Actually, I've been participating a bit with wishes on the wiki, and I'm trying it out now and then just to see how progress goes.
I think I like the way it is heading pretty well, just that it isn't there yet, but I see work is being done. The idea of a "Firefox" or at least Gecko based browser that integrates completely into Gnome *is* a good one.
The only thing I think might be a mistake is to not support Firefox extensions and instead go with the C/Python-based ones. On one hand, it's not such a bad idea for some extensions, especially when it comes to performance - on the other hand, you miss out on a huge wealth of very useful plugins, some of which are to services where there probably(?) never will come a Epiphany alternative, say like a real Google bar or the Stumble upon-plugin.
Even not counting those, people are making tons and tons of great extensions to Firefox and that is one of its major strengths. That is sad to see getting thrown away. Most of the engine for supporting it should be still there, shouldn't it? Or does Gecko not render the complete interface? I don't remember...
Of course, ideally, I suppose all widgets should be non-XUL for consistency... which might not be really doable. Or maybe it might, XUL could quite possibly use any toolkit to actually render the components if they contain the same set.
Well anyway, please keep the C/Python ones and use it for core extensions, but if at all possible, please support installing extensions for Firefox as well. If the trouble is with installing, architecture etc and not with XUL/Javascript/DOM, than I'm sure it would be possible to work with the Mozilla team and come up with something all could use. If I remember correctly, installers nowadays are "just" RDF configs that says which files do what, more or less, so it ought to be possible to use even if installed in a completely different place.
Then again, I don't actually know anything about this, but hey it is Slashdot, isn't it? =)
Anyhow, keep up the great work. I for one will at least keep trying Epiphany now and then.
Well I have to, don't I? That is tedious as it is, but the worst thing is actually when things has gotten pasted with me noticing it. That can be a bit painful to clean afterwards, if I've been writing good stuff after it and can't ^Z.
Nah, actually I am talking about implementing - a conditional around it. I'm not talking about removing it, just the option to disable.
And I do know about several different tricks involving xmodmap and imwheel and whatnot, but sometimes it just doesn't work. I've been doing this dance before, but right now I can't get it to work, for some reason.
Ok so it was a few months since I tried last, I think the main point I'm trying to make is this: I've been running Linux for years now and I'm getting very tired of editing arcane config files, all of which have their own format, at the same time I've seen this particular request raised time and again on mailing lists, in forums and other discussions, by lot's of people who actually have a problem with this (see Google). And it's always been dismissed with the usual "we know what's best" attitude.
My humble, not-knowing-enough-to-do-it-myself-attitude is that it really can't be that hard to have a simple boolean (probably in X) that says "don't use primary selection", or even just blocking middle mouse via simple Gnome checkbox. I can't imagine this is hard or that it should violate any "best practices". To me, this is both better usability and more choice. And yes, I'm fine with leaving the default as-is, and have a hidden little checkbox somewhere in the system settings or whatever.
As can be seen in this thread, the general attitude is the general "just edit config XYZ", which I think it's time Linux got away from (mainly because I've done that for years and it gets tedious hehe;-) or "you don't understand". As I expected. Sad but true. Not that I don't appreciate tips, and those tips *are* useful. Just that they don't solve the problem, just the symptom, and pretty awkvardly at that. Never been fond of sweeping under the rug.:)
I will willingly admit that it is not a *huge* issue, but just because it isn't, why couldn't it just be fixed? =)
Anyhow, while we are at it, xmodmap/imwheel-like functionality would not be boring to have in a nice interface... if someone is looking for something to do, I'm sure that would be pretty popular, because that is one of the common issues still being dealt with often in various forums and the like.
If you'd actually read my post, you'd see that I was complaining about X pasting text when I was editing code (this is the biggest issue). No mention of a browser.
But I see that you are only on a mission to promote your favourite product no matter the subject or context, something that almost always backfires. And you absolutely did not make me more positive to Epiphany, a browser that I like but don't think is good enough yet. Calling other browsers names like that does not help one bit. It just shows uncertainty and weakness. Think about that, and you'll make a lot better job promoting it.
