RSVG doesn't render to a PNG, it renders to a RGBA buffer. GdkPixbuf then blits the RGBA buffer to the screen/XServer/whatever.
In a lot of cases, it's faster to use something like libart to generate the RGBA buffer from a SVG description than it is to decompress a PNG to its RGBA contents. In some cases, it is not. What's faster depends a lot on your CPU, RAM, bus, and the particular image(s) involved.
Those "small blotches" of blue are major cities with metropolitan populations larger than several states worth of your red counties combined. Cities like New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Each of these cities has a metropolitan population between 6 and 30 million people. For comparison, a lot of midwestern states have populations of 1 or 2 million people total. So who are you calling small again? It's not clear to me why a county composed of 4 large farms with 1000 people in it should matter as much as (or more than) than New York.
I sure hope that Bush gives a damn about the cities as much as you'd hope that Gore cared about Montana, including the one he now lives in, and not just the ones he'd like to bomb overseas. Those "small blotches" represent hundreds of millions of people. Don't forget that.
PayPal charges a fee in return for providing one+ services. These services are explained in painful clarity in their terms and conditions page.
One of these said services is the ability for a redress of greivances, and for a speedy resolution of said greivances.
"PayPal will investigate your complaint and attempt to recover any funds you are owed. You will be entitled to the return of any funds PayPal is able to collect on your behalf. However, fund recovery is not guaranteed."
Please read:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ te rms#insurance and https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin /webscr?cmd=p/gen/te rms#consumer_protection
The fact that my money was stolen is inconsequential to what I feel is the main body of my argument, namely that PayPal isn't living up to the terms and conditions that we both entered into when I hit the "Agree" button. This is what I blame PayPal for. Their behavior after money being stolen is merely an unfortunate case-in-point of this.
I'm not a demanding person. I don't necessarily want my money back, though that would be the most ideal resolution to this problem. What I want is for PayPal/EBay to send me a fscking email saying "we're investigating your complaint." That's all. Even better, they could find out the address where the camera was sent and give that to me, or contact some authority a about the problem. Or at least give me the ability to do so myself without having to get a subpeona against them.
And, FYI, PayPal's money-market account interest rate is 2%. Fleet's passbook savings is is 0.95%. You do the math.
Actually, I never respond to emails from scammers who claim to be paypal, my passwords are quite long and not the same everywhere, I change my PayPal password once every 2 weeks, etc...
I don't really blame PayPal for my fund being robbed. I do blame PayPal for not responding to my customer support emails. This is the crux of my complaint.
All I asked for was an address of my grievance. I'd be pleased if they acknowledged my existence as a member of this planet. But they don't, and in my opinion, it would be the least that they could do to keep a customer happy, nevermind their legal obligations.
Paypal proclaims to be a trusted third party, collecting, holding, and disbursing your money as only you see fit. My money was disbursed from their coffers without my permission. This is robbery. No, Paypal did not rob me, someone else did. But Paypal as a trusted third party is responsible for providing certain safeguards to make sure that they're not duped too easily. And if someone tells them that they've been duped, they have an obligation to at least investigate my charge. Or at least they should.
Paypal is a company that manages and holds others property on behalf of them. As such, they are duty-bound to protect those properties. There are laws for companies that do this, and names for businesses that do this. Namely, they're called banks. As such, my money should be protected under laws and statutues similar to FDIC. It is not. Am I stupid for using PayPal? Maybe. Shame on me.
Now, if PayPal had merely responded saying "We're investigating this charge" *EVEN* if they came back saying that my charge had no merit, I would not have sent this email. I refer you to these quotes from paypal's own site:
"PayPal will investigate your complaint and attempt to recover any funds you are owed. You will be entitled to the return of any funds PayPal is able to collect on your behalf. However, fund recovery is not guaranteed."
Please read:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ te rms#insurance and https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin /webscr?cmd=p/gen/te rms#consumer_protection
This inaction when dealing with my funds pisses this one customer off. And, IMO, rightly so.
I work on a few of the larger Gnome related applications out there - AbiWord, Gnumeric, to name two. I also compile Mozilla from time to time, and I once even dared to try to compile OpenOffice.
What do these faster boxes with "absurd" gobs of RAM and CPU gain me? Reasonable compile times. On my 1.8GHz P4, a fresh compile of AbiWord takes about 10 minutes. On my older box it took half an hour. On some of our developers boxes, it can take up to a whole hour! Now, if we can wield this new fast, cheap computer horsepower to get fresh compiles of our application down to say 3-5 minutes, you have no idea how much time that can end up saving us in the average day and how much more productive we can be.
