I don't see how a long-standing industry fact, i.e. that corporate IT departments are unable/unwilling to support an infinite range of hardware options until there is reason enough to do so - gets turned into an inflammatory article dissing the iphone. The fact is, not too long ago IT departments weren't interested in dealing with Blackberries either. When the workers realized how useful they were the IT departments were convinced the new challenge was worth it, and life went on.
I don't see the iphone becoming a corporate toy immediately, but if enough corporate-types adopt the iphone (presumably because it's useful or makes their lives easier) then IT will come around.
Thanks Zonk for the predictably inflammatory headline. Might I suggest something like, "Corporate IT departments would rather commit suicide than support non-Windows hardware." You're already only one step away.
I was looking forward to this article so I could read about the interesting experiences of other PC-BSD users or Linux converts; what a disappointment. Here's a couple of points for folks who haven't used PC-BSD yet and are wondering what it's all about:
1. It's not a new kind of BSD, it's FreeBSD with a graphical installer and the KDE desktop 2. It's FreeBSD. Before you start complaining about how unfriendly you think the OS is, go learn about FreeBSD first. FreeBSD isn't about giving you a fun user experience or the latest version of software, it's about producing a rock-solid Unix OS in a well-engineered environment. That means the man pages are awesome, the choices are well explained, and the system as a coherent whole seems to be better put together than a lot of distros. You don't get a flash plugin for Firefox, you don't get the latest and greatest in drivers. It's FreeBSD.
I have gradually grown frustrated with Linux distros after floating from SUSE to Mepis to Ubuntu to Mandriva to Slackware to Dream and back to SUSE. I thought I'd give BSD a try, but was simply not clever enough to get a straight-up version of FreeBSD to install on my laptop. PC-BSD not only installed with as much ease as SUSE 9.3 (detecting all my hardware, setting up the network, the sound card, and everything else) but left me with a good looking, modern KDE desktop (early write up is here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/). Now that it's installed I can start learning about BSDs the old fashioned way - by learning with some books.
It's got some other interesting things. Its packages are intuitive and easy to use, something I wish Linux distros would adopt for userland software, leaving apt-get and equivalents for system software and power users. I was able to add Opera, my favorite browser, with no fuss and no muss.
It's lacking the driver support of a lot of Linux distros because FreeBSD has always lagged behind in the driver department, and it's not Linux it's BSD so those of you who are looking for another flashy Linux experience will be disappointed to learn it's FreeBSD and requires you to learn some new things.
Basically: if you're looking for a good Unix experience or need help installing FreeBSD on your machine, this is a great way to do it. It's a better introduction to the Unix world than most Linuxes are. It is not however just another Linux distro, and Linux users expecting that will be disappointed, as the comments in this article seem to confirm.
I confess I caught my breath when I read the blurb. Full screen keyboard? PalmOS? Instant on? Sounds great. I am a writer and have yet to find a portable writing tool more convenient and portable than a laptop and more useful than most of the PDAs on the market. This sounded like just the thing. Wrong.
I have yet to find a better tool than the Psion 5 (http://therandymon.com/content/view/86/79/), and increasingly it's my PDA as well. Where's the tool you can keep in a coat pocket, whip out, turn on, and start writing while you're waiting for a train? The Palm T|X with an external keyboard is close, the Nokia 800 with some better software gets close, but that's about it. And they both fail in comparison with the Psion 5, which is now a full ten years old.
The floundering in the PDA market these days is so loud you can actually hear the splashing.
This thing is too big to be useful to me, requires an expensive cellphone I don't want, and seems to cost an arm and a leg. And that means, I get to keep typing away on my Psion, hoping to God it doesn't break, because the market has roundly failed to produce its equal.
And that reminds me, who was on the test panel that told Palm this hunk of junk was a good idea?
It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. On Windows I love OO.o, but I tried NeoOffice and found it slow and not fun to use. That's not to disparage the hard work these folks have done on a very difficult project.
