his work over the past decade. While Microsoft has pushed out upgrades to all its software, the big picture is gloomy enough to make him sweat at upcoming board meetings: total loss to the ipod in the music market, total catastrophe in Microsoft's internally-competing music formats and platforms (Plays for Sure?), impending catastrophe in smart phones as RIM, Apple, and now Android eat his lunch, and growing irrelevance of desktop office software. Yes, they skirted disaster with Vista and pushed out Windows 7 which is generally well liked. But Microsoft is slipping behind in key growth markets and lack of vision and leadership is a big part of that.
If I were on the Board, I'd be telling Ballmer to go work on his golf game, and bring in new leadership. Microsoft has lots of talented developers and engineers. But upper management is sinking the ship.
Concede defeat? What would Wall-E say? Time for NASA to give Disney/PIXAR a chance. Seems like their robots always seem to pull through in the nick of time, and have something to say about it too.
Wow man, this is a fascinating subject! Do you think you could tell us a little more about your theory, maybe using a couple of Powerpoint slides with animation? For bonus points, just stand up there and read the text on the slides to us.
Seriously, do away with it and go back to gopherspace. No viruses there, probably. The WWW is overrated.
I've been a Fastmail user for about 4 years now, and I'm happy with them. Their IMAP and SMTP are straightforward and I can access them using every email client I've ever tried, I've never ever experienced any downtime, the tech support people are first rate, and their spam filtering is good. Furthermore, not being tied to any ISP means if I change ISP my mail is not affected. So Verizon and Comcast, bite me!
They have a couple of lesser known features I use extensively: They let you access your address book via LDAP, which is an easy way for me to keep my addresses synched across many computers. They also run a Jabber server, so I can chat with Googletalk people. They also allow limited file storage you can access via FTP. So I have a small script on my machine that uploads the manuscript of a book I'm writing every time I ask it to; nice to have an offsite file backup system. It's limited space, but that's all I need.
They also have this new family package I'm looking at now, where you can link all your family's emails and manage them, share address books and mail folders, etc.
In general I get the idea they are trying hard to offer good service, and are doing so. Bully for them! Gmail is genius in many ways, but I refuse to give them my mail so they can target advertising at me; happy to pay Fastmail for good service.
I have used Softmaker Office since about 2001, and it works well. In my experience it does a better job of rendering Microsoft docs than OpenOffice.org does - especially docs that have tables, even simple ones. As for perfect compatibility, I don't know why anyone even bothers to compare to Word anymore, since it's well known that even Microsoft is unable to make Word perfectly compatible with previous versions, and I too have experienced issues going back and forth between Word 03 and Word 07 on Windows (at work). It's ridiculous.
On the plus side:
Softmaker Office is fast and uses few resources. I've got an old Pentium III (128M RAM, 555Mhz) and it runs WELL on an old version of SUSE Linux (8.1). Obviously on my Core Duo it flies. It does a better job of reading and writing Word docs than any other software I've got, including some Macintosh stuff. I can also use it on FreeBSD, which is really cool.
On the negative side:
I love the OO.o stylist (F11) and Navigator (F5) and miss them desperately on Softmaker Office. I also love OO.o's ability to make master documents, and its embedding of one doc into another are useful as well. Softmaker doesn't do either of those things, which I miss. The proprietary doc format is also annoying, but I export everything to RTF or PDF, same as I do for the rest of my docs. At least it lets you export to RTF, Word, and a bunch of other formats.
As for the fact that it's open source, I frankly don't give a crap. Abiword is the best example of an opensource word processor that I know of and I don't think it's that good (at least, it's never been very stable for me). I'll take the closed source - and even pay for it - if it's a good product and I can do what I want to do.
The user experience is all about a daily assessment of cost vs. benefit. When Skype appeared - with sound quality worse than real phones and occasional network break up, people decided they liked it because the benefit of cheaper calls at an acceptable quality was better than the cost of the downside.
Linux has a perfectly functional desktop environment (and it also has Gnome ha ha) and enough configurability to make any CTO happy. But where are the apps? I work in an industry that largely functions on office software and email, plus a collaborative suite. Linux could probably replace our Exchange-Sharepoint set up if it weren't for the fact that we need microsoft project. Where is the Linux equivalent? Kplato and the Gnome equivalent, "Planner" both suck. SUCK! Task Juggler is cool but missing some important things I need and use. The same complaint goes for other software categories. Linux software, in spite of its awesome potential, is feature poor.
