Baen Books sell DRM-free on-line books and other media.
Did something else important, too. Chose authors like David Weber, Eric Flint, Karen Koehler, Tim Zahn, David Drake, Piers Anthony, Jerry Pournelle, Mercedes Lackey, Larry Niven and other top writers (all interesting authors) to sell.
They also have a free library which you can read from in two clicks.
Rack as many days up against that as you like. I was comatose for 30 of them and in hospital for another 30 (out of about 200 days' use, due to some malevolent ####### deliberately opening his car door directly in front of my pushbike), but the summary is zero OOo crashes at all in about 140 days.
Perhaps NOT having MS-Windoze on the laptop in question helps much more than I expect?
I feel a bit obvious going to the trouble of pointing this out, but OpenOffice Calc is Open Source. You can patch the source code to allow whatever you need or want.
Presuming that your patch(es) (is/are) competent and functional, your CV will get a significant boost and your name will go down in this piece of unique history as well. Double bonus, no extra fee. (-:
The one showstopper is non-portable applications which won't run under WINE. Thankfully, the most daunting one of these at one of my largest customers' offices has just been converted from a cobbled-together MS-SQL-based Win32 app into carefully-designed PostgreSQL+PHP-on-Apache, so the client software has almost stopped mattering, all of a sudden. So have scores of odd little bugs carefully retained by MS-SQL and the MS database libraries.
The new version of the app took something like 5%-10% of the time to recreate webbified and PostgreSQLed as the original took to port to MS-SQL (from MS-Access, probably) and to make it viably multi-userish. On top of this, it can now "instantly" be installed anywhere, on almost an server (since all of the server components are now quite portable; it's one CD and two minutes to add it to Linux now), so the developer is quite happy with the outcome long-term as well as short-term.
I can also easily give them a secure and external web interface, so Director can clock on and use the system from Bali or Thailand or Europe (examples not quite chosen at random) quite securely -- from his own laptop, not running 'doze at the time.
Adding the application to other customer sites just became amazingly easy, so it looks like everyone here is making money and getting good service from the rewrite, except for the alien per-seat [literally] virus-infested appliance-hawkers.
Mr Moreton is a very, very wise and informed gentleman, and "leadership" skills aren't the only useful ones -- in fact, they can easily become crippling handicaps as every rational response is knifed in favour of a justifiable "leadership response", effective or not.
If you see a need for a leadership character, please engage them in addition rather than in place, else Linux will overall lose even if a relative genius is so employed. There is much comment in this post WRT Linux vs Microsoft development models; if y'all want to be as vulnerable and inconsistent as Microsoft products are well-reknowned to be, then you will need to make many of the same mistakes are they are making, and the-leader-wins-all is their primary fubar.
NotePad seems to be more-or-less reliable, but as you've found, "less" can be unexpected and big-time.
I have a multi-score-element client LAN set up with Linux workstations using the simple and effective but not superfancy rdesktop(1) app to hit the few remaining MakeBux4BillO$ machines left, and some Win16+ apps runnng well on the workstations under WINE. Although the client is a reasonably large (for any WestAus) publisher, OpenOffice.org has worked out well in practice for much of their work. They also have a few Macintoshes.
The decrease in viruses, spyware and mysterious vanishments of useful stuff has been quite striking, but I don't know if this would suit the original poster's requirements.
...in order to be able to take some payload, but your basic point remains sound. Shuttles are effing expensive beasts to run. Far better to use something much simpler, more robust and reliable which more importantly was designed to do exact what you want to achieve.
...antimatter gives me the runs something terrible.
While I appreciate their audacity, I don't think they have a serious appreciation of just how complex, heavily multiplexed and interdependent our brains and supporting systems are.
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It's danged hard to actually get rid of, as is that stupid virus flypaper which everyone extols the calendaring features of and then nobody actually uses those features. One of my pet hates is the difficulty in driving a stake through the heart of these two security risks -- many "security" updates bring them back to haunt you afresh.
Likewise, I think EBay should be anti-trusted into the ground over how they're essentially forcing sellers to use PayPal now that they've bought the company.
...if I "reformat" one of their falafel rolls before eating it, so why should a content provider have any say in how you view their content?
To be certain, it's nice for them to be able to ensure that the original content is high-quality and in a certain order and all, but I should be the one to decide whether I want to watch ads and splash-screens, or even more pointedly whether my kids watch the entire movie or just the 98% of it that isn't offensive.
Would they care if I piped it into the 320x200 monochrome screen on my mobile 'phone to watch? Or watched it through a filter that corrected for colour blindness? Or just colour-inverted it? Or played it at 120% of realtime? Or toneshifted the soundtrack? Or karaoke style? If so, why?
...that the sellers are mostly front-men for Samsung. (-:
It's a pity that they couldn't actually do that, because it'd probably come close to paying their legal costs for warding off greedy corporate control-freaks.
Speaking of which, how are Samsung themselves in the GCCF department? I haven't heard anything bad about them on that front.