But your blanket statements about iWork are incorrect. I have bought iWork twice and it's a heck of a good software suite. Since we're talking about text docs instead of presentation I'll inform you it's the word processor that gets the use of styles RIGHT. OO.o was close, Word has done some catching up, but Pages (the iWork word processor) makes it easy, makes it efficient, and makes it work. You can do page layout if you'd like, but I use it for report writing and it's great software. As for Appleworks, it's true Apple has left it to wither on the vine, and its word processor was never much to write home about anyway. But Pages is great. We're not discussing presentation software here but I may as well throw this in: Keynote is a better presentation software package than OO.o and it's more fun to use than P-p-p-powerpoint. Its transitions are stunning, it's easy and intuitive to use. Finally, contrary to what you wrote, iWork costs US$79, a far cry from anything Microsoft produces for the Mac.
I don't use Monad (:s/M/G/g) or intend to, so I don't care much about the book. But what a great review. We get a lot of amateur reviews around here, but this one was particularly well written, clear, and informative. Nice job, homie.
I use Photoshop Elements, the cheapo version of Photoshop you get when you buy some scanners or cameras (a scanner in my case). The first couple of times I tried to use it I would get the splash screen, and then it would go out to the Adobe site to look for "updates," suffer bandwidth latency issues, and crap out. A little Googling found a site that tells you how to disable that "feature," which I did immediately.
The only good thing I can think of with regard to an online Photoshop site is that the software will always be up to date, unless Adobe's products can't access their own update site from in house. The fact that Adobe products need their own update manager, which always seems to run poorly and slowly in my experience, worries me with regard to their software.
Yes, it's real. Go up one level in the website and check out some of the articles the author, Kenny Greenberg, wrote about the internet. http://www.neonshop.com/bio/iw/ He's got several interesting things. Kenny Greenberg (kgreenb@panix.com) is a neon artist and owner of Krypton Neon in Long Island City, NY. He authored the chapter "Art on the Internet" for Tricks of the Internet Guru s (Sams).
Looking over the course of this Slashdot thread I'm not surprised by the now-familiar Microsoft-bashing/LaTeX/Lyx recommendation/OO.o zealotry/refusal to pay Softmaker's price. But I have been reading Slashdot now long enough to know the words to this particular song.
I bought Textmaker back in 2003 and liked it so much I also bought Planmaker, their spreadsheet (now sold together). But because I'm a (professional and prolific writer, I care a lot about my tools, and I've tried just about all of the products out there; plus, because I use Windows at work and both Linux and Macs at home, I've been exposed to a lot of word processors.
On Linux, I use Textmaker. Here's why.
Stable. I've never crashed it, even with ridiculously complicated documents
Fast. I like OO.o but on my old 555Mhz PIII it's unbearably slow to start up, and on my Mac, NeoOffice is just not fast enough, and even repainting the screen after a window stretch/shrink is ghastly. I appreciate the effort and even use the software, but it's not the first thing I reach for. On Textmaker menus are snappy, the graphics are fast, and things work as though it had been designed and built by professionals that want to make a product good enough to convince people to spend money on it.
Easy to use. That means keyboard shortcuts for everything, sensibly laid out, familiar interface, professional.
Lightweight. It's been designed to be resource friendly and is, even on my outdated hardware.
Fast enough to be a useful document previewer for your mail client so you can get a glimpse of what's in the Word docs I receive.
Basically, it's fast, reliable, and works well. Its Word doc import is much better quality than OO.o's. I gave Abiword a try but rejected it because of frequent crashes and a somewhat amateurish feel to it; Kword has never been usable for more than simple letters in my opinion and the font kerning issues make Kword printed documents ugly. OO.o is simply too slow in spite of all its other endearing qualities.
Textmaker's downside? The TML format is a mystery to me, so I don't use it. You can save to Doc format as a default, but I hate Docs. I would be thrilled if they would adopt the ODT format. It's also not as feature rich as OO.o, which is in turn not as feature rich as Word. On the Mac there are far better alternatives (I happen to love Mellel, and Apple's Pages is top-notch). And I use LaTeX for what it does best, and RTF or even plain text all other times.
But face it, GNU/Linux (and BSD more so) lacks a small, fast, good word processor. Abiword and Kword are fast but not good, and OO.o is good but not fast. For professional writers that care about their work and their tools, this is a great piece of software and I'm not alone in representing a market of GNU/Linux OSF fans that believes in freedom but is not against paying for software (SUSE, Rekall, Textmaker, Planmaker, Xandros, NoMachines) if with that software comes additional quality, reliability, or convenience. Textmaker provides all three.
