My company has been selling word processing, spreadsheet, typefaces, and database software in Germany since 1987. It's not like we just entered this business yesterday.
Any idea why I haven't heard of you before? I'm reasonably widely read, and this announcement completely blindsided me.
BTW, non-free software for Linux is just fine. If you can always do a better job than the free-as-in-beer stuff, you will always have a market in people who aren't particularly worried about codebase death, spyware, trojans etc, and never want to customise beyond the level of the typical Tools/Options panels. That's a fair-sized market. More power to you, keep the bastards honest, and ignore the less reasonable zealots.
Oh, and please set up a regularly updated escrow so if your company does go kerplonk (you get hit by the proverial bus or whatever), your efforts aren't buried by the liquidators.
...why people really fear Internet Exploder. Hint: it's not the missing tabs.
BTW, Con Zymaris listed out (on the OSIA list) some of the bet-your-company-on-this technologies which Microsoft has abandoned (who remembers Blackbird? How about DNA, the Distributed Network Architecture?), and more systems which Microsoft has sucked people into and then changed, requiring significant code rewrites (e.g. VB4 and again at VB7). It's a long and impressive list.
Bearing this in mind, and that Visual J++ is already way past "dead meat" stage, why on earth would anyone in their left mind be developing any new stuff in it? Christopher, if you're real, don't rely too much on your new day job...
Redirect them at the backbone level to a page which sends them a copy of loadlin and a Mandrake 10.0 OEM network installer image. No more MSDN problems, and they can get their updates from a public mirror.
...to put those 220,000 man-hours a year into refining OSS versions of the target apps you're interested in, so you can roll them out on MS Windows. Once that's done and everyone's used to it you can swap tablecloths underneath the crockery with nary a ripple. Goodbye, spyware. Goodbye, porn diallers. Goodbye, DRM.
As a side bonus, your company will have become famous, you will have significantly raised the skill levels of roughly 100 of your employees, your applications will do exactly what you want them to do, and will work equally well on a management consultant's W2k laptop, your wife's Mac or a remote office's Linux gateway server. Possibly also on your 'phone or PDA.
If a dozen suitably sized companies put in that much effort Microsoft would be history, the computing playfield would be totally different, productivity would skyrocket and there would be no next Sasser worm.
Oh, and sooner or later there would be an end to the haemorrhaging.
...then use Linux instead, where you can change one package at a time or pull the source and test one patch or part of a patch at a time. Speeds up testing like you wouldn't believe, and gives you an alternative when updating is critical but the updates also knacker your production systems in some way.
If the save function is fast enough, you could do a hack that saved after every action or so-many-seconds after the document becomes "dirty" into a "ring buffer" of temporary files plus keep track of what action(s) happened between saves (to help in deciding how far to undo). Then add an "undo/redo" menu which simply reloads the content being edited from the appropriate temp file.
One special rewind feature I've always wanted in almost every app I use is an "undo or alter just that step" facility. So you do a series of global replaces and it turns out twelve steps down the track that one of them made your life harder? Rewind to the faulty step, alter it, then fast-forward through the eleven succeeding flawless steps.
Seriously: yeah, fine, whatever. Any modern BSD (possibly except OpenBSD on SMP) should give you comparable performance gains. More so on SMP since X11 means display tasks are a separate thread.
It came with my PC and does everything Linux does, only without hassles
How often do you do a defrag? Yes, even XP and beyond benefit from those. How often do you sweep for spyware? Did any spyware come with your computer too? How about viruses? Does a "black-box" update or hotfix ever crash your SSL server or undo other security updates? How about updates reinstalling software you removed because you don't want it? Has any update silently added DRM restrictions to everything you do?
It's not InDesign and won't swap native files with it, but it does work some modern miracles with PDFs and the like, including animation and transparency.