Dom
Re:First they came for the Indians...
on
Shop Till It Drops
·
· Score: 1
Being a Pennsylvania native, I've gotten many a hoagie from Wawa and Sheetz. Before they used the touch screens, I had about a 60% chance of getting the correct sandwich that I had ordered. Since the touch screens were used, it's been perfect.
Why was this good? Well:
1) Freed up employees to make sandwiches instead of stopping a "production line" worker to take orders. My observed Speed of Service has improved by about 1 minute per sandwich, which is great. During lunchtime, there are usually 5-7 people in front of me. Saving 5-7 minutes per visit is a big win as far as I'm concerned.
2) Easier usability - the customer is presented with pretty pictures and text instead of a gruff worker. Also, it cuts down on the percieved "stress" and hurriedness with which you place your order
3) With #2, removed liklihood for error, because many of the attendants checked off the wrong box or worse forgot to check off a box.
4) Most Sheetz and Wawa stores have 2 touch screens instead of just one attendant taking your order. This goes along with #1. You spend less time waiting in line to place your order, so you have more time to checkout and to get that soda and bag of chips that you wanted too. Your sandwich is done by the time you want to leave the store.
The fact that you see the sandwich being made has a huge psychological effect - it just looks and seems fresh. Plus there's the benefit that it's "MTO" (Made To Order, for the uninitiated). Compare this to the demand for 7-Eleven's "shipped in on a truck this morning, maybe" line of sandwiches. Contrast this with the getting a Barbie (or other non-perishable item) from a vending machine - who cares how long the Barbie has been in there or when it was made?
For these reasons, I see a hybrid approach like what Wawa and Sheetz use as the "wave of the future," at least for consumer sandwiches bought at convenience stores.
While I would agree with RMS that Word documents should be avoided like the plague, they are hardly unpublished and undocumented formats. For instance, we have:
Just to name a few. In addition, the addendums added by the AbiWord, wvWare, KWord, OpenOffice folks and others are at our disposal. Granted, though these documents are oftentimes innacurate, misleading, or simply incomplete, they are *very* good reference points into the MSWord file format.
While I would love to see people stop sending around DOCs, this simply isn't going to happen in the forseeable future (and certainly won't stop because RMS asked us all to start bailing the ocean out of our sinking ship with a teaspoon...). Like it or not, many of us need to be able to inter-operate with the existing 99.5% of the desktop users out there, and they happen to be using Windows and Microsoft Word.
So instead of trying to get the majority of the world to change its behavior (and thus appearing as yet another whiney free-software bigot), why not suggest using AbiWord, KWord, OpenWriter, or wvWare to our GPL-loving friends? Some of these integrate well with the desktop of your choice (Abi, OO, KWord). Others can be used as filters in Pine/Mutt/Elm/... (wvWare). In the end, everyone benefits from this approach and the Free-Software community gets to put another 'X' in the "win" column.
Ok, I'm the author/maintainer of wvWare - another MSWord parsing thing (www.wvware.com) and lead developer/maintainer of AbiWord. What are you talking about?
AbiWord isn't trying to build a word processor around any particular format. We have an extremely generic import/export mechanism that I co-authored, so that input and output can be trivially done to/from any format. We actually support more unique formats on the market than most common commercial word processors...
But import/export is a very boring and uniteresting part of a Word Processor. All of the interesting stuff goes on down in our formatting and rendering classes. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand. If you are indeed serious about this, come help out Werner and myself on wv or wv2 instead of re-duplicating our efforts.
Please mod this troll down.
Dom Lachowicz
cinamod@hotmail.com
AbiWord and wvWare Maintainer/Lead Developer
Unfortunately, this is not about helping people when it's not in your best interest. It's closer to you being forced to help someone when it's not in your best interest...
Brazil is trying to play "Robin Hood" here, and it's just not right.
This simply isn't the case. We've agreed on quite a few things, and we do hope to get OO people involved too. Some things that we've agreed upon:
1) We're going to use C++, and maybe do a C api too
2) We're going to use libole2
3) Should we need an XML parser, we'll use libxml2
There will be very little duplication of effort. Abi and KWord will both use libwv2.so and have their own filters that hook up to libwv, but the majority (98%) will be entirely shared, just like is the case with and shared library usage.