If they could only add an option to block "middle click pastes" too, it would all be perfect in clipboard land. But browsing the web, evertime someone even thinks this thought it is immideately flamed through the ground by all the people who knows how superior this way of doing things is, and that also knows that there is no chance in hell that anyone could do this by mistake.
Heads up: I'm not proposing to remove it, or even turn it off by default. I just need a way to turn it off manually. It is extremely annoying, and I (and other with me) *do* click middle by mistake - often - and that is a hell when scrolling around code in text editors... Yep, a lot of it probably owes to the mouse I have, it has a tendency to get stuck slightly on scrolling, which results in a click. But really, do I need to buy a new mouse for something as simple?
I don't use, want or need it, and it hinders me in my work. I would really like to see it go. (Maybe it really is a X.org issue in the end, though. Not sure where it would be best to implement it).
How old is your microwave? Why don't you 'upgrade' it? That's the same feeling the average person has towards computers.
Interesting comparison, especially when I realized that my microwave is from the 80's. I inherited it from my mother in 1990 or 1991, and I've never had the need for a newer or better one - it does what it should, nothing more, nothing less. Unlike most of my computers it has never failed, hung, blue screened or aborted in the middle of a task either.
Not a gfx artist myself, but I know ppl who are trying Linux and therefore Gimp right now, and here are a few points. Remember that almost all of this is second hand information, based on what these guys are telling me, so if I get a fact wrong, just correct me and I'll forward it to them - they'll be very happy if these things can be solved.:)
The windows are not floating by default, so you have to go around setting "on top" on each of the windows I think, which of course can be quite annoying if you need to do it all the time. It can be *somewhat* remedied by using a separate virtual desktop for Gimp only, if you have a big screen and it can handle high frequences. Several of the people I know can't run 1600x1200 simply because the low update hurts their eyes... even though they have a big screen.
On top of that, they are sorely missing the capability to "tab" toggle all the palettes, leaving just the image (and back). I heard someone say that this command might exist, but be mapped to ALT-TAB, which of course is blocked by most or all window managers (although maybe it works in plain X). Also, this command - if it exists - apparently is not remappable.
So, in short: my friends feel that the palette windows should be floating by default, and there should be a shortcut for toggling anything but the picture on/off. Of course it would also be nice if all windows in Gimp could act together when ALT-tabbing around programs, there are some reasons you would want to work with other programs on the same virtual desktop... such as drag and drop for instance.
Any tips appreciated. Especially if it's just misunderstandings, that would be great.:)
All I need right here and now is a search function in Nautilus. It is just insane that there isn't one, even a basic one, integrated.
Type-ahead has strange timeouts, and guess what: if lots of files start with the same string, it is effectively useless, especially as it stops so easily. Not to mention recursive searches...
The external search application is crappy and unintiutive in many ways, among other things how to get to the directory you already have open in Nautilus. And if you go through all that, there is no good way to do anything with your results. You can open them, that's about it. Maybe that wasn't what you wanted?
Maybe, just maybe, I a) wanted to just move to a file I knew a substring in the name of, or b) want a file view with a list that matches my criteria - taken from the directory I'm currently in, and a possibility to manipulate these results as if they were ordinary files.
All other file managers I have used do these very simple things. I know Gnome devs sometimes "knows better" than everybody else what "is best for them" but hell, this is a feature that is impossible to do without.
It isn't supposed to be needed to do finds and copys in the shell to being able to work with your files.
Ok, so there are other things I need fixed. But this particular one is screaming in my face every day.
Back in the days, say a few years ago at least, getting JSP and Servlets up and running was a pain, even if you knew and used Java already, and had it installed. And then it was a pain configuring it all. PHP, as I remember it, has always just worked, with ease. No, I don't know how the status is today, and since I don't miss Java I don't need to know. Back then this was important though.
After all that was done, well then it was up to if you liked Java or not. And I've come to realize that Java is a language you either like or not, rarely any in-betweens. I came from Java, so in order to use PHP I'd have to learn a new language, granted it is not hard - and maybe that is the point. PHP is easier. It is not guarded by a lot of "safety syntax", but really, that usually isn't needed. Java is quite powerful, but it is also very verbose and does things the long way around, or at least it did.
