out of curiousity, what exactly do you need from a wordprocessor that is lacking in curremt Linux apps. I doubt things like startup speed are what you are considering.
Startup speed is also important. But not essential.
Simplicity is the most important thing. To achieve that, a word processor needs well thought out, clear and easy styles management. Also, it shouldn't change what I type to something else without my specifically configuring it to do so. Both Word and OO seem to love doing just that. Like when you type a quote character while talking about a 15" screen, it becomes some fancy typographic quote, or when you start a line with "-" it becomes some bullet, etc. All this can be nice if the user configures it. But I don't want to be constantly distracted while typing, by a program which thinks it knows better and it would be cool to type something else than what I did. And forcing me to interrupt my work to go hunting for hours through the menus to switch off stupid stuff I have never asked for. (never found how to prevent Word from adding a space before punctuation like ":" and others).
For me, I hate Word, and OO is simply the same thing but much worse (and much slower too).
Yes, I need to find the time some day to write down these things in a clear way. And I should probably have a look at Lyx.
I certainly hope they don't. KOffice may be one of the very few chances we have to escape the awful bloatwares and clumsywares that are both MS-Office and OpenOffice. I haven't tried KOffice yet, but I sure wish it is very different.
(BTW, TextMaker despite it's drawbacks (not free, not Open Source, proprietary file format) is the only usable Linux/Windows word processor I have seen so far. Before Linux there was Ami Pro, but unfortunately that is long dead)
Because their network admin doesn't have the time to figure out how to roll out a working install of Firefox (fully configured, and with all the desired plugins and extensions).
I know. I did install FF on around 20 machines, and it wasn't easy to find a semi-automatic way to install. And it got worse when the 1.5 upgrade came: I eventually did go to all the 20 machines, and did the upgrade manually.
But to install on a network with custom bookmarks, default languages, proxy settings, plugins for Acrobat, Quicktime, Real, Flash, and a few extensions, is no fun.
Your confusion of freedom with comfort is weird. The poor may not have travelled comfortably, but if they wanted to, individuals were free to go wherever they wanted if they could get accepted by the local population.
And it is not generally true they could not afford to pay for the trip back. Most Italians in my family who went to the US at the beginning of the 20th century, have eventually returned to their village.
I think the OP was suggesting the US government stop issuing passports, thus preventing you from travelling outside the country.
Well, that was not how I understood it. The way it is now, it's your passport which prevents you to travel. My own rich-country-passport allows me to go to holidays, but other countries' citizens do not have this privilege, and for all of us, we cannot just go and live somewhere if we have a passport from another country.
How often do you visit other countries' web sites? How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time.
Do you ever search in a language other than English,
My Google preferences are set to "Any language".
and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
I usually search first in English, then in German, then in French. That is the order of quantity of existing pages in a language which I can read easily. But I may change the order depending on the subject. My main language is really French, but on most subjects for which I search the net, the results in French tend to be much poorer than in English or German.
I occasionally found relevant results in Spanish, Italian or Polish. While I don't speak these languages, for computer related stuff, I could sometimes decipher enough of what I found to make it useful.
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
It depends. If I had only acces to sites in my own country, the Internet would become pretty much useless. But if the world lost the US and vice-versa, I guess it would be the US which would lose the most. The rest of the world is much bigger after all.
News is where the biggest difference would be, and where the US would lose the most. Since US TV tends to be completely clueless about the rest of the world, all the news sources you have are papers and the Internet. How much of the news in the papers is actually gathered or researched in more depth through the Internet, I don't know.
I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.
The point you seem to be missing with terminal commands is this:
Nobody has to type them in. You paste them in.
I do a lot of support, and the first thing I explain to the people I work with is
1. how to open a terminal (or "Command prompt" etc.) 2. how to paste a command into it (presumably from an email I sent them) 3. how to copy the (text) screen to send it to me if needed.
It's so much easier than this endless hunting around the GUI to find the application, listen to a full explanation of what is on screen, having the user find the correct menu/tab/whatever to continue, listen to what is on the screen, etc. etc.
The GUI changes all the time, and when you have to deal with it in different languages (I have users with German, French and English systems), it is a nightmare over a phone, it takes ages, and the user gets frustrated.
With a cut/paste of CLI commands, it is simpler and faster, and user appreciate it.