...but it's still pretty limited. It's way more than most people will need, but still shy of PhotoShop's benchmark for the absolute experts. You also have to switch to FilmGIMP for 48-bit colour, which costs you a fair bit of functionality comapred to standard GIMP (unless, of course, you're editing commercial movies with it:-)
...you forgot one thing: WINE is backed by Linux, and all operating systems are not created equal. Lotus Notes may well be a slug under WINE, but not everything is. Recompile WINE without debugging and try again. Despite the translation layer and lots of stuff being done the hard way because a replacement DLL for the easy way hasn't been written yet, some things still run noticeably faster under WINE than natively.
If it were email, I'd ask them "you have a delete key, don't you?" Since it's a blog, scroll down. Boy, that was tough</sarcasm>. Move along, nothing to see here, folks... (-:
...at least, has done for me for months now. See this proof-of-concept screenshot of 7.0 running under Mandrake Linux 9.2 with the January 2004 WINE SRPMs out of Cooker, rebuilt on the 9.2 system.
However, if you've used GIMP 2.0, there are very few reasons left for "I absolutely have to use PhotoShop". If you're doing 48-bit colour, maybe, but FilmGIMP does that already. Dunno what happened the fonts, maybe the OS X version of X11 doesn't render them very well. They seem to be fine under Mandrake Linux, but OTOH Mandrake do patch XFS for light hinting. It loads files very fast, but I think the dialog box from which you do this is very... dated. I'd bet most of Joe's problems stem from having to unlearn PhotoShopisms rather than them being missing from The GIMP.
He writes some very entertaining Fiction Science novels.
Yes, I did get that the right way around. (-: Nothing quite as entertaining as a good careful read of Richard "A minute's silence while I try to conjure up a suitable fact, please. No, make it several minutes. Dang it, can I call a friend?" Dawkins' works.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Pick some names from it and go hunting for more detail. OSIA has some other useful links.
Any idea why I haven't heard of you before? I'm reasonably widely read, and this announcement completely blindsided me.
BTW, non-free software for Linux is just fine. If you can always do a better job than the free-as-in-beer stuff, you will always have a market in people who aren't particularly worried about codebase death, spyware, trojans etc, and never want to customise beyond the level of the typical Tools/Options panels. That's a fair-sized market. More power to you, keep the bastards honest, and ignore the less reasonable zealots.
Oh, and please set up a regularly updated escrow so if your company does go kerplonk (you get hit by the proverial bus or whatever), your efforts aren't buried by the liquidators.
BTW, Con Zymaris listed out (on the OSIA list) some of the bet-your-company-on-this technologies which Microsoft has abandoned (who remembers Blackbird? How about DNA, the Distributed Network Architecture?), and more systems which Microsoft has sucked people into and then changed, requiring significant code rewrites (e.g. VB4 and again at VB7). It's a long and impressive list.
Bearing this in mind, and that Visual J++ is already way past "dead meat" stage, why on earth would anyone in their left mind be developing any new stuff in it? Christopher, if you're real, don't rely too much on your new day job...
"Dodge this!"
...to put those 220,000 man-hours a year into refining OSS versions of the target apps you're interested in, so you can roll them out on MS Windows. Once that's done and everyone's used to it you can swap tablecloths underneath the crockery with nary a ripple. Goodbye, spyware. Goodbye, porn diallers. Goodbye, DRM.
As a side bonus, your company will have become famous, you will have significantly raised the skill levels of roughly 100 of your employees, your applications will do exactly what you want them to do, and will work equally well on a management consultant's W2k laptop, your wife's Mac or a remote office's Linux gateway server. Possibly also on your 'phone or PDA.
If a dozen suitably sized companies put in that much effort Microsoft would be history, the computing playfield would be totally different, productivity would skyrocket and there would be no next Sasser worm.
Oh, and sooner or later there would be an end to the haemorrhaging.
...then use Linux instead, where you can change one package at a time or pull the source and test one patch or part of a patch at a time. Speeds up testing like you wouldn't believe, and gives you an alternative when updating is critical but the updates also knacker your production systems in some way.
Do what you can to improve things, but work with what you've got rather than chucking a hissy fit.
On a different note, perhaps your doc should have been two eye-poppin' pages with a reference to the other 68?
I click on my Windows Update systray icon and a gutteral voice growls "Y'all'r OWNED, boah!"