I still use PHP now and then, if rarely, but right now I'm looking into Catalyst which seems really promising - it's inspired by Ruby on Rails and Maypole, among other things, but for Perl. I really wish there were some more examples and example applications to look at though, the documentation is pretty good (and there's always the source), but too see how it all should fit together, I'd like to see more from people already grokking it. I've been reading the mailing lists, this perl.com article and some other things, but that is what I am missing.
Perl has become the favourite language. It has CPAN (if Ruby had that on the same level, it'd probably be Ruby). It can do anything, and it doesn't get in your way. It also attracts lots of jokes about readability but that's just people who haven't actually made a serious try to understand.
So, some of those emails about african guys needing to transfer huge sums of money was actually real?
Well, if the Ubuntu guys just were the first ones to actually answer one, a few people *will* be slapping their foreheads pretty hard for deleting them instead. =)
Maybe "technical support" is misleading? I can think of lots of other things to do apart from fixing bugs and problems, although I suspect providing some kind of commercial grade guarantees that any problems will be fixed would be a valid business model too, at least for some companies.
For instance, you could very well charge money for developing certain, possibly quite specialized, features for the distribution that is otherwise lower on the general priorities list. Or for helping to migrate to it from other platforms. I'm sure there are other possibilities, but I am only guessing. I do think that larger companies have little problem paying for experts to do the grunt work, they just want something that works - like you say - whichever platform they have chosen.
It also works the other way around, which is why many companies do put money or effort into projects that are free and open: they get a product they can use themselves, which might be better than anything else, and they get a say in how it will work. Many, many products out there that are shrinkwrapped may not do what companies want, and maybe they never will - as well as the risk that the product may be gone one day with no way to go forward without switching completely.
Lets say a company builds products around Apache, PHP and MySQL - or whatever - if they have specialized needs enough, or even just make big enough business on it, it might make perfect sense to help make those products as good as possible. Maybe the guy(s) behind Canonical only really need a very good Linux distribution, for whatever reason.
I don't claim to know how these people reason, I have a bit of a hard time seeing how the service model should work at times myself. But it seems that others do believe in it, and it's not only people who go bankrupt.;-)
I went for the CDs. I pay for them by giving them to friends and letting them try it out. After all, that is what they want me to do with them. Although, I might donate a bit too, it seems they need money for their servers at the moment...
The business model seems to be providing technical support, and the CDs help spreading the distribution and make it common. And it works. I've several friends who've switched because they got those CDs, two of them permanently (well, we'll see if it lasts) from being Windows users to 100% Ubuntu.
Also, I read an interview somewhere with the very rich guy who sponsors the whole thing where he said that he hopes he can eventually make money of it this way, but if not, he doesn't mind spending some of his money for a good cause. Apparently he's from South Africa(?), and feels that the world, especially the poorer part, needs a cheap, open and reliable alternative. This is the same guy who had enough money to buy himself a spacetrip, so I guess he can afford it.
Sorry, I'm not sure on the exact details, but I'm sure that interview can be found on google if you want to.
Drunken driving accidents increase in winter because every senselessly drunken teenager not properly educated by their parents will be wearing branded non-sensored gloves.
The article is very low on information, but since it could be installed in both steering wheel and gloves, maybe the car won't start without skin contact in either? So, if you want to drive, you will have to put your hands or gloves on the wheel, and then this test is performed.
And will the car come to a stop if a person only starts drinking (and got drunk) after the car's moving?
Turning off the engine would probably be a good idea here. Ok, so it could cause a traffic jam or something, but that's better than having someone crashing into some innocent bystander.
As for your comparisons to censorship cards and whatnot, that is just plain silly. This is something that - if it works correctly - could save lives! You can't possibly fail to see the difference. As much as I like freedoms and choice, I don't think it is a human right to wield a deadly weapon uncontrollaby amongst other people. And yes, parents should pay attention to, and raise their kids, but guess what: that is not in any way fool-proof. Some kids will revolt and do whatever they want no matter what, and furthermore, one of the more common effects of alcohol is drastically reduced judgement.
Of course they won't. Still, that user base is so small that Firefox could go back to being insignificant. The reason FF is so big now is because so many Windows users has (finally) switched. As long as Windows is dominant, the choices those users make is what matters.
