Me thinks Apple is getting a bit greedy with their ever-closing grip on their users. What's next? An Apple version of the Internet for their jailed iphone users? I suppose another search option is not a bad thing, as long as it really is just an option...
I couldn't agree with you more. This is why I have always used XMMS, and recently switched to Audacious. I don't *want* something to "manage" my "library". I don't want a database. I don't want 1,000,000 features. I just need a simple, fast, efficient music player. And xmms/audacious do just that:)
(I do use Amarok sometimes when I need something more powerful... but haven't used it since KDE 4, since they totally hosed the user interface:( )
Excellent posting. Too bad it had to be from an anonymous. Consumers *do* have some power over corporations, but not as much as they might think. Of course, citizens don't have all that much power over government either, as long as we have this horribly broken, only-two-party type system and with corporations pumping money into SIG's and such.
Am I am of the 1 in 40? I can talk on the phone while driving with little to no performance suffering on the driving side. BUT- I prioritize driving so much higher that you wouldn't WANT to talk on the phone with me, since I often miss half what is said or pause to respond.
$renice 20 phoneuse
That just illustrates I *can* use the phone safely, but something is going to suffer, and I let it be the phone. I find it no more or less distracting than a passenger talking. That said, I very rarely use the phone while driving- only when very important, and always hands-free. Texting? Never while moving, only at a stop... and that, rarely, too.
Well, no doubt, you have invested significant time on the issue(s)- so it really does seem well worth reporting. If there is anything about OO that drives me crazy is the very slow pace in which bugs are corrected. I am certainly not the only one to notice that, either. Sometimes I think it is the stronghold that Sun has on the project combined with limited resources (and this mess with Oracle has all of us nervous). Other times I believe it is just the nature of a project so huge that it dwarfs Linux, Firefox, and Apache combined.... the entry barrier in accumulating expertise to fix things is just very, very high.
OpenOffice is the only robust, free, open-source, and multi-platform, real MS-Office competitor, so I tend to give it a lot of slack and support. Thanks for the meaningful and well thought-out response.
>Yeah, I should just not use the features my software gives me. That'll teach them to not improve.
No, you shouldn't generalize everything based on a few broken features. It is like meeting someone and asking them two questions and they get the answers wrong and concluding that he is stupid or that even all humans are stupid. Or giving a new medicine to two people, they don't get better, and forming a conclusion that the medicine (that millions of people use every day) doesn't work for anyone.
It *should* be a goal to improve OO. And that is why when I find a repeatable bug, I spend a significant amount of time boiling it down, documenting it, and reporting it to qa.openoffice.org. Did you? Of course, I have reported many bugs over the years. OO is *huge* so, like MS-Office, it is going to have a lot of bugs. Most of the ones I reported were fixed, some were (unfortunately) not fixed yet.
I repeat- using a two slide sample created by one person is nowhere near enough of a sample size to draw such a huge/sweeping conclusion that Impress' import filter is "barely alpha quality." Through random misfortune, you might be doing something that tickles a few bugs. 1,000 other people could be asked to make two slides and compare and none of them hit both bugs, few hitting one, and their conclusions would be totally different. It is just basic statistics.
To pick on the background color example- I have seen dozens of ppt's opened in OO Impress over the years, and none of them had problems with a missing or wrong background color. That doesn't mean you are a liar, but it reinforces the point I am trying to make... With such data, I would be far more justified in drawing/stating a conclusion that "background compatibility in OO Impress is perfect" when you know it isn't.
>so if you've got poor formatting then it reflects poorly on you for your employer.
Bingo. And 95% of the time, the "poor formatting" is due to the person formatting the document and it has little nothing to do with file comparability. There are a zillion ways to poorly format any document in any program (and I recently listed a dozen examples I see all the time in another posting). And such poorly formatted documents will FALL APART when not viewed with identical software versions with identical fonts available, etc.
So yes, if you can't properly format a document, it is bought to have even poorer formatting when it is converted from one platform to another. And if your job requires any type of word processing skills, then you certainly have just revealed something to a potential employer:)
So if you can't properly format a document, then your best bet is to supply a PDF. Or at least a PDF IN ADDITION to the MS-Word document.
>Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
I agree that there are far more issues with OO opening PowerPoint files than with MS-Word or Excel files (I know because I use OO every single day), but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
>Or saving as.doc/.docx in OO.org so as to give the file to someone else, and later find out that it got reformatted to the point of being unreadable to them in the process? >Then again, it largely depends on the amount of documents you're working with, and even more so on their complexity
One of the major, MAJOR factors that causes "formatting issues" like you mention is when a document is poorly formatted. I can't tell you how many HORRIBLE MS-Word, OO, and WordPerfect documents I have seen over the years. There are certain rules in word processing, and when they are violated, the document is certain to fall apart when opened in anything but an absolutely identical machine with identical OS (and version), identical software (and version), and sometimes even identical printers.
Examples? Using spaces instead of tabs. Using spaces instead of indent. Using non-standard fonts. Using hard returns as space filler. Using frames for page numbering instead of auto-numbering. Using manual character attributes for headings instead of using styles. Using hard hyphens instead of soft ones. Trying to emulate dot leaders manually instead of using the correct auto function. Manually creating a TOC or index instead of letting the software generate them. Etc, etc, etc.
The list is endless as to how a user can screw up a document to make it incompatible with other systems. And such poorly formatted documents are also almost impossible to properly edit later on ANY software.
Thank you for the interesting and informative comparison.
The only flaw I see it in is fonts. If you don't have the font loaded on the target machine, it doesn't matter what software you use, it will not render/load it, because it doesn't exist. Almost no "office" program embeds fonts. So that cannot be a valid factor when comparing compatibility.
If you have an MS-Windows machine running MS-Office and create a document with a specific font, then try to load that document on an IDENTICAL machine in the IDENTICAL software that lacks the font, you won't see that font- it will have to substitute some other font.
I have 150 users using OO under Linux and it almost never crashes. There are some annoying bugs, but that is also the case in most proprietary software I have come across.
>The story is about Linux. What relevance does OS X have here?
The obvious comparison is to OpenOffice. One of the *major* advantages of OpenOffice is that it runs on all platforms of modern interest- Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and MS-Windows. You can select one application and know it will run on whatever machine you come across, use, or want to select later. It frees you from platform lock-in. It creates a bigger support community. As a school, you know everyone can run it at home. At work, you can know everyone can run it at home or at all other businesses you interact with, or even your customers. In government, you know all citizens and businesses you interact with can run it.
It is a feature far more important than being a bit faster or having slightly better proprietary file format compatibility.
1) It lacks vector drawing (Draw) 2) It lacks database (Base) 3) It is closed source 4) Although it supports Linux, it seems to not support MacOS 5) It costs a lot more than OpenOffice
Well, it doesn't hurt to present some numbers to Netflix. I doubt it will make that much difference, but at least it is SOMETHING. Zero feedback usually guarantees zero results, that is pretty certain.
If I had mod points, I would have +1'ed you. I can't stand it when lame spec sheets say "Memory" when what they really mean is "Storage" or "Flash". Memory = RAM. The phone has 1GB of flash/storage and 512MB of memory/RAM. Ug
It might be less of a conspiracy and more of a supply-and-demand thing. Most people have no use for and could care less about line in (I am not one of them, however). Since you are talking about laptops, anything that reduces space is often omitted, if it isn't really needed.
On desktop machines, I have not seen line-in disappear at all. And I bought a laptop last year, and it has mic/line-in, too.
>And if you can't login from home, then maybe you should do your work *at* work ?
You are missing the point... we WANT to use Linux/FOSS at work; and we mostly do. That is not a problem for MOST sites. But there are sites, mostly login-access-only that absolutely require IE+MS-Windows. Those sites we cannot control and have nothing to do with our infrastructure except that we HAVE to use them, and thus are forced to have some MS-Windows machines to deal with them.
It is not an "Intranet" unless they are apps we installed and/or control and/or for our use only. These are other companies that we need to work with.
You are wacked. I am certainly NOT defending IE/Windows only. I aggressively support FOSS & Linux. You can call me whatever you want, but posting the products that we are forced to use that are IE-only will be totally meaningless here, because they are private sites that you cannot access without a login.
>We're talking about the Internet. We really don't care about your companies intranet.
I am not talking about "my company's intranet". While the sites I am talking about are not public sites, they are on the Internet, not a private network, and not an Intranet. And they aren't "mine", because if I designed them, they certainly wouldn't require using MS-Windows and/or IE. Finally, while I can understand your not caring, you really should care, because most people do work for some type of company. Being "free" to use what we want at home but forced lock-in at work isn't good for the computing environment at-large.
