"OOo's mathematical formula support is better than what comes with MS Office."
You failed to site any examples of this. I've used both in a statistical environment and can tell you WITHOUT A DOUBT that OpenOffice lacks several features that make it unusable. One example is arrays with multiple ranges - can't do that in calc! And pivot tables (called Data Pilot in Calc) are a joke.
I'm uncertain, but the grandparent may have been referring to being able to write formulas in OO.o Writer, rather than use formulas in OO.o Calc. That being said, I'd never use MS Excel in a statistical environment--it is a blackbox & has been shown to have bugs which MS has refused to fix. (There may not be a business case for fixing bugs that effect 1% of the userbase, but do you really want to be part of that 1% it does effect?) I use Gnumeric for most of that (though, yes, Gnumeric does noticeably lack pivot tables (it DOES support multi-ranged arrays)).
I agree with another comment that a conversion to a database would be the best solution in instances such as this & would remark that there are very usable interfaces to a database. Heck--most spreadsheet programs have data connectors. If they have to select a new program to get around the limit anyway, why not make it the right kind of program?
That being said, Gnumeric is an excellent spreadsheet which allows you to set both the row and column limit at compile time. They also plan to allow it to be set at runtime. Using Gnumeric, you'd only be limited by the memory and by the compatibility you want to maintain with other programs (but, if you already have a 500,000 row CSV file, it won't be compatible with anything else anyway).
There are many areas where OO.o is still lacking badly. One of them is the math editor.
A couple points:
Remember they were discussing differences in file formats. ODF is no worse at storing equations than DOC. I have DOCs that I've converted to ODT in OO.o writer & equations are identical. (You did mention these were "implementation issues (by which you really mean INTERFACE issues," but it is worth emphasizing.)
Also: the equation editor that ships with Word is VERY bad. It is basically a limited shareware copy of MathType & will bug you to upgrade it whenever you use it. There are worse plugins that MathType, but then there are also plugin equation editors for OO.o.
Support for sound (works but buggy)
Can you clarify what you mean by "buggy?" Or at least give examples?
and video (inexistant AFAIK) in presentations
I think this requrires Java, but I do know you can use video in OOo impress.
It is very easy to install. I can get nearly identical output from the windows workstations at work as I get on my Linux machines. One particularly nice feature is that if you request the use of a package that isn't installed to your texmf folder, it will prompt you & ask you if you want to download it from CTAN. I suppose that this might not work well for multi-user environments. So, perhaps your peers want to use other packages, but don't have permission to install them on the win32 boxes & those packages are already on the *nix server. Just a guess.
The only other guess is one of performance: *nix tetex is generally faster at typesetting than win32 miktex on a similar machine (and, if the *nix server is FASTER than your win32 workstations, the difference will be even greater).
That being said, it is hardly unusable on win32. The MikTeX developers are serious about what they do. If your colleagues have a legitimate gripe which doesn't involve a poor install, get them to file a bug report!
As far as I know, WebPine is only currently available to people at UW. I don't know how their quota system works. Probably in the hundreds of MBs, depending on your seniority.
You can access WebPine from anywhere with a web browser.
WebPine also works with server-side SPAM and virus filtering.
I recently found out that the school I'm headed to for my PhD (Northwestern) no longer supports Pine.
I'm at NU. The year I started was one of the last years they offered SSH into a restricted shell which let you use pine. That being said, Pine is an excellent IMAP client. You can run it on your own system. It is free as in beer & you can download binaries for most platforms. You can look at the *nix source code & recompile it to another platform for your personal use.
A response (by a former pine user)
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I like pine. It is a great IMAP client. Crummy license, but we can't have everything. I used to use it & I don't think you give it a fair shake.
* web based, can get to it from any browser anywhere
SSHing in and using pine locally has fairly high availability. If you happen to be at UW & use the web-based version of Pine, then you obviously have it all. If you are at places you can't ssh, there are java applets which can SSH & you can put one up on your own web server.
* indexed by Google for me! I'd venture a guess that if you had a gigabyte of e-mail to search from pine, and you did searches all of the time, you'd not find PINE even capable of achieving the "within one magnitude" result you found.