...and trusting wild content is not a particularly clever survival strategy, so why doesn't OS X use file magic, like file(1), to check that incoming files are what they claim to be?
...since he has a DecSystem-10 mainframe at home. Not much on raw compute power, but big on cubage and power consumption (how many of us have a three-phase plug in our loungerooms?) and it does play StarTrek (on a DecWriter LA-36, if you please, but normally VT-220s).
One of the many huge power-supply caps has enough juice to keep my laptop running for about fifteen minutes.
My own home "network" consists of a do-everything Linux server (2.4GHz Duron, 2G RAM, 160GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2006.0) which doubles as a workstation, another (Dual PentiumPro 200, 196MB RAM, 40GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2005LE) which is effectively a CD burning jukebox (mostly Linux distributions, TheOpenCD and a couple of the free Baen's Books CDs), a NetGear DG-834G wireless ADSL router/switch, a Kingston 8-port 10/100 switch, a Duron 800, 256MB, 80GB for the kids' games (wireless, Mandriva 2005LE) two wireless laptops (one old AOpen 2.4GHz Pentium-M, 512MB, 40GB, Mandriva 2006.0, one new Durabook R15D 2.6GHz Centrino, 1GB, 60GB, Mandriva 2006.0/WinXP dual boot, which I keep dual mainly for customer support and for editing on long trips -- the ACPI is completely broken, and TwinHead've only patched it for XP), one customer server (Athlon64-3GHz, 1GB, 2x200GB, Mandriva 2006.0), one "thrash box" (Athlon 1800, 512MB, 80GB, Ubuntu 5.10) and occasionally other stuff.
I'd like to say that it's neatly arranged in a rack and so forth but that would be a blatant lie, there's stuff scattered all over the place, basically wherever it will fit within reach of the appropriate cables.
The main workstation is about to lose its 19" CRT in favour of two 17" flatscreens. I'd actually spring for 2x19" flatscreens if resolution higher than 1280x1024 was available without the loss of an arm or leg.
Slashdot Mirror
Baen Books sell DRM-free on-line books and other media.
Did something else important, too. Chose authors like David Weber, Eric Flint, Karen Koehler, Tim Zahn, David Drake, Piers Anthony, Jerry Pournelle, Mercedes Lackey, Larry Niven and other top writers (all interesting authors) to sell.
They also have a free library which you can read from in two clicks.
Rack as many days up against that as you like. I was comatose for 30 of them and in hospital for another 30 (out of about 200 days' use, due to some malevolent ####### deliberately opening his car door directly in front of my pushbike), but the summary is zero OOo crashes at all in about 140 days.
Perhaps NOT having MS-Windoze on the laptop in question helps much more than I expect?
I feel a bit obvious going to the trouble of pointing this out, but OpenOffice Calc is Open Source. You can patch the source code to allow whatever you need or want.
Presuming that your patch(es) (is/are) competent and functional, your CV will get a significant boost and your name will go down in this piece of unique history as well. Double bonus, no extra fee. (-:
...i$ what $o much matter$ to Micro$oft. That and $naffling authority over your machine$.
And it alway$ ha$.
But then again, those greedy blighters from Redmond have never been too short on cheek, have they?
The one showstopper is non-portable applications which won't run under WINE. Thankfully, the most daunting one of these at one of my largest customers' offices has just been converted from a cobbled-together MS-SQL-based Win32 app into carefully-designed PostgreSQL+PHP-on-Apache, so the client software has almost stopped mattering, all of a sudden. So have scores of odd little bugs carefully retained by MS-SQL and the MS database libraries.
The new version of the app took something like 5%-10% of the time to recreate webbified and PostgreSQLed as the original took to port to MS-SQL (from MS-Access, probably) and to make it viably multi-userish. On top of this, it can now "instantly" be installed anywhere, on almost an server (since all of the server components are now quite portable; it's one CD and two minutes to add it to Linux now), so the developer is quite happy with the outcome long-term as well as short-term.
I can also easily give them a secure and external web interface, so Director can clock on and use the system from Bali or Thailand or Europe (examples not quite chosen at random) quite securely -- from his own laptop, not running 'doze at the time.
Adding the application to other customer sites just became amazingly easy, so it looks like everyone here is making money and getting good service from the rewrite, except for the alien per-seat [literally] virus-infested appliance-hawkers.
Mr Moreton is a very, very wise and informed gentleman, and "leadership" skills aren't the only useful ones -- in fact, they can easily become crippling handicaps as every rational response is knifed in favour of a justifiable "leadership response", effective or not.
If you see a need for a leadership character, please engage them in addition rather than in place, else Linux will overall lose even if a relative genius is so employed. There is much comment in this post WRT Linux vs Microsoft development models; if y'all want to be as vulnerable and inconsistent as Microsoft products are well-reknowned to be, then you will need to make many of the same mistakes are they are making, and the-leader-wins-all is their primary fubar.