Lyx actually supports reading DOCs. It does so through a pipe to my & Caolan's wvWare program (which turns DOC into LaTeX, which Lyx then can import).
Dom
Hi, I'm a maintainer and lead developer of the wvWare project and the AbiWord project (www.wvware.com and www.abisource.com).
wvWare is a project that reads DOC files and turns them into other more useful things. It is also a library that other applications can build upon. This is what AbiWord does.
Currently, neither project supports BiDi *output*. I am rewriting wvWare to properly support Bidi in at least HTML output. This will be done within a week or so. There is a patch to the Abi tree to support BiDi that I personally will be committing this weekend.
So it doesn't (or at least won't) be that much of a deal that person XXX runs Linux or BSD or whatever and I'm hoping to prove that GPL'd applications can be just as good as their commercial equivalents. This is what AbiWord and Gnumeric strive for, as do their KDE counterparts which are also excellent products. You will be suprised in the quality and feature-set of the upcoming Abi 0.9.0 release...
I'm a maintainer/lead coder on a couple of OS Office Projects: AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com) and wvWare (www.wvware.com). I've written quite a few import/export filters for AbiWord.
AbiWord is an excellent OS word processor which already handles lots of existing formats that you speak of: DOC, XHTML, DBK, RTF, et. al.... They each have their own mertits, advantages, and disadvantages.
XHTML is not a good layout language. It has all of the same problems that HTML and thus web pages have: i.e. WYSISYG formatting is next to impossible to achieve.
DBK is nice, except that DBK wasn't really meant to be a WP file format. Its tags carry with them lots of semantic information that WPs generally just don't care about. Its layout tags leave much to be desired for a WP. There just isn't a clean mapping of DBK->WP tags.
RTF is really slick (even though it is kinda old). Basically, anything that the AbiWord format can represent, RTF can do. This is a really good choice for your format.
ABW (or your WP's favorite native format) is always nice because it maps neatly onto your feature-set.
DOC support isn't really all that bad anymore. If you know what wvWare is (if you don't, see www.wvware.com), you know that it can convert DOC files into just about any format that you'd like. It can do this through either the command-line version of through the 50KB associated library. AbiWord uses wv to import DOCs. The importer is about 1100 LOC. I'm currently also writing DOC export support into wvWare (and thus AbiWord). Our DOC importer is *significantly* better than the one that OO has released. That will probably change soon, since Sun hired wvware's ex-maintainer to work on OO;) Our DOC exporter currently exports something that looks like DOC at about 10 paces - i.e. it's not really DOC format, but it's getting there.
Please, visit the helixcode and gnome gb webpages and RTFMs. I say this as both a user of GB, Gnumeric, et. al. and a developer on those projects, I *highly* suggest reading the manuals before making statements like these. And you might also want to read Miguel's many comments already in this thread.
You should really check out gnome-print and gnumeric. You can get the cvs modules from gnome or checkout the newest releases (both had new releases yesterday). http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric The print, print-preview, and print-setup dialogs are really nice. They are based on the Libart-based Gnome-canvas. -Dom
I know that everyone has probably heard this a thousand times by now but...
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
As for copying the look, feel, and functionality of Excel or Word, etc.. I think that this is a good thing. These are very full-featured programs. Plus, if we want secretaries and our parents to someday use a free-unix, we'll need for them to make a painless transition. By 'cloning' these apps we're doing a great service to the free-software community. Plus, if there's ever a Linux port of Microsoft Office (as rumored), will people want to pay $500 or use the free(beer) clone?
I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's exactly how I build most of my stuff. Except not everyone has RPM installed on their system(debian, other Unix platforms,...) *Everyone* has sh, tar, and gzip. All that I'm saying is that Makeself is a useful tool for those without.
Have you guys heard of makeself? It creates self extracting and installing files(tar.gz or tar.bz2). It just tacks on a 30 line BOURNE shell script to the specified archive, and viola.
I have to give credit to Corel for the great amount of work they've done and commitment they've shown to the WINE project. I also applaud them for wanting them to port WINE's look and feel to be more like that of KDE, since they're heavily pushing their modified version of KDE on the desktop. Integration with a user's default environment is crucial, IMO.
But I don't like how Corel has done it. This is stereotypical of how software projects fragment and code becomes huge, bloated, slow, and incomprehensible. I'm all for WINE apps having a KDE/GNOME/whatever look and feel. But if you're going to do something, do it right.
