Just think if there was anything special you needed to do at boot time or just after. What if there was no one around anymore who knew about it? Bummer.
A license will not prevent mistakes. People will not be able to predict all implications of a given modification to a biological system. Most programmers can't predict all consequences of a software change (bugs, ever heard of em?) and humans wrote that software. I'm not saying no one can ever predict the results accurately, but even the professionals make mistakes sometimes.
That list is very large and seems intended to show people Linux equivalents not just Free Software. There are several programs listed in the Linux column that also run on Windows: Maxima & Octave and others. Eclipse is missing entirely. I know it's difficult to maintain such a list.
I've always thought MS FlightSimulator -> FlightGear is worth mentioning, but then you open a whole can of worms with games (unless you put it under simulators).
"In no way, shape or form is Mozilla's mail client an "equivalent" of Outlook."
Agreed, but it serves the purpose for most home users that just want to send/recieve email. There are other things on the list that are not exact equivalents either. It remains a useful list to point the masses in the right direction.
When friends use ripped-off commercial software I always try to point them to a legal but free alternative. I also try to steer them away from MS products (which is harder 'cause it's not stolen). My mother-in-law doesn't use any of the outlook features that can't be replaced with Mozilla.
OK, I'll add Evolution as an equivalent under Linux. There are some others too, but I try to find things that have Windows versions.
I keep a list of free software indexed by commercial equivalents. Unfortunately not on this machine. From memory:
IE & Outlook -> Mozilla
MS word -> OpenOffice.org
MS Excel -> OpenOffice.org
Powerpoint -> OpenOffice.org
Visio -> OpenOffice.org
MS Project -> Mr Project or GanttProject
Media Player -> VideoLan or MPlayer
SAP / Peoplesoft -> Compiere
Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape or Sodipodi
3D Studio/Maya -> Blender
Matlab -> GNU Octave
Mathematica -> Maxima
MS Windows -> Linux
There are more that I can't think of right now and my list is a nice HTML doc with descriptions and links to all the web sites. Perhaps I'll put it on the web some time. Also note that almost ALL of these have windows versions available.
If you ask people if they paid for all the software they use... F/OSS users will say NO and be categorized as pirates. Just because you didn't pay for it doesn't mean you were supposed to. They don't blame open source, but I bet they try to use it this way.
Maxima is a staple in my free software collection. I'm not qualified to evaluate advanced features compared to Mathematica, but IMHO it is at least a MathCad replacement without the pretty graphics. If they add MathML output into a MathML renderer people will suddenly think it's just like Mathematica.
I have a friend who uses Matlab for a living and he uses Octave at home because it's essentially the same thing (except all the user contributed toolboxes that cost extra in Matlab).
I first implemented LZW after reading about it Byte magazine when I was a kid. I thought the fact that it was published meant everyone should be using it. Oh how silly of me. I was shocked when this whole patent thing came up a decade later. That's just not playing nice.
The six month cycle just indicates that these are commoditiy items now with minor evolutionary changes. No one is developing really interesting products from scratch in 6 months. New features may be in the works a year or more before they make it into a product. Feature development cycle != product release cycle.
"GC is figuring out what stuff is valuable so you can throw away the rest."
I thought Garbage Collection was shuffling stuff around with the goal of consolidating all the stuff you don't want into large blocks (collecting the garbage) so the space can be reallocated efficiently.
I was about to install FC2 when I read about that. I can't lose my Windoze installation. I also never could figure out if it's a problem when installing FC2 on a second drive as opposed to a second partition on hda. I also got the impression this will affect all distros once they upgrade to the latest kernel.
We just ordered a table and chairs. The sales guy was really pushing the "fabric protection" crap that they spray on for another $45. I declined several times and he went ahead with the sale. We were sitting on a couch waiting for him to do paperwork when the store manager came by and said "whenever someone declines the fabric protection I have to find out why." We explained that we don't feel the need. I said I'd get it if they waived the sales tax (which they do for larger purchases). They ended up taking off 3 percent (tax is 6) which made it about the same price WITH the fabric protection. I spent the whole trip home trying to figure out why that's so important. My conclusions is the manager must get a bonus for selling this stuff and did so at the stores expense in this case - We paid the same price and got the stuff in addition to what we were willing to take home for that price.
Most people (me included and I'm plenty geeky) want to run an installer and have everything come out nice without much user intervention. In this sense, each distribution is rated by how it installs out of the box. Any hardware that is unsupported reflects badly on the distro even though it may be the hardware vendors fault for not providing support. IMHO, there are perhaps 10-20 apps that need to be present for 95% of people to do 95% of the stuff they want. The number one application is naturally a good one for installing additional packages. This isn't even very important if the really useful stuff is there - especially for out of the box evaluation.