>so you can keep doing what you do now- run Firefox except for the few times you need a craptacular website, >in which case you can carefully an old IE.
Unless you don't want to use MS-Windows. (And no, I don't count IES4Linux, which is now not stable nor updated anymore)
>What websites? I've been using Firefox on Linux exclusively for a long time,
You are obviously a home user and not a business user. There are at least 3 critical website apps that we have to access at work that will not work under anything but MS-Windows + IE.
There has been a TREMENDOUS progress in making websites cross-platform and more standards-based over the last several years. Most home users will now rarely, if ever, find a website that requires MS-Windows + IE, except for that horrible Silverlight stuff. But proprietary business stuff is often just as bad as ever... and that continues the lock-in. We just demoed yet another application-as-a-service last week.... when I asked, they didn't even know the answer to my question, but it was obviously MS-Windows + IE only.
>Forced to upgrade? IE8 works just fine on XP and will continue to do so.
It is true that IE8 works on XP, so it will really only be a problem when an IE-Only site also requires 9 for some reason. And that is probably far in the future. By that time, XP really will be VERY old, indeed.
>Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then?
Because I can choose to upgrade Linux when I choose to, and at no cost. And when I upgrade, it is not going to suck in tons of DRM and licensing restrictions like MS-Windows upgrades typically do. Also, it is almost certain that MS will use such stuff to try and kill off XP so they can continue upgrade fees and further lock-in. Motivations like that rarely (if at all) exist in the FOSS world.
Slashdot Mirror
Me thinks Apple is getting a bit greedy with their ever-closing grip on their users. What's next? An Apple version of the Internet for their jailed iphone users? I suppose another search option is not a bad thing, as long as it really is just an option...
I couldn't agree with you more. This is why I have always used XMMS, and recently switched to Audacious. I don't *want* something to "manage" my "library". I don't want a database. I don't want 1,000,000 features. I just need a simple, fast, efficient music player. And xmms/audacious do just that :)
(I do use Amarok sometimes when I need something more powerful... but haven't used it since KDE 4, since they totally hosed the user interface :( )
> XMMS 1.x is no longer supported
When what you are after is called "Audacious" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_Media_Player
>In the end I've never found anything I've liked quite as much as Winamp 2.95.
Then you will probably be quite happy with xmms ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmms ) or audacious ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacious_Media_Player ). I know *I* am :)
If you want a heavyweight, feature-packed, system and not just a simple player, check out Amarok ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amarok_(software) ) or Rhythmbox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythmbox )
+1 Insightful to parent
Excellent posting. Too bad it had to be from an anonymous. Consumers *do* have some power over corporations, but not as much as they might think. Of course, citizens don't have all that much power over government either, as long as we have this horribly broken, only-two-party type system and with corporations pumping money into SIG's and such.
Am I am of the 1 in 40? I can talk on the phone while driving with little to no performance suffering on the driving side. BUT- I prioritize driving so much higher that you wouldn't WANT to talk on the phone with me, since I often miss half what is said or pause to respond.
$renice 20 phoneuse
That just illustrates I *can* use the phone safely, but something is going to suffer, and I let it be the phone. I find it no more or less distracting than a passenger talking. That said, I very rarely use the phone while driving- only when very important, and always hands-free. Texting? Never while moving, only at a stop... and that, rarely, too.
Well, no doubt, you have invested significant time on the issue(s)- so it really does seem well worth reporting. If there is anything about OO that drives me crazy is the very slow pace in which bugs are corrected. I am certainly not the only one to notice that, either. Sometimes I think it is the stronghold that Sun has on the project combined with limited resources (and this mess with Oracle has all of us nervous). Other times I believe it is just the nature of a project so huge that it dwarfs Linux, Firefox, and Apache combined.... the entry barrier in accumulating expertise to fix things is just very, very high.
OpenOffice is the only robust, free, open-source, and multi-platform, real MS-Office competitor, so I tend to give it a lot of slack and support. Thanks for the meaningful and well thought-out response.
>Yeah, I should just not use the features my software gives me. That'll teach them to not improve.
No, you shouldn't generalize everything based on a few broken features. It is like meeting someone and asking them two questions and they get the answers wrong and concluding that he is stupid or that even all humans are stupid. Or giving a new medicine to two people, they don't get better, and forming a conclusion that the medicine (that millions of people use every day) doesn't work for anyone.