Finally, the above doesn't even take into consideration the fact that its primary market isn't Linux/BSD in the first place, it's Windows users that synch docs to a PocketPC. And in that niche, it is unsurpassed and very critically acclaimed. Be glad they even make a Linux version at all, whiney slashdotters.
From the article: "Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name. Despite the many unfortunate examples of greed, Internet entrepreneurs aren't all about getting rich quick and cashing out.
Slashdot, on the other hand, sold out to OSDN, and has never been the same since. They could've done worse than OSDN as corporate overlords, but still, there are a lot of ex-dotters out there who miss the early days.
I agree, although frankly, Mutt is one of the things that keeps me using Linux. I really love it. This is as good a place as any to plug my Woodnotes Guide to Using Mutt, available at my website in HTML and PDF format: http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/79/
It goes into setting up SMTP as well as walking you through Mutt usage and configuration in general and is released under a creative commons license. Enjoy.
As for Pine, I don't like it as much as Mutt but still use it from time to time, particularly when I'm setting a new system, haven't gotten Mutt configured right, and want to check to see if I'm able to connect using Pine instead. It's not configurable enough to float my boat, but I would switch in a second if for some reason Mutt disappeared. I am far more productive at a non-GUI interface.
I agree with the need to deal with merging. Unfortunately it's not always easy when there are conflicting file dates. Do you always choose the new file? Ask on an individual basis? I struggled with this while synchronizing two computers and finally gave up and bought synchronizing software, which deals with this problem, as well as others. Chronosoft provides very intelligent merging algorithms and other routines that have been helpful in making two folders into one.
First look? I saw one of these ages ago, back when they were called the Psion 5 (see http://therandymon.com/content/view/86/79/). Awright, the Psion didn't network at all, but it had a better keyboard and the two double-A batteries that kept it running lasted over 3 months.
This is neat, but if I bought something like this it would be to write on, and that means the keyboard isn't good enough, the battery doesn't last long enough, and it's too heavy. We're still reinventing the wheel, poorly.
The answer is simple - your users will pay it. Interested in receiving a weekly email from the dance group? It will cost you $2 per month. Not interested in the weekly? Sign up for the monthly version for $0.50. The group will use those revenues to pay its SMTP bill.
Charging for email won't put any small organizations in the poorhouse, just cause them to rethink how they operate.
what if you're not familiar with kittens? Or foxes? What if you've never seen real cattle?
Then, you are basically at the point where you need to step away from the keyboard and go outside for awhile. I'm aware that maybe not everyone is aware of the difference between a llama and an alpaca, or other exotic things, but really, kittens? I work in international economic development and have worked in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and EVERYBODY knows what a kitten is.
Let's just assume your average internet user is slightly more intelligent than a vegetative state, shall we?
My own rather inadequate trial and comparison story here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/. I had bad luck with Desktop BSD's hardware support, which gave me trouble with a network card more than one Linux distro has choked on too, for some reason. Overall I am impressed with the BSDs and intend to keep trying them out. It's impressive from a Linux user's point of view how everything fits so well together and is so well integrated. After years of Linux' organized chaos, it's a nice change. I remain on Linux for the moment, but it's only a matter of time...
I don't buy that excuse at all. I purchased a domain that came with the Cpanel and Fantastico script, and installing Joomla was a piece of cake that involved nothing more than supplying a name and password and choosing the root directory. The folks that make Fantastico are geniuses. Installing Joomla was no harder than opening a Gmail mail account, and using Joomla since then is as easy as clicking on big colorful buttons.
This screenshot seems to indicate SUSE has copied the concept of the "phenomenally confusing start menu" from Windows XP. That new start menu in XP is the first thing I turn off. How is it possible that the folks at Novell decided to just chase Microsoft, bad ideas and all, "in the name of user familiarity" rather than make good design decisions on their own?
This is one aspect I hope stays in the dumpster. Meanwhile, I'm happy with SUSE 9.2, which runs well on my PIII 555 Mhz Compaq (bought in 2000), so it's just academic to me anyway.
