Please check out "The Little Engine that Could" from your local library. It will have the infidels guessing as to what we are up to, when we could be up to what we already know how to do.
Legislation like this part of the the PATRIOT Act is a waste of paper. Why would a terrorist now check out "Bomb Building For Dummies" from a US library after knowing his reading habits could be watched? Instead, they can browse material inside the library--taking notes & photocopying particularly relevant bits. Or they could buy said books from a bookstore, paying cash. Or they could read it on the net. Or they could just rely on other terrorist communication and training channels.
It effectively wastes the time and effort of librarians and law enforcement officials who have to search for these idiots. It also strips away privacy from all of us. I hope that if your representative voted to keep this sucker, you will write letters & protest with your vote!
But not Octave vs Matlab? This is, admittedly, why I fired back a response. I am afraid to say I haven't used Maxima that much.
But it doesn't sound like Maxima isn't "even in Mathematica's league." It sounds like you have a rather specialized need that it has apparently stopped addressing. It would be easy enough to either find a version that still had PRIME or implement it yourself--you can download large lists of sorted primes & create a simple script (in Maxima or externally) that looked up the nth prime.
But perhaps you can send a bug report to the authors & ask that PRIME be reimplemented--just have it check to see whether a list of primes exists & spit out an error message if it doesn't or if there aren't actually n primes in that list. I'm surprised they didn't choose to do this, rather than cutting out the functionality.
This is one area where the OSS camp has yet to catch up - and I don't mean providing access to a Bugzilla database with 100,000+ known issues, mostly minor.
Paul Vixie wrote an article in which he point4ed out that It's best to pick "friendly" users are likely to find a lot of defects and that many linux users are so friendly as to be able to suggest fixes.
Unfunded open-source software enjoys the best system-level testing in the industry, unless we include NASA's testing on space-bound robots in our comparison. The reason is simply that users tend to be much friendlier when they aren't being charged any money, and power users (often developers themselves) are much more helpful when they can read, and fix, the source code to something they're running. The essence of field testing is its lack of rigor. What software engineering is looking for from its field testers is patterns of use which are inherently unpredictable at the time the system is being designed and built--in other words, real world experiences of real users. Unfunded open-source projects are simply unbeatable in this area. An additional advantage enjoyed by open-source projects is the "peer review" of dozens or hundreds of other programmers looking for bugs by reading the source code rather than just by executing packaged executables. Some of the readers will be looking for security flaws and some of those found will not be reported (other than among other crackers), but this danger does not take away from the overall advantage of having uncounted strangers reading the source code. These strangers can really keep an Open Source developer on his or her toes in a way that no manager or mentor ever could.
He is entirely right & there is PLENTY of stable F/OSS that is also perfectly predictable. Just stay out of the development releases & take your FUD someplace else.
GVIM isn't that far off, especially if you have the cream extension that makes VIM a single-mode editor. There are numerous plugins to do what you want, but why not just get an actual IDE?
I didn't claim they could be used natively in windows. The great-grand-parent didn't ask for a windows solution & said that anjuta was worth a try.
I think they can be used in cygwin. They can also be found in numerous bootable CDs. Cross compilation is possible. Last time I checked, Microsoft's products couldn't do this. Isn't it a "definite disadvantage" that Visual Studio can't be used for Linux development AT ALL?
Developing in linux offers many, many advantages over developing in windows. One being that the non-commercial use of the superior intel c++ and fortran compilers are free. A lot of other better tools are also more accessible--MSVS relies on source safe rather than CVS or subversion, for instance.
If you want a native windows C++ IDE, try Dev-C++.
Have you even tried them? Octave ran about 90% of my (admittedlty somewhat casual) matlab work with no modifications. Maxima was used back before there was a GPL. It was the best available then. I don't know how things have changed since then.
Some argue that the CLI is the best newbie interface. I don't know if I would be this extreme, but I would say you underestimate beginners and the tools on a CLI. Most people who have the courage to install the OS have the courage to tolerate the command line A LITTLE.
I know that in some distributions, I've seen at least a program I've never heard of. The natural inclination is to open up the darn program to figure out what it is & if it can be used to do what I want. This is a waste of time.
A friend was using gnome and wanted to open an IDE. How should he that this program with the funny name "anjuta" was what he wants? If you can grok the way the GUI desktop is organized and the way developers have named programs, you are fine. But if not?
On the CLI, this is solved with a simple "apropos integrated development." Tab completion and aliasing in most shells means you have to remember only the first few characters of most commands in order to use them. I doubt this is any harder than remembering where in the maze of menus you have to choose the program from.
If you insist on a menu of commands, this can also be implemented on the CLI. I remember (in the days of DOS) programming batch menus for floppy disks I distributed. There are now utilities to do this fo you in linux.