I recognize that Corel is under a deadline. That's never an excuse for poorly planned code. And I think that's why their KDE patch was rejected from the main source tree. But, indirectly, that means that a whole bunch of code already exists to be used if the main branch of WINE goes modular(Thanks Corel:)
I think some real thought and initiative has to go into WINE to make its use of graphic toolkits more modular. Personally, I'd like to see a GNOME port, but making things more modular would let some ambitious hacker make a KDE port just as easily(well, ok, neither will be easily:).
I'd like to poke around what would be involved to incorporate a modular look and feel into WINE. Maybe lots of #ifdefs. Maybe dynamic libraries. Definitely lots of code. Any thoughts? I'm interested in feedback.
I'm not really insulted by this article. I think that the Linux community should be a little flattered. It was well written and not inflamatory. Nor did it discuss the reasons one might have for removing Linux or for installing NT. They're catering to their potential customers just like any business should(in an ethical and legal manner). Let's not flame MSFT on this one. I mean, any RedHat, Debian, FreeBSD install has instructions to install their OS over and in parallel with an existing OS(primarily Windows).
I think that MSFT needs an acompanying 'Howto install NT onto a computer that has existing OSes on other partitions.' This could be a good way of attracting BSD/Linux/BeOs people to tinker with NT5.0 without removing their existing system, esp. since (i think) NT 5.0pre requires control of the root partition(/dev/hda1) to install. Not sure if this behavior has been changed in more recent release candidates. Haven't(and have no urge to) try it out.
Well if you ignore their contributions to the Linux kernel team(funding Alan Cox, et. al.), their donations to the Mozilla, KDE, Gtk, Gnome projects(code and $), all that wacky stuff on http://www.labs.redhat.com, contributions to Apache and Sendmail, and god knows what else, then I guess that they've done nothing more than package together other people's stuff and pay hundreds of developers to sit on their asses all day long because they've got major $$ from the IPO, right?
[sarcasm]I guess that's all Debian and Suse do for that matter too[/sarcasm]
I think that getting information about a userbase is invaluable to a company. They need to know who their users are and the hardware/OS that they run on. But something less intrusive and interactive would be a lot better option.
For example, I think that Gaim (http://www.marko.net/gaim) has this message box when you run it for the first time which says something to the effect of: "We'd like to know who our users are. We'd like to send the results of running xyz on your system. [Ok] [No Way] [Never Ask Again]"
Why couldn't the guys at id do something like this? It only takes 3 seconds to code.
Linux has JDK1.1.8 - IBM has a version that's as fast as the JDK on NT4 on low-end machines and outperforms NT on high-end machines. I guess that means that NT and Win9x have 1.1.8 as well as BSD. Wowie. I hear that Sun has something going on for Solaris too(sarcasm).
What I think is that everyone forgets that computers are tools for us to use to our benefit. Choose the tools(platform & OS) that best suits your needs. Don't use Win95 as a server. HP/UX is not known as the best desktop OS. And so on... Operating systems are not something to get this passionate about. There are more important things in life, like football and beer... mmm... "Homer no function, beer well without"
-- "Cleavage (n): something you can approve of and look down on at the same time." -- W. Garnett
Yeah, undergrads can't code worth a crap[heavy sarcasm]. Maybe even a majority of them can't code well, but in four years they get a BS and turn into middle aged programmers that can't code worth a lick. These people seem to meet your requirements just fine, don't they? Why don't you target them too? This kind of bigotry isn't needed on/.
Take a look at that Eros operating system released at my school(UPenn). These guys started it when they were Sophs and Juniors. Short story: you're a very stupid person if you completely discount youth as you have done. College grads and undergrads are a major part of the driving force behind OSS & Linux. I'd be surprised if the majority of Linux's users weren't college students.
Slashdot Mirror
RSVG doesn't render to a PNG, it renders to a RGBA buffer. GdkPixbuf then blits the RGBA buffer to the screen/XServer/whatever.
In a lot of cases, it's faster to use something like libart to generate the RGBA buffer from a SVG description than it is to decompress a PNG to its RGBA contents. In some cases, it is not. What's faster depends a lot on your CPU, RAM, bus, and the particular image(s) involved.