Sure, you can roll your own, but most people don't want to. Let me restate that: Sure YOU can roll your own, but most people CAN'T. Just because it can be done doesn't mean the general public is capable. If you can't deal with that reality don't read reviews intended for the general public.
Remember when the PS2 came along and people claimed someone in the middle east was buying them up to build a super computer:-) It seems this is just some recent way to promote processors - it's so fast they tried to ban its export!
I once saw a door with a keypad where the numbers were LEDs under funny plastic. Every time you entered the numbers would be rearranged but your pin was the same. The numbers were pretty much only readable from directly in front of it. An on-looker could not get your pin (as easy). An interesting additional security measure.
And when the spammers get the message forwarded back to their email address they can harvest all the other email addresses from it. I could harvest thousands (millions?) of peoples addresses this way. The more stupid friends they have, the wider this net is.
After my last response where I finally saw the problem I realised that I had seen this before in computer graphics (trying to combine a CSG hierarchy with a spatial subdivision scheme) so I googled a little and found this is called the "overlapping hierarchy problem" and apparently has no good solution. It's also related to multiple inheritance in OOP. The example I found on the net used strict SGML markup similar to XML to illustrate the problem. (yes, XML is flawed in this way)
"Do you really want to regulate that every ISP in a geographic region must share upstream connectivity?"
No, they would be free to connect to whoever they like - just like today. My ISP can send a packet to whoever they like as long as that provider can get it to the destination address. Perhaps my ISP sends all euro-packets to ISP6 and yours sends them to ISP27, it doesn't matter as long as those guys can both get them to europe - same as today. The difference is that the euro-packets will all have the same first byte. That makes routing pretty easy doesn't it.
If you look closely at a how large ISPs hand out DHCP addresses there are whole blocks (within an ISP) in a geographic area already. In the end it's more efficient if everyone in my neighborhood is on the same subnet on the same local router. Crap, now I see that my ISP would need to know (locally) who my neighbors ISP is to get a packet to them. I'll shut up now...
"If you route geographically or per end-user or (shudder) per person, the number of entries that your core router has to potentially traverse explodes."
What? If IP addresses were geographic, routing would be easy. It's exactly how the phone network operates. The last several bytes of the address could still be mucked about but the higher order ones should be purely geographic to facilitate EASY routing. Routers like hierachical address systems - the divisions should be geographic rather than corporate. Who you are plugged into should not have to determine your address. This is a political problem, not a technical one once you go IPV6.
" This is like taking your home address with you, when you move."
No, it's like taking your cell-phone number with you when you change carriers.
I've often said they should switch to IPV6 and everyone should get a BLOCK of static IP addresses based on geographic location. The problem is the ISPs want to own your IP address and they use the shortage in IPV4 to retain control.
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Ya, sysadmins are always trying to optimize code in the core applications they bought from vendors. NOT.
It's not useless, but the examples cited were from application developers optimizing their code.
Just think if there was anything special you needed to do at boot time or just after. What if there was no one around anymore who knew about it? Bummer.
They can keep all thoses perks and crap.
A license will not prevent mistakes. People will not be able to predict all implications of a given modification to a biological system. Most programmers can't predict all consequences of a software change (bugs, ever heard of em?) and humans wrote that software. I'm not saying no one can ever predict the results accurately, but even the professionals make mistakes sometimes.
I've always thought MS FlightSimulator -> FlightGear is worth mentioning, but then you open a whole can of worms with games (unless you put it under simulators).
Agreed, but it serves the purpose for most home users that just want to send/recieve email. There are other things on the list that are not exact equivalents either. It remains a useful list to point the masses in the right direction.
When friends use ripped-off commercial software I always try to point them to a legal but free alternative. I also try to steer them away from MS products (which is harder 'cause it's not stolen). My mother-in-law doesn't use any of the outlook features that can't be replaced with Mozilla.
OK, I'll add Evolution as an equivalent under Linux. There are some others too, but I try to find things that have Windows versions.
IE & Outlook -> Mozilla
MS word -> OpenOffice.org
MS Excel -> OpenOffice.org
Powerpoint -> OpenOffice.org
Visio -> OpenOffice.org
MS Project -> Mr Project or GanttProject
Media Player -> VideoLan or MPlayer
SAP / Peoplesoft -> Compiere
Photoshop -> Gimp
Illustrator -> Inkscape or Sodipodi
3D Studio/Maya -> Blender
Matlab -> GNU Octave
Mathematica -> Maxima
MS Windows -> Linux
There are more that I can't think of right now and my list is a nice HTML doc with descriptions and links to all the web sites. Perhaps I'll put it on the web some time. Also note that almost ALL of these have windows versions available.