I'm glued to Exchange and Sharepoint at work; if I found a place that would let me work on a Linux box - Mutt for email, Pidgin for chat, etc., I'd probably get such a raging hard on I'd faint at the keyboard. But because the apps we need don't quite exist (and because the IT guys are in love with GroupPolicy) Linux is out. At home I use the Mac, and in spite of some complaints (lack of keyboard shortcuts, for one), it has succeeded wildly because it does some things BETTER. That's why desktop Linux isn't taking off. Come out with an application that solves a problem, makes life easier for office drones, and desktop adoption will happen because the cost/benefit ratio will finally work in linux's favor.
Truth is, if the apps were superior to what's out there, people would overcome the learning curve and other hurdles and adopt the new system.
Cheers to that! At work I have a newish computer assigned to me by the corp. that does everything I need - it's actually a Pentium M from about 05. But at home I still have on line my PIII 555Mhz (128M RAM) running SUSE 8.2. And I can use it to do everything I do at work. That machine is now 9 years old but I've got updated software on it and a light office suite and I could perfectly easily use it to replace my work machine.
AutoCAD amazes me. I used to use it in '97 on a Pentium I, and in '95 I used it on a 386. How have its memory and processor requirements inflated so much?
No, this is the power of the market. Laptops are mostly commoditized by now, and consumers expect to purchase a laptop that will help them solve problems. Microsoft, for whom I am not an apologist, understands that to the user, a laptop is a black plastic box that users expect good things to come out of. Linux promotors still hope that users will want to tinker with the laptop, since that's what we like to do.
Users' predilection for returning a laptop makes sense in today's market, since users have neither the time nor skills to fix problems like busted VPN connections. What other recourse do people think they have?
This quote from one very disgruntled Jamie Ziewinski comes to mind:
My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
It's a good article anyway and a fun read. Catch the rest at: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html/.
Point is, open source is no solution, and while some of the mechanisms open source developers use to promote transparency and equity are enviable and perhaps even applicable to government processes, it's the equity and transparency that are the key, not the open source-osity.
I strongly support this initiative. For YOUR company. Have fun with it.
In the mean time, we'll be over here, competing with you. Users have no shown themselves to be overly savvy about IT equipment, policies, and configurations in general. So while all hell breaks loose over in your company, we'll be over here doing it the old fashioned way, with professional technical support making informed decisions. Let me know how it works out for you.
Taunting happy fun ball? That's my kind of EULA. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be true. The EULA at the link you provided not only isn't very fun, it exhibits some of my biggest pet peeves with EULAs in general, like:
1. Visit our website from time to time to be aware of the latest version of the agreement [like I have nothing better to do with my time than wonder if my EULAs are up to date? That was convenient for some lawyer but total horse-crap for all users].
2. Consent for us to collect non-personal data [why? I'm purchasing your product because I need a backup; not because I want to be part of your database]
3. Limitation of liability. ["Now that you've given it all up, we'd like to remind you we are responsible for nothing." Big business is great at this: it took me $50 worth of phone calls and 8 months to get a $180 rebate back from Verizon one time, but try paying your cellphone bill 8 months late some time and see how friendly they are with you. The customer is too easily abused].
Bring in the happy fun ball. I hope whoever read that EULA is visiting the website to get the latest version, because the latest version seems to be a whole lot less pleasant than its predecessors. Bastages.
Clarke shaped my adolescence as well; at the age of 13 it was a pleasure to find a book that was so engaging and kept me up at night turning pages. I still think about Clarke when I'm at the computer working on my own writing projects. I've got the latest word processors on four platforms and 'enjoy' things like auto correct and pagination and print preview, etc. but it hasn't made me much of a better writer, and never will.
