Probably a colloquialism indicating I could have phrased my comment better. It is merely finding the roots to a cubic equation.
Girolamo Cardano (or Cardan or Cardanus or...) published a famous book of solutions to polynomial equations in the 16th century. He got the credit (though he lifted some from Tartaglia (sp?), who told him the solutions on the (obviously violated) promise of secrecy). "Cardano's formula" might be a slightly more popular term.
I like maxima quite a bit! For certain operations, it is MUCH faster than Mathematica & other commercial Computer Algebra Systems (CASs). (The most recent example that springs to mind was a relatively simple (symbolic) cardonic equation. Maxima spit it out instantaneously.)
or Scilab?
Scilab is mostly a numerical package (similar to matlab). By many people's (OSI, DFSG, FSF,...) definitions, it isn't free/open source--commercial redistribution of modified versions is prohibited
A commenter further down also suggested MayaVi.
MayaVI is a 3Dvisualization package & isn't remotely a CAS. It doesn't even provide analysis.
Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).
I like grace a lot. I use it through the GUI & occasionally through python, so can't comment extensively on the perl interfaces. Neither Chart::GRACE nor Chart::Graph::Xmgrace seem TOO obscure.
The command line interface of grace isn't terrible--it is MUCH more powerful than most plotting software which has a GUI. I do agree it is under-documented, though. Fortunately, the developers are very responsive in the forums.
Grace is an excellent free/open source 2D plotting program. It is in Motif, so some might call it "ugly," but I run it on Windows (it is packaged in cygwin), OS X, and linux. It is the most versatile F/OSS package I know of--both in terms of features & in terms of user interaction. In addition to the GUI (which many of the programs you list lack), you can use a command line interface or bindings for python, perl, fortran, C++, OCaml, octave, rlab, etc.
Thunderbird ships with "message filters," which do exactly this. (There are various extensions which improve filtering if this doesn't seem to be enough.)
It also has virtual search folders, which make it easy to find a message based on criteria (including header content)
It seems to me that tagging works with IMAP. Everything looks the same with different TB profiles that have the same tags defined in prefs.js (for color, etc.).
Even before 2.0, thunderbird supported virtual search folders. This seems to be as good as labels in most cases--most gmail users I've observed have filters to auto-apply labels to their messages & few manually tag posts.
You can use external editors from Thunderbird, including MS Word. I suppose that MS products probably have tighter integration with each other, but Outlook is a truly horrific IMAP client. I can't think of many features Outlook has which thunderbird lacks, can you expand?
Regarding top posting vs. bottom posting: this is hardly a "Mac style" issue & many different clients each have there own style. It is configurable in thunderbird & you can set it top post if you really want that. (Conventions vary with different groups of people & different people have their different tates. It is usually good etiquette to trim the quoted text to the minimum and to post directly below relevant passages. If there are separate issues you are responding to, different quote blocks make it easy to see context.)
Yes--(Al)Pine can read local, POP, and IMAP. Pine and UW-IMAPd were both written at the University of Washington. The inventor (and one of the principle RFC writers) of IMAP, Mark Crispin, is involved with development and support for both projects. Pine's backend is essentially the IMAP toolkit.
I had the same issues reported (obviously), but the most recent version of thunderbird does allow me to "accept certificate permanently" & I'm no longer bugged everytime I connect to my own server.
There are "usability issues" with self-signed certificates, but it isn't with the certificates themselves--it is with the certificate authority. Your own CA isn't in the list, so you must either hack it in or choose to trust the CA every session. I'm sure this was done for security reasons--compromised CAs can create (and have created) real havoc. But it obviously makes it a little more difficult for those who do run their own CA.
It works the exact same way as other Mozilla applications. In most cases, making heavy use of multiple profiles is limited to testing--what other use cases are there for needing multiple profiles? Most people with multiple accounts want them all in one profile. The few who want to keep them partitioned will only have a few profiles, so it is easy to make shortcuts. What client are you using that has better profile support? Most clients lack profiles altogether.
It never stores the profile where i want without a whole bunch of fussing with a special start of Thunderbird (thunderbird -profile or something).
If you have a windowing system that has an application launcher (which most of them do), this is an inconvenience only once--you can setup shortcuts to launch whatever esoteric command you need.
Then, when I migrate my email into Thunderbird, it just cant handle huge volumes RELIABLY each time I have tried.
Again, a one-time inconvenience. What format are you importing? If you have A LOT of email in some proprietary format (i.e. you use Outlook), it is usually still best to convert to a standard format with a third party app. Migration issues plague ANY software change, unfortunately. Thunderbird seems better than most. Again: how easy would it be to take a huge mailspool from thunderbird and put it into your client of choice?
