Then again, OO-Calc lacks several important features (for my daily work anyway) of MS-Excel, and its even bigger and bloated-er.
One would think that the very concept of office suites is against the "Unix style" preached in the recently slashdotted Eric Raymond book. The problem of Excel remains in OO-Calc - that I have to load the database features of the spreadsheet just to get to my statistics/econometrics/graphing utilities.
The recent success stories of open source software in the Windows world (and good open source software is the best Linux propaganda, I tell ya) are all about scalability at the end-user level: SIM and Firebird.
Perhaps that kind of modularity would help OpenOffice become even useable for me. For now, as much as I cherish the ideology and the whole mythos behind the open source movement, I stick to MS-Excel for the work I actually have to do.
So we can get on with downloading our 1970's swedish prog-rock that can't be bought anywhere anyway. The Billboard-50 downloaders just flood our networks rendering the P2P system a little less useful for those music afficionados who are _actually_ deprived from the music distribution industry and who _actually_ need to use such schemes to get to their fix of raw, unpolished drugged out psych-jazz-rock.
Sure, if I ever found out how to compensate the members of Kultivator for all the great time they've given me...
The risky but perhaps feasible option strategy is having a neutral delta. Er, um, that means balancing exactly your puts and calls so you're not losing or winning money on the stock rising or falling, but on the volatility (and as you know, the volatility is reason for the risk premium). I'm not really sure how this would work in practice, but I've been toying with the theoretical concept and will soon know enough econometrics to start simulating this plan on the brazilian market.
It's hard to make the stock go up or down consistently with news, but easier to make the market nervous and volatile in a long legal battle or even a long, confusing business-to-business negotiation.
Problems like SCO are _not_ the result of structural flaws in the capitalist system. Problems like SCO are _not_ the result of structural flaws about the free market.
The problem is in the legal system.
I'm not calling for an anarchist revolution, I'm just putting the blame where it belongs so people can focus on fixing what is broken and not breaking what works.
then I guess I'd say this... "You don't need more processing power!"
Yes, on a second thought, my post was short-sighted in assuming computer use is mostly desktop stuff. It's funny how Slashdot moderation ends up working, it's always my worst posts that get modded up, while my smartest stuff always gets modded to score 0. Really, just check out my recent history.
Everyone talks about mram being great for replacing main memory for faster boot up times, etc. But seriously, who really cares about boot up times, most of the people I know just leave their computers on most of the time
Um, desktop users - specially those at home - tend to turn their computer on and off all the time, and not just for Windows making you reboot everytime you move the mouse. That's one of my pet peeves about Linux - it actually takes longer just to give me a text-mode login prompt than Win98 on the same box takes to boot up, come up with ICQ Lite and Firebird on three different tabs (Slashdot, User Friendly and Diesel Sweeties). It just gets worse with the desktop-oriented installs that login on graphical mode and send you to KDE.
Someone should come up with XP-like "hybernate" on Linux. When I shut down to "hybernate", it'll dump my ram to permanent storage, and next time I turn the computer on I'll be exactly where I was - open programs, unsaved files, even the position of the mouse pointer.
I don't do any 3D rendering, but I believe I do more processor-heavy work than the average Carlos - sp. big numerical differential equation and bigbigbig linear optimization stuff in Maple - and my tienda-de-descuentos K6-II still crunches the stuff faster than I could ever desire.
The main problem with personal computers is that they use hard drivers for memory swap space when they should be using RAM memory to cache for hard drives.
If I could spend $500 on my computer right now I'd fill it with as much memory as the architecture allows. I'd then run a ramdrive and direct many of the computer activities to there.
I mean, when a webpage opens, a banner is downloaded to my hard drive. That's just irrational. And it prolly wears the hard drive's physical mechanism faster too.
But then again, we don't have a benchmark of ram speed, nor do we have hypemakers touting new, faster RAM. And prolly there's not too much activity in technologically improving RAM either.
