Abiword is a much lighter program for MacOSX. Of course it's just a word processor. But I've never yet met a person who has any real need for a spreasheet which couldn't be filled in with Abiword's table feature.
But if you're looking for the kitchen sink, some people have apparently ported various Gnome office apps into an integrated bundle. The company behind the offering appears to have turned the traditional definition of free on its head. The software is free in the GNU sense, but you're charged $30 for a download of the (pre-built) binaries. I still need to check the site if there are patches available for free download, or if the company simply used some exotic compiler that would make it extremely difficult (or expensive) to (legally) roll out your own executables.
Actually I think RMS failed to realize he was writing for the British. Why else would he use Hugo as an example, when the British have Shakespeare, perhaps the number one infringer of literary patents?
Just for clarification, Joerg considers dvdrecord an unauthorized fork (if such a crime is possible for another project whose source has also been made freely available) of cdrecord. cdrecord-prodvd is Joerg's project. I think Joerg's main complaint against patched versions of cdrecord is that they supposedly reflect unfairly on the quality of cdrecord, as your experiences with dvdrecord appear to prove.
This is one reason (just one) why Windows will continue to have an edge in the desktop market. On Windows you can open just about any application and already know how to use it (at least, at the most basic level).
This doesn't prove that Windows is actually more usable (i.e. user-friendly) than Gnome or KDE. This does suggest that more people are already used to the Windows way of doing things. A better test of usability is to sit a person, say a Mac zealot, who has not used either Gnome or Windows XP and ask her which of the two is actually easier to use. BTW I find OSX infinitely easier to use than Windows XP
True. But one reason I don't drive is because I haven't yet gotten round to learning how to fix a car. I only use a computer because at least I know how to fix it when it gets borken (let's say, by reinstalling). OTOH when our cellphone breaks, I know the only fix is to buy a new one.
Given a few years of development, digital always beats analog. So okay, there are audiophiles who insist on vinyl. We're now at the threshold when digital cameras could now replace the standard 35mm professional SLR.
Many geeks, particularly the variety that hangs out in slashdot, are, if ever, fans of science fiction of the Star Wars variety. That is, they place a premium on adventure or novelty before the hard science. I'm not surprised. Most of computer geeks who see the laws of Einstein as an unnecessary limit on cyberspace. Thus I see the appeal of action adventure movies like the Matrix and Star Wars (despite their faults).
Monad is likely to play a different role in Windows than *sh and friends in the *n*x world. No matter how horrible or wonderful Monad (rhymes with gonad) turns out to be, it will just be an accessory. The future of Windows and Redmond doesn't hinge on the success of Monad. But they better come up with something prettier than OSX before 2007. (The server market is pretty much lost to *n*x whether of the BSD, OSX, GNU or Solaris variety.)
At my last job, I managed to lock up a networked eMac loaded with OSX.3 by running something like "find subdir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5 > md5.txt" from another eMac. I was trying to get the checksums of files I was set to burn to CDR. The files were mostly free software for GNU/Linux, OSX and WinXP that I downloaded onto the networked eMac via the office broadband. Before it hanged, that eMac, which had GBs of free disk space (as it was being used simply to access email using M$ Outlook), had a two-day uptime.
Maybe we could start, while we're busying downloading the bzip2'ed iso, a petition for the author of cdrecord to open the source to the DVD-capable version of CDRecord. Now that Sun has (or at least claims to have) released the source to what is its second most-valuable asset, Joerg has less reasons to hold on to his binary-only version of cdrecord. Not that there are no alternatives to cdrecord. But as far as optical media writing on *n*x is concerned, cdrecord is the gold standard.
The physical computer might be subject to the same laws of physics as your shiny red Ferrari that hits someone. But the rules appear to be different when it comes to bytes and megabytes. There's still no easy way to download a Ferrari over the Internet or duplicate the car X times and give away the copies to your neighbor (file sharing). It should only be in totalitarian states where you could go to jail for an idea, which is basically what the digital world is about.
If at all plausible from a technical standpont, space elevators are probably the most sensible way for sending humans or loads to space. If you can't beat gravity, use it. Armchair engineers can send in their entries.
A true Linux, make that GNU/Linux, zealot rarely plays first-person shooters since there are few, if any, good games that are free. Moreover any good FPS are likely to require binary drivers that taint his beloved kernel.
Jobs & the Mac deprived us of Hal (a.k.a. DOS
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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I was even more pissed of at Bill Gates who I see responsible for depriving us of OS advancement through MSs monopoly actions
I am absolutely pissed off at Steve Jobs for commercializing the GUI concept. If not for the industry-wide obsession for eye-candy triggered by the success of the Mac, we would now have Hal. I see Hal as basically a voice-activated (if not controlled) CLI. Seriously, the attempts of other software vendors to clone the Mac diverted precious resources from the creation of voice recognition and even just mere voice synthesis software.