Cheers,
Dom
Those "small blotches" of blue are major cities with metropolitan populations larger than several states worth of your red counties combined. Cities like New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Each of these cities has a metropolitan population between 6 and 30 million people. For comparison, a lot of midwestern states have populations of 1 or 2 million people total. So who are you calling small again? It's not clear to me why a county composed of 4 large farms with 1000 people in it should matter as much as (or more than) than New York.
I sure hope that Bush gives a damn about the cities as much as you'd hope that Gore cared about Montana, including the one he now lives in, and not just the ones he'd like to bomb overseas. Those "small blotches" represent hundreds of millions of people. Don't forget that.
Dom
PayPal charges a fee in return for providing one+ services. These services are explained in painful clarity in their terms and conditions page.
/ te rms#insurancen /webscr?cmd=p/gen/te rms#consumer_protection
One of these said services is the ability for a redress of greivances, and for a speedy resolution of said greivances.
"PayPal will investigate your complaint and attempt to recover any funds you are owed. You will be entitled to the return of any funds PayPal is able to collect on your behalf. However, fund recovery is not guaranteed."
Please read:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen
and
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bi
The fact that my money was stolen is inconsequential to what I feel is the main body of my argument, namely that PayPal isn't living up to the terms and conditions that we both entered into when I hit the "Agree" button. This is what I blame PayPal for. Their behavior after money being stolen is merely an unfortunate case-in-point of this.
I'm not a demanding person. I don't necessarily want my money back, though that would be the most ideal resolution to this problem. What I want is for PayPal/EBay to send me a fscking email saying "we're investigating your complaint." That's all. Even better, they could find out the address where the camera was sent and give that to me, or contact some authority a
about the problem. Or at least give me the ability to do so myself without having to get a subpeona against them.
And, FYI, PayPal's money-market account interest rate is 2%. Fleet's passbook savings is is 0.95%. You do the math.
Dom
Actually, I never respond to emails from scammers who claim to be paypal, my passwords are quite long and not the same everywhere, I change my PayPal password once every 2 weeks, etc...
/ te rms#insurancen /webscr?cmd=p/gen/te rms#consumer_protection
I don't really blame PayPal for my fund being robbed. I do blame PayPal for not responding to my customer support emails. This is the crux of my complaint.
All I asked for was an address of my grievance. I'd be pleased if they acknowledged my existence as a member of this planet. But they don't, and in my opinion, it would be the least that they could do to keep a customer happy, nevermind their legal obligations.
Paypal proclaims to be a trusted third party, collecting, holding, and disbursing your money as only you see fit. My money was disbursed from their coffers without my permission. This is robbery. No, Paypal did not rob me, someone else did. But Paypal as a trusted third party is responsible for providing certain safeguards to make sure that they're not duped too easily. And if someone tells them that they've been duped, they have an obligation to at least investigate my charge. Or at least they should.
Paypal is a company that manages and holds others property on behalf of them. As such, they are duty-bound to protect those properties. There are laws for companies that do this, and names for businesses that do this. Namely, they're called banks. As such, my money should be protected under laws and statutues similar to FDIC. It is not. Am I stupid for using PayPal? Maybe. Shame on me.
Now, if PayPal had merely responded saying "We're investigating this charge" *EVEN* if they came back saying that my charge had no merit, I would not have sent this email. I refer you to these quotes from paypal's own site:
"PayPal will investigate your complaint and attempt to recover any funds you are owed. You will be entitled to the return of any funds PayPal is able to collect on your behalf. However, fund recovery is not guaranteed."
Please read:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen
and
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bi
This inaction when dealing with my funds pisses this one customer off. And, IMO, rightly so.
Dom
I work on a few of the larger Gnome related applications out there - AbiWord, Gnumeric, to name two. I also compile Mozilla from time to time, and I once even dared to try to compile OpenOffice.
What do these faster boxes with "absurd" gobs of RAM and CPU gain me? Reasonable compile times. On my 1.8GHz P4, a fresh compile of AbiWord takes about 10 minutes. On my older box it took half an hour. On some of our developers boxes, it can take up to a whole hour! Now, if we can wield this new fast, cheap computer horsepower to get fresh compiles of our application down to say 3-5 minutes, you have no idea how much time that can end up saving us in the average day and how much more productive we can be.
Dom
Being a Pennsylvania native, I've gotten many a hoagie from Wawa and Sheetz. Before they used the touch screens, I had about a 60% chance of getting the correct sandwich that I had ordered. Since the touch screens were used, it's been perfect.
