It was possible, however bittorrent software, such as azureus, have now made it possible to transport these packets over a secure connection. Since it's no encrypted, they can no longer deem what's being transferred.
Throw out the baby with the bathwater it seems... no more wow patches, no more fast linux distro downloads on release day, no more pirated music. Sometimes government finds it easier to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face.
we have millions of people in prison who were made criminals under the current draconian drug laws
If these people are willing to feed their addictions knowing about how harsh these laws are, it's apparently too addictive to be let loose onto society.
Using this argument is stupid. If you'd like to point out that millions of people are in prison for drugs, you'd also have to point out that they chose to be there by using drugs in the first place. I think a better representation of this argument would be "millions of people didn't take the consequences of their illegal actions into effect before choosing to do drugs."
I'd be willing to concede that their judgment was clouded by the drugs they were using, but that hardly merits sympathy.
He's talking about addiction. People who are addicted to alcohol have the same problems as people who are addicted to pot, heroin, meth, etc. Horrible behavior, bad life choices, dumping too much income into recreational chemicals and the like.
A guy smoking a joint every night does the same amount of damage to society as when I pop open a Sapporo and read slashdot...
I don't smoke pot, I don't like it, I never have. Even if it wasn't illegal, I wouldn't smoke it. I don't support the legalization, however... I don't want to see the term "addict" confused with "casual user" of anything. Alcohol isn't to blame. Meth isn't to blame. Cocaine isn't to blame. Marijuana isn't to blame. The blame lies on the individual who chooses to abuse their chemical of choice.
If you want a position for sysadmin in the Microsoft world, you're going to have to spend a few thousand getting certifications. You'll need those whether you have a degree or not.
If you're going for a position with Linux or Unix, check out a local LUG (Linux Users Group) for some great resources and job leads.
Don't stop there though. I got my last SysAdmin job from a guy I played Battlefield 1942 with who was a fellow Linux enthusiast. You never know when opportunities pop up and where, so keep your eyes open.
Speed seems to be determined by a lack of bloat... and by bloat, I mean features. Firefox, back in the days it was referred to as phoenix, was exceedingly fast. Since then, fancy bookmarking, spellchecking, rss feeds, etc, etc has been added to it, causing slow startup and loading times. With the addition of a few thousand lines of code, not surprisingly, anything will take a bit longer to start up and go.
Chrome doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. Minefield doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. If either of them are weighted down with features (code bloat) then they will slowly grind to a halt much along the lines of IE or current FF.
I've worked accounts receivable before. If you call a company and don't like the answer you get, be polite, say thank you, then hang up. Call back immediately and 9 times out of 10, you get a different person. It's called "shopping", and people do it with doctors, salesmen, and even government offices. Call back until you get the answer you want or someone who's willing to help.
I would think so, I've been using ObjectDock for quite some time because I loved the beauty of accessing programs that way. It seems to be a direct violation. If anything, I hope Apple buys it out in lieu of suing them out of existence and allows the product to continue.
gmail actually has small business options, my girlfriend's domain is directed to gmail, her mail comes through gmail and leaves through her domain. Her website, email, everything is handled for no charge. My main employment also has gmail handle our mailservers, we're on the paid plan for support, however it's very reliable and still pretty cost effective.
I'd love to know how/this/ is insightful. While we're at it, we need to move everyone from California, after all there are way too many earthquakes there. The pacific northwest has way too many volcanoes, that needs to be cleared out as well. The midwest? Tornadoes... Florida to North Carolina, Hurricanes also, all the way down to Texas. Northeast has too many blizzards, southwest has too many heat waves because of the deserts.
If you really want to keep america safe and not have too many people paying too much for too many natural catastrophies... we need to move all the americans to europe where life is perfectly safe.
I assume you're not american, your neighbor probably has access to rocks to bludgeon you to death
OMG, teh Rox!!!
Everything can be used as a deadly weapon against an individual, not everything can be used to slowly poison mass numbers of poeple quite as well as radioactive materials with proper placement. Here in the old US of A, pot farms survive for years pulling in thousands of dollars a month in power bills for their lights and irrigation systems because power companies *gasp* are a business making money and don't give a shit, as long as Joe-Bob Hooch-Farmer pays his power bill that is.
Of course I remember the story of the radioactive boy scout who, in an attempt to provide a really neat experiment for a science project, damn near killed his family and neighbors out of common household radioactive products. Of course, he had to collect mass amounts of radioactive materials on his own instead of just buying them over teh intraweb.
