Hmm, obvious troll, but here goes anyway, just in case someone that's not already totally cynical about these issues is reading...
Does Microsoft give Office technical support for WINE installs?
No. But it doesn't charge for it either. If you want the benefits of *nix without the enslavement of The Microsoft Way, and you *must* have 100% compatibility with your colleague's MS apps, it's a no-brainer. (Anyway, have you personally ever actually tried to get any of the 'support' that's offered with MS consumer products?)
Why run it in an emulator at all when you could run the real thing?
Just because you must run Office for some reason doesn't mean you have to pay for software that you don't want or need, particularly when that software is deficient in ways that are significant to you.
If you're willing to shell out for the Office suite, why aren't you willing to buy or use the OS?
Why would I buy a product that I don't want, and that can't do the job I want satisfactorily? Would you buy an Intel web-cam just because you've got a Pentium CPU on your mobo?
And Win2k *is* stable.
If by that you mean that it's more stable than its predecessors then yes, there's no doubt at all. If, however, you mean that it's capable of staying up under load for months or years at a time, of having its major services patched on the run without a reboot, and of having its source-code analysed line-by-line by a customer until an unreported bug is found and cured... well... do I have to draw a picture for you?
Not quite - sounds like you've been confused (like so many others) by RIAA scaremongering nonsense. The copy you make of your DVD is exactly the same as the original.
If your DVD player plays the original it will play the copy. DeCSS is needed for a software player to decode any region-encoded DVD, not just copied ones.
I kinda missed the meaning of the sentence that I quoted - if any - though I certainly didn't miss the reviewers opinion of Gnome 2.
Fine.
I still regard it as "A User's first look at.. " rather than "a comprehensive review of the complex graphical apllication environment that is... " because that's all this is.
"Possibly this is the reason why there are not many Gnome applications yet ported to the new framework, neither the Gnome itself includes many applications or preference panels as it used to."
I'm prepared to accept that the author of this article may not have English as her or his first language, but this sentence seems to display a lack discontinuity of thought that's not confidence-inspiring for the rest of the 'review' (or opinion piece as it seems to really be)...
Trust me, the Herald-Sun is the absolute bottom-feeding dregs of what's laughingly referred to as Australian journalism. It's so bad it's barely worthy of being outraged about. What a story from there is doing on slashdot I cannot even begin to imagine. Must have been submitted by a non-Aussie, that's for sure.
Population of Melbourne, Australia, from Lonely Planet:
"Population: 3.4 million"
Somehow I doubt there's going to be a significant proportion of/.-reading geeks in Melbourne, Florida who are going to be terribly confused about which continent the meet is happening. In fact I'd be sureprised if there's 35 geeks in Melbourne, Florida in total...
I used to sit next to someone with RSI, who used to use MS-Word without the keyboard... he could do everything on speech. He did take some time getting up to speed on the system...
Well gee yeah that's incredible... people protest the closing of shows they like while ignoring the passing of shows that they don't like! What bias! How unfair! Boo hoo!
...and "The Family Guy"...? Just when exactly did you have your sense of humour surgically removed? Were the "All in the Family" reruns too heart-stoppingly chucklesome for you?
Consumers of mass-market music have been carefully nurtured, spoon-fed and force-fed form the age of about 5 until they simply don't recognize anything that hasn't been promoted to an inch of it's life as being worthwhile art. The argument goes: "Oh but if it was any good, everyone would be listening to it, TV sports shows would be using it for theme music, it's video would be on constant MTV rotation, etc. etc."
This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mind you, you seem to think that NSync and Linkin Park are somehow in different categories of commercial music, which beggars belief, so I'm probably just pissing in the wind with this post.
Then of course there's your dipshit referral to Pravda... christ what a little hick you are, aren't you! Why don't we just make the RIAA illegal and ban media company cross-promotion and then see what music your magical "market forces" bring to the top.
We're an small company making extensive use of open source software and recently settled (after an exhaustive morning searching freshmeat) on NOLA by Noguska Software.