It's surprising how this has even made Slashdot. I'm glad, mind you. Slashdot needs a topic diversity just a tad bit wider. I particularly think it's sad how economics is set apart when covering the Nobels and whatnotelse.
Note that I'm not saying transferring to digital is not a good idea. It's great that you and me can buy those things on DVD or CD-ROM. It's great that researches and film professors can use a properly packaged and formatted DVD (as long it's done right, with the correct tint colors for old B&W stuff and all) and not a camcorder-shot bootleg.
I'm just saying it doesn't elliminate the need for keeping copies in the original medium. And that digital facilities can create the temptation to just burn the whole acetate stuff - it's expensive to keep, after all. That's why I can't resent British Pathe trying to cash in on all this. After all, they've _kept_ the stuff all the way, while Hollywood studios burned film for special effects in other films.
On a final note, preserving the stuff is important when the stuff being preserved is important. I'm not saying microfilmed archives of bank checkbooks are to be kept. But the films that document the evolution of the cinema language are priceless.
I didn't expect to have a past preservation discussion with the Spanish Inquisition!
Ouch. This is bound to hurt jwz's feelings.
No sarcasm intended. The message on his website when he resigned from Netscape is one of the saddest things I've ever read.
As an academic economist that uses MS Excel and Maple on a regular basis for number crunching and data presentation, I'd say that Excel might be the only reason why I haven't either switched to [Free/Net/Open]BSD or to a Mac yet. Excel is an amazingly powerful tool for both business automation and statistical/econometric work.
Have any among you switched from heavy Excel use to heavy OpenOffice work? How good is its set of readymade tools for statistic work (specifically, crunching up histograms from lists of data), numeric solving and graphs? Can it come up with candlestick charts, smoothened XY plotted charts, nonlinear regression on the charting GUI?
Does it even have a correlation function? Excel goes as far as having a Beta function. I know most of those things can be easily written in a spreadsheet.
Uh, I know some of these things can prolly be read on the documentation or just tried out, but I'm sure there are a lot of features I'm forgetting about. Unlike word processing (and I've given wysiwyg editors for LaTeX altogether), this is the kind of software where creeping feature-itis actually increases use value more than computer bloat.
So, um, essentially, how have your switching experiences been with Excel and OO?
I took a couple of courses on film archiving and preservation back when I was a film school student, so I guess I have a couple of things to point out here.
1) One would think they want to profit from licensing the hi-res images for commercial use. I don't really know if it's okay to release important images from important early films that geeks of my kind value and cherish for commercial iconographic use just per se. I understand BP's need to be financially compensated for their trouble, but at least do it for money.
and, 2) Proper preservation must be taken in the original form. 35mm films should be transcribed to 35mm so they can be watched in original form in the future. I think nitrate must be sacrificed (even though they say it has a different glow on projeciton) and acetate used instead, but the importance of original media in film archiving is not to be understated.
This is a subject that really touches a nerve down with my deepest feelings, so, um, forgive me if I got cocky or arrogant or anything.
Now, really. Are you surprised that slashdotters are celebrating geek attitudes, geek lifestyles, geeky abilities and geek humour? Ever noticed the Linux articles jumping around everyday?
Moreover, are you really suggesting that having money and sexy cars is _the_ objective of life, not to mention the one sign that you're a superior being who doesn't have to bother learning basic survival skills in a modern society? They could also not learn how to drive.
Then again, there's a world of difference between not knowing how to install a hardware driver and not knowing how to check your email. I tend to be more sympathetic to the afraid-of-linux crowd than most slashdotters because compiling your kernel or changing your intittab or config files is beyond intuitive, and even a bit risky to the functioning of a computer system you actually need to use (and not just tweak around endlessly).
But not being able to sort out through the colorful, icon-laden app menus in Windows, finding an email client and clicking "Send/receive" is nothing short of a serious shortage of intuition that could and prolly is affecting their work in many other areas.