You've seen their site, right? Radioactive isotopes, burning lasers, uranium, heavy water.... is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying, and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set?
These people aren't selling black powder and aluminum shavings to make fireworks, they're selling some serious shit that I don't necessarily want my neighbor to have mail-order access to, thank you very much. If they want to shut down people who sell potentially deadly materials without a system in place to verify identity, I'd say that's not exactly limiting my freedoms, but protecting my life.
Nope, I'm not clueless, but I'm in a management position. I rarely get the opportunity to sit down and write out html any more, and last I checked, frontpage doesn't work on FreeBSD or Slackware, so I don't have a chance to even try it and see how insulted I should be at that comment.
I'm not saying I can't write pure valid simple html, that's quite simple. However performing specific acts for the specification of a client and their application within a rigid schedule shouldn't have to be such a challenge to make it 100% W3 compliant. I mean, congratulations if you write code so well that it flies through the validator without a hiccup each time... but I have a bit more to do in my day than to research every action, every javascript popup, every multimedia embedding tag, and every css call in the system to fall right into compliance.
Like I said, I'm a coder moved onto management, I know the need for compliance and clean, beautiful, and easy to maintain code, but I also know the value of getting projects out on time, on schedule, and within budget.
I think a lot of it surrounds whether the website can be functional and intuitive. W3C compliance is a nifty little button that geeks and nerds fawn over on your website, but if you're hosting something that requires java script, some "not-exactly-complaint" CSS and a bit of PFM (pure freakin magic) to make work in every browser, does it matter if W3C's validator kicks off a few complaints, or are you going to invest twice the amount of time to make it fully compliant.
If this is your hobby site, dump in all the time you want. My sites are under production guidelines and have strict schedules for preparation and implementation. If my artists take 6 weeks to give me the graphics for a 6 week long project, I don't have days to sit there and screw with the validator trying to make sure my bulleted lists fall perfectly within spec. If it works in IE, it works in Gecko, and it works in Opera, that's ~99% of our target market.
What does your business care more about, coming in at budget and on time, or coming in over budget, days late, but with a nifty little W3 button that they've never heard of hoving in the bottom corner?
Not exactly offtopic, but I had to post this. Yes, go ahead and mod me down, but it's still funny, dammit!
OS Airlines If computer operating systems ran airlines...
UNIX Airways Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Air DOS Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on...
Mac Airlines All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up..
Windows Air The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows NT Air Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Linux Air Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat installation manual - HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
Anyway, back to the real world for a sec. I run FreeBSD on 17 of my 20 servers (one CentOS, one RH9, one Debian) and 1 of my 2 laptops. (The other with Ubuntu). FreeBSD won't die any time soon, not only because of the strong corporate support, but there's still a lot of people working on development of it.
Oh, and... I'm actually going to try this install out on my laptop currently running Ubuntu.
Of course, don't take my word for it... take the word of my webserver
I barely trust the government enough to keep all my private information, I definitely don't trust a private organization to keep track of my records. I don't give them permission to collect this information, I don't give them permission to sell my information, and I'd rather just not be a part of it so... where's the "opt out" button on their website?
Doesn't equifax as well as a number of other credit reporting agencies sell private information of consumers without their consent already? Hell, they even want to charge you if you look at it.
Nice job being a smartass to someone who's trying to provide accurate and useful information to a person who is curious and obvsiously doesn't know any better.
How do you find the time to make these posts between your busy schedule of kicking kittens and shoving nuns into traffic?
I just got the latest DSL (2.2b) from http://linuxtracker.org/ a few days ago using Azureus. Actually, I'm still seeding it at 30k along with quite a few others using various speeds. I got a 50MB download in just less than a couple of minutes, and have gotten larger iso's (debian/slack) in surprisingly short periods of time. Maybe it's just the tracker or client you were using.
My download's completely legal, fully within the ToS of my cable company ISP, and I haven't had any problems using it once I got a few firewall issues sorted out. Bittorrent is a great program, but I think most of the media wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because it's a tool used by pirates and/or theives, doesn't mean that every single application for it is evil by association.
I have 4 dell computers, 3 bought with Winblows, 1 with no OS. Selling computers without the M$ tax is probably going to be the best deal going for Linux sales. I don't like Red Hat or Windows, my company doesn't like Red Hat or Windows, so we buy what we need (and can afford), and install what we want on it.
I use Slackware and Debian at home on my Dells, at work, we use FreeBSD on our Dells. Dell doesn't have the ability or perceived financial motivation to promote whatever people want, whether it be Unix or Linux. Offering a factory Red Hat install to businesses is a step in the right direction, but only to make mass alternative OS sales to companies that don't know what's out there, or just want to buy pre-installed systems with included tech support from the manufacturer.