If you ask people if they paid for all the software they use... F/OSS users will say NO and be categorized as pirates. Just because you didn't pay for it doesn't mean you were supposed to. They don't blame open source, but I bet they try to use it this way.
No, it's not as nice to use but it is free and quite capable. Kinda like comparing GIMP to Photoshop.
I have a friend who uses Matlab for a living and he uses Octave at home because it's essentially the same thing (except all the user contributed toolboxes that cost extra in Matlab).
I first implemented LZW after reading about it Byte magazine when I was a kid. I thought the fact that it was published meant everyone should be using it. Oh how silly of me. I was shocked when this whole patent thing came up a decade later. That's just not playing nice.
The six month cycle just indicates that these are commoditiy items now with minor evolutionary changes. No one is developing really interesting products from scratch in 6 months. New features may be in the works a year or more before they make it into a product. Feature development cycle != product release cycle.
I thought Garbage Collection was shuffling stuff around with the goal of consolidating all the stuff you don't want into large blocks (collecting the garbage) so the space can be reallocated efficiently.
The smart garbage man is on vacation.
I was about to install FC2 when I read about that. I can't lose my Windoze installation. I also never could figure out if it's a problem when installing FC2 on a second drive as opposed to a second partition on hda. I also got the impression this will affect all distros once they upgrade to the latest kernel.
We just ordered a table and chairs. The sales guy was really pushing the "fabric protection" crap that they spray on for another $45. I declined several times and he went ahead with the sale. We were sitting on a couch waiting for him to do paperwork when the store manager came by and said "whenever someone declines the fabric protection I have to find out why." We explained that we don't feel the need. I said I'd get it if they waived the sales tax (which they do for larger purchases). They ended up taking off 3 percent (tax is 6) which made it about the same price WITH the fabric protection. I spent the whole trip home trying to figure out why that's so important. My conclusions is the manager must get a bonus for selling this stuff and did so at the stores expense in this case - We paid the same price and got the stuff in addition to what we were willing to take home for that price.
Sure, you can roll your own, but most people don't want to. Let me restate that: Sure YOU can roll your own, but most people CAN'T. Just because it can be done doesn't mean the general public is capable. If you can't deal with that reality don't read reviews intended for the general public.
Remember when the PS2 came along and people claimed someone in the middle east was buying them up to build a super computer :-) It seems this is just some recent way to promote processors - it's so fast they tried to ban its export!
I once saw a door with a keypad where the numbers were LEDs under funny plastic. Every time you entered the numbers would be rearranged but your pin was the same. The numbers were pretty much only readable from directly in front of it. An on-looker could not get your pin (as easy). An interesting additional security measure.
And when the spammers get the message forwarded back to their email address they can harvest all the other email addresses from it. I could harvest thousands (millions?) of peoples addresses this way. The more stupid friends they have, the wider this net is.
F*ck it I'm in...
It seem this crops up in many places.
I didn't know electricity prices varied like that. Mine are fixed, but are corporate rates adjusted by the hour/minute depending on demand? Wow.
No, they would be free to connect to whoever they like - just like today. My ISP can send a packet to whoever they like as long as that provider can get it to the destination address. Perhaps my ISP sends all euro-packets to ISP6 and yours sends them to ISP27, it doesn't matter as long as those guys can both get them to europe - same as today. The difference is that the euro-packets will all have the same first byte. That makes routing pretty easy doesn't it.
If you look closely at a how large ISPs hand out DHCP addresses there are whole blocks (within an ISP) in a geographic area already. In the end it's more efficient if everyone in my neighborhood is on the same subnet on the same local router. Crap, now I see that my ISP would need to know (locally) who my neighbors ISP is to get a packet to them. I'll shut up now...
What? If IP addresses were geographic, routing would be easy. It's exactly how the phone network operates. The last several bytes of the address could still be mucked about but the higher order ones should be purely geographic to facilitate EASY routing. Routers like hierachical address systems - the divisions should be geographic rather than corporate. Who you are plugged into should not have to determine your address. This is a political problem, not a technical one once you go IPV6.
No, it's like taking your cell-phone number with you when you change carriers.
I've often said they should switch to IPV6 and everyone should get a BLOCK of static IP addresses based on geographic location. The problem is the ISPs want to own your IP address and they use the shortage in IPV4 to retain control.