It's Apache/PHP/MySQL-based and a very comprehensive solution (according to our normally-Windows-using CFO). It has a simple interface, and covers accounting, inventory, point of sale, contact management, billing, puchasing, and reporting.
It's also completely GPL'ed. Check it out - it rocks!
I guess I was (in the job I was refering to) more frustrated than angry - I'm a pretty chilled-out soul all things considered.
You raise some excellent points, and ones that I cannot disagree with. My problem is with the buzzword-laden promotion of this technology as the "one solution fits all" solution, which is an avenue that I'm sure you'd agree is a rocky garden path down which to lead any project (to mix a few metaphors just for the hell of it).Admittedly in the light of day my post was somewhat rabid, but if it helps stop one more company wasting ridiculous amounts of money and time, and indirectly screwing up an entire project's future (and let me a that this point say that this is *not* some Mom and Pop outfit we're talking about here) through sheer ignorance and force of advertising (of Java, by Sun), then I'll sleep easy despite my 0: flamebait rating for it.
I am by no means denigrating Java. Yes it was a pain to learn (from a self-taught programmer's perspective who's given 2 weeks to learn the language and de-fuck-up the Javaissimo's shite HTML generating code), yes it was unsuited to the project, but ultimately the decision was made by the gulliable management (ok, no, I can't spell gulliable).
Furthermore, we ended up using a hugely complex XML-based configuration interface which (*after* hiring the 2 Java gurus) it was decided would be needed to configure this fairly ordinary system.
It was a chicken and egg situation. Once the Java guys were hired for the GUI, everything had to be centered around Java's requirements and abilities.
In a parallel universe the GUI could have had it's back-end written in bash shell script and been just as compatible, functional, and probably faster. And written, leveraging the combined *nix experience of the devel team, in a week or two.
Considering Java's requirements were approximately twice what our core application's were, this was distressing to anyone involved that had a sense of design or any pride in the quality of the product they were producing.
It needs to be understood what Java is and isn't good for. That seems to me to be the key to making good technology decisions, and/. readers are people who are, or who soon will be, making those decisions.
Anyway, I've enjoyed both the +1 posts on this, and it has been a heads-up, but I'll stick to my original pricipals of KISS, and say that unless one actually *needs* to leverage some specific Java capability, it's overhead outweighs it's benefits for web apps.
Cheers, folks.
Having once been dragged screaming from my cozy, fast and functional PHP nest and been forced into whipping some (very highly paid) Java programmers' woeful attempt at a web-based GUI that used Apache/Tomcat/Linux into some sort of shape, I can attest to the following facts:
Unless you actually have to talk to a massively complex "Enterprise" system, or leverage some other pre-written Java, JSP is the wrong solution in almost all cases.
JSPs are insanely difficult to debug. The smallest syntactical error, an inadvertant ommision of a quote or bracket, or basically any other error at all, results in 2 or more screenfuls of verbose, largely irrelevant error messages, somewhere in which is hidden the actual message relevant to the problem.
JSPs are the ultimate example of the "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" school of programming.
Outside of my first point, there is basically nothing you can do with JSPs that you can't do with ASP, PHP, Embedded Perl, ColdFusion, etc., etc., all of which have the advantage that they were created from day one to spit out web pages. Mostly you can also do it faster, easier and cheaper, too.
Just because you happen to have a couple of hot-shot Java programmers handy doesn't mean they have any idea how to do, say, HTML, any more professionally than Joe Bloggs who's just done a 3-week "introduction to the internet" course at the local community center. Or web applications. Horses for courses, in other words.
Management types love JSPs because it's Java, and they've heard of that, and apparently it's really great!
Admittedly the project I was strong-armed into was particularly ill-suited to JSPs, and I had no experience with Java, but it wasn't Java I had a problem with. I'm a web-app designer and I can do that largely irrespective of the language used.
It's just that the idea of (in a software product) bumping the user's hardware requirements up by about 50%, and the application's total size up by about 100% just to use JSPs for the configuration interface really blew my mind.
Please help stamp out this fucking stupid technology so noone else has to go through the sort of pain I did. (All for nothing as it turned out. 2 days after I'd finished rewriting the Java gurus' HTML code - a 3 month job since they were still writing more shit code as I was fixing what they'd already done - they whole project was canned and all staff layed off.)
