As well as on numerous occasions (esp. during M$ antitrust trial) it was revelead that Bill & Melinda Gates foundation was used to funnel money into "independent" entities who were FUDing against Open Source and other M$ competitors. Also there were many reports of donations filled with freebies like M$Wind0ze and M$Office "for millions dollars." Hardly a charity.
Some devels were posting shots of KDE running on Windows.
Qt4 made major improvements which allowed for KDE4 to be easier ported to Windows.
For KOffice to function, you have to have KDE4 installed. And the installer from RTFA is essentially alpha installer for KDE4 for Windows - now also including KOffice. Even if you would select only KOffice, most of KDE4 would be also installed since KOffice depends on it.
If you are not sure, just give it a try - http://www.koffice.org/releases/2.0alpha8-release.php. You can always simple remove KDE4 from your hard drive. it doesn't yet integrates with Windows deeply: simple removal of directory would do a trick. After installation, go into bin/ directory and launch kword.exe. It's alpha quality - but it works somehow already.
P.S. My personal favorite of KDE4 is Mahjong with SVG graphics. Install kdegames package to get it.
There are only 3 corect ways here:
1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets
2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit devs sort out the look on ach platform
3. Write a native interface for each platform
Actually, OO.o uses number 1. The main problem of course that OO.o is too old: many parts were coded by many people in different times on different platforms. That's why it looks and behaves like total junky - independent of platform you are running it on.
But my first though was that you #1 is impossible. Because you chain yourself to update your application - eternally - to catch up with all the little UI improvement introduced with every minor OS update. It's just not practical. Or better say, it doesn't work in practice.
I just hope the KOffice team takes route 2, but that's dependent on Trolltech releasing Qt for Windows which uses native Windows widgets.
QT4 uses only little bit of Windows native GUI.
Many applications do not use Windows native GUI (best examples are M$IE and M$Office) for one simple reason: it has very very limited capabilities, which are not matching modern UI requirements.
Also, as somebody who did native Win16/Win32 using only SDK, believe me, native UI of Windows is major P.I.T.A. to program for. Add here aforementioned lacking features and you have literally 0 reasons even to consider using it. No need for better example - even M$ itself doesn't use it.
In the times of StarOffice, goal was to make truly cross-platform UI which can run on Mac OS, Linux, Window, etc. The problem here is that you can't make it. It is impossible. That's why UI's of OO.o now is failing the same way as Java UI did many years ago. GUI has to be native to integrate with OS, for app to be conforming to interface users of OS are familiar with.
P.S. Another example, similar to OO.o, is Opera - they also have their own toolkit very similar to Windows native controls. That's why Opera, just like OO.o, fails to integrate with OS, fails to conform to host UI standards.
KWrite is that good not because it is KWrite on its own - it is because there is KDE4 behind it as foundation.
Actual alpha of KDE4, btw, isn't that much bigger if compared to OpenOffice.org: KDE4 (with games!) takes about 315M while OO.o 2.3 takes 290M. Yes, KOffice + KDE4 itself + piles of KDE4 apps and libraries are only slightly larger than full install OO.o.
I think that bloat added by KDE4 to the Windows would be just like a drop in ocean. And for the little price you are getting lots of (eventually I hope useful) extras.
SVG Mahjong alone is enough for me to justify the occupied 315M of disk space;)
Moved to Google Talk and Skype long time ago - mainly due to the internationalization problems which always plagued ICQ - but I still keep ICQ running just for some very old friends.
Several days ago I believe I had some connection problems (I rarely look into ICQ) but now it is fine. Fine means that I'm connected but I see probably only 10-20% of people I usually have in my contact list.
Most of my friends are using Miranda IM, I presume. And many of them are off-line right now. I see several on-line contacts which I am sure are using QIP, meaning that it has fixed whatever the problem was.
My client is Trillian 3.1 Basic. (Not great overall, but works somehow - especially for the older obsolete protocols like ICQ.)
I do not like my actual mouse - but sadly it still works somehow. Coming up with the reason to buy a new mouse is quite hard.
But Diabolo is for rescue!!!
The game is notoriously known for its capability of rendering mice dysfunctional by wearing down left button very very quickly. My friend playing thru Diabolo I & II (with expansions) went thru 5(!) left mouse buttons (he was replacing only button mechanics itself) and one right mouse button.