I personally think many will stay no matter how good IE7 is, but that remains to be seen; they have switched at least once already to get a better browser. If IE7 is truly better (in their opinion), why wouldn't they switch again? And don't give me any answers about Freedom and Openness, only people like you and me care about that - that's why I used Mozilla and Firefox already when it was arguably a much worse browser than IE, at least when it came to sites and features that worked.
Most don't care though. That is why MSN is so succesful - I don't use it myself, but apparently it can do a lot of things that competitors can't, because that is what everyone tells me, and they can name feature after feature to back it up. Often it is - to me - silly stuff like excellent webcamming or being able to drop any media into a chat, but whatever it is, they see that my client can't do that. Hell, Gaim still can't even do file transfer for many protocols, even though code for it is avaiable in other GPL clients. And it has nothing to do with bundling, most of them keep ICQ or other clients as well, if nothing else to be able to talk to people like me, but they always *wants* to use the "best" IM if they are can. Same thing here.
Especially the new generation, the ones getting use to computers now, can be extremely fickle and in the hunt for the latest and coolest. Strangely enough, power users and geeks are often the ones to stick to the tools they are accustomed to; of course, this is quite practical but it is also strange that we aren't more curious and experiment to find the best things available. Just a casual observation, but I think it is true.
A bug that people seem to be ignoring is that whatever browser is shown in the screenshot did not show the correct URL after the.net was appended, but left the original URL in the location bar.
Looks like Safari. And you're right, that's the real problem here, the redirect should be shown at the very least by changing the URL in the location bar.
Who gives students access to install programs?!? Are you still on Win98 or something?
The schools does. There is no way around it in the kind of education we do. Also, everyone has their own personal computer, no shared ones. You may be thinking of another type of school, probably a traditional one. We have pretty specific needs since we do quite a lot of specialized things, often with external companies, at the same time as we are way too small to have an IT department even of one full time.
I realize you have some kind of vision of how everything should be in every specific situation, as many online thinkers do, but we really do have good reasons for our descisions - only thing we could do and don't is invading the students privacy by checking out exactly what they have installed. We don't believe in that, and that, I think is worth more than what software is used.
The same can be said for different MS Word versions. I've seen that happen a number of times.
What does that even mean? You trying to use anecdotes to make some kind of case for OOo (or rather, against MS Office)?
At least with OpenOffice you can standardize on one version since it is cross-platform and free to upgrade.
Only if the rest of the world standardizes together with us. The problem is communicating with the rest of the world, something we do a lot, students as well as teachers. That is why which version of what corrupts the most is irrelevant. What is relevant is that when documents are leaving and coming back into the building, they are altered in an unwanted way by import/export processes.
In some cases it is not a problem at all, and it all hinges on what you need - but: OOo is claimed by many to be a full and compatible replacement and that is simply not true. Saying so actually makes the case *against* open source replacements, because it is so easily proven wrong, and thus taken as a lie - tainting all other such claims as potential lies as well. ALways, always, always give true statements when promoting your product.
However, in my personal opinion, OOo is good enough for most things. That is a whole nother thing.
Both of those are useful publishing formats, but not very useful for sending editable documents around. I have trouble imagining such an environment.
Well, we are not using em that way either, because we don't need to. For passing editable information around *internally* we don't need fancy formatting for most things, and frankly, a wiki does the job much simpler and easier almost anytime. Documents from any office suite are really crappy for sending around and aren't really handled by version control either. Only reason to use office suites are for external communication and presentations. And OOo isn't very good at those, although probably good enough.
I've seen it tried. It didn't really work out, mainly because more than half the students promptly pirated MS Office instead. In many of the cases without even trying out the provided alternative seriously, but rather dismissing it right away.
On the other hand, for some parts of the suite, like for the presentations part, the MS variant is still so much better interface wise that it saves a *lot* of time using the real variant - we are talking hours and hours here. And yes, doing presentations are a large bit of what the students do around here.
It doesn't really handle MS documents all that well either, in the sense that almost anything opens, but the formatting is often distorted and the same thing the other way around, plus that the warning everytime you try to save something back to doc can be really scary to the average user. To those who say that formatting shouldn't matter - it does. We are not talking about just being readable, but papers and mateial that should look a certain way, if only because the student wants it to look that way. And we are not talking advanced stuff either... a simple image can be enough to throw it off.