Seriously, how many viruses require a working sound system? (-:
If the save function is fast enough, you could do a hack that saved after every action or so-many-seconds after the document becomes "dirty" into a "ring buffer" of temporary files plus keep track of what action(s) happened between saves (to help in deciding how far to undo). Then add an "undo/redo" menu which simply reloads the content being edited from the appropriate temp file.
One special rewind feature I've always wanted in almost every app I use is an "undo or alter just that step" facility. So you do a series of global replaces and it turns out twelve steps down the track that one of them made your life harder? Rewind to the faulty step, alter it, then fast-forward through the eleven succeeding flawless steps.
ta-dish-boom!
BSD is dying! (-:
Seriously: yeah, fine, whatever. Any modern BSD (possibly except OpenBSD on SMP) should give you comparable performance gains. More so on SMP since X11 means display tasks are a separate thread.
How often do you do a defrag? Yes, even XP and beyond benefit from those. How often do you sweep for spyware? Did any spyware come with your computer too? How about viruses? Does a "black-box" update or hotfix ever crash your SSL server or undo other security updates? How about updates reinstalling software you removed because you don't want it? Has any update silently added DRM restrictions to everything you do?
"Only without hassles", my donkey! (-:
...why don't they release Lotus SmartSuite as FOSS?
...and it rocks! (-:
It's not InDesign and won't swap native files with it, but it does work some modern miracles with PDFs and the like, including animation and transparency.
The GIMP 2.0 doesn't do any of those things for me. I'm using it under Mandrake Linux 10.0 in several places.
The GIMP 2.0pre3 also doesn't do those things on my wife's machine (Mandrake 9.2).
And yes, you can use PhotoShop (at least v7.0) under WINE (that shot under the Jan2004 release pulled from Cooker and recompiled for 9.2).
standard WINE (Jan2004 release), not CrossOver, under Mandrake Linux 9.2, no native DLLs.
...but it's still pretty limited. It's way more than most people will need, but still shy of PhotoShop's benchmark for the absolute experts. You also have to switch to FilmGIMP for 48-bit colour, which costs you a fair bit of functionality comapred to standard GIMP (unless, of course, you're editing commercial movies with it :-)
...you forgot one thing: WINE is backed by Linux, and all operating systems are not created equal. Lotus Notes may well be a slug under WINE, but not everything is. Recompile WINE without debugging and try again. Despite the translation layer and lots of stuff being done the hard way because a replacement DLL for the easy way hasn't been written yet, some things still run noticeably faster under WINE than natively.
If it were email, I'd ask them "you have a delete key, don't you?" Since it's a blog, scroll down. Boy, that was tough</sarcasm>. Move along, nothing to see here, folks... (-:
It'll raise the odds of relatively new stuff like removable hard disks (USB and FireWire, at least) working flawlessly OOTB.
...at least, has done for me for months now. See this proof-of-concept screenshot of 7.0 running under Mandrake Linux 9.2 with the January 2004 WINE SRPMs out of Cooker, rebuilt on the 9.2 system.
However, if you've used GIMP 2.0, there are very few reasons left for "I absolutely have to use PhotoShop". If you're doing 48-bit colour, maybe, but FilmGIMP does that already. Dunno what happened the fonts, maybe the OS X version of X11 doesn't render them very well. They seem to be fine under Mandrake Linux, but OTOH Mandrake do patch XFS for light hinting. It loads files very fast, but I think the dialog box from which you do this is very... dated. I'd bet most of Joe's problems stem from having to unlearn PhotoShopisms rather than them being missing from The GIMP.
"Here's mud in your I?" (-:
...he invents little vector-drawn creatures with a Mac and a PRNG, even if he first anthropomorphises, then eulogises them?
He writes some very entertaining Fiction Science novels.
:-)
Yes, I did get that the right way around. (-: Nothing quite as entertaining as a good careful read of Richard "A minute's silence while I try to conjure up a suitable fact, please. No, make it several minutes. Dang it, can I call a friend?" Dawkins' works.
...at least in the USA. Undeclared patents, yes, but that's a risk with every data format in the world. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.