It's pretty clear that there would be some bugs. (Personally I haven't seen any bug to date in my Ubuntu 8.04 system - but I use it right now only sparsely.)
On other side it is important for LTS release to get software as fresh as possible - because users are going to use it for quite some time.
It is some fancy mix of Debian support concept and Ubuntu's strive to do often releases. I think what does Ubuntu for such LTS releases is pretty good idea.
If you really want super stable desktop, I can recommend to buy workstation version of SuSE - SLED - with support. It costs not that much after all and software on average works well, since SuSE does invest some resources into actual testing before releasing something.
/me runs hiding from Novel/SuSE haters due to their partnership with M$.
Whether the software is modified or not is irrelevant.
IANAL. But I think you are wrong. If they (re)used somebody's else work verbatim, then they are users - they are not obliged to host somebody's else work.
There is no case of derivative work. People just used readily available software without modifying it.
Or to put it otherwise. They provide both BusyBox and Linux source code readily - you can also (immediately) access it: just go to BusyBox.net and Linux.org.
BTW, it works the same in Linux distributions in general and in Debian in particualr: they do not provide you with sources of the packages - they just (1) link to original URL of tarball package and (2, if applicable) give you a patch with changes. If there were no changes, then it can be said that Debian also violates GPL: it doesn't ship the sources - it just links to them. (Debian Archives)
offering, let's say, at least 10 hours of estimated gameplay each?
Most of such homebrew games are ports of well-known titles from other platforms.
e.g. Tetris. I'm sure I made already - not hours - weeks of game play on my DS. Yet, it is not yet available officially on Wii.
Seeing how open games strive on PCs (and Linux in particular) I can easily imagine that if Nintendo had opened up the platform, many non-commercial titles would have appeared.
I'm too, you know, started programming by doing games. It is quite general observation that people code what they are like doing at the moment. Younger programmers are of course play lots of games - and consequently like to code the games too. But consoles (being huge business) naturally try to prevent that: they need dumb customers who would buy all the shovelware you throw at them. People with intellect who like to tinker with stuff are of no interest to them.
[...] a lot of times "homebrew" is merely a code word for "illegally copied games" [...]
LOL.
You DO realize that Wii has no demos nor other way to preview games???
After buying R4DS I felt really really relieved - it was like I managed to return all the money I have wasted on number of overrated shovelware titles there. Now I buy games intelligently - because most of the time this are the games I already finished.
I can only welcome cracking of Wii games since it would add extra pressure on game producers to actually make simpler better games people would be willing to pay money for. If many people would be able to try game before buying, then sales of shovelware would suffer enormously. Something demos were invented to address.
And frankly conspiracy theory of a day I'd say the pact is in place: between game publishers and Nintendo to prevent any kind of demos on Wii - to keep people buying (even by mistake) all the shovelware which you see on the shelves in abundance.
Panasonic as well as several other Jap CE producers maintain their own distribution for such embedded products. It is all done under roof of CE Linux Forum. Probably you can Google for more info.
Last time I read, their goal was not to fork and to distance themselves from the development - but to simplify communication with Linux community.
Chances are good that recent Linux kernels do support embedded device in your TV without extra patches.
They need to provide only in case if it was modified. If BusyBox and Linux kernel were *NOT* modified - you can grab them from the busybox.net and linux.org respectively.
As Linux become more and more ubiquitous, people forget that hardware manufacturers need to modify less and less of the standard components. Also off-the-shelf SoC producers (and independent developers) submit support for their systems to kernel quite regularly. All manufacturers need to do is to compile everything with proper configuration and it all would work without any tweaking.
Unless fact is established that they have modified something, they hardly violate any clause of GPL.
Mini-ITX has been a popular form-factor for a range of space-constrained hobbyist and commercial applications.
I have one at home not because I'm "space-constrained" - but because it really nice and small Linux server which does everything I nee from it.
Thanks to fanless design, loudest part of the rig is hard drive. That, along with minimalistic power consumption, makes it very suitable for always-on system. I use it for back-ups and some performance-oriented development and it is just bliss.
The only downside of buying Mini-ITX, is that it's very hard to find suitable components as well as good case. Selection isn't very wide and prices often bite.
You posted to wrong story. Was the comment posted for Opera release story, then any bashing of FireFox for whatever is different from Opera would be modded up thru the roof.