Admins also constantly paste commands from web pages into the shell, because it's the easiest. Why would they suggest to users to use the hard way instead.
Unlike what you seem to think, Picasa is not a photo editing tool.
Rather, it is some sort of photo organizer/viewer. It does have a few (very simple and easy to use) tools to enhance contrast/color etc., but it's purpose is nothing like Photoshop/Gimp/PaintShopPro/etc.
Sorry for not being more clear about what it really is. It's probably because I still wonder myself... Maybe someone who has actually found a use for it can be clearer.
I NEVER hear about any projects done with Delphi...
Well, I do know of at least one program written with Delphi and still very alive: Total Commander, the best file manager for Windows ever. I wish Midnight Commander would be as solid, reliable and feature rich as it's Windows cousin. (And the lack of a Mac version is probably the main reason I don't also have Macs)
Cell phones are the wrong frequency. [...] you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Exactly. And this is why I always cook my eggs between my notebok and my wireless AP while transferring large files, instead of falling for this urban legend spread by mobile phone companies trying to boost their revenues.
Not really at home. My notebook is WinXP, the family machine is dual-boot XP/Linux. The servers I take care of are all Linux, but there is none of these at home. So...
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs
that's not what I would like to do, even though it would work very well indeed. But I neither want to spend the time to set it up, nor do I want to have a bulky machine with a fan (the only ones I have for free) eat up space for something which I don't really need.
Besides, I'm not only looking at a sloution to this for myself.
My point is that I would like many people to share their connection (knowingly, not accidentaly). So I need to be able to recommend to the people who ask my advice a router which would allow such safe connection sharing. I cannot tell them "buy 2 routers instead of 1, to be nice to passers-by", or "take this $300 VLAN switch instead of that $30 switch because you would make some total strangers happy".
I understand they replace the router's firmware. So I wonder if that new firmware would addresses the problem of sharing your Internet connection without sharing your LAN.
I do have an open access point at home, because I appreciate my ability to use other people's access points when I'm on the road, and so I feel I have to share mine as well.
BUT, I don't want to share my LAN.
It just happens that I do have 2 access points at home, so what I do is that I use the crypted one and leave the other one open for friends, visitors and passers-by.
This is not a very good solution, because I need to remember to switch off the open AP whenever I connect an insecure machine on my LAN (like during OS install, etc.), and every time I switch it back on, I have to think about my notebook's firewall and sharing settings.
What would be really great would be a router solving these problems in an easily configurable way: some authenticated users have access to the whole LAN while others have not.
Until now, the only solution I have seen is a VLAN switch, which is too expensive for home use.
Isn't it a no-brainer that www.bmw.com is the global BMW site [...] Do people really need a search engine to find this out? Soon, people are going to entirely replace DNS with Google.
You don't know many normal people, do you? It surprised me as well, but I eventually got used to it. People DO type "www.bmw.com" or whatever site for which they know the exact host name into Google instead of into the address bar.
They first type www.google.com into the address bar, and then their site's address into the Google search box. I guess these people might love a Firefox extension which completely removes the address bar, leaving only the Google bar.
Of course, the (MSIE initiated?) habit of redirecting to search results when users mistype an address, has certainly helped to develop such absurd habits.
Then there are these installations on which a friendly administrator has put Google as the browser's start page. I'm sure there are people who, after hearing something about Google on the radio, type "www.google.com" into the Google search box. Haven't actually seen this, but I'm pretty sure it must have happened more than once.
the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German
Apparently, the people at that other site don't seem to understand much German, and don't know how to use a dictionary either. According to the original blog the abused term was "BMW Neuwagen", meaning "new BMW car(s)".
But anyway, I agree:
Sounds like fraud to me.
And it's good that Google also takes action against such big corporate sites. The message has a better chance to be heard by everyone.
For identical hardware, the best solution is disk imaging. This will also get you all the software installs and configurations, which is much more work than the basic Windows install + updates.
If you don't have Norton Ghost and/or don't want to pay for it, you can use a Linux Live CD and ntfsclone. I use a script on a USB drive based on these disk imaging instructions.
For different hardware, the slipstreamed install disks suggested in previous comments seem to be a good starting point.
I know about disk imaging, and use it a lot for initial installs, or in case of big trouble on a machine.
