What sucks is the rest of the suite. hand any Excel jockey a copy of Calc and he'll laugh you right out of the room, there are too many things the Excel Jockeys use that just isn't there, likewise with Access and love it or hate it Access is used a LOT in SMBs.
...Except if you want more than 255 columns. The Excel blows and Calc rocks.
Me too! One of my childhood rainy-day activities was to start at a random article in our World Book Encyclopedia (1973 edition FTW!), read it, then go on to the "see also"'s, etc etc. It would end with about a dozen volumes laying open all over the floor as I was too lazy to replace them as I'd read them... Even though the 1973 edition then in the mid-late 1980's was probably out of date for modern-day things, it still was useful for history etc.
I've never understood the hatred for MemoryStick, unless it's that no one but Sony uses it.
That's the problem right there. Vendor lock-in. While everyone else was moving to MMC or SD card, sony insisted on using their own format memory card for their own devices. Which would not be a problem, except that they were much more expensive (~2x IIRC) than generic media.
Also you couldn't use your Sony memory stick in anything else; an SD card doesn't have that problem.
As an electronics engineer/embedded software/FPGA developer, I agree that the Mac sucks for most of those things. For hardware design, unfortunately Windows is the only game in town, unless you spend some serious coin on high-end UNIX workstations and software to match. Even then Orcad or Altium designer would be more than adequate for most designers.
For embedded software, I prefer Linux as a dev platform. Mostly because I use custom Makefiles and a bash shell to do most of my coding, so when on Windows I have to revert to cygwin. The main advantage of using windows for embedded stuff is that there are usually installers for toolchains available, which means that I can run a consistent toolchain across multiple machines/developers, and archive the toolchain with the code when releasing.
For FPGA development, Linux and windows are equivalent these days, with both the major vendors offering Linux versions of their software alongside the windows ones. They also both offer free (gratis, not libre) versions of their software for both platforms these days, too (no more running Altera QUartus under WINE...).
Unfortunately OSX is nowhere on the radar for any of this stuff, although I admit to using my macbook pro for embedded dev, although the crippled command-line tools are a hindrance on occasion (example: sed not accepting \t in a replace command).
When it comes to the creative arts, though, the mac is without peer IMO. Horses for courses I guess...
Or that other software house that released 3.0, 3.10, 3.11, 95, NT, 98, 2000 (oops, version numbers not 2k compliant), XP, 2003, vista, 7.
Make up your mind people. Version numbers, years or names. Pick one, please. Your inconsistency does not reflect well.
I absolutely hate and detest keyboards with the home and end keys hidden like those ones - the EDA software I use uses home and end for navigation around the layout, so I am lost with them in any other place than the regular 'AT' layout.
A complete reinstall takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and since you keep all your settings, all you'll need to do is use apt-get to reinstall whatever non default programs you use and you'll be ready to go.
To install exactly the same programs, before you blow it away, be sure to dpkg --get-selections >selections to find out what's installed, then dpkg --set-selections <selections ; apt-get -u select (or similar) to restore.
I'm sure a lot of kids in that situation would rather lead a "normal life" than be cooped up at home with no friends, nothing to do but play playstation and watch dvds, etc.
Some random data entry chick is just going to be losing time, and right now theres plenty of replacements if I do catch her on omgponys.net. I just don't want to be out the extra $2k to recruit a replacement - so removing the temptation works bloody wonders.
If she quits because she can't browse the web... well fuck... she was on track to getting fired anyway. Replacements are easy.
If there's something that really really needs to be done at ten to 5 that takes 15 minutes to do, well, you're just going to have to wait until tomorrow. Your deadline doesn't matter to me, because quite frankly, I don't matter to you. Sorry, you'll be staying after 5 to do the data entry because I'm outta here.
Seriously: I *hope* things like this will help drive the clean-up of the code, but until Somebody Big (Canonical, Red Hat, IBM) gets on the issue of identifying the projects that don't cross-compile gracefully (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GLIBC) and helping the maintainers fix that, it is going to be difficult for the various software sources to make their apps available under That Which Is Not X86.
Yeah, I hear you. I've fought on and off with both openembedded and pokylinux (an OE derivative), and can't even get a basic toolchain built on my bog-standard ubuntu 8.10 desktop, let alone cross-compiling anything.