The story here is essentially not about browser - but about a new Guiness record. Not much to discuss, expect the slashdotted mozilla.org servers;)
Last time I was checking, only few applications were using Direct X 10. For any kind of productivity more or less everybody uses bunch of wrappers or some commercial library.
The whole point here that there is no standard. And M$ forces everybody to kiss PR ass of Direct X, though literally nobody directly uses it, except for hardware manufacturers (nVidia and ATI). Some proprietary half-arsed spec in.DOCX peppered with implementation details from actual version of Direct X (even is such document exists) hardly qualifies as standard to me.
On other side, Kronos group is something. They are slow on up-take, but generally deliver usable standards industry needs. They are vendor neutral what is also important.
Do not expect anything in particular from OpenCL. I'm pretty sure that it would try to appeal to wider audience - consequently it would be pretty dumb down. But still it would let any developer to access GPU chip. Knowing how Apple does things, with couple of extra objects in one's program and few extra checks on whether you can use GPU, many tasks would get a decent performance boost. It wouldn't be high-end nor exclusive - it would be something for wider audience.
Mozilla/FireFox devels are performance conscious. But they target slightly different demographics. And no, 8yo computer of gp isn't their target.
FireFox on all platforms tries to be OS friendly and conform to UI standards of the OS. Opera? - Some outdated, hacked to death, overbloated with tiny features GUI which looks and behaves differently from whatever OS you have. OMG - Opera still supports the MDI stupidity when even its own author - M$ - has declared it a major mistake in UI design.
Opera's rendering engine is of course near perfect. While Fx team dedicates great effort to usability, all the resources Opera have spared on modern UI desing went into all the bells and whistles of HTML/XHTML/CSS/JS/etc support. No need to boast anything - they are most active member of WHATWG.
Do not ever expect Fx to be more resource friendly (*). But do not expect Opera suddenly be conforming to OS UI standards.
Thanks God, the iron grip of IE was lifted off WWW. Choice is all yours. Both Opera and FireFox are decent browsers - pick whatever you like.
(*) Part of reasons why Fx has much higher resource consumptions, is because they have to provide interfaces for extensions/add-ons. Opera is monolithic - FireFox is modular. Modular app would be always slower and consume more memory. As a trade-off, you have a whole bunch of extensions to choose from to make out of your browser whatever you want.
Then, the poster, who has apparently never worked at a real IT job, suggest that the PP pay for the tool himself, which again pushes the cost to the employee, [...]
That's really stupid. You apparently have no clue how business works. Procuring $200 (or any other expense) might be really really troublesome and time-consuming.
My test is simple. I come to my manager and say "To accomplish the work I were given, I need two weeks time or we can buy a $200 tool and do it in one day." If manager says that two weeks of work is cheaper, then you should go for it. Because procuring $200 might take time (esp second half of year, when all budget lines are already exhausted) and given work - even if it takes two weeks might - might have deadline where the two weeks are already included.
99% of cases it is not about the time you would waste doing work manually - it is about deadline for the work. Procuring extra money means going to bow to upper management. And latencies of upper management are unpretty high, if measurable at all. Few (none) line managers would even consider in the situation going to upper management as an option.
P.S. Last time I was checking, you can't be forced to work overtime. If you manager is slave driver then you better off changing job/department anyway.
P.P.S. Doing work manually is also (at least to me) is important option. Because honestly in past decade there were no occasion when I need an extra tool to do my work - most of the time I make my own tools and scripts. But to make your own tools and scripts - and make them efficiently and efficient - you really need to know all about the work. That can only be gained by firsthand experience which is best gained by doing it all manually few first times.
P.P.P.S.
[...] and also is probably impractical as most business only let one use "approved" software tools.
Knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. Perl) is really invaluable asset here.
Learn to make your own tool. Learn how to integrate different tools of the business process. There are some clinical cases - but in many cases it is doable and in long-term saves one a lot of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... And do not get me wrong. I'm not supporting RMS. I do not like (over)religious people in general.
As well as on numerous occasions (esp. during M$ antitrust trial) it was revelead that Bill & Melinda Gates foundation was used to funnel money into "independent" entities who were FUDing against Open Source and other M$ competitors. Also there were many reports of donations filled with freebies like M$Wind0ze and M$Office "for millions dollars." Hardly a charity.