I don't think it's right to credit Mac OSX for sound that works out-of-the-box. Sound is a hardware problem that Apple solved by refusing to license Mac OSX to other computer manufacturers that could make clones that would suck even more than Slackware at hardware autodetection. At work I used to work with an "expandable" Mac, i.e. one with PCI slots. Infected by Mac zealotry that things should just work, I decided that I could just pop in a USB card to add USB 2.0 support to the Mac. My little experiment was a total failure. With GNU/Linux on x86 hardware, the hardware would at least get recognized as an alien artifact. In contrast, the soundcard doesn't even appear in the system profile of my (admittedly fairly ancient) office Mac. One unfair comparison deserves another.
I think most software intended for blind users suffers from the fundamental flaw of being designed as a mere adjunct to graphical software already being used by sighted people. A sighted person has the ability to quickly scan a desktop or menu for an obscure program or icon. Without a "command" mode available, a blind person must have all those menus and icons read back aloud before she can select the desired action. Thus a command-line interface is actually friendlier to a blind user than an interface where the only way to fire up a text editor is via Start -> Programs -> Editors -> Vi. A truly user-friendly program for the blind should should be linear rather than spatial.
With my poor eyesight, I've been, in a manner of speaking, on the look-out for software that would enable me to type without a computer monitor, an nVidia-free computing experience.
To my surprise, I found it much easier to surf the Internet using a no-frills terminal reader like yasr with an HTML-aware line editor called edbrowse than using any "screen scraper" bolted atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or OSX. The author of edbrowse, a blind user and programmer, describes edbrowse as a "re-implementation" of the classic Unix line editor ed but "with browse capabilities built in."
One thing that Net ventures like this share with most opensource projects (except those which half-seriously claim "world domination" as their goal) is that they're really after people who do care about extending the freedom and rights they enjoy in the tangible world to the digital domain. Indeed, maybe most "people" (i.e. the masses) don't. But it's no less a lie that some people do. This venture will succeed if those people support it. The Net's main saving grace is that it allows you to narrow-cast to a choir of like-minded people just as it allows you to reach the masses (with Internet access). What's wrong with catering to the choir, rather than to the crowd?
At least you can't accuse the writers of the report of a pro-Linux bias:
New file formats and Linux user permissions complicate the process, which may involve several steps:
Login as Administrator
Extract the file
Change the file properties
Double-click to begin install.
This is certainly not the way most GNU/Linux geeks install software. The approved ways of installing are (1) make; su ; make install; (2) su ; apt-get install foo (3) su ; rpm -i foo.rpm or (4) tar xzvf foo.tgz.
English is full of words that trip even humans. "Right" the direction versus "right" the judgement is a good example.
"Right" isn't really a good example of a word that might "trip even humans." A human (translator) will parse not just by word but will attempt to extract a word's meaning from the surrounding phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. The syntax of the language may also come into play. In spoken language, additional "clues" can be derived from the situation in which the word is spoken, and often the extra-textual "body language" is more important, e.g. a hand pointing right or a head nodding in approval. I don't think an adult would be confused by the sentence "You're right. Let's go right." In wartime, I can imagine a responsible English-speaking commander barking references to GPS locations or using body language. It would be a mistake to think of a word in isolation from its context. After all, even in computer languages, a printf or goto by itself will chuck off a compiler error.
More people can afford to buy Gillete blades than an iPod, even if an iPod would turn out to be cheaper in the long run. Maybe if Apple offered a "free" iPod -- after the "free" PC business model -- you'd have the equivalent of a man buying a Gillete blade every couple of days. But there's not much innovation you can do for the disposable blade. After the three blades-in-one, what? A four-bladed Mach-4? I see the next advance in chin hygiene as the invention of nanocutters that you can spread and wash off for an instant shave. This would give a whole new meaning to the word "shaving" cream.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you're looking for the kitchen sink, some people have apparently ported various Gnome office apps into an integrated bundle. The company behind the offering appears to have turned the traditional definition of free on its head. The software is free in the GNU sense, but you're charged $30 for a download of the (pre-built) binaries. I still need to check the site if there are patches available for free download, or if the company simply used some exotic compiler that would make it extremely difficult (or expensive) to (legally) roll out your own executables.
Actually I think RMS failed to realize he was writing for the British. Why else would he use Hugo as an example, when the British have Shakespeare, perhaps the number one infringer of literary patents?
