Export to PDF *is* a pretty good feature. Huge? Not so much. It's easy enough to print to PDF, do a postscript printer to file output and convert it to PDF, etc.
99% of the users will never care about most MS Office features? What was that about subjective evaluation?:)
What really has to be weighted is user usability/user usage efficiency, right? what is important in an "office productivity suite" is how productive a user can be with it. My own experience (no, I haven't done a double blind study of "never used productivity suite before" people or something, hehe) is that Office 2007 (and Office 2003 before that... I think it was 2003...) was easier to use and easier to create nice-looking documents right off the bat. It was also much more expensive. I found OO.org good for word documents and spreadsheets. I found Powerpoint far superior with presentations (and, ironically, faster and less jerky with far fewer quirks... I am not at all impressed [pun not intended] with Impress).
Hehe, after posting a negative response to your original post... I have to say that not only are there helpful companies who will charge less than supporting Windows, but there ARE quite a few helpful Linux users. It seems to vary by distro.
OO.org is pretty cool. Some parts of it are definitely NOT as good, definitely ont better, than MS Office. MS Office is actually, in my opinion, a pretty good product. Impress vs. PPT, PPT wins hands down. Writer vs. Word... well, writer is actually pretty good, though Word 2007 has some default nice-looking document stuff going for it. Me personally? I use OO.org. But I can definitely see how it isn't for everyone.
Slick, beautiful, and easy to use. Let's see, I just installed openSuSE 11.1 on a Dell E1505. It works pretty well (had 10.3 before that, by the way). First problem: knetworkmanager and WEP: fail. It wouldn't put in the write key; had to use iwconfig to manually configure it. Has never worked for me. Windows could do WEP fine. (note: I use WEP just to keep my neighbors off. I know it's easily cracked, I've cracked WEP myself). Second problem: ATI Mobility x1400 drivers. Downloaded ATI installer; fail. Tried various things. Finally installed RPM, that worked. I think what happened was the kernel source wasn't installed, thus the ATI installer didn't compile the driver, etc. But all I got was a black screen. Oh, you want users to dig through logs in random directories? Easy to use... Windows drivers worked fine.
Third problem: can't turn off the annoying PC speaker. I could with Windows. Fourth problem: Suspend to Disk doesn't work with Compiz/XGL, it comes back up with a black screen and a mouse cursor. Have to kill X and start it again. It worked fine with Xorg but not with XGL. Unfortunate, too, since I kinda like suspending and have to do it to disk because the battery is completely dead. Windows worked fine.
It's working now, and I like it. I've always liked Linux. Interestingly, though, my wife said this (she is not a tech person): "I don't think I like Linux... it doesn't do what you expect it to." She can use it, when it's working. When it stops working, she has no clue what to do. When X doesn't boot up for whatever reason, she doesn't know the "startx" command. If that doesn't work, she doesn't know about the kernel bootoption "x11failsafe." Easy to use!
I haven't tried Ubuntu specifically on my laptop, so I can't comment on its compatibility.
All this to say: switching completely from Windows to Linux is NOT for the person who doesn't have time to fiddle with stuff (i.e., spends maybe an hour a day on their computer) and doesn't have someone that can do it for them/fix it for them. Me? I can use Linux, and my wife can, because I can fix it. My parents? Same thing. I can set it up and fix it. Other people may not be able to.
(*waits for mod -5 Doesn't support Linux in all situations.:) )
Last final note: I work with Linux all day at work, and I've used quite a few versions (including Puppy Linux, tinyMe, Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, Slackware, and a few others that I tried out on some old hardware to see which ran best). I really like it. I have also used Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, XP x64, 2003, 2003 x64, 2008, 2008 x64, Vista, Vista x64, and 7 x64.
Lastly, Wine does not work for all applications, virtualization is not "easy" to use, and I have a few other gripes about the easy to use camp but this is long enough:) hehe.
I sound bitter. Oh well, I'm not. I'm happily using Linux+KDE4.2+XGL+Amarok as my cool little media center!
Right, so it has earphones. That was what I was getting at.:) Saying it's useless as a phone because it doesn't have a speaker is kinda silly - who walks around talking on their phone on speakerphone all the time?
Coming from a musician, songsmith is actually some interesting software. Is it "serious music" - no way. But it's just as much fun as that silly Apple program where you distort the images coming from the builtin webcam. Oh, but that wasn't a waste of money, I suppose, since Apple pushed it into their MacBook and thus I am sure it's helping in the amount of sales of MacBooks!
Microsoft Bob, interestingly, looked kinda fun, too.
I don't get what the problem is with MS spending money on research and development. Yeah, maybe the ydon't ever turn into actual products, but who is to say that concepts or ideas from research projects don't end up in other products? Who knows, maybe Windows 95 took ideas from MS Bob.