It should get better, though, when Ubuntu ARM Edition is released. This was announced at LCA 2009 by David Mandala from Canonical. He basically said they had a large proportion of the desktop repository already building, and were working on the rest. IIRC he said they hoped to have it pretty much done by the next release (9.04).
ARM's OMAP 3 is the news: it's a non-Intel netbook.
A barrier is applications for the platform: I'm sure Windows doesn't run on it; and they'll be few binary linux applications. But I think the web is now mature enough, so web apps + multimedia.
You're almost right, except for the lack of applications bit. Ubuntu is right at this moment creating an ARM distribution, with the full repository available. Yes, that's right, the full desktop ubuntu repository will be available for ARM. It was announced at this year's Linux.conf.au conference by David Mandala, from Canonical.
Windows upgrades lead to nothing but pain and suffering. Anyone actually running an upgrade is crazy. Clean, fresh install is the way to go.
Well, call me crazy then. I have an older laptop with no CD drive, and no usb boot option. How to get windows XP onto it? Why, install win98 onto another machine, dd+netcat it across to the laptop hard drive, then run the XP upgrade over the network. Not the most fun thing I've ever done, but certainly it works.
Of course, the machine runs much better now it's got ubuntu on it...
I digress though, my point was that that the idea of the fanatical free linux guy is far from a strawman, I'd just be interested to see how many there are compared to Windows and Mac users who just pirate everything but don't talk about it.
Well, in my experience, the Linux guys are the ones who care the most about the license, and making sure they don't break it. Whether that license is proprietary or F/OSS, linux people are the most likely to pay more than a cursory glance.
Most if not all of the apps already mentioned have native Free equivalents that are as good, if not better.
Specifically, the majority seem to be DVD or MP3 programs, which are already heavily targeted.
Although, more officially-supported WINE apps is certainly good for regression testing the codebase.
Slashdot Mirror
From that link:
Excel 2010:
Worksheet size 65,536 rows by 256 columns
Sorry, 256 columns. My Bad.
What sucks is the rest of the suite. hand any Excel jockey a copy of Calc and he'll laugh you right out of the room, there are too many things the Excel Jockeys use that just isn't there, likewise with Access and love it or hate it Access is used a LOT in SMBs.
...Except if you want more than 255 columns. The Excel blows and Calc rocks.
Have you tried out oolite?
Maybe a fourth regret was not paying attention in class when they were teaching basic counting skills.
...Much like the karma system on slashdot?
Me too! One of my childhood rainy-day activities was to start at a random article in our World Book Encyclopedia (1973 edition FTW!), read it, then go on to the "see also"'s, etc etc. It would end with about a dozen volumes laying open all over the floor as I was too lazy to replace them as I'd read them... Even though the 1973 edition then in the mid-late 1980's was probably out of date for modern-day things, it still was useful for history etc.
Immunisation caused autism. Science FTW!
I've never understood the hatred for MemoryStick, unless it's that no one but Sony uses it.
That's the problem right there. Vendor lock-in. While everyone else was moving to MMC or SD card, sony insisted on using their own format memory card for their own devices. Which would not be a problem, except that they were much more expensive (~2x IIRC) than generic media. Also you couldn't use your Sony memory stick in anything else; an SD card doesn't have that problem.
As an electronics engineer/embedded software/FPGA developer, I agree that the Mac sucks for most of those things. For hardware design, unfortunately Windows is the only game in town, unless you spend some serious coin on high-end UNIX workstations and software to match. Even then Orcad or Altium designer would be more than adequate for most designers. For embedded software, I prefer Linux as a dev platform. Mostly because I use custom Makefiles and a bash shell to do most of my coding, so when on Windows I have to revert to cygwin. The main advantage of using windows for embedded stuff is that there are usually installers for toolchains available, which means that I can run a consistent toolchain across multiple machines/developers, and archive the toolchain with the code when releasing. For FPGA development, Linux and windows are equivalent these days, with both the major vendors offering Linux versions of their software alongside the windows ones. They also both offer free (gratis, not libre) versions of their software for both platforms these days, too (no more running Altera QUartus under WINE...). Unfortunately OSX is nowhere on the radar for any of this stuff, although I admit to using my macbook pro for embedded dev, although the crippled command-line tools are a hindrance on occasion (example: sed not accepting \t in a replace command). When it comes to the creative arts, though, the mac is without peer IMO. Horses for courses I guess...
Can anyone who went to LCA this year tell me where it's going to be held next year?