Contemporary finance is tricky business, involving advanced probability theory and partial differential equations. I don't expect anyone who can't fire up a computer and figure out how to use a maths package like Maple on their own to even be able to cut the drill and know what they're doing.
Of course, it's easier for superior management to 1) bluff and 2) prey on interns and techie's actual work output and present it as their own.
I sometimes think that MSIE might actually be more secure - its always being probed for vulnerabilities, and most of them are already known, where as a browser like Firebird, having won the community's support, might have many holes that are just not being found.
And as much as I'm a mac lover, it's amazing how LITTLE benefit it's done Apple. What's our market share now?:P
In Stackelberg's model of duopolistic competition, there's a trade-off between market share and profitability.
The small market share can be a deliberate choice, and its advantages can largely outweight the network externality issues. Macs are generally viewed as more expensive but more reliable machines for the non-technical user. Conversely, the "reliable" stigma allows them a bigger mark-up in their product line.
The cool factor is just one of them, but it's an important one. How many professional musicians have you seen playing a Casio keyboard onstage? Yamaha makes some high-end synths perfectly suitable to the pro market, but they always seem to prefer Korgs. Expensive things are cool. How else can you explain the phenomenon of designer car worship?
It's called a market economy. You get whatevet you ask over the counter. I don't think the demand for non-microsofted BIOS'es is ever going away, specially since one of the chief appeals of the PC architecture is its flexibility, and since it's prolly coming with all kinds of "features" that involve privacy issues. Let's not forget that one of the chief appeals of the PC is also how easy it is to get away with pirate software.
And then again, WindowsPC's would be competing against Macs in something they've been doing well for two decades now. I do feel there should be a wider differentiation between the "powerful flexible Linux-capable computer" product and the "end-user home-appliance-like computer".
If I ever earn enough money, I might even get a Mac as a second computer for everyday stuff and use my PC for techie trips. My main problem is that, while I want to mess with this computer, I also have _uses_ for it, so I can't just install BeOS over it only to find out it does not support my network card.
John Trinkaus is my new idol. He won the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize of Literature, as stated above. I can't stop re-reading the overview of Trinkaus' work available at the Ig Nobel site.
He reminds me somewhat of Cosmo Kramer - except he actually made his way into the academia, which is nothing short of amazing - in the proud tradition of Joshua Norton, emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico by grace of God.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, OO-Calc lacks several important features (for my daily work anyway) of MS-Excel, and its even bigger and bloated-er. One would think that the very concept of office suites is against the "Unix style" preached in the recently slashdotted Eric Raymond book. The problem of Excel remains in OO-Calc - that I have to load the database features of the spreadsheet just to get to my statistics/econometrics/graphing utilities. The recent success stories of open source software in the Windows world (and good open source software is the best Linux propaganda, I tell ya) are all about scalability at the end-user level: SIM and Firebird. Perhaps that kind of modularity would help OpenOffice become even useable for me. For now, as much as I cherish the ideology and the whole mythos behind the open source movement, I stick to MS-Excel for the work I actually have to do.
Sure, if I ever found out how to compensate the members of Kultivator for all the great time they've given me...
Yes, I know email newsletters are still in demand, but it's going away too. And in any case, no Backweb/Pointcast-like implementation.
Mod parent up as insightful, for chrissake. Linux fanboy cheering ain't news. It's not like CIO's read Slashdot anyway.
MS Word has a surprising "summary" feature that has given me impressive results in portuguese. How the hell do they do that?
Too. Much. Regulation.
Boy, it'd make quite a dent. I can see myself shelling out cash for an OS for the first time in my life.
It's hard to make the stock go up or down consistently with news, but easier to make the market nervous and volatile in a long legal battle or even a long, confusing business-to-business negotiation.
The problem is in the legal system.
I'm not calling for an anarchist revolution, I'm just putting the blame where it belongs so people can focus on fixing what is broken and not breaking what works.