NotePad seems to be more-or-less reliable, but as you've found, "less" can be unexpected and big-time.
I have a multi-score-element client LAN set up with Linux workstations using the simple and effective but not superfancy rdesktop(1) app to hit the few remaining MakeBux4BillO$ machines left, and some Win16+ apps runnng well on the workstations under WINE. Although the client is a reasonably large (for any WestAus) publisher, OpenOffice.org has worked out well in practice for much of their work. They also have a few Macintoshes.
The decrease in viruses, spyware and mysterious vanishments of useful stuff has been quite striking, but I don't know if this would suit the original poster's requirements.
...and they're starting to run out of buyers, partly as a result of that and other persistent, nagging, low-level greediness and control-freakism.
...in order to be able to take some payload, but your basic point remains sound. Shuttles are effing expensive beasts to run. Far better to use something much simpler, more robust and reliable which more importantly was designed to do exact what you want to achieve.
...antimatter gives me the runs something terrible.
While I appreciate their audacity, I don't think they have a serious appreciation of just how complex, heavily multiplexed and interdependent our brains and supporting systems are.
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...and having a total ironyectomy seems to be a prerequisite for Board memership.
Just a suggestion.
...the Firefox Downloader with the blue "e" icon?
It's danged hard to actually get rid of, as is that stupid virus flypaper which everyone extols the calendaring features of and then nobody actually uses those features. One of my pet hates is the difficulty in driving a stake through the heart of these two security risks -- many "security" updates bring them back to haunt you afresh.
Likewise, I think EBay should be anti-trusted into the ground over how they're essentially forcing sellers to use PayPal now that they've bought the company.
...Xenix, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, SunOS, Helios, UNIXWARE(R), OpenServer, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, ArchBSD, Minix, MV/UX, Digital Unix, Tru64, Irix, Coherent, OS X, Ultrix, Dynix, QNX, LynxOS, IDRIS, Delphi, DC/OSx, NonStop-UX, PTX, UNICOS, Reliant, SystemV...
it seems that they're into stock swindles but not into attacking their own customers. Half marks, I guess.
no text
...if I "reformat" one of their falafel rolls before eating it, so why should a content provider have any say in how you view their content?
To be certain, it's nice for them to be able to ensure that the original content is high-quality and in a certain order and all, but I should be the one to decide whether I want to watch ads and splash-screens, or even more pointedly whether my kids watch the entire movie or just the 98% of it that isn't offensive.
Would they care if I piped it into the 320x200 monochrome screen on my mobile 'phone to watch? Or watched it through a filter that corrected for colour blindness? Or just colour-inverted it? Or played it at 120% of realtime? Or toneshifted the soundtrack? Or karaoke style? If so, why?
Sure it's more expensive, but being boarded and pillaged in flight is still a fairly rare thing for commercial jets.
...already -- and mods, please give him +1 Insightful, because Slash has no +1 Prophetic. (-:
...that the sellers are mostly front-men for Samsung. (-:
It's a pity that they couldn't actually do that, because it'd probably come close to paying their legal costs for warding off greedy corporate control-freaks.
Speaking of which, how are Samsung themselves in the GCCF department? I haven't heard anything bad about them on that front.
...and trusting wild content is not a particularly clever survival strategy, so why doesn't OS X use file magic, like file(1), to check that incoming files are what they claim to be?
they write software.
One of the many huge power-supply caps has enough juice to keep my laptop running for about fifteen minutes.
My own home "network" consists of a do-everything Linux server (2.4GHz Duron, 2G RAM, 160GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2006.0) which doubles as a workstation, another (Dual PentiumPro 200, 196MB RAM, 40GB IDE HDD, Mandriva 2005LE) which is effectively a CD burning jukebox (mostly Linux distributions, TheOpenCD and a couple of the free Baen's Books CDs), a NetGear DG-834G wireless ADSL router/switch, a Kingston 8-port 10/100 switch, a Duron 800, 256MB, 80GB for the kids' games (wireless, Mandriva 2005LE) two wireless laptops (one old AOpen 2.4GHz Pentium-M, 512MB, 40GB, Mandriva 2006.0, one new Durabook R15D 2.6GHz Centrino, 1GB, 60GB, Mandriva 2006.0/WinXP dual boot, which I keep dual mainly for customer support and for editing on long trips -- the ACPI is completely broken, and TwinHead've only patched it for XP), one customer server (Athlon64-3GHz, 1GB, 2x200GB, Mandriva 2006.0), one "thrash box" (Athlon 1800, 512MB, 80GB, Ubuntu 5.10) and occasionally other stuff.
I'd like to say that it's neatly arranged in a rack and so forth but that would be a blatant lie, there's stuff scattered all over the place, basically wherever it will fit within reach of the appropriate cables.
The main workstation is about to lose its 19" CRT in favour of two 17" flatscreens. I'd actually spring for 2x19" flatscreens if resolution higher than 1280x1024 was available without the loss of an arm or leg.