But in the case I was talking about, it would have failed exactly as what I did failed: replacing the 1.0.3 Firefox directory with a 1.5 FF dir. doesn't work when the user's 1.0.3 roaming profile is loaded from the server at logon.
I consider wiping the profile to be an admin. failure: the user looses all bookmarks and settings, for no good reason, except that the admin didn't know how to (or really couldn't) do it otherwise. And since I'm the admin, I don't like such "solutions" which leave a taste of failure.
But other posts suggest it may be better in the future, and it would be possible to replace the 1.5 dir with a new FF 1.6 dir., and the profile would still work. Hope they are right. We'll see...
Anyway, now that FF is a great home user browser, it would be really about time that someone takes the task to make it a great (easily manageable, with extensions and plugins) browser for the enterprise.
I don't think it would work for users who don't have admin rights. Anyway, 1.0.3 didn't have it, and overwriting the Firefox directory while leaving the user profile unchanged didn't work.
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TextMaker 2006 supports OpenDocument
No, it does not! It can import OpenDocument, but cannot save in this format.
What is needed is word processors which natively and by default saves in an open and well documented format.
But as I said, TextMaker is way ahead the others in usability. I hope it keeps improving, and adopts an open format for saving documents.
out of curiousity, what exactly do you need from a wordprocessor that is lacking in curremt Linux apps. I doubt things like startup speed are what you are considering.
Startup speed is also important. But not essential.
Simplicity is the most important thing. To achieve that, a word processor needs well thought out, clear and easy styles management. Also, it shouldn't change what I type to something else without my specifically configuring it to do so. Both Word and OO seem to love doing just that. Like when you type a quote character while talking about a 15" screen, it becomes some fancy typographic quote, or when you start a line with "-" it becomes some bullet, etc. All this can be nice if the user configures it. But I don't want to be constantly distracted while typing, by a program which thinks it knows better and it would be cool to type something else than what I did. And forcing me to interrupt my work to go hunting for hours through the menus to switch off stupid stuff I have never asked for. (never found how to prevent Word from adding a space before punctuation like ":" and others).
For me, I hate Word, and OO is simply the same thing but much worse (and much slower too).
Yes, I need to find the time some day to write down these things in a clear way. And I should probably have a look at Lyx.
if I saw koffice and openoffice merge
I certainly hope they don't. KOffice may be one of the very few chances we have to escape the awful bloatwares and clumsywares that are both MS-Office and OpenOffice. I haven't tried KOffice yet, but I sure wish it is very different.
(BTW, TextMaker despite it's drawbacks (not free, not Open Source, proprietary file format) is the only usable Linux/Windows word processor I have seen so far. Before Linux there was Ami Pro, but unfortunately that is long dead)
Why are people still using IE
Because their network admin doesn't have the time to figure out how to roll out a working install of Firefox (fully configured, and with all the desired plugins and extensions).
I know. I did install FF on around 20 machines, and it wasn't easy to find a semi-automatic way to install. And it got worse when the 1.5 upgrade came: I eventually did go to all the 20 machines, and did the upgrade manually.
Firefox is great for individual users (and even then, some find the stupid "browse for folder" dialog at install time annoying).
But to install on a network with custom bookmarks, default languages, proxy settings, plugins for Acrobat, Quicktime, Real, Flash, and a few extensions, is no fun.
care to back that up with evidence?
Well, I don't remember the details, but when I moved from 6.x to 7.x a couple of years ago, it wasn't easy for me either.
I didn't know that Ingres was GPL now. So I went to have a look, but all the Ingres documentation seems to be in PDF only! No thanks...
Your confusion of freedom with comfort is weird. The poor may not have travelled comfortably, but if they wanted to, individuals were free to go wherever they wanted if they could get accepted by the local population.
And it is not generally true they could not afford to pay for the trip back. Most Italians in my family who went to the US at the beginning of the 20th century, have eventually returned to their village.
I think the OP was suggesting the US government stop issuing passports, thus preventing you from travelling outside the country.
Well, that was not how I understood it. The way it is now, it's your passport which prevents you to travel. My own rich-country-passport allows me to go to holidays, but other countries' citizens do not have this privilege, and for all of us, we cannot just go and live somewhere if we have a passport from another country.
how much would you lose?
Well, the Internet is what I would lose....
How often do you visit other countries' web sites?