Also, the OS Singularity is currently in Microsoft Research, I believe. Other Microsoft Research stuff - Windows 2000 IPv6 capability; Microsoft Surface (wasn't it used in the superbowl for traffic or something like that?); Visual Studio 2010...
I never got in trouble as a kid. but then I was aware of my location and had a scanner in my pocket with a earphone in all the time. Friends learned that if I left a party or gathering, they need to as well.
If you went to the types of parties that cops would bust, then no wonder you were always scared of them and didn't "trust" them.
My response: don't go to the parties that get busted and you probably won't hav ea problem getting busted at those parties..
The Tax cuts, if any, should be limited to people within 15% of the poverty line.
The people who pay the least percentage and least amount of taxes, you mean?
If I, the citizen and consumer, am the one that creates an economy by moving around money (investments, spending, saving, etc), then tax cuts to me should help, too. And I'm not within 15% of the poverty line.
But I'm glad you see the spending as mostly wasteful/open-ended government spending, so at least I can agree with you there.
Except that most people in Canada live in the southern parts of Canada, don't they? Sorta like Sweden. Most of the population lives in the bottom 1/3 of the country. Due to this thing called "ice" I hear:)
Unions don't run companies or have anything to do with the management of them.
You should check out some union labor laws that currently exist in the US and check out some proposed ones, then. Unions can force companies to do a lot. Try the auto worker's unions for starters, since that industry is in trouble. Or the teacher's union.
i have spoken to an employee of ibm, who lives and works in the hudson valley (ibm's historical stomping grounds), and he is being relocated to bangalore under this exact program.
That proves it. An employee at IBM is getting relocated to Bangalore. IBM is sending all employees oversees!
Sarcasm aside, I believe the majority of IBM's 370k+ workers are in the US still... far from being an "Indian" company.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that even with typewriters (which did not have "files"), users still wnated (with the expensive/advanced ones) to be able to undo something... type a line or two, make sure it's right, and THEN print it. Basically, the equivalent of typing and saving (permanently).
Put it in the gaming world. Not everyone likes persistent worlds where if you die, you're dead forever. Not everyone would want to play a game where there are no save points, and you can never go back to do something over, etc. Some people like the idea of "Hmmm, I want to save here, just in case I do something to completely mess it up."
Imagine programming on a changes-"save"-automatically environment... or say, image editing. Video editing. Etc.
For those that don't know, there isn't one. I believe what the summary is referring to (and possibly the article itself, which of course I didn't read) is Alliance@IBM, a... well, rumor site that gets a lot of disgruntled workers on it.
IBM has a ton of international employees but I believe the largest percentage of employees is in the US. It'd be interesting to compare, say, HP, IBM, Intel, etc., with percentages of employees and where they work, etc.
I guess, in order to make people REALLY happy, they should have just laid off workers and said goodbye for good, huh? Offering to re-locate and stay employed, pfffft, how stupid. Right.
My mistake then. Mac Experience Points * My Mac Experience =.005;):) Although, I know I've used mac keyboards that only have "option"... or the symbol that looks sorta like "%O"
Mine has a Windows logo on it. Calling it a "super button" makes no sense, just like calling it a "return" key when it says "enter" regardless of what the key originally said on it. Stop acting like any reference to Microsoft is a curse?:)
Incidentally, if I'm on a Mac, I don't call it a Windows key, nor do I call the "ALT" or "CTRL" keys "command" or "function" keys. They clearly say "Alt" and "Ctrl" and Macs clearly do not (I forget which one has the Apple logo and which one doesn't, so I forget which one is comparable to alt and which one is comparable to ctrl...)
Start hanging out with older people. I know a ton of people under 70, under 60, and even under 50 that don't have that much experience with computers and don't have that much time OR desire to hang out with them long enough to get it. They just want to use it and reap the benefits. Sorta like we do with cell phones.
Yeah, I can. I actually prefer Windows still, at this point, though. *shrugs* But I don't do a whole lot of audio/video editing, either. I do think Apple's stuff is overpriced (especially the laptops?), too, but then I think the same thing about Sony and a lot of other... merchandise where you pay just to have a brand name. At times, I guess it may be warranted (Barracuda or something?), but IMO it's not with Apple. At least not the ones I've used, which admittedly were older. Haven't used much newer Apple stuff.
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Export to PDF *is* a pretty good feature. Huge? Not so much. It's easy enough to print to PDF, do a postscript printer to file output and convert it to PDF, etc.
