I am slowly replacing MS Office with OpenOffice throughout our enterprise. Actually we are keeping XP, but switching to FireFox/ThunderBird/OpenOffice in order to cut down on virii, spam, malware, spyware etc.
So far it has been hugely successful. Very few complaints and only a few instances where we had to leave an MS product in place because a particular feature was needed and not available in our preferred apps.
If you use the new Beta in your demo, it's pretty much a done deal, it's so MS like that most users barely can tell the difference. Set every version to save in MS formats and open them by default and it's pretty seemless.
Joe
Well, I guess you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree. I could break out my history book and go point by point disproving you and then you could then do it to me - ad infinitum. Truth is, people disagree on these things. I agree with our current foreign policy, and I voted for our president both times. I am guessing you did not. That's ok. The difference is.. I respect that you have a different point of view. Nowhere in my posting did I resort to slander and name calling. Yet you cannot seem to restrain yourself from throwing epithets, insults and mockery instead of just relying on your facts and ability to argue your position. I guess what they say is really true, that Liberals use insults and slander to tar their opponents rather than engage in rational discourse because they know that when their positions are fully revealed - the public doesn't agree with them.
So feel free to reply, throw more insults, scream, rant rave and reveal yourself. I won't bother with a reply. You can't debate someone with a religious level conviction to an irrational world view.
I realize that what I am about to say here wil undoubtedly cause serious off-subject flame bait, but it has to be said.
War is not always bad.
WWII ended the slaughter of millions of innocent people. The recent invasion of Iraq, as controversial as it has been has had an irrifutable effect in the middle east. Iraqui's are voting and working hand in hand with Americans to build a better country. Iranians are pushing harder than ever for democracy. Syria has left Lebanon and Democracy is not far behind there either. Libya voluntarily gave up their WMD's rather than face the U.S. (a whole war totally avoided by a meaningful show of force). Countries all over the world are taking a good hard look at terrorist groups in ther midst. This is GOOD.
Killing people is always a terrible thing. But it's important to remember that the after effects of these actions can sometimes greatly benefit the common good.
With regards to the use of Linux in weapons systems.. If it means those weapons become more reliable, and more accurate, resulting in better targeted kills, then this is a good thing. It will result in lower civilian casualties. The idea of more dead terrorists does not disturb my sleep.
War will NEVER go away as long as there exists in the hearts of madmen the lust for control and power. At some point humanity stands up and obliterates those who live like tyrants and refuse to work within civil discourse. For us not to use every tool for ending the reign of monsters such as Hitler and Saddam would be a greater crime against humanity than any casualty of war.
OK, let the peacenik flames begin.
All that proves is that there was a rise in those particular gasses in Greenland and Antarctica. What about Chile? France? Russia? America?
Extrapolating results from small isolated data samples makes for worthless junk science. The Earth is over 4.5 BILLION years old with a surface area of 196,940,400 square miles. Show me a C02 survey over 2.5 billion years from every lattitudinal and longitudinal crosshair and I will go along.
The so-called "evidence" you give is like me examining a piece of grass and claiming to be able to explain the entire forest from it.
BTW - I did my research before ranting.
There was a volcano in Japan back in the late 90's that produced thousands of times more environmentally toxic pollutants in the first 5 minutes of eruption than mankind has in it's entire history. So-called "environmental scientists" have conveniently ignored this fact for almost a decade.
Anyone giving even a cursory examination of the "evidence" produced by the extremist environmental movement can debunk their entire position in minutes. I think the same could be said for the opposite position as well.
The truth is that scientists (and everyone else) do not understand even a fraction of a fraction of how this planet operates. There are a million possible and plausible explanations for environmental changes.
What I find irritating about the environmentalist whackos out there is that they cling to one explanation in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's not science, that's a religion.
I run geexbox on an old dual 400 mhz pentium system with an ATI video card with s-video out. I stream the media off of my fedora core 3 server running samba on the drives I have in an LVM.
It plays everything except AAC files. but I convert those to MP3 before I store them.
I've been paying attention to this hack for a while now. What I am curious about is, how long until you can use this in reverse and go into a PC that has Bluetooth on?
As I said in my reply to the earlier comment. I had no control over certain decisions. One of those was the decision to use Sid. As a matter of fact, the machine was running Sid on a 2.4 kernel before this project began.