But Clarke wrote his masterpieces a generation before me, using software like Wordstar, which predates even Word Perfect and has a lot less power and a lot fewer features than, basically, the text editor pico. He seems to have liked upgrading his systems as he went, which means he certainly wasn't using Wordstar to write his most recent works, but when you think of the power and elegance of his novels you realize the hardware and software made exactly zero difference: it was the mind. A little depressing for someone banging away on a brand new x86_64 with 2G of RAM, the latest software, integrated spell checking, and a whole lot more: it's not good enough.
So what comes out instead of a masterpiece is a short article for my website about the beauty of distraction-free writing: http://therandymon.com/content/view/89/98/
That's great.
I propose they call it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob's_Ladder_(film)/ Jacobs Ladder. One of the best movies ever, but it describes this scenario to a T. Way to go Pentagon.
I hate to piss on the parade here, but OSS will sell itself when the software is seen as better quality enough than the paid edition for the learning curve to be worth it. Consumers engage in a cost/benefit analysis when choosing. "I know Windows, so I'll have to learn Linux": cost. "Evolution is an almost-but-not-quite as good alternative to Outlook": cost. Whoops, where's the benefit? "But it's FREE!" Not good enough.
How about:
"I know Windows, so I'll have to learn Linux": cost. "Evolution does everything you want to AND does this new cool thing": benefit. If it's a cool enough new thing, people will go for it.
I'm talking desktop software here. Linux and OSS is wildly popular on the server side because its benefits in that area are obvious and the benefits wildly outweigh the costs. Abiword is a much harder package to try to "sell" to a potential user because its benefits are not quite good enough and the cost is too high (ie the learning curve, not the price).
I love Linux on my desktop but I use it for writing, text processing, and a whole slew of CLI apps, since I'm not much of a GUI fan. But I'm not the kind of computer user you have to convince to use OSS. Those people need software whose benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Sadly, OSS software continues to be in catch up mode on the desktop. Had the OSS folks come up with Apple's Expose and compositing desktop first, or if Abiword did some of the cool stuff that Apple's Pages does, or if Evolution did some cool Facebook/Myspace/whatever (I don't use the stuff) tie-in thingy, you could say, "why are you using that tired old software, when [OSS product] does THIS?"
And it would promote itself.
This has one advantage that I can see. I don't really expect to do much word processing on line, and it's not a collaborative suite, so that's another missed opportunity.
.DOC format and get them reading - and then writing - ODTs, that's progress. This website and software service might be a decent next step in that direction.
But this does give me the ability to send people ODT documents and when they complain "MS Word won't read this" send them to this site so they can read. Basically this gives me a justification to insist on sending people ODT rather than Word. Perhaps some of them will get tired of the website and decide to install OO.o on their own computer.
These days, it's class-A arrogance to send someone an ODT and require them to download and install the huge OO.o suite just so they can read it. Maybe some day Kword/QT4 running on Windows would make an option attractive enough to let people like me force ODT docs on people with a smug "if you want to read it, download the software" but for now Kword/Windows doesn't exist and OO.o is a hefty download that risk-averse computer users will not be interested in installing. There's a third option: http://officeviewers.com/ which is published by softmaker and actually serves as a decent ODT document reader as well. But again, that involves installing software, and not everyone is willing to do that.
In my opinion, this is the easiest way to increase people's awareness of and ability to read ODT documents. You send them the doc and if they haven't got the software, they can read it using the online suite. And if they're curious they can then go install OO.o. In my opinion, OO.o is more valuable as a vehicle for pushing an document format than as an office suite. Even on windows it's a bit slow; on Linux it's slower. And the "almost as good and FREE" line is the worst way to market a software product ever. But if we can wean people off of the
Consider me a satisfied customer of Fastmail. Does everything Gmail does, except target me with ads. I'm so sick of advertising anymore I've taken to reading the web as often as possible in a text-based browser, and the last thing I need is advertising PLUS spam in my mailbox.
That said, Gmail's label system is ingenuous. Opera's M3 email client works in a similar way, and I love it. I hope the people who roll out new standards are able to create a new version of IMAP, if not a replacement protocol, that permits something similar. I used to use a lot of folders, but nowadays I only folderize mailing lists. Everything else goes into the inbox.
Sorry for the inflammatory subject line, but I am the author of a best selling travel guidebook to Nicaragua http://www.gotonicaragua.com/. Travel guidebooks are one area that are the frequent subject of ill-fated "let's do a travel wiki" ideas that immediately turn into steaming piles of horse crap. Here's why: the crowds are stupid; many can't write, and everyone's pushing an agenda.