Why was this good? Well:
1) Freed up employees to make sandwiches instead of stopping a "production line" worker to take orders. My observed Speed of Service has improved by about 1 minute per sandwich, which is great. During lunchtime, there are usually 5-7 people in front of me. Saving 5-7 minutes per visit is a big win as far as I'm concerned.
2) Easier usability - the customer is presented with pretty pictures and text instead of a gruff worker. Also, it cuts down on the percieved "stress" and hurriedness with which you place your order
3) With #2, removed liklihood for error, because many of the attendants checked off the wrong box or worse forgot to check off a box.
4) Most Sheetz and Wawa stores have 2 touch screens instead of just one attendant taking your order. This goes along with #1. You spend less time waiting in line to place your order, so you have more time to checkout and to get that soda and bag of chips that you wanted too. Your sandwich is done by the time you want to leave the store.
The fact that you see the sandwich being made has a huge psychological effect - it just looks and seems fresh. Plus there's the benefit that it's "MTO" (Made To Order, for the uninitiated). Compare this to the demand for 7-Eleven's "shipped in on a truck this morning, maybe" line of sandwiches. Contrast this with the getting a Barbie (or other non-perishable item) from a vending machine - who cares how long the Barbie has been in there or when it was made?
For these reasons, I see a hybrid approach like what Wawa and Sheetz use as the "wave of the future," at least for consumer sandwiches bought at convenience stores.
Dom
While I would agree with RMS that Word documents should be avoided like the plague, they are hardly unpublished and undocumented formats. For instance, we have:
http://www.wvware.com/wvInfo.html
http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=wword8
http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=wword60t
http://www.wotsit.org/download.asp?f=word8
http://www.wvware.com/word97.zip
http://www.wvware.com/word5.zip
Just to name a few. In addition, the addendums added by the AbiWord, wvWare, KWord, OpenOffice folks and others are at our disposal. Granted, though these documents are oftentimes innacurate, misleading, or simply incomplete, they are *very* good reference points into the MSWord file format.
While I would love to see people stop sending around DOCs, this simply isn't going to happen in the forseeable future (and certainly won't stop because RMS asked us all to start bailing the ocean out of our sinking ship with a teaspoon...). Like it or not, many of us need to be able to inter-operate with the existing 99.5% of the desktop users out there, and they happen to be using Windows and Microsoft Word.
So instead of trying to get the majority of the world to change its behavior (and thus appearing as yet another whiney free-software bigot), why not suggest using AbiWord, KWord, OpenWriter, or wvWare to our GPL-loving friends? Some of these integrate well with the desktop of your choice (Abi, OO, KWord). Others can be used as filters in Pine/Mutt/Elm/... (wvWare). In the end, everyone benefits from this approach and the Free-Software community gets to put another 'X' in the "win" column.
Dom Lachowicz, wvWare and AbiWord maintainer
Huh?
Ok, I'm the author/maintainer of wvWare - another MSWord parsing thing (www.wvware.com) and lead developer/maintainer of AbiWord. What are you talking about?
AbiWord isn't trying to build a word processor around any particular format. We have an extremely generic import/export mechanism that I co-authored, so that input and output can be trivially done to/from any format. We actually support more unique formats on the market than most common commercial word processors...
But import/export is a very boring and uniteresting part of a Word Processor. All of the interesting stuff goes on down in our formatting and rendering classes. You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand. If you are indeed serious about this, come help out Werner and myself on wv or wv2 instead of re-duplicating our efforts.
Please mod this troll down.
Dom Lachowicz
cinamod@hotmail.com
AbiWord and wvWare Maintainer/Lead Developer
Unfortunately, this is not about helping people when it's not in your best interest. It's closer to you being forced to help someone when it's not in your best interest...
Brazil is trying to play "Robin Hood" here, and it's just not right.
This simply isn't the case. We've agreed on quite a few things, and we do hope to get OO people involved too. Some things that we've agreed upon:
1) We're going to use C++, and maybe do a C api too
2) We're going to use libole2
3) Should we need an XML parser, we'll use libxml2
There will be very little duplication of effort. Abi and KWord will both use libwv2.so and have their own filters that hook up to libwv, but the majority (98%) will be entirely shared, just like is the case with and shared library usage.