I decided to re-write the interface in PHP as personal exercise to fill in some of my now plentiful spare time. It took me one week, worked perfectly, and was considerably faster.
More info in HP's Linux/Java platform can be found here, and here.
It goes some way to addressing the doubts of cynics (like me) about the real-world usefulness of Java for anything other than a CS-graduate-existence-justification tool.
On the strength of this piece I went to lokigames.com to get the demo.
Their generic installer app is a testament to the way that gaming-related companies can occasionally surpass even the best efforts of absolutely everybody else in terms of making a software task, no matter how essentially complex or problematic, slick, stylish and user-friendly. I went the get the Kohan demo and ended up, by choice rather than coercion, downloading the mpeg preview movie, the Simcity 3000 demo, and a few other things.
Admittedly I'm getting between 36-40kb/sec (thank $DEITY for DSL) without which I might curb my curiosity a tad, but that too can be partially atributed to the sensible automatic choice of planetmirror.com as the closest server.
It's Gnome compliant, of course, and takes my theme just nicely.
Whatever Loki's financial situation is at the moment, the quality of their approach to the installer says a lot about the way they go about their work.
Now go show 'em you care: Download the demos.../. the bastards...
Re:And the key to cutting the cost would be ..
on
Budget Satellite
·
· Score: 1
It's called duct tape. Duck tape would just be cruel...
Err... I think the point is that the cells have been used in all sorts of biological experiments in outer-space, around the world, etc.
I doubt (though I'm way too slack to actually read the piece) that they're talking about strapping a brace of test tubes to the nose of an ICBM, pointing at space, and then sending a shuttle a few days later to check how the cells were doing...
...to discuss anybody's content charging policy but their own...
Are *you* going to either pay or put up with ads for the privilege of discussing asshole surgery and ignorant capitalist-aplologist propoganda with the superior-quality trolls..?
I would have made a few pithy links there to relevant nonsense on Kuro5hin but it's so bloody slow at the moment I couldn't be bothered.
Slashdot Mirror
[OT]
:-)
You sound like you should check out PL/PGSQL... just what you're after
It's quite good, too...
Hmm, obvious troll, but here goes anyway, just in case someone that's not already totally cynical about these issues is reading...
Does Microsoft give Office technical support for WINE installs?No. But it doesn't charge for it either. If you want the benefits of *nix without the enslavement of The Microsoft Way, and you *must* have 100% compatibility with your colleague's MS apps, it's a no-brainer. (Anyway, have you personally ever actually tried to get any of the 'support' that's offered with MS consumer products?)
Why run it in an emulator at all when you could run the real thing?Just because you must run Office for some reason doesn't mean you have to pay for software that you don't want or need, particularly when that software is deficient in ways that are significant to you.
If you're willing to shell out for the Office suite, why aren't you willing to buy or use the OS?Why would I buy a product that I don't want, and that can't do the job I want satisfactorily? Would you buy an Intel web-cam just because you've got a Pentium CPU on your mobo?
And Win2k *is* stable.If by that you mean that it's more stable than its predecessors then yes, there's no doubt at all. If, however, you mean that it's capable of staying up under load for months or years at a time, of having its major services patched on the run without a reboot, and of having its source-code analysed line-by-line by a customer until an unreported bug is found and cured... well... do I have to draw a picture for you?
Not quite - sounds like you've been confused (like so many others) by RIAA scaremongering nonsense. The copy you make of your DVD is exactly the same as the original.
If your DVD player plays the original it will play the copy. DeCSS is needed for a software player to decode any region-encoded DVD, not just copied ones.
I kinda missed the meaning of the sentence that I quoted - if any - though I certainly didn't miss the reviewers opinion of Gnome 2.
Fine.
I still regard it as "A User's first look at.. " rather than "a comprehensive review of the complex graphical apllication environment that is... " because that's all this is.
Reminder self - don't psmartarsed ostcomments while drunk. It will screww your kamra with.
Note to moderators - I'm not really this pisshefj.. ajhhh FUCK YA!