The GUI does provide some amount of comfort--there are sometimes icons tied to programs which will graphically jog your memory as to what you might want to run. Graphics in general are usually more soothing than text. But that doesn't mean the command line is bad.
You should check agian! NTFS support is still considered "in developmnet," but I just used QTParted to format a whole NTFS partition. The FAQ claims this has been featured since 0.1.6 (they are up to 0.4.4).
From the Post: The better solution is the smart package-installer Fedora employs; its "yum" utility fetches a program from an online archive, resolves dependency issues and sets it up with one command. It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface. Cobind has a GUI
From the Post: Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive. Which is, of course, wrong. Using parted and a graphical frontend like QTparted, you can easily resize partitions. The last SUSE install I helped out with had a partition resizer during the install. Did they take this feature out?
If you're curious about why I don't like gnucash, I can summarize in two words: double entry.
This is a fair, or at least common criticism. I would gripe thatit is possible to do single-entry accounting in GNUCash. The commonality of the complaint is what made me instinctively suggest Checkbook Tracker. It doesn't have ALL the bells and whistles of Money, but you'll certainly recognize the style & it does have some good features.
GNUCash does lack forecasting, but I am surprised that you didn't find the reports & graphing both useful and customizable to your liking.
MS Money was the last thing I gave up. I'm not saying you should too, but I am saying that I don't find the native and free financial apps to be as primitive as you make them out to be.
What do you mean by this? Linux's CLI seems to ME to be leagues ahead of what windows offers. The shells in OS X seem to be about the same as a Linux shell. If you're rather saying you'd rather do GUI-only, I'd say that that is possible in several distributions.
Spoiled by the absence of decent documentation.
This I have to take real issue with. Most windows software, for example, comes with a minimal online help system and a ~10-page install/getting started guide. The proper "documentation" is often sold separately. Most mature linux apps ship with a similarly minimal electronic install guide & often have very extensive TeXInfo or Docbook manuals.
A lot of Mac software also has good documentation, but many of the programs I use in OS X gathered most of their documentation from whatever *nix application they were ported from.
I've tried gnucash and Moneydance. Frankly, they suck. I would love to see a usable personal finance software package from the F/OSS crowd that will run on my linux boxes.
How did they suck? I do have minor criticisms with GNUCash, but if I thought that it "sucked," I would definitely try to offer constructive criticism. Moneydance isn't F/OSS. Have you tried Checkbook Tracker? I haven't used it extensively, but it has a fairly nice minimalist interface.
And I'm not going to pay for Quicken until I'm sure that it will meet my needs.
You can often get it FAR (especially when taxtime nears), partially thanks to the ads.
Most people don't use either because their bank/credit card doesn't support them.
A majority of the users I know probably don't know whether their banks or credit cards support them. Indeed, the first version of Quicken was made c.a. 1983, before the internet boom. The value of the software isn't merely integration, but in financial tracking--budget in the software, buy stuff & record in the software & then DOUBLE CHECK your bank and credit card statements against what you recorded. Banks do make mistakes.
They have posted signs everywhere prohibiting the use of routers with or without wireless access. This boggles my mind, as you'd think they would have wanted us to have the hardware firewalls. Their defense is probably "security" concerns (which is nonsense for wired routers) & to be able to provide a better infrastructure by having enough of their own routing equipment to meet the needs of their users. This micromanaging is also nonsense. The infrastructure should have less to do with the number of machines as to the amount of traffic.
This policy really is backwards, but is also implemented at our university. I chuckled the when the last worm hit--the University's firewall happily let it slip into the network & weren't effective enough about preventing it from spreading within the network. Our machines (most of which, admittedly, were non-win32 and/or properly patched in the first place) saw none of this traffic because of our illegal router.
I think this is a more interesting question. I startx mostly for watching TV (fbtv and vcr don't do it for me), but there are a few other apps that keep me there: spreadsheet software and personal finance software being the top two. What else do you miss if you're on the console?
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly don't believe I'm important enough and/or interesting enough to have anybody read my e-mail.
.mil address, I'd just assume that my email was up for grabs.
If I had a
The fact that some (such as your self) in our armed forces aren't fighting tooth-and-nail for our freedoms is somewhat depressing.
Please check out "The Little Engine that Could" from your local library. It will have the infidels guessing as to what we are up to, when we could be up to what we already know how to do.
Legislation like this part of the the PATRIOT Act is a waste of paper. Why would a terrorist now check out "Bomb Building For Dummies" from a US library after knowing his reading habits could be watched? Instead, they can browse material inside the library--taking notes & photocopying particularly relevant bits. Or they could buy said books from a bookstore, paying cash. Or they could read it on the net. Or they could just rely on other terrorist communication and training channels.