How often do you e-mail people in other countries?
All the time.
Do you ever search in a language other than English,
My Google preferences are set to "Any language".
and if you do, how often does it turn up foreign vs domestic sites?
I usually search first in English, then in German, then in French. That is the order of quantity of existing pages in a language which I can read easily. But I may change the order depending on the subject. My main language is really French, but on most subjects for which I search the net, the results in French tend to be much poorer than in English or German.
I occasionally found relevant results in Spanish, Italian or Polish. While I don't speak these languages, for computer related stuff, I could sometimes decipher enough of what I found to make it useful.
What would foreigners lose by not being able to visit US-hosted sites, and how quickly would they be able to recreate what they lost?
It depends. If I had only acces to sites in my own country, the Internet would become pretty much useless. But if the world lost the US and vice-versa, I guess it would be the US which would lose the most. The rest of the world is much bigger after all.
News is where the biggest difference would be, and where the US would lose the most. Since US TV tends to be completely clueless about the rest of the world, all the news sources you have are papers and the Internet. How much of the news in the papers is actually gathered or researched in more depth through the Internet, I don't know.
But what a stupid idea to begin with anyway!...
Maybe the next question can be: "What would we lose from getting rid of passports?"
Now that is a good question!
A regionalized Internet is completely absurd and could only appeal to people who would like to destroy it.
But a world without passports is just like it has always been (except for the last ~ 100 years) and should be.
Would someone please test it on these pictures:
s .source.jpg
Turkish bath
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/ingres/ingre
Man and Woman
or this (somewhat pretentious) Self portrait
I wonder what that new filter thinks of these.
Let me know when [...] any [...] of these tools can actually make a simple out-of-the-box GUI which is usable.
You have a GUI on your server? I don't. If it needs a GUI it would sound pretty UNusable for me.
Of course a GUI could make it easier for casual encrypting on my desktop, but I have nothing worth encrypting on my desktop...
Sheep (Ram/Ewe/Lamb) = mutton/lamb ~ Ovine? Where the hell does that come from? Sheep don't even lay eggs.
From Latin ovis (ewe).
Unrelated to ovipara from Latin oviparus, from Lat. ovum and parere
I had to chuckle at the image of asking a newbie to open a terminal and type that in.
The point you seem to be missing with terminal commands is this:
Nobody has to type them in. You paste them in.
I do a lot of support, and the first thing I explain to the people I work with is
1. how to open a terminal (or "Command prompt" etc.)
2. how to paste a command into it (presumably from an email I sent them)
3. how to copy the (text) screen to send it to me if needed.
It's so much easier than this endless hunting around the GUI to find the application, listen to a full explanation of what is on screen, having the user find the correct menu/tab/whatever to continue, listen to what is on the screen, etc. etc.
The GUI changes all the time, and when you have to deal with it in different languages (I have users with German, French and English systems), it is a nightmare over a phone, it takes ages, and the user gets frustrated.
With a cut/paste of CLI commands, it is simpler and faster, and user appreciate it.
Admins also constantly paste commands from web pages into the shell, because it's the easiest. Why would they suggest to users to use the hard way instead.
Unlike what you seem to think, Picasa is not a photo editing tool.
Rather, it is some sort of photo organizer/viewer. It does have a few (very simple and easy to use) tools to enhance contrast/color etc., but it's purpose is nothing like Photoshop/Gimp/PaintShopPro/etc.
Sorry for not being more clear about what it really is. It's probably because I still wonder myself... Maybe someone who has actually found a use for it can be clearer.
I NEVER hear about any projects done with Delphi ...
Well, I do know of at least one program written with Delphi and still very alive: Total Commander, the best file manager for Windows ever. I wish Midnight Commander would be as solid, reliable and feature rich as it's Windows cousin. (And the lack of a Mac version is probably the main reason I don't also have Macs)
So, Delphi is definitely still used.
Cell phones are the wrong frequency. [...] you need to be at the frequency water resonates which is 2.4GHz.
Exactly. And this is why I always cook my eggs between my notebok and my wireless AP while transferring large files, instead of falling for this urban legend spread by mobile phone companies trying to boost their revenues.
You don't mention if you use Linux
...