Check that too - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Criticisms
They might be doing something good - for a change - but essentially the B&MGF is business and nothing else.
Some devels were posting shots of KDE running on Windows.
Qt4 made major improvements which allowed for KDE4 to be easier ported to Windows.
For KOffice to function, you have to have KDE4 installed. And the installer from RTFA is essentially alpha installer for KDE4 for Windows - now also including KOffice. Even if you would select only KOffice, most of KDE4 would be also installed since KOffice depends on it.
If you are not sure, just give it a try - http://www.koffice.org/releases/2.0alpha8-release.php. You can always simple remove KDE4 from your hard drive. it doesn't yet integrates with Windows deeply: simple removal of directory would do a trick. After installation, go into bin/ directory and launch kword.exe. It's alpha quality - but it works somehow already.
P.S. My personal favorite of KDE4 is Mahjong with SVG graphics. Install kdegames package to get it.
There are only 3 corect ways here: 1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets 2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit devs sort out the look on ach platform 3. Write a native interface for each platform
Actually, OO.o uses number 1. The main problem of course that OO.o is too old: many parts were coded by many people in different times on different platforms. That's why it looks and behaves like total junky - independent of platform you are running it on.
But my first though was that you #1 is impossible. Because you chain yourself to update your application - eternally - to catch up with all the little UI improvement introduced with every minor OS update. It's just not practical. Or better say, it doesn't work in practice.
I just hope the KOffice team takes route 2, but that's dependent on Trolltech releasing Qt for Windows which uses native Windows widgets.
QT4 uses only little bit of Windows native GUI.
Many applications do not use Windows native GUI (best examples are M$IE and M$Office) for one simple reason: it has very very limited capabilities, which are not matching modern UI requirements.
Also, as somebody who did native Win16/Win32 using only SDK, believe me, native UI of Windows is major P.I.T.A. to program for. Add here aforementioned lacking features and you have literally 0 reasons even to consider using it. No need for better example - even M$ itself doesn't use it.
In the times of StarOffice, goal was to make truly cross-platform UI which can run on Mac OS, Linux, Window, etc. The problem here is that you can't make it. It is impossible. That's why UI's of OO.o now is failing the same way as Java UI did many years ago. GUI has to be native to integrate with OS, for app to be conforming to interface users of OS are familiar with.
P.S. Another example, similar to OO.o, is Opera - they also have their own toolkit very similar to Windows native controls. That's why Opera, just like OO.o, fails to integrate with OS, fails to conform to host UI standards.
KWrite is that good not because it is KWrite on its own - it is because there is KDE4 behind it as foundation.
Actual alpha of KDE4, btw, isn't that much bigger if compared to OpenOffice.org: KDE4 (with games!) takes about 315M while OO.o 2.3 takes 290M. Yes, KOffice + KDE4 itself + piles of KDE4 apps and libraries are only slightly larger than full install OO.o.
I think that bloat added by KDE4 to the Windows would be just like a drop in ocean. And for the little price you are getting lots of (eventually I hope useful) extras.
SVG Mahjong alone is enough for me to justify the occupied 315M of disk space ;)
Moved to Google Talk and Skype long time ago - mainly due to the internationalization problems which always plagued ICQ - but I still keep ICQ running just for some very old friends.
Several days ago I believe I had some connection problems (I rarely look into ICQ) but now it is fine. Fine means that I'm connected but I see probably only 10-20% of people I usually have in my contact list.
Most of my friends are using Miranda IM, I presume. And many of them are off-line right now. I see several on-line contacts which I am sure are using QIP, meaning that it has fixed whatever the problem was.
My client is Trillian 3.1 Basic. (Not great overall, but works somehow - especially for the older obsolete protocols like ICQ.)
Finally!
I do not like my actual mouse - but sadly it still works somehow. Coming up with the reason to buy a new mouse is quite hard.
But Diabolo is for rescue!!!
The game is notoriously known for its capability of rendering mice dysfunctional by wearing down left button very very quickly. My friend playing thru Diabolo I & II (with expansions) went thru 5(!) left mouse buttons (he was replacing only button mechanics itself) and one right mouse button.
Diabolo III - Banzaii!!
It's pretty clear that there would be some bugs. (Personally I haven't seen any bug to date in my Ubuntu 8.04 system - but I use it right now only sparsely.)