Pine searches are pretty speedy for a desktop client. They won't grok attachments, of course. But, if you have local mail, you can just use google desktop search (or spotlight or beagle or grep or find or locate or....)
* search is implemented as in Google, i.e., you can enter keywords in any order, any case, etc., and Google pretty much knows what to do. (some may not realize but Google even has nuance in what is returned in what order based on the order keywords are entered -- while still managing to preserve meaningful and complete results)
It is fairly trivial to setup compound searching using either the email client itself or some other general desktop search tool.
* when there are new and wonderful features (there sometimes are) they're their without having to install our update.
And what if you don't like those new and wonderful features. Or what if a coder not at google has a great idea for a new and wonderful feature? He won't be able to add it to Google. He might be able to add it to Pine (though would only be able to distribute it as a patch--but we already covered the lame license).
* html/graphics and multimedia capabilities. While I haven't used PINE in a long time, last time I did, mime was almost an add-on, and a bit gnarly to use.
MIME works fine. Filtering out MIME types works fine. Viewing HTML email as plain text is often useful to extract any information from it. It is easy to send HTML to lynx/(e)links/w3m/etc. Equally easy to open attachments in another program.
* gmail is nicely folded into my browser interface experience. When I send e-mail from Windows, the e-mail is instantiated in a new tab that automatically disappears when the transaction is completed.
I happen to use a window manager that lets me tab any programs together. That being said, I don't see why this is a significant advantage. If you want to check your email, you must always have a tab open to gmail. What if you don't want to have your web browser on? What if you're visiting persnickety java/flash/pdf sites that crash your browser due to some odd firefox extension that has a memory leak?
* gmail auto-saves drafts for me - I've been saved by this a couple of times.
Postponed messages in pine are persistent too.
* keyboard shortcuts (I know the author complains about the inconsistent overloading, but I've found them comfortable and decent especially for being implemented in a browser... maybe a "vi" background is handy after all!)
It is nice that gmail has shortcuts. This is NOT an advantage it has over Pine, though. In Pine, EVERYTHING is a keyboard shortcut.
* gmail keeps all of my data handy, indexed, and available for that future day someone wants to subpoena my records! (kidding)
And they give you plenty of ads based on the content of your email! Oh boy!
I have a gmail account. I think it is the best web-based email out there. I don't think it can yet replace desktop email & won't trust it to until I can more easily transfer all mail, addresses, and settings from and to any other email provider.
I don't know, offhand, if you can. This behavior should be encouraged, though: other programs also strip sigs. If bottom-post (as is also encouraged, but not as strongly enforced), your message might get stripped out with the top quote! If you top post (boo!), your signature should still probably be the last thing to appear in the message.
There are work-arounds, of course. There are extensions which offer other composition interfaces that don't obey this convention. You can also just select what you want & paste as quoted text. These should be used as edge-cases, though (only for when you receive something with '-- \n' that isn't meant to be a quote).
What you want is much like saying that you want to donate to Thunderbird, but not have the money go to the Firefox crew, as you only use Thunderbird. The same foundation is working on both, so the money goes to the group as a whole.
I wanted my money to go to Thunderbird development, so I donated to the developers of Thunderbird. There's nothing stopping you from sending honorariums to people you know who right good open code in order to encourage them to write more of it.
which apps on the list 1. run on Microsoft Windows operating systems (so that they don't require re-buying hardware)
Those which run under Linux probably wouldn't require new hardware either. That being said, here are the windows apps (which are most of them): ODT
Abiword
EZ publish
IBM Workplace
Scribus
TextMaker
Writely is web-native, so you could use that too.Kword might work in cygwin (I really don't know--I know you can run some KDE apps). ODS
Gnumeric
IBM Workplace
Same note on KSpread. ODP Same note on KPresenter as on KWord ODG
Scribus
2. are promoted in print or on television across North America or across Europe?
What does this have to do with anything? I have seen relatively few MS Office, OO.o, or Corel WordPerfect ads either. People giving away software usually don't spend money to ensure you'll take it from them.