Dom
Lyx actually supports reading DOCs. It does so through a pipe to my & Caolan's wvWare program (which turns DOC into LaTeX, which Lyx then can import). Dom
Hi, I'm a maintainer and lead developer of the wvWare project and the AbiWord project (www.wvware.com and www.abisource.com).
wvWare is a project that reads DOC files and turns them into other more useful things. It is also a library that other applications can build upon. This is what AbiWord does.
Currently, neither project supports BiDi *output*. I am rewriting wvWare to properly support Bidi in at least HTML output. This will be done within a week or so. There is a patch to the Abi tree to support BiDi that I personally will be committing this weekend.
So it doesn't (or at least won't) be that much of a deal that person XXX runs Linux or BSD or whatever and I'm hoping to prove that GPL'd applications can be just as good as their commercial equivalents. This is what AbiWord and Gnumeric strive for, as do their KDE counterparts which are also excellent products. You will be suprised in the quality and feature-set of the upcoming Abi 0.9.0 release...
Dom
Domino's pizza sucks.
Dom Lachowicz, AbiWord maintainer and developer
Hi,
;) Our DOC exporter currently exports something that looks like DOC at about 10 paces - i.e. it's not really DOC format, but it's getting there.
I'm a maintainer/lead coder on a couple of OS Office Projects: AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com) and wvWare (www.wvware.com). I've written quite a few import/export filters for AbiWord.
AbiWord is an excellent OS word processor which already handles lots of existing formats that you speak of: DOC, XHTML, DBK, RTF, et. al.... They each have their own mertits, advantages, and disadvantages.
XHTML is not a good layout language. It has all of the same problems that HTML and thus web pages have: i.e. WYSISYG formatting is next to impossible to achieve.
DBK is nice, except that DBK wasn't really meant to be a WP file format. Its tags carry with them lots of semantic information that WPs generally just don't care about. Its layout tags leave much to be desired for a WP. There just isn't a clean mapping of DBK->WP tags.
RTF is really slick (even though it is kinda old). Basically, anything that the AbiWord format can represent, RTF can do. This is a really good choice for your format.
ABW (or your WP's favorite native format) is always nice because it maps neatly onto your feature-set.
DOC support isn't really all that bad anymore. If you know what wvWare is (if you don't, see www.wvware.com), you know that it can convert DOC files into just about any format that you'd like. It can do this through either the command-line version of through the 50KB associated library. AbiWord uses wv to import DOCs. The importer is about 1100 LOC. I'm currently also writing DOC export support into wvWare (and thus AbiWord). Our DOC importer is *significantly* better than the one that OO has released. That will probably change soon, since Sun hired wvware's ex-maintainer to work on OO
Anyway, hope that this helps,
Dom
Please, visit the helixcode and gnome gb webpages and RTFMs. I say this as both a user of GB, Gnumeric, et. al. and a developer on those projects, I *highly* suggest reading the manuals before making statements like these. And you might also want to read Miguel's many comments already in this thread.
http://www.gnome.org/gb/ is a good place to start
Dom
You should really check out gnome-print and gnumeric. You can get the cvs modules from gnome or checkout the newest releases (both had new releases yesterday). http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric The print, print-preview, and print-setup dialogs are really nice. They are based on the Libart-based Gnome-canvas. -Dom
I know that everyone has probably heard this a thousand times by now but...
You don't have to run the Gnome desktop to run Gnome apps. Gnome is more than just a desktop environment, but an suite of libraries and applications which (hopefully) make a programmer's job easier and tries to enforce some uniformness in user-interfaces. Same with KDE. There is *nothing* stopping anyone from using Gnome apps under KDE or any other WM or desktop.
As for copying the look, feel, and functionality of Excel or Word, etc.. I think that this is a good thing. These are very full-featured programs. Plus, if we want secretaries and our parents to someday use a free-unix, we'll need for them to make a painless transition. By 'cloning' these apps we're doing a great service to the free-software community. Plus, if there's ever a Linux port of Microsoft Office (as rumored), will people want to pay $500 or use the free(beer) clone?
Rant....
I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's exactly how I build most of my stuff. Except not everyone has RPM installed on their system(debian, other Unix platforms, ...) *Everyone* has sh, tar, and gzip. All that I'm saying is that Makeself is a useful tool for those without.
Dom
Have you guys heard of makeself? It creates self extracting and installing files(tar.gz or tar.bz2). It just tacks on a 30 line BOURNE shell script to the specified archive, and viola.