The reason why travel guidebooks continue to sell in the Internet age is because the Internet is a huge, unfettered mixing bowl of ignorance. People are still willing to turn to professional writers and editors to sort through all the horse crap and turn it into something concise, concrete, and helpful. I too would prefer to pay $17 for a book for my next trip to Morocco than trawl through the Internet forums trying to separate fact from fiction from propaganda.
These travel wikis come and go, but they all bear the same characteristics: huge number of Google ads, a couple of lame wiki posts that two or more prolific authors debate back and forth without conclusion, and huge chunks of background material, insight, or commentary. The masses can't produce that, and anyone who's ever participated in a corporate meeting where 7 people need to come to a conclusion about something they differ in opinion about, knows why.
There's a place for this kind of approach, but mass authoring as I've seen it done, only works if one person is the lead author and has near dictatorial privileges and the diplomacy and savvy to use that power wisely. If you let the madhouse run the party, you get a madhouse. And that's why people like me can still earn the big bucks selling travel information to a place like Nicaragua in the Internet age.
By the way, I helped introduce Linux to Nicaragua. That ought to be worth something on Slashdot! http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/.
August begins next week, and within three weeks zillions of students will head back to school. A lot of them are eying that tasty "buy a Mac, get a free Ipod Nano" advertisement as I write. I suspect macs will spike soon enough.
Not that I care. I've given up advocating Mac OS X. Let Windows keep its monopoly so all the virus writer's choice remains clear. The rest of us can enjoy an easier existence. It's like going into the mosquito swarm with a fat, naked friend. Go get'em! Have fun downloading your latest virus definition file, suckers.
Greetings. I live and work in Africa (http://therandymon.com/content/view/104/59/), so I happen to know a little something about the way things are. Frankly, I don't see the scandal in the fact that Africa doesn't have good access to the Internet, and reject this article on the grounds that (a) as usual, the story is focused on lack of infrastructure, which is not the correct focus, and (b) as usual paints a bleaker picture than neecssary.
It's true service is slower and more expensive but in the capitals and in major cities there is more than enough to go around. In Benin there is dial up service for about $15 per month plus the cost of the phone call, ADSL service in the capital for about $75 a month for 256/128, and if that's not good enough you can pay more (up to $200/month) for greater bandwidth. It's more expensive than I'd like and the service is occasionally down for service, not to mention phone line trouble, saturated networks, and so on, but that's another story. The point is, I've got Internet in the capital (Cotonou, if you care) and it's essentially satisfactory. Inland in places like Burkina Faso and Mali they've got internet connections as well, but they are more expensive and the bandwidth isn't as good, since the network goes through the coastal nations - Ghana, Togo, and Benin. The big agencies - UN, embassies, major companies working in the region - also have available satellite internet at much higher prices.
Lack of infrastructure is not the problem. Lack of a market willing to pay for the service that demands that infrastructure is, and as the market develops the infrastructure will suddenly seem like a worthwhile investment. You don't get Africans connected by building a bunch of equipment and hoping they show up. The second factor is regulation, which is clearly an area where African governments have some growing to do. To build a telecommunications sector (and make no mistake about it, if you put in cable and connections you're building the sector) you need effective government regulation. Unfortunately that has to happen from within, and no multinational company can effectively impose good government (and thus good government oversight) on a nation. The article's story about Kigali is a perfect example of this point.
In the meantime, where's the scandal? I have friends and colleagues who live in small villages inland, not in the capital. Every one of them has a hotmail/yahoo.fr/gmail account, and when they need to use the Internet they go to a cybercafe for a quick hour or two. That fits their budget and works well.
If you want to connect Africa, help educate the people so they can improve their own economic situation. They will form the basis for a stronger economic market for these services, and the system will be sustainable. Impose on these growing countries the infrastructure before they are ready to sustain it and you will just perpetuate the development myth.
Before leaving this post, I highly recommend you read White Man's Burden by William Easterly, if the idea of development interests you. After 40 years of investing in growing countries we know a lot more about it than before, and there are many lessons to be learned.