Google does submit patches to these projects and has sponsored interns and employees work on various open source projects.
Does Yahoo pay for FreeBSD
Yahoo! hosts the freebsd.org cluster. They pay bandwidth and power and most of the hardware. They even give hardware to developers and employ several coders for the project fulltime.
does Apple?
I don't know Apple's financial commitment. They do give code back. Furthermore, they have really forked FreeBSD, so aren't directly using all of the "upstream" support, maintenance, development, etc. of FreeBSD.
"Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer..." Apple and SCO aren't "freeloaders", they are using the software under the intended license.
No, it's far simpler than that. Apple and SCO *paid for* BSD. BSD was paid for by the taxpayers of California, including corporations like Apple and SCO. Perhaps Theo noticed a "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California.
OpenSSH development began in 1999. So, no Apple didn't pay for OpenSSH. Yes, tax payers paid for the original BSD, from which NetBSD borrows from (and OpenBSD forked from NetBSD). (Though I think it was probably mostly funded under a federal grant, rather than state taxes.)
In any case: development and maintenance costs don't magically stop when there is no tax-funding of the project. If people want it to survive, they do need to continue sponsoring it.
First, I think the OpenSSH question was baited. Even disregarding that, you excluded an insightful caveat from Theo's reply:
Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.
He acknowledges that not only was there no obligation for these companies to donate money, but that OpenSSH wasn't created to make money. I don't think it is unreasonable for him to ask for money, particularly when he has pointed out that some of the vendors selected OpenSSH after they were quoted high fees (multi-millions of USD) from the commercial SSH vendor.
OpenBSD has done good work & currently depends on receiving financial donations. Enlightened companies should notice that OpenBSD needs some funding right now & that it would be cheaper to fund them than to have to adopt the support and development of the OpenBSD products they use.
DVDs are too small even for someone with only a few gigabytes of data to backup. (So OBVIOUSLY they're too small for three orders of magnitude more data).
We currently use Amanda to backup over a terabyte of data & we're not a very large shop. The last survey (2003, with 72 responses) showed multiple users backing up as much as 5000 GB.
With support for things like RAIT, amanda scales fairly nicely.
Re:How long until DVD spanning?
on
Amanda 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Some enterprises might be stingy with quota per person, but when you multiply that by the number of people in the company (including the big wigs who rarely have a practical quota), it is quite large. In addition to smaller capacity, optical media scratch and have a shorter shelf life than tape. Yes, there are archival quality discs. No, they're not extremely cheap (which would be the only reason to use DVDs). Also, most CD carousels/robots carry a stiff enough price premium such that you might as well just buy a tape changer.
Communication security/authentication: Kerberos 4/5, OpenSSH
Data security: Symmetric/Assymetric encrytion algorithms (aesutil and gpg encryption), Encryption can be done on server or client, Custom encryption utilities can be used.
It can and does backup names with spaces. I have it backup windows clients and *nix SMB servers which have a lot of long filenames.
I believe what is meant here is that certain configuration files (such as the list of which disks to backup or files to exclude) are delimited with white space.
This is currently somewhat anoying, but not too limiting. You'll tell it to backup things like "/home" and "/etc" or "/cygdrive/c/Docume~1" & it will backup files and folders in those with names like "New Folder" and the like.
DVDs are REALLY lousy for enterprise backup (but the price and availability may make it attractive to home users). AMANDA has been used to write to CDR(W)s and DVD+/-R(W) (using the dvd+rw-tools). I don't know if such projects have benefited from tape spanning, but it shouldn't be "too long." That being said, one machine backups to DVD may have easier options...
We need to decide on the release version? 2.6? 2.5.1?
Following is the list of features that have been requested:
- Support for POSIX file names (allowing spaces in filenames) - Amanda user ids consistency (sourceforge bug 1416737) - Requested by Paul Bijnens, Mitch Collinsworth - Backing up filesystem ACLs (schily tar support) - Design and implementation of application API (new Dumper API)
(Proposal in http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Application_API ) - Cleaning up the device interface to support WORM devices
(Suggested by mhelmling http://forums.zmanda.com/showthread.php?t=28 )
Of course, all open bugs in sourceforge.net bug tracker have to be addressed.