I can just imagine a million people all standing beside their cars, constantly hammering the grid to try and beat the que.
What, like they do at gas stations?
Or that other software house that released 3.0, 3.10, 3.11, 95, NT, 98, 2000 (oops, version numbers not 2k compliant), XP, 2003, vista, 7. Make up your mind people. Version numbers, years or names. Pick one, please. Your inconsistency does not reflect well.
I absolutely hate and detest keyboards with the home and end keys hidden like those ones - the EDA software I use uses home and end for navigation around the layout, so I am lost with them in any other place than the regular 'AT' layout.
I personally have a stockpile of 5 or 6 of these, plus another complete set of keycaps. I love my Model M.
What about trying wget with some post-parsing with sed/awk/grep (or perl)?
A complete reinstall takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and since you keep all your settings, all you'll need to do is use apt-get to reinstall whatever non default programs you use and you'll be ready to go.
To install exactly the same programs, before you blow it away, be sure to dpkg --get-selections >selections to find out what's installed, then dpkg --set-selections <selections ; apt-get -u select (or similar) to restore.
I'm sure a lot of kids in that situation would rather lead a "normal life" than be cooped up at home with no friends, nothing to do but play playstation and watch dvds, etc.
Maybe for you.
Some random data entry chick is just going to be losing time, and right now theres plenty of replacements if I do catch her on omgponys.net. I just don't want to be out the extra $2k to recruit a replacement - so removing the temptation works bloody wonders.
If she quits because she can't browse the web... well fuck... she was on track to getting fired anyway. Replacements are easy.
If there's something that really really needs to be done at ten to 5 that takes 15 minutes to do, well, you're just going to have to wait until tomorrow. Your deadline doesn't matter to me, because quite frankly, I don't matter to you. Sorry, you'll be staying after 5 to do the data entry because I'm outta here.
Regards, Random Data Entry Chick
Yeah, and you can run all your heavy apps on one server ... like, for instance, Virtualbox with 17,000 instances of WinXP :-).
Seriously: I *hope* things like this will help drive the clean-up of the code, but until Somebody Big (Canonical, Red Hat, IBM) gets on the issue of identifying the projects that don't cross-compile gracefully (I'M LOOKING AT YOU GLIBC) and helping the maintainers fix that, it is going to be difficult for the various software sources to make their apps available under That Which Is Not X86.
Yeah, I hear you. I've fought on and off with both openembedded and pokylinux (an OE derivative), and can't even get a basic toolchain built on my bog-standard ubuntu 8.10 desktop, let alone cross-compiling anything.
It should get better, though, when Ubuntu ARM Edition is released. This was announced at LCA 2009 by David Mandala from Canonical. He basically said they had a large proportion of the desktop repository already building, and were working on the rest. IIRC he said they hoped to have it pretty much done by the next release (9.04).
ARM's OMAP 3 is the news: it's a non-Intel netbook.
A barrier is applications for the platform: I'm sure Windows doesn't run on it; and they'll be few binary linux applications. But I think the web is now mature enough, so web apps + multimedia.
You're almost right, except for the lack of applications bit. Ubuntu is right at this moment creating an ARM distribution, with the full repository available. Yes, that's right, the full desktop ubuntu repository will be available for ARM. It was announced at this year's Linux.conf.au conference by David Mandala, from Canonical.
Windows upgrades lead to nothing but pain and suffering. Anyone actually running an upgrade is crazy. Clean, fresh install is the way to go.
Well, call me crazy then. I have an older laptop with no CD drive, and no usb boot option. How to get windows XP onto it? Why, install win98 onto another machine, dd+netcat it across to the laptop hard drive, then run the XP upgrade over the network. Not the most fun thing I've ever done, but certainly it works. Of course, the machine runs much better now it's got ubuntu on it...
Xenix, anyone?
I digress though, my point was that that the idea of the fanatical free linux guy is far from a strawman, I'd just be interested to see how many there are compared to Windows and Mac users who just pirate everything but don't talk about it.
Well, in my experience, the Linux guys are the ones who care the most about the license, and making sure they don't break it. Whether that license is proprietary or F/OSS, linux people are the most likely to pay more than a cursory glance.
Most if not all of the apps already mentioned have native Free equivalents that are as good, if not better. Specifically, the majority seem to be DVD or MP3 programs, which are already heavily targeted. Although, more officially-supported WINE apps is certainly good for regression testing the codebase.