This isn't to say Thunderbird is perfect (far from). But I fail to see how it underperforms a majority of the other clients in these aspects.
You can add multiple LDAP servers. Unfortunately, I believe you can only use one at a time (you can associate a different one with each of your accounts, though & there are extensions which make switching between accounts easier).
and it HAS to be LDAP. No remote VCARD address book support.
The sync kolab extension will sync the local addressbook with vcards in an IMAP directory. Most email clients don't have remote VCARD support of any kind. It would be nice if there were a standard way to dump an addressbook onto IMAP. (Al)Pine's method differs from Thunderbird's, so you can't share them. IMSP would have eased this, but no one adopted it.
Sign me up for whatever free postage system you have. Especially if it comes with delivery confirmation, etc. that the conscientious will purchase.
Or electronically, which requires you to buy an accredited program in order to generate the e-forms
70% of taxpayers qualify for free file, which allows them to e-file after using free (as in beer) online tax software. Yes, this percentage should be higher. Yes, anyone should be permitted to create tax preparation software, including open source software, which could e-file. But, it is hardly extortion.
Given the resources at the disposal of the Government, why couldn't they just build a website similar to the ones online tax programs use for data entry and obvious computations (adding columns, tax brackets, etc.). I don't care if the results are not automatically optimized, but at least, you could *fill* the tax forms online and submit the e-forms without the fees required by proprietary programs. IMHO, that should be a basic IRS service.
I actually agree with the IRS--tax software should be in the private sector, not the public sector (government monopolies suck). But there's no reason not to open this up for ALL entrants, rather than granting an oligopoly.
We're not as big as some enterprise customers, but we do have a 5 TB FreeBSD server which uses samba to both run our domain of analysis workstations and serve up all of that data. Someone else mentioned OpenLDAP frustrations (with which I somewhat agree). However, IDEALX's smbldap does warrant a shoutout for making things easier for so long.
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
As others have pointed out, there is third party software to create PDFs for free on all platforms. What I haven't seen are many tools to process XPS documents on non-windows platforms (or even on "legacy" windows). There is an open source XPS to PDF converter, but I know of no current way to create an XPS document without using Windows.
I mean seriously, think about it - you can buy a "normal" version of Office for the price of being able to export your documents to a PDF.
Not only do the creators of PDF's get screwed, the reader software (up until the latest version) has sucked hard. It had a tendency to stay open and use copious amounts of RAM even whenthere were no PDF docs being viewed.
As you said, Adobe's current version doesn't suffer these problems. There are also plenty of third party viewers & Adobe's viewer works on Windows, OS X, and Linux. This isn't the case for XPS.
There are a lot of ways to edit PDFs. Sometimes it is worth converting to postscript, as you'll have even more tools. The tools below are free/open source and run on Linux. Most also work on other operating systems. If you are willing to take a proprietary solution, there are even more options:
Disclaimer: I primarily use FreeBSD servers and Gentoo desktops.
First of all, I find it interesting that FreeBSD never seems to get these complaints and hate about having to recompile packages with portupgrade all the time, and being able to tweak the flags, etc.
I'd imagine that there are fewer FreeBSD desktop users than Gentoo desktop users, and I believe it is the "clueless user" stories that cause the most ribbing. I also think that FreeBSD has a bigger presence in the server space. Yahoo runs FreeBSD. Who, pray tell, runs Gentoo?
Does this make all criticisms against gentoo fair? No.
But the fact that more have used FreeBSD on servers for longer also means it has had useful tools. portaudit predates glsa-check & has better coverage in many ways, for example.
In this respect, it's just like gentoo!!! Except without a lot of the fancy features like etc-update and slots and masking and multiple supported versions.
Can you please tell me why I'd want slotted packages on a server, particularly if glsa-check doesn't yet work well with slots?
I think Gentoo CAN work in the server room. glsa and other tools make it a better candidate than it was a few years ago.
Some of the other popular distros capable of running X-less (e.g. Debian) and the *BSDs have been and are in wider production deployment. Of course, if one is tied to a storage, database, or backup vendor, one may be tied to Red Hat or SUSE.
Clearly, if Linux is unable to reproduce a third of Firefox's end user uptake over a much longer time-frame, there are deficiencies with the direction the GNU/Linux/X/Gnome/KDE system has taken.
Linux is an OS. Firefox is a desktop application. An OS differs from an application in many ways, including ease of installation and the impact to the rest of the desktop.
Perhaps this suggests "alternative OSs" should make it even easier to make use of virtualization on "popular OSs" (LiveCDs are popular & this would be the next logical step).
Of course the way to find the adoption of any software is difficult & the ways people look at browser usage compared to OS usage often differ.