Not really at home. My notebook is WinXP, the family machine is dual-boot XP/Linux. The servers I take care of are all Linux, but there is none of these at home. So
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs
that's not what I would like to do, even though it would work very well indeed. But I neither want to spend the time to set it up, nor do I want to have a bulky machine with a fan (the only ones I have for free) eat up space for something which I don't really need.
Besides, I'm not only looking at a sloution to this for myself.
My point is that I would like many people to share their connection (knowingly, not accidentaly). So I need to be able to recommend to the people who ask my advice a router which would allow such safe connection sharing. I cannot tell them "buy 2 routers instead of 1, to be nice to passers-by", or "take this $300 VLAN switch instead of that $30 switch because you would make some total strangers happy".
I understand they replace the router's firmware. So I wonder if that new firmware would addresses the problem of sharing your Internet connection without sharing your LAN.
I do have an open access point at home, because I appreciate my ability to use other people's access points when I'm on the road, and so I feel I have to share mine as well.
BUT, I don't want to share my LAN.
It just happens that I do have 2 access points at home, so what I do is that I use the crypted one and leave the other one open for friends, visitors and passers-by.
This is not a very good solution, because I need to remember to switch off the open AP whenever I connect an insecure machine on my LAN (like during OS install, etc.), and every time I switch it back on, I have to think about my notebook's firewall and sharing settings.
What would be really great would be a router solving these problems in an easily configurable way: some authenticated users have access to the whole LAN while others have not.
Until now, the only solution I have seen is a VLAN switch, which is too expensive for home use.
Isn't it a no-brainer that www.bmw.com is the global BMW site [...] Do people really need a search engine to find this out? Soon, people are going to entirely replace DNS with Google.
You don't know many normal people, do you? It surprised me as well, but I eventually got used to it. People DO type "www.bmw.com" or whatever site for which they know the exact host name into Google instead of into the address bar.
They first type www.google.com into the address bar, and then their site's address into the Google search box. I guess these people might love a Firefox extension which completely removes the address bar, leaving only the Google bar.
Of course, the (MSIE initiated?) habit of redirecting to search results when users mistype an address, has certainly helped to develop such absurd habits.
Then there are these installations on which a friendly administrator has put Google as the browser's start page. I'm sure there are people who, after hearing something about Google on the radio, type "www.google.com" into the Google search box. Haven't actually seen this, but I'm pretty sure it must have happened more than once.
the doorway page contained the word "gebrauchtwagen" - meaning "used car" in German
Apparently, the people at that other site don't seem to understand much German, and don't know how to use a dictionary either. According to the original blog the abused term was "BMW Neuwagen", meaning "new BMW car(s)".
But anyway, I agree:
Sounds like fraud to me.
And it's good that Google also takes action against such big corporate sites. The message has a better chance to be heard by everyone.
For identical hardware, the best solution is disk imaging. This will also get you all the software installs and configurations, which is much more work than the basic Windows install + updates.
If you don't have Norton Ghost and/or don't want to pay for it, you can use a Linux Live CD and ntfsclone. I use a script on a USB drive based on these disk imaging instructions.
For different hardware, the slipstreamed install disks suggested in previous comments seem to be a good starting point.
Yes their site is completely useless and annoying.
The answer to your question is on Froogle.
The Qualia 004, for example, is (was?) one of the best HD projectors. Certainly the best I've seen. It not cheap, though.
I know about disk imaging, and use it a lot for initial installs, or in case of big trouble on a machine.
But in the case I was talking about, it would have failed exactly as what I did failed: replacing the 1.0.3 Firefox directory with a 1.5 FF dir. doesn't work when the user's 1.0.3 roaming profile is loaded from the server at logon.
I consider wiping the profile to be an admin. failure: the user looses all bookmarks and settings, for no good reason, except that the admin didn't know how to (or really couldn't) do it otherwise. And since I'm the admin, I don't like such "solutions" which leave a taste of failure.
But other posts suggest it may be better in the future, and it would be possible to replace the 1.5 dir with a new FF 1.6 dir., and the profile would still work. Hope they are right. We'll see...
Anyway, now that FF is a great home user browser, it would be really about time that someone takes the task to make it a great (easily manageable, with extensions and plugins) browser for the enterprise.
I don't think it would work for users who don't have admin rights.
Anyway, 1.0.3 didn't have it, and overwriting the Firefox directory while leaving the user profile unchanged didn't work.