"Slashdot: picketing the Matrix since 1997"
Yes, on a second thought, my post was short-sighted in assuming computer use is mostly desktop stuff. It's funny how Slashdot moderation ends up working, it's always my worst posts that get modded up, while my smartest stuff always gets modded to score 0. Really, just check out my recent history.
Um, desktop users - specially those at home - tend to turn their computer on and off all the time, and not just for Windows making you reboot everytime you move the mouse. That's one of my pet peeves about Linux - it actually takes longer just to give me a text-mode login prompt than Win98 on the same box takes to boot up, come up with ICQ Lite and Firebird on three different tabs (Slashdot, User Friendly and Diesel Sweeties). It just gets worse with the desktop-oriented installs that login on graphical mode and send you to KDE.Someone should come up with XP-like "hybernate" on Linux. When I shut down to "hybernate", it'll dump my ram to permanent storage, and next time I turn the computer on I'll be exactly where I was - open programs, unsaved files, even the position of the mouse pointer.
Why do I need -more- processing power?
I don't do any 3D rendering, but I believe I do more processor-heavy work than the average Carlos - sp. big numerical differential equation and bigbigbig linear optimization stuff in Maple - and my tienda-de-descuentos K6-II still crunches the stuff faster than I could ever desire.
The main problem with personal computers is that they use hard drivers for memory swap space when they should be using RAM memory to cache for hard drives.
If I could spend $500 on my computer right now I'd fill it with as much memory as the architecture allows. I'd then run a ramdrive and direct many of the computer activities to there.
I mean, when a webpage opens, a banner is downloaded to my hard drive. That's just irrational. And it prolly wears the hard drive's physical mechanism faster too.
But then again, we don't have a benchmark of ram speed, nor do we have hypemakers touting new, faster RAM. And prolly there's not too much activity in technologically improving RAM either.
Come visit me in Rio de Janeiro, and I'll show you where you can have transcendentally good coffee for less than (the equivalent of) fifty cents.
Then again, text-only email _is_ a matter of style.
It's surprising how this has even made Slashdot. I'm glad, mind you. Slashdot needs a topic diversity just a tad bit wider. I particularly think it's sad how economics is set apart when covering the Nobels and whatnotelse. Note that I'm not saying transferring to digital is not a good idea. It's great that you and me can buy those things on DVD or CD-ROM. It's great that researches and film professors can use a properly packaged and formatted DVD (as long it's done right, with the correct tint colors for old B&W stuff and all) and not a camcorder-shot bootleg. I'm just saying it doesn't elliminate the need for keeping copies in the original medium. And that digital facilities can create the temptation to just burn the whole acetate stuff - it's expensive to keep, after all. That's why I can't resent British Pathe trying to cash in on all this. After all, they've _kept_ the stuff all the way, while Hollywood studios burned film for special effects in other films. On a final note, preserving the stuff is important when the stuff being preserved is important. I'm not saying microfilmed archives of bank checkbooks are to be kept. But the films that document the evolution of the cinema language are priceless. I didn't expect to have a past preservation discussion with the Spanish Inquisition!
Ouch. This is bound to hurt jwz's feelings. No sarcasm intended. The message on his website when he resigned from Netscape is one of the saddest things I've ever read.
As an academic economist that uses MS Excel and Maple on a regular basis for number crunching and data presentation, I'd say that Excel might be the only reason why I haven't either switched to [Free/Net/Open]BSD or to a Mac yet. Excel is an amazingly powerful tool for both business automation and statistical/econometric work. Have any among you switched from heavy Excel use to heavy OpenOffice work? How good is its set of readymade tools for statistic work (specifically, crunching up histograms from lists of data), numeric solving and graphs? Can it come up with candlestick charts, smoothened XY plotted charts, nonlinear regression on the charting GUI? Does it even have a correlation function? Excel goes as far as having a Beta function. I know most of those things can be easily written in a spreadsheet. Uh, I know some of these things can prolly be read on the documentation or just tried out, but I'm sure there are a lot of features I'm forgetting about. Unlike word processing (and I've given wysiwyg editors for LaTeX altogether), this is the kind of software where creeping feature-itis actually increases use value more than computer bloat. So, um, essentially, how have your switching experiences been with Excel and OO?