Personally I do use OOo exclusively, but then again I'm not the average user; I'm a geek. No amount of gentle education, helping out or poiting to similarities will get the average user to even try something new if it doesn't behave just like they are used to - at least that is my experience. A real pain in the ass.
On the plus side, we don't use doc as the internal format, we use HTML or in worst case PDF instead, which makes the situation a bit brighter.:)
Found directly in Ubuntus repositories, you probably have it in many others too:
MiMMS, formerly called "mmsclient", is a simple client to download
streaming audio and/or video media from the internet uscodeing the MMS protocol (i.e. from mms:// type URLs, generally found in asx files). Downloaded streams can then be replayed offline at your leisure, using any compatible media player of your choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you are running nightlies FF shouldn't be able to display it. It will from version 1.1, though.
Plain and simple. Maybe someone else would have, then again maybe not.
Actually, I've been participating a bit with wishes on the wiki, and I'm trying it out now and then just to see how progress goes.
I think I like the way it is heading pretty well, just that it isn't there yet, but I see work is being done. The idea of a "Firefox" or at least Gecko based browser that integrates completely into Gnome *is* a good one.
The only thing I think might be a mistake is to not support Firefox extensions and instead go with the C/Python-based ones. On one hand, it's not such a bad idea for some extensions, especially when it comes to performance - on the other hand, you miss out on a huge wealth of very useful plugins, some of which are to services where there probably(?) never will come a Epiphany alternative, say like a real Google bar or the Stumble upon-plugin.
Even not counting those, people are making tons and tons of great extensions to Firefox and that is one of its major strengths. That is sad to see getting thrown away. Most of the engine for supporting it should be still there, shouldn't it? Or does Gecko not render the complete interface? I don't remember...
Of course, ideally, I suppose all widgets should be non-XUL for consistency... which might not be really doable. Or maybe it might, XUL could quite possibly use any toolkit to actually render the components if they contain the same set.
Well anyway, please keep the C/Python ones and use it for core extensions, but if at all possible, please support installing extensions for Firefox as well. If the trouble is with installing, architecture etc and not with XUL/Javascript/DOM, than I'm sure it would be possible to work with the Mozilla team and come up with something all could use. If I remember correctly, installers nowadays are "just" RDF configs that says which files do what, more or less, so it ought to be possible to use even if installed in a completely different place.
Then again, I don't actually know anything about this, but hey it is Slashdot, isn't it? =)
Anyhow, keep up the great work. I for one will at least keep trying Epiphany now and then.
Funny guy =)
Well I have to, don't I? That is tedious as it is, but the worst thing is actually when things has gotten pasted with me noticing it. That can be a bit painful to clean afterwards, if I've been writing good stuff after it and can't ^Z.
Nah, actually I am talking about implementing - a conditional around it. I'm not talking about removing it, just the option to disable.
;-) or "you don't understand". As I expected. Sad but true. Not that I don't appreciate tips, and those tips *are* useful. Just that they don't solve the problem, just the symptom, and pretty awkvardly at that. Never been fond of sweeping under the rug. :)
And I do know about several different tricks involving xmodmap and imwheel and whatnot, but sometimes it just doesn't work. I've been doing this dance before, but right now I can't get it to work, for some reason.
Ok so it was a few months since I tried last, I think the main point I'm trying to make is this: I've been running Linux for years now and I'm getting very tired of editing arcane config files, all of which have their own format, at the same time I've seen this particular request raised time and again on mailing lists, in forums and other discussions, by lot's of people who actually have a problem with this (see Google). And it's always been dismissed with the usual "we know what's best" attitude.
My humble, not-knowing-enough-to-do-it-myself-attitude is that it really can't be that hard to have a simple boolean (probably in X) that says "don't use primary selection", or even just blocking middle mouse via simple Gnome checkbox. I can't imagine this is hard or that it should violate any "best practices". To me, this is both better usability and more choice. And yes, I'm fine with leaving the default as-is, and have a hidden little checkbox somewhere in the system settings or whatever.