Yeah, rocket scientist: that explains Microsoft Office's really weak sales. For your information I take a look around every computer store I go into to see what kind of boxed software is selling. In the Washington DC Best Buys there used to be a single copy of StarOffice for sale and now there isn't. They don't even bother to sell it any more. Meanwhile, Microsoft Office enjoys the star location in the center of the laptop shelves on a big "recommended purchase" stand.
Say what you like about office suites, the folks in Redmond are making big bucks off of them.
But I find myself using emacs less and less frequently. My first complaint is getting emacs and my Linux console to work correctly with diacritical marks. I know that's a function not only of emacs but also the packagers of my distribution, plus a deplorable lack of easily-installed console fonts that contain those glyphs. But regardless of whose fault it is, this problem makes it hard for me to get my work done the way I want to.
I also need to program lots of small macros for very specific text editing features while writing a book that requires a silly markup format unique to the industry. Emacs was simply too hard to program for me to be able to implement it. Instead, I found Jedit, which easily facilitated things like switching between soft and hard wrap, keystroke macros, and some features I now find indispensable, like search and replace across all documents in a directory.
It's not that emacs doesn't or can't implement these features, it's that it doesn't do so easily. I wrote up a little page about the macros and jedit features I use most frequently. It would be extremely difficult to publish similar instructions for emacs because of the greater difficult inherent in installing, using, and sharing macros.
I still use emacs, but I use it for emailing, in conjunction with Mutt, the world's best email client. And for writing, I tend to stick to Jedit. Best of luck to emacs, which I still like, but I think for people like me the world has progressed and emacs is of limited use.
Wow - it wasn't so long ago that people were complaining Linux had no chance because it *didn't* have antialiasing. While your complaint is certainly valid, I'd venture you are in a very sharp minority of people who prefer unaliased fonts. I've been using SUSE since it was SuSE. I bought version 7.1 and was thrilled to upgrade to version 8.0 because it offered antialiased fonts for most KDE applications. And what a huge difference it made.
Very very few users will complain about lack of antialiased fonts. That doesn't mean SUSE shouldn't deal with the issue; it just means it's not exactly a showstopper compared to many other issues.
You say ``I'd like this if they sold $20 dumb terminals to use it...''
That's exactly the point. Once the world moves to this kind of architecture, they will. You'll go down to your local electronics store and choose between the $400 Dell/Gateway/whatever with hard drive and monitor onto which you have to install and support your own software, deal with virus updates, etc. etc. Then on the next shelf you'll notice the $20 terminal sold by Verizon/AT&T/Comcast/whatever. You pay $30/month (you were paying $25/month just for broadband anyway) for access to online apps, with no need to worry about installing or maintaining software. Seems easier to you, and it's definitely cheaper. Guess which one a lot of people will be going for? I know what I'd do. I'm a writer, and as much as I enjoy putzing around with my computer, it might be worth it for me to subscribe to something like this so I could just get my writing done.
Someone has already done that but it's for the Mac platform and it's called Mellel. They have made no effort at all to ape Microsoft Word. They have made a lot of great design decisions. To everyone who starts to cry "but existing Word users will never get used to the interface" the answer is "too bad. This software isn't for them. This software is for writers who want it done right." Mellel
I happen to like emacs as my text editor for text-type things like email and prose, but I use vim exclusively for editing config files. I'm an editor junky though, so I've tried just about every editor I could find out there. I love Jed because it's quicker than emacs to start up and has a nice LaTeX environment. My biggest complaint is how much work it takes to get a good console environment configured in order to write using accented characters. The combination of console, framebuffer, and text editor eccentricities drive me to a macintosh more often than not.
This review seems like as a good a place as any to post a link to one of my creations, the Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers, by yours truly. It covers using emacs for writing and editing text/fiction/prose, not for programming. Available in PDF at http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for-writer s.pdf (HTML version: http://www.therandymon.com/linux/woodnotes/emacswr iter/emacs-for-writers.html). A corresponding reference card (PDF) is at http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-writers-ch eatsheet.pdf. Be kind - I'm on a limited bandwidth host and it's the beginning of the month.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how a long-standing industry fact, i.e. that corporate IT departments are unable/unwilling to support an infinite range of hardware options until there is reason enough to do so - gets turned into an inflammatory article dissing the iphone. The fact is, not too long ago IT departments weren't interested in dealing with Blackberries either. When the workers realized how useful they were the IT departments were convinced the new challenge was worth it, and life went on.