I took a couple of courses on film archiving and preservation back when I was a film school student, so I guess I have a couple of things to point out here.
1) One would think they want to profit from licensing the hi-res images for commercial use. I don't really know if it's okay to release important images from important early films that geeks of my kind value and cherish for commercial iconographic use just per se. I understand BP's need to be financially compensated for their trouble, but at least do it for money.
and, 2) Proper preservation must be taken in the original form. 35mm films should be transcribed to 35mm so they can be watched in original form in the future. I think nitrate must be sacrificed (even though they say it has a different glow on projeciton) and acetate used instead, but the importance of original media in film archiving is not to be understated.
This is a subject that really touches a nerve down with my deepest feelings, so, um, forgive me if I got cocky or arrogant or anything.
Now, really. Are you surprised that slashdotters are celebrating geek attitudes, geek lifestyles, geeky abilities and geek humour? Ever noticed the Linux articles jumping around everyday?
Moreover, are you really suggesting that having money and sexy cars is _the_ objective of life, not to mention the one sign that you're a superior being who doesn't have to bother learning basic survival skills in a modern society? They could also not learn how to drive.
Then again, there's a world of difference between not knowing how to install a hardware driver and not knowing how to check your email. I tend to be more sympathetic to the afraid-of-linux crowd than most slashdotters because compiling your kernel or changing your intittab or config files is beyond intuitive, and even a bit risky to the functioning of a computer system you actually need to use (and not just tweak around endlessly).
But not being able to sort out through the colorful, icon-laden app menus in Windows, finding an email client and clicking "Send/receive" is nothing short of a serious shortage of intuition that could and prolly is affecting their work in many other areas.
Contemporary finance is tricky business, involving advanced probability theory and partial differential equations. I don't expect anyone who can't fire up a computer and figure out how to use a maths package like Maple on their own to even be able to cut the drill and know what they're doing.
Of course, it's easier for superior management to 1) bluff and 2) prey on interns and techie's actual work output and present it as their own.
Now, mod the parent down. It's just a flamebait.
Um, cluetrain arriving: it's not. And hardware support is one of the chief reasons people don't switch to Linux.
I don't really want to buy a new harddisk just to have scottadams.
I sometimes think that MSIE might actually be more secure - its always being probed for vulnerabilities, and most of them are already known, where as a browser like Firebird, having won the community's support, might have many holes that are just not being found.
(The "we" being a huge group of which I'm just a tiny, insignificant part).
This gives space for hope, you know.
The small market share can be a deliberate choice, and its advantages can largely outweight the network externality issues. Macs are generally viewed as more expensive but more reliable machines for the non-technical user. Conversely, the "reliable" stigma allows them a bigger mark-up in their product line.
The cool factor is just one of them, but it's an important one. How many professional musicians have you seen playing a Casio keyboard onstage? Yamaha makes some high-end synths perfectly suitable to the pro market, but they always seem to prefer Korgs. Expensive things are cool. How else can you explain the phenomenon of designer car worship?
And then again, WindowsPC's would be competing against Macs in something they've been doing well for two decades now. I do feel there should be a wider differentiation between the "powerful flexible Linux-capable computer" product and the "end-user home-appliance-like computer".
If I ever earn enough money, I might even get a Mac as a second computer for everyday stuff and use my PC for techie trips. My main problem is that, while I want to mess with this computer, I also have _uses_ for it, so I can't just install BeOS over it only to find out it does not support my network card.
He reminds me somewhat of Cosmo Kramer - except he actually made his way into the academia, which is nothing short of amazing - in the proud tradition of Joshua Norton, emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico by grace of God.