My point is that attempting to upgrade the Debian Sid (unstable) to support the situation we wanted took an overwhelming effort by several highly qaulified people and still produced a questionable result. The same situation was accomplished with Fedora (again, as you yourself stated - the unstable branch) in less than an afternoon by one person.
I completely agree with you and the thigs that went wrong. However, when dealing with clients and a supervisor who is religiously devoted to Debian, you don't always get to make the decision to jettison what you don't like.
I recently worked for an ISP/Consuting firm that used a lot of Debian. Every single experience I had with it was unpleasant, and I am not a Linux newbie.
The installation/setup system is the most gawd-awful piece of sh*t I have ever had the misfortune of using. Upgrades are unpredictable because the lines between stable, testing, and bleeding edge versions are constantly blurred. Dependencies become a tangled mess because dselect gives no real clear indications before it just installs right over libraries other apps need. youhave to resort to using apt-get and upgrading individual pieces at a time.
Case in point - we had to upgrade a Debian server at a client site (Putting Debian in as a server at a client site is a practice advised only for the most extreme of masochists). The server provided file services, DNS, PDC, print, and some web. It also was connected to a bank of modems through an internal card so laptop users could dial in.
We were merely to install a RAID running on a PCI SATA card. We did approach it the smart way, by creating an identical machine in our lab and testing there. Well, 90 days later.. with a severely hacked 2.6 kernel, alpha code drivers, complete rebuild of every service, and hundreds upon hundreds of man hours.. it worked.. sort of. Install at the client site took 42 hours over a weekend with no sleep and several points that the client was literally screaming.
Just to prove a point to my boss, I then took the testing system and installed Fedora Core 1 on it. In less than two hours I had every single piece working - and to be honest I was doing several other things at the same time.
I understand the value of Debian and it's place in the Linux community. It is obviously the hackers distro of choice. it has many techical superiorities over other distros (great/etc setup). So I am not bashing Debian as a distro here. But I AM bashing it as a commercial tool. Debian has NO PLACE in a shop that needs to get things done.
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I am slowly replacing MS Office with OpenOffice throughout our enterprise. Actually we are keeping XP, but switching to FireFox/ThunderBird/OpenOffice in order to cut down on virii, spam, malware, spyware etc. So far it has been hugely successful. Very few complaints and only a few instances where we had to leave an MS product in place because a particular feature was needed and not available in our preferred apps. If you use the new Beta in your demo, it's pretty much a done deal, it's so MS like that most users barely can tell the difference. Set every version to save in MS formats and open them by default and it's pretty seemless. Joe
Well, I guess you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree. I could break out my history book and go point by point disproving you and then you could then do it to me - ad infinitum. Truth is, people disagree on these things. I agree with our current foreign policy, and I voted for our president both times. I am guessing you did not. That's ok. The difference is.. I respect that you have a different point of view. Nowhere in my posting did I resort to slander and name calling. Yet you cannot seem to restrain yourself from throwing epithets, insults and mockery instead of just relying on your facts and ability to argue your position. I guess what they say is really true, that Liberals use insults and slander to tar their opponents rather than engage in rational discourse because they know that when their positions are fully revealed - the public doesn't agree with them. So feel free to reply, throw more insults, scream, rant rave and reveal yourself. I won't bother with a reply. You can't debate someone with a religious level conviction to an irrational world view.
I realize that what I am about to say here wil undoubtedly cause serious off-subject flame bait, but it has to be said. War is not always bad. WWII ended the slaughter of millions of innocent people. The recent invasion of Iraq, as controversial as it has been has had an irrifutable effect in the middle east. Iraqui's are voting and working hand in hand with Americans to build a better country. Iranians are pushing harder than ever for democracy. Syria has left Lebanon and Democracy is not far behind there either. Libya voluntarily gave up their WMD's rather than face the U.S. (a whole war totally avoided by a meaningful show of force). Countries all over the world are taking a good hard look at terrorist groups in ther midst. This is GOOD. Killing people is always a terrible thing. But it's important to remember that the after effects of these actions can sometimes greatly benefit the common good. With regards to the use of Linux in weapons systems.. If it means those weapons become more reliable, and more accurate, resulting in better targeted kills, then this is a good thing. It will result in lower civilian casualties. The idea of more dead terrorists does not disturb my sleep. War will NEVER go away as long as there exists in the hearts of madmen the lust for control and power. At some point humanity stands up and obliterates those who live like tyrants and refuse to work within civil discourse. For us not to use every tool for ending the reign of monsters such as Hitler and Saddam would be a greater crime against humanity than any casualty of war. OK, let the peacenik flames begin.