I don't see the iphone becoming a corporate toy immediately, but if enough corporate-types adopt the iphone (presumably because it's useful or makes their lives easier) then IT will come around.
Thanks Zonk for the predictably inflammatory headline. Might I suggest something like, "Corporate IT departments would rather commit suicide than support non-Windows hardware." You're already only one step away.
I was looking forward to this article so I could read about the interesting experiences of other PC-BSD users or Linux converts; what a disappointment. Here's a couple of points for folks who haven't used PC-BSD yet and are wondering what it's all about:
1. It's not a new kind of BSD, it's FreeBSD with a graphical installer and the KDE desktop
2. It's FreeBSD. Before you start complaining about how unfriendly you think the OS is, go learn about FreeBSD first. FreeBSD isn't about giving you a fun user experience or the latest version of software, it's about producing a rock-solid Unix OS in a well-engineered environment. That means the man pages are awesome, the choices are well explained, and the system as a coherent whole seems to be better put together than a lot of distros. You don't get a flash plugin for Firefox, you don't get the latest and greatest in drivers. It's FreeBSD.
I have gradually grown frustrated with Linux distros after floating from SUSE to Mepis to Ubuntu to Mandriva to Slackware to Dream and back to SUSE. I thought I'd give BSD a try, but was simply not clever enough to get a straight-up version of FreeBSD to install on my laptop. PC-BSD not only installed with as much ease as SUSE 9.3 (detecting all my hardware, setting up the network, the sound card, and everything else) but left me with a good looking, modern KDE desktop (early write up is here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/). Now that it's installed I can start learning about BSDs the old fashioned way - by learning with some books.
It's got some other interesting things. Its packages are intuitive and easy to use, something I wish Linux distros would adopt for userland software, leaving apt-get and equivalents for system software and power users. I was able to add Opera, my favorite browser, with no fuss and no muss.
It's lacking the driver support of a lot of Linux distros because FreeBSD has always lagged behind in the driver department, and it's not Linux it's BSD so those of you who are looking for another flashy Linux experience will be disappointed to learn it's FreeBSD and requires you to learn some new things.
Basically: if you're looking for a good Unix experience or need help installing FreeBSD on your machine, this is a great way to do it. It's a better introduction to the Unix world than most Linuxes are. It is not however just another Linux distro, and Linux users expecting that will be disappointed, as the comments in this article seem to confirm.
I confess I caught my breath when I read the blurb. Full screen keyboard? PalmOS? Instant on? Sounds great. I am a writer and have yet to find a portable writing tool more convenient and portable than a laptop and more useful than most of the PDAs on the market. This sounded like just the thing. Wrong.
I have yet to find a better tool than the Psion 5 (http://therandymon.com/content/view/86/79/), and increasingly it's my PDA as well. Where's the tool you can keep in a coat pocket, whip out, turn on, and start writing while you're waiting for a train? The Palm T|X with an external keyboard is close, the Nokia 800 with some better software gets close, but that's about it. And they both fail in comparison with the Psion 5, which is now a full ten years old.
The floundering in the PDA market these days is so loud you can actually hear the splashing.
This thing is too big to be useful to me, requires an expensive cellphone I don't want, and seems to cost an arm and a leg. And that means, I get to keep typing away on my Psion, hoping to God it doesn't break, because the market has roundly failed to produce its equal.
And that reminds me, who was on the test panel that told Palm this hunk of junk was a good idea?
It's clear you don't know what you're talking about. On Windows I love OO.o, but I tried NeoOffice and found it slow and not fun to use. That's not to disparage the hard work these folks have done on a very difficult project.
But your blanket statements about iWork are incorrect. I have bought iWork twice and it's a heck of a good software suite. Since we're talking about text docs instead of presentation I'll inform you it's the word processor that gets the use of styles RIGHT. OO.o was close, Word has done some catching up, but Pages (the iWork word processor) makes it easy, makes it efficient, and makes it work. You can do page layout if you'd like, but I use it for report writing and it's great software. As for Appleworks, it's true Apple has left it to wither on the vine, and its word processor was never much to write home about anyway. But Pages is great. We're not discussing presentation software here but I may as well throw this in: Keynote is a better presentation software package than OO.o and it's more fun to use than P-p-p-powerpoint. Its transitions are stunning, it's easy and intuitive to use. Finally, contrary to what you wrote, iWork costs US$79, a far cry from anything Microsoft produces for the Mac.