Get it here http://www.lokigames.com/~megastep/mak eself/
Dom
I have to give credit to Corel for the great amount of work they've done and commitment they've shown to the WINE project. I also applaud them for wanting them to port WINE's look and feel to be more like that of KDE, since they're heavily pushing their modified version of KDE on the desktop. Integration with a user's default environment is crucial, IMO.
:)
:).
But I don't like how Corel has done it. This is stereotypical of how software projects fragment and code becomes huge, bloated, slow, and incomprehensible. I'm all for WINE apps having a KDE/GNOME/whatever look and feel. But if you're going to do something, do it right.
I recognize that Corel is under a deadline. That's never an excuse for poorly planned code. And I think that's why their KDE patch was rejected from the main source tree. But, indirectly, that means that a whole bunch of code already exists to be used if the main branch of WINE goes modular(Thanks Corel
I think some real thought and initiative has to go into WINE to make its use of graphic toolkits more modular. Personally, I'd like to see a GNOME port, but making things more modular would let some ambitious hacker make a KDE port just as easily(well, ok, neither will be easily
I'd like to poke around what would be involved to incorporate a modular look and feel into WINE. Maybe lots of #ifdefs. Maybe dynamic libraries. Definitely lots of code. Any thoughts? I'm interested in feedback.
the Dominator
I'm not really insulted by this article. I think that the Linux community should be a little flattered. It was well written and not inflamatory. Nor did it discuss the reasons one might have for removing Linux or for installing NT. They're catering to their potential customers just like any business should(in an ethical and legal manner). Let's not flame MSFT on this one. I mean, any RedHat, Debian, FreeBSD install has instructions to install their OS over and in parallel with an existing OS(primarily Windows).
I think that MSFT needs an acompanying 'Howto install NT onto a computer that has existing OSes on other partitions.' This could be a good way of attracting BSD/Linux/BeOs people to tinker with NT5.0 without removing their existing system, esp. since (i think) NT 5.0pre requires control of the root partition(/dev/hda1) to install. Not sure if this behavior has been changed in more recent release candidates. Haven't(and have no urge to) try it out.
Dom
Well if you ignore their contributions to the Linux kernel team(funding Alan Cox, et. al.), their donations to the Mozilla, KDE, Gtk, Gnome projects(code and $), all that wacky stuff on http://www.labs.redhat.com, contributions to Apache and Sendmail, and god knows what else, then I guess that they've done nothing more than package together other people's stuff and pay hundreds of developers to sit on their asses all day long because they've got major $$ from the IPO, right?
[sarcasm]I guess that's all Debian and Suse do for that matter too[/sarcasm]
I think that getting information about a userbase is invaluable to a company. They need to know who their users are and the hardware/OS that they run on. But something less intrusive and interactive would be a lot better option.
For example, I think that Gaim (http://www.marko.net/gaim) has this message box when you run it for the first time which says something to the effect of:
"We'd like to know who our users are. We'd like to send the results of running xyz on your system. [Ok] [No Way] [Never Ask Again]"
Why couldn't the guys at id do something like this? It only takes 3 seconds to code.
Ummm.. Whoop de friggin' doo!
Linux has JDK1.1.8 - IBM has a version that's as fast as the JDK on NT4 on low-end machines and outperforms NT on high-end machines. I guess that means that NT and Win9x have 1.1.8 as well as BSD. Wowie. I hear that Sun has something going on for Solaris too(sarcasm).
What I think is that everyone forgets that computers are tools for us to use to our benefit. Choose the tools(platform & OS) that best suits your needs. Don't use Win95 as a server. HP/UX is not known as the best desktop OS. And so on... Operating systems are not something to get this passionate about. There are more important things in life, like football and beer... mmm... "Homer no function, beer well without"
--
"Cleavage (n): something you can approve of and look down on at the same time."
-- W. Garnett
Yeah, undergrads can't code worth a crap[heavy sarcasm]. Maybe even a majority of them can't code well, but in four years they get a BS and turn into middle aged programmers that can't code worth a lick. These people seem to meet your requirements just fine, don't they? Why don't you target them too? This kind of bigotry isn't needed on /.
Take a look at that Eros operating system released at my school(UPenn). These guys started it when they were Sophs and Juniors. Short story: you're a very stupid person if you completely discount youth as you have done. College grads and undergrads are a major part of the driving force behind OSS & Linux. I'd be surprised if the majority of Linux's users weren't college students.