It *should* be a goal to improve OO. And that is why when I find a repeatable bug, I spend a significant amount of time boiling it down, documenting it, and reporting it to qa.openoffice.org. Did you? Of course, I have reported many bugs over the years. OO is *huge* so, like MS-Office, it is going to have a lot of bugs. Most of the ones I reported were fixed, some were (unfortunately) not fixed yet.
I repeat- using a two slide sample created by one person is nowhere near enough of a sample size to draw such a huge/sweeping conclusion that Impress' import filter is "barely alpha quality." Through random misfortune, you might be doing something that tickles a few bugs. 1,000 other people could be asked to make two slides and compare and none of them hit both bugs, few hitting one, and their conclusions would be totally different. It is just basic statistics.
To pick on the background color example- I have seen dozens of ppt's opened in OO Impress over the years, and none of them had problems with a missing or wrong background color. That doesn't mean you are a liar, but it reinforces the point I am trying to make... With such data, I would be far more justified in drawing/stating a conclusion that "background compatibility in OO Impress is perfect" when you know it isn't.
>so if you've got poor formatting then it reflects poorly on you for your employer.
Bingo. And 95% of the time, the "poor formatting" is due to the person formatting the document and it has little nothing to do with file comparability. There are a zillion ways to poorly format any document in any program (and I recently listed a dozen examples I see all the time in another posting). And such poorly formatted documents will FALL APART when not viewed with identical software versions with identical fonts available, etc.
So yes, if you can't properly format a document, it is bought to have even poorer formatting when it is converted from one platform to another. And if your job requires any type of word processing skills, then you certainly have just revealed something to a potential employer :)
So if you can't properly format a document, then your best bet is to supply a PDF. Or at least a PDF IN ADDITION to the MS-Word document.
>Until MS office gets perfect ODF export or OpenOffice perfect emulation of office 2007 graphics filters, I suppose your best bet is to create presentations in OpenOffice and save ppt versions for those students who don't have access to it.
Or for him to at least not use (as he puts it) "fancy new 3Dish effects introduced in PowerPoint 2007"! Comparing just two slides, created by one person, who even admits using "fancy new" effects is hardly a rational or reasonable comparison.
I agree that there are far more issues with OO opening PowerPoint files than with MS-Word or Excel files (I know because I use OO every single day), but declaring it to be "barely alpha quality" is way beyond inaccurate.
>Or saving as .doc/.docx in OO.org so as to give the file to someone else, and later find out that it got reformatted to the point of being unreadable to them in the process?
>Then again, it largely depends on the amount of documents you're working with, and even more so on their complexity
One of the major, MAJOR factors that causes "formatting issues" like you mention is when a document is poorly formatted. I can't tell you how many HORRIBLE MS-Word, OO, and WordPerfect documents I have seen over the years. There are certain rules in word processing, and when they are violated, the document is certain to fall apart when opened in anything but an absolutely identical machine with identical OS (and version), identical software (and version), and sometimes even identical printers.
Examples? Using spaces instead of tabs. Using spaces instead of indent. Using non-standard fonts. Using hard returns as space filler. Using frames for page numbering instead of auto-numbering. Using manual character attributes for headings instead of using styles. Using hard hyphens instead of soft ones. Trying to emulate dot leaders manually instead of using the correct auto function. Manually creating a TOC or index instead of letting the software generate them. Etc, etc, etc.
The list is endless as to how a user can screw up a document to make it incompatible with other systems. And such poorly formatted documents are also almost impossible to properly edit later on ANY software.
Thank you for the interesting and informative comparison.
The only flaw I see it in is fonts. If you don't have the font loaded on the target machine, it doesn't matter what software you use, it will not render/load it, because it doesn't exist. Almost no "office" program embeds fonts. So that cannot be a valid factor when comparing compatibility.
If you have an MS-Windows machine running MS-Office and create a document with a specific font, then try to load that document on an IDENTICAL machine in the IDENTICAL software that lacks the font, you won't see that font- it will have to substitute some other font.
I have 150 users using OO under Linux and it almost never crashes. There are some annoying bugs, but that is also the case in most proprietary software I have come across.
>The story is about Linux. What relevance does OS X have here?