I don't use Monad (:s/M/G/g) or intend to, so I don't care much about the book. But what a great review. We get a lot of amateur reviews around here, but this one was particularly well written, clear, and informative. Nice job, homie.
I use Photoshop Elements, the cheapo version of Photoshop you get when you buy some scanners or cameras (a scanner in my case). The first couple of times I tried to use it I would get the splash screen, and then it would go out to the Adobe site to look for "updates," suffer bandwidth latency issues, and crap out. A little Googling found a site that tells you how to disable that "feature," which I did immediately.
The only good thing I can think of with regard to an online Photoshop site is that the software will always be up to date, unless Adobe's products can't access their own update site from in house. The fact that Adobe products need their own update manager, which always seems to run poorly and slowly in my experience, worries me with regard to their software.
Yes, it's real. Go up one level in the website and check out some of the articles the author, Kenny Greenberg, wrote about the internet. http://www.neonshop.com/bio/iw/ He's got several interesting things. Kenny Greenberg (kgreenb@panix.com) is a neon artist and owner of Krypton Neon in Long Island City, NY. He authored the chapter "Art on the Internet" for Tricks of the Internet Guru s (Sams).
Looking over the course of this Slashdot thread I'm not surprised by the now-familiar Microsoft-bashing/LaTeX/Lyx recommendation/OO.o zealotry/refusal to pay Softmaker's price. But I have been reading Slashdot now long enough to know the words to this particular song.
I bought Textmaker back in 2003 and liked it so much I also bought Planmaker, their spreadsheet (now sold together). But because I'm a (professional and prolific writer, I care a lot about my tools, and I've tried just about all of the products out there; plus, because I use Windows at work and both Linux and Macs at home, I've been exposed to a lot of word processors.
On Linux, I use Textmaker. Here's why.
Stable. I've never crashed it, even with ridiculously complicated documents
Fast. I like OO.o but on my old 555Mhz PIII it's unbearably slow to start up, and on my Mac, NeoOffice is just not fast enough, and even repainting the screen after a window stretch/shrink is ghastly. I appreciate the effort and even use the software, but it's not the first thing I reach for. On Textmaker menus are snappy, the graphics are fast, and things work as though it had been designed and built by professionals that want to make a product good enough to convince people to spend money on it.
Easy to use. That means keyboard shortcuts for everything, sensibly laid out, familiar interface, professional.
Lightweight. It's been designed to be resource friendly and is, even on my outdated hardware.
Fast enough to be a useful document previewer for your mail client so you can get a glimpse of what's in the Word docs I receive.
Basically, it's fast, reliable, and works well. Its Word doc import is much better quality than OO.o's. I gave Abiword a try but rejected it because of frequent crashes and a somewhat amateurish feel to it; Kword has never been usable for more than simple letters in my opinion and the font kerning issues make Kword printed documents ugly. OO.o is simply too slow in spite of all its other endearing qualities.
Textmaker's downside? The TML format is a mystery to me, so I don't use it. You can save to Doc format as a default, but I hate Docs. I would be thrilled if they would adopt the ODT format. It's also not as feature rich as OO.o, which is in turn not as feature rich as Word. On the Mac there are far better alternatives (I happen to love Mellel, and Apple's Pages is top-notch). And I use LaTeX for what it does best, and RTF or even plain text all other times.
But face it, GNU/Linux (and BSD more so) lacks a small, fast, good word processor. Abiword and Kword are fast but not good, and OO.o is good but not fast. For professional writers that care about their work and their tools, this is a great piece of software and I'm not alone in representing a market of GNU/Linux OSF fans that believes in freedom but is not against paying for software (SUSE, Rekall, Textmaker, Planmaker, Xandros, NoMachines) if with that software comes additional quality, reliability, or convenience. Textmaker provides all three.
Finally, the above doesn't even take into consideration the fact that its primary market isn't Linux/BSD in the first place, it's Windows users that synch docs to a PocketPC. And in that niche, it is unsurpassed and very critically acclaimed. Be glad they even make a Linux version at all, whiney slashdotters.