As can be seen in this thread, the general attitude is the general "just edit config XYZ", which I think it's time Linux got away from (mainly because I've done that for years and it gets tedious hehe
I will willingly admit that it is not a *huge* issue, but just because it isn't, why couldn't it just be fixed? =)
Anyhow, while we are at it, xmodmap/imwheel-like functionality would not be boring to have in a nice interface... if someone is looking for something to do, I'm sure that would be pretty popular, because that is one of the common issues still being dealt with often in various forums and the like.
If you'd actually read my post, you'd see that I was complaining about X pasting text when I was editing code (this is the biggest issue). No mention of a browser.
But I see that you are only on a mission to promote your favourite product no matter the subject or context, something that almost always backfires. And you absolutely did not make me more positive to Epiphany, a browser that I like but don't think is good enough yet. Calling other browsers names like that does not help one bit. It just shows uncertainty and weakness. Think about that, and you'll make a lot better job promoting it.
Thank you.
If they could only add an option to block "middle click pastes" too, it would all be perfect in clipboard land. But browsing the web, evertime someone even thinks this thought it is immideately flamed through the ground by all the people who knows how superior this way of doing things is, and that also knows that there is no chance in hell that anyone could do this by mistake.
Heads up: I'm not proposing to remove it, or even turn it off by default. I just need a way to turn it off manually. It is extremely annoying, and I (and other with me) *do* click middle by mistake - often - and that is a hell when scrolling around code in text editors... Yep, a lot of it probably owes to the mouse I have, it has a tendency to get stuck slightly on scrolling, which results in a click. But really, do I need to buy a new mouse for something as simple?
I don't use, want or need it, and it hinders me in my work. I would really like to see it go. (Maybe it really is a X.org issue in the end, though. Not sure where it would be best to implement it).
All in all, I think that is an excellent analogy.
Not a gfx artist myself, but I know ppl who are trying Linux and therefore Gimp right now, and here are a few points. Remember that almost all of this is second hand information, based on what these guys are telling me, so if I get a fact wrong, just correct me and I'll forward it to them - they'll be very happy if these things can be solved. :)
:)
The windows are not floating by default, so you have to go around setting "on top" on each of the windows I think, which of course can be quite annoying if you need to do it all the time. It can be *somewhat* remedied by using a separate virtual desktop for Gimp only, if you have a big screen and it can handle high frequences. Several of the people I know can't run 1600x1200 simply because the low update hurts their eyes... even though they have a big screen.
On top of that, they are sorely missing the capability to "tab" toggle all the palettes, leaving just the image (and back). I heard someone say that this command might exist, but be mapped to ALT-TAB, which of course is blocked by most or all window managers (although maybe it works in plain X). Also, this command - if it exists - apparently is not remappable.
So, in short: my friends feel that the palette windows should be floating by default, and there should be a shortcut for toggling anything but the picture on/off. Of course it would also be nice if all windows in Gimp could act together when ALT-tabbing around programs, there are some reasons you would want to work with other programs on the same virtual desktop... such as drag and drop for instance.
Any tips appreciated. Especially if it's just misunderstandings, that would be great.
Maybe you want to check whether you need to, first. It seems this issue is not really an issue for most people.
All I need right here and now is a search function in Nautilus. It is just insane that there isn't one, even a basic one, integrated.
Type-ahead has strange timeouts, and guess what: if lots of files start with the same string, it is effectively useless, especially as it stops so easily. Not to mention recursive searches...
The external search application is crappy and unintiutive in many ways, among other things how to get to the directory you already have open in Nautilus. And if you go through all that, there is no good way to do anything with your results. You can open them, that's about it. Maybe that wasn't what you wanted?
Maybe, just maybe, I a) wanted to just move to a file I knew a substring in the name of, or b) want a file view with a list that matches my criteria - taken from the directory I'm currently in, and a possibility to manipulate these results as if they were ordinary files.
All other file managers I have used do these very simple things. I know Gnome devs sometimes "knows better" than everybody else what "is best for them" but hell, this is a feature that is impossible to do without.
It isn't supposed to be needed to do finds and copys in the shell to being able to work with your files.
Ok, so there are other things I need fixed. But this particular one is screaming in my face every day.