Firefox can run on many OSs, including Linux. Unless another browser becomes very dominant on Linux or Firefox becomes unpopular in other OSs, it isn't a good point of comparison.
The fact that a browser was the basis for comparison is telling--server-side apps are becoming more important & many of these do run on Linux.
Billhead already has a tape drive, so he might as well use it.
I personally like tapes for a number of reasons. Yes, the drives are expensive. But for small business to enterprise level hardware, the drives aren't more expensive than RAID hardware of comparable quality. Also, the cost of adding media is better with tape.
Mean-time-to-failure is better & having data segmented across several tapes is nice--if one tape fails, you should still have a backup on another tape. It is rare that that other tape would also fail. Separating the read/write mechanism from the media does improve reliability.
Also, tapes are fairly small & rugged & lend themselves to transport (to keep backups offsite, for instance).
I also disagree with your specific recommendation for hard drive backups. What you describe amounts to little more than a clunky mirroring, which is not what backups should be. Backups should be zero-touch (automated/cronned)! OP also wants network backup solution.
HDDs can be used to perform networked backups daily (and can be used to store multiple full and incremental backups, rather than a one-time mirror). They can even be put in an array to improve reliability and loaded on trays to make swapping almost as easy as tapes. But this requires the same kind of backup software that the OP is asking about. It also doesn't really solve the incremental media cost or mechanical durability issues.
We run AMANDA in our small setup. It is fantastic. The scheduler is quite sophisticated & backing up to tar makes disaster recovery easy. Not having to purchase client licenses is also a big plus
I've used Retrospect. It was "O.K.," but the above reasons make AMANDA a better fit.
We have a 5 TB RAID-5 FreeBSD server and a handfull of clients (mostly windows, but a few OS X and Linux boxes). The cygwin clients work well & there are now binaries, so you don't have to compile it yourself (as we did when we set it up a few years ago).
"Problematic" clients (such as laptops which aren't on at night) use rsync+ssh to backup to the server (which is then additionally put on tape).
Amanda provides options to encrypt the network traffic and/or the backups. It has reasonably good indexing & supports tape changers. It even supports RAIT. I have a few gripes, but relatively few of them in comparison to other backup software.
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Girolamo Cardano (or Cardan or Cardanus or...) published a famous book of solutions to polynomial equations in the 16th century. He got the credit (though he lifted some from Tartaglia (sp?), who told him the solutions on the (obviously violated) promise of secrecy). "Cardano's formula" might be a slightly more popular term.
For other open source options, see Comparison of computer algebra systems on Wikipedia.
The command line interface of grace isn't terrible--it is MUCH more powerful than most plotting software which has a GUI. I do agree it is under-documented, though. Fortunately, the developers are very responsive in the forums.
Grace is an excellent free/open source 2D plotting program. It is in Motif, so some might call it "ugly," but I run it on Windows (it is packaged in cygwin), OS X, and linux. It is the most versatile F/OSS package I know of--both in terms of features & in terms of user interaction. In addition to the GUI (which many of the programs you list lack), you can use a command line interface or bindings for python, perl, fortran, C++, OCaml, octave, rlab, etc.
Thunderbird ships with "message filters," which do exactly this. (There are various extensions which improve filtering if this doesn't seem to be enough.)
It also has virtual search folders, which make it easy to find a message based on criteria (including header content)
It seems to me that tagging works with IMAP. Everything looks the same with different TB profiles that have the same tags defined in prefs.js (for color, etc.).
Even before 2.0, thunderbird supported virtual search folders. This seems to be as good as labels in most cases--most gmail users I've observed have filters to auto-apply labels to their messages & few manually tag posts.
You can use external editors from Thunderbird, including MS Word. I suppose that MS products probably have tighter integration with each other, but Outlook is a truly horrific IMAP client. I can't think of many features Outlook has which thunderbird lacks, can you expand?
Regarding top posting vs. bottom posting: this is hardly a "Mac style" issue & many different clients each have there own style. It is configurable in thunderbird & you can set it top post if you really want that. (Conventions vary with different groups of people & different people have their different tates. It is usually good etiquette to trim the quoted text to the minimum and to post directly below relevant passages. If there are separate issues you are responding to, different quote blocks make it easy to see context.)
Yes--(Al)Pine can read local, POP, and IMAP. Pine and UW-IMAPd were both written at the University of Washington. The inventor (and one of the principle RFC writers) of IMAP, Mark Crispin, is involved with development and support for both projects. Pine's backend is essentially the IMAP toolkit.
I had the same issues reported (obviously), but the most recent version of thunderbird does allow me to "accept certificate permanently" & I'm no longer bugged everytime I connect to my own server.