From the article:
"Their noble stance gives entrepreneurs from San Francisco a great name. Despite the many unfortunate examples of greed, Internet entrepreneurs aren't all about getting rich quick and cashing out.
Slashdot, on the other hand, sold out to OSDN, and has never been the same since. They could've done worse than OSDN as corporate overlords, but still, there are a lot of ex-dotters out there who miss the early days.
I'm surprised they missed this one. I mean, BSD is pretty geeky. http://www.uberg33k.com/gallery/view_album.php?set _albumName=bsdgirl-large
Warning: probably not work safe, depending on where you work.
I agree, although frankly, Mutt is one of the things that keeps me using Linux. I really love it. This is as good a place as any to plug my Woodnotes Guide to Using Mutt, available at my website in HTML and PDF format: http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/79/
It goes into setting up SMTP as well as walking you through Mutt usage and configuration in general and is released under a creative commons license. Enjoy.
As for Pine, I don't like it as much as Mutt but still use it from time to time, particularly when I'm setting a new system, haven't gotten Mutt configured right, and want to check to see if I'm able to connect using Pine instead. It's not configurable enough to float my boat, but I would switch in a second if for some reason Mutt disappeared. I am far more productive at a non-GUI interface.
I don't have time to read TFA. Can someone just copy the image and send it to me by email?
Because that's what everyone else does to me. Jeez, one friend sent me an "update" with over 10MB of photos in it to me today.
I agree with the need to deal with merging. Unfortunately it's not always easy when there are conflicting file dates. Do you always choose the new file? Ask on an individual basis? I struggled with this while synchronizing two computers and finally gave up and bought synchronizing software, which deals with this problem, as well as others. Chronosoft provides very intelligent merging algorithms and other routines that have been helpful in making two folders into one.
This is neat, but if I bought something like this it would be to write on, and that means the keyboard isn't good enough, the battery doesn't last long enough, and it's too heavy. We're still reinventing the wheel, poorly.
The answer is simple - your users will pay it. Interested in receiving a weekly email from the dance group? It will cost you $2 per month. Not interested in the weekly? Sign up for the monthly version for $0.50. The group will use those revenues to pay its SMTP bill.
Charging for email won't put any small organizations in the poorhouse, just cause them to rethink how they operate.
what if you're not familiar with kittens? Or foxes? What if you've never seen real cattle?
Then, you are basically at the point where you need to step away from the keyboard and go outside for awhile. I'm aware that maybe not everyone is aware of the difference between a llama and an alpaca, or other exotic things, but really, kittens? I work in international economic development and have worked in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and EVERYBODY knows what a kitten is.
Let's just assume your average internet user is slightly more intelligent than a vegetative state, shall we?
My own rather inadequate trial and comparison story here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/. I had bad luck with Desktop BSD's hardware support, which gave me trouble with a network card more than one Linux distro has choked on too, for some reason. Overall I am impressed with the BSDs and intend to keep trying them out. It's impressive from a Linux user's point of view how everything fits so well together and is so well integrated. After years of Linux' organized chaos, it's a nice change. I remain on Linux for the moment, but it's only a matter of time ...
I don't buy that excuse at all. I purchased a domain that came with the Cpanel and Fantastico script, and installing Joomla was a piece of cake that involved nothing more than supplying a name and password and choosing the root directory. The folks that make Fantastico are geniuses. Installing Joomla was no harder than opening a Gmail mail account, and using Joomla since then is as easy as clicking on big colorful buttons.
This screenshot seems to indicate SUSE has copied the concept of the "phenomenally confusing start menu" from Windows XP. That new start menu in XP is the first thing I turn off. How is it possible that the folks at Novell decided to just chase Microsoft, bad ideas and all, "in the name of user familiarity" rather than make good design decisions on their own? This is one aspect I hope stays in the dumpster. Meanwhile, I'm happy with SUSE 9.2, which runs well on my PIII 555 Mhz Compaq (bought in 2000), so it's just academic to me anyway.