On other side it is important for LTS release to get software as fresh as possible - because users are going to use it for quite some time.
It is some fancy mix of Debian support concept and Ubuntu's strive to do often releases. I think what does Ubuntu for such LTS releases is pretty good idea.
If you really want super stable desktop, I can recommend to buy workstation version of SuSE - SLED - with support. It costs not that much after all and software on average works well, since SuSE does invest some resources into actual testing before releasing something.
IANAL. But I think you are wrong. If they (re)used somebody's else work verbatim, then they are users - they are not obliged to host somebody's else work.
There is no case of derivative work. People just used readily available software without modifying it.
Or to put it otherwise. They provide both BusyBox and Linux source code readily - you can also (immediately) access it: just go to BusyBox.net and Linux.org.
BTW, it works the same in Linux distributions in general and in Debian in particualr: they do not provide you with sources of the packages - they just (1) link to original URL of tarball package and (2, if applicable) give you a patch with changes. If there were no changes, then it can be said that Debian also violates GPL: it doesn't ship the sources - it just links to them. (Debian Archives)
Hum?
Most of such homebrew games are ports of well-known titles from other platforms.
e.g. Tetris. I'm sure I made already - not hours - weeks of game play on my DS. Yet, it is not yet available officially on Wii.
Seeing how open games strive on PCs (and Linux in particular) I can easily imagine that if Nintendo had opened up the platform, many non-commercial titles would have appeared.
I'm too, you know, started programming by doing games. It is quite general observation that people code what they are like doing at the moment. Younger programmers are of course play lots of games - and consequently like to code the games too. But consoles (being huge business) naturally try to prevent that: they need dumb customers who would buy all the shovelware you throw at them. People with intellect who like to tinker with stuff are of no interest to them.
LOL.
You DO realize that Wii has no demos nor other way to preview games???
After buying R4DS I felt really really relieved - it was like I managed to return all the money I have wasted on number of overrated shovelware titles there. Now I buy games intelligently - because most of the time this are the games I already finished.
I can only welcome cracking of Wii games since it would add extra pressure on game producers to actually make simpler better games people would be willing to pay money for. If many people would be able to try game before buying, then sales of shovelware would suffer enormously. Something demos were invented to address.
And frankly conspiracy theory of a day I'd say the pact is in place: between game publishers and Nintendo to prevent any kind of demos on Wii - to keep people buying (even by mistake) all the shovelware which you see on the shelves in abundance.
Homebrew - banzaii!! Cracking - banzaii!!!
Panasonic as well as several other Jap CE producers maintain their own distribution for such embedded products. It is all done under roof of CE Linux Forum. Probably you can Google for more info.
Last time I read, their goal was not to fork and to distance themselves from the development - but to simplify communication with Linux community.
Chances are good that recent Linux kernels do support embedded device in your TV without extra patches.
Calm down, cowboys.
They need to provide only in case if it was modified. If BusyBox and Linux kernel were *NOT* modified - you can grab them from the busybox.net and linux.org respectively.
As Linux become more and more ubiquitous, people forget that hardware manufacturers need to modify less and less of the standard components. Also off-the-shelf SoC producers (and independent developers) submit support for their systems to kernel quite regularly. All manufacturers need to do is to compile everything with proper configuration and it all would work without any tweaking.
Unless fact is established that they have modified something, they hardly violate any clause of GPL.
I have one at home not because I'm "space-constrained" - but because it really nice and small Linux server which does everything I nee from it.
Thanks to fanless design, loudest part of the rig is hard drive. That, along with minimalistic power consumption, makes it very suitable for always-on system. I use it for back-ups and some performance-oriented development and it is just bliss.
The only downside of buying Mini-ITX, is that it's very hard to find suitable components as well as good case. Selection isn't very wide and prices often bite.
RC3 == Final == FireFox 3.0
The difference is only in name.
History has many examples on how you are wrong.
Crappy product with decent PR campaign would outsell cheaper and better alternative which isn't advertised properly. This is given.
In nuts, few people make intelligent decision before jumping on board. Some do that just to try something new.
That what is called "crash test."
Any experience can contribute positively. Especially negative one.
You posted to wrong story. Was the comment posted for Opera release story, then any bashing of FireFox for whatever is different from Opera would be modded up thru the roof.