It effectively wastes the time and effort of librarians and law enforcement officials who have to search for these idiots. It also strips away privacy from all of us. I hope that if your representative voted to keep this sucker, you will write letters & protest with your vote!
But not Octave vs Matlab? This is, admittedly, why I fired back a response. I am afraid to say I haven't used Maxima that much.
But it doesn't sound like Maxima isn't "even in Mathematica's league." It sounds like you have a rather specialized need that it has apparently stopped addressing. It would be easy enough to either find a version that still had PRIME or implement it yourself--you can download large lists of sorted primes & create a simple script (in Maxima or externally) that looked up the nth prime.
But perhaps you can send a bug report to the authors & ask that PRIME be reimplemented--just have it check to see whether a list of primes exists & spit out an error message if it doesn't or if there aren't actually n primes in that list. I'm surprised they didn't choose to do this, rather than cutting out the functionality.
This is one area where the OSS camp has yet to catch up - and I don't mean providing access to a Bugzilla database with 100,000+ known issues, mostly minor.
Paul Vixie wrote an article in which he point4ed out that It's best to pick "friendly" users are likely to find a lot of defects and that many linux users are so friendly as to be able to suggest fixes.
Unfunded open-source software enjoys the best system-level testing in the industry, unless we include NASA's testing on space-bound robots in our comparison. The reason is simply that users tend to be much friendlier when they aren't being charged any money, and power users (often developers themselves) are much more helpful when they can read, and fix, the source code to something they're running.
The essence of field testing is its lack of rigor. What software engineering is looking for from its field testers is patterns of use which are inherently unpredictable at the time the system is being designed and built--in other words, real world experiences of real users. Unfunded open-source projects are simply unbeatable in this area.
An additional advantage enjoyed by open-source projects is the "peer review" of dozens or hundreds of other programmers looking for bugs by reading the source code rather than just by executing packaged executables. Some of the readers will be looking for security flaws and some of those found will not be reported (other than among other crackers), but this danger does not take away from the overall advantage of having uncounted strangers reading the source code. These strangers can really keep an Open Source developer on his or her toes in a way that no manager or mentor ever could.
He is entirely right & there is PLENTY of stable F/OSS that is also perfectly predictable. Just stay out of the development releases & take your FUD someplace else.
GVIM and most likely Emacs can use a windows-type set of controls.
I really wouldn't call Ultraedit bloated, but to each his own.
GVIM isn't that far off, especially if you have the cream extension that makes VIM a single-mode editor. There are numerous plugins to do what you want, but why not just get an actual IDE?
I didn't claim they could be used natively in windows. The great-grand-parent didn't ask for a windows solution & said that anjuta was worth a try.
I think they can be used in cygwin. They can also be found in numerous bootable CDs. Cross compilation is possible. Last time I checked, Microsoft's products couldn't do this. Isn't it a "definite disadvantage" that Visual Studio can't be used for Linux development AT ALL?
Developing in linux offers many, many advantages over developing in windows. One being that the non-commercial use of the superior intel c++ and fortran compilers are free. A lot of other better tools are also more accessible--MSVS relies on source safe rather than CVS or subversion, for instance.
If you want a native windows C++ IDE, try Dev-C++.
Have you even tried them? Octave ran about 90% of my (admittedlty somewhat casual) matlab work with no modifications. Maxima was used back before there was a GPL. It was the best available then. I don't know how things have changed since then.
I have yet to see any program, free or non-free, compare to Dreamweaver.
Quanta really isn't bad.
Visual Studio is the best development suite I've used.
I'm hooked on Anjuta. Others may prefer KDevelop.
Or Matlab.
Octave completely replaced the casual use of this for me.
Mathworks Matlab: $1900 Commercial Use
Octave
The Linux Mirror Project
Some argue that the CLI is the best newbie interface. I don't know if I would be this extreme, but I would say you underestimate beginners and the tools on a CLI. Most people who have the courage to install the OS have the courage to tolerate the command line A LITTLE.
I know that in some distributions, I've seen at least a program I've never heard of. The natural inclination is to open up the darn program to figure out what it is & if it can be used to do what I want. This is a waste of time.
A friend was using gnome and wanted to open an IDE. How should he that this program with the funny name "anjuta" was what he wants? If you can grok the way the GUI desktop is organized and the way developers have named programs, you are fine. But if not?
On the CLI, this is solved with a simple "apropos integrated development." Tab completion and aliasing in most shells means you have to remember only the first few characters of most commands in order to use them. I doubt this is any harder than remembering where in the maze of menus you have to choose the program from.
If you insist on a menu of commands, this can also be implemented on the CLI. I remember (in the days of DOS) programming batch menus for floppy disks I distributed. There are now utilities to do this fo you in linux.