99% of the users will never care about most MS Office features? What was that about subjective evaluation? :)
What really has to be weighted is user usability/user usage efficiency, right? what is important in an "office productivity suite" is how productive a user can be with it. My own experience (no, I haven't done a double blind study of "never used productivity suite before" people or something, hehe) is that Office 2007 (and Office 2003 before that... I think it was 2003...) was easier to use and easier to create nice-looking documents right off the bat. It was also much more expensive. I found OO.org good for word documents and spreadsheets. I found Powerpoint far superior with presentations (and, ironically, faster and less jerky with far fewer quirks ... I am not at all impressed [pun not intended] with Impress).
Hehe, after posting a negative response to your original post ... I have to say that not only are there helpful companies who will charge less than supporting Windows, but there ARE quite a few helpful Linux users. It seems to vary by distro.
OO.org is pretty cool. Some parts of it are definitely NOT as good, definitely ont better, than MS Office. MS Office is actually, in my opinion, a pretty good product. Impress vs. PPT, PPT wins hands down. Writer vs. Word ... well, writer is actually pretty good, though Word 2007 has some default nice-looking document stuff going for it. Me personally? I use OO.org. But I can definitely see how it isn't for everyone.
Slick, beautiful, and easy to use. Let's see, I just installed openSuSE 11.1 on a Dell E1505. It works pretty well (had 10.3 before that, by the way). First problem: knetworkmanager and WEP: fail. It wouldn't put in the write key; had to use iwconfig to manually configure it. Has never worked for me. Windows could do WEP fine. (note: I use WEP just to keep my neighbors off. I know it's easily cracked, I've cracked WEP myself). Second problem: ATI Mobility x1400 drivers. Downloaded ATI installer; fail. Tried various things. Finally installed RPM, that worked. I think what happened was the kernel source wasn't installed, thus the ATI installer didn't compile the driver, etc. But all I got was a black screen. Oh, you want users to dig through logs in random directories? Easy to use... Windows drivers worked fine.
Third problem: can't turn off the annoying PC speaker. I could with Windows. Fourth problem: Suspend to Disk doesn't work with Compiz/XGL, it comes back up with a black screen and a mouse cursor. Have to kill X and start it again. It worked fine with Xorg but not with XGL. Unfortunate, too, since I kinda like suspending and have to do it to disk because the battery is completely dead. Windows worked fine.
It's working now, and I like it. I've always liked Linux. Interestingly, though, my wife said this (she is not a tech person): "I don't think I like Linux... it doesn't do what you expect it to." She can use it, when it's working. When it stops working, she has no clue what to do. When X doesn't boot up for whatever reason, she doesn't know the "startx" command. If that doesn't work, she doesn't know about the kernel bootoption "x11failsafe." Easy to use!
I haven't tried Ubuntu specifically on my laptop, so I can't comment on its compatibility.
All this to say: switching completely from Windows to Linux is NOT for the person who doesn't have time to fiddle with stuff (i.e., spends maybe an hour a day on their computer) and doesn't have someone that can do it for them/fix it for them. Me? I can use Linux, and my wife can, because I can fix it. My parents? Same thing. I can set it up and fix it. Other people may not be able to.
(*waits for mod -5 Doesn't support Linux in all situations. :) )
Last final note: I work with Linux all day at work, and I've used quite a few versions (including Puppy Linux, tinyMe, Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora, Knoppix, Slackware, and a few others that I tried out on some old hardware to see which ran best). I really like it. I have also used Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, XP x64, 2003, 2003 x64, 2008, 2008 x64, Vista, Vista x64, and 7 x64.
Lastly, Wine does not work for all applications, virtualization is not "easy" to use, and I have a few other gripes about the easy to use camp but this is long enough :) hehe.
I sound bitter. Oh well, I'm not. I'm happily using Linux+KDE4.2+XGL+Amarok as my cool little media center!
Almost spit my Mountain Dew all over my desk
Probably would have been a good idea, it's not good for you. ;)
*wakes Gogo0 up*
Right, so it has earphones. That was what I was getting at. :) Saying it's useless as a phone because it doesn't have a speaker is kinda silly - who walks around talking on their phone on speakerphone all the time?
That's presuming that the same media/politicians don't make it worse.
Coming from a musician, songsmith is actually some interesting software. Is it "serious music" - no way. But it's just as much fun as that silly Apple program where you distort the images coming from the builtin webcam. Oh, but that wasn't a waste of money, I suppose, since Apple pushed it into their MacBook and thus I am sure it's helping in the amount of sales of MacBooks!
Microsoft Bob, interestingly, looked kinda fun, too.
I don't get what the problem is with MS spending money on research and development. Yeah, maybe the ydon't ever turn into actual products, but who is to say that concepts or ideas from research projects don't end up in other products? Who knows, maybe Windows 95 took ideas from MS Bob.
Also, the OS Singularity is currently in Microsoft Research, I believe. Other Microsoft Research stuff - Windows 2000 IPv6 capability; Microsoft Surface (wasn't it used in the superbowl for traffic or something like that?); Visual Studio 2010...