What problems with hardware support did you have? It can write to any tape device that mt can & integrate with any tape changer that mtx can. It can read and write to any disk that the kernel allows. rdiff-backup was started fairly recently, so I can't imagine your amanda problems were insurmountable.
Re:How does it compare to Bacula?
on
Amanda 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This version of amanda supports tape spanning. Many used to say use amanda for the scheduler or bacula for the tape spanning. Since amanda spans, this no longer holds.
Amanda has always allowed backups to a holding disk & the scheduler has been fantasitc. There isn't a native windows client, but the windows client runs fine under cygwin, or one can backup SMB shares.
Amanda does rely on tar (which is, IMHO, a good thing), but that tar can be different on each client (so that one can backup resource forks on OS X, for example).
Amanda doesn't rely on NFS or SMB, but can use them. There are excellent web interfaces through, for example, webmin.
Yes, it supports tape spanning. It also supports compression and encryption of your choice (so you should be able to use star instead of gtar & bzip2 rather than gzip). These are the most frequently requested features, so this is really a good release!
My favorite podcatcher is BashPodder, a minimalist bash script that uses wget to grab enclosures for you. Fast, light, stable, easy to modify. I typically use an iPod shuffle which I charge overnight, so one can also make a script to check if it is mounted, copy or move files to it, and run iPod Shuffle Database Builder.
For better reccomendations, you might give us an idea of which OS you're using, if you have always-on internet, whether you'd prefer to grab content at least once a day or manually (with or without having to manually launch a program or to have a background service/daemon running at all times), and other features you would like in your pod catcher.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with another comment that a conversion to a database would be the best solution in instances such as this & would remark that there are very usable interfaces to a database. Heck--most spreadsheet programs have data connectors. If they have to select a new program to get around the limit anyway, why not make it the right kind of program?
That being said, Gnumeric is an excellent spreadsheet which allows you to set both the row and column limit at compile time. They also plan to allow it to be set at runtime. Using Gnumeric, you'd only be limited by the memory and by the compatibility you want to maintain with other programs (but, if you already have a 500,000 row CSV file, it won't be compatible with anything else anyway).
Remember they were discussing differences in file formats. ODF is no worse at storing equations than DOC. I have DOCs that I've converted to ODT in OO.o writer & equations are identical. (You did mention these were "implementation issues (by which you really mean INTERFACE issues," but it is worth emphasizing.)
Also: the equation editor that ships with Word is VERY bad. It is basically a limited shareware copy of MathType & will bug you to upgrade it whenever you use it. There are worse plugins that MathType, but then there are also plugin equation editors for OO.o.Can you clarify what you mean by "buggy?" Or at least give examples?I think this requrires Java, but I do know you can use video in OOo impress.
The only other guess is one of performance: *nix tetex is generally faster at typesetting than win32 miktex on a similar machine (and, if the *nix server is FASTER than your win32 workstations, the difference will be even greater).
That being said, it is hardly unusable on win32. The MikTeX developers are serious about what they do. If your colleagues have a legitimate gripe which doesn't involve a poor install, get them to file a bug report!
As far as I know, WebPine is only currently available to people at UW. I don't know how their quota system works. Probably in the hundreds of MBs, depending on your seniority.
You can access WebPine from anywhere with a web browser.
WebPine also works with server-side SPAM and virus filtering.
I have a gmail account. I think it is the best web-based email out there. I don't think it can yet replace desktop email & won't trust it to until I can more easily transfer all mail, addresses, and settings from and to any other email provider.
Well, follow the bugzilla entry I guess:
8 1
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2015
I don't know, offhand, if you can. This behavior should be encouraged, though: other programs also strip sigs. If bottom-post (as is also encouraged, but not as strongly enforced), your message might get stripped out with the top quote! If you top post (boo!), your signature should still probably be the last thing to appear in the message.