The GUI does provide some amount of comfort--there are sometimes icons tied to programs which will graphically jog your memory as to what you might want to run. Graphics in general are usually more soothing than text. But that doesn't mean the command line is bad.
You should check agian! NTFS support is still considered "in developmnet," but I just used QTParted to format a whole NTFS partition. The FAQ claims this has been featured since 0.1.6 (they are up to 0.4.4).
Yum is also included with the distro (which can't be said for portage, apt, etc.). But I agree the article should have mentioned up2date.
From the Post:
The better solution is the smart package-installer Fedora employs; its "yum" utility fetches a program from an online archive, resolves dependency issues and sets it up with one command. It's a clever system. Except -- duh -- there's no graphical front-end to it, forcing users to use a text-only, command-line interface.
Cobind has a GUI
From the Post:
Unfortunately, to install any of these versions without wiping out most Windows installations, you'll need to buy a third-party program to partition your hard drive.
Which is, of course, wrong. Using parted and a graphical frontend like QTparted, you can easily resize partitions. The last SUSE install I helped out with had a partition resizer during the install. Did they take this feature out?
If you're curious about why I don't like gnucash, I can summarize in two words: double entry.
This is a fair, or at least common criticism. I would gripe thatit is possible to do single-entry accounting in GNUCash. The commonality of the complaint is what made me instinctively suggest Checkbook Tracker. It doesn't have ALL the bells and whistles of Money, but you'll certainly recognize the style & it does have some good features.
GNUCash does lack forecasting, but I am surprised that you didn't find the reports & graphing both useful and customizable to your liking.
MS Money was the last thing I gave up. I'm not saying you should too, but I am saying that I don't find the native and free financial apps to be as primitive as you make them out to be.
Spoiled by arcane command line syntax.
What do you mean by this? Linux's CLI seems to ME to be leagues ahead of what windows offers. The shells in OS X seem to be about the same as a Linux shell. If you're rather saying you'd rather do GUI-only, I'd say that that is possible in several distributions.
Spoiled by the absence of decent documentation.
This I have to take real issue with. Most windows software, for example, comes with a minimal online help system and a ~10-page install/getting started guide. The proper "documentation" is often sold separately. Most mature linux apps ship with a similarly minimal electronic install guide & often have very extensive TeXInfo or Docbook manuals.
A lot of Mac software also has good documentation, but many of the programs I use in OS X gathered most of their documentation from whatever *nix application they were ported from.
I've tried gnucash and Moneydance. Frankly, they suck. I would love to see a usable personal finance software package from the F/OSS crowd that will run on my linux boxes.
How did they suck? I do have minor criticisms with GNUCash, but if I thought that it "sucked," I would definitely try to offer constructive criticism.
Moneydance isn't F/OSS. Have you tried Checkbook Tracker? I haven't used it extensively, but it has a fairly nice minimalist interface.
And I'm not going to pay for Quicken until I'm sure that it will meet my needs.
You can often get it FAR (especially when taxtime nears), partially thanks to the ads.
A REAL comparison would be nice.
Here is a review of the linux offerings and another. One more.
sorry guys, tried moving over to OSS and wasn't satisfied with current state
May I ask which programs you tried & what faults you found with them? GNUCash is really quite good, as are some of the simpler alternatives.
Most people don't use either because their bank/credit card doesn't support them.
A majority of the users I know probably don't know whether their banks or credit cards support them. Indeed, the first version of Quicken was made c.a. 1983, before the internet boom.
The value of the software isn't merely integration, but in financial tracking--budget in the software, buy stuff & record in the software & then DOUBLE CHECK your bank and credit card statements against what you recorded. Banks do make mistakes.
They have posted signs everywhere prohibiting the use of routers with or without wireless access. This boggles my mind, as you'd think they would have wanted us to have the hardware firewalls.
Their defense is probably "security" concerns (which is nonsense for wired routers) & to be able to provide a better infrastructure by having enough of their own routing equipment to meet the needs of their users. This micromanaging is also nonsense. The infrastructure should have less to do with the number of machines as to the amount of traffic.
This policy really is backwards, but is also implemented at our university. I chuckled the when the last worm hit--the University's firewall happily let it slip into the network & weren't effective enough about preventing it from spreading within the network. Our machines (most of which, admittedly, were non-win32 and/or properly patched in the first place) saw none of this traffic because of our illegal router.
I think this is a more interesting question. I startx mostly for watching TV (fbtv and vcr don't do it for me), but there are a few other apps that keep me there: spreadsheet software and personal finance software being the top two. What else do you miss if you're on the console?
Freshmeat had an article on The Antidesktop a while back that was a good read.