Um. No speaker? How do you listen to your iPod music?
Well... it's a VOIP phone. Landline phones have other advantages (one major one: don't go out in a power outage).
I wondered that, too. even 70 seconds is way too long. And they are referring to "simple" HTML pages. Maybe they meant milliseconds.
I never got in trouble as a kid. but then I was aware of my location and had a scanner in my pocket with a earphone in all the time. Friends learned that if I left a party or gathering, they need to as well.
If you went to the types of parties that cops would bust, then no wonder you were always scared of them and didn't "trust" them.
My response: don't go to the parties that get busted and you probably won't hav ea problem getting busted at those parties..
The Tax cuts, if any, should be limited to people within 15% of the poverty line.
The people who pay the least percentage and least amount of taxes, you mean?
If I, the citizen and consumer, am the one that creates an economy by moving around money (investments, spending, saving, etc), then tax cuts to me should help, too. And I'm not within 15% of the poverty line.
But I'm glad you see the spending as mostly wasteful/open-ended government spending, so at least I can agree with you there.
Except that most people in Canada live in the southern parts of Canada, don't they? Sorta like Sweden. Most of the population lives in the bottom 1/3 of the country. Due to this thing called "ice" I hear :)
Keyword is "including."
Unions don't run companies or have anything to do with the management of them.
You should check out some union labor laws that currently exist in the US and check out some proposed ones, then. Unions can force companies to do a lot. Try the auto worker's unions for starters, since that industry is in trouble. Or the teacher's union.
i have spoken to an employee of ibm, who lives and works in the hudson valley (ibm's historical stomping grounds), and he is being relocated to bangalore under this exact program.
That proves it. An employee at IBM is getting relocated to Bangalore. IBM is sending all employees oversees!
Sarcasm aside, I believe the majority of IBM's 370k+ workers are in the US still... far from being an "Indian" company.
Additionally, I'd like to point out that even with typewriters (which did not have "files"), users still wnated (with the expensive/advanced ones) to be able to undo something... type a line or two, make sure it's right, and THEN print it. Basically, the equivalent of typing and saving (permanently).
Put it in the gaming world. Not everyone likes persistent worlds where if you die, you're dead forever. Not everyone would want to play a game where there are no save points, and you can never go back to do something over, etc. Some people like the idea of "Hmmm, I want to save here, just in case I do something to completely mess it up."
Imagine programming on a changes-"save"-automatically environment... or say, image editing. Video editing. Etc.
One only needs to visit distrowatch and look at #315. 1 page hit for Nepa Linux! Woohoo!
NepaLinux, a localized Linux Distribution in Nepali developed by Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) [...]
For those that don't know, there isn't one. I believe what the summary is referring to (and possibly the article itself, which of course I didn't read) is Alliance@IBM, a ... well, rumor site that gets a lot of disgruntled workers on it.
IBM has a ton of international employees but I believe the largest percentage of employees is in the US. It'd be interesting to compare, say, HP, IBM, Intel, etc., with percentages of employees and where they work, etc.
I guess, in order to make people REALLY happy, they should have just laid off workers and said goodbye for good, huh? Offering to re-locate and stay employed, pfffft, how stupid. Right.
My mistake then. Mac Experience Points * My Mac Experience = .005 ;) :) Although, I know I've used mac keyboards that only have "option" ... or the symbol that looks sorta like "%O"
Mine has a Windows logo on it. Calling it a "super button" makes no sense, just like calling it a "return" key when it says "enter" regardless of what the key originally said on it. Stop acting like any reference to Microsoft is a curse? :)
Incidentally, if I'm on a Mac, I don't call it a Windows key, nor do I call the "ALT" or "CTRL" keys "command" or "function" keys. They clearly say "Alt" and "Ctrl" and Macs clearly do not (I forget which one has the Apple logo and which one doesn't, so I forget which one is comparable to alt and which one is comparable to ctrl...)
Start hanging out with older people. I know a ton of people under 70, under 60, and even under 50 that don't have that much experience with computers and don't have that much time OR desire to hang out with them long enough to get it. They just want to use it and reap the benefits. Sorta like we do with cell phones.
Yeah, I can. I actually prefer Windows still, at this point, though. *shrugs* But I don't do a whole lot of audio/video editing, either. I do think Apple's stuff is overpriced (especially the laptops?), too, but then I think the same thing about Sony and a lot of other ... merchandise where you pay just to have a brand name. At times, I guess it may be warranted (Barracuda or something?), but IMO it's not with Apple. At least not the ones I've used, which admittedly were older. Haven't used much newer Apple stuff.
Except HP is not, as far as I can tell from NOT RTA, selling their Ubuntu based Linux distro and allowing people to only use it on HP Minis.