There are work-arounds, of course. There are extensions which offer other composition interfaces that don't obey this convention. You can also just select what you want & paste as quoted text. These should be used as edge-cases, though (only for when you receive something with '-- \n' that isn't meant to be a quote).
ODT
- Abiword
- EZ publish
- IBM Workplace
- Scribus
- TextMaker
Writely is web-native, so you could use that too.Kword might work in cygwin (I really don't know--I know you can run some KDE apps).ODS
- Gnumeric
- IBM Workplace
Same note on KSpread.ODP
Same note on KPresenter as on KWord
ODG
- Scribus
What does this have to do with anything? I have seen relatively few MS Office, OO.o, or Corel WordPerfect ads either. People giving away software usually don't spend money to ensure you'll take it from them.In any case: development and maintenance costs don't magically stop when there is no tax-funding of the project. If people want it to survive, they do need to continue sponsoring it.
OpenBSD has done good work & currently depends on receiving financial donations. Enlightened companies should notice that OpenBSD needs some funding right now & that it would be cheaper to fund them than to have to adopt the support and development of the OpenBSD products they use.
DVDs are too small even for someone with only a few gigabytes of data to backup. (So OBVIOUSLY they're too small for three orders of magnitude more data).
We currently use Amanda to backup over a terabyte of data & we're not a very large shop. The last survey (2003, with 72 responses) showed multiple users backing up as much as 5000 GB.
With support for things like RAIT, amanda scales fairly nicely.
Some enterprises might be stingy with quota per person, but when you multiply that by the number of people in the company (including the big wigs who rarely have a practical quota), it is quite large. In addition to smaller capacity, optical media scratch and have a shorter shelf life than tape. Yes, there are archival quality discs. No, they're not extremely cheap (which would be the only reason to use DVDs). Also, most CD carousels/robots carry a stiff enough price premium such that you might as well just buy a tape changer.
It can and does backup names with spaces. I have it backup windows clients and *nix SMB servers which have a lot of long filenames.
I believe what is meant here is that certain configuration files (such as the list of which disks to backup or files to exclude) are delimited with white space.
This is currently somewhat anoying, but not too limiting. You'll tell it to backup things like "/home" and "/etc" or "/cygdrive/c/Docume~1" & it will backup files and folders in those with names like "New Folder" and the like.
DVDs are REALLY lousy for enterprise backup (but the price and availability may make it attractive to home users). AMANDA has been used to write to CDR(W)s and DVD+/-R(W) (using the dvd+rw-tools). I don't know if such projects have benefited from tape spanning, but it shouldn't be "too long." That being said, one machine backups to DVD may have easier options...
What problems with hardware support did you have? It can write to any tape device that mt can & integrate with any tape changer that mtx can. It can read and write to any disk that the kernel allows. rdiff-backup was started fairly recently, so I can't imagine your amanda problems were insurmountable.
This version of amanda supports tape spanning. Many used to say use amanda for the scheduler or bacula for the tape spanning. Since amanda spans, this no longer holds.
Amanda has always allowed backups to a holding disk & the scheduler has been fantasitc. There isn't a native windows client, but the windows client runs fine under cygwin, or one can backup SMB shares.
Amanda does rely on tar (which is, IMHO, a good thing), but that tar can be different on each client (so that one can backup resource forks on OS X, for example).
Amanda doesn't rely on NFS or SMB, but can use them. There are excellent web interfaces through, for example, webmin.
Yes, it supports tape spanning. It also supports compression and encryption of your choice (so you should be able to use star instead of gtar & bzip2 rather than gzip). These are the most frequently requested features, so this is really a good release!
My favorite podcatcher is BashPodder, a minimalist bash script that uses wget to grab enclosures for you. Fast, light, stable, easy to modify. I typically use an iPod shuffle which I charge overnight, so one can also make a script to check if it is mounted, copy or move files to it, and run iPod Shuffle Database Builder.
For better reccomendations, you might give us an idea of which OS you're using, if you have always-on internet, whether you'd prefer to grab content at least once a day or manually (with or without having to manually launch a program or to have a background service/daemon running at all times), and other features you would like in your pod catcher.