Whatever the future holds, the lawyers takes VISA.
Statler: Ah, there's nothing like a good story.
Waldorf: And that was nothing like it.
Back in the days, say a few years ago at least, getting JSP and Servlets up and running was a pain, even if you knew and used Java already, and had it installed. And then it was a pain configuring it all. PHP, as I remember it, has always just worked, with ease. No, I don't know how the status is today, and since I don't miss Java I don't need to know. Back then this was important though.
After all that was done, well then it was up to if you liked Java or not. And I've come to realize that Java is a language you either like or not, rarely any in-betweens. I came from Java, so in order to use PHP I'd have to learn a new language, granted it is not hard - and maybe that is the point. PHP is easier. It is not guarded by a lot of "safety syntax", but really, that usually isn't needed. Java is quite powerful, but it is also very verbose and does things the long way around, or at least it did.
I still use PHP now and then, if rarely, but right now I'm looking into Catalyst which seems really promising - it's inspired by Ruby on Rails and Maypole, among other things, but for Perl. I really wish there were some more examples and example applications to look at though, the documentation is pretty good (and there's always the source), but too see how it all should fit together, I'd like to see more from people already grokking it. I've been reading the mailing lists, this perl.com article and some other things, but that is what I am missing.
Perl has become the favourite language. It has CPAN (if Ruby had that on the same level, it'd probably be Ruby). It can do anything, and it doesn't get in your way. It also attracts lots of jokes about readability but that's just people who haven't actually made a serious try to understand.
Maybe "technical support" is misleading? I can think of lots of other things to do apart from fixing bugs and problems, although I suspect providing some kind of commercial grade guarantees that any problems will be fixed would be a valid business model too, at least for some companies.
;-)
For instance, you could very well charge money for developing certain, possibly quite specialized, features for the distribution that is otherwise lower on the general priorities list. Or for helping to migrate to it from other platforms. I'm sure there are other possibilities, but I am only guessing. I do think that larger companies have little problem paying for experts to do the grunt work, they just want something that works - like you say - whichever platform they have chosen.
It also works the other way around, which is why many companies do put money or effort into projects that are free and open: they get a product they can use themselves, which might be better than anything else, and they get a say in how it will work. Many, many products out there that are shrinkwrapped may not do what companies want, and maybe they never will - as well as the risk that the product may be gone one day with no way to go forward without switching completely.
Lets say a company builds products around Apache, PHP and MySQL - or whatever - if they have specialized needs enough, or even just make big enough business on it, it might make perfect sense to help make those products as good as possible. Maybe the guy(s) behind Canonical only really need a very good Linux distribution, for whatever reason.
I don't claim to know how these people reason, I have a bit of a hard time seeing how the service model should work at times myself. But it seems that others do believe in it, and it's not only people who go bankrupt.
I went for the CDs. I pay for them by giving them to friends and letting them try it out. After all, that is what they want me to do with them. Although, I might donate a bit too, it seems they need money for their servers at the moment...
The business model seems to be providing technical support, and the CDs help spreading the distribution and make it common. And it works. I've several friends who've switched because they got those CDs, two of them permanently (well, we'll see if it lasts) from being Windows users to 100% Ubuntu.
Also, I read an interview somewhere with the very rich guy who sponsors the whole thing where he said that he hopes he can eventually make money of it this way, but if not, he doesn't mind spending some of his money for a good cause. Apparently he's from South Africa(?), and feels that the world, especially the poorer part, needs a cheap, open and reliable alternative. This is the same guy who had enough money to buy himself a spacetrip, so I guess he can afford it.
Sorry, I'm not sure on the exact details, but I'm sure that interview can be found on google if you want to.
As for your comparisons to censorship cards and whatnot, that is just plain silly. This is something that - if it works correctly - could save lives! You can't possibly fail to see the difference. As much as I like freedoms and choice, I don't think it is a human right to wield a deadly weapon uncontrollaby amongst other people. And yes, parents should pay attention to, and raise their kids, but guess what: that is not in any way fool-proof. Some kids will revolt and do whatever they want no matter what, and furthermore, one of the more common effects of alcohol is drastically reduced judgement.