"Possibly this is the reason why there are not many Gnome applications yet ported to the new framework, neither the Gnome itself includes many applications or preference panels as it used to."
I'm prepared to accept that the author of this article may not have English as her or his first language, but this sentence seems to display a lack discontinuity of thought that's not confidence-inspiring for the rest of the 'review' (or opinion piece as it seems to really be)...
Trust me, the Herald-Sun is the absolute bottom-feeding dregs of what's laughingly referred to as Australian journalism. It's so bad it's barely worthy of being outraged about. What a story from there is doing on slashdot I cannot even begin to imagine. Must have been submitted by a non-Aussie, that's for sure.
Population of Melbourne, Florida, from www.melbourneflorida.com:
"Population 71,382"
Population of Melbourne, Australia, from Lonely Planet:
"Population: 3.4 million"
Somehow I doubt there's going to be a significant proportion of /.-reading geeks in Melbourne, Florida who are going to be terribly confused about which continent the meet is happening. In fact I'd be sureprised if there's 35 geeks in Melbourne, Florida in total...
Damn no-one writes lyrics like that anymore... not even Mr Bungle it seems. Where the hell are they now?
I guess I should have been a bit more --verbose. Or I could also have just shut up and avoided looking like a dill ;P
Wow man, you must be *very* patient...
Please, quit with spreading the (I assume) deliberate confusion.
Even better, just get Debian and learn the joys of typing:
apt-get install [whatever]
-- or --
dpkg -i [whatever]
and watching it sort out the deps for you.
Wow! Does that mean they've release another game for the XBox? Or do you just get 2 copies of Halo?
Well gee yeah that's incredible... people protest the closing of shows they like while ignoring the passing of shows that they don't like! What bias! How unfair! Boo hoo!
...and "The Family Guy"...? Just when exactly did you have your sense of humour surgically removed? Were the "All in the Family" reruns too heart-stoppingly chucklesome for you?
...and the value of *your* comment was what?
Prat.
No, sorry, but it just doesn't work like that.
Consumers of mass-market music have been carefully nurtured, spoon-fed and force-fed form the age of about 5 until they simply don't recognize anything that hasn't been promoted to an inch of it's life as being worthwhile art. The argument goes: "Oh but if it was any good, everyone would be listening to it, TV sports shows would be using it for theme music, it's video would be on constant MTV rotation, etc. etc."
This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Mind you, you seem to think that NSync and Linkin Park are somehow in different categories of commercial music, which beggars belief, so I'm probably just pissing in the wind with this post.
Then of course there's your dipshit referral to Pravda... christ what a little hick you are, aren't you! Why don't we just make the RIAA illegal and ban media company cross-promotion and then see what music your magical "market forces" bring to the top.
We're an small company making extensive use of open source software and recently settled (after an exhaustive morning searching freshmeat) on NOLA by Noguska Software.
It's Apache/PHP/MySQL-based and a very comprehensive solution (according to our normally-Windows-using CFO). It has a simple interface, and covers accounting, inventory, point of sale, contact management, billing, puchasing, and reporting.
It's also completely GPL'ed. Check it out - it rocks!
Howdy, Rich.
/. readers are people who are, or who soon will be, making those decisions.
I guess I was (in the job I was refering to) more frustrated than angry - I'm a pretty chilled-out soul all things considered.
You raise some excellent points, and ones that I cannot disagree with. My problem is with the buzzword-laden promotion of this technology as the "one solution fits all" solution, which is an avenue that I'm sure you'd agree is a rocky garden path down which to lead any project (to mix a few metaphors just for the hell of it).Admittedly in the light of day my post was somewhat rabid, but if it helps stop one more company wasting ridiculous amounts of money and time, and indirectly screwing up an entire project's future (and let me a that this point say that this is *not* some Mom and Pop outfit we're talking about here) through sheer ignorance and force of advertising (of Java, by Sun), then I'll sleep easy despite my 0: flamebait rating for it.