The obvious comparison is to OpenOffice. One of the *major* advantages of OpenOffice is that it runs on all platforms of modern interest- Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and MS-Windows. You can select one application and know it will run on whatever machine you come across, use, or want to select later. It frees you from platform lock-in. It creates a bigger support community. As a school, you know everyone can run it at home. At work, you can know everyone can run it at home or at all other businesses you interact with, or even your customers. In government, you know all citizens and businesses you interact with can run it.
It is a feature far more important than being a bit faster or having slightly better proprietary file format compatibility.
Let's see:
1) It lacks vector drawing (Draw)
2) It lacks database (Base)
3) It is closed source
4) Although it supports Linux, it seems to not support MacOS
5) It costs a lot more than OpenOffice
Sorry, it is hard to get all that excited.
Well, it doesn't hurt to present some numbers to Netflix. I doubt it will make that much difference, but at least it is SOMETHING. Zero feedback usually guarantees zero results, that is pretty certain.
Hopefully they will release a Linux version at some point. In the meantime, please take a minute and fill out this petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/Linflix/petition.html (right now it is at 4429, we can do much better)
If I had mod points, I would have +1'ed you. I can't stand it when lame spec sheets say "Memory" when what they really mean is "Storage" or "Flash". Memory = RAM. The phone has 1GB of flash/storage and 512MB of memory/RAM. Ug
It might be less of a conspiracy and more of a supply-and-demand thing. Most people have no use for and could care less about line in (I am not one of them, however). Since you are talking about laptops, anything that reduces space is often omitted, if it isn't really needed.
On desktop machines, I have not seen line-in disappear at all. And I bought a laptop last year, and it has mic/line-in, too.
>And if you can't login from home, then maybe you should do your work *at* work ?
You are missing the point... we WANT to use Linux/FOSS at work; and we mostly do. That is not a problem for MOST sites. But there are sites, mostly login-access-only that absolutely require IE+MS-Windows. Those sites we cannot control and have nothing to do with our infrastructure except that we HAVE to use them, and thus are forced to have some MS-Windows machines to deal with them.
It is not an "Intranet" unless they are apps we installed and/or control and/or for our use only. These are other companies that we need to work with.
You are wacked. I am certainly NOT defending IE/Windows only. I aggressively support FOSS & Linux. You can call me whatever you want, but posting the products that we are forced to use that are IE-only will be totally meaningless here, because they are private sites that you cannot access without a login.
>We're talking about the Internet. We really don't care about your companies intranet.
I am not talking about "my company's intranet". While the sites I am talking about are not public sites, they are on the Internet, not a private network, and not an Intranet. And they aren't "mine", because if I designed them, they certainly wouldn't require using MS-Windows and/or IE. Finally, while I can understand your not caring, you really should care, because most people do work for some type of company. Being "free" to use what we want at home but forced lock-in at work isn't good for the computing environment at-large.
>so you can keep doing what you do now- run Firefox except for the few times you need a craptacular website,
>in which case you can carefully an old IE.
Unless you don't want to use MS-Windows. (And no, I don't count IES4Linux, which is now not stable nor updated anymore)
>What websites? I've been using Firefox on Linux exclusively for a long time,
You are obviously a home user and not a business user. There are at least 3 critical website apps that we have to access at work that will not work under anything but MS-Windows + IE.
There has been a TREMENDOUS progress in making websites cross-platform and more standards-based over the last several years. Most home users will now rarely, if ever, find a website that requires MS-Windows + IE, except for that horrible Silverlight stuff. But proprietary business stuff is often just as bad as ever... and that continues the lock-in. We just demoed yet another application-as-a-service last week.... when I asked, they didn't even know the answer to my question, but it was obviously MS-Windows + IE only.
>Forced to upgrade? IE8 works just fine on XP and will continue to do so.
It is true that IE8 works on XP, so it will really only be a problem when an IE-Only site also requires 9 for some reason. And that is probably far in the future. By that time, XP really will be VERY old, indeed.
>Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then?
Because I can choose to upgrade Linux when I choose to, and at no cost. And when I upgrade, it is not going to suck in tons of DRM and licensing restrictions like MS-Windows upgrades typically do. Also, it is almost certain that MS will use such stuff to try and kill off XP so they can continue upgrade fees and further lock-in. Motivations like that rarely (if at all) exist in the FOSS world.