By selling Linux PC's (not workstations) to the average consumer, they're sure to piss off M$, but considering they can hide under the "the user may have their own XP at home" guise while selling blank HD's in a new PC, then there's not really much that can be bitched about by the powers that be. As long as they're sold with either the easily deletable freedos, or with blank HD's, I'll continue to buy them that way.
Until the public decides that they want to demand alternatives, it's not going to be financially reasonable for Dell to piss off M$, and as long as M$ carries a huge market share, the public will never move to Linux. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that will keep M$ on top while the select few of us run Unix on our servers and Linux on our notebooks and home pc's. As far as Linux goes, there's not enough easily accessible software in the public eye to make people want to switch and not having many people to sell to, companies aren't going to spend the time and money developing software and advertising it to make people want to switch. I've used Slack forever, and I've never seen it advertised in Wal-Mart next to windows. Same can be said for Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever distro you use at home. I saw Red Hat Pro Server there once, for like $399 next to a Windows XP Home box for like $199. Which one do you think Joe Average is going to buy for his "puter"?
Honestly, before the flamewar starts, I have nothing against Red Hat, I just don't choose to use it. After all... Linux is all about choice.
Ha, turn down google's job, laugh in their faces!
You'd be better off going to Microsoft anyway! Wait, they modified their search engine and OS for China.
Wait, go for Yahoo! That'd be a kick in the... nevermind, they did the same.
Oooooh! Go work for IBM, that would... wait, nope, they assist China with hardware and OS's with the Guangdong Initiative....
I know, Go to work for Dell because they... nevermind, they assisted with the Guangdong Initiative too.
Go to work at a mom and pop convenience store and slowly starve to death living in your mom's basement making minimum wage while Google continues to rake in billions!
Slashdot Mirror
It was possible, however bittorrent software, such as azureus, have now made it possible to transport these packets over a secure connection. Since it's no encrypted, they can no longer deem what's being transferred.
Throw out the baby with the bathwater it seems... no more wow patches, no more fast linux distro downloads on release day, no more pirated music. Sometimes government finds it easier to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face.
we have millions of people in prison who were made criminals under the current draconian drug laws
If these people are willing to feed their addictions knowing about how harsh these laws are, it's apparently too addictive to be let loose onto society.
Using this argument is stupid. If you'd like to point out that millions of people are in prison for drugs, you'd also have to point out that they chose to be there by using drugs in the first place. I think a better representation of this argument would be "millions of people didn't take the consequences of their illegal actions into effect before choosing to do drugs."
I'd be willing to concede that their judgment was clouded by the drugs they were using, but that hardly merits sympathy.
He's talking about addiction. People who are addicted to alcohol have the same problems as people who are addicted to pot, heroin, meth, etc. Horrible behavior, bad life choices, dumping too much income into recreational chemicals and the like.
A guy smoking a joint every night does the same amount of damage to society as when I pop open a Sapporo and read slashdot...
I don't smoke pot, I don't like it, I never have. Even if it wasn't illegal, I wouldn't smoke it. I don't support the legalization, however... I don't want to see the term "addict" confused with "casual user" of anything. Alcohol isn't to blame. Meth isn't to blame. Cocaine isn't to blame. Marijuana isn't to blame. The blame lies on the individual who chooses to abuse their chemical of choice.
If you want a position for sysadmin in the Microsoft world, you're going to have to spend a few thousand getting certifications. You'll need those whether you have a degree or not.
If you're going for a position with Linux or Unix, check out a local LUG (Linux Users Group) for some great resources and job leads.
Don't stop there though. I got my last SysAdmin job from a guy I played Battlefield 1942 with who was a fellow Linux enthusiast. You never know when opportunities pop up and where, so keep your eyes open.
Speed seems to be determined by a lack of bloat... and by bloat, I mean features. Firefox, back in the days it was referred to as phoenix, was exceedingly fast. Since then, fancy bookmarking, spellchecking, rss feeds, etc, etc has been added to it, causing slow startup and loading times. With the addition of a few thousand lines of code, not surprisingly, anything will take a bit longer to start up and go.
Chrome doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. Minefield doesn't have many features, so it runs amazingly fast. If either of them are weighted down with features (code bloat) then they will slowly grind to a halt much along the lines of IE or current FF.