I am by no means denigrating Java. Yes it was a pain to learn (from a self-taught programmer's perspective who's given 2 weeks to learn the language and de-fuck-up the Javaissimo's shite HTML generating code), yes it was unsuited to the project, but ultimately the decision was made by the gulliable management (ok, no, I can't spell gulliable).
Furthermore, we ended up using a hugely complex XML-based configuration interface which (*after* hiring the 2 Java gurus) it was decided would be needed to configure this fairly ordinary system.
It was a chicken and egg situation. Once the Java guys were hired for the GUI, everything had to be centered around Java's requirements and abilities.
In a parallel universe the GUI could have had it's back-end written in bash shell script and been just as compatible, functional, and probably faster. And written, leveraging the combined *nix experience of the devel team, in a week or two.
Considering Java's requirements were approximately twice what our core application's were, this was distressing to anyone involved that had a sense of design or any pride in the quality of the product they were producing.
It needs to be understood what Java is and isn't good for. That seems to me to be the key to making good technology decisions, and
Anyway, I've enjoyed both the +1 posts on this, and it has been a heads-up, but I'll stick to my original pricipals of KISS, and say that unless one actually *needs* to leverage some specific Java capability, it's overhead outweighs it's benefits for web apps.
Cheers, folks.
Having once been dragged screaming from my cozy, fast and functional PHP nest and been forced into whipping some (very highly paid) Java programmers' woeful attempt at a web-based GUI that used Apache/Tomcat/Linux into some sort of shape, I can attest to the following facts:
Admittedly the project I was strong-armed into was particularly ill-suited to JSPs, and I had no experience with Java, but it wasn't Java I had a problem with. I'm a web-app designer and I can do that largely irrespective of the language used.
It's just that the idea of (in a software product) bumping the user's hardware requirements up by about 50%, and the application's total size up by about 100% just to use JSPs for the configuration interface really blew my mind.
Please help stamp out this fucking stupid technology so noone else has to go through the sort of pain I did. (All for nothing as it turned out. 2 days after I'd finished rewriting the Java gurus' HTML code - a 3 month job since they were still writing more shit code as I was fixing what they'd already done - they whole project was canned and all staff layed off.)
I decided to re-write the interface in PHP as personal exercise to fill in some of my now plentiful spare time. It took me one week, worked perfectly, and was considerably faster.
More info in HP's Linux/Java platform can be found here, and here.
It goes some way to addressing the doubts of cynics (like me) about the real-world usefulness of Java for anything other than a CS-graduate-existence-justification tool.
On the strength of this piece I went to lokigames.com to get the demo.
/. the bastards...
Their generic installer app is a testament to the way that gaming-related companies can occasionally surpass even the best efforts of absolutely everybody else in terms of making a software task, no matter how essentially complex or problematic, slick, stylish and user-friendly. I went the get the Kohan demo and ended up, by choice rather than coercion, downloading the mpeg preview movie, the Simcity 3000 demo, and a few other things.
Admittedly I'm getting between 36-40kb/sec (thank $DEITY for DSL) without which I might curb my curiosity a tad, but that too can be partially atributed to the sensible automatic choice of planetmirror.com as the closest server.
It's Gnome compliant, of course, and takes my theme just nicely.
Whatever Loki's financial situation is at the moment, the quality of their approach to the installer says a lot about the way they go about their work.
Now go show 'em you care: Download the demos...
It's called duct tape. Duck tape would just be cruel...
-Sam
Hell yeah! How about Flagstaff Gardens in the CBD if the weather's good?
Surely LUV would be willing to help, too...
Err... I think the point is that the cells have been used in all sorts of biological experiments in outer-space, around the world, etc.
I doubt (though I'm way too slack to actually read the piece) that they're talking about strapping a brace of test tubes to the nose of an ICBM, pointing at space, and then sending a shuttle a few days later to check how the cells were doing...
...to discuss anybody's content charging policy but their own...
Are *you* going to either pay or put up with ads for the privilege of discussing asshole surgery and ignorant capitalist-aplologist propoganda with the superior-quality trolls..?
I would have made a few pithy links there to relevant nonsense on Kuro5hin but it's so bloody slow at the moment I couldn't be bothered.