Yeah, rocket scientist: that explains Microsoft Office's really weak sales. For your information I take a look around every computer store I go into to see what kind of boxed software is selling. In the Washington DC Best Buys there used to be a single copy of StarOffice for sale and now there isn't. They don't even bother to sell it any more. Meanwhile, Microsoft Office enjoys the star location in the center of the laptop shelves on a big "recommended purchase" stand.
Say what you like about office suites, the folks in Redmond are making big bucks off of them.
Despite the trollish title of this post, I'm essentially an emacs fan. I am a writer, not a coder, and prefer the command line over GUI. I am the author of the Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers (HTML) (PDF Version) and a bunch of books and papers..
But I find myself using emacs less and less frequently. My first complaint is getting emacs and my Linux console to work correctly with diacritical marks. I know that's a function not only of emacs but also the packagers of my distribution, plus a deplorable lack of easily-installed console fonts that contain those glyphs. But regardless of whose fault it is, this problem makes it hard for me to get my work done the way I want to.
I also need to program lots of small macros for very specific text editing features while writing a book that requires a silly markup format unique to the industry. Emacs was simply too hard to program for me to be able to implement it. Instead, I found Jedit, which easily facilitated things like switching between soft and hard wrap, keystroke macros, and some features I now find indispensable, like search and replace across all documents in a directory.
It's not that emacs doesn't or can't implement these features, it's that it doesn't do so easily. I wrote up a little page about the macros and jedit features I use most frequently. It would be extremely difficult to publish similar instructions for emacs because of the greater difficult inherent in installing, using, and sharing macros.
I still use emacs, but I use it for emailing, in conjunction with Mutt, the world's best email client. And for writing, I tend to stick to Jedit. Best of luck to emacs, which I still like, but I think for people like me the world has progressed and emacs is of limited use.
Wow - it wasn't so long ago that people were complaining Linux had no chance because it *didn't* have antialiasing. While your complaint is certainly valid, I'd venture you are in a very sharp minority of people who prefer unaliased fonts. I've been using SUSE since it was SuSE. I bought version 7.1 and was thrilled to upgrade to version 8.0 because it offered antialiased fonts for most KDE applications. And what a huge difference it made.
Very very few users will complain about lack of antialiased fonts. That doesn't mean SUSE shouldn't deal with the issue; it just means it's not exactly a showstopper compared to many other issues.
You say ``I'd like this if they sold $20 dumb terminals to use it...''
That's exactly the point. Once the world moves to this kind of architecture, they will. You'll go down to your local electronics store and choose between the $400 Dell/Gateway/whatever with hard drive and monitor onto which you have to install and support your own software, deal with virus updates, etc. etc. Then on the next shelf you'll notice the $20 terminal sold by Verizon/AT&T/Comcast/whatever. You pay $30/month (you were paying $25/month just for broadband anyway) for access to online apps, with no need to worry about installing or maintaining software. Seems easier to you, and it's definitely cheaper. Guess which one a lot of people will be going for? I know what I'd do. I'm a writer, and as much as I enjoy putzing around with my computer, it might be worth it for me to subscribe to something like this so I could just get my writing done.
Someone has already done that but it's for the Mac platform and it's called Mellel. They have made no effort at all to ape Microsoft Word. They have made a lot of great design decisions. To everyone who starts to cry "but existing Word users will never get used to the interface" the answer is "too bad. This software isn't for them. This software is for writers who want it done right." Mellel
I happen to like emacs as my text editor for text-type things like email and prose, but I use vim exclusively for editing config files. I'm an editor junky though, so I've tried just about every editor I could find out there. I love Jed because it's quicker than emacs to start up and has a nice LaTeX environment. My biggest complaint is how much work it takes to get a good console environment configured in order to write using accented characters. The combination of console, framebuffer, and text editor eccentricities drive me to a macintosh more often than not. This review seems like as a good a place as any to post a link to one of my creations, the Woodnotes Guide to Emacs for Writers, by yours truly. It covers using emacs for writing and editing text/fiction/prose, not for programming. Available in PDF at http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-for-writer s.pdf (HTML version: http://www.therandymon.com/linux/woodnotes/emacswr iter/emacs-for-writers.html). A corresponding reference card (PDF) is at http://www.therandymon.com/papers/emacs-writers-ch eatsheet.pdf. Be kind - I'm on a limited bandwidth host and it's the beginning of the month.