I've worked accounts receivable before. If you call a company and don't like the answer you get, be polite, say thank you, then hang up. Call back immediately and 9 times out of 10, you get a different person. It's called "shopping", and people do it with doctors, salesmen, and even government offices. Call back until you get the answer you want or someone who's willing to help.
I would think so, I've been using ObjectDock for quite some time because I loved the beauty of accessing programs that way. It seems to be a direct violation. If anything, I hope Apple buys it out in lieu of suing them out of existence and allows the product to continue.
gmail actually has small business options, my girlfriend's domain is directed to gmail, her mail comes through gmail and leaves through her domain. Her website, email, everything is handled for no charge. My main employment also has gmail handle our mailservers, we're on the paid plan for support, however it's very reliable and still pretty cost effective.
http://www.google.com/apps/
I'd love to know how /this/ is insightful. While we're at it, we need to move everyone from California, after all there are way too many earthquakes there. The pacific northwest has way too many volcanoes, that needs to be cleared out as well. The midwest? Tornadoes... Florida to North Carolina, Hurricanes also, all the way down to Texas. Northeast has too many blizzards, southwest has too many heat waves because of the deserts.
If you really want to keep america safe and not have too many people paying too much for too many natural catastrophies... we need to move all the americans to europe where life is perfectly safe.
I assume you're not american, your neighbor probably has access to rocks to bludgeon you to death
OMG, teh Rox!!!
Everything can be used as a deadly weapon against an individual, not everything can be used to slowly poison mass numbers of poeple quite as well as radioactive materials with proper placement. Here in the old US of A, pot farms survive for years pulling in thousands of dollars a month in power bills for their lights and irrigation systems because power companies *gasp* are a business making money and don't give a shit, as long as Joe-Bob Hooch-Farmer pays his power bill that is.
Of course I remember the story of the radioactive boy scout who, in an attempt to provide a really neat experiment for a science project, damn near killed his family and neighbors out of common household radioactive products. Of course, he had to collect mass amounts of radioactive materials on his own instead of just buying them over teh intraweb.
You've seen their site, right? Radioactive isotopes, burning lasers, uranium, heavy water.... is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying, and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set?
These people aren't selling black powder and aluminum shavings to make fireworks, they're selling some serious shit that I don't necessarily want my neighbor to have mail-order access to, thank you very much. If they want to shut down people who sell potentially deadly materials without a system in place to verify identity, I'd say that's not exactly limiting my freedoms, but protecting my life.
Nope, I'm not clueless, but I'm in a management position. I rarely get the opportunity to sit down and write out html any more, and last I checked, frontpage doesn't work on FreeBSD or Slackware, so I don't have a chance to even try it and see how insulted I should be at that comment.
I'm not saying I can't write pure valid simple html, that's quite simple. However performing specific acts for the specification of a client and their application within a rigid schedule shouldn't have to be such a challenge to make it 100% W3 compliant. I mean, congratulations if you write code so well that it flies through the validator without a hiccup each time... but I have a bit more to do in my day than to research every action, every javascript popup, every multimedia embedding tag, and every css call in the system to fall right into compliance.
Like I said, I'm a coder moved onto management, I know the need for compliance and clean, beautiful, and easy to maintain code, but I also know the value of getting projects out on time, on schedule, and within budget.
I think a lot of it surrounds whether the website can be functional and intuitive. W3C compliance is a nifty little button that geeks and nerds fawn over on your website, but if you're hosting something that requires java script, some "not-exactly-complaint" CSS and a bit of PFM (pure freakin magic) to make work in every browser, does it matter if W3C's validator kicks off a few complaints, or are you going to invest twice the amount of time to make it fully compliant.
If this is your hobby site, dump in all the time you want. My sites are under production guidelines and have strict schedules for preparation and implementation. If my artists take 6 weeks to give me the graphics for a 6 week long project, I don't have days to sit there and screw with the validator trying to make sure my bulleted lists fall perfectly within spec. If it works in IE, it works in Gecko, and it works in Opera, that's ~99% of our target market.
What does your business care more about, coming in at budget and on time, or coming in over budget, days late, but with a nifty little W3 button that they've never heard of hoving in the bottom corner?
Not exactly offtopic, but I had to post this. Yes, go ahead and mod me down,
...
but it's still funny, dammit!
OS Airlines
If computer operating systems ran airlines...
UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport.
They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece,
arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the
plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on
again, and so on
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act
exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently
but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and
everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just
shut up..
Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage
check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the
air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows NT
Air Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and
takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own
airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways
themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the
ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you
board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of
the seat installation manual - HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully
adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time
without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell
customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say
is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
What I found odd was that Linux is a modified version of Minix which was based on Unix. Heh, a few paragraphs in and he's already mis-stated facts.