Of course they won't. Still, that user base is so small that Firefox could go back to being insignificant. The reason FF is so big now is because so many Windows users has (finally) switched. As long as Windows is dominant, the choices those users make is what matters.
I personally think many will stay no matter how good IE7 is, but that remains to be seen; they have switched at least once already to get a better browser. If IE7 is truly better (in their opinion), why wouldn't they switch again? And don't give me any answers about Freedom and Openness, only people like you and me care about that - that's why I used Mozilla and Firefox already when it was arguably a much worse browser than IE, at least when it came to sites and features that worked.
Most don't care though. That is why MSN is so succesful - I don't use it myself, but apparently it can do a lot of things that competitors can't, because that is what everyone tells me, and they can name feature after feature to back it up. Often it is - to me - silly stuff like excellent webcamming or being able to drop any media into a chat, but whatever it is, they see that my client can't do that. Hell, Gaim still can't even do file transfer for many protocols, even though code for it is avaiable in other GPL clients. And it has nothing to do with bundling, most of them keep ICQ or other clients as well, if nothing else to be able to talk to people like me, but they always *wants* to use the "best" IM if they are can. Same thing here.
Especially the new generation, the ones getting use to computers now, can be extremely fickle and in the hunt for the latest and coolest. Strangely enough, power users and geeks are often the ones to stick to the tools they are accustomed to; of course, this is quite practical but it is also strange that we aren't more curious and experiment to find the best things available. Just a casual observation, but I think it is true.
Bork Bork Bork ;-)
And some more info from Answers.com...
http://www.inkscape.org/
I realize you have some kind of vision of how everything should be in every specific situation, as many online thinkers do, but we really do have good reasons for our descisions - only thing we could do and don't is invading the students privacy by checking out exactly what they have installed. We don't believe in that, and that, I think is worth more than what software is used.What does that even mean? You trying to use anecdotes to make some kind of case for OOo (or rather, against MS Office)?Only if the rest of the world standardizes together with us. The problem is communicating with the rest of the world, something we do a lot, students as well as teachers. That is why which version of what corrupts the most is irrelevant. What is relevant is that when documents are leaving and coming back into the building, they are altered in an unwanted way by import/export processes.
In some cases it is not a problem at all, and it all hinges on what you need - but: OOo is claimed by many to be a full and compatible replacement and that is simply not true. Saying so actually makes the case *against* open source replacements, because it is so easily proven wrong, and thus taken as a lie - tainting all other such claims as potential lies as well. ALways, always, always give true statements when promoting your product.
However, in my personal opinion, OOo is good enough for most things. That is a whole nother thing.Well, we are not using em that way either, because we don't need to. For passing editable information around *internally* we don't need fancy formatting for most things, and frankly, a wiki does the job much simpler and easier almost anytime. Documents from any office suite are really crappy for sending around and aren't really handled by version control either. Only reason to use office suites are for external communication and presentations. And OOo isn't very good at those, although probably good enough.
I've seen it tried. It didn't really work out, mainly because more than half the students promptly pirated MS Office instead. In many of the cases without even trying out the provided alternative seriously, but rather dismissing it right away.
:)
On the other hand, for some parts of the suite, like for the presentations part, the MS variant is still so much better interface wise that it saves a *lot* of time using the real variant - we are talking hours and hours here. And yes, doing presentations are a large bit of what the students do around here.
It doesn't really handle MS documents all that well either, in the sense that almost anything opens, but the formatting is often distorted and the same thing the other way around, plus that the warning everytime you try to save something back to doc can be really scary to the average user. To those who say that formatting shouldn't matter - it does. We are not talking about just being readable, but papers and mateial that should look a certain way, if only because the student wants it to look that way. And we are not talking advanced stuff either... a simple image can be enough to throw it off.
Personally I do use OOo exclusively, but then again I'm not the average user; I'm a geek. No amount of gentle education, helping out or poiting to similarities will get the average user to even try something new if it doesn't behave just like they are used to - at least that is my experience. A real pain in the ass.
On the plus side, we don't use doc as the internal format, we use HTML or in worst case PDF instead, which makes the situation a bit brighter.
Of course, a torrent would be even better - for their bandwidths sake.