The story here is essentially not about browser - but about a new Guiness record. Not much to discuss, expect the slashdotted mozilla.org servers ;)
If we exclude automatic updates, I think than a million in a day is already a record.
There is a difference between automatic updates and N million people going to some URL and knowingly and willingly downloading some piece of software.
View > Zoom > Zoom Text Only and then "Ctrl-+", "Ctrl--" (^-) and "Ctrl-0"
About patent... Do not forget to file it in Texas.
+10
And can you point to any standard??
Last time I was checking, only few applications were using Direct X 10. For any kind of productivity more or less everybody uses bunch of wrappers or some commercial library.
The whole point here that there is no standard. And M$ forces everybody to kiss PR ass of Direct X, though literally nobody directly uses it, except for hardware manufacturers (nVidia and ATI). Some proprietary half-arsed spec in .DOCX peppered with implementation details from actual version of Direct X (even is such document exists) hardly qualifies as standard to me.
On other side, Kronos group is something. They are slow on up-take, but generally deliver usable standards industry needs. They are vendor neutral what is also important.
Do not expect anything in particular from OpenCL. I'm pretty sure that it would try to appeal to wider audience - consequently it would be pretty dumb down. But still it would let any developer to access GPU chip. Knowing how Apple does things, with couple of extra objects in one's program and few extra checks on whether you can use GPU, many tasks would get a decent performance boost. It wouldn't be high-end nor exclusive - it would be something for wider audience.
OMG. What'a flames.
Mozilla/FireFox devels are performance conscious. But they target slightly different demographics. And no, 8yo computer of gp isn't their target.
FireFox on all platforms tries to be OS friendly and conform to UI standards of the OS. Opera? - Some outdated, hacked to death, overbloated with tiny features GUI which looks and behaves differently from whatever OS you have. OMG - Opera still supports the MDI stupidity when even its own author - M$ - has declared it a major mistake in UI design.
Opera's rendering engine is of course near perfect. While Fx team dedicates great effort to usability, all the resources Opera have spared on modern UI desing went into all the bells and whistles of HTML/XHTML/CSS/JS/etc support. No need to boast anything - they are most active member of WHATWG.
Do not ever expect Fx to be more resource friendly (*). But do not expect Opera suddenly be conforming to OS UI standards.
Thanks God, the iron grip of IE was lifted off WWW. Choice is all yours. Both Opera and FireFox are decent browsers - pick whatever you like.
(*) Part of reasons why Fx has much higher resource consumptions, is because they have to provide interfaces for extensions/add-ons. Opera is monolithic - FireFox is modular. Modular app would be always slower and consume more memory. As a trade-off, you have a whole bunch of extensions to choose from to make out of your browser whatever you want.
Let's see...
Then, the poster, who has apparently never worked at a real IT job, suggest that the PP pay for the tool himself, which again pushes the cost to the employee, [...]That's really stupid. You apparently have no clue how business works. Procuring $200 (or any other expense) might be really really troublesome and time-consuming.
My test is simple. I come to my manager and say "To accomplish the work I were given, I need two weeks time or we can buy a $200 tool and do it in one day." If manager says that two weeks of work is cheaper, then you should go for it. Because procuring $200 might take time (esp second half of year, when all budget lines are already exhausted) and given work - even if it takes two weeks might - might have deadline where the two weeks are already included.
99% of cases it is not about the time you would waste doing work manually - it is about deadline for the work. Procuring extra money means going to bow to upper management. And latencies of upper management are unpretty high, if measurable at all. Few (none) line managers would even consider in the situation going to upper management as an option.
P.S. Last time I was checking, you can't be forced to work overtime. If you manager is slave driver then you better off changing job/department anyway.
P.P.S. Doing work manually is also (at least to me) is important option. Because honestly in past decade there were no occasion when I need an extra tool to do my work - most of the time I make my own tools and scripts. But to make your own tools and scripts - and make them efficiently and efficient - you really need to know all about the work. That can only be gained by firsthand experience which is best gained by doing it all manually few first times.
P.P.P.S.
[...] and also is probably impractical as most business only let one use "approved" software tools.Knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. Perl) is really invaluable asset here.
Learn to make your own tool. Learn how to integrate different tools of the business process. There are some clinical cases - but in many cases it is doable and in long-term saves one a lot of time.