Just for clarification, Joerg considers dvdrecord an unauthorized fork (if such a crime is possible for another project whose source has also been made freely available) of cdrecord. cdrecord-prodvd is Joerg's project. I think Joerg's main complaint against patched versions of cdrecord is that they supposedly reflect unfairly on the quality of cdrecord, as your experiences with dvdrecord appear to prove.
True. But one reason I don't drive is because I haven't yet gotten round to learning how to fix a car. I only use a computer because at least I know how to fix it when it gets borken (let's say, by reinstalling). OTOH when our cellphone breaks, I know the only fix is to buy a new one.
Given a few years of development, digital always beats analog. So okay, there are audiophiles who insist on vinyl. We're now at the threshold when digital cameras could now replace the standard 35mm professional SLR.
Many geeks, particularly the variety that hangs out in slashdot, are, if ever, fans of science fiction of the Star Wars variety. That is, they place a premium on adventure or novelty before the hard science. I'm not surprised. Most of computer geeks who see the laws of Einstein as an unnecessary limit on cyberspace. Thus I see the appeal of action adventure movies like the Matrix and Star Wars (despite their faults).
Monad is likely to play a different role in Windows than *sh and friends in the *n*x world. No matter how horrible or wonderful Monad (rhymes with gonad) turns out to be, it will just be an accessory. The future of Windows and Redmond doesn't hinge on the success of Monad. But they better come up with something prettier than OSX before 2007. (The server market is pretty much lost to *n*x whether of the BSD, OSX, GNU or Solaris variety.)
Whoever modded this as funny has obviously not lived through the experience. The future is here.
At my last job, I managed to lock up a networked eMac loaded with OSX.3 by running something like "find subdir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5 > md5.txt" from another eMac. I was trying to get the checksums of files I was set to burn to CDR. The files were mostly free software for GNU/Linux, OSX and WinXP that I downloaded onto the networked eMac via the office broadband. Before it hanged, that eMac, which had GBs of free disk space (as it was being used simply to access email using M$ Outlook), had a two-day uptime.
Maybe we could start, while we're busying downloading the bzip2'ed iso, a petition for the author of cdrecord to open the source to the DVD-capable version of CDRecord. Now that Sun has (or at least claims to have) released the source to what is its second most-valuable asset, Joerg has less reasons to hold on to his binary-only version of cdrecord. Not that there are no alternatives to cdrecord. But as far as optical media writing on *n*x is concerned, cdrecord is the gold standard.
If at all plausible from a technical standpont, space elevators are probably the most sensible way for sending humans or loads to space. If you can't beat gravity, use it. Armchair engineers can send in their entries.
A true Linux, make that GNU/Linux, zealot rarely plays first-person shooters since there are few, if any, good games that are free. Moreover any good FPS are likely to require binary drivers that taint his beloved kernel.
When the current software patents expire and the number of new patents reaches zero.
I don't think it's right to credit Mac OSX for sound that works out-of-the-box. Sound is a hardware problem that Apple solved by refusing to license Mac OSX to other computer manufacturers that could make clones that would suck even more than Slackware at hardware autodetection. At work I used to work with an "expandable" Mac, i.e. one with PCI slots. Infected by Mac zealotry that things should just work, I decided that I could just pop in a USB card to add USB 2.0 support to the Mac. My little experiment was a total failure. With GNU/Linux on x86 hardware, the hardware would at least get recognized as an alien artifact. In contrast, the soundcard doesn't even appear in the system profile of my (admittedly fairly ancient) office Mac. One unfair comparison deserves another.
With my poor eyesight, I've been, in a manner of speaking, on the look-out for software that would enable me to type without a computer monitor, an nVidia-free computing experience.
To my surprise, I found it much easier to surf the Internet using a no-frills terminal reader like yasr with an HTML-aware line editor called edbrowse than using any "screen scraper" bolted atop a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or OSX. The author of edbrowse, a blind user and programmer, describes edbrowse as a "re-implementation" of the classic Unix line editor ed but "with browse capabilities built in."
his fans are going to make sure he delivers, even if it involves necrophilia.
Linus better not be on vacation!
There ought to be a military regulation forbidding the use of anything other than "Yes," "No," or "I don't know, sir" in a combat situation. Right?
More people can afford to buy Gillete blades than an iPod, even if an iPod would turn out to be cheaper in the long run. Maybe if Apple offered a "free" iPod -- after the "free" PC business model -- you'd have the equivalent of a man buying a Gillete blade every couple of days. But there's not much innovation you can do for the disposable blade. After the three blades-in-one, what? A four-bladed Mach-4? I see the next advance in chin hygiene as the invention of nanocutters that you can spread and wash off for an instant shave. This would give a whole new meaning to the word "shaving" cream.