There are "usability issues" with self-signed certificates, but it isn't with the certificates themselves--it is with the certificate authority. Your own CA isn't in the list, so you must either hack it in or choose to trust the CA every session. I'm sure this was done for security reasons--compromised CAs can create (and have created) real havoc. But it obviously makes it a little more difficult for those who do run their own CA.
This isn't to say Thunderbird is perfect (far from). But I fail to see how it underperforms a majority of the other clients in these aspects.
Sign me up for whatever free postage system you have. Especially if it comes with delivery confirmation, etc. that the conscientious will purchase.70% of taxpayers qualify for free file, which allows them to e-file after using free (as in beer) online tax software. Yes, this percentage should be higher. Yes, anyone should be permitted to create tax preparation software, including open source software, which could e-file. But, it is hardly extortion.I actually agree with the IRS--tax software should be in the private sector, not the public sector (government monopolies suck). But there's no reason not to open this up for ALL entrants, rather than granting an oligopoly.
We're not as big as some enterprise customers, but we do have a 5 TB FreeBSD server which uses samba to both run our domain of analysis workstations and serve up all of that data. Someone else mentioned OpenLDAP frustrations (with which I somewhat agree). However, IDEALX's smbldap does warrant a shoutout for making things easier for so long.
Does this make all criticisms against gentoo fair? No.
But the fact that more have used FreeBSD on servers for longer also means it has had useful tools. portaudit predates glsa-check & has better coverage in many ways, for example. Can you please tell me why I'd want slotted packages on a server, particularly if glsa-check doesn't yet work well with slots?
Gentoo in the server room?
I think Gentoo CAN work in the server room. glsa and other tools make it a better candidate than it was a few years ago.
Some of the other popular distros capable of running X-less (e.g. Debian) and the *BSDs have been and are in wider production deployment. Of course, if one is tied to a storage, database, or backup vendor, one may be tied to Red Hat or SUSE.
Over two thirds of tax payers can file online for free. The IRS runs Free File, which helps you to select a service to file through.
Most of these were browser and OS agnostic last year & a good choice for those with AGIs low enough.
Linux is an OS. Firefox is a desktop application. An OS differs from an application in many ways, including ease of installation and the impact to the rest of the desktop.
Perhaps this suggests "alternative OSs" should make it even easier to make use of virtualization on "popular OSs" (LiveCDs are popular & this would be the next logical step).
Of course the way to find the adoption of any software is difficult & the ways people look at browser usage compared to OS usage often differ.
Firefox can run on many OSs, including Linux. Unless another browser becomes very dominant on Linux or Firefox becomes unpopular in other OSs, it isn't a good point of comparison.
The fact that a browser was the basis for comparison is telling--server-side apps are becoming more important & many of these do run on Linux.
Billhead already has a tape drive, so he might as well use it.
I personally like tapes for a number of reasons. Yes, the drives are expensive. But for small business to enterprise level hardware, the drives aren't more expensive than RAID hardware of comparable quality. Also, the cost of adding media is better with tape.
Mean-time-to-failure is better & having data segmented across several tapes is nice--if one tape fails, you should still have a backup on another tape. It is rare that that other tape would also fail. Separating the read/write mechanism from the media does improve reliability.
Also, tapes are fairly small & rugged & lend themselves to transport (to keep backups offsite, for instance).
I also disagree with your specific recommendation for hard drive backups. What you describe amounts to little more than a clunky mirroring, which is not what backups should be. Backups should be zero-touch (automated/cronned)! OP also wants network backup solution.
HDDs can be used to perform networked backups daily (and can be used to store multiple full and incremental backups, rather than a one-time mirror). They can even be put in an array to improve reliability and loaded on trays to make swapping almost as easy as tapes. But this requires the same kind of backup software that the OP is asking about. It also doesn't really solve the incremental media cost or mechanical durability issues.
We run AMANDA in our small setup. It is fantastic. The scheduler is quite sophisticated & backing up to tar makes disaster recovery easy. Not having to purchase client licenses is also a big plus
I've used Retrospect. It was "O.K.," but the above reasons make AMANDA a better fit.
We have a 5 TB RAID-5 FreeBSD server and a handfull of clients (mostly windows, but a few OS X and Linux boxes). The cygwin clients work well & there are now binaries, so you don't have to compile it yourself (as we did when we set it up a few years ago).
"Problematic" clients (such as laptops which aren't on at night) use rsync+ssh to backup to the server (which is then additionally put on tape).
Amanda provides options to encrypt the network traffic and/or the backups. It has reasonably good indexing & supports tape changers. It even supports RAIT. I have a few gripes, but relatively few of them in comparison to other backup software.