All that proves is that there was a rise in those particular gasses in Greenland and Antarctica. What about Chile? France? Russia? America? Extrapolating results from small isolated data samples makes for worthless junk science. The Earth is over 4.5 BILLION years old with a surface area of 196,940,400 square miles. Show me a C02 survey over 2.5 billion years from every lattitudinal and longitudinal crosshair and I will go along. The so-called "evidence" you give is like me examining a piece of grass and claiming to be able to explain the entire forest from it. BTW - I did my research before ranting.
There was a volcano in Japan back in the late 90's that produced thousands of times more environmentally toxic pollutants in the first 5 minutes of eruption than mankind has in it's entire history. So-called "environmental scientists" have conveniently ignored this fact for almost a decade. Anyone giving even a cursory examination of the "evidence" produced by the extremist environmental movement can debunk their entire position in minutes. I think the same could be said for the opposite position as well. The truth is that scientists (and everyone else) do not understand even a fraction of a fraction of how this planet operates. There are a million possible and plausible explanations for environmental changes. What I find irritating about the environmentalist whackos out there is that they cling to one explanation in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's not science, that's a religion.
I run geexbox on an old dual 400 mhz pentium system with an ATI video card with s-video out. I stream the media off of my fedora core 3 server running samba on the drives I have in an LVM. It plays everything except AAC files. but I convert those to MP3 before I store them.
You haven't had a job since Clinton was president? God, whose fault is that?
I've been paying attention to this hack for a while now. What I am curious about is, how long until you can use this in reverse and go into a PC that has Bluetooth on?
As I said in my reply to the earlier comment. I had no control over certain decisions. One of those was the decision to use Sid. As a matter of fact, the machine was running Sid on a 2.4 kernel before this project began.
My point is that attempting to upgrade the Debian Sid (unstable) to support the situation we wanted took an overwhelming effort by several highly qaulified people and still produced a questionable result. The same situation was accomplished with Fedora (again, as you yourself stated - the unstable branch) in less than an afternoon by one person.
Actually, the Debian distro was Sid. There were four techs workingon this problem and all had 10+ years of Linux experience with 5+ of Debian each.
I completely agree with you and the thigs that went wrong. However, when dealing with clients and a supervisor who is religiously devoted to Debian, you don't always get to make the decision to jettison what you don't like.
I recently worked for an ISP/Consuting firm that used a lot of Debian. Every single experience I had with it was unpleasant, and I am not a Linux newbie. The installation/setup system is the most gawd-awful piece of sh*t I have ever had the misfortune of using. Upgrades are unpredictable because the lines between stable, testing, and bleeding edge versions are constantly blurred. Dependencies become a tangled mess because dselect gives no real clear indications before it just installs right over libraries other apps need. youhave to resort to using apt-get and upgrading individual pieces at a time. Case in point - we had to upgrade a Debian server at a client site (Putting Debian in as a server at a client site is a practice advised only for the most extreme of masochists). The server provided file services, DNS, PDC, print, and some web. It also was connected to a bank of modems through an internal card so laptop users could dial in. We were merely to install a RAID running on a PCI SATA card. We did approach it the smart way, by creating an identical machine in our lab and testing there. Well, 90 days later.. with a severely hacked 2.6 kernel, alpha code drivers, complete rebuild of every service, and hundreds upon hundreds of man hours.. it worked.. sort of. Install at the client site took 42 hours over a weekend with no sleep and several points that the client was literally screaming. Just to prove a point to my boss, I then took the testing system and installed Fedora Core 1 on it. In less than two hours I had every single piece working - and to be honest I was doing several other things at the same time. I understand the value of Debian and it's place in the Linux community. It is obviously the hackers distro of choice. it has many techical superiorities over other distros (great /etc setup). So I am not bashing Debian as a distro here. But I AM bashing it as a commercial tool. Debian has NO PLACE in a shop that needs to get things done.