Figures an anonymous coward would post this.
Anyway, back to the real world for a sec. I run FreeBSD on 17 of my 20 servers (one CentOS, one RH9, one Debian) and 1 of my 2 laptops. (The other with Ubuntu). FreeBSD won't die any time soon, not only because of the strong corporate support, but there's still a lot of people working on development of it.
Oh, and... I'm actually going to try this install out on my laptop currently running Ubuntu.
Of course, don't take my word for it... take the word of my webserver
10:31PM up 492 days, 21:04, 0 users, load averages: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00
8 more days to 500! woo! (FreeBSD4.11)
Cool.... How do I opt out?
I barely trust the government enough to keep all my private information, I definitely don't trust a private organization to keep track of my records. I don't give them permission to collect this information, I don't give them permission to sell my information, and I'd rather just not be a part of it so... where's the "opt out" button on their website?
Nice job being a smartass to someone who's trying to provide accurate and useful information to a person who is curious and obvsiously doesn't know any better.
How do you find the time to make these posts between your busy schedule of kicking kittens and shoving nuns into traffic?
asswipe.
Amazing how these idiots always post anonymously.
I just got the latest DSL (2.2b) from http://linuxtracker.org/ a few days ago using Azureus. Actually, I'm still seeding it at 30k along with quite a few others using various speeds. I got a 50MB download in just less than a couple of minutes, and have gotten larger iso's (debian/slack) in surprisingly short periods of time. Maybe it's just the tracker or client you were using.
My download's completely legal, fully within the ToS of my cable company ISP, and I haven't had any problems using it once I got a few firewall issues sorted out. Bittorrent is a great program, but I think most of the media wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because it's a tool used by pirates and/or theives, doesn't mean that every single application for it is evil by association.
I have 4 dell computers, 3 bought with Winblows, 1 with no OS. Selling computers without the M$ tax is probably going to be the best deal going for Linux sales. I don't like Red Hat or Windows, my company doesn't like Red Hat or Windows, so we buy what we need (and can afford), and install what we want on it.
I use Slackware and Debian at home on my Dells, at work, we use FreeBSD on our Dells. Dell doesn't have the ability or perceived financial motivation to promote whatever people want, whether it be Unix or Linux. Offering a factory Red Hat install to businesses is a step in the right direction, but only to make mass alternative OS sales to companies that don't know what's out there, or just want to buy pre-installed systems with included tech support from the manufacturer.
By selling Linux PC's (not workstations) to the average consumer, they're sure to piss off M$, but considering they can hide under the "the user may have their own XP at home" guise while selling blank HD's in a new PC, then there's not really much that can be bitched about by the powers that be. As long as they're sold with either the easily deletable freedos, or with blank HD's, I'll continue to buy them that way.
Until the public decides that they want to demand alternatives, it's not going to be financially reasonable for Dell to piss off M$, and as long as M$ carries a huge market share, the public will never move to Linux. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that will keep M$ on top while the select few of us run Unix on our servers and Linux on our notebooks and home pc's. As far as Linux goes, there's not enough easily accessible software in the public eye to make people want to switch and not having many people to sell to, companies aren't going to spend the time and money developing software and advertising it to make people want to switch. I've used Slack forever, and I've never seen it advertised in Wal-Mart next to windows. Same can be said for Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever distro you use at home. I saw Red Hat Pro Server there once, for like $399 next to a Windows XP Home box for like $199. Which one do you think Joe Average is going to buy for his "puter"?
Honestly, before the flamewar starts, I have nothing against Red Hat, I just don't choose to use it. After all... Linux is all about choice.
Am I the only one that caught this like 6 months ago?
http://www.oooff.com/
This shameless ripoff brought to you by linspire, the same people that made a company out of selling debian.
Ha, turn down google's job, laugh in their faces!
You'd be better off going to Microsoft anyway! Wait, they modified their search engine and OS for China.
Wait, go for Yahoo! That'd be a kick in the... nevermind, they did the same.
Oooooh! Go work for IBM, that would... wait, nope, they assist China with hardware and OS's with the Guangdong Initiative....
I know, Go to work for Dell because they... nevermind, they assisted with the Guangdong Initiative too.
Go to work at a mom and pop convenience store and slowly starve to death living in your mom's basement making minimum wage while Google continues to rake in billions!
That'll show google who's boss! Yeah!
Whoops, my err. OpenOffice displays powerpoint presentations quite well.